Captain Canuck
The poster formerly known as captaincanuck65
Mostly off topic, but...what's apocryphal about it? The Bible is the best documented ancient text in the history of the world with over 5,000 ancient copies or fragments of copies in existence. In all of these copies and fragments that come from all over the Middle East, only 2% of the content differs. These differences are mostly spelling mistakes and copying errors. You know the game telephone, right? Where you whisper a phrase to one person and they whisper it to someone else, etc and at the end the phrase is nothing like it started out. That happens with historical accounts over time, so it is legitimate to question the authenticity of an ancient writing that has been passed down for years. But imagine instead of whspering the phrase to one person you whispered it to four people, and each of them whispered it to four more, and so on until 5,000 people (or if you want the math to work 4,096 people) had heard the phrase. If one telephone chain produces a completely changed phrase, you would expect this kind of branching to produce many different variations of the phrase - with resulting phrases that came from the same branches to be more similar to each other than phrases that were further away in origin. But what if by the end you had 5,000 phrases that were 98% the same? Its impossible that 5,000 people could change the phrase in almost exactly the same way without talking to each other (and even then they'd probably screw it up). The only other option is that what you have is the original phrase (at least 98% accurate). Scholars who know what they are talking about admit that the Bible we have today is amazingly close to what was originally recorded.
Also, Archeology has continually confirmed historical events/names/places recorded in it, as have ancient secular historians.
The Bible passes all of the tests of historical validity with flying colours. If nothing else, it at least deserves to be respected as a legitimate history of Ancient Israel and of the spread of Christianity in the first century AD. And that's without even acknowledging the possibility that the supernatural exists. If you're willing to even admit that there might be a god, or some higher power out there, then the Bible is the only book in the world with the credentials that warrant objective investigation.
So to say the Bible is literature that, although is often circulated as true, is of doubtful authenticity (which is what "apocryphal means", for any of you who didn't know) is a rather uniformed statement.
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And I think there'd be a much more nuanced layer of irony in the fact that he finally comes to peace with all his guilt, rights himself as a man and reaches inner peace only to have all this undone and forgotten when the deal goes into effect. Call it a baptism, if you really want to get religious with it.
