Member-only story
The idea of when was the bible written begs the question, which bible? Or if we narrow it down to the Old Testament or the Jewish bible, we have to ask which Jewish bible?
If you’re a casual student of bible history, or even less familiar with the subject this might be ‘All Greek to you.’ That’s something of an inside joke because the oldest intact edition of the Hebrew bible is actually a Greek translation called the Septuagint.
There are, I think, self evident problems with our oldest edition being a translation when it comes to having knowledge of what the original text said. A friend of mine used to reference a quote about translations, that a translation is like a woman, if it’s beautiful it’s unfaithful.
But going back to having a casual knowledge of the world around 2000 years ago. A different friend, very intelligent, lawyer, member of Mensa, we were talking about the three wise men coming to see Jesus in the New Testament. And he said they had to be from Israel. And I said they weren’t they were from the East, like from Persia. And my friend said “Persia, but everybody was either Roman or Jewish back then.”
So I don’t think everybody has a clear idea of the geography and countries that existed at the time. So here’s a link to a map of the time. And all the gospel of Matthew tells us about the wise men is that…
