Because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all base their teaching on a history of the Promised Land, this book follows the Christian Bible timeline from Creation through Revelation, with historical discovery added where it might interest you. The book is an unvarnished history with emphasis placed on a new sect of Judaism who were followers of Christos - the Anointed One. Many divinely inspired stories you are about to read were either ignored or discarded by the early church fathers on their way to building a new religion that Jesus came to inaugurate. Dates given are best-case estimates, give or take a year. The historicity of the Bible is the question of its acceptability as a history. In the study of the Bible, scholars incorporate fields that range from archaeology and cultural anthropology to historical linguistics and comparative literature. They examine biblical passages, comparing them to non-biblical evidence. They have discovered that a tremendous amount of credible information is stored in a collection of writings called Pseudepigrapha which are noncanonical texts written for purposes other than the teaching of scripture. Discoveries made in the 21st century lend little support to Old Testament stories as being history while offering challenging New Testament stories. The Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi Codex have placed a new light on first-century Palestine. Translation of Josephus's Jewish War and Antiquity of the Jews from ancient Greek into English highlights a diversity of Jewish beliefs and shared expectations and teachings. These discoveries have had the effect of centering Christianity much more within its Jewish roots than was previously thought. The Christian belief system began with Jews living in exile who spoke the Greek language and had been exposed to the Greek god Zeus and the coming of a King David figure. What separated the first followers of Jesus from non-believers was their belief that he was the resurrected Messiah with vi The Chosen that belief has its roots in literature of the second century BCE which promised a future anointed leader who would re-establish the "Kingdom of God" in place of the foreign rulers of that time. For scholars, Apostle Paul is the originator of Christianity as it is his vision of Jesus that accounts for over one-half of the New Testament. Because of the differences that exist between the picture of Jesus painted by his first followers and the picture painted by Apostle Paul, scholars question the accuracy of his description. One of the main elements in the study of the Bible is to recognize the difference that exists between the pre-Easter and post-Easter Jesus with the former referring to the "earthly view" people had of him before the crucifixion as compared to the "divine view" after the resurrection when Jesus became a bright light and a voice from on high with the earthly story of Jesus the Nazarene being removed from the Christian story by the fourth century so that, Paul's version of Jesus could more easily compete with the many gods of the pagan world. By connecting the dotted lines of research done by biblical scholars, the history surrounding an "earthly" man named Jesus of Nazareth can be given with fairly good accuracy.
