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Lesson 2

Michael W. Holmes is a very reliable author. He has a Ph.D from Princeton in Theological seminary and has been involved in the biblical studies department at Better University for many years. It was fairly easy to find his background and education since he is a professor because that means that that information is on the universities website. Professor Holmes has an area of specialization in the New Testament. He does teach at an Evangelical school, which could provide room for biases, since not all beliefs are the same throughout christianity.

Another scholar I found was Scot McKnight. He has a Ph.D from the University of Nottingham and he is also a New Testament scholar. I looked for “New Testament Scholar” on google scholar. His information that I found kind of lines up with Holmes’ but the topic was not as narrow. McKnight talks about how people have reduced the Bible to solely salvation Scriptures, which is similar to what Holmes’ claims is happening with the canon, that its becoming too broad.

Oxford University Press Published Michael Holmes’ work. This proves that it obviously went through a lot of scrutiny to get approved and pushed through to be published.

Overall, I learned more about finding the background to authors to help prove reliability. I also learned about biases. I always thought to avoid biases but I learned that it is inevitable and that we, as readers, just have to realize these by looking into their backgrounds and keeping that in mind.

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Intro Blog

Hi. I am Caroline Osler. I am a sophomore from Fishers, Indiana. I am double majoring in math and economics, with hopes of going to law school after Butler. I am taking this course for two reasons, one being it fulfills my TI requirement. The second being that I am a christian and want to learn about different perspectives and ideas that others have about the Bible.

The Bible, to me, is a collection of stories, rules, and guidelines, that were spoken by God but we received them through people, who were His prophets. Basically, it’s God telling us how to reach a true state of peace and happiness. I also think of it as a tool to help get through hard times and difficult situations.

I believe that God was the author of the Bible, but He used people who He believed were influencers to be the narrators and actually transcribe the Bible itself. I know that it took a village to write the Bible, but the first person that came to mind was Paul, because he wrote quite a bit.

When I look up what a Bible is, the first information presented is actually videos. They talk about how to read the Bible and what it is. The first actual text source is Wikipedia, which is not reliable. But I also couldn’t say with confidence that the religious sites are very reliable either. I think that the author’s education tells a lot about their credibility.