I decided to take History of the Bible to gain insight into my own religious beliefs and to slake my historical thirst inspired by the Bible. What I received was a flooding of thoughts and ideas that almost drowned me. The experience was awe-inspiring, frustrating, enlightening and enigmatic. Much time was taken to ponder, envision and comprehend the revelations revealed through the text. Simply the massive amounts of information that was unknown to me previously was tough to grasp.
             I have read the Bible(Old and New Testament) several times, but never realized that there are really two versions of creation. This simply blew me away. Of all the times I have read through Genesis, using the text as a basis for Creationist vs. Evolutionist arguments, I never realized that there were actually two, at times, conflicting stories of this event. It is right there, not extremely cryptic, but never realized.
             Another piece of information that was new and intriguing is that the books aren't all written by who I thought they had been. It's something that I had never thought about before, and just took it as so. I'm sure that if I had placed some critical thought about it within my mind, I would have come to those conclusions, but I hadn't. Having this revealed created some consternation with my own lack of insight into a Book I had been reading "religiously" for most of my life. It began to reveal my own lack of critical thinking when previously looking at the Bible.
             Within this consternation, I was surprised, however that many of my previous ideas about the Bible were not only true, but supported by the text. The actual existence of Jesus, recorded by other sources other than the Bible such as Josephus's writings, were a pleasant reminder that Jesus did exist in historical terms.
             Other pleasant surprises came from the text supporting several of the Gospels actually being written by who...