Scripture- Source of Christian Theology

The Bible is arguably THE most important source of Christian Theology, so it was only natural that in discussing Christian Theology we made a start with this holy book. I have to say that at the end of the class, I found out I knew near to nothing about the Bible and I’ve been a Christian for 22years!!
HISTORY OF THE BIBLE: The Catholics and Protestants have 2 slightly different Bibles. The Roman Catholics use the Jerusalem bible which contains more books than the new international bible so really there are books in the bible I’ve never read and didn’t even know existed.
The other books weren’t just omitted because the protestants ran out of paper, no, there was actually a sorting system: the Scripture is made up of Latin and Greek, many years the Hebrew canon of the old testament was written by the Jews but there were some books called the Apocrypha (the books omitted) that were never written in Hebrew, they were in fact written in Greek (Greek Canon). Many years later, the Septuagint was produced which was a collection of the old testament and the Apocrypha translated in Greek, this was the bible used by the Jews in the Mediterranean world in the 2nd or 3rd century before Christ.
The Septuagint which was in Greek prevailed for awhile and became the Latin Vulgate which was used as the standard bible for the western church until the reformation. In the 17th century the Apocrypha came under attack and all of a sudden there were Bible being produced with these books, the reformation relegated the Apocrypha to subordinate status because they didn’t have a Hebrew origin like the Hebrew canon which in their opinion made the Apocrypha less authoritative or perhaps less authentic. This is just a guess but maybe they found the Greek books more hedonistic than the Hebrew canon but the Roman Catholic church in 1546 reaffirmed equal status of the Apocryphal books with those of the old testament and have stuck to them till date hence the Jerusalem Bible but most other types of Bible are still produced without these books.
Then there’s the ANALYSIS OF THE BIBLE.
‘Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening , and the morning existed without the sun and the moon and starts?’ ( Origen, from On First Principles)Colin E. Gunton, Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae,(eds), The Practice of Theology, SCM Press, 2001.
In the lecture there were a few stories from the Old Testament read and analysised, some of them were David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, God’s testing of Abraham and a few others. Apart from the fact that there’s a moral to every story, Through out these stories there seemed to be very common themes of violence, instant and physical retribution, almost impossible tasks for humans and Human sacrifice(if the stories were taken literally).
It seemed like God condoned or initiated violence or perhaps the people who wrote these stories in the time they were in associated violence with power and God being the all power, all knowing God, it made sense to make Him fearful and violent.
Origen argued that it is impossible to take the scriptures literally and it seemed to me that the some of the stories are perhaps figurative expressions which try to identify or explain particular mysteries through tradition and history instead of actual events.
Maybe the stories were based partly on people’s views of God and this would have definitely played a part in their story telling. So maybe, just maybe some of the stories in the Old Testament is based partly on inspiration from God and partly on mans imagination and his own biased view of God.
To a Christian like me who took every single word in the Bible as gospel, finding all this out turned everything around in a positive way