Who is Daniel Boyarin?Daniel Boyarin (born 1946) is a historian of religion. Born in New Jersey, he holds dual United States and Israeli citizenship. Trained as a scholar in 1990, he was appointed Professor of Talmudic Culture, Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, a post which he still holds. Boyarin was educated at Goddard College, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Columbia University before earning his doctoral degree at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He has taught at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bar-Ilan University, Yale, Harvard, Yeshiva University, and the University of California at Berkeley.
What is The Bible?The Bible is a canonical collection of texts sacred in Judaism and Christianity. There is no single "Bible" and many Bibles with varying contents exist. The term Bible is shared between Judaism and Christianity, although the contents of each of their collections of canonical texts is not the same.
Different religious groups include different books within their Biblical canons, in different orders, and sometimes divide or combine books, or incorporate additional material into canonical books.
The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, contains 24 books. Christian Bibles range from the 66 books of the Protestant canon to the 81 books of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church canon.
The first part of Christian Bibles is the Old Testament, which contains, at minimum, the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible divided into 39 books and ordered differently from the Hebrew Bible. The Catholic Church and Eastern Christian churches also hold certain deuterocanonical books and passages to be part of the Old Testament canon.
The second part is the New Testament, containing 27 books: the 4 Canonical gospels, Acts of the Apostles, 21 Epistles or didactic letters, and the Book of Revelation.
What is Gospel?Gospel is the Old English translation of Greek evangelion, meaning "good news". It originally meant the Christian message itself, but in the 2nd century it came to be used for the books in which the message was set out. The four gospels of the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the main source of information on the life of Jesus.
Who are ONS?The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the official national statistical institute of the United Kingdom.
What is Sin?In Abrahamic contexts, sin is the act of violating God's will. Sin can also be viewed as anything that violates the ideal relationship between an individual and God; or as any diversion from the ideal order for human living. To sin has been defined as "to miss the mark".
Sins fall in a spectrum from minor errors to deadly misdeeds. Catholicism regards the least corrupt sins as venial sins which are part of human living and carry immediate consequences on earth, and, if unrepented for, more painful purgation, assuming the person is destined to heaven, as it is written in the formation letter "Purgatory", "most of the early Fathers of the Church speak of a cleansing fire, though we cannot tell whether this means actual or spiritual fire."
Conversely, sins of great evil are mortal sins which bring the consequence of hell if they are not addressed either through an act of perfect contrition or going to confession about them.