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Who is Paul William?Welcome to Blogging Theology. Our mission is to produce bitesized discussions of academic and scholarly books on Islam, Christianity and Judaism to encourage respectful interfaith dialogue and discussion to have some fun.
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.
Who is the Messiah?In Abrahamic religions, the messiah or messias is a saviour or liberator of a group of people.
What is Jewish?Judaism encompasses the religion, philosophy, culture and way of life of the Jewish people. Judaism is a monotheistic religion, with the Torah as its foundational text (part of the larger text known as the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible), and supplemental
oral tradition represented by later texts such as the Midrash and the Talmud. Judaism is considered by religious Jews to be the expression of the covenantal relationship that God established with the Children of Israel.
Judaism includes a wide corpus of texts, practices, theological positions, and forms of organization. Within Judaism there are a variety of movements, most of which emerged from Rabbinic Judaism, which holds that God revealed his laws and commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai in the form of both the Written and Oral Torah.
The Jews are an ethnoreligious group and include those born Jewish and converts to Judaism. In 2012, the world Jewish population was estimated at about 14 million, or roughly 0.2% of the total world population. About 42% of all Jews reside in Israel and about 42% reside in the United States and Canada, with most of the remainder living in Europe.
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.
