Before christ who is the god

A BC date, e. An AD date is written A. Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of all world history. Outside of Him, nothing has, will , or ever will happen John John the Baptist was the last of the Old Testament prophets, and he served as the one who prepared the way of the Lord and heralded His arrival Isaiah , Matthew , John Prophecy is a part of many of the Old Testament books in most part regarding the coming Messiah.

Different forms of prose do not detract from Scripture; they instead enhance how we engage with the Scriptures and receive an understanding of what the Lord presents to us.

Jesus gives them and us the definitive reason for knowing the Old Testament in John when He answers the group of Jews who questioned His authority and His deity John Some people may ask why we need to invest ourselves in the Old Testament. To look at only one and not the other is incomplete and will leave us with questions that may only be answered by the entire Bible Proverbs It also equips us to live godly lives.

Besides, the Old Testament is replete with history—a history which captivates us with the wondrous works of God Creation, the Flood, the parting of the Red Sea, etc. Abraham, the father, had been commanded, by the God he worshipped as supreme above all others, to sacrifice the young man himself, his beloved and only legitimate son, Isaac. We all know how things turned out, of course. If we could ask someone from a much earlier time, however, a time closer to that of Abraham himself, the answer might be different.

The usual story we tell ourselves about faith and reason says that faith was invented by the ancient Jews, whose monotheistic tradition goes back to Abraham. In the fullness of time, or—depending on perspective—in a misguided departure, the newer faiths of Christianity and Islam split off from their Jewish roots and grew to become world religions in their own right. Meanwhile, in a completely unrelated series of events, the rationalistic paragons we know as the ancient Greeks invented reason and science.

A tidy tale, to be sure, but nearly all wrong. Historians have been struggling to correct it for more than a century. This failure of synthesis may have something to do with why the old, discredited story has hung on for so long in popular imagination. Because we separate faith and reason psychologically, thinking of them as epistemological opposites, we tend rather uncritically to assume that they must have separate historical origins as well.

Surprisingly, the pattern that fits best with the historical evidence locates the origins of faith in the rise of reason itself, and despite its novelty it does so in a way that I suspect will strike many readers as sensible and intuitive. This new synthesis in turn yields psychological insights into the issues of faith and reason that continue to bedevil us today—from public confrontations over evolution, abortion, and gay rights, to suicide bombings, West Bank settlements, and flying lessons in which students ominously disdain instruction in landing.

That sort of belief, common to all humanity, is the part of our larger religious instinct that we might call the mental faculty of faith. It permits worshippers to accept the existence and divinity of gods whom they themselves do not worship, as people did, for example, in ancient Greece and Rome.

Faith, in this sense, encompasses more than mere religious belief. It also entails a negative belief about other kinds of belief, a peculiar kind of exclusivity found only in true monotheism.

We might call that exclusive sort of belief the tradition of faith. Admittedly, all kinds of religion rely on tradition. Imagine for a moment that we could wave a magic wand and make everyone on the planet forget everything they know about religion.

At the same time, we can erase every word of religious scripture, along with all religious representations in art and literature. If we wiped all religion away, anthropology suggests, it would rapidly reappear in new yet familiar forms—but probably without monotheism, assuming that history is any guide. Religion in the broad sense clearly represents a human instinct, since we find it in all human societies.

If you worship that sort of God, you share in that single, though by now hardly unitary, tradition. The monotheistic tradition of faith seems to focus and amplify the mental faculty of faith, concentrating the idea of the divine into a single, exclusive deity. Who else but the Jews, those famous monotheists from way back? This essentially polytheistic outlook accords with the frequent mention of other gods in the Hebrew Bible Old Testament , for example.

El was the Canaanite high god, but under him served other gods such as the fertility god Baal and the water god Yam. Perhaps Abraham and his kin adopted El as their own, accepting him as the same god who had urged Abraham to leave Ur and seek out the land of milk and honey in the first place.

Nor, like El before him, does Yahweh appear at first to have been thought of by the Hebrews as a divine creator, at least not according to the picture we get from the last century or so of biblical scholarship. Scholars believe that not until the eighth century bc was the first biblical account of creation composed starting at Genesis , and that only a couple of centuries later did an anonymous priestly author write down the full-blown version we get starting at Genesis 1.

By that time, the Jews were rejoicing in their return to Palestine after the Babylonian Captivity c. Enjoying a sense of revival and optimism, the Jews built the Second Temple in Jerusalem; Jewish priests acted as ambassadors to their Persian rulers.

Jewish life comes down to earth at this point. The days of the prophets are fading. From here on in, the Jews will be concerned less with further prophecies than with the proper interpretation of past ones. In the coming centuries, the Jews did indeed take the final steps down the long road to true monotheism. Neither they nor their new conception of faith evolved in a vacuum. Right around the same time that the Jews were celebrating their release from the Babylonian Captivity, the ancient Greeks freed themselves from a very different sort of captivity.

The crucial first step was a fully alphabetic writing system, which the Greeks invented and began using around bc. Earlier alphabets had been missing vowels. The Greeks took one of them, the Phoenician alphabet, and added new letters for vowel sounds, making the whole thing a much more flexible and precise instrument.

Here begins, if not the march, then at least the toddle toward string theory and space telescopes. For writing and thinking go together, and the dawn of this new literary age was simultaneously the dawn of reason.

Within a mere couple of hundred years or so, we see a Greek thinker named Thales of Miletus taking the novel step of trying to explain the material world in secular, naturalistic terms, and of publicizing his ideas so that others could critique them.

This is not to say that no one had ever thought rationally before, of course. All humans have the capacity for rational thought; clearly there exists something we might, for consistency, call the mental faculty of reason. It comprises an innate ability for symbolic logic, which we humans use in something akin to the way dolphins use sonar.

Thales and his immediate successors came from Ionia, the coast of what is now Turkey, where the mainland cities of Greece proper had established a number of prosperous colonies of which Miletus was the acknowledged leader. But their explanations always came back to religious mythology. Thales and his successors struck off in a fundamentally new direction, that of secular explanation.

Within a generation or two, they established free rational inquiry as a recognizable movement, a culturally coherent literary and intellectual tradition, in which ideas and concerns were passed from identifiable individuals in one generation to identifiable individuals in another, with each generation building on the work of those who came before.

And as any student of ancient philosophy can tell you, we see the first appearance of a unitary God not in Jewish scripture, but in the thought of the Greek philosopher Plato, who wrote in the early fourth century bc. Moreover, its origins go back to none other than Thales, who had proposed that nature can be explained by reference to a single unitary principle that pervades everything.

Thales thought everything boiled down, so to speak, to Water, which he seems to have seen as an inherently divine material substance with no agency in nature; his immediate successors posited their own monist principles, including Air, Fire, and the Infinite. Divine but not divine agents, these ideas straddled the line between religious and secular. Adding limited agency to this tradition, Plato in his dialogue Timaeus described what he called the Demiurge, a divine Craftsman who shapes the material world after ideal Forms that exist on a perfect immaterial plane.

Centuries would pass before the Jews assimilated Greek thought, and scholars suspect that it was Hellenized Jewish philosophers such as Philo of Alexandria who imported the Greek idea of a single unitary God into the Jewish tradition.

So one indisputable thing the last century or so of scholarly work has uncovered about faith and reason is that they are hardly the rigidly separate traditions we commonly take them for. Even more surprising, perhaps, is how quickly monotheistic faith followed, starting with its first glimmering in the thought of Thales himself.

As we perceive order in nature, it seems, we also gravitate to the One. This extraordinarily powerful idea was, in fact, entirely unprecedented. For thousands of years before Thales, humanity encountered only one undifferentiated world, a world still inhabited today by some, it is true, though their numbers are dwindling. See payment details. Special financing available. Any international shipping and import charges are paid in part to Pitney Bowes Inc. Learn More - opens in a new window or tab International shipping and import charges paid to Pitney Bowes Inc.

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