True or False
According to the Bible, . . .
1.God created the world in seven days.
2.Jesus and John the Baptist were cousins.
3.Along with seven family members, Noah took only two of every kind of animal on the Ark.
4.Jonah was swallowed by a whale and was vomited out three days later.
5.Wise men from the east presented gifts to the baby Jesus as he lay in the manger.
6.The last book of the New Testament is known as “Revelations.”
7.The Ten Commandments are numbered differently in the Jewish and Christian Bibles.
8.One or more of the gospels quotes Jesus as saying, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
9.Eve disobeyed God by eating an apple, then tempting Adam to eat from it as well.
10.Jesus was born in Bethlehem on December 25th.
The answers are below.
1.False: God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh (Genesis 2:1-3).
2.False: The New Testament does not specify their relationship. Luke 1:36 says their mothers were related, but does not say how.
3.False: He took two of each unclean animal and seven of each clean animal (Genesis 7:2)
4.False: Jonah 1:17 says it was a “big fish” that swallowed up Jonah.
5.False: Matthew 2:11 says Jesus was in a house. Matthew 2:16 suggests that the wise men arrived a considerable time after Jesus was born since Herod orders all the male children in Bethlehem who are two years and under to be killed.
6.False: The New Testament itself doesn’t assign names to its books, but the last book has traditionally been called Revelation, without an –s, or the Apocalypse, which is a transliteration of the Greek word for revelation.
7.False: Jews, Catholics, and Protestants do number the Ten Commandments differently, but their Bibles all read the same and do not actually contain literal numbers. The precise wording of the ten depends on how you break them out of the text in a list. Nevertheless, since the complete text is the same, the commandments are the same for everyone, depending, of course, on how the commands are spun by different commentators.
8.False: None of the gospels records this saying. The author of Acts (thought to be Luke, a colleague of Paul) quotes Paul as saying Jesus said it (Acts 20:35).
9.False: The Bible does not specify what kind of fruit it was (Genesis 3:12), but given the climate of Iraq, it probably wasn’t an apple.
10.False: The New Testament does not say in what month Jesus was born, much less on what day. Since shepherds were in the field overnight (Luke 2:8), it might have been spring, but no one knows.
Misperceptions of the Bible abound in popular culture. Some, like these, are factual. Others are theological. The Bible, it seems, is not an easy book to get straight.