Truth and Eternity

Prologue

But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

1Corinthians2:9/KJV

If there is only one truth in the world, surely it is in this book, which has been read around the world for thousands of years. That's what I think about the Bible. Why are we alive, what is right, why is there suffering and evil in the world, what is happiness, what is love? Countless people have tried to find the answers to these questions, which we all encounter at some time, in this book. And they have found in this book a never-ending spring. It is a fountain of life. I am one of them.
Everyone sees something through the spectacles created by the environment they were born into, their family and their own experiences, such as that they are the only person they can trust, or that they are happy to have a steady income. My glasses have been the Bible since I was born. I see the world through the Bible. But I also wonder if perhaps it is not the glasses that I wear, but the truth that I see when I take off all my glasses.

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　The Bible is the canon of Christianity, but no original copies are extant. So why is the Bible being published all over the world, which is due to the existence of a vast number of manuscripts. Before the advent of letterpress printing, books were copied and transmitted by hand. The Bible has been copied by countless human hands throughout its long history. The Bible was copied on papyrus and parchment made from plants for thousands of years in order to preserve it for future generations. The original text of the Bible can be deduced from the sheer number of such manuscripts. Because of the human inscription, not all manuscripts are exactly the same. Therefore, by selecting the text of several manuscripts, a text that is considered highly probable is adopted. In other words, a word-for-word accurate Bible does not yet exist in human hands. However, the majority of the text is in agreement between manuscripts. This is remarkable in a manuscript that has been produced by an extraordinary number of hands over several thousand years.

Nothing is known for certain about when they were written. The New Testament contains the events after the birth of Christ, while the Old Testament contains the events before the birth of Christ. The Western calendar is based on the birth of Christ. The New Testament is therefore thought to have been written around the first or second century AD. The Old Testament was written before that, but it is not certain how far back it can be traced. The content of the Bible varies and can be classified as history, poetry, epistles and the Gospels, which describe the life of Christ.

Who wrote them, again, is not known for certain. In the Bible, which consists of 66 books, each written at a different time, some of the authors are known, while others are not. The men who wrote the Bible were not interested in preserving their own names for posterity. They attributed glory to its supposed ultimate author, God.

This utterly mysterious book has fascinated people for a long time, now and in the future. Translated into more than a thousand languages and with hundreds of millions of copies published annually, it is a book that transcends time and space.