The problem with scripture

The Problem with Scripture 2000 years ago, the great Siddhartha Gautama taught a timeless lesson. He voiced, "Don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, or by scripture. It is not that these things should be discarded, but ultimately it’s experience and the opinion of the wise that should be your guide." Within this simple phrase, Buddha left me pondering the true identity of our guide and wondering whether the general populace's faith in scripture is ill-founded. The latter seems to be the more answerable question of two, as scripture, specifically the Bible and Quran, have a significant amount of attributes that lead them to have paradoxical text and controversial nature. Throughout history, individuals have hand picked and dismissed different sections of the holy books to create a foundation for contrasting branches of the same religion by claiming that they alone understand God through their interpretation of western scripture. However, in order to understand the reason behind the complexities of scripture, we must first dwell into the history of the books, specifically the Bible. The Bible was not written by God, but was written by men centuries after the events in the book occurred. According to the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry, the Bible was constructed by a mass of 40 men over 15000 years. The earliest author was said to be Moses, the shepherd, who wrote Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy which would then become the first five books to make up the Old Testament. Since Moses' work, over 40 men from all walks of life have added onto the holy tales including Joshua the fisherman (1404-1390 B.C.), Matthew the tax collector (60 A.D), and Paul the tentmaker (49 - 63 A.D). With such a vast time gap between each individual author and the vast pool of authors, it brings up the question of how many had firsthand accounts of the events they wrote about and how many simply scribed the oral tales that had been passed down