Don’t forget, WTWizard, that it is the Watchtower religion that claims they are a religion based on the New Testament. It is not a sola scriptura movement either. It’s a totally different concept from traditional Christian or Jewish religion.
Neither Christianity nor is Judaism based on the Bible. These religions composed the Scriptures. They did not get their doctrines from these books. Instead these books got their doctrines from these religions. It's not a question of abiding by the books, as if the books were the basis and sole path toward the truth. While that argument is sound against the Witnesses, it only works with folks like them who expect carts to pull horses.
To explain: the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “The Christian faith is not a ‘religion of the book.’ Christianity is the religion of the ‘Word’ of God, a word which is ‘not a written and mute word, but the Word [Jesus Christ] is incarnate and living.”—CCC 108; quoting St. Bernard, S. missus est hom. 4,11:PL 183,86.
As for the religion of my people, the Jews, it is not based on Tanakh (the Hebrew Scriptures). To Jews, God reveals his truth through prophets and other religious leaders, like the rabbis. The rabbis tell us that a Jew does not need to be a follower of Jewish laws and customs to be considered Jewish. In fact, a Jew can have no belief in God at all and still be Jewish. There is nothing in that religion about the Scriptures being the path to abide and follow.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses, by teaching that “true religion” must be based on the Bible, have created for themselves a paradox. The Scriptures were not written to be the basis of any creed or religion. They were meant to be read in the living and evolving tradition (religious practice and theology) of the religions that composed them. They aren’t meant to be used in any other fashion. If you do, you end up reading Genesis like it is literal history or believing that the Gospel accounts are meant to be chronological and historical biographies of Jesus of Nazareth. They aren’t. All the books of Scripture are a theological or religious take on events, but not a historical transcript of what has come before us.
The religion of the Jehovah’s Witnesses came about during a time when some people in the United States of America developed an interest in gnostic-like teachings, claiming that the written work of religions had a spiritual or even magical quality to them, hidden to all save a select few. The Christian groups of the revival period after the Civil War in America had their own take on this, claiming that the Bible was the ultimate of such "secretly coded" books. It was in this atmosphere that Joseph Smith made claim to finding the Book of Mormon, on which the religion of the Latter-Day Saints is hinged. And it wasn’t long after that happened that the Miller/Russell view of the Bible as a book to “base” religion on (using it like the Book of Mormon) and containing some mysterious code foretelling the future (available to a select few) fired up the Bible Students movement.
Using the Bible this way, as the basis for religious belief (especially if one doesn’t want to convert to Judaism or be a Catholic, either Roman or Greek Orthodox) is totally ridiculous. It’s just as sensible as if someone ran into a group of members of the Church of Scientology and took a copy of Dianetics and announced: “This book is the basis of all true religion…But we must ignore the reason this book was written by the Scientologists and all the practices and belief of the Scientologist religion in applying it.
You can’t base Christianity or Judaism on the Bible. That would mean these books would have had to be written before Abraham and Moses were born, before Matthew and Luke existed, before Jesus of Nazareth started to preach. It’s claiming that this book just popped up out of nowhere and someone stumbled into it and said: “Hey, this sounds great! Let’s base religion on these stories.”
That didn’t happen. Regardless of what you or anyone else thinks about religion or God, these religions existed before these books. History knows and can testify that people from these religious movements wrote the books--this is so regardless if the testimony in them is true or not. These books were not meant to be the starting point of religion. If the religions and their doctrinal stories didn’t exist before the Bible, then where did the Bible get them? The Bible didn’t exist before Moses received the Ten Commandments. There wasn’t a New Testament when Jesus walked the earth or when the apostles received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Neither Moses nor Jesus and his apostles based their religion on the Bible. These individuals created religions. These religions then wrote the Bible, but did not do so in the belief that these books were exhaustive creeds of theology.
You can’t put the cart in front of the horse. It doesn’t work that way. Carts will only move if you have a horse to pull them. Religious books don't write themselves. You can't have a Judeo-Christian religious book first--unless you're Joseph Smith--and claim that the true religion can o nlycome from the book. The religions who wrote the book had to be true if the religious writings reflecting their teachings are true. If the religions aren't true, then neither are their books. If the books are true, then the religions are true. And if the religions are true, why are people making up new religions instead of joining the ones that composed and canonized the Scriptures?
Like Dianetics, if you want to follow the religious book of another group, you must follow that religion. If you don’t, leave that "copy of Dianetics" alone.
