Stickinarut2,
These points don't seem universal to Christian or Jewish religion. They may be quite limited to the Jehovah's Witnesses or perhaps due to a personal interpretation getting repeated over and over:
The bible is held up as sacred just because it is "old" and apparently preserved...
I guess what I am trying to ask is, why is it that we as humans give value to writings just because they are old?
It's been a long while since I've been one of Jehovah's Witnesses, the 1990s to be honest. And if this is what the Witnesses are now teaching, I promise you it isn't what makes Scripture or any artifact necessarily valuable.
I do know that the Jehovah's Witnesses tend to teach that the Bible was somehow "lost" to humanity. They point to Bible burnings, the persecution of a handful of Bible translators, and the fact that the Roman Catholic Church kept the Bible in Latin for centuries. These points are part of a "straw man" rouse. Apparently, even some ex-JWs don't realize that they still hold on to this "straw man" view.
The Bible: Cherished from It's Inception, Not Because It Was Old
The Bible was never lost to humanity. It was redacted by Hebrews from former stories, legends, and even likely some writings that the Jews had in their own possession while they lived exiled to Babylon. The reason for the redaction of these was in order to preserve the cultural identity of the Jews while in exile, to avoid the Jews from assimilating while away from their land and shrine. The Scriptures were designed to be read in synagogues, originally homes of Jews in exile where each Sabbath a leader would read from the books and discuss the meaning of their stories in regards to their heritage and personal identity. They were loved from the moment they were invented.
The Scriptures were not designed to be read like a regular book, but to be proclaimed piece by piece in what are called "Parashah" and "Haftarah." These are divided portions where each Sabbath of the year a "Parashah" would be read from the Torah and a "Haftarah" from the other writings that might reflect or explain the Parashah for that week would be presented. They invented a calendar that would yearly follow the same pattern. Special "holy days" designed to mark special days in history require the reading of particular Parashah and Haftarah that gave historical and spiritual significance to the day. This is what is known today as a liturgical calendar. The Psalms served as the official "song" or "hymn" book, with the songs being considered actual prayers that could be prayed even outside the synagogue service. This practice continued after the exile up through present times.
Christians Cherished Their New Writings Immediately Too
When Christianity began, it followed the same pattern in worship. The Jerusalem Church had its own service, with a Parashah reading, followed by a Haftarah, and then adding what Justin Martyr later called "the memoirs of the apostles." When the Bar Kokhba revolt ended with the Romans banning all Jews from Jerusalem in 135 C.E., the liturgical service of the Jerusalem Church was absorbed into all the other churches, even those made up entirely of Gentiles. The "memoirs of the apostles" later became canonized as the New Testament in the 4th century, with Church officials choose Christian books that were used for Christian liturgy after Parasha and Haftarah were read. Today the same pattern occurs in Catholic and some Protestant churches in what is called the Revised Common Lectionary, now with a reading from the Old Testament, followed then by a reading from epistles, and then a reading from the Gospel, with a Psalm following the Old Testament reading as a chanted prayer.
The Bible was never "lost." Nor was there much use of the Bible outside the synagogue or church liturgical service. When some Protestants outside of Lutheranism began viewing the liturgical system as "non-Biblical," they demanded having the Bible "set-free" to use outside of the church setting. Before this no one had a need to own their own copy of Scripture as neither Judaism nor Christian was based on the Bible. It was read in Hebrew in synagogues and Latin (or a vernacular like Greek) in most churches, but these new Protestants (wanting to rebuild Christian religion directly from Scripture) felt the need for more.
How Did the Bible Got to Be In Every Home? Catholics Started It
The first Bible to be printed by a press (with moveable type) was the Catholic Vulgate, often only admitted as the "Gutenberg Bible" by the Jehovah's Witnesses. That was about 1450. Again, Christians had, for the most part, done without their own copy of the Bible for 15 centuries now because 1) religion merely used Scripture to teach, not to base its beliefs upon and 2) trained religious teachers taught religion to the untrained, most of whom were illiterate. There just was no demand from the general public, and up until 1450 there was no way to mass produce Scripture anyway.
The translations that ended up getting their translators into trouble were those made without getting an official nod from Church authority. Since many of these new translators wanted to use Scripture to rebuild Christianity (claiming that the Church had lost her way and needed to be "restored"), the Church often attempted to stop things by violence, even executions. Translations made for such purposes were burned.
Jehovah's Witnesses Don't Tell You a Lot...Like they are Copy Cats!
What the Witnesses don't tell you is that the Church wasn't entirely against translating Scripture into the vernacular. It made portions of it available as soon as mass production made it possible. There was little demand, however, as the majority of Catholic and Orthodox Christians learned "religion," not Scripture. The Bible was seen a tool of religion not its basis (as claimed by the Witnesses). During this time Judaism had even less of a problem as the Scriptures were generally used as prayers and memorized still in their original Hebrew, even by children.
The first time in history Bibles were made available to the public en masse was in the 1800s, especially after the famous barefoot walk by a little girl named Mary Jones inspired the development of Bible Societies in Britain. These Protestant groups felt it was important to get the Bible into the hands of each and every Christian (something never done before). In order to do this they found wealthy patrons to help devise ways to print and distribute the Bible at cost.
This became somewhat of an anti-Catholic ministry, and religions built around Bible and tract distribution societies popped up everywhere. Bible sellers were called "colporteurs" and it became part of the theology of some of these Protestant movements to make sure Christians had their own Bible to read for themselves (and to 'educate themselves against Romanism,' as some saw it). It was during this time that the Apocrypha was first removed from printed Bible editions.
Stories of the "anti-Bible" Catholic Church developed as the mainstay of these colporteurs, most of them still repeated as "historical fact" by Jehovah's Witnesses today. While some of the atrocities really did happen, the stories were reshaped to make it seem like the Bible was being hidden away from the world by the "evil Papists" until the Bible Societies came to the rescue in the 1800s. These tales helped sell more Bibles, supporting more colporteurs.
When the Second Great Awakening occurred in America, most of the "leaders" of the New Religious Movements were unlettered. They took the stories of the colporteurs as fact and began religions that centered around restorationism and Bible distribution. Russell was one of these, developing his own movement around what was originally called Zion's Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. The rest is, as they say, history.
So while the Witnesses may claim that the Bible is to be treasured because it is "old" and that it's contents were kept from the public due to Satan the Devil employing the churches of old to do so, the real truth is that it wasn't possible for most people to have a copy of Scripture until the development of Bible Societies in the 1800s.
The real reason the Bible is treasured is mainly because it holds importance to the Jewish culture and Christianity. This was a "love at first sight" situation. It was never lost. It was never treasured because "it was old." The Gentile public had access to it every Sunday where, despite large populations being more or less literate enough to do so for themselves, the Church read it aloud to them. It even built large churches with stained glass art to "proclaim Bible stories" to the public so that even those who couldn't read would still be able to keep the Bible in mind. And the Jewish population never lost touch with their Scriptures. The great Churches and Judaism never stopped preserving and proclaiming the Bible.
No One Has Ever Had to Revise the Lord's Prayer, Christmas Carols or Revise Stained Glass Windows...
There was also never an "original" that was lost either. The words of Scripture have been read and re-read every Sabbath and Sunday for generations, with practically no change whatsoever. They make up ancients prayers and hymns and even Christmas carols that use the same words the Church has always used. Very few changes crept into translations, and mistakes have been corrected over time.
The whole idea that the Bible being "ancient" as a reason for its greatness or that it "survived" attacks is rubbish. It was revered and cherished since it was first composed. The Christians did the same when they added their reading from the apostles to follow the Haftarah in their liturgies based on the Jewish ones.
It's all a big lie. The Bible's not been changed. It's not been lost. It's always been available in one way or another to the public. And it has been loved since day one. Anything else you got from the Witnesses, and what they offer is a straw-man argument that they have used since the 1800s. It's never been true.
