Chapter 1 – Story of God’s Boundless Love

1. Chapter 1 – Story of God’s Boundless Love 1 - The Bible is a love letter from God 2 - To a person in distress, like a soldier, a letter allows one heart to touch another across space and time to remind the oppressed that they are not forgotten 3 - Each letter is read again and again and held close to the heart 4 - The Bible is the word of God inspired by the Holy Spirit 5 - “Testament” means covenant or promise 6 - The Old and New Testaments together tell a great story: God created the world and humankind; God offered hope and a promise of salvation even when humans rejected His love; God chose a people, the Israelites, and made a covenant with them that through them the whole world would be saved;; God molded and fashioned this people to look to a future day when God’s reign of justice and peace will fill the world

2. God sent his Divine Son, the long-awaited messiah, as the human expression of His love and the fulfillment of His promises to Israel; • By his life, death and Resurrection, Jesus bought salvation to all the world; and, • The Holy Spirit was sent to nourish, sustain, and renew the followers of Christ. 7 - To say that the scriptures are inspired means that God ensures they contain all the truth necessary for our salvation. 8 - They contain a wide variety of literary forms including ancient myths and legends, various forms of dialogue intended to meet the needs of diverse audiences: ex Roman versus Greek versus Jewish. 9 - The first five books of the Old Testament are called the “Torah” 10 - The New Testament was set in place over a period of about 50 years while the Old Testament took over 1,000 years to take shape

3. 11 - Old scriptures were written on scrolls made of goatskin or sheepskin. Copies were made by hand from home-made ink using styles made from cut-point reeds. 12 - The Church’s Tradition is the oral preaching of the first Apostles 13 - The Church’s Magisterium is its official teaching voice or office. 14 - The “Dead Sea Scrolls” found in the 1940s confirm the accuracy of many of the previously oldest known books of the Old Testament 15 - The Old and New Testament were written in a span of about only 2,100 years – a very small span of the total timeline of human development and yet their impact far exceeds that of documents which spanned far greater periods of time

4. 16 - Abraham and Sarah are considered the parents of the Jewish race. Abraham was told by God to leave the city of Ur (in present day Iraq) and to travel to Canaan and God would make his offspring a blessing to the world. Remember this promise was made in a different cultural and historical context that what we experience today. 17 - At the close of Genesis the descendents of Abraham are living in Egypt to avoid a famine. Joseph, the unwanted brother, had through his wisdom saved Egypt directly from the famine and indirectly saved his own people. By the end of Genesis the Jews are enslaved in Egypt (archeologists have found the location where the Jews lived as they worked as slave labor) 18 - Moses lead his people out of Egypt and in a direct face-to-face meeting with God on Mt. Sinai God, Yahweh, makes a covenant with the Israelites through Moses.

5. 19 - God’s part of the deal was to make the Israelites “the people of God” and to return them to Canaan. 20 - The Jew’s part was to keep The Ten Commandments 21 - Around 1,000 BCE Israel became a nation in lieu of a group of wandering, nomadic tribes. The first king was David and his son Solomon built the first temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem. 22 – After Solomon’s death the kingdom split into two pieces: Israel in the North made up of 10 of the original 12 tribes and Judah in the south comprising the other two. 23 - The Assyrians obliterated the kingdom of Israel in the north while Babylon destroyed the kingdom of Judah in the south. Both invaders took the Jews with them into exile. 24 – The exiling of Jews from their homeland throughout the world has become known though the ages as “The Jewish Dispersion.” 25 – After 50 years in Babylon an enlightened Persian conquer of Babylon freed the Jews and allowed them to return to Canaan

6. 26 - The Jews remained part of the Persian Empire until it was overthrown by Alexander the Great and Judea came under Greek control and then in turn came under Roman control. 27 - It was the period of Roman control which led to two important thinking processes on the part of the Jews: • that the end of the world was near • that the Messiah when he arrived would be a military messiah to free Israel from Roman control 28 - Jesus in fact met all four criteria for a Messiah called for in the Old Testament. But the thinking processes mentioned above made the Jews of the first century in Jerusalem blind to Jesus arrival as the one, true messiah. 29 - By the end of the 1st century CE the Jewish bible was defined as consisting of three major components: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.