The things you notice.  This past weekend I was cleaning my house and had one of my favorite anime shows on the TV, Bubblegum Crisis, which I have watched many many times before except for one thing and it was a small thing.  The show revolves around the future Tokyo, the police department and an elite all female fight force, one scene in particular show a city map and the police districts and you would think that they would be in Japanese.  They were references to the movie 'Top Gun' which was a 1986 movie and 'Bubblegum Crisis' was made in 1988, each district was named after Meg Ryan, Val Kilmer, Maverick, Goose, etc..  What does this have to do with all the Biblical research that I have been posting?  It's about what you don't see,  most people that I have met take the Bible at face value or if the read any commentaries they are only commentaries that support what they believe the Bible to say and not what the Bible actually says.  Let's face it, the Bible was written by human hands; flawed, imperfect. judgmental humans who try to sway ideas to fit their ideology not theology because if the Bible said so then it must be true, much like the internet, right?  I was one of those people but as I got older and get older I have come to realize that what is written is not necessarily what is meant.  Sometimes there are parables and sometimes there are hidden meanings that we just miss because of cultural differences between the time of the apostles and now, time itself, and laws.  

Laws.  Laws are what governs social order and we need laws for certain crimes but what happens when laws become archaic?  Traffic laws for example, we have them to help keep us safe and avoid accidents but in Biblical times they did not have traffic laws because they did not have automobiles or aircraft.  I know that in one specific city I lived in there was a law that stated you could not walk down a street with an ice-cream cone in your back pocket.  First of all why would you do such a thing but secondly it was a law against horse thievery.  Horses that were un-hitched would follow people with ice-cream and therefore stealing a horse was illegal but it was a law and is it really necessary today or that important?  Not really since it is irrelevant with the times that we live as nobody rides a horse to town, we all drive automobiles or ride the bus.  

As I have stated before I was not there when the Bible was being written or scriptures being recorded for future generation nor was anybody that I know so how do we truly know what was intended by the apostles?  One last tidbit of information or food for thought, the Bible as a whole was passed on as an oral transmission and eventually written down, how accurate is your memory when passing along information that someone told you to tell someone else?