The “fathers” of the church, especially Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in North Africa, read the Bible as if it were one continuous book written presumably by God. That is why they called the Bible “the Word of God.” They had no understanding, as we have come to learn in the last two hundred years, of the relationship between various parts of the biblical story to history or to one another. The book of Genesis, with which the Bible opens, is, we now know, the composite of at least four Jewish sources written over a period of up to six hundred years. It was not a single story in which one event
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