ANCIENT RELIGIOUS TEXTS AND CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURE
ANCIENT RELIGIOUS TEXTS AND CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURE

Summary/Abstract: This article seeks to address issues related to the relationship between ancient religious texts and the sacred text of Christianity. The question regarding the relationship between these two categories of texts worries both those inside the Christian community and those outside it. Some of them underline the priority in time of ancient texts. There are voices within Christianity that question the extent to which the Divinity has been revealed in the religious writings of other peoples? It is said that the first section of the biblical text: the Old Testament comes from a small nation called Israel, compared to the ancient texts produced by large nations, who formed great cultures and civilizations. Also, the holy book of the Jews - the Old Testament was written much later, not earlier than the fifteenth century BC, unlike the ancient texts of the great empires of the East: the Sumerians - (3rd millennium BC) and the Akkadians (mid-third millennium BC), Indians, Egyptians, Babylonians, etc. The author highlights striking similarities in terms of themes addressed by the text of the Old Testament and the religious texts of older peoples such as: The Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian and Akkadian, and the Babylonian and Egyptian texts. Among the common themes we mentioned: Divinity, Garden of Eden, Tree of Life, The Snake, Conflict between God (gods) and man, the Man, the Woman, Fall, Flood, and others. One of the main criteria of the acceptance or rejection of some narratives from older ancient texts was the official Judeo-Christian tradition, which although it is open to new information, to elucidate new aspects of the historical and religious experience of the community's past, it is constrained by the limits of the official tradition – expressed by the canonical text that claims to be the revealed divine message.

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