My book selection

I need to start with a clean slate. I searched the Boarders for The Torah. It is impossible to find this Old Testament in a very Christian environment. SO, I found The New Jerusalem Bible. This bible is translated from the Original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts. It puts inserted words in brackets and roughly translated words in parenthesis. This is reassuring to me and I feel that i would get the truest translation from this bible vs. The King James or New Women's Bible. I also have bought the Complete Dead Sea Scrolls translation because I think this will be interesting to read. It is a wonderful historic document and from the Contents I see that I will be learning about Ancient Community Rules, Prayers and Hymns, Calendars, Histoical and apocalyptic works, Liturture on Wisdom, Bible interpretations, and Bible based apocryphal works. Apocryphal=fiction, fabricated, made-up. Think of these as Parables.

I am going to being tonight by cracking open the Bible and The Illustrated Guide to World Religions. This texts has me starting in the begining with Judaism. I know that Zoroastrianism, was also one of the first religions and I don't know if it'll be covered in this book... we'll see.