the special holiday event, back to the beginning with christiane amanpour continues now. i m christiane amanpour and we re on a journey back to the beginning. we ve set off to try to unravel some of the history and the mysteries that lie behind the stories of the bible from genesis to jesus. we re overlooking the old city of jerusalem where so many stories unfolded. our journey is taking us to cities and deserts across the ancient world. so come along with us. after the great flood, the bible says that god made a promise to never again destroy the earth. noah s family prospered and the descendents spread across the
that faces a human being. you have to choose. on our journey, we met believers who say the bible is the literal truth straight from the mouth of god. do you think that it happened? and we met others, even those of faith who believe these are stories and passed down through the generations. what brought you to rally? a record of a people s struggle with the world, and their place in it. so how are we meant to read the book of creation? this is a wonderful myth. a myth is more than history, it s telling you the meaning of history. the meaning of events. god can communicate truth through different types of literature. it doesn t always have to be newspaper-style account of what happened. for instance, was the world created in seven days or did it take millions of years of
really good questions, how could we do this better? if i were in this person s shoes, how would i have acted? if i m judge and jury, what punishment would i assess? and god forbid if i committed that crime, what would i want my peers to do to me? narrator: coming up, with all the extreme weather punishing our planet, hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, imagining noah s flood isn t that hard to do. so, did it happen? we meet a man convince it did, and he s building an ark. so was the 100% electric e-golf, and the 45 highway mpg tdi clean diesel. and last but not least, the high performance gti. looks like we re gonna need a bigger podium. the volkswagen golf family.
name of this site is complicated, jews call it the temple mount while muslims call it noble sanctuary. on one side is the western world, the holiest site the jews come to pray at. and nearby, the christian church. in just one square mile, the most revered places of each of the three religions. and this is also the place where the bible tells us that god had finally demanded too much. abraham had waited into very old age for the children that god had promised. he had already been told to send his first son, ismaaiyl, away, now only isaac was left at home. abraham, for better or for worse, is used to hearing god s voice. and one day, as the torah tells us, god decides to test abraham. and he says, take your son, your
help you to persuade your grief and anguish, and rage. these biblical stories are a way of finding meaning. when i was younger, this story was kind of a fairy tale for me. i think that when you get older, you kind of see the sadness and the kind of the sorrow in the story. because lots of people die in this flood. destroying the earth, the bible tells us, is the only thing god ever regrets. so he sends a rainbow as a promise. this rainbow shows that god will never send a flood again to hurt humanity. and all the animals that live on this earth. what happens next is left out of the colorful pages of storybooks. noah comes out of the arc, and he plants a vineyard and gets drunk.