The Church of Scotland said
something sensible not long ago: "Every
student of the Bible is a selective literalist. Those who swear by the
anti-homosexual laws in the Book of Leviticus wouldn't publicly advocate
slavery or stoning women taken in adultery. They presumably no longer accept
Biblical teaching on sexual matters such as polygamy and sex with slaves. And
yet there are many who continue to be bound by a few Biblical verses - none of
them in the Gospels - about homosexuality, nowadays understood as a matter of
genetics rather than
lifestyle."
But let's look at the larger
question: where did the Bible really come from?
The evangelicals insist that the Bible is the unchallengeable word of God, as passed directly to the prophets. The problem is that no one knows where these texts really came from.
As Thomas Paine pointed out, the Bible is allegedly based on the word of God, divine revelation to man. But it is only a revelation to that man – everything after that is hearsay. Bush claims God told him to invade Iraq; Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, claims God told him to kill women. This is why you can’t rely on hearsay.
And much of the Bible cannot be claimed as revelation of any kind, even the second-hand variety. When the Bible reports observable historical events, that is not divine revelation – that wipes out the Old Testament histories, the Gospels, and Acts. The Bible’s songs are not divine revelation either, or the proverbs, or the letters, or the lamentations. So right away, most of the Bible is not the word of God.
A number of biblical references seem to indicate that the “prophets” were poets or musicians.
This material in the Bible started as oral and then written fragments, and no one knows who created them. Religious scholars have concluded that every book of the Bible may have been written by more than one person – so can a burning bush “reveal” to two people at once? The scholars who originally assembled the Hebrew Bible had no interest in the actual authorship of the books: they just picked the books which seemed sacred to them, and Catholic leaders followed that pattern centuries later. Jewish leaders even argue about whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch, particularly since it refers to Moses in the third person and discusses Moses’ death; by the 17th century, scholars essentially proved that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch, although the Church tried to suppress these facts. The Book of Ruth was probably “written” by someone who wasn’t even Jewish. Judges is anonymous – you can’t have God revealing his word to someone we don’t even know. Samuel couldn’t have written the book attributed to him since it describes his death; Isaiah was also written after Isaiah was dead.
The evangelicals insist that the Bible is the unchallengeable word of God, as passed directly to the prophets. The problem is that no one knows where these texts really came from.
As Thomas Paine pointed out, the Bible is allegedly based on the word of God, divine revelation to man. But it is only a revelation to that man – everything after that is hearsay. Bush claims God told him to invade Iraq; Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, claims God told him to kill women. This is why you can’t rely on hearsay.
And much of the Bible cannot be claimed as revelation of any kind, even the second-hand variety. When the Bible reports observable historical events, that is not divine revelation – that wipes out the Old Testament histories, the Gospels, and Acts. The Bible’s songs are not divine revelation either, or the proverbs, or the letters, or the lamentations. So right away, most of the Bible is not the word of God.
A number of biblical references seem to indicate that the “prophets” were poets or musicians.
This material in the Bible started as oral and then written fragments, and no one knows who created them. Religious scholars have concluded that every book of the Bible may have been written by more than one person – so can a burning bush “reveal” to two people at once? The scholars who originally assembled the Hebrew Bible had no interest in the actual authorship of the books: they just picked the books which seemed sacred to them, and Catholic leaders followed that pattern centuries later. Jewish leaders even argue about whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch, particularly since it refers to Moses in the third person and discusses Moses’ death; by the 17th century, scholars essentially proved that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch, although the Church tried to suppress these facts. The Book of Ruth was probably “written” by someone who wasn’t even Jewish. Judges is anonymous – you can’t have God revealing his word to someone we don’t even know. Samuel couldn’t have written the book attributed to him since it describes his death; Isaiah was also written after Isaiah was dead.
The first three gospels – the
“synoptic” gospels – were based in part on a mysterious “Q” document. No
version of it exists and no one knows who wrote it, let alone who or what
inspired it. Scholars are still arguing about which gospels stole from each
other and which passages were written first. Much of the material seems to have
been assembled from tiny fragments of scripture, and none of the material is
first-hand from anybody, let alone God. Mark and Luke were not present for the
events they reported, and we don’t know where they got their information from,
other than the Q, which the Almighty, with suspicious carelessness, managed to
lose for all time.
Several
books, such as Peter’s epistle, refer to the death of the purported author.
Of all the epistles of Paul, only
seven are deemed with any confidence to be Paul’s actual work; as for the rest
– no one knows for sure who wrote them. The authorship of all John’s books is
in dispute, particularly since some geographical errors in his alleged works
suggest he was not from Palestine; on the other hand they could have been
written by Mary Magdalene. And many of these texts may be corrupted by the
extensive use of scribes by illiterate or semi-literate religious leaders.
If God wanted to make his will known to all nations, he wouldn’t choose a poor carpenter in a despised ethnic group in a distant corner of the Roman empire.
Time magazine reported that the
"new" old Bible they found shows that the Bible was subjected to at least
27,000 human corrections. So much for the infallible word of God.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1910141,00.html
Erasures, additions, corrections, substitutions — Sinaiticus reveals a Bible-in-process. Between the 4th and 12th centuries, various scribes changed earlier colleagues' bad spelling. Of more theological significance, the Gospel of Mark ends early. Sinaiticus even contains two books that didn't make the later canon cut, the Epistle of Apostle Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. The changes are significant, according to British Library curator Scot McKendrick, because "the recognition is that Scripture, as it comes down to us, is transmitted by human hand."
The three manuscript powerhouses behind the modern Bible are Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and Alexandrinus. Like Sinaiticus, the Vaticanus codex dates to the 4th century, with Alexandrinus transcribed 100 years later. Vaticanus was preserved and overwritten in the 15th century. Alexandrinus may be the best preserved. But only Sinaiticus has the prized complete New Testament. The books' different ordering, contents and appearances again testify to the Bible's evolutionary history.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1910141,00.html
Erasures, additions, corrections, substitutions — Sinaiticus reveals a Bible-in-process. Between the 4th and 12th centuries, various scribes changed earlier colleagues' bad spelling. Of more theological significance, the Gospel of Mark ends early. Sinaiticus even contains two books that didn't make the later canon cut, the Epistle of Apostle Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. The changes are significant, according to British Library curator Scot McKendrick, because "the recognition is that Scripture, as it comes down to us, is transmitted by human hand."
The three manuscript powerhouses behind the modern Bible are Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and Alexandrinus. Like Sinaiticus, the Vaticanus codex dates to the 4th century, with Alexandrinus transcribed 100 years later. Vaticanus was preserved and overwritten in the 15th century. Alexandrinus may be the best preserved. But only Sinaiticus has the prized complete New Testament. The books' different ordering, contents and appearances again testify to the Bible's evolutionary history.
Christians can’t even agree on what the “unchallengeable word of God” even means. Some follow the doctrine of inerrancy, which means that the whole Bible is accurate, even on history and science; the second doctrine, infallibility, merely asserts that the Bible is accurate only on faith and practice. Christians are still arguing about which is true. A third school, the “authoritativeness” school, says the Bible is accurate on issues of morality. Likewise, even Conservative Jews have four ways in which they interpret the divinity of the word of God.
To make matters worse, all of this interpretation has been tangled up in human political issues. Medieval Christian leaders discouraged translations of the Old Testament for political reasons. Pope Innocent III banned unauthorized translations – people who tried to reach out and understand the word of God were punished (rather like Adam and Eve at the tree of knowledge). Likewise Henry VIII suppressed the circulation of English-language Bibles; Henry changed his mind and tried to make the Bible available to the people, but then changed his mind again and decreed that only the upper classes could have it. Mary I, his daughter, also suppressed the circulation of Bibles. During the early days of the Reformation many competing versions of the Bible were in circulation, and the ones unpopular with the monarch of the day were burned.
Even the issue of which texts were, in fact, the word of God was argued over, by humans, from the beginning. For 600 years, Jewish leaders known as Masoretes argued about what should even be in the text of the Bible. For six hundred years there was no agreement on what the word of God even was. It is possible that ancient Jewish leaders decided which books to include as the “word of God” based on what the Christians put in their own Bible.
Things got worse when the Christians got involved. The Church didn’t even get everyone on the same page with regard to doctrine – let alone scripture – until the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. In the fourth century Christian leaders held a series of meetings to decide which texts were the word of God. The books of the New Testament were “canonized” – deemed holy – 300 years after Jesus and most of the other central players were dead. Originally the Book of Revelation was left out – and no wonder.
When the Protestant reformation came around, the arguments about which books were really the word of God started all over again. Different denominations now include different books: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Slavonic. Different traditions include different books in the Bible as “God’s word”.
Protestants established four “criteria for canonicity”, to decide which scripture is “holy”. First, apostolic origin, which means it came from the disciples chosen by the church’s followers. Universal acceptance, which means the texts were chosen by the church’s followers. Liturgical use, which means that the church’s followers chose to use it in church. Consistent message, which means the text preaches a message which agrees with what is popular with the church’s followers. In other words, the divinity of the texts was a popularity contest among humans.
So what do we have here? No one knows where this stuff comes from. We don’t know when these fragments of oral storytelling were first jotted down, or by whom, but we know they were human beings. As the centuries rolled on, their successors (who had no part in the original “revelation”) added their own human translation abilities, their own human interpretations, their human political issues, and their many, many human errors. And these human beings have been arguing about what these texts mean, for centuries. They have even argued about which books should be included at all. And in the middle of all this, they have decreed that these texts (whichever ones they decide to include) were passed on centuries ago as the unchallengeable word of an unchallengeable God – and then they set about arguing about what “unchallengeable” means.
For my money, as soon as you have dozens of denominations and sects using dozens of different versions of the same book (which itself has four different versions of Jesus’ life), the whole “unchallengeable” notion goes out the window. As soon as you get to a point where you can simply use your own human impulses to choose which of these versions is the right one, you’ve lost “unchallengeability”. The fact that all those other versions even exist, is in itself a challenge to the book you choose.
And without the “unchallengeable” word of God, where do we get God from?
