Sometimes the Bible is Just Wrong

 

Sometimes the Bible is Just Wrong

April 14, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

The Bible is the word of God, right? Because it is it contains no errors, right? We’ve all herd those claims about it, right? I mean, if God wrote it the Bible can’t have any errors in it, right? So everything in it is God’s honest truth, right? If the Bible says it, it’s right, right? An awful lot of people believe those things, so they must be correct, right?

Well, actually no, not right. The Bible is full of things that are just flat wrong. Of course it also contains truly profound truth, but that doesn’t mean everything in it is correct. Today I was reading the Revised Common Lectionary’s texts for Sunday, April 25, 2021. Those readings include Acts 4:5-12 and John 10:11-18. Both of those texts include statements that either theologically or historically speaking just aren’t correct. Let me begin with Acts.

In Acts 4:5-12  Peter and John have been arrested for proclaiming that in Jesus there is resurrection of the dead. It seems they were also arrested for performing healings. The next day they’re brought before the Jewish authorities. Those worthies demand to know by what power or name they do healings. Peter, supposedly filled with the Holy Spirit, says they do healings “by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified….” Now, it may well be true that Peter and the others did healings in the name of Jesus Christ. I’m not going to quarrel with that claim here. But when Peter says that the Jewish authorities crucified Jesus he’s just wrong. The Jewish authorities under the Romans never crucified anyone. In Jesus’ time at least they had no legal authority to execute people. Only the Romans could do that. And even if they had had the legal authority to execute people they wouldn’t have done it by crucifixion. That was a Roman method of execution not a Jewish one. When in Acts the mob turns against St. Stephen they stone him to death, they don’t crucify him. Acts 7:54-60. So no, book of Acts, the Jewish leaders didn’t crucify Jesus. The Romans did. That’s error number one in this passage.

There’s another. This lectionary reading from Acts ends at Acts 4:12, which reads, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” The name in question of course is Jesus Christ. This verse is one of the many in the New Testament that claims that salvation comes only through Jesus. It at least implies that to be saved, whatever that means, one must believe in Jesus, whatever that means. And it just isn’t true. I understand, I think, why the New Testament makes the claim so often that it is. It was the first Christians’ way of saying to the Jews you’re wrong when you deny that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah. You’re also wrong when you throw us out of the synagogues because we confess that he is, which by the late first century CE at least the Jews were doing. Those early Christians were mad as hell at the Jews for not accepting Jesus as the Messiah and for excluding them from what had been their spiritual community. So they said Jesus is the only way.

Yet of course Jesus isn’t the only way. He is a true and powerful way in which we can know and live our relationship with God, but he isn’t the only one. We know that he isn’t the only one because of a couple of quite undeniable truths. First, it makes absolutely no sense that God would establish only one valid way for people to live their relationship with God, then make that one way known to only some of humanity not all of humanity. That God would make that way known only to us Christians is absurd, and God is not absurd. Second, in today’s world we know that huge numbers of people find a valid connection with God through faith traditions other than Christianity. The world is full of faithful, caring, loving people who aren’t Christians. Does God reject them or even damn them though they live good lives of love and care just because they aren’t of our faith? Of course not! God isn’t that narrow. God isn’t that petty. God’s just whole lot bigger than that. God doesn’t care about the thoughts in our heads to the exclusion of care about our living good lives of love and care for all of God’s people. So no, book of Acts, the name of Jesus Christ is not the only one by which we must be saved.

Then there’s John 10:11-18. In those verses Jesus first says “I am the good shepherd.” John 10:11a. There’s no problem there. Metaphorically speaking he is. But at John 10:15 he says “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” Now, the author of the Gospel of John clearly wanted that to be true of Jesus. John is the Gospel of incarnation par excellence. In John Jesus is only barely human. He’s much more divine and much less human than he is in the other Gospels. Mere humans like the Romans surely couldn’t kill God, so in John they don’t. The armed mob come to arrest Jesus fall to their knees before his divine majesty. See John 18:1-12. See the translators note on what Jesus actually says in the Greek original, and remember who “I am” is. See Exodus 3:14. In John, though Jesus dies, no one kills him. He dies only because he has determined to die as his way of going back to heaven where he came from in the first place.

As an historical matter John’s account of Jesus’ dying because he laid down his own life is utter nonsense. It works as a confession of Jesus Christ as God Incarnate, and we can value it for that reason. As historical fact it doesn’t work at all. There’s little doubt about what happened as historical fact. Jesus carried out a ministry of teaching and healing that drew many followers to him. He led a popular, messianic movement. There had been popular, messianic movements before Jesus. The Romans knew how to deal with them. Kill the movement’s leader, and the movement disappears. The Romans didn’t tolerate popular movements, especially not ones like Jesus’ that proclaimed a truth that directly contradicted the Romans’ way of doing things. So they crucified Jesus. They executed him as a political criminal. That they would was virtually inevitable, and Jesus knew it. See Mark 8:31. As an historical matter Jesus didn’t lay down his life except perhaps in the sense that he was willing to run the risk of crucifixion to proclaim what he knew to be God’s truth. The Romans arrested and killed him. They had the power to do it. They’d done it before. They’d do it again. There was no way Jesus could avoid it except perhaps by renouncing  everything he’d said and everything he stood for. Surely Mark’s scene in the Garden of Gethsemane is closer to what actually happened than is John’s “I lay down my life.” See Mark 14:32-42. As an historical matter John’s Jesus saying “I lay down my life” is just wrong.

The errors I’ve discussed here are but a few of the many things in the Bible that just aren’t correct. Some of the errors are theological—Jesus is the only way—and some are historical—no one takes my life from me but I lay it down. Christian Fundamentalism insists that the Bible is inerrant. It isn’t. It so obviously isn’t that when I hear someone say that it is I always want to ask if they’re actually read it. So what are we to do with it? Throw the whole thing out? By no means! For all its problematic aspects, the Bible is the one book Christianity cannot do without. What we are to do with it is work harder to understand it than most of us do most of the time. The Bible doesn’t give us God’s truth nicely prepared on a silver platter. Rather it calls us to the hard but sacred work of doing our own discernment. We might wish that it made things easier than that. It doesn’t.

I’ll close by giving you once again what I consider to be the best paragraph I’ve ever written:

 

Let me suggest that you think of the Bible as invitation. The Bible doesn’t dictate truth to us. Rather, its ancient authors say here are the experiences and understandings of some of your ancient forbears in the faith. Generation after generation of faithful Jewish and Christian people have found meaning, hope, comfort, and challenge in these pages. So come on in. Learn what we have to say. Do the difficult work of really understanding our ancient texts on their own terms. Then do your own discernment. We did ours, now you do yours. We hope that what you read here will light your path to God, but we cannot relieve you of your duty to discern God’s truth for you and your world. We don’t all say the same thing. We didn’t all understand God the same way. We didn’t understand the universe and human nature the way you do. But come on in. Learn from us. There is great wisdom here. Learn from us, but don’t just parrot back what we had to say. We invite you not to rote responses and easy answers. We invite you to the hard but sacred work of study and discernment. May God be with you in that work. Amen.