Response to a Silly
Attack on the Bible
September 17, 2021
A Facebook friend of mine recently
posted this quote from someone named David Cross. Although this ramble never
quite expresses a conclusion, Mr. Cross apparently intends it as an attack on
the reliability and usability of the Bible. He wrote:
Back when the Bible was rewritten, then
edited then rewritten, the re-edited, then translated from dead languages, then
re-translated, then edited, then rewritten, then given to kings for them to
take their favorite parts, then rewritten, the re-rewritten, then translated
again, then given to the pope for him to approve, then rewritten, then edited
again, the (sic) re-re-re-re-rewritten again, all based on stories that were
told orally 30 to 90 AFTER they happened..to people who didn’t know how to
write...so...
I don’t know who David Cross is. It doesn’t matter for my
purposes who he is. The quote as I saw it on Facebook had a couple of affiliations
or sources with it. One is “azquotes.com.” Another is “Dinosaurs Against
Christians Against Dinosaurs (DACAD).” I don’t know what either of those things
is, although both the quote itself and the attribution to something called
DACAD suggest that it comes from a source insufficiently versed in the nature
and history of Bible that knows only literalist, obscurantist Christianity with
no knowledge of contemporary, non-literal Christianity or the current state of
biblical scholarship.
When I read this quote I immediately
thought that I needed to draft a response to it, although the quote is so snide
and simplistic that I hardly know were to start. I certainly don’t believe that
the Bible is above criticism. Anyone who has read my book Liberating the
Bible knows that I hold no such view. I do believe that any critique of the
Bible, like the critique of any other text, must be grounded in a solid
understanding of the nature of the text one is criticizing. This quote from Mr.
Cross clearly is not so grounded.
Cross’s screed may not actually be
worth responding to, but I’ll respond to it anyway. I’ll start here. What is
the Bible? It is a collection of writings that functions as the sacred
scripture of the Christian religion, and the part of it Christians call the Old
Testament functions as the scripture of the Jewish religion.[1] The
Christian Bible consists of sixty-six texts usually called books though none of
them is really a book in the modern meaning of that word. Cross’s quote more or
less gets a couple of things about the Bible more or less correct. His
statement that the Bible is based on stories that were first handed down orally
is true of many though not all things in the Bible. His reference to stories
told thirty to ninety years after the events the stories relate, which is what
I take him to mean though his wording is far from clear on that point, has some
truth in it, though only some. The authentic letters of Paul, which are the
oldest parts of the New Testament, are not based on oral stories at all. They
are texts that were for the most part written or at least dictated by Paul of
Tarsus, whom Christians acknowledge to have been the apostle to the Gentiles.
They date from roughly twenty to thirty years after the death of Jesus of
Nazareth, whom Christians confess to be the Christ, the Messiah. The four
Gospels of the New Testament date from roughly forty to perhaps as much as
seventy years after Jesus’ death. They probably contain some stories that the
Gospels’ unknown authors took from oral tradition.[2]
They all however also contain material original to their authors, and two of
them, Matthew and Luke, repeat most of the Gospel of Mark and add material from
a hypothetical written source scholars call Q that no longer exists. The texts
of the Hebrew Bible, the Protestant Old Testament, do not deal with Jesus
Christ at all, and the most recent of them dates from well over one hundred
years before Jesus, not thirty to ninety years after him. The Hebrew Bible is
immensely complex in the origins and editorial history of many of its texts. Some
but not all of them almost certainly contain material that began as oral
tradition and was written down only later.
The Bible as we have it today was
never “rewritten” much less rewritten numerous times as Cross contends with his
silly repetition of the particle “re.” Most of us read the Bible in
translation, and there are some unavoidable issues that arise in any
translation. Translation is more of an art than a science, and it always
involves the translator’s interpretation of the meaning of the text she is
translating. There are many translations of the Bible into English. There are
no doubt thousands of translations of the Bible into all of the world’s languages.
That does not mean however that the translated texts are necessarily
unreliable. The good translations of the Bible into any language translate the
oldest and best manuscripts we have of the books of the Bible in Hebrew (mostly—part
of the book of Daniel was written in Aramaic not Hebrew) for the Old Testament and
Greek for the New Testament. Yes, the Greek of the New Testament and the Hebrew
of the Old Testament are now dead languages (though Hebrew has been revived and
is used in Israel today). That does not mean, however, that scholars don’t know
what the texts in those languages say. Especially with the Hebrew of the Old
Testament there are some words the meaning of which has been lost, but the
meaning of those words is never central to the meaning of the text in which
they appear.
Many translations of the Bible into
English stand in a tradition that goes back to the King James Version issued in
1611. Our contemporary translations are not however a re-translation of the King
James Version. They are translations of the best ancient manuscripts that we
have of the various books of the Bible. It is true that even the oldest of
those manuscripts date from hundreds of years at least after the text was
originally written. We might wish that we had the original manuscripts of the
texts from the hands of the many authors of the biblical texts, but we don’t.
Nonetheless, scholars who devote professional lifetimes to studying the Bible’s
texts and the historical-cultural-linguistic worlds in which they originated
can be acceptably confident that the manuscripts that we have are sufficiently similar to what the original
texts contained that we can use those old manuscripts with confidence that we
are not significantly altering a text’s original meaning. Beyond that, what is
important in our lives of faith today is what the Bible that we consider to be
sacred scripture says, not what some more ancient text may once have said.
Yet the biggest problem with Cross’
quote may not be the way he strings the particle “re” together to create the
impression that the biblical texts that we have are unreliable. It may instead
be the assumption Cross seems to make about what the Bible is and what it
should be. His statement about the Bible containing stories told thirty to
ninety years after the events the stories recount (which is what I take him to mean
though he has not expressed that meaning at all well) suggests that for the
Bible to be legitimate it must relate actual historical facts as they actually
happened. He seems to assume that the Bible’s only legitimate purpose is to
report wie es eigentlich gewesen, how it actually was. In making that assumption,
which of course he shares with a great many Christians, he is applying an
understanding of the purpose of historical writing that developed only in the
nineteenth century CE to texts written hundreds upon hundreds of years before
anyone thought that was history’s only legitimate function. The Bible’s many
authors had no such understanding of what they were doing. The texts of the
Bible were written not as history in the modernist understanding of that
discipline but for various other purposes. Many of the texts of the Old
Testament were written as much for political or theological purposes as for
what we would call historical ones. The authors of the Gospels in the New Testament
did not intend to write historical, merely factual biographies of Jesus. They
meant to tell stories about Jesus as confessions of their faith in him. The
Gospels tell us more how their authors and the communities for which they were
written understood and believed in Jesus than they give us historically
provable facts about him.
We modern creatures of the
rationalism of the European Enlightenment think truth consists only of facts.
We’re wrong about that, and none of the Bible’s authors would have reduced
truth to fact the way we moderns do. The New Testament texts confess Jesus to
be the Christ, and they tells what their authors understood that confession to
mean (and they didn’t all mean the same thing by it, not by a long shot). The
Bible uses the language of metaphor and symbol to point us toward Jesus as the
Christ, not to give us mere facts about him. Most if not all of the Bible’s
texts do contain some historical facts, but those facts are sometimes so deeply
buried beneath the language of myth and legend that we can’t really know what
they are. We really do need to get over seeing the Bible as a recitation of
mere facts. It actually is so much more than that.
And we need to understand how the
Bible as we have it can work for us in our lives of faith. It tells the
foundational stories of our faith, and it tells us how some of our ancient ancestors
in the faith understood God and/or Jesus Christ. So to state here how the Bible
should actually function in our lives I’ll close by repeating most of what I
consider to be the best paragraph I’ve ever written about the Bible from my
book Liberating the Bible:
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 in 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.
Mr. Cross apparently does not understand the Bible this way.
A great many Christians don’t either. We would all be better off if they did.
[1] I
refer here to the Protestant Old Testament. The Roman Catholic Old Testament
contains several writings that are not part of Jewish sacred scripture.
[2]
Although each of those Gospels is known by the name of a person who can be
identified in other Christian sources, we do not know who wrote the Gospels.
The names we associate with them, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are attributions
made quite a long time after the Gospels were written.
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