The Worst Book Ever?

 

The Worst Book Ever?

Recent news reports say that the actor Brian Cox has called the Bible “the worst book ever.” Is he right? Is the Bible the worst book ever? I suppose it depends on what you mean by “worst,” but in any event my answer to that question is a qualified no. The Bible is an immensely complex set of documents. There is a widespread conception among Protestant Christians that anyone can pick it up, read it, and understand it. That conception is simply false. The Bible contains sixty-six different documents. They were produced over the span of nine hundred years or so. They were all written in socio-cultural-political-religious worlds that were radically different from ours. Yes, anyone who is literate can pick up the Bible, read it, and have some understanding of what at least most of the words in it mean. That does not, however, mean that that person has really understood what she is reading. Unless she has done a lot of study, she very probably hasn’t.

What might someone mean when they call the Bible “the worst book ever?” I haven’t bothered to find out what Cox meant by it, but to me the worst book ever would be the book that has caused the most damage in the world. Is that the Bible? It has a lot of competition for that dubious title. Hitler’s Mein Kampf comes to mind. It lays out the blueprint for all the horror the Nazis inflicted on the world, including but not limited to the Holocaust. Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital certainly began a journey into immense evil for Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo? has misled generation after generation with regard to what Christianity is really about, and Christians have inflicted one hell of a lot of damage on the world as a result. These books only scratch the surface of all of the really bad books we humans have produced.

So what about the Bible? Well, on the one hand, it is indeed a really, really bad book. There’s no point in denying that truth. Parts of it are horribly violent. In the Old Testament, the ancient Israelis are at war almost constantly, and they do it with God’s blessing. The God of the Bible either uses violence to accomplish God’s ends or is terrifically violent Godself. In the Old Testament, God sends snakes that kill thousands of God’s people. In the Old Testament, God uses the Assyrians and the Babylonians to inflict horrific suffering on the Hebrew people. Moreover, much of the Old Testament reduces faith to a set of laws we’re supposed to obey, which isn’t what true faith is at all. The book of Leviticus prescribes death as punishment for a violation of many of those laws.

But there’s even worse in the New Testament. In the book of Revelation God and Jesus Christ use unspeakable violence to wipe out a very substantial portion of the human population. The divine violence in the Bible has functioned as a justification for a great deal of Christian violence over the centuries. That Jesus was radically nonviolent has not stopped Christians from engaging in massive violence at will. Christians used the Bible to justify their imperialistic crusades against Muslim believers. They used its claims of Christian exclusivism to justify the destruction of native cultures around the world, including killing a great many people who were part of those cultures.

There’s more bad stuff about the Bible. Christians have used passages in it for millennia to condemn God’s LGBTQ+ people. Never mind that the ancient world of the Bible had no understanding of homosexuality and other sexualities as naturally occurring varieties of human sexuality the way we do. Christians have used passages in the New Testament, attributed to St. Paul but not really by him, to justify cultural oppression of women nearly from the beginnings of the Christian faith. One passage in the Gospel of Matthew has been used to elevate a mere human being who happens to be the Bishop of Rome to the level of Christ’s infallible vicar on earth. The Roman Catholic Church continues to use the fact that Jesus Christ was a male human being to justify its sinful exclusion of women from the priesthood. There’s a lot of really bad stuff in the Bible, a fact which any openminded reading of it will confirm.

Among the most evil things in the Bible is the New Testament’s anti-Judaism. There is no doubt that as a matter of historical fact the Romans not the Jews crucified Jesus. Yet the New Testament authors, including especially the authors of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John, tried to shift the blame for that act of profound cruelty and injustice from the Romans to the Jews. Matthew even has the Jewish people say as they demanded Jesus’ crucifixion, “His blood be on us and on our children.” Christians have used the New Testament’s anti-Judaism as the basis for their claims that all Jews are “Christ killers,” which of course they aren’t and never were. Christian violence against Jewish people is one the faith’s greatest sins. It is something of which we must repent and for which we must atone.

But. On the other hand. There is great wisdom in the Bible. The prophet scholars call Second Isaiah gave the world true monotheism. For all its shortcomings, the Old Testament gives us a God who truly cares about and for God’s people. In at least the good parts of the New Testament, we see God in human form. We see as much of God as we humans are capable of understanding. We see that God’s ways are the world’s ways turned completely upside down. We see that God is nonviolent and calls us to nonviolence too. We see that God demands distributive justice for all people. We see that for God gender differences between human beings make no difference. All are equal in God’s sight.

We see that God has no time for the power of empires. We see that God prefers the poor and lowly to the high and mighty. We see that God calls us to lives of inner transformation in which we love our neighbors as ourselves, and everyone is our neighbor, even people we really wish weren’t.

We see that God is love. God is a God of universal grace freely given to everyone. We don’t have to earn it, which is good because we couldn’t earn it even if we had to. God gives it as God’s free gift for every human being there ever was or ever will be. If we read the New Testament aright, which, sadly, Christians seldom do, we see that nothing in all creation can or ever will separate us from the love of God.

The Bible is the foundational book of Christianity. What Christians call its Old Testament is the sacred scripture of the great, ancient Jewish faith. Yet, perhaps unfortunately, it is impossible to make any other valid generalizations about it. It is an immensely complex book. Great evil has flowed from it, but so has great good. Its diverse, complex texts have helped people find a meaningful relationship with God for nearly three thousand years. It has been a source of comfort, courage, and inspiration for more people than we can possibly count, and it continues to be that today.

So is the Bible the worst book ever? No, it isn’t. That is not to say that there isn’t much evil in it. There is. It is not to say that Christians have never used parts of it as justification for great evil. They have. Yet there is also much that is good in it. There is much wisdom in it. We have to read it carefully to find that wisdom. We need guidance from people who understand it better than we do to find that wisdom. Yet that wisdom is there. There is no wisdom in Mein Kampf. There is nothing but evil. There is no wisdom in Mao’s little red book. There is nothing but evil, and it led to nothing but death and destruction.

So no, the Bible is not the worse book ever. There are worse books than the Bible. Yes, there is a lot about the Bible that is really, really bad. Yes, I know. We Christians aren’t supposed to say that, but it’s true. But unlike many other books humans have created there is also great good in it. It’s not the worst book ever. It is a book that it is difficult not to misunderstand. It is a book we must read carefully and from which we must draw wisdom selectively. The Bible’s far from perfect, but it’s far from the worst book ever. Thanks be to God!