The Thing About the Bible
We just can't come to believe everything we read.
8/24/20234 min read
The Bible
The Bible has been a source of inspiration and comfort for thousands of years. Many believe the Bible to be inerrant and a factual account of the creation, of God's purpose, and our ancestral history. It is chalked full of fantastical events; talking serpents, burning pushes, giants, rivers of blood, angels galore, even angels murdering children, and so much more of things we never see today. But where did it come from -- who wrote it?
Christians and Jews traditionally believe the first books of the Bible (Pentateuch) to have been written by Moses. Today, we're not sure everything we know about Moses is true, or if he even existed, and the end of Deuteronomy describes the “author” dying and being buried. So, not likely Moses. Many Christians today believe that while they don't know who was involved in writing the Bible, what their motivation was, what their intentions were, they are convinced their hand and words were guided by the Holy Spirt and God himself. So, no origin in fact of any kind yet Christians believe the Bible to be the absolute truth and inerrant with all their heart. Unfortunately, believing, no matter how hard one believes, cannot turn a belief into fact. This belief is quite similar to the way that Muslims believe just as hard that the Quran is actual word of God and the only truth... someone's wrong.
It's more historically accurate to believe that they were compilations of oral stories and folklore than had been told for thousands of years previously. Studies have shown traces of older stories that have been passed down verbally for generations before writing even existed have found their way into the Bible. One of the earliest written stories is the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, written between 2150-2000 BCE that contains some strikingly similar stories to the Great Flood and the Garden of Eden. Liberal theologians generally accept the "Documentary Hypothesis" which asserts that the Pentateuch was written by a group of four authors over a period of four centuries. Each wrote with the goal of promoting their own religious views:
J: the Yahwist source: written c. 950 BCE in the southern kingdom of Judah, a writer who used JHWH as the "unpronounceable name of God." It is often translated as Jehovah.
E: the Elohist source: written c. 850 BCE in the northern kingdom of Israel, a writer who used Elohim as the divine name.
D: the Deuteronomist: written c. 600 BCE in Jerusalem during a period of religious reform, the author of the book of Deuteronomy.
P: the Priestly source: written c. 500 BCE by Aaronid priests in exile in Babylon, writers who added material of major interest to the priesthood.
R: the Redactors: first JE, then JED, and finally JEDP, producing the final form of the Torah c.450 BCE, who shaped the contributions of J, E, P and D together into the present Pentateuch
While most believers consider the Bible to be inerrant, to the unbiased eye there are quite a few inconsistencies, doublets, and claims that break the physical laws of nature. As early as Genesis 5 you're asked to believe that the generations from Adam to the birth of Noah's son Shem covered 1,056 years and that most men lived to be over 900 years old. Fossil records show life expectancy at the time for early Homo Sapiens was 18-24 years and individuals reaching the age of 40 was rare. Using the Bible Chronology, man has been on Earth is less than 7,000 years. However, fossil records of the Homo Species date modern man at 300,000 years and earliest man at 3-6 million years. The Y-chromosome Adam has been traced back to 120,000-156,000 years ago and Mitochondrial Eve at 99,000-148,000 years with some studies suggesting a common ancestor for all modern humans lived well over 200,000 years ago.
The authenticity of the New Testament is also hard to accept. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written 60-200 years after Jesus' death and not by their namesakes. In fact, their names were not associated with the books until the second century. The gospels also conflict with each other (click to see an example). But do a search on Bible Inconsistencies and you'll find much more on both sides of the argument.
The books of the New Testament are stories told in a way to evoke a specific image of Jesus. Which is not surprising because when the pagan Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 he later convoked the Council of Nicaea in 325, and specified the criteria by which the gospels and books of early Christianity were going to were chosen, or canonized, in the New Testament and which were books were to be banned, you could even killed for possessing one -- there was an agenda behind the selection.
But rather than detail the reasons why it's extremely difficult to accept the Bible as fact, there are literally hundreds of thousands of references on the Internet that attempt to prove or disprove these things. We suggest you read them and decide for yourself. We accept the Bible is a collection of stories handed down from oral tradition by essentially uneducated (by today's standards) people who lived over 3,000 years ago. It has been edited, altered, and amended by people with their own personal agenda and motivation. Even if well intentioned, they still introduced a bias that has altered fact. Saying the authors, even though nobody knows who they are, were "inspired" by God doesn't make what they wrote any more of a fact or God's word.
It is unthinkable that today we would treat a disease, an injury, a mental health issue, with 3,000 year old medical knowledge, practices, and medicine. So, how is it without hesitation Christians treat their spiritual self based on 3,000 year old ideas and beliefs written by people with such an incredibly small and superstitious world view? Having to suspend logic, suspend reason, suspend reality, ignoring scientific evidence, and accepting facts that contradict the physical laws of nature is not an act of faith, but of fantasy.
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