They wave their Bibles at passersby, screaming their condemnations of homosexuals. They fall on their knees, worshipping at the base of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments while demanding prayer in school. They appeal to God to save America from their political opponents, mostly Democrats. They gather in football stadiums by the thousands to pray for the country’s salvation. They are God’s frauds, cafeteria Christians who pick and choose which Bible verses they heed with less care than they exercise in selecting side orders for lunch. They are joined by religious rationalizers—fundamentalists who, unable to find Scripture supporting their biases and beliefs, twist phrases and modify translations to prove they are honoring the Bible’s words…. A Pew Research poll in 2010 found that evangelicals ranked only a smidgen higher than atheists in familiarity with the New Testament and Jesus’s teachings. “Americans revere the Bible—but, by and large, they don’t read it,” wrote George Gallup Jr. and Jim Castelli, pollsters and researchers whose work focused on religion in the United States.
One of the things I’ve challenged myself to attempt to understand is the disconnect between the teachings of Jesus Christ and the practices of those who profess to follow those teachings. I don’t believe in God, but anyone who lives in this country understands the profound effect religious faith has on so many aspects of American life. Here’s the thing about that, though: the Christian faith that is woven so intrinsically into the fabric of so many American live is too often not even close to what one would find in the Bible.
It turns out that many, perhaps even most, Christians don’t even read the Bible, much less understand the historical context and contradictions. Of the ones who do, many grossly misinterpret what they read. Most Fundamentalists know next to nothing about what the Bible says (or doesn’t say) on a myriad of subjects from homosexuality to the place, role, and rights of women. Yet they’re convinced that their faith is the Way, The Truth, and the Light- the One, True, and Only Faith.
Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald has written an excellent piece on why Christianity’s Holy Book is so thoroughly and completely misunderstood and misinterpreted (The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin). Right off the bat, there will be those who will accuse me of “Christian bashing,” when nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t think it at all unrealistic to expect that if believers are to travel a path that they do so honestly and with clarity. The Bible, like any holy book from any faith tradition, doesn’t exist so adherents can twist it into something that supports their biases, fears, and prejudices…and yet that’s exactly what so many Fundamentalists do.
If you call yourself a Christian, yet you A) don’t read the Bible and/or B) misinterpret the teachings contained within, you’re deceiving yourself and those around you. Call me naive, but if I was misinterpreting something, I’d hope someone would point it out to me. If I was misunderstanding and/or misusing information, I’d certain want that to be brought to my attention. I don’t want to live dishonestly based on inaccurately interpreted information. Yet so many Fundamentalist Christians are absolutely convinced that they KNOW what Jesus taught, and that their interpretation is the One, True, and only Faith. Period.
I don’t know about you, but to me that seems the very definition of arrogance and self-delusion..never mind a recipe for religious tyranny.
The Bible is not the book many American fundamentalists and political opportunists think it is, or more precisely, what they want it to be. Their lack of knowledge about the Bible is well established…. When the illiteracy of self-proclaimed Biblical literalists leads parents to banish children from their homes, when it sets neighbor against neighbor, when it engenders hate and condemnation, when it impedes science and undermines intellectual advancement, the topic has become too important for Americans to ignore, whether they are deeply devout or tepidly faithful, believers or atheists.
Never in the history of humankind have so many been so convinced of the correctness and accuracy of their beliefs…and been so thoroughly, completely, and utterly wrong. To say that many Christians, even ones who seriously endeavor to lead Christ-like lives, base their beliefs on inaccurate interpretations of Scripture and information made up out of whole cloth would be something of an understatement.
The Barna Group, a Christian polling firm, found in 2012 that evangelicals accepted the attitudes and beliefs of the Pharisees—religious leaders depicted throughout the New Testament as opposing Christ and his message—more than they accepted the teachings of Jesus.
Perhaps the biggest fallacy is that the Bible is true, unerring, and immutable- the literal and infallible Word of God. The truth is that the Bible was not dictated to one person who then wrote it down so it could be shared with all Mankind, forever and ever, Amen. The book the Christians revere today is the product of translation after translation after translation over many hundreds of years encompassing all manner of political and ecclesistical upheaval.
If you’ve ever played “telephone,” you know how quickly and thoroughly even the simplest of declarations can be scrambled into something unrecognizable. So it is with the Bible.
No television preacher has ever read the Bible. Neither has any evangelical politician. Neither has the pope. Neither have I. And neither have you. At best, we’ve all read a bad translation—a translation of translations of translations of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on, hundreds of times.
About 400 years passed between the writing of the first Christian manuscripts and their compilation into the New Testament. (That’s the same amount of time between the arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower and today.) The first books of the Old Testament were written 1,000 years before that. In other words, some 1,500 years passed between the day the first biblical author put stick to clay and when the books that would become the New Testament were chosen. There were no printing presses beforehand or until 1,000 years later. There were no vacuum-sealed technologies to preserve paper for centuries. Dried clay broke, papyrus and parchment crumbled away, primitive inks faded.
Before the printing press was invented, literary works and letters could only be copied by hand. This meant the human element complicated the odds of getting a true, complete, and/or accurate copy of anything. Combine this with the numbers of scribes who translated and copied the manuscripts over several hundred years, and…well, you can see where this is going. There’s simply no way to credibly make the case that the Bible is the literal Word of God. To assert otherwise is to argue against logic and historical reality.
There’s no definitive way to determine just how accurate today’s Bible is, which probably helps to account for the number of translations available to Christians- from the formal, stilted language of the King James Version to the modern vernacular of the Living Bible. IF the Bible is to be considered to absolutely be the literal Word of God, why is it that 45 seconds worth of very basic research revealed at least 21 different versions, each written in a unique linguistic style? Would not a Bible that’s the literal Word of God exist in only ONE version?
The historical context surrounding the codification of modern Christianity is not a straight line. The early history of Christianity was one of repeated political and theological upheaval and conflict, much of it bloody. It required the reconciliation of a wide variety of viewpoints and interpretations on a myriad of subjects. For example, some evidence suggests that the Sabbath was originally meant for the day we know as Saturday, but that the Emperor Constantine moved it up a day, to the day of rest decreed for worshippers of the sun god- hence, “Sunday.” Then there’s the story of Christmas, celebrated on December 25th, which Christians now almost universally accept as the day of Jesus Christ’s birth:
[T]he Bible mentioned nothing about the day of Jesus’s birth, the birth of the sun god was celebrated on December 25 in Rome; Christian historians of the 12th century wrote that it was the pagan holiday that led to the designation of that date for Christmas.
Even the Nicene Creed, recited by Christians worldwide today as the affirmation of the Holy Trinity, was the product of intimidation, massacres, and significant historical conflict…and it was rewritten at least once to satisfy beliefs that were in vogue at the time. In short, like so much of the Bible, it’s a human construct written to conform to a particular theology. It was in no sense handed down by God…to anyone.
THIS is the true, unerring, literal, and infallible Word of God? That’s not my attempt at disrespecting or discounting beliefs; it’s my attempt at pointing out the historical realities that lead Christianity to where it is today…something few Christians understand and even fewer are aware of.
To understand how what we call the Bible was made, you must see how the beliefs that became part of Christian orthodoxy were pushed into it by the Holy Roman Empire. By the fifth century, the political and theological councils voted on which of the many Gospels in circulation were to make up the New Testament. With the power of Rome behind them, the practitioners of this proclaimed orthodoxy wiped out other sects and tried to destroy every copy of their Gospels and other writings.
And recall that they were already working from a fundamentally flawed document. Errors and revisions by copyists had been written in by the fifth century, and several books of the New Testament, including some attributed to Paul, are now considered forgeries perpetrated by famous figures in Christianity to bolster their theological arguments. It is small wonder, then, that there are so many contradictions in the New Testament. Some of those contradictions are trivial, but some create huge problems for evangelicals insisting they are living by the word of God.
The logical flaws and historical fallacies are what one might expect in any document subject to the time frame, the number of interpretations, and the political and ecclesiastical conflicts of the period. Stories were conflated with other stories, some accurate, some less so, and some that were little but pure fantasy written to bolster a particular theological point of view (Like what Fundamentalists believe to be the biblical injunction against homosexuality- fabricated by a man with an anti-gay agenda.).
NONE of this points to a document that could be described in any sense as being the Living Word of God. It’s a book that was continually revised and altered, and subject to various and assorted political and theological exigencies. It’s a very human document that reflects human prejudices and self-interest. The idea that it’s the literal Word of God simply doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
None of this is meant to demean the Bible, but all of it is fact. Christians angered by these facts should be angry with the Bible, not the messenger.
Given the historical evidence, one cannot credibly reject what is known because it doesn’t mesh with their beliefs. The “When faith and fact collide, go with faith” argument is patently absurd, in that it defies logic and denies what is provably true. Fact is knowable, provable, demonstrable. We know something to be fact because there is evidence to support it. Faith, while certainly not invalid, is neither knowable, provable, or demonstrable. Faith is believing in something because it resonates, it speaks to something within a person. That shouldn’t be held to supersede fact…unless one clings so tightly to their faith that nothing can shake it- not even provable, abject reality.
That’s not faith. That’s denial.
Making matters worse is that several famous biblical tales- the story of Noah and the flood, David’s killing of Goliath, the birth of Christ, the Second Coming, Jesus’ death and resurrection- have more than one version, some with seemingly no relationship to the stories taught in Sunday Schools today. IF the Bible were the literal, unerring Word of God, would there not be ONE version, and one version only? Would not the provenance of Christianity’s Holy Book be a simple and easily understood process? Instead, today’s Bible arguably blurs and conflates the mythological with the theological. It’s the theological equivalent of a historical novel.
I could go into endless detail about the contradictions, inaccuracies, forgeries, and the occasional completely made up story that comprise the book many Christians fervently believe to be the living, unerring Word of God. I would challenge my reader to peruse Eichenwald’s excellent piece thoroughly and with an open mind. I’m not trying to change minds, nor am I discounting anyone’s religious faith. What I AM saying is that if you’re convinced that the Bible was handed from God to Man and is the literal Word of God, you’re making an unsupportable leap of faith that ignores historical reality. There’s simply no evidence to support the Evangelical belief regarding the absolute, unquestioned inerrant nature of the Bible- but there’s certainly a veritable mountain of historical evidence that refutes it.
The unfortunate reality is that most Christian faith today is based on stories that have been translated, re-translated, altered repeatedly, or simply made up. That doesn’t mean Christianity is invalid, merely that the basis of it isn’t what most Christians believe it to be.
God doesn’t need the help of fundamentalists in determining what should be done in the afterlife with the prideful, the greedy, the debaters or even those homosexuals. Which could well be why Jesus cautioned his followers against judging others while ignoring their own sins. In fact, he had a specific word for people obsessed with the sins of others. He called them hypocrites.
My concern is that modern Christianity is based on what in many cases is an intellectually dishonest relating of time-honored stories that most of us learned in Sunday School. In a sense, yes, most of what we’ve learned about Christianity is wrong. That doesn’t invalidate anyone’s faith; it merely suggests that it deserves to be questioned and re-evaluated.
As a historical document, the Bible is a mess; perhaps it’s time that modern Christendom admitted as much and worked to reconcile their faith with the truth.
