This morning thousands upon thousands of our neighbors are walking into church carrying their Bibles. Across the Front Range, across Colorado, across America and beyond, people by the millions are walking into their congregations for Bible study. The sermon they will hear is based (even if loosely) on a biblical text. On television we can see preachers delivering sermons while holding an open Bible in one hand. Yesterday, in synagogues across the world, Jews heard readings from the Hebrew Bible (what most of us know as the Old Testament).
All across America personal and political decisions are made based on someone’s interpretation of the Bible. The Bible is an omnipresent religious, political and cultural force. Bible colleges are churning out thousands of graduates every year. Millions of kids are memorizing Bible verses in Sunday school. Zillions of Bibles are sold every year. Try as we might, we cannot ignore the Bible. The opinions you and I hold about the Bible define where we are placed on America’s religious map.
Did you bring your Bible today? I didn’t think so. The fact that we do not hold the Bible as the supreme authority on all religious matters says a lot about us.
One of the challenges you and I face is that the Bible has become a symbol of religious fundamentalism. The people who are most reactionary are those most likely to base their opinions on their reading of the Bible. “Bible-thumping” has become synonymous for narrow-minded, judgmental, and anti-intellectual. Just as our flag has become associated with the most militaristic elements in our society, the Bible has become associated with the most extreme cultural conservatism.
Ironically, the people who are most likely to use the authority of the Bible as the basis for their cultural conservatism are guilty of a kind of idolatry that the Bible condemns. Those most likely to quote passages from the Bible to support a particular agenda are the least likely to understand the Bible. The Bible we encounter as a cultural artifact is a twisted distortion. It is a caricature of the real Bible. The real Bible is something quite different.
What is the real Bible? What do we know about it? Who wrote the Bible? What should the Bible mean to us?
Well, let’s go back to the beginning. No, not the book of Genesis and the creation myths, but to the beginning of the Bible. Let’s first take a quick look at what we know about the Bible. Once we have done that, let’s reflect on what the Bible might mean to you and me.
First of all, despite all appearances to the contrary, the Bible is not a book. At least it isn’t a book in any usual sense of the term.
The Bible is a compilation of “books.” Almost all of the books of the Bible, like Genesis and Exodus and Luke and John, did not begin as something written. They began as stories that were told orally. Eventually these stories were written down, some of them many centuries after they were first told. So the stories about Abraham and Isaac and, yes, Jesus, were first transmitted by word of mouth. We all know what happens to stories that are retold orally. They change a little every time they are told. When they were finally written down, they were recopied dozens of times. The stories were often recombined and edited and woven together. For example, biblical scholars have identified a number of different sources and traditions in the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures (these books are known as the Torah, or Pentateuch). Most serious scholars believe that the book of Genesis is a compilation of several traditions. One obvious example of this is that the name used for God keeps switching back and forth from YHWH (Yahweh, or Jehovah) to Elohim. Interestingly, Elohim is a feminine plural noun that essentially means “the divine.”
We don’t have the original manuscripts of anything in Bible. The earliest manuscripts we have are copies of copies of copies of copies of edited stories that had been retold for centuries.
When we ask who wrote the Bible, the answer is hundreds and hundreds of people, all of them unknown to us. Moses did not write the first five books. King David did not write the Psalms. Mark did not write the Gospel According to Mark. The only exceptions are some of the letters of the apostle Paul. Scholars believe that Paul actually did write a half dozen of the letters attributed to him. Other letters attributed to Paul were almost certainly written by someone else writing in what they believed was the spirit of Paul. And even when we consider the few letters of Paul that were actually written by him, the earliest physical fragments we have come from almost 300 years after Paul’s death. They are copies of copies.
By the way, nowhere in the Bible is there the claim that the writings were written by God. Nowhere. The claim that the Bible contains the verbatim words of God is a modern claim made by religious conservatives. They claim for the Bible what none of the authors of the Bible claims.
So what we call the Bible is a collection of a wild variety of writings that came down over centuries. And the collections we have were not put together until long after any of the individual books were written. It was a couple of generations after the death of Jesus before rabbis collected the canon of Hebrew works that became known as the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. The earliest collections were not even in Hebrew. The books had been translated into Greek. In the first century, almost no Jews spoke Hebrew. They spoke Aramaic or Greek.
But let’s take a giant step back. If the Bible is a collection, who decided what was going to be included and what was going to be left out? In the case of the Christian scriptures, this is absolutely crucial. There were something like 30 gospels written. Four of them got into the Bible. In the last 60 years a number of additional works have been found. One famous collection of scrolls, found in Egypt, has been labeled the Gnostic gospels. These works take a very different view of Jesus and of religion. The Christian bishops who put together the collection of writings that came to be known as the New Testament decided that these writings of gnostic Christians were heretical and left them out. Beyond that, they tried to destroy them all. That is why the copies we have found were had been carefully hidden for almost two millennia.
My point is that the collection we know as the Bible is a collection compiled by religious authorities who had a particular theological axe to grind. The Bible is neither a complete nor a representative collection of religious writings of Jews and Christians. It is especially not representative of the broad range of perspectives that existed in early Christianity. Even today, not all Bibles are the same. Protestant Bibles are slightly different from Catholic Bibles, for example.
Then, of course, there is the matter of translation. The entire Christian doctrine of the virgin birth, for example, is the result of a mistaken translation. The original word is accurately translated as “young woman,” not “virgin.” Today there are dozens of English translations available, all the way from the old King James version with its dated English to modern translations that attempt to sound like modern conversational American English.
What a mess! What a wonderful, marvelous, confusing, mess!
If I open my Bible to, say, the book of First Kings, what am I going to read? I am going to read a story told and retold countless times before it was written down. It was then edited and copied and recopied who knows how many times. And then it was translated. There is absolutely no way of knowing what the original words were. There is no way of knowing who first said them. There is no way of knowing to whom these words were said, in what context, nor what it meant to them.
Clearly, for us to read these words today, in English, as if we were reading the word for word dictation of God is a wild distortion of the Bible.
What, then, are we to do? Do we simply dismiss the Bible? I don’t believe we can or should. We live in a time when the Bible is being misused to further all kinds of public policy agendas. The Bible is a pervasive presence in our culture. It surrounds us like the air we breathe. The Bible is simply too important to ignore.
I believe we need to understand the Bible. When we do understand it, we will see that in their misplaced zeal the biblical fundamentalists have made the Bible into an idol. They have made the Bible into something it manifestly is not. They worship the words in the Bible while missing the larger message.
Something fascinating and amazing happens when we look at the Bible calmly and when we read it in light of all the things scholarship has told us. If we look at the whole Bible, I believe that a story begins to emerge. The story the Bible tells is different from any of the stories in the Bible. This is not a story any of the authors intended to tell.
The Bible, taken whole, is a story of people struggling to understand life’s big questions. As the centuries go by, they come to understand life in new ways.
Take the images of God in the Bible. The kind of God that Jesus talks about in the gospels is completely different from the God in the early books of the Hebrew Bible.
The god in the Bible starts out, like all gods, as a creator. And yet this God of the early scriptures soon becomes your basic tribal god. His specialty is smiting the enemies of the Hebrew people. This God thinks nothing of killing all the firstborn sons of the Egyptians. He is happy to exterminate women and children in land the Jews want to occupy. He is very jealous of other gods. The historical writings of the Hebrew scriptures are incredibly bloody. You cannot read these histories without coming away with the sense that God rather enjoys slaughtering tens of thousands of people.
Later in the writings of the prophets God gets a social conscience. The prophets take the rulers to task for how they treat the powerless. God discovers peace. He now asks people to walk humbly and do justice. We get passages about studying war no more and poetic passages about everyone living unafraid beneath a vine a fig tree.
By the time of Jesus, God has become a caring father who seeks reconciliation with his wayward children. With Jesus and the early Christians we get the expression of a new consciousness. God now loves everyone, not just the Jews. God wants us to love each other. God wants us to care for the poor and the powerless. God even wants us to love our enemies. Love our enemies! We are supposed to love our enemies because they too are God’s children. We are all one family now. This is a truly amazing development. Is this the same God who centuries before went around gleefully smiting tens of thousands? Well, yes and no.
Yes, in that Jesus and his followers clearly thought this was the same God of the Jews. But no, in that this God has a new personality.
What we are really seeing in these changing images of God is an expression of the development of the people writing the Bible. As time passes, as they come into contact with other people, as they become victims of oppression of Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Romans, they gradually come to see themselves differently. They slowly come to see other people differently. Some of them, the ones labeled as prophets, begin to imagine a world beyond tribalism, beyond ceaseless war. They come to see compassion as holy. Eventually, some of them come to see God as love. They come to imagine a kingdom of God where everyone is loved, everyone is cared for, everyone matters. In this new imagining of the kingdom of God, everyone is equal. Jesus tells his followers that to help a poor and powerless person is the same as helping him.
It’s an amazing story.
And, of course, the story did not stop two thousand years ago. The story goes on and on. The writings in the Bible got collected as a canon, but the great human story that the Bible contains goes on and on.
The story that continues after the Bible is compiled is not always a happy tale. The great message of compassion and justice becomes the official religion of the Roman empire. In the middle ages it becomes a huge bureaucracy that is authoritarian and corrupt. In the name of Christ Europeans subjugated people across the Americas, in Africa and in Asia. The message of Jesus was distorted in order to legitimize empires.
Alas, we humans are good at distorting messages in order to justify treating others badly. In the American south Christian ministers used the legend of Abraham sending away Hagar and Ishmael as a way of justifying slavery and racism.
As recently as the last century the church that says it worships Jesus and the God of love united with authoritarian fascist regimes in Italy, Spain and Argentina.
Of course, the Bible is full of stories of leaders running amok and people losing sight of what is essential. That is why there are so many stories of prophets like Jeremiah, Isaiah and Micah speaking truth to power.
The story that the Bible tells is still unfolding today. The story is far from over. It does not stop with the Acts of the Apostles or the wild visions of Revelations.
The story the Bible begins is not someone else’s story, it is our story. The Bible belongs to us as much as it belongs to religious reactionaries.
Our task is not to worship the Bible. Our first task is to understand it and to accept it for what it is. The Bible is part of our heritage and, rightly understood, a precious part of our human inheritance. We should read the Bible with a critical mind, an informed mind, and an open heart. We need to read with wisdom and common sense. We need to leave behind the trappings of rigid legalisms and the patriarchy of an early agricultural society. We have to use our heads. In the ancient writings we are told it is all right to sell our children into slavery and that we should stone to death someone who commits adultery. Lots of stuff in the Bible just makes no sense today. Parts of the Bible are as obsolete as writing on animal skins.
The first step is to take the Bible for what it is and read using our good judgment. Our next task is huge. Our next task is to help write the Bible’s next chapter.
Who wrote the Bible? People like us wrote it—people who cared about life’s important questions, people who wanted to be faithful to a vision that transcends violence, hatred and fear. Like the writers of the Bible, we want to be part of a story that is a narrative of the spread of compassion, of peace, of acceptance.
In a deep sense, we wrote the Bible. And we are still writing it.
Our task today is to make the next chapter a chapter where the dreams of Jesus and Micah and Isaiah begin to come true. Our task is not to worship the Bible. Our task is to write the next chapter.
May we write a chapter that tells of brave and glorious deeds. May we write a chapter that tells of peace and kindness.
Let us get busy. We have a task of biblical proportions. Amen.