When I was driving to work this morning, I listened to our local Christian station (99.7) for a while. They were all up in arms about a warning label some groups were putting on Bibles in hotels saying “Literal belief in this document can be hazardous to your health” and then detailing various things in it that should not be taken literally. (This is not the same warning label you get when you google “Bible warning label.”)
The DJ or whatever you call him was very upset about this and called this group his enemies and so on.
But isn’t that more or less what Catholicism and most forms of Judaism teach you, that you can’t take the Bible literally?
So I have a question for our religious readers: how do the various protestant dominations deal with all the craziness in the Old Testament? I know how the Catholic Church deals with it — they tell you not to read without the guidance of a priest. And I know that in Judaism there is a similar prescription.
I’m sure it varies from denomination to denomination, of course. So any specific examples or general patterns would be welcome.
How about places where Jesus rejects Old Testament teachings? I’ve heard various Christians say “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” justifies the death penalty. But Jesus said:
You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.
Growing up Catholic, I heard the Jesus take on it a lot, but never the original Old Testament passage he was referring to. How do denominations that actually read the Old Testament deal with contradictions like this?
I know some religious protestants and I know how they personally come to grips with this, but I don’t know it is dealt with officially.
Cat Lady
They all lost me at the Holy Ghost. Not one, not two, but three gods? And one was a ghost? SRSLY? Why not four, or more? Four would have made more sense if one of the four gods was a woman, but no woman, a ghost? OK. No.
/6 year old girl
themann1086
IME (speaking as someone who was raised Catholic, is a “militant” atheist, and has a good ecumenical group of friends) they cherry-pick the parts they like and ignore the parts they don’t. Not just our liberal believer friends; the conservatives and moderates, too. It’s relatively easy to do, since various Bible verses either, a, contradict other verses; b, are inherently self-contradictory; or c, are vague and can be interpreted any way if you squint at it a certain way.
Ever take a course on “Feminism and Christianity”? It was kinda funny, reading all these attempts to cast Christianity and Islam and Hinduism as not patriarchal religions. Riiight…
J. Michael Neal
I’m a Universalist. We take the whole damned thing as metaphor, and deny the divinity of Christ on top of it.
LD50
Protestantism is so incredibly fragmented, there is no ‘official way’ it’s dealt with.
In practice, most Protestants merely ignore the awkward parts of the Bible, and only talk about the parts that they already agree with. This is especially easy since most Protestants in this country hardly have any idea what’s really in the Bible. Fundamentalists scarcely talk about the Four Gospels at all, and instead base their pronouncements on a selective mishmash of the OT, Paul, and Revelations.
DougJ
@themann1086:
I believe that there may be a way to read the New Testament in a way that makes it intellectually coherent. This may involve looking at other sources, studying the mores of the era, etc.
But when I read it, years ago, it didn’t seem that self-contradictory to me. The Old Testament of course is all nonsense. Christians should leave it alone (except for the Book of Ruth and a few other parts) unless they are ready to go the full Talmud on it as Jews have done.
My opinion.
Violet
In my Protestant religious background, inconvenient passages in either the OT or NT were first ignored. If that didn’t work, then a scholar would be consulted (in person or via commentaries) to provide insight and into how that text fit into modern day interpretations, etc. I do recall that some of my questions were met with embarrassed sideways looks and non-answers.
For example the Songs of Solomon, with all the seksi talk, was roundly ignored as far as I can remember. I don’t think the prim Protestant denomination I grew up in knew how to deal with that book of the Bible. So they just tried to pretend it didn’t exist.
DougJ
How about the genocidal parts?
Mike Kay
Does anyone believe Moses or Charlton Heston parted the Red Sea?
Fern
@LD50: The Bible appears to be an highly versatile document.
handy
This Christian’s take: /facepalm. That is all.
ETA: Assuming DougJ’s characterization here is accurate, which I have no reason to doubt it is.
demkat620
Most christians today claim to worship Christ and follow his example while being head over heals in love with Jehovah of the Old Testament.
They live in perpetual excitement over the god of the old testament coming down to lay the smackdown on people they don’t like.
Violet
@DougJ:
That would be dealt with in a variety of ways. First, it would be explained that it was a “different time” so things like this happened back then. If someone were so bold as to say something like, “well, what about the Holocaust?” then they might move to the “many of the things in the OT should be taken metaphorically.”
For example, in my Protestant church, no one really believed that the earth was created in a week. The Baptist family across the street did, though, so it definitely varies by denomination.
Things such as slaves or women being owned by their husbands, or like in Esther, women being raped by the King, were explained away as “another time, another culture, we’ve moved beyond that sort of thing.”
Svensker
The Greek Orthodox deal with it basically as the Catholics do — the OT is pretty much tribal stories and metaphor.
Protestants are all over the map. I’ve tried to get some of my fundie family members to explain how they deal with contradictions in the OT but their answers don’t make a lot of sense to me.
A Presbyterian minister once said that his denomination saw the Bible as a book that contained the word of God transmitted by humans, to be read and pondered, but that many modern protestants were committing the sin of idolatry by worshiping the book itself, rather than the God behind it.
That’s not much help, is it?
I’d actually love to hear some answers to your question.
handy
@DougJ:
I think Violet’s point is the genocidal parts aren’t the problem, it’s the genital ones that are.
Fern
@DougJ: I suggest reading Karen Armstrong’s The Bible: A Biography. It is a history of how the Bible has been interpreted. It’s very readable and I found it very informative.
Martin
All religious institutions:
“Remember, don’t try this at home. We’re what you would call ‘experts'”
toujoursdan
The problem here is using the Bible like an encyclopaedia rather than reading it like an unfolding story with a changing central character and a developing plot line.
If you follow the plot ,”El” the mountain god is one of many tribal gods, who then becomes Israel’s warrior God Yahweh (and Israel became God’s chosen people who had to follow certain distinctive rules) and then becomes humanity’s God of love and justice in the later prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel and for Christians ultimately through Christ.
It isn’t that God changed, is that the Biblical writers’ perception of God evolved as they evolved over the 1,500 years the Bible was written.
It doesn’t make sense to dip into a portion of an early chapter and disregard what happened next.
It was never meant to be read like an encyclopaedia, but when they started inserting chapters and verse numbers into the text in the late 15th Century it transformed the Bible from being an unfolding narrative to a reference book. And fundamentalism, which is based on an inerrant encyclopaedic reference Bible took off.
nutellaontoast
@Mike Kay:”Does anyone believe Moses or Charlton Heston parted the Red Sea?” While there are strong believers in both camps, most academics have come to an agreement that the parting of the Red Sea was accomplished through equal parts effort on both of their behalf, so no, no one believes it was either/or.
themann1086
@DougJ: True. I was thinking of OT passages being self-contradictory.
The NT does contradict itself at various points though, largely on timelines (it doesn’t help that the Synoptics were written in the 2nd/3rd century while John was written in the late 1st or early 2nd, and Paul’s letters were written mid-1st). I guess my point was that you’ve got enough material to create a semi-coherent story with a mostly consistent moral system, if you ignore all the other stuff that directly contradicts it.
The Other Steve
I always got the impression that Christ was sent to say “Look you fucks, you don’t understand a God damned thing I’ve been telling you.”
As such the New Testament replaces the Old.
I don’t know where I got that idea from, it was either my Brethren Mother, or the Presbyterian Church I attended in my youth. Probably my mother though.
BH
I just had a Facebook “discussion” the other day with some fundamentalists deeply troubled by the fact that the Methodist church now accepts the teaching of evolution in schools. They contended that they can’t pick and choose what to believe or not in the Bible, since it’s the inerrant word of God. I pointed out that they pick and choose every day by not having slaves or condoning slavery, as the Bible does, just as one example. They responded with incoherent gibberish about how you need the spirit to guide your reading. I’m sure that they had a pulled pork sandwich later that evening with a side of shrimp and felt no sense of irony whatsoever.
Joseph Nobles
That strictly speaking isn’t a rejection of eye for an eye. Under the law the believer was well within his or her rights to ask for the punishment. Jesus was saying to forswear your rights under the law in the spirit of forgiveness.
After all, the original “eye for an eye” was meant to dictate just how much revenge you could get for damages. The problem was that you’d put out my eye, and I’d put out both your eyes and chop off your hand, and then your brother would kill my family, and then….
So “do not resist an evildoer” is a reinforcement of the spirit behind the letter of the law. The righteousness of the followers of Jesus had to be different from the legalistic abiding by the jot and tittle of the words. “Do not resist the evildoer” is where that particular law was aiming people to go, in Jesus’ philosophy.
It’s like the creation story in Genesis 1. We roll our eyes at a literal interpretation of that story today, and rightly so. But in the time it was written or told, the mythologies surrounding the Hebrew culture were full of layered, complex stories explaining creation as the work and interactions of various gods. Seen against that backdrop, the language of Genesis 1 is explicit in its allusions to these myths, but there is only one God working on the stuff of the universe. That stuff is not alive until God makes it alive. It’s ten times more “scientific” than any story of the same time period because it expels the necessity for Gods in every aspect of the story.
In other words, the theologically subversive character of Genesis 1 is now cruelly neutered by the literalized interpretation put on it today, the same kind of literalization that Jesus was trying to combat in the Sermon on the Mount.
No excuses for the genocidal parts, though. And being a gay atheist myself, I’m particularly hacked off that some long-winded joke about the neighbors of Israel being descended from an incesteous knucklehead became the go-to text for hating on homosexuality.
BH
@toujoursdan:
You could have just stopped at “It doesn’t make sense.” Really. It doesn’t, no matter how many qualifiers and conditions you choose to impose.
mikey
Frankly, I’m not sure that’s even worth asking. It’s physically impossible for a virgin to give birth. Dead people STAY dead. There’s very likely a reason why we don’t see miracles in this millenium, and there’s certainly reasons why god won’t just show himself if he’s so butthurt that people don’t WORSHIP him.
We KNOW what causes crop failures and miscarriages and accidents and disease. We no longer NEED to invent a method by which we can attempt to influence the outcome – we understand the science.
It’s beyond stupid. I remember sitting 50% security on a perimeter north of the fishhook and having to pull a kid off an M-60 because he wouldn’t stop praying long enough to look for sappers. Here’s the moral of the story. If you have decided that supernatural intervention is the best hope you have, it’s time to rethink your understanding of the world….
mikey
jl
I will try a serious answer, in this den of poor, lost, unbelievers and doomed scoffers.
I think most mainstream Protestant denominations (or ‘Christian sects’ as the Founders called them) believe in some form of progressive revelation, and that is how they deal with the Old Testament.
There was a sequence of ‘Covenants’ moving towards the final message of Christ. As humankind progressed, they got better and cooler covenents, that lead them forward spititually.
I don’t remember them all. Abraham is one, Noah is another. I guess Moses is another, that is where all the complicated laws come in, though I think it is not named after Moses.
I think Judaism had the same scheme. Back when what became Christians considered themselves to be Jews, there was debate about whether you had to convert to Judaism before you could join up with the Jesus followers. Circumcision was a stumbling block. I think they decided that gentiles who wanted to follow Jesus could slip by with an earlier less stringent covenent, maybe of Noah?
I forget the details. Anyone know the details?
This all sounds very liberal and reasonable (though not to the flying spaghetti monster crowd). But the modern Xtianists use the same logic to throw away the earthly teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. See, in their view, that was also also a covenent (or dispensation) that the Jews rejected.
So Jesus became Christ and the Gospels were superseded by the Second Coming, Apocalypse, Armageddon, final battle between Good and Evil, etc.
So, when Xtianists say they are in a war, and the next time Jesus comes, He will kick ass and take names, they are not being inconsistent when the they talk about literally killing for Christ if that is necessary. They think Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels are not for them, they were for the Jews of Israel, who rejected them.
In the Xtianist view, reading the Gospels is dangerous unless you realize that they do not contain many teachings relevant for modern Xtians.
Jefferson, when he cut all the miracles out of his version of the New Testament, and retained all Jesus’ ethical, mystical, and meditative teachings revealed a mistaken view of Christianity, one that probably will land the poor deluded sap in Hell. In the Xtianist view, that is.
DougJ
Frankly, I’m not sure that’s even worth asking. It’s physically impossible for a virgin to give birth. Dead people STAY dead.
That’s not the same. You can believe in resurrection and not be a nut. But if you think God is telling you to wipe out an entire village, you’ve got problems.
toujoursdan
You have to remember that the ancients knew that there were contradictions. They put the contradictions in the text. The question that must be asked is WHY it didn’t matter to them.
We live immersed in a modernist worldview. It is very difficult for modernism to cope with the idea that truth can be transmitted in a non-literal fashion. For modernists, if it isn’t factually or literally or historically true, it must be suspect or false.
Ancient people were different. The detail didn’t matter as much of the inner message. So contradictions didn’t invalidate a story; it just meant that there were more version. So they inserted all of them and allowed the reader to decide which conveyed the message best.
It’s like the story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. In the story a boy herded sheep in the fields and sounded several false alarms that a wolf was approaching. The townspeople came running to rescue the herd. The one day a real wolf showed up, the boy sounded the alarm and no one came. They had been tricked too many times already.
Now is the most important aspect of the story whether the boy, the townspeople or the sheep really existed? No. If there were two versions of the story circulating where one boy was a sheep herder and in the other story he herded cattle would it make the moral any less valid? No.
The contradiction in the Bible are similar. The factual detail didn’t matter as much as the inner message. So ancient people didn’t think twice about putting contradictions into the text.
We’re modernists and the Bible isn’t a modern text. As my priest says: “Everything in the Bible is true and some of it actually happened”. Once you allow yourself to find truths in things that may be factually false then the Bible makes more sense.
toujoursdan
@BH:
That’s not helpful. Just because it doesn’t make sense to YOU doesn’t mean it won’t make sense to others.
If it isn’t your thing, fine. But please don’t speak for me.
LD50
It doesn’t help how incredibly ignorant the noisiest fundies are. I once got into an argument on a Facebook group about gay marriage, where I asked some rightwing Christians where in the Bible Jesus said anything about gays at all. Several earnest rednecks all chimed in with that quote from Leviticus. I then said “not the Old Testament, a quote FROM JESUS”. A few people repeated the Leviticus quote, but most of the others started popping up with quotes from Paul. I then said “not the OT, not Paul, A QUOTE FROM JESUS. Don’t you people know the difference??” Half the people just repeated the same quotes, and a few started babbling about “if it’s in the Bible, that means Jesus believed it”. The rest apparently just got confused and quit responding.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@toujoursdan:
Thanks for that. That’s one of the more astute, elegant ways I’ve seen to put it. I myself am not a believer, but I’ve always thought the bible was sort of a fascinating psychological narrative about how peoples’ changing perceptions of god changed their behavior.
Fern
@BH: The old testament makes sense if you view it as a record of a particular tribe/nation’s attempts over a considerable stretch of time to create meaning and understand their relationship to the divine (whatever that is). It also helps to remember that it is not really a book at all, but a selection/collection of documents that were not, at the time they were written, intended to be part of an extended narrative. Each was written at a particular time for a particular purpose and it would be a miracle (teehee) if they formed a consistent whole.
So I actually think the OT is kinda interesting.
I recently read Robert Alter’s heavily annotated translation of the pentateuch. Totally threw all my ideas about it upside down. I found it (if I can use the term) – revelatory. ;)
And in case you are wondering, no I am not of christian (or any other) faith.
db
Baptized, raised, confirmed Catholic here….. and only now do I recognize the huge difference that makes compared to going through the same upbringing as a congregationalist.
Getting to have final say on the interpretation of the scripture? No way as a Catholic. But there were plenty of opportunities to discuss that interpretation with careful guidance.
But I do think there is important variation among Catholics. I happened to spend most of my Catholic life among a group of liberal Dominicans who dissented from our bishop a lot and encouraged parishioners to do the same (which led to a let more opportunities to question interpretation of scripture). Of course, years later, a new bishop came to town and cleaned house.
Jon H
I dunno, I’m minimally Buddhist. I don’t have much use a lot of the more ritualistic aspects, extreme interpretations of karma*, literal belief in rebirth, or the visualization hokum of Tibetan Buddhism. But I do like that they have a somewhat more rational basis for why life is hard for people than “a talking snake conned a woman into eating an apple, and that’s why your children got cancer.”
(My take of the Buddhist way, at least in a “Buddhist atheist” sense, is that life tends to suck *inherently*, in a variety of ways of greater or lesser severity. Our desire for it to be otherwise causes excess suffering than is really called for. And because we aren’t adequately mindful of what we’re doing, we keep doing the same dumb things over and over again, and we thus keep kicking our own asses.)
(* Regarding karma, I figure if you just assume that some good or bad things happen to people that have no basis in karma at all, it works okay. Trying to find karmic explanations for everything is as stupid and offensive as Falwell blaming everything on the gays. Maybe a baby has cancer because of the bad karma of their past life, or maybe it’s the karma of a local chemical plant at work, or maybe it’s just a random mutation. Karma works fine for ‘moral guidance’ if you focus on your daily life. Slack off at work and, hey, you’re most likely to get laid off. Etc.)
Fern
@LD50: I always find that argument kinda funny. The Bible as we know it did not exist during Jesus’ time.
Cheryl Rofer
I am not currently a member of a Protestant church, but during the sixties, when I was in graduate school and just after, I spent a fair bit of time with this sort of thing. I’ve wondered where all that went, and many of the comments in this thread reinforce that.
The mainstream denominations (which accounted for most Protestants at that time) were heavily invested in historical study and criticism of the Bible. That means figuring out the sources and interactions that resulted in a single document. The various statments of faith (Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, for example) were also considered as historical documents whose politics and development could be studied.
Authors like Paul Tillich and Rudolph Bultmann were some of the sources. What they had to say was quite different from the nonsense and what looks to me like blasphemy almost universally identified as “Christian” in today’s news media. Even back then, there were some folks in the church I attended who were not at all happy with these developments, but it was a big enough church that they attended some classes, and I attended others.
When I look at Protestant churches of these denominations today (quite from the outside), these influences seem to have totally disappeared. I’ve asked friends who still attend about this, and they don’t seem to have a clue. They’re kind of familiar with the names, but that’s just not a part of what’s happening.
mikey
That’s not the same. You can believe in resurrection and not be a nut.
Um, no. Frankly, you can not. How many people have you ever seen ‘rise from the dead’. If you actually believe this happened, or a snake talked, or a bush talked, you are, by definition, a nut.
Try it in ANY context outside of the christian bible. Tell ’em your uncle ralph died, and three days later he came to hang out and play poker. See how you get looked at.
It’s fiction, and while it served a purpose in its day, it’s anachronistic and ridiculous now. It’s time is past, and it serves no purpose but to provide wealth to egocentric madmen and provide cover to those who would rape children…
mikey
Turbulence
@Cheryl Rofer:
The historical critical analysis you describe is very much alive in some churches. I go to a Episcopal church and although it doesn’t come up often, that sort of analysis is considered kind of obvious. Then again, our church is located in a major coastal city and has close ties with the seminary down the street, so we’re probably not typical Episcopalians in any event.
One of my fondest memories is practicing the old African American spiritual “The Battle of Jericho” with the choir when one of the older guys got up and said “you know, this is the first recorded genocide in the Bible…what a bunch of crazy sociopaths.”
Allan
@LD50:
Fixed.
/Methodist
toujoursdan
There is always going to be variation in interpretating a written text and people of goodwill are always going to come to different conclusions.
Heck, the U.S. Constitution was written only 200 years ago, in English, in a literal legal genre, in a culture that is similar to ours today and this country STILL convulses over what the 2nd Amendment means.
Now apply that to a book written in three languages – Hebrew, Koine Greek and Aramaic, two of which are essentially dead languages – by over a hundred writers, in several genres (narrative, song, poetry, legal text, parable, etc.) over a 1,500 year span, in a culture that died out 2,000 years ago and you begin to see the problem.
Written language is symbolic and human beings in our diversity always interpret symbols differently. It’s no surprise that there are different denominations.
Jon H
@mikey: “Frankly, I’m not sure that’s even worth asking. It’s physically impossible for a virgin to give birth. Dead people STAY dead.”
On the other hand, the Bible’s at least internally consistent on this: if you take as given an entity that existed outside of space and time (which would also be physically impossible) created the universe, then clearly we’re dealing with someone who is not limited to the laws of physics as we know them, and “physically impossible” is not a good line of argument.
You’re basically arguing that Galactus couldn’t cross the galaxy in a blink of an eye, because that’s contrary to the laws of physics, when what you really need to do is argue that Galactus is a comic book character invented in the 1960s, and thus doesn’t exist.
You really have to argue directly against the existence of this creator God.
BH
@toujoursdan:
1. I didn’t speak for you, but it certainly made for a nice zinger at the end of your post.
2. Your argument is essentially that the Bible’s nonsense makes sense. You contend that these simple people were making very sophisticated, self-aware decisions about what to write and what would eventually be included in the book, and that they somehow knew what effect all of the transcription errors and translation errors would have over the course of thousands of years. If one is allowed to try this hard and stretch this far, an apologetic argument could be made for anything ever written. If it makes you feel better, so be it, but I’m not buying it because it doesn’t make sense.
Fern
@Turbulence: Here in Canada, I think it’s a pretty strong element in the training of Anglican and United Church ministers. I don’t know much about Episcopalians, but my guess is that those two denominations are a pretty close equivalent.
Cheryl Rofer
@Turbulence: I’m glad to hear that. I have to admit that the church I attended was in Berkeley, California, and there were seven seminaries in the area, from which came some of our Sunday School teachers.
RadioOne
How to interpret the Bible is an extremely complicated question, because you’re not only dealing with the writings of Old and New Testament, but you’re also dealing with about two thousand years of philosophical and theological interpretations of those writings, which have obviously had a lot of influence with both the Catholic and Protestant churches over the centuries.
I think every single modern “literalist” Bible movement tends to incorporate a lot of the theology developed over many centuries that was not apparent to the writers of both the Old and New Testament.
handy
@Turbulence: That church wouldn’t happen to be near a CPK and a the site of a major parade every January 1st, would it?
Incertus (Brian)
how do the various protestant denominations deal with all the craziness in the Old Testament?
The mind is a very flexible thing. Why, I’ve been known to believe as many as seven impossible things at once.
That’s a more serious answer than it comes off as. Everyone’s capable of some cognitive dissonance. Religion on the whole is such a successful fiction that billions of people now and in the entirety of our existence have become convinced that it’s an accurate way of viewing the universe–and if you stick to the metaphors, no matter what the faith, you’re probably not far off. And I think more and more people are doing just that–focusing on the underlying truths to be found in their faiths.
You’ll find precious few more militant atheists than me, but I still respect the power of the faith narrative–it’s so strong that some people earnestly believe that God put fossils in the earth to challenge their faith. It’s so strong that some people give their lives, for good or evil, in its service. But what happens in these peoples’ minds to deal with the contradictions is no different from what people do to get through their lives and dealings with their fellow humans. We make allowances. We selectively ignore what makes us uncomfortable. We deal.
West of the Cascades
What jl said.
My church (a United Church of Christ congregation — liberal mainline Protestant) has an informal tenet of biblical interpretation that “where the Bible contradicts Jesus, Jesus wins.” Basically, the Bible cannot be read literally (because it is internally contradictory on many points), and where some Old Testament doctrine doesn’t reflect Jesus’s message of love, inclusiveness, foregiveness, and (gasp) social justice, the Old Testament doctrine has been superseded and the new covenant takes its place.
The most comprehensive, explicit example in the New Testament is the dietary laws (mostly in Leviticus) which are superseded and no longer bind Christians. Thinking of many of the Old Testament laws as “purity” laws and Jesus’s message that it’s ok to eat with sinners and touch lepers and therefore that purity for purity’s sake is nonsense is one way many mainline Protestant churches can dismiss parts of the Old Testament.
r€nato
In Sunday School at a non-demoninational, quasi-Protestant quasi-fundie church, they told us that that bit Jesus said about giving up all your belongings if you wanted to go to Heaven… we didn’t have to do that. Of course we were too young and intimidated by authority to ask the question that was begging to be asked, ‘why not? Who put you up as a greater authority than Jesus?’ I think we were relieved Jesus wasn’t going to expect us to give up our bikes and TVs and toys and such.
So, I guess my answer is, they avoid the contradictions with a lot of rationalization and re-interpretation eagerly gobbled up by folks all too willing to cooperate in a comfortable mass deception.
OriGuy
I’m an atheist now, but I was brought up in the Disciples of Christ. They’re pretty moderate Protestant; the website says they are “in full communion with the United Church of Christ”. I think most people saw the Gospels and the Letters as fact, but Genesis as mythology. Beyond that, everybody was supposed to interpret the Bible on their own.
I think a lot of Christian fundamentalists see the Bible the same way a lot of Muslims see the Qur’an: dictated from Heaven and word for word truth. Of course, most of the Qur’an wasn’t written down until after the Prophet’s death, for that matter.
toujoursdan
@BH:
It does make sense for many people who study ancient texts like the Bible, Qu’ran and others even secular literature.
This was a culture where 99.9% of the population was illiterate. For most of that time writing had as much value as Chinese script would have in Iowa today. Communication was done orally. It was the only way to transmit messages through a society. This was done through groups of people (families around campfires, etc.) which kept the main thrust of the message intact.
When the educated members of these societies started to write down that oral tradition about 4,000 years ago, occasionally they would find several versions of a story. At that point they did make sophisticated, self aware decisions to keep all versions and put them together. Whether they thought there would be effects on future readers is irrelevant. They chose to include each version they heard in order to be complete.
These people are every bit as intelligent and self aware as we are. They didn’t have nearly as much scientific knowledge as we do and they didn’t have post Enlightenment values. But that is a completely different thing. They were not simple. They were not stupid.
mikey
@Jon H:
Totally disagree. I live in a world, situated in a universe where certain things appear to be possible and other things have never happened and cannot be made to happen and therefore must be considered to be impossible.
If you need to screw around with universal laws in order to postulate the existence of some kind of super being, as near as I can figure you defeat your own argument. If ‘god’ created the universe, he’d operate within it’s constraints – it wouldn’t make sense any other way.
And if it was SO freakin important that humans on this little planet on the outer arm of this galaxy in this universe of a billion billion galaxies worship THAT god and not come up with some other kind of god to worship, maybe he’d leave a little evidence of his existence for us to find? Because otherwise, it’s just a sadistic stupid game and fuck him, y’know?
Fern
@r€nato: I found that text to be very useful when discussing theology with my ex-ex father-in-law. He was a missionary and a pastor, a bit of an literalist and very big on the inerrancy of the bible. I told him that when he and the people in his church sold all that they had and gave the money to the poor, I would acknowledge that he really did believe in scriptural inerrancy. That was the last time he discussed theology with me.
r€nato
DougJ, I think a reading of Bart Ehrman and discussion here on this blog would be highly valuable to this question.
When one has the intellectual honesty to confront head-on the numerous contradictions in the Bible – particularly regarding what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John each had to say about what Jesus purportedly said – it’s awfully difficult to take any of it at face value without resorting to self-deception and self-delusion.
(Ehrman notes that much of what Christians teach and preach about Jesus, is a conflation of the four gospels intended to mask their profound contradictions.)
Combine this with the fact that the books of the New Testament were not contemporaneous accounts; instead they were written long after Jesus died, and therefore subject to the same noise-in-the-channel as results in that game where someone whispers something to someone else, who turns and whispers it to the next person, until the last person hears something completely different from the original statement.
Christians often get around this by the deus ex machina device of, “it was divinely inspired; God spoke it and they just transcribed it.” Yeah, whatever. Handy excuse there, just like the one where you can slag off whatever an atheist quotes from the Bible by citing, ‘even the Devil can cite Scripture for his own purpose.’
r€nato
@Fern: ROTFLMAO good on ya! Hehehehe.
Keith G
Back when I was a lad, it seemed to me that Protestant pastors pitched their teachings to their home audience. Internal coherence wasn’t an issue as 1) Local pastors were by definition selectively using the texts and 2) media preaching hadn’t reached the current level of ubiquity, so many of us just heard one managed message.
Current Doug, the issue you raise is still easily side stepped because media preaching is dominated by two types of “preachers” cultivating two main (and separate) audiences: 1) The Joel Osteen type Prosperity Theology crew, and 2) The John Hagee type repent or fry crowd.
I swear these two types are using two different holy books, but it doesn’t matter because the two audiences are quite different and neither one for vigorous intellectual debate.
toujoursdan
@Fern:
The Episcopalians are the U.S. branch of the Anglicans. I was raised in the Anglican Church of Canada and when I moved to New York just transferred my membership to the Episcopal Church. The theology, structure and ministry are identical. Clergy, academics and lay professionals cross the border to serve in each others’ congregations all the time.
The United Church of Canada and the Anglican Church have a very close relationship. They nearly merged in the 1970s (but the Anglicans got cold feet) and still share hymnals. The Anglican/Episcopal and ELCA Lutherans are in “full communion” which is just short of a merger in both countries nowadays – both groups share clergy, seminaries and church buildings with each other if needed.
Marcus Borg a Lutheran turned progressive Episcopal priest, has an excellent book called Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally which is a good overview of mainline Protestant thinking nowadays. He comes from the same perspective that “Everything in the Bible is true and some of it actually happened”: that the Bible isn’t meant to be alternative history or science and that many of the events are myth-stories and didn’t factually happen, but myths are merely a non-literal way of communicating truths about ourselves, our world and why we’re here and for that they still have great value.
With that, I’m off to bed.
r€nato
@toujoursdan:
perhaps so… and perhaps some cultures ‘edited’ the main thrust (or side thrusts) of the message to conform to societal/cultural norms.
Just like today, where Glenn Beck insists Jesus wasn’t into that pussy social justice shit like helping the poor.
Cultural legends and myths always, always, always tend to reinforce pre-existing beliefs. They tell Americans, for instance, that it’s our God-given destiny to conquer the entire continent. Or they tell the British that of course white people should colonize brown and black people, for their own good of course. It’s just a fortunate knock-on effect that colonialism also happens to enrich the colonial power.
I see no reason to regard the Bible as anything other than a transcription of contemporaneous legends and myths.
mithaler
I have a conservative Jewish background, and no form of Judaism from Orthodox down that I know of has any prescription or religious mandate to read sacred literature with the guidance of a rabbi or anyone in particular. Judaism has no top-down organizational structure that preaches a specific way of interpreting the Torah that they expect to carry weight outside their respective movement; I’ve even spoken to plenty of Orthodox people whose recommendation for study is just to pick up a book and crack it open.
There’s certainly strong encouragement to educate one’s children in the basic biblical narratives and how to participate in services, but there’s a lot of room for alternative ethical interpretations with a lot of them, and in the better services I’ve been to the “sermons” of the rabbis were more along the lines of guided discussions than preaching. Frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Plenty of Jews, myself included, consider Scripture to be a historical record left behind by one of many ancient tribal groups, as well as a narrative intended to explain the basis for devotional display–Mosaic authorship (that is, the belief that the Torah was written by Moses, guided by divine inspiration) of the Torah is certainly not well accepted in Jewish circles anymore outside of the most fundamentalist circles. I myself see it as a matter of heritage and historical study–even if it’s just a story, and even if parts of it might have been written for no reason other than to differentiate its writers from their neighbors, it reveals a great deal about the values and traditions of its writers and therefore my own cultural history.
That’s certainly not to say that I support the things it does–it’s not hard at all to find plenty of commandments in it that would be distasteful at the very least to someone of modern sensibilities. Look at, for example, the story of Amalek (whose name sounds suspiciously similar to a well-known Doctor Who villain), or the happy murderous rampage at the end of the Book of Esther (the one we tend to gloss over at Purim readings, which is basically the archetypal “they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!” holiday). Do I feel a need to reconcile it with my beliefs? No, I don’t–I don’t believe this stuff is supposed to guide my life. What traditions I do follow I follow out of a sense of connection to my ancestors, and I look for ethical lessons that are palatable to us in them (for example, I treat the “no meat with dairy” rule as a reminder not to add insult to injury).
Of course, one thing I would never presume to do is quote the bible at someone in order to justify the ethics of something. Even leaving aside the issue of how much weight the bible may or may not carry with someone else, I consider this an abuse of scripture–if you intend for the bible to be the source of moral authority, then you damn well better be consistent about following all of its idiosyncrasies in your life, instead of cherry picking statements that appear to support what you already believe. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who can claim to do that without looking like a moron.
Finally, regarding Jesus: my understanding is that he was active at a time when there were many different Jewish sects with different interpretations of Scripture, and much of his shtick involved reassuring the Jewish authorities that he didn’t intend to rebel against existing Law (see, for example, Matthew 5:17), even though he very much was breaking from it in many respects (as mentioned in the post). Not being Christian, however, I can’t speak to how any Christian might resolve the differences.
r€nato
@BH:
They say ‘spirit’, I say, ‘groupthink’.
Spirit… groupthink… spirit… groupthink… let’s call the whole thing off.
handy
Hence the charge of idolatry, which is quite fitting for these types.
David
Here’s the logic for many fundamentalist sects: Jesus embodied a new dispensation of grace (documented in the New Testament) that superseded the era of law (the Old Testament). The story–which is quite poetic, actually: Christ endured all of the punishment of all sin to fulfill the demands of the law, so that now mankind can be redeemed through merely accepting the truth of Christ’s sacrifice. Obviously, religious arguments often turn on disagreements on the specifics of that schematic, but for most fundamentalists, the Old Testament is still historically and factually infallible, but has been superseded doctrinally by the New.
hamletta
To answer the OT: In my adult catechesis class, we watched videos with theologians taking on different topics. One compared the Bible to a newspaper: When you read the paper, you’ll see a straight news story, an opinion column, and a cartoon. They can all contain truth, but you’re going to approach them differently.
r€nato
@David: …and to think that Jesus got all upset with the Pharisees for being so legalistic, such that they’d managed (like John Yoo) to turn the actual meaning of the OT on its head.
I mean, when you make things that complicated… WTF? If god loves us so much, why make getting on his good side so complicated?
You know what I get, ultimately, out of both the OT and the NT?
Gods want to be worshipped. They are the ultimate narcissists. All that stuff about not lying and not killing and being good to the poor and less fortunate and so on… that’s all fluff. A sideshow, ultimately.
The main thrust of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is that there’s a God who demands you get on your knees and worship if you know what’s good for you, or he’ll squash you like a bug.
Maybe that made sense in the 1st century. Not in the 21st century. Fuck that noise. 1st century people were every bit as shrewd and intelligent at a basic level as we are… but a basic difference between then and now is that we know enough to know that the Earth is not the center of the universe and the stars are not pinholes in the firmament of heaven.
We should also be sufficiently advanced, intellectually speaking, to reject the idea that the entire purpose of our existence is to worship a god… regardless of whether this god actually exists or not.
Keith G
@hamletta:
Said theologian apparently has never read the Washington Times.
BTW David Plotz, “Blogging and Bible” is a really cool read. I highly recommend it.
http://www.slate.com/id/2150150/
cdmarine
The New Testament trumps the Old Testament. That sounds flip, but I’m serious. I was told to read the word “Testament” as “Covenant,” or in more modern language, “Agreement” or “Law.” Basically, God’s contract with man. The New one supercedes the Old one. Therefore, whenever there are contradictions between the two, a Christian goes with the New Testament. Yadda yadda etc.
Splitting Image
Some parts of the Bible are definitely intended to be taken literally. Most of the books of Kings, for example, are a (somewhat whitewashed) history of the monarchs in Israel and Judah. There may be some parts of the books that aren’t accurate, but they are intended to be read as real history.
This is also true of many parts of the Acts (James being put to death with the sword, for example) and many of the minor prophets. The book of Nahum, for example, deals with Assyria’s imperial over-reach and the Great Alliance that was being formed to take it down.
The problem is that in many parts of the book, it is hard to tell where history ends and embellishment begins. The succession of Saul, David, and Solomon is certainly historical, but what about the story of David and Goliath? Did Solomon seriously threaten to cut a baby in half, or did a folk-tale latch itself onto him?
Different Christian groups don’t have any consensus about a lot of these things, but I think most reasonable Christians understand that different parts of the Bible have different “truth-values”. Psalms and prayers aren’t “true”, but they are intended to have an emotional impact when recited. Jesus’ parables aren’t “true” any more than Aesop’s fables, but they don’t have to be true to provide the moral lessons they are teaching. I don’t even know what “literalism” is supposed to mean with respect to the parables. That a Samaritan really did help a traveller at one point in history? That a man once divided his property between a devoted son and a prodigal?
I can only roll my eyes when some Christian talks about Bible “literalism”. As others have said, the Bible contradicts itself in hundreds of places and many passages are symbolic, allegorical, or metaphorical. When someone tells me he or she is a literalist, I assume they care about the passages saying that a man must be head of his household and that homosexuality is an abomination, and not much else.
BeccaM
When truly bored in a far-flung motel room with nothing but channels of rubbish on the TV and the Gideon in the nightstand drawer where it always is, I must confess to have given in to the temptation on multiple occasions to edit the tome for consistency, content, and to point out with margin comments and footnotes where men were clearly inserting their opinions as opposed to the unknown will of an unseen and inscrutable deity.
I would even use a highlighter at times to indicate those books in there most often cited as reasons for bigotry and discrimination — where they also included rules about slavery, the wearing of mixed fiber clothing, and shellfish (abomination!).
Aaron
Since I haven’t seen it mentioned, I thought I’d mention how Jews generally approach the Bible, especially the “eye for an eye” passage. The nickel version: an eye for an eye is more just than an eye for a life and we’re talking about monetary equivalents anyway.
Traditional Jewish bible study focuses on the Talmud, which is the written down version of the oral Torah, a sort of Jewish common law based on the written Torah, and commentary on top of that. (Written beginning 1800 years ago). Rabbinic Judaism is necessarily literal, but not in the way we would understand it today. In the case of “an eye for an eye” the rabbis in the talmud argue that since the literal punishment would be meaningless to an eyeless or blind perpetrator, and the Torah necessitates that the law be applied equally, an eye for an eye must not be understood literally.
Fern
@Splitting Image:
My guess is that they mean that the accounts of the parables are faithful transcriptions of what Jesus actually said. And that their own interpretations of the meaning of the stories are also true. Apart from that, I dunno – that word “literal” really does fall down on the job in that regard.
In any church I’ve been in, even with pretty fundamentalist preachers, the parables have always been interpreted figuratively.
Bosh
As other people have said a whooooooole lot of cherry picking.
I remember in church having a psalm reading printed in the flier that was something like 1-8 and then 11-15 or something. What were verses 9-10 about? Bloodlust and calls for vengeance.
That was the United Church of Christ, a nice bunch of people but most of the theology of the members goes like this:
1. God is Love.
2. Love is nice.
3. Therefore anything that isn’t nice in the Bible we’ll just ignore since it Doesn’t Count.
Turbulence
@handy:
Nope. We’re in Cambridge MA.
r€nato
@Fern:
My *understanding* of what a fundie means when he says, ‘the Bible is literally true,” is that there really WAS a Good Samaritan… not just that the account is a faithful transcription, but that the events described actually happened.
Because if they didn’t, it means not every word of the Bible is literally true; and if Jesus told a parable about something that didn’t actually happen, it would be a lie. And it can’t be that God or his kid would lie to us.
Dave Trowbridge
I’m a Quaker, which originated as a radical Protestant sect in the 17th Century during the English Civil War. Now, Quakerism is no longer a wholly Christian faith (there are Jewish, Buddhist, Pagan, even non-theist Quakers), but as one who still identifies as Christian in some sense, these two quotes from the very beginning of Quakerism in the 17th Century still resonate for me–and make it obvious that from the very beginning, Quakers were not literalists.
George Fox, c. 1652:
“The scriptures were the prophets’ words, and Christ’s and the apostles’ words, and what, as they spoke, they enjoyed and possessed, and had it from the Lord…Then what [have] any to do with the scriptures, but as they [come] to the Spirit that gave them forth? You will say, ‘Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;’ but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?”
A little later, Robert Barclay, in 1678, wrote this:
“[B]ecause [the Scriptures] are only a declaration of the fountain, and not the fountain itself, therefore they are not to be esteemed the principal ground of all Truth and knowledge, nor yet the adequate primary rule of faith and manners. Yet because they give a true and faithful testimony of the first foundation, they are and may be esteemed a secondary rule, subordinate to the Spirit, from which they have all their excellency and certainty: for as by the inward testimony of the Spirit we do alone truly know them, so they testify, that the Spirit is that Guide by which the saints are led into all Truth; therefore, according to the Scriptures, the Spirit is the first and principal leader.”
In other words, whether or not the scriptures (of any faith) are “inspired” is besides the point unless one receives them by way of the spirit that inspired them. And literalism is not that way.
cs
This old post from a Metafilter discussion, about the Book of Job, is possibly the best thing I’ve ever read about the transition between the God of the OT and Jesus.
The transition never made sense to me until I found this.
M. Bouffant
but for most fundamentalists, the Old Testament is still historically and factually infallible, but has been superseded doctrinally by the New.
Huh? Don’t most fundamentalists, by definition, claim that the Bible is the word of gawd, & must be obeyed?
I’ve heard all the “Now you just have to accept Jesus as your personal savior to be “saved” stuff, but w/ that keep them form insisting that everyone obey The Law, even if it has to be put into the civil codes & criminal law.
And of course “Accept & then be ‘saved’ no matter what” is a pathetic cop-out. You can be the evilest MF in the world, kill millions, & as long as you “accept” you’re in the Kingdom of Heaven? Bullshit.
The Bible & all other Holy Sacred Books being works of fiction, & there being no evidence or reason to think of or believe in gawd/gawds besides these fictions, there’s no need to disprove the existence of gawd(s). There’s no reason to believe it/they ever existed.
(More historical evidence for unicorns, considering they were mis-identified rhinos.)
r€nato
@cs: I’ve never heard that before. Fascinating.
r€nato
@M. Bouffant:
Doesn’t the whole NT/OT thing kind of beg the question of God’s supposed perfection and omnipotence?
What’s the need for the New Testament, unless God didn’t get it right the first time and needed a Bible version 2.0?
jl
@r€nato: Even Biblical literalists do not think the parables are literal. They say that the Bible itself declares explicitly, or often implicitly, that some passages to be stories or metaphorical.
Where the Bible ”declares’ itself to be not literal is of course a knotty problem. To keep track they have divided themselves into those who believe the the Bible is literally true and those who believe iin Biblical ‘inerrancy’ and who tend not to interpret as much of the Bible as literally true.
I do not understand how some of the prophecies are not obviously metaphorical, and if metaphorical then subject to interpretation, and if so, ‘inerrancy’ does not mean much unless you are willing to believe some human’s interpretation. But then I am not a ‘Bible believing Christian’.
It gets very complicated, like trying to figure out all the different kinds of libertarians.
Tom
With regard to God ordering killings and such in the OT, you have to take that with a grain of salt. They made many decisions by casting lots (essentially rolling dice). They did not believe in chance – whatever faces those dice turned up on were put that way by God’s own hand, in their eyes.
So each General would have a diviner with him in battle:
G: “Should we attack with the chariots on the left flank?”
D (Rolls dice): “God says that would be a good idea.”
So much of what “God Says” in the OT with regards to military exploits is merely what the rolling of the dice told them. If the townspeople didn’t make their saving throw against annihilation, it would have been recorded that “God Said” to wipe them out. At no point did a voice boom out of the sky ordering them to slaughter thousands of innocents, they just recorded things in a way that seems to us today to imply that.
In their defense, that was how they sincerely believed God talked to them for a long time. We would regard it as remarkably silly in this day and age, but it’s what they knew.
The bottom line is that you have to be a bit careful with the interpretation of the “God Said” stuff. You have to understand the cultural and historical context to get what’s really going on.
M. Bouffant
Also: Not worshiping any old bastard (Let alone his self-appointed representatives on this planet.) who lets his stenographers get away w/ that whole incoherent contradictory Bible mess.
Who does he think he is, Megan McArdle?
Fern
@r€nato: They get around that with something they call “progressive revelation” – the vision of God in the OT is true, but not complete.
jl
@M. Bouffant:
It’s not clear that Jesus said you have to believe he is the ‘Sone of God’ in order to be saved, in the way that the Xtianists interpert it today. Below is an example:
Matthew 10:40-42 (Young’s Literal Translation)
40`He who is receiving you doth receive me, and he who is receiving me doth receive Him who sent me,
41 he who is receiving a prophet in the name of a prophet, shall receive a prophet’s reward, and he who is receiving a righteous man in the name of a righteous man, shall receive a righteous man’s reward,
42 and whoever may give to drink to one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say to you, he may not lose his reward.’
Some scholars of NT Greek and Aramaic say that the language in verse 41 implies that the prophet and righteous man refers to Jesus himself.
Winston Smith
@Cat Lady:
The Holy Ghost is female. The word in Hebrew is Ruach HaKodesh which is feminine.
Also, one of the names of G-d is Elohim. The -im ending indicates that “Elohim” refers to at least three entities and this group is of mixed gender.
Take that, fundies!
r€nato
@Fern:
*rolling eyes* they’ve got an excuse for EVERYTHING, don’t they.
jl
No ‘progressive revelation’ in science?
M. Bouffant
@r€nato:
Yeah, as cs noted just above you. Makes ol’ gawd a lot more, uh, human & fallible.
As I snarked @76 even before reading you.
MNPundit
Jesus supercedes the OT. That’s the whole point. He is supposed to be the fulfillment of the OT and from that point on, the OT is present for a historical understanding of the prophecies Jesus fulfilled and the struggle to live appropriately before God prior to Christ. It’s an example of how hard and brutal life was before Christ and how it is simpler and harder in a way after.
@jl: Exactly, Science is nothing BUT progressive revelation through the methodological systemic observation of experimentation.
Fern
@r€nato: Pretty much. The thing is, it all seems to make sense when you are in that little bubble where everyone believes the same thing. but step outside and it does look mighty weird.
r€nato
“progressive revelation” my ass.
That’s exactly the same dodge as when a spokesperson says, “what President Bush meant to say, was…”
I get really impatient with the constant excuses from those who claim to represent Eternal Truth.
mclaren
Unfortunately the mere fact that a physical situation is self-contradictory does not mean that it cannot be factually real. For example, an uncollapsed wave function exists in both of two mutually exclusive physical conditions simultaneously. You might point out that we can’t physically detect a wave function until it collapses, but does that change the mathematics of quantum theory?
As Feynman pointed out, distrust anyone who claims to be able to make sense of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics doesn’t make sense.
The Bible also doesn’t make sense but, alas, the Banach-Tarksi Conjecture is mathematically provably true but impossible and self-contradictory. (The Banach-Tarski Conjecture states that it is mathematically possible to disassemble any three dimensional object into a large number of very complex shapes and then reassemble them into another larger object of greater mass. This is so bizarre it sounds like something out of a drug trip, but happens to have been proven mathematically.)
So the mere fact that a given text is self-contradictory and nonsensical doesn’t (sadly) prevent it from being true. The bible is a mass of wild self-contradictions, but so, tragically, is mathematics itself.
Morris Kline’s Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (1982) goes into more detail.
This does not constitute a defense of the bible or any other bizarre religious text. Rather, it merely reinforces the point that the human mind has limitations which mathematics, along with the physical universe, often appear to transcend — so subjecting an hypothesis to the test of whether it is self-contradictory appears inadequate.
r€nato
@Fern:
Any cult is like that, and so is the right-wing reality distortion field. Exhibit A: Fox News Channel.
Of course it makes its own circular sort of sense. It has to, no matter how fucked up it is in reality. Our brains seem to demand it. You’ll find few of the truly evil people in history who said they did this or that despicable act ‘just because they could’; there always has to be a rationale, no matter how demented or self-serving it may seem to the rest of us.
r€nato
@mclaren:
and again I ask: why make things so complicated, when the penalty for getting it wrong is eternal damnation? Where’s the just and loving god in that?
Winston Smith
@r€nato:
“Progressive revelation” is bullshit.
The New Testament is not the same kind of book as the Old Testament. The New Testament was explicitly written by people. Jewish tradition states that the Torah (the first five books of the Tanakh) were “breathed out by G-d” letter-by-letter.
For some reason, some idiots (mostly in the last few centuries) decided that the New Testament writings were as “divinely inspired” as the Torah. This is ridiculous. Half the New Testament is just a collection of correspondence written by Paul (allegedly — probably Paul and his students). How are these the direct word of God? Even Paul didn’t claim that.
Probably the closest to being the direct word of God would be the Gospel of Thomas, but that didn’t even make the final edition.
r€nato
@MNPundit:
and yet, I can point to the tangible results of science’s ‘progressive revelation’. This computer I’m using. The car I drove today. The radio to which I listened. The phone I used to make calls.
What, exactly, has been the result of Christianity’s ‘progressive revelation’? It sounds to me a lot like a more refined way of counting – and arguing about – the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. Fascinating, perhaps, to those with a philosophical/metaphysical bent. Beyond that… it’s a bunch of intellectual wankery.
“What if Santa Claus had a nuclear-powered sled? Then he could TOTALLY deliver presents to all the billions of good children in the world in one single night!”
Or, “Superman would SO totally kick Spider-Man’s ass, and here’s why!”
Winston Smith
@r€nato:
The Bible doesn’t say “eternal damnation.” It’s pretty clear that if you falls from God, you will simply perish as in flames that burn eternally. The flames are there, but you’re just ash.
This punishment is not for just “getting things wrong,” it’s for rejecting forgiveness for doing something wrong.
Winston Smith
@r€nato:
Dude, you are attacking an interpretation of Christianity born from the same malfunctioning brains that brought us “death panels.”
Idiot: “Why are there death panels in Obamacare!”
You: “There aren’t death panels.”
Idiot: “Sarah Palin said there are death panels!”
You: “Sarah Palin doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
Idiot: “Read the bill!”
You: “I did, there are no death panels.”
Idiot: “You just hate America.”
You want to argue that the version of Christianity that Mr. Idiot believes is stupid? Well no shit, Sherlock.
r€nato
@Winston Smith: oh, OK, so according to you (or at least, according to someone else’s interpretation which you are merely relaying to me), my punishment for picking the wrong door with my inferior, imperfect human intellect and reason and faith is to simply not experience God’s love for eternity, and I’ll just perish in a poof of ash. Well, that doesn’t sound too awful. I’ll take ‘hedonism and epicureanism because this is the only life that matters’ for $1000, Alex.
Or, should I believe in the interpretation fervently pushed by millions of bible-thumpers who insist that I’ll be tormented eternally in fire and brimstone, with Satan’s minions jamming their pronged cocks up my boil-encrusted ass for eternity?
So difficult to choose between fairy tales…
r€nato
@Winston Smith: and that, ultimately, is why it is fruitless to debate whether there’s a deity (or deities) or not. I mean, the journey may be fascinating and infuriating and whatever, but ultimately it can never arrive at one destination or another.
Reason and logic must be used in a debate – at least, any debate that is worthy of both the word and the time and effort to put into it – but the skeptic cannot retreat from reason, while the religionist can always retreat from reason to faith when it is convenient.
Winston Smith
@r€nato:
You’re free to believe what makes you happy, r€nato, but that afterlife you describe in the quote above does not appear in the Bible.
It’s not even like you have to take my word for it over someone else. The text is widely available.
Original Lee
Bother. I had a long eloquent post, and WordPress ate it. I will summarize:
It seems to me that the older the Protestant denomination is, the more likely it is that the members are encouraged to read the Bible all the way through multiple times throughout their lives, and that they are also encouraged to participate in an education program that will help them interpret what they are reading and to interpret what they are reading for themselves. They also have developed standards for addressing primacy of NT over OT and the contradictions within the Bible, and the pastors can be removed from the pulpit if they stray too far from the denominational standards. The newer denominations and independent churches appear to be more likely to leave it up to the leaders of each church to develop their own standards, which lets them cherrypick the bits they like and leave the rest alone.
A small joke that might help:
Q: What do you get when you put 3 Calvinists in a rowboat?
A: The First, Second, and Third Reformed Church.
Fern
@Winston Smith:
Snicker
r€nato
@Winston Smith: how fortunate it is, then, that I can read Aramaic and ancient Greek.
Winston Smith
@r€nato:
Anyone can retreat from reason.
Suppose we were to debate world hunger. Science can tell us how to grow more food to feed more people. That’s great, and certainly not open for varying interpretations — you either grow more food with a technique or you don’t. Science does not, however, tell us why we should grow more food to feed more people. Certainly, the decision to do so should rely on as much reason and logic as one can apply, but somewhere along the line, a value judgment must be made and my value judgment may seem “unreasonable” to you and vice versa. Radical libertarians would say, “if you can’t get enough food, then you should just starve.” You can’t objectively say that’s unreasonable. You can subjectively say it, but it’s not a strictly rational decision.
Original Lee
OT, but the literalists who insist on using only the King James version of the Bible and totally ignore the fact that all English-language versions are translations from the original text really bug me. A lot.
Brachiator
@DougJ:
Wow. Where to begin? Part of the problem here is that the Old Testament is some wacky stuff, and the New Testament is a refinement. This will, no doubt, come as a surprise to a lot of religious people, and also to non-religious people like me who think that all religion is nuts, but that the Old Testament, and much of Judaism, is much more rational and compassionate than most varieties of Christianity.
Huh? This was vivid poetic language that demanded that justice be proportionate, a huge advance over cultures that would allow massive retaliation for even minor offenses. It also called for justice without regard to social standing, so that a prince could not demand more justice than a goat herder. Nowhere in the Old Testament nor the Talmud nor any Jewish interpretation is “eye for an eye” used in and of itself to call for capital punishment.
A guest on a recent episode of the NPR program Fresh Air pretty much conclusively demonstrates that the Four Gospels tell different and contradictory stories and that they also probably represent significantly divergent views of the early Church, and reflected the different needs of early Christian communities (interview with Bart Ehrman, author of Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them)..
The Fresh Air interview link also includes an excerpt from the book discussed. Ehrman’s book also points out an obvious fact that is known to all Biblical scholars, but which is glossed over by most lay people and believers: “A further reality is that all the Gospels were written anonymously, and none of the writers claims to be an eyewitness. ”
Some of the supposed coherence of the New Testament may be accounted for by the fact that it was written in Greek, went through a process of editing, and represents a much shorter period of time than the Old Testament. Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic. Whether any of them were literate, and literate in Greek, is unlikely. Most scholars conclude that the author of the Gospel of Matthew knew Hebrew.
The wild TV minister Gene Scott was actually quite knowledgeable in ancient languages. From repeats of his TV programs still shown in Southern California, one can see where he drove even some of his own followers up the wall by pointing out correspondences between biblical verse and Arabic and Persian theological concepts.
Which again, kinda undermines that coherence thing.
r€nato
@Winston Smith: well now you’re getting into the faith vs. works thing, aren’t you?
Catholics insist that works matter; you have to go to Heaven the old-fashioned way, you EARN it.
Protestants insist that our works are puny and insignificant; God already decided who’s getting into Heaven, and in a happy coincidence, it’s the people with money and power, generally speaking.
Mark S.
Well, my favorite book in the OT is Jonah. Everyone gets hung up on the stupid whale part, but the story is a satire on prophets. Jonah goes to the capital of Assyria, tells them God’s going to punish them, and they believe him. They all repent, and God decides not to kill them. Then Jonah is pissed about this, because it means he’s not a very good prophet. The implication is that Jonah is not a very good man, even though he’s God’s spokesman.
Winston Smith
@r€nato:
What a coincidence that you learned the two languages widely used in the Second Temple Period of Judaism — when Christianity arose. Now maybe you can familiarize yourself with the actual contents of the books about which you hold such strong opinions.
r€nato
@Winston Smith: It is quite common, when debating whether God exists or not, for the religionist to fall back on faith when confronted with facts or logic which is/are difficult or impossible to rebut.
“Well, God works in mysterious ways, you know.”
“It’s a matter of faith, not reason.” Well, isn’t that convenient. I can believe that 2 and 2 make 5 if faith is the ultimate arbiter, not reason.
Religion, after all, regularly scorns the inadequacy of reason when it comes to comprehending god.
Perhaps because people asking hard questions are so dangerous to the scam known as organized religion, ya think? SHUT UP THAT’S WHY is, more or less, the religionist’s retort of last resort.
Winston Smith
@r€nato:
That’s news to me.
Fern
@Original Lee: Yes to that. I’ve been doing some translation of late, and I will never look at a translated text in the same way again. Even when the foreign language text is only 150-odd years old and – there are things that just can’t be translated. Jokes, puns and wordplay – untranslatable. Out of date idioms – often untranslatable. Poetry – very very difficult.
Not to mention all the ways that you can pick a word that shades the meaning just a little one way or the other, or the impossibility of finding an exact equivalent, even in a language that has strong liguistic connections to English.
Winston Smith
@r€nato:
If you have logic and facts that settle the existence of God, then by all means trot them out. Last time I checked, the existence of an omnipotent being was neither provable nor falsifiable, but I guess I’m not up on the latest innovations in science. Do tell.
Where are you getting this?
jl
@r€nato: I think that Luther was the first Protestant to go apeshit over faith versus works. He didn’t like the NT book of James, which emphasized that sooner or later true faith had to be embodied in works, or at least good faith attempts at works. Luther thought the book of James should not be in the Bible.
Not so much in the first Presbyterians, including Calvin hisself. He did not have a logical worked out faith versus works system.
The monstrous full blown Calvinist system we all know and love today was put together about 150 years later by a theologian named Bezos, who decided that Calvin’s thought had to be made a logical coherent theological system.
Batocchio
How about places where Jesus rejects Old Testament teachings?
This is one solution – many of Jesus’ teachings specifically reference Old Testament scripture and refute it or modify it. (Leviticus is the most problematic.) The second is that serious Bible study pretty much necessitates a more literary, metaphorical, less dogmatic and more interpretative approach. Apparently, the inerrant-literal approach to reading the Bible is a fairly recent development, dating from the 20th Century or perhaps the late 19th. Interestingly enough, earlier worshippers were much more savvy in this respect. The third “solution” to the problem is that many self-described Christians don’t know the Bible well at all. The fourth (related to #3) is that they believe it says whatever they think it says or their leaders say it says. The fifth (related to #3 and#4 and in opposition to #2) is that authoritarians simply ignore contradictions in the Bible even when directly pointed out to them, such as conflicting accounts in the Gospel. Bob Altremeyer’s book “The Authoritarians” has an interesting section on it all.
r€nato
@Winston Smith: Uh, let’s see, the Catholic church regularly insists that reason is insufficient to comprehend God, as do the Protestants, by and large.
Martin Luther himself stated that reason is the greatest enemy of faith. (I would agree with him wholeheartedly in this instance.)
More quotes from Martin Luther on reason, can be found here.
Official Catholicism doesn’t scorn reason quite as robustly as traditional Protestantism; instead it insists that reason must be combined with faith, which to me is kind of like saying truth should be mixed with legend.
Perhaps you subscribe to a strain of Christianity which is not so hostile to reason. Pretty much every mainstream denomination I’ve heard of, doesn’t take too kindly to people asking hard kweschins, AKA using reason to try to suss out the existence of God as well as which flavor of God they better believe in, or else.
Bart Ehrman is the most notable example I can think of, someone who believed utterly in fundamentalist Christianity and followed reason to its inescapable conclusion; it’s all malarkey.
That is why official religion hates or at least distrusts reason so much. It’s dangerous to their scam if the marks start looking at it too closely.
Winston Smith
@Fern:
In addition to the problems inherent in translation (English doesn’t have anything similar to Koine Greek’s Aorist tense, for example), the King James Version uses English that is no longer comprehensible.
The KJV makes frequent use of the subjunctive tense, which has all but faded from use in modern English.
A simple sentence like, “Thy kingdom come,” sounds imperative and certain to modern speakers, but the use of the subjunctive tense (“come” rather than “cometh”) indicates uncertainty — an event beyond the control of the speaker.
Lupin
Burn the Heretic.
r€nato
@Lupin: shun the unbeliever! SHUUUUUNNNNNN!
Winston Smith
@r€nato:
Reason is insufficient to comprehend a lot of things. For example, what is it like to be a cat? You can reason all you want but you can’t know what it’s like to experience the world as a cat unless you’re a cat. The best you can do is try to develop a model of catness relative to your own experience. “I would have worse vision and a better sense of smell.” That’s not really understanding the experience of catness qualitatively, just quantitatively and relative to your own consciousness.
God is, by nature, incomprehensible, so saying that reason is insufficient to understand God is similar to saying that being able to count is insufficient to understanding infinity.
I really have difficulty imagining Ehrman agreeing with that characterization of his views.
Fern
@Winston Smith: Yes. The world in which the King James Bible was translated is mighty alien to us now, and the words often don’t mean what we think it means. I grew up in a church that used the King James version for English services and the Luther translation for German services – same problem with both.
I think people think they understand the KJV because people have told them what it means, not because they could independently make much sense of it.
I recently read Adam Nicolson’s book God’s Secretaries – about the translation of the KJV – it helped me understand how the time and place helped to form translation.
r€nato
@Winston Smith: I thought Richard Dawkins made a comprehensive and satisfying (to me) argument against God’s existence. I would refer you to The God Delusion, as anything I could write here would be a pale shadow of his thesis.
I don’t share his stridency with regard to religionists, but I do think he makes an effective argument and just as importantly, he demolishes the traditional arguments in favor of belief in a deity, such as Pascal’s ridiculous wager, which I saw through at a rather precocious age (and yet, this was cited for many decades and still is, as an effective argument for a god’s existence).
r€nato
@Winston Smith: and so, us debating a god’s existence with our ‘puny’ reason is, ultimately, a waste of time, is it not? Which was my point in the first place.
We may find such a debate stimulating, but you can always say what you just said when the going gets rough – “well, we can’t understand Him anyway.”
Talk about a deus ex machina, quite literally, to get you out of a tight spot.
I, on the other hand, don’t have that luxury. I can’t retreat to such an argument. Which was also a point I was making up above.
Good night, all.
r€nato
@Winston Smith: Ehrman might not state it thusly, but he has stated that he’s now agnostic. That’s pretty much an admission that everything he believed before, simply was not true.
I think ‘malarkey’ is a pretty good way of putting it, and probably quite polite.
Winston Smith
@r€nato:
I’ve read The God Delusion.
Dawkins’ conclusion that there is no God is based on some pretty straightforward thinking, but it’s just an argument — not proof. Dawkins’ problem is that he jumps between objective and subjective claims without really seeing the distinction. This is a mistake that Dennet doesn’t make due to his background in Philosophy of Mind. Saying that something is “relative to a teleology” would make perfect sense to Dennet and probably confuse Dawkins. That’s why Dennet takes a different approach to arguments.
Winston Smith
@r€nato:
You are confusing “existence” with “understanding.”
Debating the existence of God is, in fact, a completely pointless exercise.
If God exists, then we cannot fully comprehend Him. If God does not exist, then we cannot fully comprehend what He would be like if He did.
That’s pretty much all you can say with certainty.
mclaren
@Renato:
Hypotheses non fingo.
I confess that inconsistencies in the bible strike me as being approximately as important as inconsistencies in the various Star Wars films. I’ve seen teenagers waste a lot of time arguing about that stuff, and, frankly, I just don’t care. The Star Wars films never impressed me. They have no significant connection with my life. I just have no interest in it.
Same deal with the bible, imaginary sky fairies, fantasy lakes of fire outside the universe, etc., etc., etc. As far as I can tell all that stuff has the same level of credibility and importance to my life as problems in the timelines of the various Star Wars films.
KS in MA
If you want to understand the Bible, you’ll have to spend your whole life studying it. There are no shortcuts.
Good night. Peace.
Uriel
Oh boy- a religion thread. An internet oasis where everyone involved can feel righteous and pure in willfully mis-characterizing the arguments of their opponents based on nothing more that their ability to erect the most outrageous strawmen possible.
I really didn’t have the time, but I hope *someone* mentioned, on the one hand, the lack of zombies and, on the other, the impossibility of secular morals, as uncontested proof of their victory for their respective side of the issue. Because those chestnuts never get old.
Man, I’m glad I’ve developed the ability to not give a damn about these particular internet tossups.
klokanek
I get so frustrated with literalism imposed on the Bible–even in the very first pages, there are TWO Creation stories, and it doesn’t get any better after that. A literal approach necessitates rejecting some parts of scripture. It also means, as you point out, rejecting Christ’s rewriting of the 10 commandments and other DFH approaches that he takes. And you have to ignore the fact that there’s no way that Paul wrote all of the Pauline letters. There’s just so much that a good critical reader MUST reject if she expects to take the document literally. I am a good critical reader, I like to think, and as a sometime Episcopalian, sometime Presbyterian, I see the Bible as written in mythic language.
What annoys me the most, though, is the lack of awareness from the literalists that they’re reading a document in TRANSLATION. As a medievalist (full disclosure: English language historian), I have some awareness of the different languages the Bible is written in and has been translated into, and there’s just a LOT that English, especially modern English, cannot capture (oh, and the King James Bible is great literature but a lousy, lousy, lousy translation!). So a lot of literal beliefs are founded on the inability of English to capture the intent of the original (or to read a decent translation, as the case may be). One example: the word day in Genesis is not used the same way as the word day that means “24-hour period.” In Old English translation, this meant that it was marked as a feminine noun, whereas the word day in OE (much as it is in German) is a masculine noun. Thus, we can see that God’s days of creation are NOT meant to be construed as 24-hour periods.
Oh yes, and there are several Bibles; the Catholic Bible, for instance, is different from the Protestant Bible. The Bible gets treated as if it’s the Qu’ran–a single book basically compiled in a single voice in a single location at a single time. (As a side note, when I was teaching the Bible and the Qu’ran to college freshman last year in a humanities course, they had crises of faith when they realized just how the Bible is a many-authored hot mess of a text, and they loved the cohesion of the Qu’ran in comparison.)
It’s weird to think how full circle we’ve come in the way the religious among us read the Bible. In the Middle Ages, the Old Testament was seen merely as an allegory for the New Testament. Now, people are totally fine with rejecting NT teachings for old.
I will also note that the real brainiacs historically were Christians. Thinking about God used to be an intellectual and philosophical pursuit. Now most Commander Smartypants reject the brainless literalism that seems to be required of Christians (terrible branding there!) and choose agnosticism or atheism instead.
mclaren
Did someone say zombies?
Jesus Christ was supposed to have risen from the dead after three days, which I believe technically makes him a zombie. True believers also claim to eat Christ’s flesh when they chow down on the holy eucharist in a mystical process known as transubstantiation.
This would appear to make true Christian believers into zombie-worshiping cannibals.
Brachiator
@Winston Smith:
This is as goofy as saying that Shakespeare or Marlowe or Ben Jonson are no longer comprehensible. Hell, Chaucer is still comprehensible, with a little assist. And the King James version was deliberately archaic even when it was published, drawing on earlier English translations. Still millions of readers, believers and non-believers had no problems enjoying the poetry of it or deriving religious meaning from it.
This is a theological argument, and circular (if God does not exist, there would be no point in trying to conjure Him up so that we might try to comprehend His putative existence).
A furious agnostic like me would say that God’s existence is largely irrelevant. We have free will so there is not particular reason to try to suss God out so that we might obey him, and there is no reason to choose any particular religion or religious text as representing anything that God or any other deity might want.
mclaren
Well, to support Winston Smith’s point about the inadequacy of popular translations of the bible, consider the baffling phrase “In the beginning was the word, and the word was God.”
That makes no sense in english — but it makes perfect sense in Greek. En archei ton logos — In the beginning was the logos. But in Greek, logos very seldom means “word.” We more often find logos in Greek in combination terms like meteorologos — the underlying plan of the sky. So logos means word occasionally, but more often something like “underlying plan” or “hidden order.” If we then translate that biblical passage as “In the beginning was the hidden order, and the hidden order was God,” we arrive at a very different meaning from the weird english translation.
Basilisc
#58 mithaler and #68 aaron put the Jewish position well, but here’s my two zuzim anyway, as someone who’s only dabbled in this stuff:
The tanaim and amoraim who wrote the Talmud, in the first few centuries C.E., made a show of taking every word literally, but then came up with clever (sometimes too clever) ways of subverting or changing the meaning of rules and passages that were particularly egregious. For example, “an eye for an eye” becomes monetary compensation. They explained this by saying – well, this is the oral law, you see, which was given to Moshe at Sinai along with the written law, but he just didn’t write it down.
One story (I may have this garbled) has Moshe asking God what all the decorations on the Hebrew letters in the Torah were for, and God explains that, someday, there will be a Rabbi Akiva who will use them to explain the text. God then takes Moshe into the future to watch Akiva and his his colleagues in a learned Rabbinnic discussion, and Moshe has no idea what they’re saying, but is still OK with it. Hey, you can’t be surprised if life changes a little since you wrote this all down on a mountain in 1230 BCE.
The overall lesson I got from my (not very deep) encounters with traditional Jewish interpretation of scripture was: “This is beautiful stuff, no one knows quite what it means, and your guess is as good as mine. But it’s interesting and worthwhile to try. And make sure you see what others have said about it over the years – you may learn something.” There are only a few solid things that Jews are expected to take on faith; Maimonides listed 13 of them.
I think this attitude explains why, when scientific advances made it clear that a lot of what was described in the Bible could not possibly have happened, Jews were mostly OK with it and tried to understand them as metaphors, while Christians had crises of faith (and some became crazier as a result). (I would also argue that non-Orthodox Jewish denominations follow the traditional approach more closely, because they’re willing to reinterpret and adapt the old prescriptions rather than hewing to them mindlessly, and that the mindless fundamentalism you see in parts of Brooklyn or Bnai Brak are actually departures from the traditional approach, but that’s an argument for another time and place.)
JGabriel
@Cat Lady:
In practice if not theory, Mary is pretty much a fourth, female, god – at least among Catholics. After the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary is easily the most popular.
.
Anne Laurie
@JGabriel: In case you haven’t run across this before… in medieval Catholic iconography, every saint was assigned at least one “attribute”, a symbol that would make identification easier for illiterate worshippers (and also the nascent marketers of religious tchotchkes). St. Peter is always carrying a key, St. Jerome gets a lion, St. Barbara a castle. The “attribute” of St. Anne, the mother of Mary & grandmother of Jesus, is that she’s always depicted as an older woman in the company of a young woman carrying an infant or toddler. In other words… the images of “Saint Anne”, patron of mothers, homemakers, and miners, are frequently indistinguishable from images of the Triple Goddess.
drunken hausfrau
Basically, this is how the contradictions are dealt with:
“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for…
move along…”
DPirate
Jesus replaced the law. Before Jesus came, we/they performed blood sacrifices to God in the form of animal sacrifice. Abraham and Isaac provides the biblical foreshadowing of Jesus’ time when God demands Isaac be sacrificed to Him, then shows mercy (forgiveness?) by providing the sheep or lamb. Jesus was the last blood sacrifice required by God and by this sacrifice he ended the law(s) of the old testament.
So, fundamentalists do not actually follow the literal proscriptions of the old testament, as “everything is permissible” (yes, the bible says so), and it simply no longer applies. However, that doesn’t mean, looking at this from the fundamentalist viewpoint, that God no longer views these things as sins. It only means that God has provided the means of forgiveness thru Jesus. Some say only faith is required, others faith and works, others a true awakening in the spirit, etc, but they all basically agree that Jesus sacrifice (lamb of God), has replaced Leviticus and all that stuff.
So, they still despise homosexuality and, I suppose, non-kosher food as displeasing to God. Like any good worldview, it is actually consistent within itself. The trouble is when the ignorant start forgetting what Jesus had to say.
DPirate
@Brachiator: Just curious, but how can there be free will if there is no God? Without God, isn’t existence purely mechanical? Free will would be a delusion.
El Cid
@DPirate: There is no particular reason why the existence or non existence of God can yet be said to explain or prevent ‘free will’, since no scientific conception of consciousness has yet arisen.
AListair
@DPirate:
Free will assumes a god that is not omniscient, because omniscience implies knowledge of all outcomes, which precludes free will. A deterministic universe precludes free will, as input conditions directly lead to output conditions. In our probabilistic universe, free will may still be an illusion, but it’s at least still a live possibility. I choose (or perhaps not) to cling to that view, because I selfishly want to believe that I’m not an automaton. That may turn out to be just as naive as faith in a religion. I’m agnostic, since that’s the only worldview that I can justify logically, but that may be how I’m wired. I find that trying to think about religion logically always ends up in a cul-de-sac of solipsism.
DPirate
@AListair: Not necessarily. There is the multiple universes hypothesis which, coupled with God, may allow for free will. So that, while God is omniscient, all possible choices are accounted for. An idea I heard once expounded on this by supposing that unchosen paths/universes sort of “popped” before they actualized (whatever that might mean).
Besides, must God be omniscient?
lol I like it.
Alistair
@DPirate:
Well, no, actually I kind of like the idea of a universe where god isn’t omniscient or omnipotent. However, that implies that god may be a higher being, but is not supernatural. Sort of how my cats view me (but perhaps with less contempt). I’m not sure why I should worship such a god. I’m already inclined to shake my tiny fist and stick out my tongue at an all powerful god. After all, heaven doesn’t sound like much fun and none of my friends will be there.
Mum
@themann1086:
Actually, the Synoptic Gospels were written between about 70 CE and 100 CE, with Mark being the earliest. John was written most likely at or near the end of the first century or the beginning of the second century. The earliest epistle was the Pauline First Epistle to the Thessalonians, 52CE. All of the rest, both the authentic Pauline epistles and the others, were composed between 52CE and 100CE.
The contradictions in the New Testament, particularly those between the four gospels, exist because they were written by four different authors with different agendas, philosophies, and audiences.
Mum
@DougJ:
Isn’t it the same god asking you to do both things?
Lisa K.
@themann1086:
Actually, according to most of what I have read of experts, Mark was written around 70CE or so, and at the latest John around 120CE. All of the gospels were written for different audiences and different purposes-Mark for Jews after the destruction of the Temple, Luke for Gentiles, John to drive home the idea of Jesus as divinity-so it makes sense, from that perspective, that the stories not parallel each other, as they were trying to make different points. The same gospel was not even all written by the same pen, ie, the last verses of Mark are later editions.
Paul is actually the earliest accounts we have of what early Christians actually believed.
Lisa K.
@Mum:
Ahhh, I see you had much the same thing to say…sorry for repeating.
Lisa K.
@r€nato:
I am a subscriber to Dawkins on this issue, but since you cannot prove a negative, the arguments he presents would not convince anyone who chooses to believe.
Toast
“BJ” – Belief Jockey
El Cid
People not only assume the existence of a universal intelligence, they also assume its preferences and tendencies. Maybe a universal intelligence is aware of and fascinated by our every move and whether or not Tommy made his bed today. Maybe not. Maybe it acts much like a human with superpowers, which is what most religions appear to assume. Maybe it is omniscient and omnipotent, and maybe not. Maybe it would take an interest in whether or not we ‘believed’ in it and thought nice thoughts about it, or not. There’s an awful lot of assuming and interpretation going on without the slightest shred of evidence.
Paris
@mikey: Uncle Ralph was not God.
Bulworth
Let me guess. There is no such warning label. The professional whiners are just pulling another sign of persecution out of their asses.
Bulworth
@LD50:
Most conservative Christians are about as familiar with the Bible as most teabaggers are with the Constitution.
Winston Smith
@Uriel:
So what you are saying here is that everyone on the Internet has erections. Well, obviously that’s wrong because a lot of the people on the Internet are women.
You are indistinguishable from Hitler.
tjlabs
Having studied the Bible for four years when I was in a (Catholic) seminary, I guess I can give something of an informed response to your question. The reason I think that the interpretation of the Bible has been so diverse is based upon how one views what the Bible actually is.
If one believes it to be the literal word of God, then there’s not much hope in arguing with that person. And the inconsistencies and discrepancies in Biblical teachings are either ignored or explained as being part of God’s unfathomable wisdom which mere mortals cannot hope to understand.
But what I was taught was that the Bible should be viewed from an historical and sociological perspective. What was the intent of the writer? For whom was he writing? What was the shared experiences of his audience? To truly oversimplify it, the Biblical writers’ purpose was to establish a belief in one Supreme Being as opposed to the beliefs of other societies and peoples in many gods. Thus the numerous rules, prohibitions, condemnations, etc that we find in the Old Testament are in juxtaposition to those same things done by “pagan” believers.
One must remember that at the time these books were being written it was a novelty to believe in only one god. But that is the the essence of the first five books of the Bible. And when one studies the Bible in depth, you learn that many of the biblical stories such as the creation can be found in many other near-Eastern pagan creation myths. The Old Testament author has taken a story which his audience would be familiar with and puts a totally different spin on it.
Jesus did the same thing. In the New Testament, we find him over and over again drawing upon the books of the Old Testament with which the Jews of his day were totally familiar with and putting a new spin on those stories. Jesus’ goal was not to install a belief in only one God. That had already been done. But rather it was to say that all the prophecies and stories of the Bible had been fulfilled in His coming. The intent of the New Testament authors was to show that the promise of a Messiah made in the books of the Old Testament who would save mankind had been accomplished with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Winston Smith
@Brachiator:
I shouldn’t have said “incomprehensible” — I meant that modern speakers (uneducated in the differences in the English usage) would misapprehend the meaning of some of it.
Why do people assume that everything you say about religion is supposed to be some kind of “argument” as to whether God exists? I was making a point about our ability to comprehend something that is way beyond our experience.
BruceK
I just shrug and say “beats the heck out of me” and try to go on with my life and do right by others. Where was it written that you should basically not do to others the sorts of things you’d object having done to you, that that was the core of religion, and the rest was just commentary or embellishment or something?
Got me in trouble in the Greek army a couple of times, not being of the proper faith. I put down “agnostic” on the forms I had to fill out for conscription, and aside from getting latrine cleanup duty whenever there was a religious service, I was told point-blank by a chaplain officer and an NCO that I absolutely had to go visit a priest on my next leave and arrange to get myself baptized. What’s a conscript private supposed to do in a case like that?
(I was two days away from discharge; I ignored the problem and it basically went away.)
I estimate roughly a thousand different purported paths to salvation, some of which are mutually exclusive, so the idea of “pick a religion” feels to me like I’m making Pascal’s wager against a roulette wheel with a thousand numbers on it … only to find out after the “no more bets” call that the wheel doesn’t have a thousand numbers on it, but a trillion. Only winning move is not to play, right?
DanF
John – “An eye for eye, a tooth for a tooth” was from the “Code of Hammurabi” – a Babylonian king:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
It does show up in the bible in Exodus, but this is not one of god’s laws as the Babylonians were polytheistic.
Most bible-thumpers really don’t give a shit about what the Bible actually says and are content to find those things that justify their beliefs and ignore the rest. This “law” appeals to people who like their revenge violent so laissez le bon temp rouler…
Quackosaur
@r€nato:
I know you posted this many hours ago and the discussion has left this topic far behind, but please don’t conflate the works vs. faith arguments of various Protestants. Predestination for the the rich and powerful (or rather, if you are rich and powerful, you must be predestined) is distinct to Calvinism, and specific interpretations at that. Luther and Calvin are not the same (especially on matters of justification) and should not be construed as such.
DanF
@DanF: John … Oops … DougJ … More coffee. Stat.
marjo
Episcopalians teach that the Bible must be filtered through your sense of reason and your gut feelings of individual faith. That’s why ~most~ Episcopalians are actually able to adapt to modern life, gays, women, etc. They are encouraged to think through matters of faith for themselves.
FormerSwingVoter
In modern American Christianity? However the Republican Party tells them to deal with it.
chopper
@DanF:
you also have to remember that the idea that “‘an eye for any eye’ shouldn’t be taken literally” was not there from the beginning. back in the day the pharisees pushed the figurative explanation (because it made a hell of a lot more sense), but the saducees were very literal about it. likely too the essenes and other hardcore sects.
the pharisees ended up winning out in terms of influence, and gave us the talmud, and the tradition of rabbinic judaism arguing over the real metaphorical meaning of every goddamned word in the torah.
while everybody hates on the pharisees because of christianity’s later smear-job, they really were the best of the bunch.
Basilisc
@BruceK:
That was Hillel (who lived c100BCE – year 0). As I tried to say above, the ancient rabbis generally had a pretty well-balanced view of things, in contrast to some of their putative successors.
Ash Can
Went to bed early last night so missed this thread, but it made for some great reading this AM. Kudos to the commenters for their fascinating observations.
My $0.02 on the Catholic approach: I suppose the “guidance of a priest” bit holds since (theoretically) any priest’s interpretation of Scripture will reflect the Church’s official interpretation. But I don’t recall it being repeated/reinforced in this manner. Throughout my years of religious education, mass-going, and just general discussion with Catholic theologians, it’s been far less explicit, and more along the lines of “This is what we as Catholics believe the writer of this passage is trying to say, and this is why we believe it.” Historical and linguistic context is important to Catholics in interpreting the Bible, which helps in explaining the many contradictions throughout the text. Additionally, from a Catholic theological standpoint, the entire tome needs to be viewed through the prism of the Gospels, and specifically what Jesus says in them, since as others have said, the Bible traces the evolution of the relationship between humans and God (and that relationship culminates in Jesus). As for the differences between the Gospels, those differences are accepted and valued, since the four stories together present a more detailed account of Jesus’s time on earth.
Also, what tjlabs said.
@JGabriel: You make a good point, but just as a matter of clarification, Mary is definitely not (or definitely should not be) considered a deity per se by Catholics. She’s first among saints, since it was through her that God gained human form. And she’s a powerful saint indeed; we just have to read the story of the wedding feast at Cana to see her ordering God around (and God obeying her!). Despite her specialness, though, she’s still exclusively human.
Shabbazz
I grew up in an Evangelical church in the backwoods were everything in the Bible was literally true. There was literally a talking snake. Jonah was literally swallowed by a whale. Noah literally put two of each animal on a big boat and saved humanity.
I don’t really talk religion with my parents these days.
frankdawg
The bible is not a mirror. When an ass peers in he sees an apostle peering out.
I am glad someone pointed out the 2 different creation stories in Genesis – I never miss an opportunity to point that out to creationist. Better still are the multiple versions of the 10 commandments (5 or 6 maybe I forget now) all found within a few pages of the most famous ones.
I grew up in a religious household & read the bible. In addition to making me a Pastafarian later in life it constantly illuminates the total lack of familiarity most “Tru-Bee-levers” have with the book. None of them have actually read it with any effort at all. They rely on spoon-feed bits of it that support their preconceived ideas.
There is one of those prosperity gospel @zzholes on TV in MN that I heard the other day preaching on “Sell all you own & give it away & follow me”. His bible does not have that bit in it & he maintained that it was put in there later by “liberals!” That seems to be a common theme when the book diverges from TB prejudices, it was a mistranslation or put in later etc.
Pennsylvanian
Well, in my fairly liberal protestant upbringing, we were taught about the Old Testament, but also that the New Testament represented a new covenant with the people and the vengeful ways of the Old Testament in reaction to the sin of the people were wiped away, along with our sins, with the death/acsension of Jesus in our name.
r€nato
@Quackosaur: fair enough.
jrosen
@cs: This point is discussed in depth in “God: A Biography”, by Jack Miles. This book (Miles’s) is the best commentary on the OT that I have ever read, and I’ve read a lot. It changed my whole understanding of what the writers of the scrolls that were much later collated, edited, and blended (not very well!) into the Bible were understanding at the time when they wrote. Another good book is “The Unauthorized Version” by Robin Lane Fox, and to ground the whole thing in concrete fact, “The Bible Unearthed” (Finkelstein), by an Israeli archeologist who literally digs for the truth.
BTW, I am a life-long committed atheist, but I have read and studied the Bible a lot…as it is the source of the world we live in.
Strangely, as a serious musician (music has been the basic religion of my life) I have always been most moved by the great sacred works like Bach B-minor Mass, Beethoven Missa Solemnis, and Brahms Requiem (parts of which I am actually conducting this Sunday). My understanding of this experience is that if there is a “spirit” moving in human lives, this is the most intense and palpable embodiment of it that is available to me. (Words begin to fail here.) This music and the text which motivates it are about something real, but that something is not expressible in the language of hard science (in which I am also trained, and in which I also find some transcendent meaning), and perhaps in any words at all but the greatest poetry, some of which is to be found in the BIble.
. What happens after my heart and brain fail I have not the slightest idea (nothing, I suspect), but I think the closest I may come to Heaven is the 2nd movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto.
BombIranForChrist
I was raised in the Methodist church in the south, and the literal aspects of the old testament were not emphasized. There was also, interestingly, not a lot of hellfire and damnation preaching.
This was in contrast with the Southern Baptists, who where more political and in your face.
Brachiator
@DPirate:
I don’t see how one is connected to the other.
No.
I think I see what you’re getting at. Are you suggesting that “soul” or “spirit” or some other kind of supernatural juice makes humans more than mere organisms? I have run into some people who believe that consciousness is merely some kind of reaction to environmental circumstances. And certainly, one can do experiments on the brain, inject certain chemicals that will evoke a response. But this still poses a problem for theists. How can a deity create a human that can behave as though free will does not exist?
Also, many Christians run into their own free will problem. They want to insist that humans are supposed to work out divine intention and then do it, or suffer eternal damnation or something. What’s the point of free will if the idea is to never use it lest one cross a vengeful, demanding deity?
les
@Winston Smith:
This is, I think, accurate on the greater question of whether any kind of god exists. When it comes to the actual gods described and worshiped by actual religious folk, not so much. I’ve always found the attack on Dawkins that he just doesn’t get or address the hyper-sophisticated arguments of the theologians/philosophers to be lame, because based on 11 years of Catholic education, extensive reading and lots of thinking, I’d say 99.9% of those religious folk don’t get or address (or, for that matter, in most cases know anything about) those sophisticates either.
r€nato
@les:
with regards to WS’ comment:
Well, I guess by that standard, we can’t conclusively prove anything. “It’s just an argument” is no more convincing an argument against Dawkins than the creationists who say, “Evolution is just a theory.”
Some arguments are far, far more convincing and coherent than others. Leveling the field with, ‘it’s just an argument’ is rather disingenuous. I can make an ‘argument’ that there are invisible pink unicorns dancing on the ceiling above all of our heads, but they are very shy so they become invisible when you try to directly observe them.
This is not proof; it is ‘just an argument’. Therefore, it’s no better nor worse than Dawkins’ argument?
Besides, it is the religionists who make the positive claim that there is a god. The burden of proof lies upon them, not the agnostic/atheist.
And as I repeatedly stated above, they can always retreat to the argument, ‘well, God is so majestic and incomprehensible that we can’t possibly understand.’ Talk about a cop-out.
Physicists understand there are still things about the quantum world which are incomprehensible; however, they don’t just throw up their hands and say, “God did it”. They try harder to figure it out using reason, evidence, facts, testable hypotheses and logic… not mystical texts whose meaning varies depending upon the reader.
les
@r€nato:
Agreed. My attempted point was that, whatever one might say about arguing basic deism, Dawkins’ “mere arguments” about actual religious portrayals of god are awfully damn good arguments, with actual factual referents.
Joel
Dawkins’ theories about the genetic basis of evolution are much more convincing than any arguments against the existence of God; and for good reason, the latter is completely untestable, one way or the other.
Ergo, I’m a committed agnostic (effectively atheist in terms of religious practice, of course).
Winston Smith
@r€nato:
You can prove things that are objectively true. You cannot prove things that are subjectively true.
Sigh.
Brachiator
@Winston Smith:
I see what you mean, but I still think that a great deal of Biblical English is not only comprehensible, but is a core of many people’s understanding of English. I once taught a group of students who thought that Shakespeare was a foreign language. I quoted a couple of Psalms (KJV) and asked how many people were familiar with them. Everyone nodded. Then, going through a couple of Psalms purely as pieces of poetry, I then jumped off into Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Later, I mentioned how traces of Biblical language can be found in great American oratory, from Lincoln to Martin Luther King.
But I take your point about issues regarding usage. But I think that this is more an issue for people who believe that the “word of God” is manifestly understandable without regard to the language of the Biblical text, than for those who may recognize the need for an assist from scholars.
RE: This is a theological argument, and circular (if God does not exist, there would be no point in trying to conjure Him up so that we might try to comprehend His putative existence).
No, what I meant to suggest was that your notion of our ability to comprehend things beyond our experience comes from a theological framework. My secular, scientific outlook assumes that what appears to be incomprehesible today will be obvious to a school child tomorrow.
Recently, I joked with fellow commuters that when I was a kid, my science textbook flatly asserted that our solar system was not only the only one with planets, but the only one that could have planets. Some scientists could not comprehend how it could be otherwise. Until they could. Gravitational wobble and all that. And then there is the stuff that we think we understand very well, until something new comes along which makes us reassess everything that we thought we knew.
les
@Winston Smith:
I’m rapidly losing your point. Most, if not all, organized religions make claims that certain things are objectively true; and then, when either they can’t demonstrate them, or they are disproved, they retreat to “oh well god’s all subjective.”
Beej
I was raised a Methodist. You don’t get a whole lot more “free thinker” than that in terms of religion. Methodists are encouraged to read the entire Bible. They are also encouraged to think for themselves. It is made clear through sermons, membership classes, and church-produced literature that there are many, many parts of the Bible which must be seen as symbolic rather than literal. I remember Sunday School discussions (when I was old enough, junior high age) about whether Genesis’s account of how the world was created was an actual or symbolic account. I don’t remember that the teacher ever gave a definitive answer. I also remember discussions about the passages you cite. Which one should be given precedence? I was taught that the Old Testament was the history which led to the birth and crucifixion of Jesus. As Christians, we were bound by the words of Jesus. So when any parts of the Old Testament were contradicted by the New Testament, it was the New Testament that we were to follow.
Tonal Crow
@BH:
And thus they went circular. And it was bad.
nicteis
To revert to the post’s original question for a second –
There are no doubt many of today’s post-literate and revenge-besotted Christianists, who see no need to crack open their Bibles, because the preacher will select a few verses for them and throw them up on the video screen each Sunday morning, and who will justify their blood thirst by quoting “an eye for an eye”. Those would be the same slackjaws who will justify their contempt for the poor with another of their favorite Bible quotes – “God helps those who help themselves”, unaware that it never appears in the Bible.
But the Bible believers I hobnobbed with, for a few decades, a few decades back, actually studied and knew their material, albeit with a tentative grasp of Jesus’ actual point of view. They understood that Jesus had declared “an eye for an eye” was old hat. Like Augustine and the Reformers, they justified their embrace of capital punishment with Romans 13:1-4. That’s still a stretch – the “sword” of the state can be used to threaten without having to be used to execute, and Paul was not explicit about which he meant. But at least not an outrageous stretch.
These days, I gather, they stop short before Romans 13:6, which goes on to tell them, even more clearly than Jesus saying “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s”, that it’s both virtuous and useful to pay your taxes. It seems recent decades have seen a devolution in deference to the actual contents of Scripture.
Kathy in St. Louis
I am Catholic (cough, sort of) and an old one, at that. I was never told that the bible should, in any way, be taken literally. It was presented as a series of stories.
I always found it sort of boring, so I know I’m going to be burning in hell.
DPirate
@Alistair:I think that would be a problem of semantics to begin with. What is supernatural? Would, for instance, a “spaceman” from a parallel universe be supernatural; he is not of this world/instance. Regardless, I tend to think of God as electro-mechanics, or something like that. The things we ascribe to the supernatural, such as telekinetics, miracles, telepathy, answered prayer, synchronicity, whathaveyou, might be explained via some sort of particle interaction influenced by animal action, or in the case of astrology, if you like, planetary action. While I do myself believe in God, I suspect that we ourselves somehow create God by our belief or need. Imagine for a moment a God that is the sum total of all of his followers – no more and no less. Is this omniscient or supernatural?
@Brachiator: What I meant with a free will/determinism dependence upon God was just that barring God in some form, barring something external to the natural world, afai-can see we are relegated to determinism. Heredity and stimuli have shaped us into what we are, and while we have the illusion of free will and choice, our choices are pre-determined accordingly. Yes, the future is unsettled, but it can only come out according to what has come before. It is all just thermodynamics and physics. Quantum mechanics may provide an “out”, however! I suspect I am not being clear but I’m on my lunch hour.
Looks interesting, ty.
Good one, but as far as christianity is concerned, it is not a matter of adhering to the law, but of RE-learning what is good and right.
r€nato
@les: I’ve tried repeatedly to make that point with WS, to no avail.
Religionists can always conveniently retreat to the, “God is incomprehensible to reason and mere humans” argument. I don’t have that luxury.
The pink magical unicorns that dance on your ceiling are also incomprehensible to reason and mere empirical study. You just have to accept them on faith. Therefore, I win.
gVOR08
My mother once read a story about modern theology and became somewhat concerned. She asked my brother, Reverend Bruce, if he believed in the literal truth of the bible. Without blinking an eye, he replied that he absolutely believed in the truth of the gospel. It made her very happy. She didn’t know something that my brother had mentioned to me some time earlier. For theologians “gospel” is a term of art meaning those parts of the Bible that are the true inspired word of God. The problem is that his Lutheran associates acknowledged that they had no idea which parts these were.
Phoebe
@Bosh: That is hilarious and made my day.