God Doesn’t Write Books January 28, 2024
Dr. Roger Ray
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As I prepared to move to my new home in Florida, I had to dispose of very many things but what I packed to take with me, I put into boxes and labeled the boxes with two pieces of information: what was in the box, and where the box was to go in the new house.
As it turns out, there were many books whose contents were described as Biblical Books, and the place where the movers were to set those boxes said simply, “garage.” Lots of other boxes of books were labeled to go into the office but the fact that the Biblical books were being exiled into the garage seemed to upset the head of my moving team. “Aren’t you a minister?” He asked incredulously.
I get similar challenges from listeners who can’t help noticing that I often go months at a time without ever mentioning any passage of scripture. Obviously, this has not always been my habit. I entered the ministry at the age of 23 and I was determined to be quite the Biblical scholar. I read aloud the prescribed lectionary passages in every Sunday service I led for more than 30 years and even when I realized that a service didn’t have to have an Old Testament, a gospel, and an epistle lesson every week, I still picked a few passages from the assigned readings as the foundation for my sermon.
I went to seminary believing that the Bible, though written by men and women, was somehow sacred, somehow uniquely authoritative as if God somehow spoke through its pages. I believed that the gospels accurately preserved the oral traditions of the teachings of Jesus.
For most of my early decades, I asked the Sunday morning congregation to stand up when the gospel lesson was read, out of respect for the teachings of Jesus. But as my grad school education worked its way, deeper and deeper into my awareness, I accepted that virtually none of the Bible was historical and that only five or six sentences in the gospels could credibly be attributed to the historical Jesus and even those were the words, not of a half man- half God figure but to a very human prophet who was sometimes right and sometimes wrong.
Once you fully accept that the Bible not only is not the word of God but it is, in fact, a very human product, written by people so long ago that not a one of them had the slightest idea where the sun goes at night, then all of those years of grad school and years of personal study become something of intellectual curiosity but the whole thing loses any authority as a source . . . there is a lot of truth in the Bible, a lot of insight and guidance that can be gleaned from it, but not because it comes from a holy book and not because it was inspired by God.
Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian scriptures are the collected wisdom of many generations of ancient people. The Quran had a much shorter period of time in composition but even it was influenced by more ancient texts and subjected to the editing of literate family members of Muhammad, who, by the way, could not read or write.
While there are some powerful insights in the Bible, there is also no small amount of homophobia, irrational guilt, misogyny, xenophobia, mythology, misinformation, and exclusivism. People have always paid attention to their favorite passages and ignored most of it.
There are three times in the gospels where Jesus is recorded to have told people to sell all they own and give the money to the poor and only once, in John’s gospel, does Jesus tell someone that they must be born anew but we all know lots of people who claim to be born again and damned few who have ever sold all they owned and gave everything to the poor.
The truth about the Old Testament, or, more properly, the Hebrew Bible, is that it is a collection of religious writings from at least three different countries, and probably more, that were written over a period of about 800 years, and possibly more, from at least 4 distinct perspectives and written by dozens if not hundreds of different people. The Hebrew Bible describes a religion that is based on a priesthood, that practiced animal sacrifice in a singular temple. That is the most ancient Semitic religion but then later parts of the Hebrew Bible describes an almost completely different religion that is based in an emphasis on a religious text and practiced in scattered places of worship. There was the Temple religion and the synagogue religion and that only begins to touch on the diverse ways in which, for several centuries, people were Jewish.
The Hebrew Bible contains are enthronement passages that praise the king and the royal family and there are prophetic passages that summarily condemn the very idea of having a king. There are even two very different versions of the 10 commandments . . . you would think that they would be able to get at least that part of the story right!
The Hebrew Bible borrows stories and songs from other religions, other languages, and other nations and when I say, “borrows,” you could say “plagiarizes” if only Babylonians and Persians had copyright laws.
The much shorter New Testament was written over a period of about 80 years. Most of it clearly did not come out of Judah and it was written in the common language of the Roman Empire. The biggest part of it was written by Paul, who never met the historical Jesus and who had almost no interest in the historical Jesus. By his own account, when he did, in fact, meet Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, he refused to let them teach him anything about Jesus.
Paul writes in the first chapter of his letter to the church in Galatia that even though he did eventually go to Jerusalem and spent 15 days with Peter and during that time he also met James, that he didn’t get any instruction from them. . . in fact, they were arguing.
Paul was a mystic who claimed that everything he knew about Jesus had come to him as a revelation and he was, to be honest about it, too arrogant to be instructed by people who knew more than he did and yet he is the church’s primary source on the Christian religion, and I believe, though this is debated among scholars, that the writers of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were dependent on Paul’s view of Jesus in writing their versions of the gospel and that none of them had ever met Jesus nor did they know much about him. The gospel of John was written much later, in Rome, in large part to refute the theology of Marcion.
People sometimes get very upset about this but the truth is that Jesus was never a Christian. He was a Jew from the Galilee, which meant that he was a synagogue Jew as opposed to being a Jerusalem Temple Jew. There was enough difference in their religion that when the Sadducees and priests called someone a “gentile” they were typically talking about the Jews who didn’t live in Jerusalem.
Why wasn’t Jesus received well when he went to Jerusalem? Mostly because they would not have seen him as being a part of their religion . . . remember, the temple was the center of a priest operated, animal sacrifice religion . . . the synagogues didn’t sacrifice animals, they were focused on religious texts and practices of prayer and purity. Jesus conducted his short ministry, probably nine or ten months long, not three years, out of Capernaum, the hometown of Peter.
Jesus was an exorcist, healer, and miracle worker from the Galilee. The priests in Jerusalem would have viewed him as being something like the way we would view a magician in a traveling circus . . . not someone to be either admired or trusted.
The historical Jesus was a traveling preacher who had gathered some illiterate supporters who followed him to visit other Jewish towns during the Roman occupation of Judah. Jesus was probably a Jewish reformer, and he was probably an anti-empire agitator against the Roman occupation. Why he went up to Jerusalem is a subject of academic debate. Did he hope to change Judaism at its birthplace. Did he mean to announce himself to be the King of Israel and to lead a revolt against Rome?
Whatever his real motivations were, the Roman government viewed him as being just one of dozens and dozens of insurrection leading Jewish agitators and they dispatched him in their usual brutal manner.
The hardest part of the history of the early church for me to understand is why the disciples decided to stay in Jerusalem after the crucifixion of Jesus? Why didn’t they retreat back to Capernaum? Why did they stay in the backyard of the temple priests where they were not wanted and where they were not respected?
Whatever their reasons were, it didn’t work out well for them because within two generations the temple was destroyed, the priesthood was lost, any memory of who was from what Tribe of Israel disappeared and the Jews who survived were dispersed all over the Roman empire. By the end of the first century, there were more Jews, and hence, more of various forms of Christianity, in northern Africa than there were in Palestine. In the early second century, a dominant form of Christianity had become rooted in Rome, the capital of the Empire.
Mystery religions were abundant in the first century of the common era. Religions that offer hope beyond this visible world, beyond this mortal life, always flourish in times of great social stress . . . like a military occupation, a plague, or severe economic or natural catastrophe. When people give up hope on reforming the world as it is, they imagine another world, a world where things will be just, fair, and happy. Sadly, it is an imaginary world but a whole lot of people invest heavily in that imaginary world because this visible life is just too far gone to be fixed.
So Jesus, and the story of his resurrection, became a central character in lots of afterlife mystery cults, of which Paul was just one. If you go to seminary, you get a brief introduction of several gnostic cults and Christian spin offs but as much as traveling preachers, like Paul, tried to impose a particular way of being the church on the churches they either founded or visited, obviously, they were not very successful in that effort as early Christians made up their beliefs by blending them with all of the beliefs of their surrounding cultures.
The personal friends of Jesus who continued to meet in his name after the crucifixion probably were essentially Galilean Jews who clung to the Torah and interpreted certain passages of the law and the prophets to be references to Jesus. That is why we see so much of that in the gospel tradition, especially in Matthew, where the author totally misappropriates passages from Isaiah and the Psalms to be applied to the Jesus story. That kind of Christianity began to lose its appeal early in the second century and there was an emerging collection of writings that formed a Christian library. This was especially motivated by the fact that Rome had tried to wipe out Judaism and clinging to Jewish scriptures was bad for your health.
I mentioned Marcion earlier and I have only in the last decade come to appreciate how important he was in the emergence of a Christian Bible. Marcion was a wealthy Christian from Turkey. His family was in the shipping business which gave him two very big advantages . . . he had money to publish books and he had means and reason to travel all over the empire by ship. Marcion wanted to put distance between Christianity and Judaism, dismissing the punitive God of the Hebrew Bible in favor of the loving and life-giving God of the resurrection of Jesus. And so, he tried to form a Christian bible based on a shorter and earlier version of Luke’s gospel and 10 of the letters of Paul.
Marcion was very influential and managed to form the largest following of any of the kinds of Christianity that might have been a rival to what would emerge as the earliest form of Roman Catholic Christianity. When more subtle forms of persuasion failed, he was condemned as a heretic and he and his followers were expelled from Rome. But he left his mark on the faith, introducing the idea of a Christian Bible . . . his had 11 books but within a century, the church in Rome had added 16 more to that list to eventually give us a 27 book New Testament. Marcion was so influential that even after he was in exile, certain of the church fathers continued to write against him and his influence… in fact, they wrote so much that we can reconstruct Marcion’s writings just from the quotes of his work in the writings of his critics, especially in the five books titled “Against Marcionism” written by Tertullian.
What I am trying to illustrate for you is that our holy scriptures came into existence in distinctly unholy ways. There were political battles among rival forms of Christianity and the winners were often the ones that had the money to pay scribes to copy their books and distribute them. And once you realize these things, it is difficult to get people very interested in reading the Bible as a source of authority in their lives. The Bible has survived among churches out of tradition, out of habit, not out of loyalty to God or reverence for the text.
And let’s face it, the 27 book canon of the New Testament has been the church’s book for 1600 years and yet it has hardly created unity within the religion. There is as much difference between a Pentecostal Church in Tennessee and an Episcopal Church in Massachusetts as there is between a Mosque in Tehran and a Buddhist Temple in Thailand. Having the same book doesn’t end up in producing a singular religion.
I have very nostalgic, almost romantic feelings about scripture. I spent most of my adult life deeply immersed in it. I know more about scripture than I know about any other subject . . . I just don’t talk about much in this era because it no longer has the power to leave any muddy footprints on the clean waxed floor of people’s minds. Still there are many people who insist that the Bible is actually the word of God and they claim it as the absolute authority in their lives. None more famously than the Louisiana Congressman and current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who, when he was plucked from obscurity last fall to become Speaker and people wanted to know who he was and what he believed, he told them to understand his beliefs on any topic to just read the Bible.
But what does it mean to be a Bible inspired person in the 21st century? For Mike Johnson, it meant trying to illegally overthrow the 2020 election and to provide protection for the people who violently attacked the Capitol police and caused the deaths of 4 people. It means opposition to the legal rights of the LGBTQ+ community. It means making it more difficult to get divorced and impossible to get an abortion. It means cutting the Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare programs that give healthcare and food to the poorest among us.
Prior to being elected to congress, he was a spokesperson for The Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This Bible believer might be seen as a savior in a Pentecostal Church in Louisiana, but he would be seen as an anti-Christ in most mainstream Christian denominations. . . . in much the same way that Trump is beloved by Christian evangelicals and considered to be the greatest threat to the world by more intelligent and informed people . . . not to reveal my prejudices in a single sentence. . . but I am out of time and I don’t have the ability to polish the turd.
But, hey, you don’t come here for political correctness now do you? So, we are in a new age. We have lost a lot when the Bible ceased to be a common meeting place for religious people who were united at least by a shared set of stories and a language that was all our own. Now we have to search for truth that can stand on its own two feet…. Truth that we recognize as being true based on its own virtues, not because we can assign chapter and verse to it.
That may seem to be subject to all kinds of personal heresy but if you ever get nostalgic for the good ol days, drop in a church that advertises itself as being a “Bible Believing” congregation some Sunday and you will quickly see that we don’t want any more of that.
