The Bible vs the Bible Feb. 23, 2025 Dr. Roger Ray
I grew up in what would have passed for being a fairly progressive church in those days, in the little Kentucky town where I was born. I don’t think that my church really taught evangelical religion but it was so much in the air of rural Kentucky that I think that I absorbed a lot of its harder beliefs, even if they were not being spoon fed to me in my own church. I knew the language of the Bible and had spent more time reading it than had many of my peers but it wasn’t until I was a college student that I began to really dig into scripture and to read it in earnest.
In spite of all of the language about the Bible being the “word of God,” and that the Bible contained the teachings that would lead to salvation, it was evident to me, even as a teenager, that the Bible contradicted itself, that it had many versions of the same stories, which did not agree with one another, and that it clearly had been written by people and not by God, and, it was also apparent to me that parts of it had been written by some pretty bad people.
Once you give up on the belief that God wrote the Bible and that this rather wordy collection of letters, sermons, poems, and ancient philosophy does not have a singular message then the Bible becomes an ancient collection of the wisdom of long lost cultures all huddled around what we now call the Middle East.
With that more honest starting point, it begins to be more interesting to take note of how and when the Bible is debating itself. When the surviving children of Israel are finally released from captivity in Babylon, we read a lot in the prophets, particularly in Ezra and Neimiah, about how that remnant of Jews set about safeguarding their purity as Jews, and how they attempted to cleanse themselves from the influences of Babylonian culture, religion, and language.
A lot of the Hebrew Bible’s laws about clothing, diet, and even hair cuts, were ways in which they separated themselves from the surrounding and competing tribes. These observances helped to keep the Hebrews from assimilating into other cultures and helped to preserve their language and their religion. But in the time of rebuilding after their exile, the observances turned decidedly racist. The 10th chapter of Ezra names the names of men and priests who had married Babylonian women and they were commanded to divorce them and to send them and any children they had with them, away. Which, if they actually did it, was probably a death sentence for those women and children.
Nehemiah brags in the 13th chapter that he confronted those whose children spoke the language of Babylon, saying that he beat them and pulled out their hair. But it was during this time that a subversive religious text appeared, pretending to be older than it really was, telling a story about a fish, a vine, a worm, and a preacher.
It is easy to get lost in the story of Jonah, thinking about a man being swallowed by a fish and staying alive in its stomach for 3 days. But if you pull back the wide-angle lens and look at the whole of the story, about a preacher being sent to preach to foreigners that he didn’t want to preach to and whom he did not want to save.
Ezra and Nehemiah have the pulpit and the authority to teach nationalism, exclusivism, even racism, as they tried to save Judaism from extinction. But someone in that time felt the need to offer and alternative, a corrective, to the harsh racism of the time.
The story of Jonah is just that, a story, a kind of parable. It isn’t historical. It is a story about a preacher who hated non-Jews and, according to the story, God used a great fish, a shade giving vine, and even a worm, to eventually confront Jonah, asking him, “Do you do well to be angry?” Jonah actually defends his anger to God but God makes it clear to him that he is selfishly angry about the hardships of his life but that he wasn’t able to feel compassion for the 120,000 people who lived in Ninevah whom he wanted God to destroy.
The book of Jonah ends right there. It doesn’t get preachy or too explicit, but if you were one of the zealous jerks who had divorced your foreign-born wife and exiled her and your own children to the wilderness, the message of Jonah was rather clear. The religious authorities are telling you to hate foreigners, but Jonah is drawing that racism into question. There is racism in the biblical texts of this era but there is also a message of compassion so that people back then, just like us, have to grapple with the issues and decide what is really right.
There are those in our day who believe that America should be an English only nation, and I suspect that there are many among those monoglots who also think that America should be a whites only nation. That kind of exclusivism can certainly be found in many churches, but, thankfully, there are also others among the churched who still appeal to compassion.
Leviticus, one of the least read books of the Hebrew Bible, details a lot of the laws I mentioned earlier about diet, clothing, and haircuts, but it also contains a fairly insulting list of what it meant to be pure enough to be a priest. Leviticus 21 actually says: 16 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 17 “Speak to Aaron and say: No one of your offspring throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the food of his God. 18 Indeed, no one who has a blemish shall draw near, one who is blind or lame, or one who is mutilated or deformed,[a] 19 or one who has a broken foot or a broken hand, 20 or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a defect in his eyes or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles.
As disgusting as that fragment of scripture is, I’m at least glad that it didn’t mention being fat. I’m not blind, lame, hunchbacked, or afflicted with dwarfism, and, I’m happy to report that my private parts have not been crushed, but, you know, this ancient list of unacceptable deformities would be updated in our day.
Prejudices about beauty, skin color, shape, are so pervasive that here in Asia, where I am now, you cannot buy a suntan lotion, hand cream, or cosmetic that does not include the claim that it contains, “whiteners.” It is amazing how very many poor people there are in Thailand but still, even among the poor, there are many who have had surgery on their noses and eyes to look more European and even my girlfriend fights against the sun out of fear of becoming more brown. There are aspects of prejudice that can literally be “caught,” and become a subtle kind of self loathing. Rather than being offended by white racism, many people are tricked into wishing that they were white.
Of course, western standards for judging beauty don’t have to be actually taught. It is like how I absorbed an Evangelical faith from my environment, you learn that the world you live in is normal and you try to conform to it.
I don’t know why Fox news is on in very country I visit but if you live in Centra America, or Asia, or Africa, and you just watch the news, no one has to say that you need to be a young, white, blond, beautiful woman to have credibility and fame . . . it is just the way it is. They are more diverse now but not by much.
Of course, at the time of the Babylonian exile, you might defend their list of what makes a person unworthy as a matter of breeding for best results, but it still stinks, doesn’t it? In the 35th chapter of Isaiah, we find a passage written at the time when the remnant in Babylon was preparing to return to their native land.
This is the high sounding poetry that became immortalized in Handel’s Messiah, about a highway through the wilderness that will take the Israelites back home. And, as I have said before, I am not a linguist, but I had the good fortune of having some professors along the way who were. One of our Old Testament professors when I was a student at Vanderbilt was Walter Harrelson. Professor Harrelson was on the committee working on a new translation of Isaiah. He told us about arguing for a way of translating Isaiah 35, verse 8 which reads: A highway shall be there,[c]
and it shall be called the Holy Way;
the unclean shall not travel on it,[d]
but it shall be for God’s people
The translation committee insisted that they keep the familiar form of the sentence saying that this highway, immortalized in Handle’s Messiah, this Holy Way; as it says in the second half of verse 8, “the unclean shall not travel on it.”
Which is to say, that this highway which leads to the Kingdom of God is reserved strictly for those who are without sin. This was not an uncommon sentiment in ancient Judaism. Priests and those who lead in worship were to be pure both physically and spiritually, with a rash or blemish on their skin or a blight on their soul. Churches, in one way or another, have a tendency towards the same kind of narrow path….. there are people who are in and there are people who are out.
When I was young, the church was fighting integration and trying to keep women out of leadership. When I was a young adult, the church was trying hard to keep divorced people out of church. In the 80’s, they turned their attention on keeping gay people out of church and when they failed at that, they have most recently turned their attention to the transgender community. Always someone who is not “holy enough.”
Churches have defined people out for a whole host of reasons….. women cannot lead in church because…. Well, because they don’t have the right plumbing….. the handicapped, the divorced, the addict…. Maybe the wrong skin color, the wrong sexual orientation…… the unclean shall not travel on it, but is shall be for God’s people!
Almost all of us have been found to be unworthy in some religious tradition and so we understand this passage, no matter how much it may set our teeth on edge.
Dr. Harrelson argued, and I think quite convincingly, that they have the sentence structure so that it means the exact opposite of what the original author intended. It should not be, he said, “The unclean shall not travel on it,” but rather, it should read: Those who travel on it shall not be unclean. That is, if you will walk on this path…. If you are willing to live your life towards the faith community, then you will be made clean. Instead of being exclusive and keeping people out, the prophet’s intention was to insist that everyone is included and that by being in the faith community, by living the life, by walking in the way, you are restored.
And this is not simple wishful thinking on Dr. Harrelson’s part. Look at verse 3: Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. The prophet is talking about how the call to be in community heals the infirm.
Look at verse 5: Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
A lot of you, a lot of us, have been wounded by our religious tradition. A lot of us have been wounded by family members or that person with whom you once stood with a crowd of witnesses and swore an oath to God that you would love, honor and cherish one another until the day you died. And sometimes we start to believe in our wounds.
Sometimes we start to identify ourselves by how we have been hurt. The tradition in A.A. is to begin the meeting by going around the room and everyone says their name and claims their brokenness: Hi, I’m Bill and I’m an alcoholic. It is a part of the tradition which gives me some pause, but I can tell you that outside of A.A. meetings, other people will do it for you.
I would like to be known for my accomplishments. I have had a meaningful career in ministry: I’ve been a part of building dozens of Habitat Houses, hundreds of houses in Nicaragua, I’ve published three books and hundreds of articles. I’ve been a visiting fellow at Harvard and I’ve become a friend to hundreds of homeless and poor people in this community. But when I walk into coffee shop in the town where I lived and worked for most of my life, the people there might not think of any of those things. For them I may be nothing more than that preacher who got divorced…… twice. You would like to think that no one is keeping score but the people who have known you since you were young…. Keeping score is what they do best.
What does it mean to be shy other than to be afraid of the judgment of others? On the list of anxieties, the list of things people are the most afraid of, snakes is number one, death is number three and public speaking is number two. Now, I think there is good reason to be afraid of snakes and of dying, and for me those two things can come pretty close to one another, but why are you afraid to speak in public? Why would you be afraid to speak to a class or a social gathering?
Isn’t it because we know how harshly people can judge us…. And, in part, we know that because we know how harsh we are towards other people!
I think the biggest hurdle to getting over being shy is to stop judging other people so harshly so that you can take a more charitable view of human kind.
One of the great paradoxes of the practice of the Christian faith is the observation that Jesus was tolerant of everything except intolerance. You cannot find any instance of conflict in the New Testament between Jesus and anyone, not the Roman occupation forces, not even his own executioner or the friend who betrayed him…. The only time Jesus gets mad and calls people names it was for intolerance.
Jesus was known for keeping company with prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners specifically because that was so uncommon. Religious people didn’t socialize with prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners…. They didn’t want to be associated with the unclean. Jesus, on the other hand, didn’t mind being associated with the unclean, he just didn’t want to associate with the people who thought they were clean….. the self-righteous, the religious hypocrites who used religion to brand people because of their failures rather than to try to love them into health.
The vision of the prophet Isaiah was that when the Jews were released from Babylon, when they were again allowed to be a people, a community of faith, that those who walked with them would be healed…. Metaphorically, the lame learn to walk by walking, the blind will see, the deaf will hear and the unclean will be forgiven, healed, made clean, they will be fully restored so that no one remembers their past brokenness.
Matthew records a very telling exchange between Jesus and some of the disciples of John the Baptist. It is pretty clear that John the Baptist was from that Essene community which was waiting for God to send a Messiah who would deliver the nation of Israel from bondage in much the same way that the Maccabbees or the kings of old had.
If you take the baptism scenes in all four gospels as being in any way historical, John the Baptist had endorsed Jesus as being the one, but some months have passed, John is in prison, and it does not seem to John that Jesus is getting with the program. John expected Jesus to get on with some serious butt kicking and name taking…. and he just doesn’t seem to be acting like any Messiah John had ever envisioned.
Jesus tells John’s disciples to go back and tell them what they have seen. Jesus doesn’t really give John an answer in so many words, he just wants his disciples to give him a report of what is going on…. The blind see, the lame walk, the poor have good news preached to them.
John would recognize that language from the prophet Isaiah and we can only hope that he understood and accepted this for what it was. Jesus wasn’t going to lead a military revolution. He wasn’t going to change the world by force. He was going to change it by showing compassion.
Compassion may not be the quickest way to right certain social wrongs… compassion is not a direct path to justice but it is the right path, and, if you believe the prophet, those who walk on that path will be made clean.
There are those who will label you by your worst failures. But, folks, that’s their problem. You know who you are, own that and be made whole.
