Want to Know Where the Bible Came From? Don't Ask a Fundamentalist

 

I recently read Whose Bible Is It? by the prominent scholar Jaroslav Pelikan. It was an interesting overview of facts that are found in many other books, such as those by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman’s books are somewhat combative, which is understandable, since he emerged from a fundamentalist background. Pelikan came from, and remains in, a scholarly environment, and he is telling the fascinating story of where the Bible came from without feeling the need to fight the anti-information crowd.

Pelikan tells of the gradual accumulation, over centuries, of the books of the Old and New Testaments, and the books that didn’t make it into either one. The Bible is not a book; it is a collection (Bible comes from the Greek word for library). Different versions of the Bible included different books, and even as late as Martin Luther there was disagreement about which books really belonged in the Bible.

One point that Pelikan made that I had not previously thought about was this. The world of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, was one totally unfamiliar to modern people. When the scriptures say that Jesus is a shepherd, modern people have no idea what a shepherd actually does. Also, people thought that diseases were caused by demons, not germs or genes; the Bible contains not a single example of a medical healing. Also, the Old Testament world was one of continual and continuous war. When the prophets longed for turning swords into plowshares, they were not just thinking about spiritual warfare within one’s spirit but relief from suffering right now. And in the New Testament, when they expected the Second Coming, they expected it right away, not in the undefined future; so much so that Paul said that we shouldn’t even bother getting married. When so many of the expectations of the Israelites and Christians failed to materialize, they had to scramble around to find an excuse for it.

Another point was that some major Christian doctrines have a very shaky Biblical basis. In one place, our modern Old Testament says, of the redeemer, “They have pierced his hands and feet.” But it could just as easily be read as, “They have mauled his hands and feet like lions.” The first one sounds like a prediction of the crucifixion, the second does not. The difference is one slight line in the text—these are Masoretic vowel points, not even letters—a yod vs. a waw, which look very similar on paper. Something important was lost in translation.

Another thing that was lost in translation was the character of Jesus. When Jesus told the religious authorities that God can make children (ben/banim) of Abraham out of these stones (eben), it was evident that He loved puns. You just can’t get this in English. Most of us realize this, although there are some churches that believe that it was the 1611 King James Bible that was inspired by God, rather than the original writings.

The Bible is not a book—or, rather, a library—to be quickly read or superficially interpreted. Fundamentalists seldom have the patience to examine closely what they consider to be the scriptures.