In and Out of God - God and the Bible

These Golden-Brown Pages

Ever since that fateful Saturday morning when the Holy Spirit arrested me and laid me prostrate in his presence, my love for the Bible has never waned. Even today, though I don’t believe in God, I still appreciate the Bible for its wisdom and interesting stories, just not as a holy book. There are some parts of it, however, that could be done away with.

The Bible was the first thing I fell in love with after my conversion experience. I remember rushing home to tell my mother that I had gotten ‘slain’ in the prayer meeting I went to and that I needed to get a Bible of my own. She ridiculed me, saying that I was just playing the fool, but gave me an old, golden-brown paged Bible never the less. I guess it made her happy to see her son actually interested in things holy.

The pages were well oiled, so to speak, and one of them was sticking out of the middle as though trying to get out. It was the beloved Psalm 23 - “Yahweh is my shepherd, I lack nothing.” Half of itself was missing, sadly. An old wives’ tradition was to place a copy of the Word of God at the foot of a child’s crib to ward off any uninvited spiritual guests – emphasis on the word ‘foot.’ The Psalm was unceremoniously ripped across its centre by my own baby-feet, probably while crying for ‘tea-tea’.  

I love that story for its irony. The same feet that were used to tear the Bible apart, were the same feet I would use to “Go forth and preach.” “How lovely on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news!” Isaiah 52:7. My feet were made lovely, thank goodness.

My favourite books of the Bible were what the Jews call ‘The Writings’ and what Christians call the Books of Wisdom - and you know I love wisdom. The Jerusalem Bible that I owned styled the writing of the Proverbs as couplets separated on the page for easy reading. I would read those for hours and hours, reflecting, journaling, praying with them. On two occasions I dreamed that a golden-brown piece of parchment, surrounded in darkness, was laid open before me, written in the same couplet style. I hate that I could never remember what I read on those pages after waking up, but I would always have this sense that I had happened across something deep, something divine and eternal.

I can go on about my day-long, self-imposed retreats with my Bible, and my wiggly style of underlining favourite verses and my forgetting of exact verse locations, having to rely on my memory of the fact that it was written on the left side of the page, underlined in red ink and more than likely in the New Testament...but I won’t. I figure you would have caught on to how much of a Bible freak I was.

This started to change, slowly but surely, after I went to a retreat with my missionary class. The priest started us off with the usual praise and worship, prayer and then he “broke the word.” I was always interested in hearing other preachers share their insights. He spoke about the parable of the unscrupulous judge and the importunate widow.

The story talks of a judge who did not fear God and was approached by a widow in search of justice. The story relates that the judge continuously refused her his services, but she kept up her pestering, forcing him to relent and grant her wishes saying “I must give this widow her just rights since she keeps pestering me, or she will come and slap me in the face.”

Usually, priests and pastors alike would use this parable as a lesson for perseverance in prayer. It reminds me of the acronym PUSH – Pray Until Something Happens. It was an easy-to-preach teaching, not only for its simplicity, but for the readiness of the people to accept it. Human beings are “harassed and dejected,” in search of help in whatever form we can get it. That’s why the most hardened of sinners will tell you to pray for what you want and the holiest of Church ladies go to the village seer-man to get her stolen husband back from some wretch.

This priest, however, took it from an entirely different point of view. He switched the usually ascribed roles in the story, linking us to the importunate judge and God to the widow. He said that the story was not about perseverance in prayer but rather the perseverance of God’s undying love that was always searching, thirsting for us. This did not go down too well with people who had been hearing otherwise all their lives, although it did make sense of the judge being called ‘unjust’ a bit. It didn’t make sense of the widow asking for justice done to her enemies, though, unless God wanted us to fight in his army again.

I had encountered different interpretations of scriptures before this one, but this one affected me, probably because the priest was my spiritual director and I looked up to him dearly. Why was he saying something so radically different from everyone else? How was I to know which one was true? Was the truth necessary? Were the two interpretations mutually exclusive?

So, not able to stand the uncertainty, I just had to gain knowledge about the origins of the Bible.

Where did the Bible come from?

The Bible is a collection of books, in case you did not already know, written by a number of authors over a long period of ancient history. Because I was still ignorant of so much of history and I didn’t apply my critical thinking skills to my faith unless it was within its own boundaries, I thought this particular quest for answers would be a smooth one. I laugh at my old self.

What Christians call the Old Testament is also called the Hebrew Bible. It contains books said to have been written by Moses, Wisdom books written by Solomon, scrolls written by Prophets and a few other authors n between. I was utterly flabbergasted to find that the preceding statement was wrong on so many counts.

Tradition holds that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, but the probability of that being true decreases significantly by the fact that Moses’ death is recorded therein. How Moses came to write about his own death and God-burial is titillating to my imagination. Even without that mishap, other things give it away, like the differences in writing styles and double accounts of the same stories, like that of Creation in Genesis. If Moses played any part at all in the writing of those books, it certainly wasn’t a one man show.

The works of the many prophets, from Isaiah to Malachi, take higher precedence than the gospels in some fringe-churches. These churches claim to have deciphered secrets in these writings that speak of things to come, usually the death and devastation of all the world – except them, of course. Pastors like this may find some interest in the fact that prophets never actually wrote anything. Their many disciples would write down their sayings for them and more and more would be added-on and amended to what was initially written over the years. Scholars believe that these writings were collected over a period of 500 years and only stopped about 200 years before Jesus. When you thought you were reading exactly what Hosea said about his beautiful harlot-wife you got excited. Instead you were probably reading what some other guy wrote years later.

What I am about to say may shock you, though I hope it doesn't. If you are anything like Miriam 'Ma' Ferguson, it may be necessary to say that the Bible was not written in English. The Old Testament was written originally in Hebrew, which was then translated into Greek, legend says, by 72 scholars who were put into 72 isolated rooms for this task and each of them produced perfectly identical translations. The Greek translation of the Old Testament is called the Septuagint which means ‘70’.  

Many of the Jews who lived at the time didn’t speak their original Hebrew language but Greek. This is why the New Testament writers, when quoting from the Old Testament, quoted from Greek sources as opposed to Hebrew. This point is of dire importance. The translation of the Bible is not a mere matter of changing words. Words are the symbols we use to convey information and any change in them, no matter how small, can result in a change in theology. What struck me the most thus far is that the word used in the original Hebrew Isaiah 7:14, which is said to be the prophecy of the awaited Messiah, was almah. Almah is Hebrew for “young woman.” The Greek version, however, uses a word which means “virgin” and it is this translation of Isaiah that the Gospel writers quote from to predicate the divinity of Jesus. The Virginal Birth of Jesus Christ is an indispensible doctrine of traditional Christianity. What was it that caused this simple but very consequential difference?

Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Madonna and Child.

Let’s jump ahead a few centuries. This divine collection of books - the Bible, as we know it - did not exist until the closing of the 4th century. In a series of Councils leading up to one in Hippo 393CE (Common Era is used to not offend non-Christians), the books deemed worthy to be included into the canon of scripture were chosen. Prior to this, the new testament epistles were separated amongst the churches. You don’t need to be a historian to recognise that when Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he was addressing specific problems that occurred within that community. This means that the churches in Philippi and Ephesus would not have been privy to his advice on managing spiritual gifts or his poetry on the greatness of love in 1Cor 13. Have you ever thought about that?

St Jerome, towering Doctor of the Church, was commissioned to translate the Bible into Latin, a project that took him 15 years. Latin translations of the various books were already in existence, but he took it upon himself to correct their many disagreements. St. Jerome tells a story in one of his letters of having a dream where the Lord admonished him for being a “Ciceronian,not a Christian.” He repented and vowed never to read secular books again, lest he should be sent to hell. It is widely known that he translated the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels into Latin, - the common language of the people at the time - what is now called the Latin Vulgate. 


The same, can be said of John Wycliff, who is purported to have translated the entire Bible from Latin to English. Translations of parts of the Bible had been done before but never in it's entirety. It is probable that Wycliff did not translate them all by his lonesome but was aided by two of his disciples. He, unfortunately, was regarded as a heretic by the Church and was posthumously burned for it about a century after closing his eyes. With the plethora of English translations today, I wonder if the Jamaican patois translation would ever catch on? You jeer at it today in the same way people once jeered at the idea of having the Word of God written in the English vernacular and not Latin.

The Gospel of Luke (Jamaican Patois Translation)

Today, I am going to use my HP printer for the first time in months. Doing so reminded me of the fact that mass printing is a fairly recent phenomenon. It was in the 1440's that Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press which allowed books to be printed in large numbers. It's uncertain whether the hundreds of 'copyists,' as they were called, were happy about this machine taking their job. 


Copyists, being human and all, were subject to fatigue and error. Sometimes, they may just have made corrections to scriptures that were not in need of correction. This is a safe, historical assumption to make because upon the discovery of scrolls in the Judean Desert after World War II, some of them being the oldest known copies of parts of the Old Testament, we found a few discrepancies between them and the traditional texts used as references, for example, the Codex Vaticanus. In some of the unearthed manuscripts, Jesus' story ends at the empty tomb, while others include his appearances. The most striking difference for me, though, is that the popular story of the woman caught in adultery is not found in any of the manuscripts at all. I do love that story.  


Teleporting through time again, I take you back to my school. I was sitting in class in a circle of friends during one of our many free periods. What else could we be doing but arguing over the authority of the Bible? Being Catholic, I defended the authority of the Church with every trick up my sleeve, while some of my non-Catholic Christian friends defended the authority of scripture. Whence cometh this divide?

For the greater part of our history, the Bible was not available to every man, woman and child as it is today; you didn’t get a copy of the New Testament under your pillow in a motel. It was in the 14^th century that Wycliff opposed the authority of the papacy saying:

“Even the lord Pope, or any other grandee, may be ignorant of the sense of scripture and, in a greedy quest for wealth, interpret it in a sense contrary to Christ. But the faithful whom Christ calls in meekness and humility of heart, whether they be clergy or laity, male or female, bending the neck of their inner man to the logic and style of scripture, will find in it the power to labour and the wisdom hidden from the proud. ”

Wycliff was upset about the abuses of the papacy, especially that of Gregory XI. A century later, a more popular name arises in Martin Luther. He was a monk who was also fulminating at the continued abuses of the papacy and he embraced and popularised a tradition that is known as sola scriptura – scripture alone. Luther said “I want scripture alone to rule, and not be interpreted by my spirit or that of any other man, but to be understood in its own light.” He went on to say that “its plainest meanings are to be preserved and the words are not to be understood apart from their proper and literal sense.”

The Catholic Church responded decisively:

“The council further decrees, in order to control those of unbalanced character, that no one shall dare to interpret the sacred scriptures either by twisting its text to his individual meaning in opposition to that which has been and is held by holy mother church, whose function it is to pass judgment on the true meaning and interpretation of the sacred scriptures, or by giving it meanings contrary to the unanimous consent of the fathers.”

If you would allow me to be myself for half a sentence, this sounds like a pissing competition between a pompous Catholic Church and a good-intentioned maverick with a horrible idea. Why Luther ever thought the Bible to be “plain” and easily understood is beyond reason. Thus started the Bible wars, where Protestants would condemn Catholics for holding extra-biblical doctrines, casting a blind eye to their own extra-biblical belief in the Trinity.

As I would tell my Protestant friends sitting around me in class, “the Bible did not fall from the sky as precipitation.” The scriptures were born in the womb of the early Church who later decided what books would be put in the Bible. And now, centuries later, one guy decides to cut the fruit from its source and call it heaven sent. It did not make sense to me then or now.

More than likely, you would have heard about Dan Brown and his controversial book The Da Vinci Code. If so, you would have also heard mention of the Gospel of Thomas and/or Mary Magdalene. It’s possible that you heard it and never allowed it to take root in your consciousness. Dan Brown's books are not to be taken as historical (as many unfortunate souls have done) but as works of fiction. This does not affect my point, however. I have a friend who has a special place in his heart for conspiracy theories. When Dan Brown’s book came out, he started pestering me about my trust in the Church and the Bible. I brushed him off.

Whether you like it or not, these gospels do exist. What are we to make of them? There is a reason, or many, that these books were not thought of to be inspired by God. The Gospel of Thomas, for example, has a theology that is not known today. Thomas portrays a more human Jesus than a godly one. The Gospel also makes no mention of Jesus' Passion or Passion prophecies.

Who made the decisions as to what went in the Bible and what was disregarded? Bishops. These guys argued and debated and eventually decided which books were to be considered divinely inspired. The Gnostic Gospels were not chosen because they were not thought to give accurate accounts of the life of Jesus Christ. Instead, the four Synoptic Gospels were chosen; yet, even they do not agree on important points like the genealogy of Jesus. 

There is so much more to this story I feel as though I am cheating you by stopping here, but I have written enough to elucidate my point of contention. Why was I, in the 21^st century, saying that the Bible was the inspired word of God? As an aspiring writer myself, people have told me good stuff about my writing. I should probably say differently to score points, but honesty is, on most days, a policy of mine – I am not inspired by God. There are some writers that I may quicker say were inspired by God than the writers of the Bible. Two that come to mind are Khalil Gibran and Vaclav Havel. After all those translations, mistakes, new-found gospels, be-headings, schisms and heresies, over this one book, how was I to be certain that the one I possessed was The One Book?

Suppose the Qur'an was the One Book? It has been more consistent than the Bible.

The only thing I had to rely on, as always, was the authority of the Catholic Church. Fortunately, by this time my trust in the Church was thinning, admittedly because of negative personal experiences and disagreements with how the Church handled sexual abuse scandals among other things. There had to be a better reason to continue believing this book had any salvific importance.

Unfortunately, I could not find one. I could find no significant difference between the wisdom I found in the Bible and that of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Actually, I take that back. The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter had better plot twists, more logical character development and inner consistency. The Bible, on the other hand, did not, and that may never change. 


I have noticed an interesting thing about us humans. We are eager to believe, and are willing to believe outlandish things as long as they are said to have happened long ago in far away places. Of course, a man rose from the dead! Of course, a virgin had a child! Of course, a man walked on water. It's written right there! I, however, am not so sure whether I would believe my girlfriend if she tells me she is pregnant with the Son of God. It's either she stole a child, I was drugged and slept with her unconsciously, or I was cheated on. Would you believe your wife? If a man came today, preached out his liver string, and said that he had come to save you from your sins, would you have fallen at his feet to worship? Why, then, are we so quick to believe similar stories from the Bible? Because of those darn golden-brown pages, I say. I am almost certain that if I were stranded on an island, lost and alone, and happened across two books - the Bible and the Alchemist - I would quicker believe in the metaphysics of the Alchemist than the Bible. 

The Simple Truth

What would I expect from a book that claimed divine authorship? Apart from being written in gold and having a continuous glow around it, I would expect much better writing; I would expect it to contain verifiable truths about life; I would expect that God would know how the earth was formed and that he would be the same God throughout, not changing from a malevolent dictator to a pacifist between centuries; I would expect that the teachings in it would leave no room for interpretation so that its readers would be monolithic in beliefs; I would expect that it would have been written in a time when tape-recorders and the internet were invented to ensure maximum salvation; I would expect that it's chief character, Jesus Christ, would treat his mother better. Essentially, I would expect it to be completely different from what it is.


Instead, I have a book that is filled with myths, mistakes, mis-translations that were made to suit more palatable theologies, then forced down the throats of ignorant people who were used to build palaces for sick men. I have a book that is inaccurate about the origins of the universe and paints a picture of a God that is merely the anthropomorphisation of progressive epochs. I have a book that does not condemn incest, rape and genocide, but advocates it more than a few times. I have a book that contains unheard of history but is the source of a faith that depends on the history being true. My Bible’s pages may be golden-brown but I’m afraid that the blood of many is soaked deep within its pages.

Conclusion

More and more was being taken away from me. My faith was slipping through the creases of my heart as sand slips through fingers. It is never easy to lose a first love. Fortunately, my love for the Bible was never entirely lost, only altered. The Bible has it's inaccuracies and atrocities, but it also contains some gems.   


Let this atheist give you some Biblical advice:

"It is not every spirit, my dear people, that you can trust; test them, to see if they come from God" 1John 4:1

"Do not refuse yourselves the good things of today; do not let your share of what is lawfully desired pass you by." Ecclesiasticus 14:14

"Finally, brothers (and sisters), fill your minds with everything that is true, everything that is noble, everything that is good and pure, everything that we love and honour, everything that can be thought virtuous or worthy of praise." Philippians 4:8.

"Be quick to listen, and deliberate in giving an answer. If you understand the matter, give your neighbour an answer, if not, put your hand over your mouth." Ecclesiasticus 6:4.


For now, the Bible is a book. I love books. 


Look out for God and Prayer.