The Origins of the Bible, Part 1: Examining the Aura Created Around the Bible
How did the Bible come to be written? Does it reflect a single point of view, even a single inspiration or has that been an idea imposed upon it by religious devotees? Since what we now call the Bible was written by many authors over a period of about 1000 years, what were the particular circumstances that prompted the writing of each piece? What was the process by which these individual pieces got designated as “Holy Scripture?” Were there other works that competed for inclusion in the Bible, but for some reason were not chosen? If so, who made those decisions and on what criteria? Are all parts of the Bible to be regarded as equally holy, equally valid or does the Bible embrace concepts that are demonstrably untrue and proclaim attitudes that modern sensitivity and an expanded consciousness now find both repellant and repulsive? Amazing as it may seem, these perfectly obvious questions are seldom raised in the various churches of the Christian world and indeed are regarded by some Christians as hostile, faithless and inappropriate. In the great theological centers of learning, however, these inquiries are routine and commonplace. Yet when one leaves these theological centers for a career as a pastor serving people who occupy the pews of our churches, there appears to be almost a conspiracy of silence about biblical knowledge. In the heartland of religious life, these newly minted clergy confront a Bible that has been covered with an aura of sanctity, which is so powerful that it blunts critical questions, regarding them not as a search for truth, but as attacks on holiness, upon God, on the Bible itself. So before beginning to look at the Bible itself, I want us to look first at this defense shield erected over the centuries by pious, but not well informed people, and designed to protect the Bible and its “revealed truth” from erosion.
One runs into this biblical defense shield almost everywhere. It is present in the propaganda emanating from religious fundamentalists. Television evangelists like Albert Mohler, Pat Robertson, and the late Jerry Falwell constantly refer to the Bible as “the inerrant word of God.” They quote from its pages to attack evolution, the rise of feminism, homosexuality and even environmental concerns. These contemporary fundamentalists have their roots in a group of Evangelical Protestants who, between 1910 and 1915 in America, published, with the help from the Universal Oil Company of California (Unocal), and spread across the world, a series of tracts called “The Fundamentals,” which in fact produced the word “fundamentalism.” This tractarian movement proclaimed that the only true Christian position on the scriptures was to regard every word of the Bible as both revealed and inerrant truth.
If one looks further back in history, one discovers that this mentality was present even at the time of Galileo in the 17th century, when representatives of Roman Catholic Christianity condemned Galileo’s idea that the earth was not the center of a three-tiered universe and that the sun did not rotate around it. What was the proof that they offered for this condemnation? It was a passage from the Book of Joshua (10:12-14) in which God, in response to Joshua’s prayers, stopped the sun in the sky to allow more daylight in which Joshua could pursue his military rout of the Amorites. This, the church fathers argued, was clear proof from the “inerrant word of God” that Galileo was wrong.
This defensive shield around the Bible is also daily constructed even in those mainline churches that would be embarrassed to be called fundamentalists, since they regard themselves as more learned and sophisticated than those they think of as fundamentalists. Yet at the end of biblical readings Christian churches of all denominations still use some version of the phrase “This is the word of the Lord,” to which the people dutifully reply with some version of the phrase “Thanks be to God.” This common liturgical usage reinforces attitudes that the Bible’s origins are not to be the subject of the questions we might apply to any other piece of literature.
In the more formal liturgical Christian traditions, when the gospel is read there is normally some kind of procession into the congregation with the gospel book elevated, presumably for the adoration of the people. Then the reader announces: “The Holy Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ according to” and then identifies which gospel provided the reading for that day. While this is going on, the appointed reader might well make some magical sign of the cross on the gospel text itself as if to bless it again and, not coincidentally, to remove that text from any critical analysis. Next the reader might also cross himself or herself as if to say that only a holy person can read these sacred words. In many churches the reading of the gospel is in fact reserved for one who is ordained, which suggests special status for the gospels themselves.
When the gospel passage is complete, the reader then proclaims: “The Gospel of the Lord,” to which the people once again dutifully respond, “Praise to you Lord Christ.” The clear message communicated by these pious acts, which occur Sunday after Sunday and year after year is to reinforce an attitude toward the Bible in general and the gospels in particular that any critical questioning of biblical content is deemed inappropriate. The ancient biblical defense shield is thus regularly made more solid. Those who seek to remove it, to go around it or beneath it, raise the threat level of believers and so they proceed at their own peril. Clergy, especially newly ordained clergy, are loath to attack this “Maginot Line.” A pattern is thus set.
This defense shield is also revealed in other far more subtle ways. Until relatively recently, Bibles were generally printed on gilt-edged tissue thin pages inside a floppy leather cover, sometimes with a gold cross on the front, all of which served to designate this book as different from all other books. The Bible was to be given the place of honor on the book shelf or to be prominently displayed on the coffee table as it was in my childhood home. One learned quickly in that pious age not to place any other book on top of that Bible for that would be a desecration. These “family Bibles” were seldom opened and then primarily not to be read, but to record the family history of baptisms, marriages and deaths. This book thus served as the repository in which all of the solemn, sacred moments of a family’s transition were recorded. One did not trifle with the content of its pages.
Yet another mark of the Bible’s special claim on truth is found in that this book was normally printed with two columns of text on each page. That seemed to be standard. Even today, both the Harper Collins Study Bible and the Oxford University Study Bible still use the twin-columned format. Most books that people read are not laid out this way. Have you ever wondered how this custom developed or why it has become so uniform? When the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was published between 1946 and 1952 in three volumes (two for the Old Testament and one for the New Testament), this two-column format was abandoned. However, this RSV was so mightily resisted by evangelical churches that book burnings were held in various parts of America. There were several reasons for this, some located in the way various texts were translated, but making the Bible appear like any other book was clearly, if subliminally, another source of irritation.
The only other books normally published in a two column per page format are reference books like encyclopedias and dictionaries. Both are sources of authority. One goes to an encyclopedia to get facts that are assumed to be accurate. One goes to a dictionary to get definitions and meanings that are the last word. By printing the Bible in this authoritative way religious propaganda appears to be implying that this book too is a source of ultimate and inerrant answers. The format itself was part of the aura of sanctity, which served, albeit unconsciously, to make it quite difficult for people to relate to the Bible in any other way except as beyond questioning. Someone at an early date must have consciously made this decision.
Recall that for most of history, universal education was not commonly available so the vast majority of people in the pre-modern world could not read. Even with that barrier to knowledge firmly in place, for centuries the Bible was still kept in Latin that the masses did not speak anyway. In parts of Christian history it was a crime punishable by death to translate the sacred scriptures. In this manner the biblical defense shield was constantly reinforced.
By translating the Bible into the vernacular, the Reformation in the 16th century began the process of eroding ecclesiastical authority. That erosion has yet to be stopped. That same Reformation, however, also produced a Protestant tradition that no longer had a central authority like the Papal office to determine truth for all believers. Feeling the anxiety of that lack quite deeply, Protestants began to treat the Bible as a paper Pope, investing its words with the same infallibility that the Catholic tradition has claimed for the Papal office, thus powerfully reinforcing the defense shield around the Bible even as expanding knowledge tore it away.
So the first step in studying the origins of the Bible is to navigate a pathway through this biblical defense shield in order to examine the text of the Bible itself without the presuppositions of religious propaganda. That is what I plan to do in this protracted series of columns. I hope the result will be salutary not just for modern faith but for intellectual integrity.
- John Shelby Spong
- things attributed to Solomon.
- As with myth, the consciousness of the writers is reflected in the stories.
- Almost all of the violent stories in the Hebrew Bible were written by one writer who lived during the time when humankind’s predominant level of thinking was of violence.
- There is a dramatic change of consciousness reflected in the writings as a worldwide shift occurred.
- One can track the evolution of consciousness by reading the Hebrew Bible based on the time of the writings.