A Reliable Bible

It doesn’t matter where, but I recently came across the blog of a very conservative, fundamentalist Christian.  There is essentially no difference between his faith in the Bible and his faith in God.  For him, a flawed Bible means there is no God, or at least there is no redeeming God of the New Testament.  Fair enough.

In one part of his blog, he writes about the “reliability of the Bible.”  What exactly does this mean?

What most people mean is this: If a book is reliable, you can trust what it says.  To assert the Bible is reliable is to assert that it’s telling us the truth.  God really did create the universe.  We really are flawed, collectively and individually.  God really does love us.   God really will redeem us.   One might also mean the people, places, and events the Bible talks about were real.  The Garden of Eden was a real place.  The Red Sea really parted.  Jonah was a real person.  Jesus really walked on water.

But when scholars talk about the reliability of the Bible, they mean something different.  They mean we actually know the words of the Bible.  What does this mean?

The original biblical documents no longer exist.  All we have are a few thousand copies in ancient languages such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.   These copies weren’t made by Xerox.  They were made by hand, and for a variety of reasons, no two of them are in perfect agreement.  When you hold an ancient biblical manuscript in your hand, some of the words duplicate the actual words of the original book, but not all of them.   It’s the job of the textual critic to compare the manuscript copies of a particular book to remove the copying errors and reconstruct the original text.

Textual critics have a good understanding of the kinds of mistakes made by ancient copyists, and they have a large number of copies to work with.  Their methods can be used in controlled tests to make sure they work.  For these reasons, textual critics claim to have reconstructed the original biblical text to a high degree of accuracy.  (Not everyone agrees with this.)

That’s what we mean when we say the Bible is “reliable.”  We mean we can be very confident we’re reading the actual words written by the authors—if you’re reading in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek!

No one can “prove” the Bible is reliable in the more general sense of communicating the truth about its various topics.  The issue here is complicated, because people view the Bible from many different perspectives.  For example, a fundamental question about the Bible, one that more or less split the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s, is whether the Bible is a record of God’s revelation to man or is itself God’s revelation to man.  But whatever your point of view, there’s come a point when you have to decide if the Bible is telling you the truth.  And to make that decision, you need to read the Bible, and read about the Bible.

In my opinion, far too many Christians allow others to read the Bible for them, and let others tell them what the Bible says and means.

To understand the Bible, you have to put in some effort.  Like trigonometry, grammar, and bowling, understanding the Bible takes practice and patience.  At a minimum, you need a good English translation and some good reference books, such as commentaries or biblical dictionaries.  And it never it hurts to be humble enough to listen to what others have to say about the Bible, and ask for help when you need it.

Taking the Bible Literally

I picked this up from Exploring Our Matrix.  Click for a larger image.

Biblical Literalism

Biblical Men?

It doesn’t matter where, but I came across this blurb on a website today:

Our goal is building biblical men who will be Christ-centered leaders in their families, churches, and communities.

A sincere question for anyone who wishes to answer.  What exactly is a biblical man?

Is it a man who reads the Bible?  If so, there are hundreds of millions of biblical men all over the world, including me.  The designation “biblical” seems to lose its meaning if it applies to virtually every male who has picked up a Bible.  Even atheists read the bible.  Surely an atheist is not a “biblical man.”

Is it a man who attempts to live up to the high moral bar set by the best parts of the Bible?  There are many such men, and they do not all read the Bible regularly, or even believe its contents.

So perhaps it is a man who reads and believes the Bible.   Believes what?  For many, it’s not enough to believe or even to act; one must believe exactly the correct things.  If the content of one’s belief makes him biblical, what precisely are the beliefs one must hold to be biblical?

Is it a man who behaves like the men in the Bible?  Nearly all the men in the Bible exhibited behavior not easily defended.  Is Judas a “biblical man?”  In the end, how much better than Judas are you?

It is a man who behaves like Christ?  I submit such a man, aside from Christ himself, does not exist.  If it is a man who attempts to behave like Christ, fair enough.  We should all make this attempt.

And what about the women?  Is a biblical woman different from a biblical man?  In what ways?

Just curious.

Confusing the Bible and Jesus Christ

At EthicsDaily.com, Bob Allen writes about theological objections to a VBS song being used in Southern Baptist Churches across the nation this summer.  “The Word” is a daily song sung as part of the “Outrigger Island: Living God’s Unshakeable Truth” VBS curriculum published by LifeWay Christian Resources, one of the publishing arms of the Southern Baptist Convention.  The lyrics:

In the beginning was the Word and It was with God and was God.
Before an eye had seen or ear had heard, there was the Word.
I know the Bible is God’s Word, His written promises to earth.
It is a lamp unto the feet of those who believe in its worth.
The Word is Perfect Truth. The Word is what I cling to.
Unbreakable, unshakeable Word of God.
I love the Word of God.

Puzzeling Out Noah’s Flood

At Theological Scribbles, Robin Parry offers the first article in a mini-series about Noah’s flood.  He outlines one of the primary reason why many Christians, including me, do not believe Noah’s flood was an historical event: external geological evidence makes it simply impossible to believe the entire planet was covered by the waters of a great flood.  Parry promises at least three or four articles in the series, and one of them will answer the most common question posed by those who read the text literally: How can we take the text seriously if we don’t read it literally?

The Bible and Science

At EthicsDaily.com, Drew Smith writes about the Bible and science.  His thesis: the Bible cannot be used as a scientific textbook.

First and foremost, we must understand that the narratives of Genesis were written by ancient humans, who, without the skill of modern science, sought to explain their world and the origins of the natural world from a religious viewpoint. Genesis, then, was the ancient Hebrews’ story of their beginnings and the origins of the world and humanity as they saw it from their theological, but not a scientific, point of view. Like other ancient peoples, the Hebrews justified their religion and their view of the world by telling their creation story, which detailed how the world came about as an act of their God.

The Bible in English, Part 1: Recovering the Original Text

This is the first of a four-part series I’m teaching at Farmville Baptist Church.

The Bible was originally written in three languages: Hebrew (most of the Old Testament), Aramaic (parts of Daniel and Ezra), and Greek (all of the New Testament, and parts of the Old Testament accepted in the Catholic and Orthodox churches). To translate the Bible into English, we need the original text. But we don’t possess the original documents, the autographs. They’re probably lost forever. For the New Testament, the focal point of this series, we possess approximately 5,500 hand-written copies in Greek, and approximately 10,000 hand-written translations into Latin. We also have ancient manuscripts in other languages such as Syriac and Coptic, and quotations of the New Testament written by early Christian scholars. All of these sources provide an opportunity to recover the original text of the New Testament.

The Bible in English, Introduction

This is the introduction of a four-part series, based on an Adult Bible-study series that I’m teaching at my church.

This series is about the Bible in English. The Bible holds a central place in our worship and our daily lives. We use it for doctrine and ethics. Baptists have always believed that each individual has the right and responsibility to read and understand the Bible to best of his or her ability. It’s my goal that this series will encourage you to read the Bible more often, and more intelligently.

How Real Men Go to the Bathroom

The Internet never ceases to amaze me. Neither do fundamentalist Christians. The following might be the single worst example of biblical scholarship ever committed to video.  It’s also the funniest thing you’ve ever seen in church.

HT: Ben Witherington

Things No One Ever Told You About Women in the Bible

Check out Mona Loewen’s guest-post at Wade Burelson’s blog, Grace and Truth to You. Mona surveys the role of key women in the biblical texts.