Reading the Bible - looking beyond the words

 There are different ways of approaching how we read the Bible. This isn’t to say any way is better than another. I merely offer a view that you may want to consider. Or maybe it is a way you have been looking at the Bible for a while.  Some times it can help to know that there are different ways of relating to the Bible that are equally faithful, and still inform our relationship with God.

There are those who consider the Bible to be inerrant – this can refer to the original languages or for others the translated words too. This view believes that God has protected the exact words down the ages and the translations. However we don’t have any original texts, only a range of manuscripts that are multiple copies down the line, and with differences between them.  Translation is also tricky (see over)

There is also the approach that the Bible is Inspired by God – this gives a very wide approach, from the writers being guided directly by God, to it being their own choices to write and record things and God uses what they wrote to speak to us.

Then there is the matter of what we do with the stories we find in the Bible. How do we deal with 2 different stories of the Creation – the first poetic where everything created was good, and the second a narrative to explain why there is badness in the world, the animals in Gen 1 are created before people, and in Gen 2 there are created after Adam who is asked to name them.   Likewise there are multiple points in the Old Testament where stories are repeated, or 2 versions run together like the flood.  Scholars think that what we have today is an amalgam of different writers (eg each creation story uses a different term for God).

As well as who wrote what, there is also when. It is generally agreed that the version of Genesis we have was mostly compiled when the Jews were in exile in Babylon, many years after all the kings such as David.  It is when people are away from their roots that the need to affirm their distinctiveness as a people seems more important. This opens up a way for the early events in Genesis  - creation to flood – to be influenced by even older stories from Mesopotamia, which predated the Babylonians in that land.  Does the fact that the Epic of Gilgamesh has a flood story with a man on a boat with animals mean that Genesis has nothing to say to us? I believe in the evidence for evolution and that the world is older than 6000yrs, and recognise that cultures with written records (writing began with balancing accounts and taxes – predictable?) have noted time before and after the flood with no record of a disaster. That and the geological evidence.

Do these stories have to be historically true for the Bible to carry meaning for us? I don’t think so, and actually I think that the message behind why these stories were told, what the writers wanted to say about God still has a message for us, and changed to a different message than the version of a flood story told in Babylon.

At some point after King Solomon’s descendants the list of kings are picked up by records found in other nations around them. Before that we have no archaeological evidence for eg mass slavery in Egypt; nor the great city massacres during the book of Joshua as the Israelites conquer Canaan.  For me that insight has been really helpful since those wars against the existing residents of the land are some of the most troubling parts of the Bible for me.

We read stories of cities being attacked and all the people being slaughtered, including children and even all animals, and this is cited as some kind of offering to God.  Reading this as written leaves us asking why God is asking for that total violence. Reading it as people writing about something that happened and they thought it was what God was asking for so they wrote in that he told them to do it. But if this was part of a national origin myth, then that is a very different point from which to ponder the points being made by the authors.

In the New Testament too there are questions. The gospels were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – those names were added later. Whilst only some of Paul’s letters are considered genuine. The letters to Timothy being among those written in his name but the style of Greek is different and they talk about a church that has developed further and is more structured with ministers and overseers/bishops. Hence the commands about how church should be governed.

There are many more aspects to this, for some what I am writing is abhorrent, a denial of God’s word. For the strictly inerrant believers I am already invalid as a woman preaching and a church minister. Others may say that if I accept this range of scholarly questioning of the Bible, then do I even see it as God’s word at all.

For me these insights actually invite me to seek deeper meanings, why is the writer saying this? What is hidden under the story or poetry? How does the timing of the writing affect the meaning to the immediate culture? (The book of Ruth is dated before King David but thought to be written around the return from exile – at the time were there were issues about separating from foreign wives for national purity a writer tells a story of a foreign woman marrying into the line of David himself).

This may not be your approach, but there are many ways of hearing God’s voice through the Bible, and being a faithful disciple is possible across many ways of seeking inspiration through the Bible.

However you read it, may you find deeper knowledge of God 

Letter to my biology teacher

Dear Mrs Evans,

You inspired my interest in the wonders of life. I had long since exhausted my parents with my ‘why?’ questions, and here in science class there were answers and insights.  I cherished getting the New Scientist magazine at a special rate. Reading that and watching TV on a Thursday night – for ‘Tomorrow’s World’ rather than many classmates wanting the update of ‘Top of the Pops’ fed my curious mind.  Chemistry was cool , whilst physics never starched the itch, biology however fascinated me. I would read ahead in the textbooks. Had I been a student in the internet age I would have been devouring science content, as I do now.

However, I was ‘that child’, the one who came to you proclaiming that I wanted to opt out of the evolution classes because of my faith. I even gave you a book that suggested the fossil record merely reflected the drowning sequence of creatures during the flood of Noah’s day.   Looking back I am not sure where my anti evolutionist stance came from – it was not part of the general message of my Methodist Church I had attended since infancy. Perhaps it was the books I was reading, and my young in faith enthusiasm.  It reflected my limited understanding of faith and of science. You responded with grace and I sat in the prep room during those classes. In reality I was reading up on evolution anyway should it come up in any exams!  I guess it was my way of ‘making a stance’ from my faith.

You continued as my biology teacher for years beyond that, through GCSEs and A level, and saw me depart for a degree course in Biochemistry with Microbiology.  And such is the nature of teaching, that you work with us closely and then set us loose into the wider world, without hearing back from where we end up.

I am not sure where or when I embraced the scientific evidence of evolution, or at least when I stopped fighting it.   I suspect it was when I was still in your classes, but I just didn’t recognise it at the time, like someone wandering in the borderlands. At Uni I embraced the wonder of life without trying to define how it came to be.

You may not be surprised that I ended up as a church minister, I hope you will be affirmed that I do so as someone who affirms the beautiful insights of scientific discovery.   That discovery was something that was rooted in what you taught.