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.
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