So even though these posts are somewhat getting picked apart (in a polite way), I’m going to continue. The focus of this blog since early summer has been my journey away from faith and back to it again, so I want to stay true to what this blog is all about.
Yesterday’s post began to tackle the reliability of the Bible, and despite numerous complaints from commenters, I’m sold. This book, Letters from a Skeptic, is showing me how to view Christianity and the Bible from a lens other than fundamentalism, and that’s something I’ve desperately been searching for. It’s really helping me to rebuild a foundation with solid footing.
So today I want to look at the reliability of the Bible a little more and discuss how it should relate to faith.
You raised questions about the construction and consistency of the Gospels, and whether or not we can even know for sure what Jesus said. It is true that most scholars believe that the Gospels utilized sources, oral and written, when they composed their accounts. I completely accept this. The evidence for it is irrefutable. But I don’t see anything radical or “liberal” about this. Luke, after all, tells us himself that he is utilizing the sources available to him (Luke 1:1-4). Neither do I see how this diminishes the authors’ credibility in the least. In fact, in my view it enhances their credibility in the least. In fact, in my view it enhances their credibility in that it ties them in with pre-existant material which brings us even closer to the original events they are talking about. Whenever they actually composed their Gospels (probably between A.D. 50 to 70), the evidence clearly demonstrates that they to some extent utilized material which was circulating for some time before this date. And the closer the material of a document is to the events of which it speaks, the more solid is its claim to report those events accurately.
So the fact that the writers of the Gospel used other sources shouldn’t detract from it’s reliability. The history books that are used in schools right now aren’t written from a first person perspective (though the Gospels were) – and they use many sources to relay evidence.
It is also true that the order of events in all the Gospels varies a great deal, but I again don’t see this as diminishing their credibility. Dad, the Gospels are not trying, on every point, to just give us biographical information on the life of Jesus. They were not written to satisfy historical curiosity. They were written to save people by bringing them into a relationsihp with the Savior. They are each painting a portrait of the historical Christ – an “impressionistic painting” if you will – and they rearrange material to fit the theme of their portrait. Like a well-constructed sermon, they tell their story with an eye both on the history of what happened and on how their telling of the story will impact their audience.
None of this, I argue, diminishes the Gospels’ general reliability. All the historical works of this time period were written in just the same fashion. It only means we can’t know for sure the exact order in which the events of Jesus’ life took place (though a general order is certainly discernable). But what difference could this information make?
Greg also addresses the notion that the Gospels are full of contradictions:
Almost all of the alleged “contradictions” in the Gospels are the result of people misusing the Gospels, viz., treating them like 20th-century works which work under a “snapshot-tape recording” criteria of truth. But if they are read in accordance with their first-century context and the purpose for which they are written, the “contradictions” disappear. Not because they are explained away, but because they instandly become totally irrelevant.
So what does that mean for faith? Particularly mine? Well, I even found an answer for that in this book.
Most evangelicals treat the Bible as though it fell from heaven, but I think this is a mistaken conception and has nothing to do with inspiration. Though I believe the Bible is inspired, and even infallible, it also clearly is a collection of books written by humans in the same fashion other books are written. When I say that the Bible is “inspired,” I’m expressing my conviction that God worked through – not above – the historical process which brought the Bible into being. I thus don’t see any incompatibility in believing the Bible is God’s Word and also analyzing it in the same historical fashion I’d analyze any other work of history.
Beliving the Bible to be inspired is, in my mind, not as central to what Christianity is about as is believing that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and can be the Lord and Savior of your life. Salvation is a matter of being related to Christ, not the Bible. In fact, believing the Bible to be inspired is, for me, simply a consequence (not the basis) of confessing Christ to be the Lord of my life.
Before, my faith was all wrapped up in the Bible itself. I love the way he looks to the person of Jesus and then sees the Bible as inspired. It seems, backwards, that’s for sure, but since what I was doing before wasn’t working for me, maybe I need to try a little backwards.
“Believing the Bible to be inspired is, in my mind, not as central to what Christianity is about as is believing that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and can be the Lord and Savior of your life. Salvation is a matter of being related to Christ, not the Bible. In fact, believing the Bible to be inspired is, for me, simply a consequence (not the basis) of confessing Christ to be the Lord of my life.”
Yes! I love the written Word of God for pointing me to the living Word. We DO get it backwards when we become Bible-book-theists. The more I internalize the words for the life they give, for the change they make in my own heart and behavior towards others (not to be used as scriptural truth bullets), the more I want to know Him, the One, my rescuer, my Savior.
“The Word of God became flesh and blood and moved in to the neighborhood…” The Gospel of John.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, this must be some strange new definition of “reliability” that I wasn’t previously aware of. He’s already concluded that the Gospel writers were not first-hand witnesses, that they were relying on second- or third-hand sources of completely unknown veracity, and that the documents they wrote contain many errors of various magnitudes. That’s not “reliable” by any definition I’ve come across.
In what other sense can a given piece of scripture be considered “reliable”? In what other sense can a religious text have “overall credibility”? This is not a rhetorical question – I’m genuinely interested in figuring out what the heck he’s saying.
This kinda raises the question: why Christ? Why not (for example) Krishna? Why not Buddha? Why not Mohammed? Why not Quetzalcoatl? If his belief in the Bible is only the consequence of his faith, how did that faith get its specificity?
Hope that works out for you. Let us know if the constant stream of nitpicking gets too irritating
I think you’ll also enjoy “The Case for the Real Jesus” by Lee Strobel. He has a chapter that says pretty much the same things. Good stuff.
Lifewish – the nitpicking doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I can remember a time a year ago (do you recall my pro-Hovind posts? ugh) when it would have, but no longer!
I think I came along post-Hovind, which is probably a good thing. I know that whole debate unhealthily well as it is.
Out of curiosity: what was it that led you to figure out that Hovind was talking out of his donkey?
Since we’re apparently recommending books, can I second TechSkeptic’s comment on the other thread by recommending Lost Christianities by Bart Ehrman? Very interesting book – well-written and (apart from one carefully-delineated sidenote) in line with the current academic consensus.
(As always: academic consensus doesn’t mean that something’s right, but it does mean that it’s not obviously wrong.)
There’s a couple of Strobel’s books in the library I’m writing from – I’ll have to flip through them and report back.
Lifewish -
There were several things about Hovind. I discovered that many of the examples he used were hoaxes (like the human footprints in the dinosaur footprints, or the Inca stones). And then I started paying attention to how we was presenting his information, and I realized that he was no better (or that he was worse, even) than his atheist counterparts because he was calling everybody who didn’t agree with him an idiot and calling them stupid. If his information were valid and true, then he wouldn’t need to resort to such measures.
Lee Strobel…ugh.
Is his case in the books as good as this one?
Not sure, got distracted looking for a transcript of Dawkins’ “Root of all evil?” series*. Will check tomorrow.
* After much googling, I still can’t find one of these. But I had a mystical experience that I can’t quite describe, which leads me to believe that such a transcript must exist**.
** In case you hadn’t guessed, that’s a rough parody of a rather nice pair of middle-aged evangelists I was chatting to this lunchtime.
I was not able to find the “root of all evil” series. The only thing I had recently found was the “enemy of reason” series, which was pretty good.
There never seems to be much interest among Christians that the events reported in the bible have simply been misinterpreted by simple and impressionable people. Even the gospels portray the apostles as stupid, so why should we imagine their view of the events was right? Dr M D Magee explains this, and much more, fully at our website, Askwhy Publications, which at core shows that Judaism and Christianity are explainable perfectly rationally without any need of supernaturalism. Christians have to believe that this is not so, yet it is by far the most likely. Do they ever think of such things?
Excuse me while I beat AskWhy Books around the head with a cluestick for blatantly failing to read the thread he/she/it posted to.
More generally, the AskWhy site is tripping a few of my crank detection circuits – please don’t anyone take it as reflective of atheism until the atheists who post here have had a chance to vet it.
This crap reminds me of a ton of other ridiculous sites like:
http://www.notmilk.com/
http://www.fixedearth.com/
http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/
I dont think lunacy is a religious endeavor. Its a human one. Check out this “atheist” blog
http://icon-rids.blogspot.com/
by this guy
http://www.geocities.com/fiddleboy2003/Bitscience.htm
too funny
Anyway, besides trying to sell crap. I’m not sure what motivates these guys.