Bible – Page 2

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 4: Naked Emperors

August 17, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I’ve argued (Part 3) that the Bible is a coherent work of literature. But that’s obviously not true if it contradicts itself. You can find all kinds of collections of supposed biblical contradictions; there’s one site that lists 101 of them, and the Skeptics Annotated Bible identifies 496.

I’ve studied this topic for many years, and the more of these charges I read, the less I think of them. In fact, the great majority—I’m talking 98 or 99%–are just silly. I don’t have the space to prove that here, but I’d like to engage in a little exercise that will get us started in that direction.

For many years, if you Googled^TM “contradictions in the Bible,” you’d get first a link to a list of 69 errors compiled by Jim Meritt. (The site owners have since taken it down, for reasons that will become obvious in a minute.) If you don’t know all the details of how something gets to be the first hit in Google, in brief it’s an indication that the internet community has decided, by linking to it, that it’s the most valuable resource available on the topic.

Since Meritt’s list was #1 for years, I went to the trouble of evaluating it in depth and compiled this summary. His work is now gone and replaced with this list of 332 alleged contradictions, largely harvested from the Skeptics Annotated Bible, but the principles we’ll note today still very much apply.

When skeptics allege a contradiction in the Bible, they’re pretty much always making at least one of eight very basic scholarly errors. Let me identify them and give an example of each.

1. Depending on an English Translation

No orthodox Christians teach that any translation of the Bible is inspired; inspiration, and thus inerrancy, apply only to the original writings. So when Luke says that the men with Paul heard the voice of Jesus from heaven (Acts 9.7), and Paul later tells the mob in Jerusalem that they didn’t (Acts 22.9), some English translations fail to make obvious a very clear distinction in the Greek—that the men heard the sound of the voice but could not understand the message. Now, a skeptic can be forgiven for being misled by a translation, but he should not get away with making scholarly judgments when he doesn’t even have the basic tools (knowledge of the biblical languages) to speak to the question.

2. Transcription Errors

The manuscripts from which modern Bibles are translated were copies made by hand from older copies. They contain copying errors; no one denies this, and there’s an entire discipline (textual criticism) that devotes itself to dealing with them. (And by the way, that’s not a problem for us—but that’s a subject for another post.) So when 1Kings 4.26 says that Solomon had 40,000 horse stalls, and 2Chr 9.25 says he had 4,000, that’s not an error in the original; it’s clearly a copying error.

3. Not Paying Attention

Any work of literature contains details, and readers are supposed to notice them. Gen 7.9 says that all the animals went into the ark in pairs. Back in Gen 7.2, we find that God told Noah to take 7 of each kind of clean animal—obviously, so he’d have extras for eating and sacrificing. Verse 9 doesn’t contradict that; there were 2 of all animals, and 7 of just the clean ones.

4. Not Paying Attention to Context

In 1Co 2.15, Paul says that the spiritual person judges all things; in context he’s talking about discerning what the Spirit teaches to those whom he indwells. In 1Co 4.5 he tells the Corinthians not to judge—that is, not to make decisions “before the time,” or without having complete information. The context of each statement makes it clear that they do not contradict.

5. Cultural Ignorance

The Bible is the literary product of another time and place. When we interpret it, we need to understand how the people of that time and place would have spoken or written. For example, Paul speaks of “The Twelve” apostles (1Co 15.5) after Judas’s suicide, when there would have been only 11. But it’s clear in the NT that the body of the apostles was routinely called “The Twelve”; and Peter’s statement in Acts 1.20-22 that the missing Judas must be replaced helps verify that.

6. Childish Literalism

Literature uses metaphor routinely. But skeptics often read such metaphors like Amelia Bedelia—perhaps because they think that’s how we read them. (It isn’t.) So God tells the serpent that he will eat dust (Gen 3.14), and the critic says that’s a scientific error. Um, no. When a drag racer looks in his rear-view mirror and shouts, “Eat my dust!” he’s not making nutritional recommendations.

7. Eyewitness Perspective

When two eyewitnesses report an event, they notice and thus report different things. (Investigators will tell you that if two suspects report exactly the same details about an accusation, they’ve probably concocted the story.) So when Matthew, Luke, and John report that the rooster crowed after Peter’s denial, and Mark reports that he crowed twice, that’s not a contradiction. In fact, since Mark is reporting Peter’s perspective, and Peter was the only disciple there, it’s likely that the other 3 are just summarizing what Peter had told them.

8. Roundness of Character

Good literature celebrates the fact that people are complicated. Is God a God of war (Ex 15.3) or a God of peace (Rom 15.33)? Well, it kinda depends on where you stand with him. That’s not a contradiction; it’s a round character, and we learned about those back in ninth-grade English, when somebody apparently wasn’t paying attention.

An objective analysis of these passages makes it clear that not only are they not contradictions, they’re not even reasonably problematic. And usually the people making the charges don’t know enough about the subject even to be addressing it.

That said, there are some difficult passages in the Bible; there are statements that we don’t have enough information to evaluate with certainty. What about those?

In the past, some of the thorniest questions—writing in the time of Moses, and the existence of the Hittites, for example—were answered as further information came to light from archaeology and other sources. Undoubtedly more questions will be answered as the Lord tarries.

But what if they aren’t?

Let me suggest that it’s not naïve or unscholarly to trust your friends. I trust my wife because I know her; we have a basis for trust. I trust God and his Word for the same reason. That’s not blind faith; it’s how healthy relationships work.

So for the things in God’s Word that we don’t understand, we wait, and we trust.

And for the things we do, we obey, and we worship.

Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 3: Too Many Cooks

August 14, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Part 1 Part 2

And so we come to the evidence: objective evidence that the Bible is, um, unnatural, extraordinary, not like any other books. I’d suggest two lines of such evidence; we’ll look at the first one today, and a related topic later in the week. Next week, we’ll get to Door Number 2.

Door Number 1. Writing a book is hard. Just getting the facts right is hard enough (more about that next time); but doing it artfully, in a way that pleases the attentive reader, is really, really hard. Literary critics delight themselves in finding such artful devices in serious literature—for example, in noting how Willa Cather uses the imagery of wilting flowers to foreshadow the crumbling of the protagonist in the short story “Paul’s Case,” or how Dickens contrasts polar extremes in A Tale of Two Cities, or how an episode of Seinfeld weaves together a seemingly impossible number of storylines so they all come to resolution at the last moment: in one episode George, pretending to be a marine biologist to impress his girlfriend, pulls Kramer’s golf ball from the blowhole of a beached whale. (OK, that last one was ridiculous, and involves stretching the definition of literature almost to the breaking point. But give me some slack; I’m making a point here.)

The Bible does that: it tells a story—or rather, narrates and evaluates a history—in an artful way, bringing it to a resolution that leaves us amazed and deeply satisfied. (How is that evidence of the supernatural? If Dickens can do it, why do we have to bring God into the picture? Fair question. I’ll get to that in a minute.)

The Torah

The Bible consists of two parts: the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament began its life as the Hebrew Scriptures. The Jews call it the “Tanakh,” which is not really a Hebrew word; it’s an acronym, like NASA or YOLO. The “T” stands for Torah, or “teaching,” which is the first 5 books of the OT. In the Torah we read about the origin of the earth, then that of the nation of Israel, then of the covenant that God made with Israel at Sinai, including its stipulations. There’s a lot of talk (especially in Leviticus) of the priesthood, its clothing, its sacrifices, its calendar. Details.

The priests had to do everything a certain way. The amount of detail is overwhelming. Each sacrifice had its own purpose, timing, and procedure. And to the reader’s surprise—it doesn’t work. Oh, God forgives the sins of the sacrificer, and of the nation, but the sacrifices don’t really work. Every morning there’s a sacrifice, and by mid-afternoon the priests have to do it again. The next morning, the cycle starts anew. Every year there’s a Passover, and the next year they have to do another one. The sacrifices don’t last, and that means they don’t really work.

We finish the Torah with a nagging sense of disappointment. We want a priest who can make a sacrifice that works—one sacrifice that gets the job done. We want a priest who knows how to priest.

The Prophets

The “N” in Tanakh stands for nebi’im, or “prophets.” In the prophets we meet men who bring messages from God. But frankly, they’re disappointing too. Many of the messages are obscure. Nathan the prophet tells David that God will build him a house through his son, whom he names as Solomon (2Sam 7). But then he says the son will reign forever. How’s that going to work? And some of the messages are downright bizarre—what’s with Ezekiel’s vision of the wheel in wheel in a wheel (Ezk 1)?

Why are the prophecies so—hard?! Why can’t a prophet tell us—better yet, show us—clearly what God is like, what he wants, how we can know him? We want a prophet who knows how to prophet.

The Writings

The “Kh” in Tanakh stands for khethubim, or “writings.” In the writings we meet the kings—their story in Chronicles, their writing in Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. We want them to succeed. Saul the Tall is (not surprisingly ????) a failure, and God himself selects David, a man after his own heart, and we think he’ll succeed. But he fails suddenly and spectacularly, and his family disintegrates. His son Solomon begins well; God gives him practically infinite wisdom. But by the end he’s worshiping idols. Solomon’s son splits the kingdom, and after that the kings in David’s line are successful only rarely and incompletely.

We finish the Writings, and the Tanakh, disappointed in the kings, wishing for a king who knows how to king. It’s all disappointing, all unfulfilled potential, all promise and no really satisfying fulfillment.

And then we turn the page.

The New Testament

We meet “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the Son of Abraham” (Mat 1.1)—perfect prophet, priest, king, who reveals God to us perfectly (Jn 1.1-18), who offers—himself!—as the perfect and final offering (Heb 10.1-13), who reigns now and forever in perfect righteousness and justice (Lk 1.33; Rev 11:15). The Gospels tell us what he said and did; Acts tells us about his successors; the epistles tell us what it all means; and Revelation tells us how it all ends.

A perfect story. Plot, character, storyline. Rising action, climax, denouement. Coherence, bookended by a perfect world destroyed (Gen 1-11) and a better world restored (Rev 21-22).

So how does that evidence a divine source? If Homer and Shakespeare and Dickens and Faulkner could do it, why couldn’t an ancient writer?

Here’s the thing. There was no “ancient writer.” There were about 40 of them, living across about 1500 years. (Yes, critical scholars would say more like 1000 years, but even if they’re right—and they’re not—the point still stands.) None of the writers ever met most of the other writers.

So how did they do it? How did they write a coherent, cohesive, artful narrative? It wasn’t some talented editor who came along at the end and pieced it all together from earlier sources; the OT was in place and ordered before any of the NT was written. The OT writers couldn’t possibly have known the end, and the NT writers couldn’t possibly have influenced or edited the OT writers.

Only an editor could do that. An editor who oversaw the entire process, beginning to end.

An Editor.

PS To be fair, if a book contradicts itself, it’s not really coherent. There are lots of accusations of contradiction in the Bible. In the next post, we’ll talk about that.

Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 2: The Bible’s Claims for Itself

August 10, 2017 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

In my previous post, I noted that anyone who claims that the Bible is God’s Word should be expected to support that extraordinary claim with hard evidence—for the sake of his reputation, certainly, but more importantly for his own integrity; no one should order his life around a falsehood.

In this post I’d like to begin by defining exactly what the statement “The Bible is God’s Word” claims. No sense in proving something that nobody’s advocating. If we’re going to evaluate the claim, we need to know accurately and precisely what it is.

So does the Bible make any claims about its own nature? If so, what are those claims?

Most conservative Christians have come across the Big Two verses that speak to this question. The first of them is 2 Timothy 3.16, where Paul tells his disciple Timothy that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God” (KJV). The word inspiration translates the Greek word theopneustos, a compound word meaning “God-breathed.” So Paul says that God breathed, or uttered, the Scripture. I’m going to keep things pretty simple here, but if you’d like (a lot) more information on this concept, I’d recommend this article and this book.

The second Big Verse is actually 2 verses, 2 Peter 1.20-21, which I’ll quote here in full:

²⁰Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. ²¹For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

Three claims to note here:

The human authors were not making this stuff up or just sharing their own opinions.
The human authors were under divine compulsion; the word moved here is the same Greek word used to describe Paul’s Roman ship being driven across the Mediterranean by a powerful storm (Acts 27.15, 17).
The divine compeller was specifically the Holy Spirit.

So the central claim is that God the Holy Spirit breathed out the words of Scripture by compelling the human authors in some way so that they wrote things that originated with Him, not them.

It’s no surprise, then, that Jesus remarks, almost off-handedly, that “the Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10.35).

But the Bible indicates a few further details about its claim. For example, in places the authors are themselves aware that what they’re writing is not coming from their own minds. Most obviously, the Old Testament prophets repeatedly—415 times in the King James Version—preface their words with “Thus saith the LORD.” And Paul says, “This we say unto you by the word of the Lord” (1Th 4.15), while John famously ends the book of Revelation by insisting that not a word of it be modified, on pain of damnation (Rev 22.18-19).

Further, the authors recognize other passages of Scripture as God’s Word. The New Testament authors repeatedly and consistently cite the Old Testament as authoritative (e.g. 1Tim 5.18); but more impressively, Peter refers to Paul’s writings as Scripture (2Pt 3.16), even after receiving a public dressing-down from him (Gal 2.11ff), and Paul quotes the Gospel of Luke as Scripture in parallel with the writings of Moses himself in the Torah (1Tim 5.18). This is all the more significant because the ink on the Gospel of Luke was barely dry when Paul wrote these words, and Luke had been a close traveling companion of Paul. Why is that significant? Well, Paul knew if Luke snored, or had bad breath, or had BO. You’re not likely to think of your close friends as Direct Messengers of the Almighty.

Now, none of this proves that the Bible is God’s Word. Anybody can take a piece of papyrus or parchment and write “Thus saith the Lord,” and that doesn’t make it so. In fact, if anyone we know today did that, we’d think he was ready for psychological intervention.

But these statements do help us define exactly what the claim is, and thus they prepare us to evaluate it. Is there verifiable evidence that the Bible is what it says it is—an extraordinary, supernatural book? If there is, we cannot reject the Bible’s claim without dealing with that evidence. And if there isn’t, we ought to return to sanity.

Next time, we’ll begin reviewing the evidence.

Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Hard Evidence for a Supernatural Book, Part 1: On Being Reasoned About a Crazy Claim

August 7, 2017 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

As a conservative Christian, I talk a lot about what the Bible says. Sometimes I even try to settle arguments with it (graciously, of course ????).

There’s a reason for that: conservatives believe that the Bible is the Word of God—that the words in the original languages of the Old and New Testaments are the very words that God spoke through the human authors, through a process called inspiration. In fact, the very first line of the doctrinal statement for the college where I teach is “I believe in the inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments.”

Now, that’s an extraordinary claim—to many minds, extraordinary to the point of ridiculousness, and thus ridicule. It’s perfectly reasonable for someone who hears that claim to respond, “So, you got any evidence for that?” I mean, really. There are Scriptures all over the place. Within the broader Christian tradition, there are the writings of Ellen G. White, and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and the Book of Mormon, and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. In the broader religious world, there’s the Qu’ran, the writings of Baha’u’llah, the Sutras, the Vedas, the writings of Haile Selassie, Dianetics, the writings of Swedenborg, and the Divine Principle. And we’re just getting started.

So why should we elevate one, the Bible, over all the others? For that matter, why should we elevate any of them? Can’t we just appreciate them for what they obviously are, the musings of various cultures, ancient and modern, that give us insights into their thinking and even life principles from which we can benefit? Do we have to get all exclusive and mythological and … freakish about it?

That’s not only a legitimate question; it’s one that we must ask. If you think you’re hearing the voice of God, and you aren’t, you’re deeply deluded, perhaps even to the point of psychopathy. And you might even be a danger to society.

But not only should we ask the question; we should demand an answer. It’s not enough to just shrug and say, “Well, that’s just what I’ve always believed.” What laziness. What irresponsibility. What nonsense.

So let’s get serious. Is there evidence—objective, observable, testable, verifiable evidence—that the Bible is extraordinary, and not like other books? And specifically, evidence that calls for alleging a supernatural origin? That’s a tough standard, but it’s a reasonable and even necessary one.

I’m not one to submit to an ancient writing unless there are compelling evidences that I’d be a fool not to. I’d like to spend a few posts sharing how my thinking along these lines has proceeded. My plan is to lay out the next few posts as follows:

What the Bible says about itself—not that that’s proof of anything, but we need to start by determining accurately what is actually being claimed.
Evidence #1 that that claim is worth considering seriously.
An excursus on a matter that evidence #1 raises.
Evidence #2. There’s a lot to discuss here, so this one may take 2 or even 3 posts.

Since my choice of life authority has depended on this issue, I’ve tried to think it through as objectively as possible. I’m going to try to communicate that objectivity as I share these thoughts with you.

I invite you to join me for the investigation. See you in the next post.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8