Is the Bible the “Word of God”

Is the Bible the “Word of God”?

Think about it: we don’t find out about most things by logic or deduction. We find out about them because we experience them. If there is a God of the traditional kind out there, we would not necessarily expect to know about it unless it announced itself in some way. And, conveniently, we have various religious scriptures that claim that this is exactly what happened.

It would be tedious to examine all alleged divine revelations, but let’s spend a little time looking at the most important of them: the Bible. If the Bible is actually the Truth as revealed by God, then the arguments pro and con that we have been contemplating mean little. We should still listen and obey. So…should we?

Perhaps unfortunately, not many people read the Bible these days. Parts of the Bible are truly remarkable: well written, astonishing, inspiring. Never mind that it is the foundation of much of our art and literature, and even of some of our legal and political system. It’s worth reading in and of itself.

If you do read it, and do so attentively, you might observe several interesting points about the Bible.

First, the Bible is not one book by one author. Nor is it two (the original Hebrew scriptures, often called the Old Testament, and the early Christian scriptures, called the New Testament). Instead, it is a collection of dozens of writings that are widely different. Some are ancient tales, some are dry history, some are books of poetry or philosophy, some are books of rules, some are narratives of what were then current or recent events, some are letters of exhortation or encouragement or instruction, some are prophecy. Some would have to be included among the finest literature of ancient times, others are stupefyingly turgid. Some repeat the same stories as others, some repeat different versions of the same story within the same book – with inconsistent details. The books were clearly written by different hands – with some individual books evidently by multiple hands – in widely different eras.

Second, the Bible is not self-defined. The books that are now included are not the ones that were always included (and different branches of Christianity even today disagree on some of the books). Nor does the Bible itself claim to have been authored by God. The contents and the nature of the Bible have been determined by what are now mostly anonymous priests of the distant past, whose thought processes and motivations one can only intuit.[1]

Third, the Bible has a running theme, though one that is not a constant element. The theme is that some limited group of humans form the chosen people of God. But the chosen people repeatedly backslide into idolatry and other forms of faithlessness, and again and again, God has to punish them, send them a prophet to set them straight, and then resume the covenant. The second-to-last stage, in the Christian scriptures, is the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth. He is killed by those who reject him, but he comes back from the dead temporarily and returns to heaven – also temporarily. The final act is what is only prophesied in the Bible: the final coming of Jesus and the end of the world as know it, when those who are finally chosen will be saved and sent to an eternal reward, while those who are rejected will be hustled off for punishment. This sequence of events is sometimes called “salvation history.”

So much for generalities. What should we think of this book? There seem to be four main attitudes toward it:

(a) The Bible is authored by God and is true literally and in every detail (the Fundamentalist stance).

(b) God inspired the writing of the Bible and it reflects his point of view, adapted to the culture to which its various parts were addressed. From the standpoint of our own culture, we can see that many details are not to be taken literally, but the overall theme of salvation history and the moral messages that the Bible embraces do reflect the acts and the will of God.

(c) The Bible was not literally inspired, but much of the historical portions are true, or mostly true, and most of the moral guidelines are valid. The prophets (including Jesus, if you are a Christian) and the scriptures themselves remain our best conduit to the God represented in the Bible who is, after all, the one true God.

(d) The Bible is a collection of ancient writings whose status is no more and no less than that of other ancient writings. Like non-Biblical texts, the Bible contains some fact and some legend. It presents the laws, the morals, the beliefs, and the actions of the people of its time, or at least a portion of those people, but it is best understood as an artifact of history, with no special status as a guide for our own beliefs or morals.

Obviously, other views are also possible, but let’s limit our own discussion to these four. Which makes the most sense?

Clearly the first is untenable. It was never really tenable, since the Bible itself contains many internal contradictions. But unless substantial portions of modern scholarship in history and science are simply rejected, it is hopeless to maintain the fundamentalist position.

Positions (b) and (c) are certainly possible, but there are two main problems with them. First, there is no actual reason to believe them. Second, the Bible itself makes them rather difficult to accept.

Ever notice that it is rare for anyone to provide a reason – any reason at all – to believe that the Bible has some special status, that it is somehow more true than other books of its kind? People of faith often give reasons why it makes sense to believe in God, even if those reasons are faulty. Christians also offer reasons to believe that Jesus was not just another prophet, or that he was actually God. But when it comes to the Bible, somehow blind, unquestioning faith seems good enough.

The main excuse for this silence must be that there is, in fact, no reason to believe it. The claim is incredible on its face, as incredible as that Allah dictated the Koran to Mohammed, or that God gave the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith, or that some supernatural power inspired the sonnets of Shakespeare (a claim that is never made, though it would be at least as plausible as the others).

The actual reason that people believe in the Bible is that other people have believed in it for a long, long time. But as we saw earlier, when thinking about the “inertia of faith,” this is not a good enough reason to accept a belief. Can’t we come up with some better evidence concerning the validity of the Bible?

Naturally, it’s a hard thing to prove, one way or the other. In theory, one could conceive of convincing reasons that the Bible was the Word of God. The Bible itself gives us a clue about one such possibility. In the Second Book of Kings, the story is told that the Ark of the Covenant – essentially a small portable house for the tablets of the Ten Commandments – was being transported and began to tip; a man named Oza saw this, reached out his hand (out of piety) to stabilize it, and was immediately struck dead by God, because God had commanded that the Ark not be touched. So the Bible tells us that God can protect human-made artifacts if he deems them worthy. Presumably, then, God could do something similar for the Bible itself. Suppose that every time a Bible were printed, using the same process as with any other book, that copy of the Bible became, unlike other books, impervious to damage. It could not be burned or torn or mildewed or eaten away by acid. That would be pretty hard to explain other than as a divine endorsement of the text.

I suppose God doesn’t owe us anything like that, but the point is, there could, in principle, be proof that the Bible had a special status. Suppose that anyone who swore an oath on the Bible would be incapable, like Jim Carrey’s character (in the 1997 movie Liar, Liar), of not speaking the truth. Suppose that a practice followed by some believers, wherein they open the book and point randomly to a passage, did indeed generate the hoped-for supernatural guidance – by which we mean guidance that was consistently, infallibly correct. It would be easy enough to test such a phenomenon, if it happened.

But in reality, we see none of that. There is no external reason whatever to believe that the Bible is the Word of God.

There could be internal reasons for belief in the Bible, though. The book could be so superior in content to every other book that we would have to believe that it was inspired by a higher power, or at least believe that regardless of where it came from it would deserve to be accepted.

It’s hard, however, to see how anyone could actually read the Bible from cover to cover and come to that conclusion.[2]

Again, this is not to deny its many excellences. Like many human books, it has its fine moments: well-told stories, thought-provoking insights, expressive and elegant writing, morally uplifting messages, pathos, glory. Despite its errors, many of its historical observations, including some that were once thought to be baloney, have proved to be true, or at least partly true. These are all good reasons for reading the Bible, or parts of it. But they do not set the Bible apart from other books, nor even apart from other ancient books.

At the same time, there is a good deal that is horrible about the Bible – and I mean that literally. It is not just badly written in parts, factually incorrect in places, frequently tedious, and simply hard to get through. It is at times truly horrifying, and morally despicable. In the older historical books of the Bible, anyone who lived in Palestine but wasn’t a Hebrew had, apparently, no moral right to live. The only thing better than winning a battle against the Canaanites was the outright massacre of everyone who lived in a Canaanite village or town, including women and children. It wasn’t just the outsiders who were in trouble, though. Even within the Hebrew family, relatively trivial offenses were punishable by death – not because the Hebrews necessarily thought that this was a good idea (one imagines that there must have been at least a few dissenters), but because the scripture demanded it. It was the Law of God, as laid down in Exodus or Deuteronomy.

Frankly, God comes across rather badly in the Bible. He does have his good moments, but he is moody and frequently cruel. When he makes up his mind, he is easily talked out of it, or negotiated to a lesser resolution. He is deeply insecure, jealous of non-existent gods, impatient, quick to anger. He has no sense of restraint: the Pharaoh won’t let his people go, so the first-born male of every Egyptian family must die, even though the mere news of most of those deaths cannot possibly reach the Pharaoh by the time he sends the Hebrews away. (In an echo of this, Herod later slaughters a much smaller number of innocent babies in a futile attempt to kill Jesus, but somehow it’s a bad thing when someone else does it.)

This sort of moral childishness is perfectly understandable, of course, if the Bible is just a collection of writings from ancient Palestine, reflecting the aspirations – spiritual and political – of those people and those times, including their own blind spots and prejudices. But if it is supposed to represent the high standard of morality that one expects to find in a God, it falls way short.

Christians, of course, like to say that all that bad stuff is from the Old Testament, but the New Testament is much more idealistic and civilized. And that’s true, at least if you disregard all the New Testament talk about people – apparently a vast horde of us – ending up in everlasting fire (the whole Hell theme is not really a big feature of Judaism). But having mentioned that, there truly is an impressive emphasis in the New Testament on love, and on taking care of the disadvantaged. It is a big step forward – though hardly the last word in uplifting human morality.

Unfortunately, there is another problem with the Old Testament that is, if anything, made worse in the New Testament. Both are full of prophecies, and both are wrong. The Old Testament predicted a Messiah (literally, an “anointed one”) who would bring peace and glory to the Hebrew people. This never happened – in 3,000 years, it hasn’t happened, even during the Holocaust when a Messiah might have been just the ticket.

In the Christian faith, Jesus is the Messiah. His story is told in the Gospels with a lot of otherwise irrelevant details that connect him to the Old Testament prophecies, so there is no question that the Gospel writers believed it, or at least that they wanted their audience to believe it. But the Jews of the time mostly did not buy into this concept, because they knew that the Messiah was going to come in power and glory, which Jesus definitely did not. The Christian response was, and 2,000 years later still is – well, yeah, but he’s coming back, and next time he’ll come in power and glory. It you come to this argument as a disinterested third party, it’s hard not to side with the Jews on this one: the “Jesus Is Messiah” claim is pretty much unsubstantiated. But the Jews don’t win either, because they still don’t have their own Messiah.

You would think that the Bible, of all books, would have its most central prophecy come true. Instead, after thousands of years, the prophecy has failed. And if we were going to have to wait this long, or longer, you’d think that maybe the Bible would have mentioned that. But somehow, when it comes to religious prophecies, there’s always a catch. They rarely if ever come true (except when they are told in retrospect, when amazingly they always seem to come true). There’s forever an escape hatch, though – some implausible reason why the prophecy is not false but merely delayed, or it came true in a way other than what seemed to be the clear language of the original. These loopholes may help the true believers who simply can’t accept that their cherished beliefs are groundless (not necessarily false, mind you – merely groundless). It’s not evident why any of the rest of us should take their claims seriously, though.

If one is simply trying to be objective, therefore, the most reasonable conclusion is that the Bible is nothing other than a pretty interesting collection of old writings with no unusual claim to the truth. There is definitely truth in it, but not necessarily more or different kinds of truth than other books possess, and there is also falsity in it: inaccurate history, depraved morality, false prophecy. It is almost certainly just the Word of Various Men, not the Word of God.

Is it OK to believe that the Bible is the Word of God, nonetheless?

Previously, we came to the conclusion[3] that it was OK to believe in some kind of divinity or spiritual being (and sure, call it “God” if you want to). So isn’t it equally OK to believe that the Bible is the Word of God, even though it can’t be proved?

Actually, no, it isn’t OK. It isn’t much better than saying that The Guinness Book of World Records is the Word of God, and it is not at all better than saying that the Koran or the Bhagavad-Gita is the Word of God. The divine origin of the Bible is a completely groundless belief that leads to a lot of mischief.

You certainly may respect the Bible and its teachings. If you have any moral sense at all, you can derive a lot of inspiration from the Bible (as you can from any scripture, most books about moral thought, and much philosophy, poetry, biography, and fiction). Reading the Bible is a good thing, and extracting what is best from it, while ignoring what is small-minded and wicked, can only do you good.

But if you fall into the trap of thinking that the Bible is more than it is, that it is itself somehow sacred, rather than just being a book about the sacred (among other things), then you are almost certain to come to conclusions that are false and harmful.

Don’t go there!

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[1] Most likely, those ancient souls did not believe, or expect anyone else to believe, that these writings were in some way authored by God. If they did want to suggest this, they probably would have left out the parts that contradict one another. Instead, the Bible appears to have been assembled simply as a collection of key writings documenting Hebrew culture – much as we might collect the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the legend of Paul Bunyan, some Bob Dylan tunes, and various other writings into a compendium of U.S. culture, without expecting everything to be consistent, or implying that any of it is supernatural in origin.

[2] Re-reading it doesn’t help, either. I read it three times from start to finish, waiting for it to get better; it reads about the same each time. Still, it’s a perennial best-seller, which one hopes is a precedent for other books about God.

[3] At least I did. I hope you haven’t gone out already and started your own religion.