You may have noticed over the last several weeks that we’ve been hearing a lot of parables from Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. The last Sunday in July featured five short parables with no explanation. In all, there are something like 30-60 different parables (with Luke’s Gospel seemingly having the most and John’s Gospel having none). You may also notice that parables are a different and odd way to speak/write/teach but we know they were fairly common practice among Jewish teachers (rabbis) of Jesus’ day.
Thinking about all the parables we’ve been hearing and that exist in the Gospels makes me think about reading the Bible more generally. It makes me ask, “Well, if Jesus is telling stories (parables) that are not historical fact but are 100% made up, how can we trust any other story in the Bible to be historical fact?”
You may also remember that a few weeks back when I was preaching on the story of the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) I mentioned that the story was completely concocted and not actual fact.
So…what gives!? Can we trust our Bibles? Are they telling us the truth?
The answers…Yes and Yes…need to be a bit unpacked. Soooo…I’m inviting you to buckle up and strap in for a firehose of information about our Bibles that will at times surprise, upset, and amaze you. All the while, I hope, will make you love our Bible even more.
First…
Please remember that the Bible was written during periods that ranged from about 5,000 to 2,000 years ago. The Bible is an ancient library of documents. As an ancient library, it does not comport with our modern rules for literature, history, and fact.
A huge portion of the Bible (estimates vary widely) is exaggerated fact or just plain fiction. Another large swath of the text is an interpretation of actual events but in a way that the “real truth” is harder to find. Finally, yes, there are recordings of actual people, actual events, and actual times in a way that we understand as modern fact.
This doesn’t mean that Scripture is not true or trustworthy or that it does not grant us an experience of God. We have to understand that we were never the target audience of the texts we read today and that they had no concept of our world, our knowledge, our ways, or our thinking patterns. They wrote for their world and in their ways, using techniques and approaches that made sense to them.
We have to remember that all of Scripture is written for one purpose: to reveal God. To do this, the authors used every device, tool, and approach that their culture understood. They twisted the language (which was never English, by the way). They used poetic “sounds alike” moments (like onomatopoeia, assonance, and alliteration). They used hyperbole, metaphor (like parables), and plain old made up stories to make a point. Sometimes they made up words (Paul is famous for that) or wrote in completely new genres of literature (like the Gospels) while also borrowing from established literary styles (Luke’s Gospel, for example, begins like a Greek epic). And, again, the point was always to reveal God.
Second…
Truth to the Biblical authors and audience does not mean the same thing it means to us. For example: We accept truth as fact. When we say fact we usually mean something akin to researchable, scientific, or verifiable information.
For the Biblical authors and their communities, truth is that which reveals the nature, character, and action of God and God’s relationship to that which is not God (the creation, us, etc.) …and it’s not always factual (by our definition).
For us, truth is fact and therefore is something objective and rarely disputed. For the ancients, truth is an ontology (nature of being); it is metaphysics (the nature of reality); it is epistemology (the nature of human knowledge); and it is ethics (the nature of right and wrong). They were never trying to get to the facts, like we are. They were trying to understand what it meant to know, experience, and explore God.
Third…
Made-up stories are just as helpful to our understanding of God and God’s ways as stories which we can, with pretty good certainty, confirm through our modern studies.
Take this example:
The Book of Job is completely made-up. There was never a man named Job (I mean, honestly, there could have been…but the story we have is not about such a person). The entire book of Job is a theological exploration of prevailing schools of thought in the day. It opens with a narrative about a man who was so perfect and blameless that we have to say, “Wait…that’s impossible. No one is that good.” And then it explores this weird series of scenes in the heavenly throne room where God is hanging out with the divine workers…including Satan (pronounced saw-tawn). He’s not a bad guy…in fact he works for God as a henchman of sorts (which should also make us say, “God has a henchman?”…Of course not…that’s the point!)
The Book then goes on to explain that Job and his family befall all sorts of bad stuff and then some of his friends come to sit with him and tell him why it all happened. The first represents what is called “the Wisdom School;” the second mostly echoes the first (but with more vitriol); the third represents what is called “the Deuteronomic Theology,” and the last gets a lot closer to real theology and what is properly understood about God and God’s ways.
The point of the Book was to explore the wrong-headed teachings that prevailed in its day. It serves as a polemic (a potent and critical attack) against such bad theology. Thus, we are granted a lens into seeing the real truth: bad stuff happens and we don’t have a good answer often (or even ever) and our casual, lazy answers are not what God is really up to in the world.
Fourth…
Sometimes the Bible is telling us real things and in real ways. But we have to do a lot of homework and research to figure them out. This seems like a lot of work. However, we have to realize what I said earlier on: The Bible is really old and is from a place and time that we have no experience of in our lives. As the scholar John Walton has said, “If you have to translate the language you’re also going to have to translate the culture.”
Take this example: The entire story of Jesus being buried in a tomb and visited by the women on the third day of the week.
This is almost certainly a completely true story. The reason we say this is because the great detail gone to by the Gospel authors (and they all tell the story in one way or another) completely comports with how a person suspected of a crime (remember: Jesus was tried and crucified as a criminal) would have been put to death, immediately taken down upon death and buried (to comport with Jewish law), placed in a tomb that was not his family’s tomb (again in deference to Jewish law), and then anointed after three days for private mourning (public mourning of a criminal was forbidden by Jewish law). Other details like a stone blocking the entrance and the presence of a guard (actually a cemetery custodian charged with enforcement of Jewish law) again go to great lengths to tell us that this story sounds awfully fact based. If they wanted to make up something they easily could have. But the presence of a sheer mountain of specific and direct references to funerary traditions known to be practiced at the time of Jesus seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through to tell a made-up story.
Fifth…
The Bible was never…not ever…written in English. It is translated into English and English has its own fun rules and meanings that the original languages do not.
The Bible’s primary languages, Hebrew and Greek, are not ours. The third common language, Aramaic, was also not ours. And thus, they function in ways that English does not and vice versa.
When we read the Bible, we’re reading a translation. And translation is its own form of interpretation. There are a lot of words from those languages which simply do not jump over to English nicely or even at all. And making the choice to select a word for translation into English is going to be done with a particular viewpoint in mind because humans are informed by our culture, language, religion, experience, etc.
For example: in Genesis 1 we hear (in English): “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”
The word translated as “wind” is the Hebrew word ruah (pronounced roo-ach). It can mean wind, spirit, breath, air. And a deeper look at how the noun is modified gives it the sense of “violent, moving quickly/rapidly/powerfully.” If we translate ruah as, “Spirit of God,” then we’re assuming a concept of Christian theology that the ancient Jewish author had no concept of in his day. If we say wind, then we’re going to need to keep the modifier. And on and on and on. Even the word for God in this passage is the Hebrew Elohim which translated directly mean Gods. But the author isn’t telling us that there is more than one God. Instead, they’re using an ancient Hebrew device of pluralizing a singular to attempt to set off just how big something is. Put simply: God is so big that God is God’s own plural (if that makes sense). And we have no concept of this in English.
Finally…
After all of this crazy, nerdy writing, I want to make a final point.
The Bible is trustworthy and it is true. God is the inspiration (even if the authors are human). God is the inspiration to the Scripture like this:
You write a love poem to your significant other to communicate your feelings about the relationship. In this example, your partner is still the inspired source of the text you produce even if they’re not the direct author. This is pretty akin to how Scripture acts.
God vested God’s authority in humans to communicate about God. And so that’s going to be done in ways that make sense to humans. Sometimes fictional stories are needed. Other times poetry will do the trick. Still others we need a lengthy treatise. In all of these ways, God is revealed to us.
Even when we find errors of transmission (Luke for example biffs some of the history) we still get the larger point being made. Even when we’re not exactly sure how to render a translation or verse or original meaning has been lost to history, we still can experience God in the text. The text is always meant to point away from itself and toward the bigger revelation and reality of God.
Over the years, I have found that dearly beloved stories that I have held onto were not factually true. But that didn’t stop me from believing the Scripture was trustworthy or not truly inspired of God. Instead, it made me trust the words even more because I saw our God allowing us to talk about God in ways that made sense to us even if they weren’t a 100% accurate picture of events or even of God’s very self.
I hope this exploration helps you in your reading. If you ever have a question…just ask! Lord knows I love to talk about the Bible! And if you’re looking for books to help you understand all of the nerdy stuff I referenced here, I can help there too.
Enjoy and cherish your adventure of studying the Bible. It is the greatest library ever!