Unfounded Prejudice against the Bible
For all the apologetics and reasonability Christians strive for, it seems that message is being heard less and less. Easily debunkable arguments are increasingly circulating among even America’s intellectual elite (I can’t speak for universities elsewhere, but I imagine the situation is similar if not worse) as irrefutable fact and signs of self-sophistication. The use of these arguments as fact (i.e., “this is so” as opposed to “but what about…”) is a sign both of intellectual laziness, and if unable to move past these arguments, deeper emotional objections not rooted in any sort of pure reason (though more sophisticated arguments do not necessarily preclude such a barrier).
I’m not the first to rebut these arguments and hopefully I will not be the last, but for the sake of establishing these arguments as clear smokescreens lacking any real substance, here are several.
1. The Bible contains lots of contradictions.
O RLY? Most people who say this can’t point to one. There are lists, however, of multitudes of apparent contradictions, most of which are easily rebuttable (see point 2), but occasionally a stumper will come along among the lists. Yet, with just as much effort as was taken to find such a list, one can find it documented and rebutted (listing each alleged contradiction would be beyond the scope of this article). If an entire faith were so easy to disprove as to point to two contradicting verses, then who would believe it? From whence would we get our theologians who apply an intellect as great as any found in other fields to the study of the Bible? A faith does not survive and multiply as greatly as the Christian faith by hanging on a thread of hope that no one will notice and point out two contradicting verses.
2. You can make the Bible say anything you want.
With enough rearranging and omission, I can make The Count of Monte Cristo say anything I want it to. Does that take away from its literary merit? The fact that one can take portions of the Bible out of context to seemingly justify anything removes nothing from the spiritual merit of the whole. Just as the end of Monte Cristo makes no sense without the preceding plot and events, so does a single piece of scripture stripped of its context have no meaning outside of the rest.
3. The English bible contains numerous mistranslations / Biblical translators had an agenda.
There are 96 different translations and derivatives of the entire Bible in modern English, falling under almost two dozen separate and independent translations, the vast majority of which were taken directly from the original manuscripts (as opposed to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament). It seems hardly likely that each of these groups throughout the centuries that English has existed in a form intelligible to us would have the same agendas, even less so that the teams of experts having devoted their lives to the study of Biblical languages working on single translations would have these same agendas. We have translations ranging from strictly literal (NASB, ESV) to complete paraphrases (NLT, The Message), and everything in between (NIV). With these completely different philosophies of translation all producing essentially the same text - translational controversies are extremely rare - there is no place for an agenda to be hidden.
4. The Canon was decided arbitrarily under Constantian influence to suppress other Christian sects.
This is perhaps the argument with the most semblance of reason to it. Espoused by popular authors like Dan Brown and Bart Ehrman, it paints the picture of early Christianity as a war among diverse sects with Orthodoxy eventually winning out. However this is a vastly distorted picture. Christianity like any other religion has always had heretics and purveyors of misdoctrine, but regarding these (and especially the Gnostic sects, as these authors are prone to do) as alternate Christianities has no basis in reality. The canon as we see it now was already established well before the Council of Nicea, being referenced by many early Church fathers. The council simply codified what was already in practice in order to curb heretical sects with new gospels (the Gnostic gospels, for example, are known to have been written centuries after Christ’s death). It was not at all a political move, rather, a self-preservation move.
There is no reason for anyone to believe these sorts of fallacies, and even less that anyone should become convinced of them and fall away from the faith. Unfortunately there remain enough people who refuse even to advance the sophistication of their arguments that these simplistic and fallacious objections become held by a vast number of people, simply because they are bite-sized, dismissive, and do not require further thought. I have no solution to propose to this problem; only that the Church and the members thereof should go to great lengths to avoid creating these deeper emotional barriers that masquerade in these cases as reasonable objections. Then again, people have been calling the Church to greater sensitivity since its inception and we are here no less.
SHARE{ FacebookDiggRedditNewsVinedel.icio.usStumbleUponSlashdotTechnoratiMa.gnoliaWindows LiveTwitter }
3 Responses
Oct 08 at 8:18 am
I think there are two problems with this post. Most of the “original manuscripts” that we take for our translations are actually a few centuries after. The problem with them, since they are so close, is that in different areas you find different passages included and excluded. The transcribing/translating process was so difficult back then that it was easy to mistranslate, transcribe passages that you have already translated in earlier gospels into different gospels (in the case of cannonical gospels) and insert what the scribe believed/had heard without anyone noticing. Even if you read a believing Catholic Dr. Luke Timothy Johnson, he’ll admit that all of these can happen (though he also poses that it doesn’t really matter). I listened to a wonderful lecture series by Johnson that i got from my father. I’ll see if i can get it again and loan it to you. I think you’d really enjoy it.
Oct 08 at 8:22 am
Second, one argument that i’ve been hearing a lot is that the bible holds a lot of then current cosmology that makes absolutely no sense when looked at now. They use this as an example to show that despite our confidence in its historicity, it has a lot of things that are scientifically, physically or just generally wrong or not accepted as possible. Excluding miracles, there are examples of cultural biases throughout the old testament and these show that the bible, while maybe thought of as word of God back then, cannot be taken as such without putting it through the filter that it was written in a culture, by a culture. This, i have heard argued, shows that the bible cannot be taken literally (especially in the case of creationism, virgin birth, etc)
Oct 08 at 10:55 pm
As far as original manuscripts go, the New Testament was written recently enough so as to have reliable copies, if not the originals themselves. IIRC, there were dozens/hundreds (I forget the exact range, but it was a lot. I’ll research it more) copies made of the original texts, so I don’t think it’s as easy to mistranslate as it seems. Also, where did you hear about transcribing into the different gospels? I’d never heard that before.
As for the second comment - regarding the virgin birth, I would say that that’s no less a miracle of divine intervention on Earth than water into wine and since it was one instance isn’t really subject to scientific disproval if you believe in the miracles. Creationism is really subject to a lot more ridicule than it probably deserves, but http://answersingenesis.org/ is a good site about that. It’s definitely a thought-provoking contrast to what usually gets thrown around.
There’s definitely culture evident in the Bible (Paul references a lot of Greek things and stuff like that, and also the Jewish culture in the entire OT), but as God-breathed scripture, I’d say one should be careful attributing elements of it to culture.
I definitely agree that there can be reasoned arguments against the Bible (or at least against an orthodox interpretation), just that those first four in the article aren’t. I enjoy talking about stuff like this a lot with people who use them (like right now).