Huh, evidently this is my 1001st blog post. And to think when I first started this I thought I’d putter a few posts out and find no use for blogging. Guess my desire to “hear my own voice” is strong. 
So, a couple of online articles have colluded to make me comment on the subject of Bible literacy:
The first article discusses how the oldest known collection of books of the Bible, once part of a single collection which has since been pieced and parsed here and there, are coming back together as an online collection. What’s interesting about this is that it points up something most Christians don’t realize: There is no “original Bible.” This earliest collection was compiled 400 years after the last of the known gospels were written. Think about how long ago 400 years ago is from today…1600 AD. The Renaissance, more or less. From then to now is about the same amount of time that passed between the events depicted in the New Testament were supposed to happen and when the various and sundry stories were collected into one book.
Well, I’m fudging a little: It was about 350 years after the events that the more powerful and connected Christian leaders, who fought tooth and nail to eliminate many many of the less politically powerful Christian sects (like the Gnostics), got together under order of Emperor Constantine and decided what books, gospels, and epistles were to become “official” religious canon…because Constantine didn’t like all this bickering and fighting among the diverse orders of the religion he recently became a part of. Even by that time, 300+ years after Christ, the existing gospels and Pauline letters were copies of copies and passed around as individual documents. There is no original Bible, and more important, there is no original of any single document which makes up any of the Biblical books.
Not only that, but this article also discusses a topic very troubling to most Christians but is old hat to any Biblical scholar: The various gospels and letters have been changed and edited over time, so that what we have now in most Protestant and Catholic Bibles is not what was is depicted in Bibles 800 years ago and even more so what existed 1600+ years ago! One of the big examples is the ending to the Gospel of Mark (which is the earliest written gospel, on which Luke and Matthew are heavily based and even copied from). In the earliest known copy of that story, it ends with the women running away from what they encounter at the tomb and the Gospel saying they told no one of what they saw. Some decades later, a coda was added to make it fit more in line with some of the later “official” gospels like Luke.
Then, in that second article linked above, “Why a Real ‘Year of the Bible’ Would Horrify Its Sponsors,” we read a bit about how Christians today really have little idea what’s in this “Word of God” they revere:
A 2000 survey showed that even 60 percent of those chapter-and-verse-quoting Evangelicals thought Jesus was born in Jerusalem rather than Bethlehem. Similarly, a 2004 survey of high school students found that 17 percent thought “the road to Damascus” was where Jesus was crucified and 22 percent thought Moses was either one of Jesus’ 12 apostles or an Egyptian pharaoh or an angel.
When I was a kid and a teen, growing up Christian, I was encouraged to read and study certain very important verses. Sunday School, church camp, I encountered the same usual verses over and over, and invariably they were the verses involving God loving the world, Jesus is the one and only way, etc. Interestingly, I never encountered passages like these:
Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household.
Matthew 10:34-36 (RSV)
Or Matthew 12:46-50 in which Jesus ignores and refuses to recognize his own family. Or Matthew 5:18-19 and Luke 16:17 where Jesus tells his followers the old Law of Moses is the Word of God and none must break them. Which makes things awfully awkward for Christians who want to claim we don’t need to kill the married victims of rape (Deuteronomy 22:23-24), nor sell our virgin daughters to their rapists (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), nor sell daughters into sex slavery (Exodus 21:7-11), nor eat shrimp because they’re an “abomination” (Leviticus 11:9-12), nor kill our children if they disobey (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). Just to name a few of the hundreds of fun rules and laws God gave Moses and his other prophets.
See, I was like most Christians who only knew the John 3:16-type stuff of the Bible, until I was 17 or 18 and decided if I was going to be a good Christian, maybe even become an apologist or Biblical scholar, I should actually read the whole Bible. That’s when I read all about how God condones slavery and neither he nor Jesus (nor Paul for that matter) say a single word against owning people as property. In fact, women are property in the Bible from beginning to end, and owning slaves is fine for any good follower of Yahweh. I read how God sent bears to slaughter children who made fun of one of his prophet’s baldness (2 Kings 2:23-24) (not to mention the countless other instances in which God kills children en mass, such as the innocent first born of Egypt instead of giving Pharaoh a Paul-like Road to Damascus vision and change of heart), and the song of praise to God for killing children like this gem:
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!
Psalm 137:8-9 (RSV)
Praise be to the God of Love and Forgiveness.
The long way ’round to my point is this: Actually reading the Bible started me in realizing that the Bible is nothing more than a collection of myth and history (most of it fabricated) of an ancient patriarchal and superstitious Bronze Age people who were a nomadic offshoot of Babylonian culture. Followed by the stories (mostly copied from various older Near/Middle Eastern myths [see mainly Mithra, Horus, Dionysus and Krishna]) about an existence-questionable cult leader who believed the world would end within his followers’ lifetime (Mark 8:39 to 9:1, Mark 13:30-33, Matthew 16:28, Matthew 24:34, Luke 9:26-27).
And the history of the religion, why it’s survived this long instead of going the way of countless other religions that sprang up in that teeny-tiny patch of dirt, aka: God’s Promised Land, is because a Roman Emperor decided he wanted to add another religion to his collection of religious beliefs, of which he had many, and thus gave Christianity political protection. Followed by another Roman Emperor (Theodosius I) who spread it across Europe, foisted upon Europeans at the point of a spear. When you’re forced to convert or die, the religion will tend to take hold.
Back to the original topic: most Christians have not a clue what’s in the Bible. Like the fundamentalist Republican Representative who wanted the Ten Commandments displayed in Congress, most Christians can’t even name them. Well, of course the problem there is that in the Bible, as opposed to the mass produced porcelain replicas you find at Christian gift shops, there was actually two different sets of Commandments given to Moses–the pre- and post-broken tablets. Evidently God changed his mind about some stuff in between. Oh, and neither set were actually ten of then, but who’s counting. Most people who check the box marked “Christian” on forms do so simply because that’s how they were raised to answer the question, and have maybe been armed with a verse or two and some nice stories about an Ark, a manger, and a cross. Most Christians have no clue about the actual blood-soaked, misogynist, psychopathic, stone-age level of morality and ethics found in the book they believe to be the Word of God.
Read the whole thing sometime, cover to cover, including the “boring bits.” It is, after all, the very Word of God, is it not? At the very least divinely inspired by the all-creator. If you believe this to be true, then shouldn’t you actually have read it over and over again? It’s the most important document ever compiled, if it is truly God’s history and instruction book to all of humanity. I guess the first step is deciding which version of the compilation of ancient scrolls and letters is the true God-intended “official” one….
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