Can the Bible be Trusted?

Is the Bible historically accurate? Does it matter?

Take it easy on me – I need some lullabies –
They tell me Heaven's just a lie – well, I'm not surprised!
Tell me that you know – no, you don't – yeah, you're just like me –
Can't we just all hope for the best – take it easy…
- Imagine Dragons

Question: Does the Bible carry Divine authority?

Instinctively, I feel like saying “how should I know?” Yet, I'm a little flustered to admit I am probably one of the best qualified people on WdC to answer this question. Or at least, I've been exposed over the past twenty years to every permutation, deconstruction and analysis of Christianity out there. My mom is a dedicated and pious student of Biblical history, and I've been aware of her faith journey since I was little.

Rather than instilling a strong faith in me, however, her determination to follow the history wherever it led, from Seventh Day Adventism to Judaism to Caesar's Messiah to Robert Eisenman and the Essenes, tended to make me stand back and take a fifty-thousand foot view of religion in general. I didn't feel comfortable with observance of Sunday or belief in the Trinity, yet Jewish beliefs in polygamy and reincarnation hardly seemed biblical. Catholic beliefs seem too primitive and ritualistic, Adventists place too much faith in Ellen G White, Muslims place too much faith in unverified words of Mohammed, and I could go on pointing out all the off-putting oddities of different denominations and religions.

I'll deal with the Old Testament and New Testament separately. Jews do not believe the NT is divine, and Muslims believe both Old and New Testaments are corrupted. Sometimes, especially when listening to Rabbi Tovia Singer,   it's difficult to see any divine continuity between the two portions of the Bible.

The OT has always puzzled me. I grew up reading adult Bible commentaries and artistic children's retellings (I remember especially the Tomie dePaola   version) alongside the full, unabridged Bible. I found out soon enough, it's not exactly Safe for Work. It seemed every time I opened it, I would find something untoward and say to myself “oh my… I guess I wasn't supposed to read that.” One might call it traumatic… I simply wondered what the point was of including such things in a holy book.

From Lot sleeping with his daughters, to Rachel pretending she had her period so she could steal her father's idols, to the unspeakable events in the book of Judges, to the assault of David's daughter Tamar by her half brother, there unfolds a multitude of filthy sins and stupid behaviors that lead one to conclude everybody was a fool or pervert of some kind. Even if someone started out on the right path, they'd do something awful soon enough. Joseph and Daniel are my two favorite Old Testament characters, because they managed to get through difficult lives without any shocking misdeeds.

No wonder Calvinists declare mankind's total depravity; it isn't hard to get there by reading the Old Testament. I appreciate the laws given, and I know the reasoning that the laws, though appearing not advanced enough by modern standards, served to rein in a savage population. Yet at the same time, I wonder why so much of the Pentateuch is spent dealing with the Temple and the sacrificial system. Hauling endless animals to a central location to be slaughtered, wiping animal blood on the high priest's big toe, and telling people how much God enjoys the smell of roast meat seems decidedly primitive and overly ritualistic. It also seems like a good way for the priestly class to have a steady source of high-quality food, leading one to consider how much of it was actually sanctioned by God and how much was simply a sort of feudalism. Didn't God say later, in the prophets, “I don't want your bulls and lambs, but rather your hearts and minds?” (Isaiah 1:11, Hosea 6:6, Psalm 51:16-17)

Another objection to the divinity of the Old Testament is the endless wars. I understand it's a matter of recorded history. But did God really sanction the Hebrew armies to take over Judea by destroying every man, woman, child and animal in the land? I've seen a multitude of explanations for the carnage, including genetic contamination from generations of perversion (even the animals would presumably have been tainted by abusive breeding, similar to the situation with pit bulls   in the United States.)

If this was the case, why did God allow it to get to such a level of depravity? It says He was patient with them for centuries. Perhaps He was too patient? Wasn't there a different way it could have been handled? We are expected to devalue and dismiss entire civilizations of people as being too depraved to live? I'm reminded of the situation with the Incas and Aztecs in South America. When the Conquistadors arrived, the complex social structures already present were wiped out and castigated as savages who practiced human sacrifice. They had their culture, their way of living adapted to their environment, and it was all lost, without an opportunity to learn from it or potentially improve the flaws.

I remember reading, several years ago, a book by John Dominic Crossan, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian. In it, he dissected the Old Testament, reducing it to a series of tribal documents recording the desperate prayers of an outnumbered group of people beset by enemies on all sides. His arguments seemed convincing at the time, so much so that I thought I'd never be able to look at the book of Isaiah the same way again, but it turns out I have not remembered enough of what he said to be bothered by it. He had a pretty obvious socialist political agenda, which is a different subject entirely.

As a collection of texts documenting the history and culture of a particular socio-geographic area, the Old Testament appears to be accurate, tracing the rise and fall of the kingdoms of Northern and Southern Israel and their constantly seesawing relationship with the Lord. Their tendency to accept the pagan gods of their neighbors always annoyed me; here they had a God who had worked tremendous miracles for them, who wrote their laws with His own hands, who brought fire from heaven to consume the sacrifice, and all they could do was squabble and cling to those worthless idols like kids with Temu toys? They seemed to have no better understanding of the nearness of God than we do today… Which is an interesting thought.

Moving on to the New Testament, we have a different kettle of fish entirely. Here, the Jews are firmly under Roman subjugation, primed and waiting for a Messiah figure to come and rescue them, to restore their ability to follow the Torah as they were supposed to without the burden of corrupt pagan rulers. They have a Temple, expanded gloriously under the orders of a puppet king, Herod, but they've lost the heart of their religion.

Along comes Christianity, turning the world upside down. Amidst the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the disintegration of ancient Judaism and the dispersion of the Jews, a new religion rises among the masses. The exact ways it happened have been analyzed and debated for several centuries.

Very little external evidence exists of Jesus as he is seen in Scripture. The well-known quote from Josephus about him is a later insertion, never mentioned by early Christian scholars. Josephus does mention James the brother of Jesus, and John the Baptist who was executed by Herod, which indicates there was something solid behind the religion. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1944, they bore witness to a mysterious group of people spoken of by Josephus and Pliny: the Essenes. These people believed the temple system was corrupt and lived out their lives separated from the culture and society of the day, both pagan and Jewish. Some of them were apocalyptic, believing that strict ritual purity and separation from the world would bring the angels of God to right the wrongs brought about by the wickedness of others.

Some have suggested Christianity originated from the Essenes, even wondering if the unnamed Teacher of Righteousness in the Scrolls is Jesus himself. I tend to think, if there's a connection, that perhaps Christianity was inspired by Essene principles. This implies it was crafted artificially, which brings me to…

The things Jesus says and does in the Gospels are incongruous and anachronistic, set in a pastoral backdrop where the Romans are seen not as oppressors to be overthrown but as rulers to be obeyed and paid the taxes they demand, no matter how burdensome. I remember when the documentary Caesar's Messiah   came out, around 2013, the brainchild of a guy named Joseph Atwill who noticed some parallels between the warpath of Titus Flavius as described by Josephus, and the stories in the Gospels. He gathered a bunch of atheists, hippies and scholars, and spun together a theory of Roman rulers collaborating with rogue Jews to craft a new, unifying religion to keep the rebellious masses under control.

When Mom and I first watched it, we assumed it would make some impact in the world. For a long time, it didn't make a dent, remaining largely ignored. These days, the theories it proposed are making a comeback in the form of sleek, faceless AI generated videos, criticizing the origins of Christianity in uncited narrative form (much like this essay) with enough monotonous, stentorian repetition of “once you see the truth, you will never unsee it” and other Orwellian cliches to make you groan and turn to something else. The attempts to brainwash and gaslight are obvious.

There are also those who split Christianity between Paul and Jesus, or Paul and James, the brother of Jesus, insisting that Paul is really the enemy who turned a down-to-earth, socially aware, potentially Essene spiritual uprising into a watered-down, salvation-by-grace, antinomian religion which worships a man Paul never met as God. Dr. Robert Eisenman   is a scholar who has studied this rabbit-hole extensively, and helped make the original Dead Sea Scrolls available to the public.

Personally, I've seen it all, and I don't allow it to bother me anymore. It's not that I believe every word of the Old and New Testaments is inspired by God, or that God is an ineffable Trinity of Persons Who sent the second person of the Godhead down to die to satisfy His own penalty for our sins. It's more of, in my own explorations, I find the perspectives and philosophies originating from Christianity make the most sense. I've spent the past ten years reading the daily evangelical worldview publication Breakpoint, and it's shaped my ways of thinking so that I'm pretty much stuck with the Bible, whether I like it or not.

I appreciate how Christianity has shaped the world, and in a liberal sort of way I accept the Bible as a valuable set of moral codes and life lessons, probably the most substantial, sensible collection of such out there. I suppose I have something in common with the old school atheists who have “gone soft” in recent years. I believe Richard Dawkins in particular recently admitted   he likes Christmas and churches more than Ramadan and mosques, bemoaned the postmodern dismissal of biological gender, and wondered what will become of a civilization unmoored from the beliefs that founded it. Breakpoint likes to say, we can't have the moral underpinnings of Christianity (human rights, etc) without also accepting its fundamental theological implications.

I suppose I've become jaded over the years of study, tired of endless clever arguments for one side or the other, cynical about any religion or anti-religion claiming to be true at all. I've settled into a quiet, lackadaisical acceptance of Christian morality and worldview, whether the history behind it is valid or not. Christianity is the strongest option we have to keep civilization and humanity safe. It must be true, if it's the best there is. And since Christianity is built on the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, then I'll accept the whole thing, whatever I might think about it personally, for the good of society.

Words: 1996 (not including the quote at top)
Written for "Grill a Christian" 
Prompt ▼

Can the Bible be trusted?
Christians claim that the Bible was inspired by God through 40 authors, in three languages and on three continents over 1500 years. The claim is that the Bible carries Divine authority. This claim has been seriously challenged in the last three centuries by contact with alternate religions, various archaeologists and theologians, by anti-supernatural Western ideology, by scientists discussing the origins of life, by interests and groups with agendas that contradict Biblical claims and by rapid technological progress. Has the Bible survived these tests as a source of Christian authority?