The final thing that I think is important for readers of this blog to understand is how I think about the truth of the Bible, and why I think that differs from a mundane sort of factual accuracy.  This is an important conversation to have, I think because in the US, one important baseline has been set by Biblical literalists, who make the argument that the Bible is the WORD OF GOD in ways that make Christianity antagonistic to science, modern archeology, the fruits of the best and most current historiography, and also academic biblical studies.  Karen Armstrong makes the argument in The Battle for God that this sort of literalist fundamentalism is a modern development, and the result of people attempting to set religious truth on the same footing as scientific truth.  In my opinion this is a misguided effort that demeans religion by attempting to have it serve a function to which it is poorly suited.  Most importantly, it is impossible to believe that the Bible is literally true without performing torturous mental contortions, because it contradicts itself in many places.  To pick the first example of these contradictions, let us consider the two creation timelines in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and Genesis 2:4-24.  

This is the chronology of Gen 1:1-2:3:

1. In the beginning there is nothing
2. God said let there be light, creating night and day (1st day)
3. God creates a dome in the sky to separate the waters of heaven from the waters of earth, creating the sky (2nd day)
4. God creates dry land, and then creates plants (3rd day)
5. God creates the sun, moon and stars (4th day)
6. God creates birds and fish (5th day)
7. God creates land animals, and then humankind (both male and female (6th day)
8. God rests (7th day)

This is the chronology of Gen 2:4-24

1. It is implied that heaven and earth and the sky exists, and a stream that rises to water the ground (but not rain)
2. God makes Adam
3. God then creates plants (in the form of the garden of Eden)
4. God creates birds and land animals
5. God creates Eve

These chronologies cannot both be literally true, because they contradict each other! The scholarly consensus is that these two different chronologies represent a compromise, in which two different religious traditions were melded into a single tradition which valued both stories.  One creation story helps to explain the Sabbath, the other explains the relationship between men and women (and leads into the story about the exile from Paradise).  The point of this dual inclusion is that both stories provide meaning, and explain aspects of a living religious tradition.  

This sense of meaning is what we should be looking for in the Bible, rather than mere facticity.   Consider for example the story of Jesus turning water into wine in John 2:1-11.  John was likely composed after 85 CE and no later than 100 CE.¹ This is obviously several decades after Jesus’ death, long enough for liturgical practices to have begun to spring up.  So when we read in vv. 6 that the water vessels were “of the sort laid out for the purification of the Jews” and we continue to read that Jesus subsequently turned the water from those vessels into wine and that this wine was better than the wine the bridegroom had originally provided, what is actually being communicated by the story is that the sacrament of drinking wine as the blood of Christ is better absolution than Jewish practices of ritual purification.  This passage is meaningful because it describes the distinction between Jewish practice and Christian practice, and that distinction is true regardless of whether it is factually the case that there was a wedding in Canaan that Jesus attended, at which he literally turned water into wine.

Or compare the descriptions of Jesus’ death in Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46, where he cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” with Luke 23:46, “Father, into your hands I hand over my spirit.” Luke’s version quotes Psalm 31, in which a beleaguered David describes placing his trust in the Lord while and concludes by saying that God has heard his supplications and exhorting God’s people to place their trust in the Lord.  These are contradictory accounts and cannot both be factually true, but both provide meaning.  “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is surely one of the most relatable pleas for Christians when they inevitably have a crisis of faith, while “Father, into your hands I hand over my spirit” (and the meaning of the psalm from which it quotes) acknowledges those crises but also directs us to a path forward.  

There are many, many examples throughout the Bible where attempting to force a religious text that is not a modern history to conform to modern notions of facticity is at best irrelevant to the meaning of Scripture and at worst would force us to amputate parts of that meaning from Scripture to reduce it to mere history.

Footnotes

[1] My source for this is the section on the date of composition in the introduction to the Gospel of John in volume IX of the New Interpreter’s Bible.  The argument presented there is that there is a surviving manuscript fragment dated to 100 CE, and that several references to being put out of the synagogue refer to a practice of excommunicating heretics from the synagogue that was developed between 85 and 95 CE. <back to top>