Now, this was in the bible belt. Most folks know that the bible is probably the most printed book in the west, perhaps the world. No one really thinks about what happens to all those bibles. Even the Gideons don’t have that many hotel rooms to fill.

As it happens, quite a number of those bibles wind up being donated to library book sales. As in, boxes and boxes of them. Most of them cheap, poor quality bibles of dubious translations: “The Bible Even You can Read,” or “The Bible in Plain English Just Like Jesus Spoke!”

What to do with all these bibles? No one would buy them. Everyone already had a couple of copies at home, and how many do you need? That’s why everyone was donating them to us.

This was back in the days before recycling came to little towns in the south. So my first job in the library field was to play look-out while the librarian heaved arm-loads of bibles into the dumpster. There I was, a nervous sixteen year old watching for anybody to come around the corner while a small southern lady tossed grocery bags full of God’s word into the trash. Also, lots of Harlequin romance novels, but those wouldn’t have gotten us into trouble if we’d been caught.

Perhaps I should have taken this as a sign of things to come.

A Swedish scholar named Gunnar Samuelsson has successfully defended his thesis that the Gospels do not clearly describe a crucifixion that matches later traditions.

His argument seems to hinge on the word “stauroun,” which the Gospels use in a way that has been interpreted as meaning “crucified.” As in, “He was handed over to be ’stauroun.’

In this case, “stauroun” simply means to hang or suspend. Samuelsson has apparently done his homework and found that in the Gospel period, “stauroun” used in the case of executions could mean hanging or impaling.

There are a number of places to read about Samuelsson’s argument. CNN’s Belief blog has one report, but like a lot of other reports it has problems. Consider the opening:

There have been plenty of attacks on Christianity over the years, but few claims have been more surprising than one advanced by an obscure Swedish scholar this spring.

How is this an attack? Samuelsson’s arugment is very narrow; one might even say pedantic. He’s arguing that the Gospels – and only the Gospels – do not absolutely say that Jesus was crucified. That might be what they are trying to say, but there’s enough wiggle room in the words chosen that they could also be telling us that he was impaled or hung.

It reminds me a bit of the argument over Joesph’s profession, and by extension Jesus’s early profession: were they carpenters? The word the Gospel’s use is “tekton,” which merely means “manual laborer.” It’s the same root as our words like “technical,” or “technician,” that is, working with the hands. It might mean that Joesph was a carpenter (though probably not a furniture maker as sometimes depicted but rather a home builder), but it might not. The tradition that Joesph was a carpenter is first found in Justin Maytyr a century after Jesus’ death.

Regardless of what the Gospels say, early Christian tradition definitely had the idea that Jesus had been nailed to a cross. It’s possible that they were embroidering a bit, or perhaps were cleaning some things up, but I don’t see any real reason to be suspicious of the traditional reading as long as we bear Samuelsson’s points in mind.

Though I admit, part of me is morbidly curious as to what would have happened to early Christianity if Jesus had been impaled through the anus, as was sometimes done.

Hmmm, no, on second thought, nevermind.

The idea is that Christian fundamentalists are making the Bible itself into a God and placing an heap of of expectations on it that are to much for any collection of books to bear. There’s something to this, but I notice there are all different levels to which even fundamentalists ascribe.

Inspiration

As some basic level, beneath that which most people would call idolatry, is the idea I remember from Catholic school: the Bible is inspired. This meant something very similar to what we means when we say an artist is inspired; the author received some insights and ideas (from God, it was assumed) that they proceeded to work into prose. But they were human authors, who were capable of writing some poorly worded sentences or confusing an issue. Thus we needed something more with which to illuminate the text, and the Catholic answer to that is Christian tradition maintained and developed by the Church.

Dictation

Somewhere beyond that is verbal inspiration, in which the Gospel authors are merely secretaries, taking dictation from the Almighty. This sidesteps the messy process of having to consider the mentality of the author; instead, we’re getting it straight from God. One doesn’t have to believe that every jot and tittle is accurate since the books may have changed a bit since their original manuscripts, but presuambly the Bible is absolutely reliable on matters of faith and salvation.

One idea I often hear is that God is loving, and would not leave us with flawed instructions on how to achieve salvation. This assumes a lot about the way God might operate, or what “loving” means in the context of an infinite non-corporeal entity, but it does make a certain sense. However, once you start reasoning this way, there really is no limit. What else might an all-loving God provide us with in his Word?

Absolute Sufficiency

Ken Pulliam over at Why I De-Converted from Evangelical Christianity has some thoughts on the more extreme form of this idolatry, in which the Bible offer guidance on things having little to do with salvation. As one fundamentalist co-woker explained to me, “All truths are found in the Bible,” and these apparently include truths relating to psychology; thus Biblical or “nouthetic” counseling:

“Nouthetic” comes from a NT Greek word meaning: “to admonish,” or “to correct.” This type of counseling says that man’s basic problem is sin and that the job of the counselor is to point out to the counselee the nature of his sin and then admonish him to confess it and ask God to heal him. The father of the movement is Jay Adams, longtime Professor of Pastoral Counseling at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Westminster is a very conservative evangelical Reformed seminary. Adams burst on the scene in 1970 with his book, Competent to Counsel: Introduction to Nouthetic Counseling. The very popular book has been used by thousands of Pastors to guide them in their counseling methodology.

And so Adams believe he can derive principles for the Bible which allow him to deal with depression and other psychological problems. You can read Pulliam’s entire post, but I can give you a hint: Adam’s methods are both misogynistic and toxic.

Let me close with a joke that Darrell Dow, blogger at Stuff Fundies Like, left in one of his comments on the topic:

Jay Adams, Tom Cruise, and Mary Baker Eddy walk into an emergency room…and see a man in a full body cast moaning in pain.

Tom Cruise declares “this man is not injured, he merely needs to audit himself into a clear state to uncover his thetan reality then his so-called pain will cease.”

Mary Baker Eddy contradicts “No, this man merely needs to acknowledge that his physical flesh is a sinful manifestation and that only pure spirit can be righteous then he will understand his pain is an illusion.”

Jay Adams says nothing but picks up a Gideon Bible and begins beating the man on the head with it.

“What are you doing?!” ask the other two in horror.

“Discipleship!” yells Jay loudly “By the time I’m done he’ll still be in pain but by golly he’ll at least have the decency to feel guilty about it!”

James McGrath declares this video (originally from Stuff Fundies Like) as “one of the least intelligible “arguments” I’ve ever encountered to support any point of view, anywhere, ever.”

I’m having a hard time disagreeing.

However, this may be a perfect time to try out YouTube’s “vuvuzela” function. Click through to the YouTube site (by clicking on the YouTube logo at the bottom right). Once there, click on the soccer ball/foot ball icon on the bottom right, just beneath the video.

There now, doesn’t that just improve his argument immensely? That’s the magic of the vuvuzela button. Use it wisely.

What, you’re not convinced?!

Craft Shop Family Buys Up Ancient Bibles for Museum

[...]

With a goal of establishing a national Bible museum of great depth and size, the evangelical Christian family behind the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores has been spending heavily to amass a collection that has set dealers buzzing in the staid world of rare books.

First off, what is it about the founders of big box stores that makes them want to open museums? Alice Walton is building an art museum in Arkansas – and swiping Hudson Valley art in the process. *grumble*

Second, this is something that could be done very well, or very, very poorly. Many Americans are woefully ignorant about the history of the book itself. A museum about the collection, transmission and translation of the bible could be a real educational asset, or just another Creation Museum.

Even if the museum has a clear Evangelical bias, I think it might still be worth it. If nothing else, there are enough good Evangelical scholars that I think would give the exhibits a very balanced tone. The patrons might not hear the theories of the Dutch Radicals, but I can live with that.

Plus, there’s a lot of potential to tell engaging stories that bring people in, while also leaving them with a sense of how complex the book and its history really are. How about the stories of some of the great translators like John Wycliffe? The politics and personalities involved in the creation of the KJV? The controversy around Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum?

Or how about stories from the formation of the canon? Granted, there would be a challenge there, since it’s a long, drawn-out and frequently unsatisfying story. But it’s got shocking twists (the first canon was probably established by the arch-heretic Marcion), heroes (Eusebius recording the names of the fallen before undertaking one of the great feats of scholarship in the ancient world), and lots of funny names (“Polycarp of Smyrna”? C’mon, you just made that up.)

But I’m afraid that it’s going to turn out to be a one-dimensional presentation of some canned stories without any scholarly underpinnings. I’m afraid, given some of the quotes in the article, that it will just be seen as another tool for evangelism, like the Creation Museum.

A lot depends of the adviser, Dr. Scott Carroll, who is unfamiliar to me. Anybody know his background?

Historian John Sparks talking about Barton Stone, grandfather of Charles Chilton Moore, who may have been suffering a brief crisis of faith:

It is not inconceivable that, at this time, [Barton] Stone could have come to that realization so unsettling to anyone who has somehow become convinced and assured that he or she possesses pure biblical truth: that no one’s system of belief can truly be straight exegesis from Scripture so much as it is, and ultimately always proves itself to be, instead more of an eisegesis, that is, an attempt to reconcile one’s own varied passions and prejudices with one’s perceptions of the Bible.

–John Sparks, Kentucky’s Most Hated Man, p. 27-28

I’d be lying if I said that this wasn’t one of the reasons I left the faith. A feeling that all Biblical interpretation was eisegesis: “I believe it, the Bible says it, that does it.”

Fred Clark over at Slacktivist is looking at a aspect of this right now. In this case, the conflict between the way that many American Evangelicals interpret the (many) passages about economic justice verses the way they interpret the (few) passages about homosexuality.

Noah is best known as the protagonist in the flood story. How exactly did his voyage on the ark bring “relief from our work and from the toil of our hands”?

I think the way to understand this is to assume that this section comes from one source – call it the Name Source – and the flood story comes from another – call if the Flood source.

Place your (figurative) hand over the flood story – Genesis 6 down to about Genesis 9:19 or so. Now look at Genesis 9:20 “Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. ”

Noah was the first to till and plant a vineyard, growing grapes out of the ground that God had cursed. He was the first to make wine that people could drink, and there’s our explanation for how he provided “relief from our work.” Noah made it possible for people to have a glass of wine after a hard days in the fields.

If God has cursed us to work the soil in order to survive, Noah’s invention of wine allows us to have a drink at the end to get mellow.

From this perspective, the Name Source looks something like a list of heroes, running through Seth, Enosh, Kenan, etc. It tells us how long each lived and sometimes a little of what they did. It stops when it gets to Noah, then picks up again after Noah with his sons.

My guess is that the Flood source was plunked down in the middle of the Name Source. It breaks up the Name Source story of Noah, separating the description of Noah’s name from the explanation of what he did to deserve that name. Only by removing it can we see how Noah gave us relief from our toils.

So the shepherd rolled a natural 20, big deal.

(via Sunday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

(via)

One of the worst apologetic arguments for the authority of the bible is that the bible is unique in its continuity. That is, although the books in our modern bible were written over a stretch of centuries, they all speak as if from the same voice. Clearly, that is the voice of God.

This argument hinges on the notion that the books are “thematically consistent;” that they are all in agreement as to their major themes of morality and theology. This is pure bunk, and the argument fails. The books of the Bible are in conflict, pure and simple.

For example, one of the themes of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah is that the Israelites should remain ethnically pure and not intermarry with foreign women:

“And Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, “You have trespassed and married foreign women, and so increased the guilt of Israel. Now then make confession to the LORD the God of your fathers, and do his will; separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign wives.” (Ezra 10:10-11)

Now, compare that with with book of Ruth, where the Moabite Ruth becomes the ancestress of line of Jesse, David and Jesus. Does this story square with Nehemiah 13:1, “On that day they read from the book of Moses in the hearing of the people; and in it was found written that no Ammonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God”?

This is likely not an accident; the book of Ruth may have been intentionally written as an argument against the ethnic purity themes of the earlier works.

Consider also the fact that Moses, the greatest hero in the OT, marries into a Midianite family. Of course, in the book of Numbers, Moses wages war against the Midianites, kills the men and captures the women and children. I suppose that’s one way to deal with your in-laws.

This is just an example; just one of the ways that the OT is in tension with itself. But now consider the NT and all the ways that the gospels conflict. Let’s take a subtle one: compare the eschatologies of Mark and John.

Mark famously has a straight-forward apocalyptic tone: “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.” In contrast, John has a more complex “revealed eschatology,” in which Jesus’s ministry is part of the end times: “Truly, truly, I say to you he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life; he does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life”

In Mark, the second coming is something that will take place in the near future. In John, it’s something that is here now, and yet is still to come. It’s not a pure conflict, but it is one of the ways that the Gospels are inconsistent with each other.

Of course, the apologists have another card up their sleeve: they know what each of these passages really means. They’ve already decided that the books are thematically consistent, and they’re prepared to strap any straying passage into Procrustes’s bed and make it fit.

(via)

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many. (Matt. 27:51-52 NRSV)

Both Christians and skeptics focus on the resurrection of Jesus as the “extraordinary” event. But the tombs opening and dead people walking around are just as incredible (literally), if not more so. If all these dead people were walking around, why is it only mentioned once in ancient history — and that one time is in a biased, anonymous story about the life of Jesus written generations after it happened?

Dead people rising and walking around would have had people talking. And yet no one seems to have thought to mention it except the Gospel of Matthew.

What’s odd is that many of the people who believe this story refuse to believe in evolution, claiming it has no evidence. What hypocrisy and inconsistency!

How is it you can get people to believe in things that are undocumented, unverifiable, and impossible, but not things that are documented, verifiable, and proven to be possible?

Mark, the earliest Gospel, says that Jesus died on the day after the passover meal:

On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed, his disciples said to him, “Where do you want us to go and make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?” [...] As soon as it was morning, the chief priests … bound Jesus, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate…. It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him. (Mark 14:12; 15:1, 25 NRSV)

But John, the latest Gospel, says Jesus was crucified on the day before the passover meal:

Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon. [Pilate] said to the Jews, “Here is your King!” (John 19:14)

So in Mark, Jesus was nailed to a cross at 9am the day after the Preparation of the Passover. In John, Pilate is about to send Jesus to his death at 12pm on the day of the Preparation for the Passover.

Those timelines just don’t add up. At least one is false; both cannot be true.

Why would John change the day Jesus was crucified from the earlier Mark narrative? Bart Ehrman gives an interesting theory in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium:

Possibly the author of John, our last Gospel to be written, is actually trying to say something, to make a “truth-claim” about Jesus in the way he has told his story. Readers have long noted — and this can scarcely be either an accident or unrelated to our present dilemma — that John’s is the only Gospel that explicitly identified Jesus as “the Lamb of God.”

In fact, at the very outset of the Gospel, Jesus’ forerunner, John the Baptist, sees him and says, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (1:29); and seven verses later, he says it again: “Behold the Lamb of God” (1:36). John’s Gospel thus portrays Jesus as the Passover lamb, whose blood somehow brings salvation, just as the blood of the Passover lamb brought salvation to the children of Israel so many centuries before. [...]

John, or someone who told him the story, made a slight change in a historical datum in order to score a theological point. For John, Jesus really was the Lamb of God. He died at the same time (on the afternoon of the day of Preparation), in the same place (Jerusalem), and at the hands of the same people (the Jewish leaders, especially the priests) as the Passover lambs. In other words, John has told a story that is not historically accurate, but is, in his judgement, theologically true.

That’s the best explanation I’ve heard. John was either told the story slightly differently or changed it to fit his theological point (purposely or accidently).

What I find so refreshing about “liberal” biblical scholarship is its honesty. Fundamentalist scholars are usually apologists — they’re just defending what they want to be true. They are not willing to consider that this, for instance, is a real contradiction. They explain it away with theological smoke and mirrors.

The truth is we don’t know when Jesus died. We only have accounts written generations later, and what we have agree on some parts and disagree on others.

Did Jesus die at 9am the day after the Passover meal, or after 12pm on the day before the Passover meal? I don’t know. You don’t know. Scholars don’t know. And certainly the Christian knocking at your door doesn’t know.

But don’t expect Christian pastors and priests to tell you that this weekend. They’re not in that business.

[For a fuller explanation of this, you can read Ehrman's chapter on it.]