Deconstructing the Bible

by Christian LeVesque

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The Bible. The Word of God. God-breathed. Inspired. Sola Scriptura.

So much of Christian culture revolves around the Bible. It's the source of almost all our primary knowledge about the life of Christ, the formation of the early church, and God's plan for our salvation. I didn't want to analyze my beliefs about the Bible, but I did want to analyze the Bible itself - and in the process, I ended up changing my views on what the Bible is, what it does, and what it means for those seeking God.

The death of Judas and its relation to biblical inspiration

Many people don't realize that there are two biblical accounts of the death of Judas. I strongly suspect that this is because one account is taken as authoritative, and the other account is problematic - and your pastor probably teaches one version or the other on purpose, shying away from the issue because of several differences between the two accounts.

In Matthew 27, the author recounts how Judas committed suicide when he realizes the grievous sin he has committed. Matthew's account of Judas' demise precedes Jesus' trial before Pilate.

¹Early in the morning, all the chief priests and the elders of the people made their plans how to have Jesus executed. ²So they bound him, led him away and handed him over to Pilate the governor.

³When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. ⁴“I have sinned,” he said, “for I have betrayed innocent blood.”

“What is that to us?” they replied. “That’s your responsibility.”

⁵So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.

⁶The chief priests picked up the coins and said, “It is against the law to put this into the treasury, since it is blood money.” ⁷So they decided to use the money to buy the potter’s field as a burial place for foreigners. ⁸That is why it has been called the Field of Blood to this day. ⁹Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled: “They took the thirty pieces of silver, the price set on him by the people of Israel, ¹⁰and they used them to buy the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.”

- Matthew 27:1-10, NIV

In Acts 1, the author records Peter making a case that Judas should be replaced as an apostle. He tells of how Judas' body burst open, then quotes two minute bits of scripture to imply that God preordained the ascension of Matthias to the apostleship.

¹⁶[Peter] said, “Brothers and sisters, the Scripture had to be fulfilled in which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus. ¹⁷He was one of our number and shared in our ministry.”

¹⁸(With the payment he received for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out. ¹⁹Everyone in Jerusalem heard about this, so they called that field in their language Akeldama, that is, Field of Blood.)

- Acts 1:16-19, NIV

Differences in accounts of Judas' death

If you briefly compare these accounts, a number of inconsistencies and outright contradictions present themselves.

• In Matthew, Judas hangs himself. In Acts, Judas either falls or throws himself down and "burst open".
• In Matthew, Judas returns his blood money to the chief priests, and the priests buy the potter's field with the money. In Acts, Judas uses the money to buy the potter's field himself.
• In Matthew, the moniker "Field of Blood" comes from the fact that it was bought with Judas' blood money. In Acts, the name comes from the fact that Judas' insides were spilled out on the land.

I've heard several proposed resolutions for these contradictions over the years, and each resolution involves a lot of mental gymnastics - in other words, you have to accept an alternative explanation for the text that doesn't appear anywhere in the text in order to reconcile the two accounts. This type of mental gymnastics hurt my faith a lot before I deconstructed.

I'll make several quotes from an article by Got Questions attempting to reconcile Judas' death accounts, then discuss why I don't think these explanations are correct.

Hanging vs. bursting open

One common resolution for this contradiction is that there's no contradiction at all if you accept that Luke never actually says that the fall is what killed Judas.

Concerning how Judas died, here is a simple reconciliation of the facts: Judas hanged himself in the potter’s field (Matthew 27:5), and that is how he died. Then, after his body had begun to decay and bloat, the rope broke, or the branch of the tree he was using broke, and his body fell, bursting open on the land of the potter’s field (Acts 1:18–19). Note that Luke does not say that Judas died from the fall, only that his body fell. The Acts passage presumes Judas’s hanging, as a man falling down in a field does not normally result in his body bursting open. Only decomposition and a fall from a height could cause a body to burst open. So Matthew mentions the actual cause of death, and Luke focuses more on the horror surrounding it.

They suppose that Luke transitions from a living Judas buying a field to a dead Judas rotting and falling from a nonexistent tree for no other reason than because it's how it has to be. (Otherwise, there's a contradiction, and there's obviously no contradiction, because the Bible is the Word of God, and God doesn't contradict himself.)

They fail to mention how Judas "fell headlong" (Acts 1:18) prior to bursting open. I find it hard to believe that Luke was so specific that he mentioned how Judas fell, but somehow managed to forget to mention that Judas had hanged himself in the first place.

Who bought the field?

Over the years, I've heard a couple disingenuous explanations about how Judas receives the field in exchange for the 30 pieces of silver, and so he "bought" the field, even though he was already dead at the time.

When Judas threw the thirty pieces of silver down, the priests took the money and used it to buy the potter’s field (Matthew 27:7). Judas may not have purchased the field personally, but he provided the money for the transaction and could then be said to be the purchaser.

This explanation is straightforward, but ultimate fails the sniff test in my opinion. This relies heavily on technicality and essentially boils down to, "Don't read what I wrote, read what I meant, even though it's not what I said." This explanation suggests that, despite the fact that Judas never approached the seller, returned the money used for the purchase to the priests, and died before the transaction even took place, Judas is still the one that should be considered the "purchaser".

GQ goes even further than that in their other explanation and adds some extra-biblical speculation that has no foundation whatsoever, other than in possibly resolving the contradiction itself:

Judas was promised the thirty pieces of silver several days before Jesus’ arrest (Mark 14:11). Sometime during the days leading up to his betrayal of Jesus, Judas made arrangements to purchase a field, although no money had yet been transferred. After the deed was done, Judas was paid, but he then returned the money to the chief priests. The priests, who considered the silver to be blood money, completed the transaction that Judas had begun and bought the field.

This explanation highlights one of the hypocrisies of the evangelical church: you can't add to the Bible or take away from the Bible - unless, of course, it works to the church's benefit. In this case, GQ created an entire backstory to explain details of how Judas planned to buy the potter's field before he had the money for betraying Jesus, then the chief priests decide to complete his pending purchase with the money. All this despite the fact that in the Acts account, Judas is explicitly described as purchasing the field himself, and in the Matthew account, the chief priests purchase the field as a burial ground for foreigners. In the Matthew account, Judas doesn't even hang himself in the potter's field - he just hangs himself, and the field has nothing to do with Judas other than being bought with the blood money that he threw away.

These problems are stark, and they have no solid explanation. There is some speculation about how the contradictions can be resolved, but none of them are founded in any facts of the text.

Prophecy misattributed to Jeremiah

I also want to note that Matthew 27:9-10 attributes the quoted words to Jeremiah, but the closest quote that can be found in the Old Testament actually comes from Zechariah. There are several theories that explain this mistake, some more plausible than others.

For example, the linked Got Questions article claims that when Matthew says "Jeremiah says", he actually means "the scroll of Jeremiah says". The theory they put forward is based on the fact that ancient Jews separated their scriptures into three sections: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. When Matthew says "Jeremiah says", he's referring to "the scroll of Jeremiah", which Got Questions supposes is a euphemism for "the Prophets". The only problem with this theory is everything about it.

GQ claim: Jeremiah was the first book of the Prophets

The section of the Hebrew scriptures called "the Prophets" was divided into two separate sections: the Former Prophets, which tells the story of Israel's history from Joshua to the Babylonian exile, and the Latter Prophets, which includes works that either a) were completed after the Babylonian exile, or b) were set after the Babylonian exile. GQ claims that Jeremiah was the first book of the Prophets, but Jeremiah wasn't the first book of either the Former or Latter Prophets. Jeremiah was the second book of the Latter Prophets.

GQ claim: the Prophets were contained in a single scroll

The "scroll of Jeremiah" theory also presupposes that when we hear of "the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings", these are three literal scrolls containing each of their respective books in order. This is false.

Scrolls generally contained a single book of the Bible as we know them today because they were considered separate works. "The Bible" didn't exist as we know it until long after the first century, so when Matthew said "Jeremiah says", we can be certain that this is a misattribution because Jeremiah would have existed as a separate scroll from the other books of the Latter Prophets - in other words, this theory provides no rational link between Jeremiah and Zechariah.

For the record, there were four books of the Latter Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and one book containing the work of all twelve minor prophets, collectively called "The Twelve". The Twelve would have contained the text of Zechariah, so regardless of where Jeremiah appears in the collection of the Latter Prophets, Zechariah would have certainly been in a separate scroll.

GQ claim: the Hellenistic Jews called Jeremiah's book "Jeremiah"

The "scroll of Jeremiah" theory has a subtle modern bias in it: It assumes that the ancient Jews called Jeremiah's book of prophecy "Jeremiah". The problem is, they didn't.

Ancient Hebrews didn't name any of the books of the Bible for hundreds of years after they were written because they didn't name texts the way we do in the modern world. Instead, they referred to texts using their prominent opening lines. For example, Genesis might have been called something like "God created the Heaven and the Earth". The name Genesis (as well as the purported author Moses) would not be associated with the book itself for several hundred years.

Because of this, the idea that there is no misassociation between Jeremiah and Zechariah falls apart because while, in a strictly literal sense, Jeremiah might say ____ in the book that we call Jeremiah, the name Jeremiah would not be associated with the title of the text or with the title of the scroll containing it until well after the composition of Matthew (which, likewise, was not called "Matthew" until well after its own composition). Therefore, any link between the given name Jeremiah and a text written by or about Jeremiah would be limited to the work he wrote, or a specific quotation within his own scroll - there is, again, no rational link between Jeremiah and Zechariah.

Other GQ theories

One theory is that Matthew is alluding to a group of prophecies including Zechariah and Jeremiah, juxtaposed together. This is problematic because no such composite is known to exist.

Another theory is that Jeremiah has other writings that have since been lost, and these lost writings included the quoted prophecy. GQ themselves note that this is an argument from silence, because as with the prophecy composite, there's no evidence that Jeremiah had other writings than the one that shares his name today.

The most plausible theory that GQ puts forward is that the error was introduced by a scribe or copyist. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this theory, and I think it's quite likely. However, there's one theory that GQ doesn't consider at all.

Maybe the author of Matthew made a mistake

For some reason, it never seems to cross the mind of the author of the GQ article that the author of Matthew simply messed up. He's human after all - he can make mistakes, right?

...right?

Inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration

When we talk about the Bible as a work that was inspired by God, there are two words that inevitably come up: inerrancy and infallibility. These words are used somewhat interchangeably, so let's attach some definitions to these words.

When I say infallibility, I refer to the belief that the Bible contains no factual errors, period. The Bible contains only true theology, only true history, and only true science. If the Bible says there was a global flood, then there was a global flood. If the Bible says God created everything in 6 days and the universe is 6,000 years old, then there's no question.

When I say inerrancy, I refer to the belief that the Bible contains no errors in doctrine. It's a kind of infallibility-lite; the Bible contains only sound theology, but history and science may be incorrect.

(I want to point out that these definitions are interchangeable, depending on who you ask, and some sources flip these definitions.)

Inspiration of the Old and New Testaments

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness...

-2 Timothy 3:16

According to Paul, scripture is God-breathed. The evangelical church has interpreted that statement to mean that God literally breathed the words out of his mouth; in other words, God spoke the words of Scripture, and so the scriptures are the literal Word of God. When Paul wrote his letters, the scriptures were made up of what we call the Old Testament today (as far as we can tell, Paul's letters were the earliest works of the New Testament that were written - so from Paul's perspective, there was not yet a New Testament to be considered scripture).

[Paul's] letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other scriptures...

-2 Peter 3:16

According to Peter's wording, Paul's letters should be considered scripture - "ignorant and unstable people [also] distort...the other scriptures", implying that Paul's letters are also scripture. Literally, this only means that Paul's letters are also scripture (and, by extension from 2 Timothy 3:16, God-breathed), but most Christians apply this more broadly to the entire New Testament.

God-breathed

The English phrase God-breathed is the Greek word θεόπνευστος (theopneustos). The ancient church didn't think this meant God dictated the body of scripture. The word θεόπνευστος was understood as "life-giving" - rather than God "breathing out" the words of scripture, scripture is "life-giving" in the same way that God breathed life into Adam.

The nature of the scriptures

If scripture isn't inspired in the sense that modern evangelicals believe, then this opens up a whole new can of worms when it comes to reading the Bible. What do we do with a text that isn't the literal Word of God? How is the Bible better than the Quran or the Vedas, and how do we know we should trust the Bible?

I think the first thing we should do, now that we know what the Bible isn't, is to find out what the Bible is. What is actually contained within its pages? When we know this, we can know what to do with it.

Myths

As an ancient holy book, I don't think we should be terribly surprised that it contains a lot of myths. In the famous words of Ricky Gervais, "You deny one less God than I do." I think this applies to holy books as well - Christians deny every holy book in the world except their own, but they shouldn't be shocked to learn that there's nothing particularly special about their book. Most holy books contain many myths, so the Bible would be extraordinary indeed if it didn't fit that mold.

Creation

Go ahead and crack open your Bible to Genesis 1. I'll wait.

Read through Genesis 1:1-2:3. You immediately start to get a very high picture of a creator from the text - "God said ____, and it was so" type stuff. It's evokative of a strong God who engages in mighty acts of creation ex nihilo, creating all that is and ever will be with nothing but verbal commands, his will so inexorable that the void itself springs to life to obey him.

Now read Genesis 2:4-3:24. This God is very different than the one we met moments ago. For starters, we immediately see that God doesn't create by giving verbal commands; instead, he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. He plants a garden. He breathes life into a clay doll. But not only does he act in mundane ways, he also has mundane limitations.

In 2:15-25, we see that God seems to take a few different stabs at creating a fit partner for Adam. First, he tries creating the beasts of the field and birds of the sky, but there wasn't a fit partner found. Only then does God realize, "Adam needs another human!" so he creates Eve out of one of Adam's ribs. Problem solved.

Later, in 3:1-13, we see that God also lacks omniscience. He doesn't foresee that the humans he made would be disinclined to obedience. When he comes looking for them, he calls out for them as if he doesn't know where they are. He learns that they have advanced knowledge that they shouldn't (their nakedness). He interrogates them as to how they learned of their nakedness, and only then does he realize that they ate from the one tree he forbade them.

There are a number of inconsistencies between these two ostensibly related tales. For starters, Genesis 1 shows us a God who rules the cosmos with his might, while Genesis 2-3 shows us a God who can't even run a garden staffed by two talking apes. Barring that obvious difference, the text also shows us very different orders of creation. In Genesis 1, God creates plants, then sea creatures and birds, then land animals, and finally man (both man and woman, and in theory, many of them at once, just as God likely didn't create only two goldfish or two cows). In Genesis 2, God creates man first, then plants, then land animals and birds, and then finally woman last.

Beyond all of this, there's another teensy problem: Genesis' creation account appears not to be unique. Many scholars believe that the creation story of Genesis is based on a previous creation myth from ancient Mesopotamia. The Babylonian myth Enuma Elish bears some interesting similarities with the Israelite creation story: the creation of the ordered world from a watery primordial chaos, the separation of said chaos into heaven and earth, numerological significance. Enuma Elish tells a creation story where the gods conspire to defeat Tiamat, the primordial sea goddess, and in the process create the features of our world, such as the sun, the winds, the firmament, etc. Some Bible scholars believe that the Genesis creation account is a Jewish retelling of the same story, but other scholars believe that the Genesis account is a polemic; in essence, Babylonians taught that their pantheon created everything in battle against a primordial sea goddess, but Jews taught that their god could do everything the Mesopotamian pantheon could do, and he could do it better. Instead of conspiring with other gods to defeat Tiamat, Yahweh tames the primordial chaos himself, creating the sea and the heavenly firmament. Instead of giving birth to a sun god, Yahweh creates the sun by power of his will. Yahweh doesn't just create the constellations, night and day, the moon, rain, and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, like Marduk, slayer of Tiamat; Yahweh also creates two more rivers, the Pishon and the Gihon. Marduk sacrificed Kingu, god-consort of Tiamat, and created man with the power of his enemy's blood. But Yahweh created man with the power of his own breath. Marduk needed the help and blessing of several members of the Mesopotamian pantheon to accomplish his goals, but while Yahweh had access to the Divine Council, he instead chose to act alone while the Divine Council watched.

Flood

In Genesis 6-9, we read a harrowing tale of sin and righteousness, obedience and intransigence, giants and half-breeds and utter destruction. We again see God plagued with an anthropomorphic character (regret that he made man, anger, desire to kill). We also see the author plagued with a short memory; Noah enters the ark twice (7:7 and 7:13), gathers two different numbers of each animal (7 pairs of clean animals according to 7:2-3, but a single pair according to 6:19-20 and 7:9) who go into the ark twice (7:8-9, 7:15), sends out a bird to check for dry land twice (a raven in 8:7, who never returns, but a dove in 8:8-12, who he sends out several times until she also doesn't return, at which point he decides the ground must have dried), and checks for dry land multiple times (the waters had abated in 8:3, but in 8:5 they were still abating for several more months; the ground was dry on the first day of the first month in 8:13, but then it wasn't dry until the 27th day of the second month in 8:14). The flood account is clearly one of the most convoluted accounts in the entire Bible.

A popular theory among American and Jewish scholars that explains why the flood myth is so repetitive and contradictory (along with the rest of the Torah) is called the documentary hypothesis. The general idea of the documentary hypothesis is that the Torah was originally composed using bits and pieces of multiple different works, some of which told the same story. Rather than creating a single cohesive story, the editors of the Torah opted to place much of the story side-by-side, leading to periods of repetition and contradiction. The documentary hypothesis has several variants, and these variants are widely accepted in American and Jewish scholarly circles.

Much like the creation account in Genesis 1-3, the flood myth is also not unique or original. There are examples of flood myths throughout the world - which some Christians take as proof that the flood of Genesis is a historical account, and not an allegory or myth.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the most well-known flood stories. In it, Utnapishtim is warned by the gods that man has become too evil, but because of his righteousness, he and his house will be saved. After the flood is over and humanity is decimated, Utnapishtim offers sacrifices. The earliest version of the Epic of Gilgamesh dates to approximately 3300 BCE. (This is a problem for using the Epic of Gilgamesh as a proof of the biblical flood because, according to Answers in Genesis, the Genesis flood happened in 2348 BCE, meaning the earliest accounts of a global flood predate the actual event by a millennium.)

Atra-Hasis is another ancient flood myth. It tells the initial story of how the Sumerian pantheon created humanity by making clay figures with with the blood of the god Geshtu-E (does that sound at all familiar?). The earth god Enlil decides to destroy mankind because of its wickedness, but the water god Enki warns Atra-Hasis of the coming destruction and gives him instructions on how to build a boat that will weather the flood. Anki and Enlil fight when Enlil finds out what he did, but ultimately, they agree not to destroy humanity. When Atra-Hasis leaves his boat, he offers sacrifices to the gods. This tale dates to about 1600 BCE.

The biggest problem with the biblical flood myth is not one of content, but one of timeline. As I mentioned, Answers in Genesis dates the Genesis flood to approximately 2350 BCE, but the Torah itself doesn't appear until after the Babylonian exile ended in 539 BCE. Do you see why that's a problem? The Hebrew Bible as we know it today wasn't written until after Jews were already exposed to creation and flood myths of other ancient cultures in Babylon. Due to the vast similarities between these stories, it's entirely reasonable to assume that the Genesis accounts of creation and the flood were picked up during the exile in Babylon, then re-worked to conform to the Jewish worship of Yahweh during the Second Temple era.

History and law

A large chunk of the Bible is dedicated to explaining how the religious ethno-state of Israel came to be, as well as what religious and criminal laws would rule the country.

The patriarchs

At the end of the flood myth, the Bible takes a turn toward the scholarly and tries to recount the founding of the nation of Israel. After taking a chapter or two to tie up loose ends, Genesis abruptly transitions to telling the story of Abraham in chapter 12. The rest of the book follows the story of the patriarchs as they leave the land of Canaan and eventually settle in Egypt, where Jacob's son Joseph was a high-ranking official.

But there are problems with the story of the patriarchs, too. For example, Abraham had a flock (?) of camels - but camels weren't domesticated for another thousand years, based on the timeline of when the story purportedly took place. Abraham comes from Ur of the Chaldees, but during Abraham's lifetime, the Chaldeans were still living 500 miles away in northern Iraq. Edom appears in the history of the patriarchs, but wasn't populated until almost the time of the Babylonian exile. These sorts of problems are called anachronisms, and they indicate that the text of Genesis was written very late by someone (or someones) with a good knowledge of Mesopotamia, but a poor knowledge of the region's history. Remember how I mentioned that the Torah didn't appear until after the end of the exile period? As it turns out, these anachronisms also point to a time frame of 600-500 BCE as an estimate of when it would make sense for the text to appear - exactly when the exile took place.

The exodus

The exodus of Jews from captivity in Egypt is one of the most dramatic events in all the Bible. The tale of the journey, from the birth of Moses to his death overlooking the Promised Land, takes up almost 20% of the Bible.

There's also very little evidence it ever happened. For starters, there's zero evidence of a millions-strong Semitic slave caste in Egypt. There is evidence that there were some Semitic slaves, but this also comes from a time when Egypt was a political powerhouse with several sizeable minority populations. During this time, there were even Semitic leaders in Egypt - specifically, Lower Egypt was ruled by pharaohs from the Hyksos people, who were definitely Semitic and probably Canaanite in origin.

There's no evidence of a massive slave upheaval in Egypt. Millions of Canaanites never rose up, gave Egypt the middle finger, and set off on their own following a tornado through the desert. There's no archaeological evidence of millions of people wandering the desert for decades on end, which is an event that would have left massive scars on the land that we would see clearly today in the archaeological record - but we don't. I think a lot of people forget that the whole purpose of a 40-year exodus was to kill off the unfaithful generation of Israelites who refused to enter the Promised Land the first time around, and that means there should be millions of Semitic bodies either burned or buried in the desert, but there aren't.

The cities that the Israelites supposedly interacted with during the exodus are also problematic. Many of the cities didn't exist at the time of the exodus, which is another anachronism that points to a later author.

The difference between the exodus story and prior myths of the Torah is that it's uniquely Hebrew. Many scholars believe that the exodus is based on a true story, however separated the written account is from the reality of what happened. The exodus story is where we start to see evidence that we're dealing with real events, even if those events are still full of inaccuracies and anachronisms that suggest they were compiled long after they happened. For example, ethnic names in Genesis tend to reflect the post-exile time period, but in Exodus, the name Moses is an actual Egyptian name from that time period. There was no slave uprising in Egypt during the time of the exodus, but the Hyksos people (Canaanites who ruled Lower Egypt) were frequently at war with Upper Egypt at this time, and the Hyksos were eventually dethroned by the Egyptians. There's no evidence of what happened to the Hyksos after they were expelled from the throne, but scholars have postulated that some Hyksos returned to Canaan - not as a large group, but gradually over time. It's not hard to see an undercurrent of truth in the myth of the exodus story: a large caste of Canaanites oppressed by the Egyptians (through conquest instead of slavery), ultimately driven out in a bloody confrontation (through conquest instead of plagues) and forced to wander in the wilderness for decades (it's a long trip to Canaan from Egypt, and while an individual can make the trip in weeks, the Hyksos themselves would have left gradually over generations). Add in a giant cyclone, edible snow, and a teensy bit of creative license, and you have Exodus.

The conquest of Canaan

One of the bloodiest parts of the Bible is the conquest of Canaan, when the Israelites claimed the Promised Land for themselves. Entire cities were brutally massacred. Or were they?

The answer to this question is, again, probably not. Archaeologists studying the Bible have looked for evidence of the conquest for decades, and that search has mostly turned up negative results (Answers in Genesis articles notwithstanding). Many of the towns mentioned in the conquest account didn't exist yet during the conquest (for example, Arad and Heshbon weren't founded until 300 years after the conquest, Dibon wasn't founded until 400 years after, and Gibeon 500 years after). Many others were described inaccurately (for example, Jericho was destroyed several hundred years before the conquest, and Ai was abandoned a thousand years before; neither city was repopulated until after the conquest was over). Even some cities that certainly existed at the time showed no evidence of warfare during the time frame attributed to the conquest.

Perhaps most damning to the conquest story is the fact that ancient Israelites are ethnically Canaanite. Israelite culture took over the region during the fall of Canaanite culture - not through bloody conquest, but through a gradual replacement process that took decades or more.

If we take the Hyksos exodus as true, then the story of the conquest is probably a muddying of the historical waters. Rather than engaging in warfare before they left their kingdom in defeat, they retold their story such that they entered into another land and won their right of ownership through conquest. Land conquest is barbaric by modern standards - indeed, it violates international law in the 21st century - but it was commonplace throughout most of human history, so establishing a claim on the land via military action would help reinforce a strong sense of attachment to their land and their history, which is something that would be very important to a 6th-century BCE Jewish population returning home after over a generation of exile.

Prophecy

Another huge chunk of the Bible is the writings of prophets. Evangelical Christians love to spend a good deal of time studying the future-predicting sages of both the Old and New Testaments, from Jeremiah and Ezekiel to Jesus himself.

Prophecy, simply put, isn't really that important. Evangelicals believe prophecy is a body of grand predictions from thousands of years ago regarding events that either haven't happened yet, or else have happened already and been fulfilled. But there's also a large body of prophecy that never came to pass. There's also prophecy that hasn't happened yet, according to the evangelical interpretation. But at the end of the day, this work simply isn't that important because it neither tells us anything about our faith now, nor gives us any actionable advice on what to do in the future. But it's for both of these reasons that I think most evangelical Christians grossly misunderstand what prophecy really is.

If you read the prophets of the Old Testament in their own context, you can see that they're not really concerned with predicting hundreds of years' worth of future events. They're concerned with what is going to happen here and now, next week, next month - and not usually prophetically in the sense that they divined the future. Usually, the foreknowledge of a prophet was the result of either a) the general idea that God will punish people for iniquity, b) the ability to predict future events using reason, or c) in some narrow cases, specific visions from God (or maybe, it was just weed). And - most importantly - prophets gave warnings that had a tremendous impact on the faith of their contemporaries, along with actionable advice on how to change. Christian interpretations of prophecy are utterly useless, but contextual interpretations of ancient prophecy as messages for ancient people can reveal a great deal that is still useful, even to this day. Some things we should have learned from the prophets, had we been reading closely:

• God doesn't care about our religious traditions
• God hates government corruption
• God hates business corruption
• God expects good works toward one another
• God expects us to act justly
• God expects us to care for orphans and widows
• God expects us to care for the poor and sick
• God expects us to care for immigrants

For more information, read Isaiah, Amos, Ezekiel, and Hosea (each of these bullet points come directly from these books).

New Testament

The New Testament is much shorter than the Old, and it's made up of several different types of literature. The Gospels are mostly biography. The epistles are mostly doctrine. Acts is history. Revelation may or may not be prophecy.

Gospels

There are four gospels. (Duh.) Have you ever read them side-by-side? When I was as young as 12, I was afraid to read them side-by-side because I was afraid they would contradict. When I started deconstructing, I decided that it was time to do a full-on, side-by-side comparison. And what I found was pretty surprising: they didn't just agree - they agreed almost perfectly.

It wasn't a good kind of surprising. It was suspicious.

When Matthew, Mark, and Luke all report something, the wording is extremely similar, and often identical. If I ask three different people to describe the same event, I would expect to get three very different descriptions because different people use different words and employ different sentence structures. Even a relatively simple description should be quite different between two people. But the first three gospels agree using similar language, event order, explanations, etc. What gives?

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are known collectively as the synoptic gospels, and they all three give very similar versions of Jesus' life. Bible scholars call this the "synoptic problem", and it's unique to the first three gospels. The synoptic problem has several resolutions, but the leading theory among scholars is called "Marcan priority".

The Gospel of Mark contains very little unique content - over 90% of its content is shared with either Matthew, Luke, or both. This has led scholars to believe that Mark was written first (this is true of both Christian and secular Bible scholars). Matthew and Luke both have a lot more unique content, but they also share a lot of content in common with one another. Many scholars believe that this shared content that Mark excludes came from a shared source called the Q document. The composition of the gospels thus looks like this:

1. Mark writes his gospel
2. The Q document is written
3. Matthew and Luke use Mark and the Q document to create their gospels, often copying extensively or even verbatim. Both authors add their own unique passages.
4. John writes his gospel, which is not strongly connected to Mark and shares little in common with the synoptics.

Most scholars believe that the gospels weren't written by their named authors. For starters, the gospels are all anonymous, and our modern nomenclature arose several hundred years after their composition. If the gospels were genuinely written by Jesus' immediate disciples, you would expect that claim to be front and center from the beginning as a way to lend credibility to the accounts. You also need to consider when the gospels were likely written - Mark was most likely written sometime after 65-75 CE, if for no other reason than because Paul never seemed to be aware of a written account of Jesus' life, and Paul's last epistle is generally considered to be Titus, completed around 67 CE.

There's one more point I want to make about the gospels: While the gospels we have were originally written in Greek, they were most likely based on other written sources that were written in Aramaic. The reason for this assertion is that first-century Judeans spoke Aramaic These Aramaic sources may have been eyewitness testimony, or else they may have been based on an oral tradition. We don't have access to the Aramaic sources, so it's impossible to say. What we can say for sure is that Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic, and the earliest records of Jesus' ministry would have almost certainly been in Aramaic as well. When we read the Greek gospels, we're reading a translation of an account of unknown provenance without access to any of the original work. The gospels are the best source about Jesus we have, but I think it's reckless to assume that everything we read in the gospels is accurate - not only are the gospels a secondary source, but they were written by unknown authors with unknown biases and unknown intentions. Christianity started as a Jewish sect, but thanks to Paul, the number of Gentile Christians quickly outpaced the number of Jewish Christians, and by the time the gospels were written in Greek, the broader Christian church likely had little to no knowledge of Aramaic records of Jesus' life, acts, and sayings. All this is to say that by the time the Greek gospels were published, the church writ large probably had very little, if any, firsthand knowledge about Jesus.

Epistles

The epistles are the meat and potatoes of the New Testament. Most of Christian theology comes either directly from the epistles or (usually) from our interpretation of the epistles and how we put them together with each other and the broader body of scripture.

The epistles are also the earliest works of the New Testament. None of the epistles' authors mention the existence of the four gospels, nor do they quote them. There are sporadic cases of an epistle recounting an event from Jesus' life that is recorded in the gospels, but these aren't quotations and probably point to common knowledge about Jesus as shared in the church.

The epistles also don't really seem to agree with one another on matters of theology. James is convinced that a person is justified by works (Jas 2:24) while Paul insists that justification is by faith alone (Romans 3:28; Eph 2:8-9), even if faith necessarily includes works (Eph 2:10). James believes that Christians should keep the law (Jas 2:10), but Paul teaches that Christians don't need to keep the law (Romans 6:14, 1 Cor 10:23). The church taught that Christians should avoid food sacrificed to idols (Acts 15:29), but Paul thought it was fine as long as it didn't create a "stumbling block" for "weak" Christians (1 Cor 8, and specifically 8:8)...except when he thought it was bad two chapters later (1 Cor 10:14-21)...except when he again thought it was okay a few verses later (1 Cor 10:27-31).

I could go on for awhile, but I think you get the point: Even the earliest Christian teachers couldn't agree on the finer points of theology, even if they agreed on the broad strokes. And these epistles are where we get our theology, at least in theory - the source doesn't agree with itself, so how do we proceed?

Revelation

For an entire subculture of evangelical Christians, Revelation belongs in a class of its own. Jesus warns his favorite apostle that God is going to destroy the world, take over as direct monarch, and punish the wicked for all eternity.

But is Revelation really a prophetic vision of the future? A majority of scholars say no, and if you look back in church history, the inclusion of Revelation in the biblical canon was extremely contentious.

Revelation, as it turns out, shares striking similarities with a literary genre that was massively popular around Jesus' time: apocalyptic literature. Apocalyptic literature was popular in times of oppression because it almost universally featured God performing mighty supernatural acts to rescue the oppressed, destroy the oppressor, and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity for all. Sound familiar? It should. If you've ever read the Apocrypha (or if you've watched popular media like the Supernatural TV series, which draws from the Apocrypha), this motif appears frequently. Of course, this also appears in canon works such as Daniel and Revelation, and to a lesser degree, Isaiah. There are several features that seem to define most apocalyptic literature, and Revelation fits each of these explicitly:

• visions of the future
• journeys to heaven
• conversing directly with God or angels
• symbolic, often bizarre, imagery
• political discourse masquerading as religious revelation, usually involving one group persecuted or oppressed by another
• portraying our world as a backdrop for a larger battle between good and evil
• end times and eschatological punishment of the wicked

I'm sure you were on board with all of these bullet points except one: political discourse. A common Christian belief is that Revelation maps end times language to the fall of the Roman Empire because the Roman Empire was powerful during the early church. However, there's a strong case to be made that Revelation isn't using the Roman Empire as a narrative device to explain future events; Revelation is about the Roman Empire.

Some Roman history

In 64 CE, Rome was destroyed by a fire. The Roman emperor Nero, who was (possibly falsely) known as a tyrant, allegedly pointed to Christians as a scapegoat for the fire. In his magnum opus (Annals), Tacitus, a first-century Roman senator and one of the most celebrated Roman historians of all time, records that Nero framed Christians for the fire and persecuted them in Rome as punishment. This was followed by several years of persecution, until Nero's death in 68 CE.

There are several reasons to doubt that Nero was a tyrant. For starters, he was extremely popular with the Roman lower class; only the aristocracy opposed Nero, including Tacitus. He was known for debasing the office of emperor, personally appearing in low-brow plays and street performances and performing other acts considered below the dignity of the throne. It is widely believed among scholars that Nero was a popular and charismatic leader who was subjected to negative rhetoric by his contemporaries in the ruling class. Because those contemporaries also controlled temples, education, and history books, Nero was successfully slandered.

In 68 CE, Nero died by assisted suicide after he was exiled during a successful coup. In the years following Nero's death, a legend formed suggesting that Nero would return, resurrected and leading an army to destroy Rome, possibly to exact revenge upon those who took his throne. Christians of this era, who either suffered under real Roman persecution or heard the aristocratic propaganda against Nero, started to fear that Nero would, in fact, return to reclaim the throne and eradicate Christianity.

After a period of upheaval following the death of Nero, Domitian eventually rose to power. In 89 CE, Domitian reorganized the Roman imperial cult and stylized himself as a living god, using the official title "Master and God". Domitian was severe toward those who opposed him, and the early Christian church stood against Domitian and his worship. It's not clear from the historical record, but there may have been isolated incidents of Christians being arrested or even executed for refusing to worship the emperor.

Some Revelation

Revelation was originally written to give comfort to Christians who feared suffering under Roman rule. The Roman Empire features heavily in the symbolism of Revelation:

• the seven-headed beast was worshipped by the people (Rev 13:4); according to the Roman imperial cult, Roman emperors were divine following their death, and Domitian even claimed divinity while he was still alive
• Babylon is a name for Rome in other apocalyptic texts, such as 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch. In Revelation, the seven heads of the beast are described as seven mountains upon which the great Whore sits (Rev 17:9), which can be understood as the seven hills of Rome
• the seven heads of the beast also represent seven kings (Rev 17:9). Five of these have fallen, one is living, and one has yet to come (Rev 17:10). This can be understood to mean the five Roman emperors who died (Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, and Nero), Vespian (who, from the past perspective used in the text, was still ruling), and Titus (who had not yet ascended to the throne, and whose rule lasted only two years).
• the wounded head (Rev 13:3) and the eighth king who was also one of the previous kings (Rev 17:11) represent Nero and the legend that he would return to the throne (Rev 13:3). Nero's popularity with the general public was such that, had he returned, the people would have followed him willingly; according to Dio Chysostom, a Greek historian, "...everybody wishes [Nero] were still alive. And the great majority do believe that he still is..."
• the image of the beast (Rev 13:14-15) refers to statues and coins bearing the emperor's likeness
• the number of the beast (Rev 13:18) refers to the numerical value of name Nero Caesar. In the first century BCE, Jews adapted a Greek practice, which the Jews called gematria, whereby number values are assigned to letters in a word and the values of a word's letters are summed. The sum is then semantically associated with the word itself. The gematria sum of "Nero Caesar" in Hebrew script is 666. This could be a mere coincidence, but a less common alternate spelling of Nero Caesar yields a different gematria sum: 616 - and several manuscripts of Revelation actually report the number of the beast to be 616, which confirms that 666 is a gematria of Nero Caesar

Because we can so convincingly tie the beast, the whore, and the mark of the beast to Rome and Nero, we can safely accept that Revelation is not a prophecy of a horrible end to come, but rather an apocalyptic allegory meant to remind Christians that Jesus is in control and our future is with him, no matter what happens. It's even possible that Revelation may serve as a polemic against Rome; since Nero was supposed to return, reclaim his throne, and destroy his enemies, Christians may have appropriated the tale into one of triumph: Jesus will instead return, claim the throne over the whole world, and utterly destroy his enemies - then punish them forever for good measure.

So where does this leave us?

The Bible is a rich document. It's full of history, biography, non-fortunetelling prophecy, theology, and even myth. Much of what is contained in the Bible is undoubtedly true, and the Bible itself clearly contains discourse on the nature of God, life after death, punishment of the wicked, and more. The Bible defies summary in so few words. But at the end of the day, there's simply no justification for the idea that the Bible is the Word of God.

The Bible contains hundreds of contradictions. Some of these are innocuous, such as how many times a rooster crowed before Peter denied Jesus (none in John, once in Matthew and Luke, and twice in Mark). Others have a major impact on theology, such as whether Christians should follow the law (no according to Paul, yes according to James). This eliminates both the ideas of infallibility (because the Bible clearly makes factual errors) and inerrancy (because the Bible clearly has contradictory doctrine). The Bible, however useful it might be, is obviously not the literal word of an omniscient God.

This doesn't mean I don't believe the Bible. In fact, in a perverse way, I can now embrace the Bible more fully than I could before. When I believed the Bible was the infallible Word of God, I had to tread carefully in order to preserve that belief. If the Bible contradicted itself (and it obviously does), I had to find a way to resolve that contradiction. There were contradictions that I had a hard time addressing without mental gymnastics, and that hurt my faith. Now, when I see something about the Bible that doesn't make sense, I can step back and take a look at the passage in its context and try to make a decision about the best way to view that passage - not to interpret that passage based on other parts of the Bible that absolutely must agree, but how to view that passage in light of what I know of God, Jesus, and the rest of the Christian framework. Most of Christendom for all its history has believed that the Bible is a book written by man about God, and has treated its words accordingly. Don't fear for my soul - I'm in good company.

Perhaps most importantly, the concept of the Bible as the Word of God is...unbiblical. The phrase "Word of God" appears many times in the Bible. Fortunately, the Bible itself identifies what the "Word of God" is: Jesus! In the Gospel of John, we read: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God....And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us..." (John 1:1,14). The evangelical insistence that the Bible is the Word of God (and especially the rejection of all translations but the KJV and its derivatives) is actually a form of idolatry. The Bible itself never claims to be God's spoken words, and the authors of scripture certainly never seem to think they are writing down God's spoken words. That's a modern doctrine, and I would argue that the belief that the Bible is God's literal Word is far more dangerous than the belief that it isn't.

So what do we do with the Bible? I believe we do exactly as Paul told us to do in 2 Timothy 3:16: use scripture for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness. Because the Bible isn't the word of God, we no longer have to worry about how to handle harsh laws from the Torah, or how to approach commands from God to destroy cities and murder women and children - and we certainly don't have to explain away God's atrocities in the Bible, because if God has a consistently good character, then those are just human myths that got attributed to him. We need to look at what happens in the Bible and decide for ourselves what matches God's character, or Jesus' character. We need to think and train ourselves in what we think Paul is trying to accomplish with his theology, and if we think Paul's theology is lacking, we can modify it in ways that we feel are correct. Peter and Paul argued over theology, and this is recorded in the Bible (Gal 2:11-14). Paul wasn't perfect, and neither was Peter, and we need to train ourselves to decide which we think is right, and for what reasons - as Paul said, we must "work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling..." (Php 2:12).

Statement of faith

I believe the Bible is an imperfect collection of man's musings on God. I don't believe God authored any of the Bible; instead, the Bible is man's best guess at interpreting his encounters with God.

I believe the early Old Testament is largely myth and allegory, with small kernels of truth spread throughout. I believe the first 11 chapters of Genesis are entirely fabricated based on earlier Mesopotamian myths. I believe the rest of the Torah is made up of bits of truth that have been mangled and retold so many times that, by the time they got written down, they bore little resemblance to the real events they described. I believe the post-conquest, pre-exilic books of the Bible are probably at least partly true, but I also believe these stories should be taken with a grain of salt.

I believe the later Old Testament is at least as accurate as other nation-state written history of the time. Post-exilic Hebrew history is fairly accurate and aligns well with the known archaeological record. This makes sense, considering the fact that our best information on how the Old Testament came to be suggests that it was written, compiled, and edited together during the post-exilic period, using both recent and ancient source texts.

I believe that the theology of the Bible is invaluable in forming our own theology. But I also believe that the Bible has a long history of creating theology out of human dogma. I believe that Jesus came, in part, to correct that tendency and point us to a more perfect religion. I also believe that once Jesus was gone, we reverted to our old ways. When I think about what I want my theology to look like, I think of Mark 12:28-31:

²⁸And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?”

²⁹Jesus answered, “The most important is, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. ³⁰And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." ³¹The second is this: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." There is no other commandment greater than these."

Matthew goes even further by adding, "On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets." There is no greater call in following Jesus than in loving God and loving your neighbor, and according to Matthew, all the law can be fulfilled by following these two simple rules.

Conclusions

For more information on approaching the Bible as a man-authored document, see The Bible is Dead; Long Live the Bible in The Chronicle of Higher Education and Jesus, Not the Bible, Is the 'Word of God' in Baptist News Global.