Questioning the Bible

When I was in college, I took a course on Johannine literature. In case you’re not familiar with the term, Johannine literature concerns itself with the Gospel of John; 1, 2, 3, John and the Book of Revelations. The course was taught by the priest who chaired the religious studies department, a dour old Augustinian who wanted his students to memorize what he said instead of asking questions. That didn’t settle well with me.

Since I wasn’t exactly getting what I wanted from our instructor, I started pulling volumes of commentary from the college library’s shelves. Our priest, I prefer not to think of him as a teacher, had neglected to discuss the disputed nature of the texts – as far back as the earliest days of the church. If I remember correctly, there was some question as to whether or not the literature attributed to John was written by John during his lifetime or at some point following his death – at which point the texts in question could only have been constructed by his followers and not by John himself. Even Eusebius and Origen considered parts of the works attributed to John to be questionable in origin.

Anyway, I’ve been reading Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto, and he has been spending a good deal of time pointing to the internal and historical inconsistencies of the Christian bible in much the way the critics of Johannine literature had done when I was a student all those years ago. For example, Onfray makes the following claims:

• Historical records tell us that the traditional punishment for persons committing the crimes that Jesus was accused of was stoning, not crucifixion;
• Pontius Pilate would have spoken Latin and Jesus Aramaic, making it impossible for them to communicate with each other.

These are just a couple of Onfray’s examples. He provides many more which anyone interested in the validity of the bible may want to explore.

Coincidentally, I was watching a television show on cable last week (I’ve forgotten if it was one of the Discovery or History channels) about devices of torture. The crucifix was one the devices featured. The anthropological and archaeological experts interviewed pointed out that the traditional depiction of the crucifix as a cross was not historically accurate, that it would have looked like a “T” and not the traditional representation of crossed beams.

Together, all of these pieces of evidence reminded me that I had once begun to question the reliability of the bible and had somehow agreed with some other part of myself not to think about it. To accept what might not be the truth at all as some sort of divine revelation. I’m not sure why I needed god so badly that I would have allowed myself to stop questioning what was so clearly in need of questioning.

I’m certainly not an academic, but I’m not sure you need to be to ask whether it is better to rely on facts that agree with our experience of the world rather than stories entirely at odds with the facts of history. It bothers me that what so many of the religious are unwilling to consider the degree to which human intervention may influence what they believe to be divine revelation.

Academics and scholars have spent centuries commenting on the bible. Is it so difficult to believe that some of the earliest of these, also believers, took advantage of their learning to improve upon what they themselves saw as inconsistencies and deficiencies in the bible? Not really. I wish more people would have the courage to question, even if it frightens them to do so.