How I Became a Humanist #16: Who Wrote the Bible?

You're probably sitting in a chair reading these words.  There's a good chance that this isn't the first essay of mine you've read.  If you've read all the essays in this series up to this point, you've probably picked up on my tone.  You know how my paragraphs flow.  You might have noticed that I break paragraphs up for ease of reading, rather than keeping large chunks of text together.  You have a sense that there will be a picture somewhere between the top of the page and the third paragraph.

If I inserted a paragraph from another person somewhere in this essay, you might notice.  You'd be more likely to notice if that person was from a different part of the country or a different part of the world.  If the person were much older or younger than me, he or she might use language differently from me.  Education would play a factor too.  If you had some question about whether or not I was the writer, you could even observe how I use commas.  Or you could put my essays from this series in a word cloud generator and see if the author frequently uses the same verbiage that I do.  There are any number of ways that you could figure out whether or I not I was the author. If the essay were written by someone else, you'd probably guess it.

Probably a German Bible

Scholars use this same sort of analysis to determine who wrote particular books of the Bible.  They look at the words they use in the Greek.  "Does this person write like they're from around 100 CE or from 300 CE?"  "Does the original manuscript look like it was written by someone who was born in Tarsus or from someone born in Alexandria?"  Dialects change with time and location.

Of course, this only concerns who wrote the books as a whole and not whether or not additions have been made to the books over time.  Consider the game of telephone you might have played as a child only now the game is being played with the written word.  Remember that the Bible was copied by hand for about 1400 years of Christian history.  Scribes sometimes wrote notes in the margins of their texts and sometimes those notes were mistaken for scripture by subsequent scribes (remember that for a time the Bible didn't have chapters or verses and the copy the scribe was working with was likely the only copy the scribe would have had.  He couldn't cross-reference with another copy.  He had to make his best guess.)

How do scholars know what belongs and what doesn't?  First, they take the earliest manuscripts we have and compare them.  They compare them for age, but also compare them for location and lineage to the degree that's possible.  When they see differences between the various manuscripts they try to discern when the difference took place and where the divergence began.

One of the most interesting cases of this, to me, is the case of John 8 - the story of the adulterous woman who nearly gets stoned.  This is the beloved story in which Jesus says, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone."  The problem is that this story didn't start showing up in copies of John until several centuries after Christianity had begun and it's wasn't in the majority of copies until about the tenth century.  We even have evidence of church leaders arguing over whether or not the story should be in the Bible.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that it doesn't belong in the John 8 is that when the early manuscripts include it in the Bible, they sometimes place the story later in John.  Other times they actually place the story in the book of Luke.  If you remove the story from John, the text flows just fine.  I'll add, it's a weird story for John.  John isn't concerned about grace for the disenfranchised in the way the other Gospel writers are.

Mark Twain's writing from less than 200 years ago is easily distinguishable from writing from this century

You might think that learning all of these thing would have destroyed my faith immediately.  It didn't.  While the evidence is overwhelming and the methods not what I had expected before my studies, the Bible is still a powerful book.  Moreover the New Testament is not adulterated in the way its detractors sometimes suggest.  There are only a few changes from the original manuscripts and they don't change the overall message of the New Testament.

The same this is true of authorship of various books.  We don't really know who wrote much of the New Testament.  We have confidence that Paul didn't write all of the books ascribed to him, but those other books do reflect Pauline theology.  Maybe they were written by a secretary.  Maybe they were written by a student.  Perhaps they are apocryphal.  Here, I'm mostly talking about the pastoral letters, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus and also Ephesians.  The other books ascribed to Paul are generally considered to have been written by him.  And again, the central message of these other texts coheres with the New Testament as whole.

While this information was troubling to me in some ways, it never made me question my faith in God
.  It did lead me away from certain kinds of Evangelical theology.  When I look back, I have to admit that these things were difficult to digest even if they didn't quite challenge my faith.  It's hard letting go of one understanding and picking up a new one when the belief in question is central.  Heavens, we even resist admitting that we were wrong about a referee's call during a sporting event.

How I Became a Humanist: Broadening Horizon's (Part 1): An Introduction to Philosophy

I grew up believing that the Bible was the only book I needed to know and that King Solomon (of Israelite history) was the wisest person who ever lived....

I'd grown up without much emphasis on academics.  My mom didn't care if I brought home As or Fs on my report card.  "You're a smart kid, you'll figure it out," she'd say.  And until I started studying theology, that's exactly what I did, even in college.  I had no concept of money or time or anything.  Almost overnight, my theology classes had transformed me.  I read constantly. First, I read the Bible cover to cover repeatedly. Then, I turned to theology and church history.  I researched topic after topic and found myself spending hours online reading texts from www.earlychristianwritings.com, which is, as of this writing, still a great repository for primary sources from church history.

On account of my studies, I could tell you why the early Christians didn't believe in the ascension of the soul.  I could tell you why any progressive who claimed to love the Gospel of Thomas clearly hadn't read the whole thing.  I could explain Paul's doctrine of the Fall based on what was commonly believed by Pharisees of his day.  I had gone from nearly failing out of college to being a rigorous academic.

One fall semester, at the advice of a friend, I took a Critical Writing and Literary Analysis class from a man named Tom.  Tom was supposed to be one of the most challenging teachers on campus.  Really, he just made students think.  He scared away half his students with a syllabus full of assignments. After half the class dropped the course, he'd reduce the work load and have us focus on digesting the readings. I still wonder if the school's administrators knew that he did this.  We loved it.

Tom had us read Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche and so much more.  We analyzed the world from their perspective.  Tom played the Devil's Advocate, making sure that we both understood the author's perspective and took it seriously.  We wrote a lot.

The exposure to primary philosophy documents reshaped my mind.  At once, I fell in Love with Aristotle, Nietzsche and Hume - so I read them, especially Aristotle.  I read his Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics and more. His insights were so much deeper than Solomon's. It was undeniable. The realization slowly led me away from believing that the best knowledge to be had came from scripture.

Reading philosophy was more than just a ideological shift for me.  Not only was I openly embracing reason over faith, I was subjecting myself to scrutiny.  I began to use the perspectives of the authors I'd read to deconstruct myself.  I found myself compelled to criticize my own perspectives as if they were those of an intellectual adversary.  Deeply held convictions frequently changed overnight.  It was a terrifyingly stressful experience that gave me panic attacks for months.  It changed me forever.  Even now, when I consider an idea, a multitude of voices challenge my evolving perspective from a variety of angles.  I bring friends and authors into the perspective and even past versions of myself.  It's exhilarating.  It's bad sleep hygiene too.

One of the most important documents I read was a short essay by David Hume entitled A Standard of Taste.  The essays asks how people know what they know.  It changed the way I looked at knowledge.  We never have it all.  We learn bits and pieces.  We become experts in tiny fields of large subjects.  Information can make us less ignorant, but it never really makes us smart.  I came to distrust teachers who didn't see their own knowledge this way.  How could they teach me to think if they didn't understand the limited nature of human knowledge?  What could they show me if they thought that seeing one painting made them as much a connoisseur of art as analyzing a thousand?

The same thing happened when I read Emerson's American Scholar, an essay that tells us to read dead authors poetically, to be inspired by them rather than reading them like French Neo-Classicists.  If Karl Marx were alive today, he would say something different than he did in the 1800s, so we shouldn't apply his words directly to our situation.  We don't know what he would say, so we shouldn't pretend.  But, we can take his work and the situation to which he was writing and take inspiration.  We can extract things from the text and reapply them.  This is true of all dead authors. It's true of living ones too. It's even true of past versions of ourselves. The lessons we learn in one situation rarely directly apply to situations that follow. If we think they do, we may be led to apply the right lesson to the wrong situation.

How I Became a Humanist: How the Creationist Killed Creationism

I was visiting my fiancee Sarah at Northern Michigan University in Marquette.  While there I met a man named Jason who was dating Sarah's roommate, Rachel.  Jason was currently captivated by a Creationist by the name of Kent Hovind.  While the ladies were out doing other things, he and I spent time together watching Kent's videos.  I was intrigued and continued watching them after I returned to Rochester.

I watched video after video.  I believed every word that came out of Kent's mouth until he mentioned an early Christian bishop by the name of Irenaeus.  Kent claimed that Irenaeus' doctrine of theosis was identical to the one taught by the Latter Day Saints - something most Christians would consider heresy.  Irenaeus believed that Christians continue to grow to be more and more like Jesus even after death.  This is a doctrine that may surprise Evangelicals, but it is not heretical and very different from the LDS teaching that humans will themselves become Gods.  I understood Irenaeus' doctrine because I'd actually read his works.  It was quite clear to me that Mr. Hovind hadn't.  And that's where everything fell apart.

I started looking at the sources Mr. Hovind shared.  Upon inspection, they appeared suspect.  They were often websites that read like something out of the National Inquirer.  Perplexed, I decided to visit my science teachers.  I first went to an earth scientist who taught at Rochester.  I shared with him the earth science that Mr. Hovind taught concerning dinosaur fossils next to human footprints - a common evidence used by creationists.  "I've visited that site," he said.  "Those are not human footprints."  I was also told that my teacher had started out as a young earth creationist, but that geology had overwhelmed him.  "This happens a lot," He told me.  "It even happens at creationist schools."  He gave me some fraction of how many people left a particular creationist geology school believing in an old earth. I was shocked then. I'm not now.

I then went to my biology teacher to ask her about evolution.  She immediately pulled out an article about present day examples of evolution among bacteria.  She explained to me that evolution not only happened, but continues to happen today and that we have plenty of evidence of this.  Both of these people were and continue to be firm believers in Jesus.  My former biology teacher prays for me from time to time to this day. There's a good chance that she's actually reading this. Hi!

I did, around this time, also subscribe to Kenneth Ham's Answers in Genesis newsletter.  It didn't really grab my attention.  Ham's primary answer is that we should have faith.  He uses other "evidences," but it's clear that his faith is the guiding factor.  Blind faith seeking justification was always a non-starter for me. His newsletters sat mostly unread.

It wasn't much later that I sat in a Genesis class where I was taught that Genesis 1 was a polemic against polytheism, rather than against Darwin.  Who would have expected that a document written thousands of years ago was concerned with something other than modern science - obviously I'd not considered it.  It's the questions we fail to ask the leave us with the wrong answers.

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For those who are interested, the creation story in Genesis 1 is better read with this understanding.

Here are the days enumerated side by side:

(1) Light and Darkness   (4) Sun, Moon and Stars

(2) Sky and Sea              (5) Birds and Fish

(3) Land                         (6) Land animals, creeping things, plants, humanity

You can take time to see this for yourself.  Notice also that the text several times mentions "all kinds" and "every."  I used a literal translation in the link so that readers will see the words "Greater Light" and "Lesser Lights" rather than "Sun, moon and stars."  The reason for this is that the words "Sun and Moon" are named for deities in the Phoenician language, of which Hebrew is a dialect.  So instead of saying those names, the author omits them.  You'll only see this in a literal translation, but it's something contemporary readers would have noticed.  They would have understood it as the attack on polytheism that it was.  

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After a while, I came to trust the scientists and distrust the creationists.  I came to understand evolution.  This didn't create an immediate problem for my faith.  Indeed, much of Christianity believes in evolution.  I came to find it odd that so many of the Christians who think that "Believing in evolution is heresy," absolutely love C.S. Lewis.  It's still true today, and it's still weird. Most of them only read Mere Christianity, the Screw Tape Letters and his children's novels, so they don't understand that he wasn't an Evangelical.  I'm digressing.