God’s Truth
Problems? Of Course! Criticisms of the Bible
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
Problems? Of Course!
Having dealt with reasons for believing our guide moves on to solve the problems unbelievers have. In one of his typically homely introductions, he tells us that “Einstein’s propositions nowadays look almost as incomplete as Newton’s did a half-century ago”. Why this scientist says this, I do not know. It can only be ignorance. I admit that it is very likely that Einstein’s theories will be superseded by more successful ones—eventually! But at present satellite observations show that Einstein’s propositions are as accurate as the experiments allow, and that is pretty accurate.
Of course, Phibber wants us to believe that only God can understand nature and mankind must put up with degrees of approximation. In just the same way, we might come across problems with our belief of the bible but, like our scientific analogy, we should be satisfied with a degree of approximation knowing that the difficult bits will be revealed eventually.
Now Phibber tells us that the Epistle to the Hebrews says (Heb 1:3) Jesus was “the express image of God’s person” or as my own bible puts it “the very image of his substance”. And John’s gospel says Jesus’s words were “the very words of God”. Again my bible disagrees somewhat saying (Jn 14:24) “the word which you hear is not mine, but the father’s who sent me”. The singular “word” plainly means message and not the precise words of the message, but it suits a Christian to believe that Jesus, being God, spoke God’s words. If you believe in the Trinity, I suppose it must be true, but even Christians need not believe in the Trinity since it was invented long after Jesus had died.
Most people would consider that Jesus was a man and spoke the words of a man. The quotation from Hebrews is clearly intended to prove that God’s book maintains Jesus to be God. But it says no more than Genesis 1:27 where God creates man “in his own image”. Never mind! We are all images of God but Jesus is more of an image than the rest of us—he is the very substance of God and speaks the very words of God. Trinity, Schminity! What does it matter as long as you can make words mean whatever you like?
The purpose of it all is for Phibber to assert that Jesus was way above us. It is therefore not surprsing that we cannot understand him but we should not, like the Jews, use it as an excuse. So saying, he launches us into the solution of bible problems. His first step is to write a whole chapter telling us not to trust experts because they can be wrong. Quite!
Every Word True
Phibber informs us categorically that the bible—the whole of it—is true. Why? Because the bible says so! He gives us quotations to prove it:
The scriptures cannot be broken.Jn 10:35
It is easier for the heaven and the earth to fail than for one tittle of the law to fail.Lk 16:17
Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed in me, for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings , how shall ye believe my words?Jn 5:46-47
They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them... If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither shall they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.Lk 16:29-31
An unbeliever might not be impressed by these quotations so Phibber calls upon the atheistic biology professor J B S Haldane for support, perhaps because, being a scientist, he makes it sound more official. In fact, Haldane simply points out that either the bible is the word of God or it is not. There is no intermediate position. It cannot be regarded as the infallible word of God and yet contain mistakes. Christians cannot have it both ways. Haldane’s scientific view is that it can easily be shown to contain errors, it therefore cannot be infallible. Christians like Phibber are determined that the bible is the inspired and infallible word of God—it is all true. If it seems to contain errors a closer look will show that errors they are not.
It is common for Christians to prove that the bible is true by quoting from the bible. It is one aspect of God’s Truth. The fact, that it is an absurd tautology evades them. Even these quotations are absurd because, according to Christians, Jesus himself defied the laws of Moses in declaring all food clean. If we are to accept Jesus’s own words as expressed in these biblical excerpts then Jesus could not have declared all foods clean without the heavens and the earth disappearing. You cannot have it both ways. Unless you are a Christian!
Phibber tells us that if Jesus accepted it as true because it was written in the scriptures then it was true and we should believe it too. In case anyone is not convinced by Jesus’s acceptance of the veracity of the scriptures, our teacher informs us that the Devil believed it (Mt 4:11), so there!
Our scientific guide seems to allow nothing for the growth of knowledge especially over the last few years. The teaching of Moses was a distillation of millennia of experience and was sensible enough for relatively primitive societies. However, even at the time of Jesus, it was not state of the art—Greek learning, rejected by many Jews at that time, was more advanced. Why then should we believe today that which was not even true then? Our tutor is hugely impressed by the way Jesus silences tempters and critics alike by appealing to the scriptures. “This was absolute truth. There could be no gainsaying scripture”. For our teacher the reason is that it was the very word of God. Two thousand years later he thinks just like a first century Jew—so much for scientific progress!
Of course, it was absolutely true for a Jew—it was their law—the law by which they lived their daily lives. The Jew appealed to God as the power which gave the law to them and which would ensure that it was obeyed. Jesus’s supposed enemies, the Pharisees, were exactly those who were most liberal about the proper interpretation of the law. They believed that the earth is not heaven and that nothing on earth is perfect including the law. Nobody could be certain precisely what God had in mind when he told Moses how the Chosen People should behave. And Moses was a man. Even he wasn’t perfect. Even Moses did not get it exactly right.
This is why Jesus was able to confound his critics. They were obliged to recognise that, by their own rules, Jesus’s interpretations were often legitimate. Our professor of veracity, Phibber, wants none of this, though. Because Jesus could confound his critics by his erudition, our teacher believes all Christians can. As long as they know the difference between Genesis and Revelation it does not matter that they are as dense as a neutron, degrees in science notwithstanding, just believe and all is forgiven, whatever the lie! God’s Truth.
Phibber offers us more quotations in which Jesus claims that prophetic descriptions apply to him (Lk 18:31-33; Mt 26:24; Mark 9:12; Jn 5:39). There is no knowing that Jesus said these words, they being written perhaps half a century or more later, and there is only the assumption of Christians since the gospel writers that scriptural prophecy applies to Jesus.
Messiah
If we can get the gist of the story of Jesus from the gospels, it seems that on entering Jerusalem Jesus might have thought of himself as the Jewish messiah, and he declared it to the people. That, however, does not make him the Christian Son of God. Perhaps it is asking too much for a Christian to see the difference, but it should not be asking too much of a scientist who brags of applying the “same spirit of analytical inquiry” to his biblical studies as he applies to his scientific work. Anyway for our analytical inquirer the prophetic references to a messiah of the scriptures meant Jesus because the New Testament tells us that Jesus said so. Jesus was the Son of God and could tell no lie, so the whole of the Jewish scriptures are absolutely and literally true.
Since the Old Testament claims, Phibber insists, no less than 3,808 times that it is the message of God then it must be! Our guide sounds more like an alchemist than a scientist. Perhaps he believes that by trying 3,809 times to convert lead into gold it will succeed. Or by asserting 3,809 times that 2 + 2 = 5 then it will be so. Apparently the prophet, Haggai, asserts his work is the work of the Lord more frequently than any other prophet. I suppose he must therefore be the most revered prophet of them all. And these prophets who wrote down the exact words of God confirm, would you believe, that the scriptures are truly the word of God! This man, Phibber, has an analytical brain?
But wait! A miracle! Phibber now says to us that these claims “may be true, or they may be false” and later on we shall have to try and decide which. Blow me down! I thought he’d already decided but now he is telling us it is “an open question”. Meanwhile let us concentrate, he tells us, on what the claims are.
The claim in the New Testament is that it too is absolutely infallible because the gospel of John, which you will observe is a part of the New Testament, tells us it was transmitted to the gospel writers by none other than the Holy Ghost (Jn 14:26; 16:13). It is this Holy Ghost which made sure that the New Testament was correct and that all the apostle’s of Jesus are inspired by God. Fallible memory did not come into it because the infallible Holy Ghost had perfect recollection. So the whole bible, Old and New, is inspired by God and is totally infallible. This makes utter sense to our analytical tutor.
Funny then that the four gospels contradict each other. Oh, but our professor has an answer for that. It is all the fault of translators and copyists. The apostles were guided by the Holy Ghost but evidently not the translators and copyists. A curious oversight by God, one might think. What too of the different styles of the biblical writers? Simple! God did not dictate to them. He chose exactly the man who He knew would write precisely the biblical text He required.
So now our tutor sums up for us. None of this “proves that the bible is written by God”. “I have not made the claim that because the bible makes certain claims, those claims must be true”. “We must beware of making” the mistake of reasoning “in a circle”. Oh dear, we misunderstood all along! All he was saying was that the bible is emphatic about it. It might be true or it might be false but, because it is so emphatic about it, it cannot be in between! Phibber now addresses this problem.
Ten Commandments
You have to believe in the bible because of the Ten Commandments. If people don’t believe in the Ten Commandments you get trouble. God said so and “all the people saw the thunderings and lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet and the mountain smoking” (Ex 15:18) when God gave His rules so they must be true.
Believe all this and there is power in your life according to Phibber. But suppose you believe in the “misguided philosophy” that there are no miracles and the Ten Commandments are just useful rules for an orderly society made up by a few pious lawgivers. “All the power and authority is gone”. “If God didn’t give the commandments He won’t punish you for breaking them”. So you have to believe all the bible.
Let us pause a moment. Is our tutor telling us that if we do not believe in miracles, we are misguided? And that Christianity works because the God of love will punish people who break his commandments? So people who break commandments whether Christians or not are punished by a God who loves us all, even sinners. Or are only the unbelievers punished?
Phibber maintains that, because so many people nowadays do not believe in the authority of the bible, we have so many crimes and drug addicts. And it is all because of the big headed Victorian scientists—Darwin, for example, whose Origin of Species sold out on the day of publication, making people believe that there was no Creator. Rotten archaeologists and historians said the bible was full of mistakes and could not have been written by eye-witnesses. Phibber comforts us that we now know Victorian scholarship was a “hotch-potch of truth and error”, our tutor’s way of saying that some of it was wrong, though much of it was, and is still, correct, and yet the theological colleges lapped it up and sent generations of young ministers on the path of the higher criticism.
Now “what did this mean?” our guide asks and answers rhetorically. It meant that if Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did not write the gospels then… we can not rely on what they say about Jesus! And if so then people will gradually believe less and less. And that is exactly what happened, Phibber says. Plainly Phibber, the scientist, is not interested in what is true but what is best for Christianity. That is, of course, God’s Truth.
Valid Only in Religion
Ernest Phibber moves on to talk about those who argue that the bible is valid in matters of religion but not necessarily so in matters of history. That means, he tells us, that when Jesus says in John 13:34: “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another”, we can accept it as true, but we are entitled to be skeptical about the infant Moses being saved from the bulrushes. Curiously enough our guide had told us earlier, in case we did not know it already, that the commandment to love your neighbour comes from Leviticus 19:18. How then can it be a “new commandment” as Jesus in the New Testament explicitly states? And, if this is not a new commandment then how can we accept as true Jesus’s statement that it is? In short, our mentor has given us an example of a biblical statement which he says many churchmen can accept as true, even those that disbelieve many other parts of the bible, yet the example is itself manifestly untrue!
That aside, our tutor makes a distinction between parables which have a message but are not historically true and the historical truth of the scriptures. Some would argue that the scriptural stories can be used like parables as illustrations of a moral truth. “No”, says Phibber. Paul tells us (1 Cor 10:11) that “all things happened to them by way of example, and they were written for our admonition” and so they must be true! Our mentor writes with emphasis that these things “happened. Actually happened”. They happened, actually happened because Paul the apostle wrote in the bible that they happened, actually happened. It must therefore be true! Not surprisingly, Jesus believed that everything in the Old Testament also actually happened and refers to it regularly. Well I would like to bet, though it is one which is impossible to realise, that if Jesus believed that the Sears Catalogue had been handed down by God then he and our mentor would have believed it, and would have referred to it.
Phibber is more than glad to believe that a man can be hideously tortured to death but can then pop up and chat on several occasions to his friends and indeed to a multitude. Indeed, he finds it surprising that many people are unable to believe this. However he does give us the reason for his own irrational belief. It is because “if Christ be not raised then your faith is vain” as Paul put it (1 Cor 15: 17). Phibber tries his hardest to plug the holes lest his faith be challenged.
A man who believes that the whole of an ancient compendium is God’s infallible revealed wisdom would believe that Doonesbury is the Necronomicon.
Phibber tells us that if Jesus is wrong about some aspects of the Old Testament because the Old Testament is wrong then how can we believe anything he says? But this is only a problem for someone who believes that Jesus must be infallible, being an aspect of God. If you believe that Jesus was wholly a man then how could he know about the errors in the scriptures. There are many Christians who would feel no less Christian believing that Jesus was a man sent or selected by God to fulfil his plan.
If our mentor argues that God, through the Holy Ghost, can ensure that holy scriptures can get written without direct compulsion or dictation but merely by the breath of God in a man’s ear then why shouldn’t the same principle work for Jesus. This is the opposite of Monophytism in the sense that Jesus has one nature but it is wholly human not wholly divine. An early view of the nature of Christ by Theodore of Mopsuesta which later was declared heretical probably expresses the idea best.
Ignorant Prelates
Christians today are conditioned by the dogmas of ignorant prelates almost two thousand years ago yet still are compelled to believe what they taught even though other prelates, possibly less ignorant, had argued for a truth more agreeable to our modern day state of knowledge. But don’t expect someone who is an expert on God’s Truth to look for facts. Instead he tells us that, if Jesus was wrong in believing an erroneous scripture then he can be wrong about being Son of God. Well, a rational man would agree that he could have been wrong about being the Son of God but not because he was wrong in believing mistaken scriptures. If Jesus was indeed the Son of God then quoting any number of “fallible” scriptures will not demonstrate it. It is a question purely of belief, as it always has been.
If Jesus was not the Son of God then he was either deluded or he was using the expression Son of God in a more diluted sense than Christians understand it. So when we read in the gospels that Jesus declared himself to be the Son of God, conceivably the gospels were correct but not as Christians innocently read it. It goes without saying that if Jesus was not literally the Son of God then Christians are deluded. But that might be too close to truth rather than God’s Truth.
Our teacher now digresses slightly to tell us that many of his friends are people of “very keen intellect”. He is not apparently seeking more kudos but simply saying that intelligent men—in this story women and wives, are uneducated but have common sense!—often lack sense. The purpose is to get to a quotation by the apostle, Paul, deriding wisdom (1 Cor 1:20-29) because wisdom did not reveal God. A further quotation by Jesus (Lk 10:21) confirms that learning and wisdom are derided by God who deliberately hides the truth from them—according to Jesus.
So now we have it! The scientific qualifications and analytical brain of our mentor are shams! He does not accept them himself because Jesus says God hides the truth from such men. That explains it. I think I am being analytical in dissecting our tutor’s arguments and finding them full of lies whereas he, following his Christian founders, Jesus and Paul, decries learning and knowledge as false because God yields only falseness to clever men. Christians therefore should never be learned lest they lose God’s revealed Truth. Plainly, then, what appears to me to be true is false and what appears to be false is true. There you have it! Christian truth is lies!
Infallible?
Phibber wonders next why so many biblical scholars fail to accept the bible as infallible. Among the reasons he throws into the ring are fear of seeming ridiculous and failure to appreciate the limitations of subjects outside their own sphere. The first is wholly clear if our own scholar is anything to go by. He has no fear whatsoever of seeming to be ridiculous and has written a whole book to prove it. Others will be understandably more circumspect.
Failing to understand subjects outside their own sphere is totally ironic since our professor, though an expert in the bible, evidently has made no attempt to study it other than as an expression of his own irrational belief. He has not attempted to study it seriously as a subject outside his own field and instead denigrates those who study it within their own field. He begins the book by denigrating experts precisely because he knows that much expert opinion renders his own simplistic views absurd.
There are many reasons for not believing what experts tell you but the principle one can be summed up in the question, “What’s in it for them?” Our tutor claims to be an expert in reading the true meaning of the bible. So what’s in it for him? The answer is likely to be that he has built up his whole personality and psyche on his childish beliefs, yet he is a trained scientist, he would have us believe, so his analytical brain must trouble him greatly. He has to suppress his own doubts by rationalising his beliefs to us. Regrettably, every line he writes says “self-deluding pious twit” and nothing that he writes says “carefully analytical scientific scholar”.
On the other hand, when a plethora of scholars of Greek, Hebrew, history, archaeology and the bible all find evidence that the bible is in some respect or another not true, what could be in it for them? I cannot see why there should be any huge conspiracy by these people to undermine the bible. Are they being paid vast sums of gold by a foreign power—the Soviets who want to undermine Christianity to convert the Western world to Communism? Sorry, they’ve collapsed, haven’t they? Then it must be Gaddaffi and the Libyans who want to undermine Christianity to convert the Western world to Islam. Or, Osama bin Laden, or… something!
Phibber completes this chapter by giving us another homely nugget of science to prove his own credentials, and, of course, wide scholarship, since our tutor is evidently a physicist whereas here we get a bit of zoology. June Goodall furthered our knowledge of chimpanzees not by dissecting them but by effectively living among them for several years. The purpose of the anecdote is to explain that we should look up to the bible rather than look down on it. We should learn from it not just learn about it. We are told the “wisest bible scholars” whose “conclusions are most likely to be right” are those who learn from it.
Now it is plain that the “wisest bible scholars” is our analytical tutor’s way of referring to himself and people like him. That is why their “conclusions are likely to be right”. But those of us who are actually analytical see that the scholar who dissects the bible thereby taking account of its construction, history, the beliefs and circumstances of the time it was written, the objectives of the writers, the influence of editors and copyists, the contradictions and falsehoods thereby introduced, will have a sounder basis for learning anything from the bible. It would be surprising if, after all this, the result was nothing. Ancient stories whether they be Greek myths, Germanic fairy tales, Hindu Vedas, Jewish scriptures or Christian gospels usually encapsulate tribal histories and mores. They contain truths even if they are not true. To assert that they are infallibly true can only mean that someone has lost their reason.
