I have a friend who says the Earth is approximately 6,000 years old. My friend is a strong believer in Jesus, but that particular insistence and teaching of his about the age of the Earth is un-Christian. The reason it’s un-Christian is because it’s easily shown to be untrue. According to the Bible, Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6) and “the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me” (John 18:37). Jesus’ biggest publicist, Paul the Apostle wrote, “Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor” (Ephesians 4:25). Therefore anything that is false and untrue is un-Christian.
To be fair to my friend, I should qualify that he believes this is true. Therefore, he’s not behaving in an un-Christian manner. He’s just misguided, as all humans are in one way or another. My friend says the world is approximately 6,000 years old because if you add up all the various events and time periods stated in the Bible from the beginning to the birth of Jesus, and then add 2,000 years to get from Jesus to the present, the sum will be approximately 6,000 years. The mistake in that logic is that it treats all of the Bible as truth, and the Bible as a whole cannot be taken as entirely true. There are two main reasons that the Bible as a whole cannot be taken as entirely true. First, it lacks internal consistency; parts of the Bible contradict other parts of the Bible, therefore all the contradictory parts can’t be simultaneously true. Second, many things stated in the Bible are inconsistent with what we now know to be factual and true from other, reliable, verifiable, external sources of information today.
Some people who consider themselves to be devout Christians would accuse me of heresy for believing and saying and writing such things. That doesn’t matter to me. They’re humans, and humans are not my God.
It’s a mistake to view the Bible in its entirety as a literal, unerring, documentary account of supposedly factual, accurate, historical events and sequences. Rather, the Bible is like a pan full of watery gravel and sand and silt taken from the bed of a gold-bearing stream. There is real gold in there, and a lot of it, but you have to look for it by sifting through the water and gravel and sand and silt. It’s worth it. But if we intend to follow Jesus, who claims to be the personification of truth, then we have to sift and separate the truth from the untruths.
Parts of the Bible were passed from one person to the next, and from one generation to the next, as oral tradition and accounts and stories and tales, long before they were ever written down. Even if some of the original content somehow came first from God, through whatever form of direct communication or revelation, it was then filtered through human brains and minds and personalities and cultures and concepts and words and language in passing from one person to the next. At some point, individual humans began writing these narratives down. Thus the narrative is filtered by humans again, choosing which version of the traditional oral narratives to put on the page. Then sects and individuals and groups within sects make pronouncements and choices about which writings are to be included in the canon of holy scripture, or removed, or revised. Then the language of the people changes with time, from Hebrew to Aramaic to Greek to Latin to Old English to Middle English to modern English, or whatever, and the texts have to be translated into contemporary languages, and choices of translation and interpretation must be made. Like pure rainwater falling from the sky, before it even hits the earth, it starts picking up particles of dust and dirt. Depending where you catch it along its journey, you might be drinking from a pure mountain spring, or a muddy river, or a swamp, or a toxic cesspool.
Back to the analogy of the gold-bearing stream: the gold is what I call the ‘signal’, and the gravel and sand and silt I call ‘noise’. The truth is the signal. The other stuff is noise. The Bible has a lot of signal, and also a lot of noise. It’s a gold-bearing stream, not a golden stream. Like a birder in a rainforest, listening for the call of a rare bird that’s sometimes heard but never seen, you have to be quiet, and listen, and know the sound of the rare bird, as well as knowing which sounds are not the sound of the rare bird. If you mistake the noise for the signal, then you can get lost. ‘Barking up the wrong tree’, we say where I come from. And if you mistake your own thoughts for the signal, then you are in real trouble. A third kind of mistake is deciding that because there is gravel, it must all be gravel, and you throw the gold out with the gravel, the baby Jesus out with the bathwater. There are many ways to get lost.
We keep looking and listening for the signal. Sometimes we pick it up very late in the game, like the outlaw who recognized Jesus at the last minute, hanging beside him on their separate crosses (Luke 23:40-43). Just keep swimming.
Like Blind Willie Johnson sang in the old gospel blues song, “Nobody’s fault but mine, nobody’s fault but mine, if I don’t read and my soul be lost, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”
[For the best analysis of internal inconsistencies and historical and factual inaccuracies in the Bible, see The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible by Robin Lane Fox, published by Knopf, 1992, ISBN-10: 0394573986, ISBN-13: 978-0394573984.]
ReligioMedici 