The Sins of Scripture (4 page)

In a narrative about the child Jesus at age twelve, we are told that he was capable of confounding the greatest teachers of the land (Luke 2:41–52). Stories showing the hero possessing godlike wisdom as a child constitute a familiar theme in the mythology of many great leaders.

We cannot read the rest of the gospel narratives without confronting the image of Jesus as a worker of miracles, from walking on water to stilling the storm. If we believe these stories in any literal way, we have to presume that God suspended the laws of the universe in the first century to allow Jesus to demonstrate his divine origins. The only alternative is to be forced to face the fact that we have in the gospels only mythical accounts of Jesus’ life. In either of these rather sterile choices it becomes very difficult to assert that these narratives are the “Word of God.”

When we turn to the writings of Paul, the claim that the words of this rather passionate, intensely human and clearly conflicted man were in any sense the “Word of God” borders on the absurd. Since no one would ever confuse Paul with God, there appears little rationality in the attempt to confuse the words of Paul with the “Word of God.” Paul was many things, but divine was not one of them.

When Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, “I wish those who unsettle you would mutilate themselves” (5:12), is there something godlike in his words that I am missing? How about his advice to women to keep their heads covered in worship or his assumption that the ancient Hebrew myth of Adam and Eve proved that women were inferior to men (1 Cor. 11:2–16)? When Paul or one of his disciples instructs women to subject themselves to their husbands (Eph. 5:22), slaves to obey their masters (Col. 3:22 and Eph. 6:5) and children to obey their parents (Col. 3:20 and Eph. 6:1–3), surely that is not the eternal “Word of God” speaking. These are the reflections of a rather discredited cultural sexism, an immoral oppression of human life and an obsolete guide to good parenting being revealed here. When the holy God is identified with such bankrupt ideas, surely God is not well served.

In contemporary studies of the way the gospels came into being, scholars are all but unanimous today in asserting that Mark was written first and that both Matthew and Luke incorporated Mark into their narratives. The problem for the excessive claim of a divine origin for the scriptures then comes when we discover that both Matthew and Luke changed Mark, expanded Mark and even omitted portions of Mark. That is not exactly the way one treats something identified as the “Word of God,” or even something thought to be inspired by God. The problems grow when these same studies reveal that Matthew and Luke periodically disagreed with Mark and thus contradicted him. Luke went so far as to edit Mark’s poor grammar, treating his Marcan source very much as an English professor might treat a freshman’s term paper.
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Mark ended his gospel with the dangling phrase “for they were afraid” (16:8), which Luke simply omitted (24:1–12). Clearly the gospel writers themselves had no concept that either they or their sources were writing the “Word of God.” Luke indeed insists that he is writing only after consulting other, presumably conflicting accounts, to compose an “orderly one” (Luke 1:1–4).

The gospel writers are also not averse to ripping biblical stories out of their Hebrew context and using them to buttress their arguments for Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophets. A defensive writer who twists or tweaks his sources so that they will serve his purpose hardly gives evidence of the fact that he is writing something that might be referred to either as the revealed “will of God” or the inspired “Word of God.” Matthew is, in my opinion, the writer most guilty of this abuse. He bases his virgin birth story, for example, on Isaiah 7:14. Yet he translates that text to read that a virgin shall conceive (see Matt. 1:23) when the text in Isaiah not only does not use the word “virgin” but says that a young woman
is
with child. In the world I inhabit, if a young woman is with child, she is hardly a virgin! He also twists either a passage that refers to a holy man as a nazirite (Judg. 13:5), or a passage that uses the word
nasir,
which is translated “branch” (Isa. 11:1), to suggest that the Hebrew scriptures had centuries earlier referred to Jesus growing up in the village of Nazareth (see Matt. 2:23). That is a rather huge stretch even for a gospel writer!

Later, the church fathers would build the superstructure of the Christian creeds, doctrines and dogmas on the same shaky foundation of assuming that the Bible contained the irrefutable words or “Word of God.” So the virgin birth was placed into creeds along with the cosmic ascension, though I know of no reputable biblical scholar in the world today who thinks that either ever happened in any literal way. Nor do scholars today believe that the prophets predicted things that Jesus actually did. That is a gross distortion of scripture. Yet much of the Christology debate in early church history depended on that assumption. Not only was the Jesus story in the gospels written some forty to seventy years after the earthly life of Jesus had come to an end, but it was written quite deliberately with the Hebrew scriptures open so that the story of Jesus could be conformed to those expectations. Various doctrines of the Christian church quake in instability with this undoubted recognition.

The idea that God would plant holy hints of Jesus’ life into the writings of Jewish prophets some six to eight hundred years before the birth of Jesus is fanciful enough, but when you then suggest that as these books were being copied anew in each generation—for that is the only way an ancient text could be preserved—God watched over the copiers to make sure that they did it correctly, and that in times of war and natural disaster God guarded these sacred texts from destruction so that when Jesus came people would recognize him as Messiah because he fulfilled these expectations, rationality rebels and proclaims, “There is something wrong in this equation.” It violates everything we know about how the universe operates. It defines God as a super manipulator.

When all these things are put together, it becomes clear that the traditional claim that the Bible is in any literal way the “Word of God” is problematic at best and absurd at worst. To the degree that the historical liturgies of the church are themselves dependent on these same biblical claims, it becomes obvious that they too will collapse as soon as these things become consciously evident. The future of the Christian enterprise, therefore, does not look secure, at least to the extent that it is based on the premise of the authority and literal historicity of scripture. The hysterical denial of these obvious biblical truths that mark the life and rhetoric of right-wing churches, both evangelical Protestant and conservative Catholic, is not a sign of hope. It matters not that these churches attract thousands of worshipers who come craving both authority and certainty. This is rather just one more sign of an internal sickness that has not yet been adequately faced by Christian leaders. The constant attack of these right-wing voices on Christian scholarship is a clear tip-off that they cannot face reality. When people cannot deal with the message, the ancient and still regularly practiced tactic is to shoot the messenger.

The greatest tragedy that has arisen because of the way these claims have been made for the Bible, however, is not just the impending collapse of organized religion, as frightening as that now is to many; it is rather in the moral dilemma that comes when religious people face the evil and pain done to so many people over the centuries in the service of these biblical claims. It is high time to call the church and this use of the Bible itself to accountability.

Text by text I will seek to disarm those parts of the biblical story that have been used throughout history to hurt, denigrate, oppress and even kill. I will set about to deconstruct the Bible’s horror stories. But destruction is neither my aim nor my goal. I want above all else to offer believers a new doorway into the biblical story, a new way to read and to listen to this ancient narrative. I want to lead people beyond the sins of scripture embedded in its “terrible texts” in order to make a case for the Bible as that ultimate shaper of the essence of our humanity and as a book that calls us to be something we have not yet become. I want to present a different portrait of Jesus, not as a mythical hero, not even as a divine invader of humanity, but as a God presence, a new dimension, even a new vision, of what human life was meant to be.

There is a story told about Elijah in the book of 1 Kings (19:4–18) that guides my efforts. Elijah had been defeated and hounded by his enemies, who thought him responsible for the fact that the popular religion of the people was collapsing. He prayed in his despair for God to take away his life, since in his mind the original covenant had been forsaken, the altars thrown down and the prophets slain. God, instead, invited Elijah to stand upon a mountain and to watch a great and mighty wind rend that mountain into pieces. Then came an earthquake that broke open the great rocks and finally there came a fire of consuming power. God was not in any of these. Yet each of these incredible and fearful acts of destruction had to be endured before Elijah was able to hear “the still small voice.” God was in that small voice, and the divine message urged him to return to the work to which he had been called.
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I am now convinced that institutional Christianity has become so consumed by its quest for power and authority, most of which is rooted in the excessive claims for the Bible, that the authentic voice of God can no longer be heard within it.

So I want to invite people to a mountaintop where together we can watch the mighty wind, the earthquake and the fire destroy those idols of creed, scripture and church, all of which have been used to hide us from the reality of God.

When that destruction is complete, my hope is that we too will then be ready to hear that still, small voice of calm that bids us to return to that vocation which is, I believe, the essence of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. We are to build a world in which every person can live more fully, love more wastefully and be all that God intends for each person to be. In that vocation we will oppose everything that diminishes the life of a single human being, whether it is race, ethnicity, tribe, gender, sexual orientation or religion itself. That is what I see Jesus as having done, and because he did exactly that, people were able to see, to meet and to experience God in him in a radically new way.

That is the Jesus I hope to sketch out when the deconstruction is complete, so that my readers will close this book not with the shreds of a destroyed Bible in their hands, but with the vision of a new humanity before them. An ambitious task? Perhaps! But that is the primary task of reformation.

THE TERRIBLE TEXTS

T
hese lines occur in the first chapter of Frank McCourt’s award-winning memoir entitled
Angela’s Ashes
. It is the moving story of growing up poor in Ireland, being subservient to and shaped by a radical nationalism that was deeply infused by tribal religion. Indeed, this book comes out of a world where to be Irish is to be Roman Catholic. It reveals with dramatic power the impact on this struggling family as birth after birth after birth is endured as their way of being loyal to their religious heritage. After all, the Bible urged reproduction on the people, and those injunctions have been interpreted by the Roman Catholic Church to be a divine command against birth control. Those who find their identification in this religious system must be loyal to its teachings and therefore they must walk in lockstep with its prohibitions against anything that contravenes God’s order to reproduce.
Angela’s Ashes
chronicles the human cost of poverty, as well as the loss of life to death and the diminishment of life to disease that poverty constantly exacerbates. It portrays a father so overburdened with the anxieties of his life and by the absence of any hope for a way out in the future that he drowns his pain in alcohol. It also portrays a mother, old and haggard before her time, beaten down by the combination of inadequate diet and constant pregnancies and enduring the traumas that a woman in those circumstances has to confront. The most trying trauma was quite obviously the history of both the births and the deaths of her own children. She was able neither to care adequately for these children nor to keep them from being born. She could neither protect them once they were born nor change her circumstances.

Two things sustained this family emotionally, and both were radically interconnected. One was the delusional hope that Ireland would someday be not only free and independent, but mighty and admired among the nations of this world. The other was their devotion to the “true faith” of the Catholic Church, which, they believed, would secure for them a better life in the world to come. The corollary of this heavenly dream was, of course, their fear that if they were not faithful and obedient to Mother Church, they would have to absorb the wrath of Father God. They would then face the eternal punishment of the literal hell that was said to await not only all Protestants, but also those Catholics who compromised one of their church’s principles or deviated in any detail from their church’s “true faith.”

If the Catholic Church said that birth control was sinful, then sinful it was. There was no further debate. The Church of Rome told its people that all of its teachings were based on the clear dictates of the “Word of God” found in the Bible, where God’s first commandment to the original man and woman was “Be fruitful and multiply.” It did not seem to register or even to matter in any ultimate sense that many of the McCourt family babies died prematurely. Indeed, it happened so often that McCourt reports in this memoir that he and his siblings actually looked forward to such deaths because they got a day off from school to attend the funeral, an occasion that was accompanied with much sympathy and even increased amounts of food to eat. It did not seem to matter that the lives of both parents were being destroyed in this process, since through it all the teachings of the church were affirmed and the fires of hell were averted. McCourt’s parents were taught constantly by the one they called “Father” that the sex act was sinful unless it was used for reproduction. The choice between sexlessness and hell had no great appeal. So they opted for the practice of sex that was indivisible from reproduction, no matter how desperate life was, no matter what each new pregnancy did to the entire fabric of this family, whose dietary, emotional and financial resources were never sufficient to absorb one more baby. Mother Church had spoken and this loyal Irish Catholic family would not think of refusing to obey the pope. One wonders where morality lies in this sad story. Were responsible choices available? Is the absence of family planning holy or is it evil? Is the text “Be fruitful and multiply,” as it has been traditionally interpreted, the “Word of God”? Or is it a “terrible text” that reveals one of the sins of scripture, since it has been used inappropriately throughout history to maximize the authority of the leaders of the church?

Agatha Yarnell is not a Roman Catholic. She is rather an evangelically oriented, Protestant fundamentalist Christian. As a psychologically damaged woman, she had sought medical help and counseling after a prolonged postpartum depression following her third pregnancy. Her doctor urged her and her “born-again” husband not to have any more children, warning them both that the emotional resources of this family were simply not adequate to encompass another pregnancy. But in the “Word of God,” Agatha and her husband read that God had enjoined the people of the world to “be fruitful and multiply.” We must obey the Bible, this couple concluded, rather than the words of some doctor, who may not even be a “true believer.” He could be an agent of Satan tempting us to deviate from the revealed divine truth. So another baby was conceived, and then another, until Agatha was the mother of five.

Then came that all but inevitable break. It was so sudden, so severe and so final. Agatha Yarnell systematically took her five children, beginning with the youngest, and drowned them one by one in the bathtub. She had to chase the oldest one in order to catch him after he saw that his four brothers and sisters, lined up side by side on the mattress, were lifeless. But he was caught and soon took his place beside his siblings on that same bed.

Agatha next placed a call to the police and announced, “I have just drowned my five children.” Today she is in a jail in the southwestern part of the United States under a life sentence with the conviction of murder written indelibly across the record of her life.
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The court judged the obvious fact. This woman was guilty of this heinous crime. It did not occur to the members of the jury, charged with rendering a verdict, that it was their responsibility either to judge the motive or to explore any extenuating circumstances. All that mattered to them was that this was a criminal act and Agatha Yarnell had clearly done it.

Yes, she is guilty. Is she, however, the sole guilty party? Were there any accomplices? Of course there were. No human being is an island. We now know that each of us is created by millions of interactions and actions that have taken place in our lives. Her husband, for example, was hardly without some fault, some responsibility, even if it was nothing more than the sin of bad judgment. He heard and he ignored the medical opinion. Yet he was judged by the law to have been innocent, since he took no overt action to destroy his children’s lives. He walks the streets today as a free man.

Was her church guiltless? Are institutions responsible for expressing what they believe are divine laws, even if those laws turn out to cause enormous destruction? Ignorance has certainly never been declared a crime. But this question does raise the issue of the responsibility of an institution that becomes obsessed with its ability to tell the gullible and easily manipulated what God thinks. Can anyone say that this particular church, which placed its rules ahead of a woman’s health and her children’s safety, acted in Agatha’s best interest or that of her children? Or is this not one more place where what some call the “Word of God” turned out to be nothing more than a “terrible text” that has yet one more time brought destruction on the lives of innocent people? Is it not time that we raise to consciousness the destructiveness of the sins of the Bible and the terrifying price they exact? How can words like “Be fruitful and multiply,” which brought such pain to Frank McCourt’s mother and siblings and to Agatha Yarnell, her husband and their five children, be called the “Word of God”?

My journey into these destructive aspects of the Bible begins with an examination of the biblical setting of this particular text. It occurs at the end of the first story of creation in the book of Genesis.
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In this narrative God’s wondrous work of creation is almost complete. The sun has been fashioned to give light by day and the moon to give light by night. The firmament that separated the waters above from the waters below has been established. Fish swim in the sea. Plants have taken root in the soil of the earth and birds have been made to populate the sky. Then the climactic sixth day arrives. We are told that on that day, by the hand of God, the earth brings forth “living creatures,” which are identified as “cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth” (Gen. 1:24, NRSV). God then pronounces the world, as it exists thus far, to be good (Gen. 1:25). The crown jewel of this divine creative act, however, is still to come. So God is quoted as saying, on that same sixth day, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth” (Gen. 1:26). The text goes on to be specific: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27).
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It was at this moment on the final day, before God was to begin the holy rest from all the divine labors that would establish the Sabbath, that God is said to have spoken these words: “Be fruitful and multiply.” The first rule, the first divine command that God issued, was given to the only creatures who bore the divine image, and these words clearly stated that these human creatures were intended to be dominant over all the other creatures on this planet earth. “Be fruitful and multiply,” that is your divine duty. Doubt it not, for this is the “Word of the Lord.”

Since the idea of God speaking to give commands to the created ones seems somewhat inappropriate in our age, the question we need to ask is, What did these words mean to those ancient people who framed them? How were they first understood? What was the human experience that caused our ancestors to “hear” God say these words? Why did this message gain such power that people began to say that God commanded us to “be fruitful and multiply”?

Understanding the context in which anything is written is essential to grasping the import of the message. The context of the words “be fruitful and multiply” is both specific and universal.

On the level of specificity it must be noted that these words are generally attributed to one of the priestly writers who penned them during the period of Jewish history known as the Exile. The Jews were captives, deported to the foreign land of their Babylonian conquerors. They had dreams about someday returning to the sacred soil of Judah, but they had no very realistic hopes. They had few rights in captivity. To reproduce and to grow their tribal numbers so that some of them might someday return home was keenly important.

The universal context out of which these words must be heard drives us deeply into our understanding of the nature of our humanity. Part of what it means to be human is to accept the fact that we carry within ourselves longstanding and chronic anxieties. From the moment in which human beings achieved the dramatic step into self-consciousness, the evolutionary struggle to survive became primary, carrying with it enormous emotional consequences. Self-conscious human beings knew the dangers of existence in a way no other creatures did. It was as if human life was hardwired to endure the traumas of an existence in which danger was always anticipated and unrelieved fear was a part of what it meant to be human. Human beings now lived in the stream of time with a remembered past and an anticipated future, so that they were forced to contemplate daily what might actually happen at any moment. To be human was always to be on guard against external enemies, both human and subhuman. The desire to survive compelled our ancestors to the task of subduing whatever might threaten them. It created for them an atmosphere of vigilance and life-and-death competition. Success in both tribal warfare and the hunt was the key to survival and many of our forebears died in both enterprises.

In this struggle a driving motivation developed that would help these self-conscious creatures to achieve success in battle against their enemies and to establish viable defenses behind which they could live in safety. Both offensive and defensive tactics took many forms. On the offensive side more and more lethal weapons were devised to enable both warfare and the hunt to be successfully engaged at greater and greater distances of safety. Rocks and sticks gave way to spears and then to bows and arrows. The animal world was mastered. When the species we call Homo sapiens could not defeat human enemies, they learned to build defensive walls to protect themselves. Death began a slow but steady retreat.

On a different front, this one in their battle against the enemy of hunger, our ancestors learned to cultivate the land, to grow crops and to build food surpluses so that the anxiety of the daily quest for food that made our ancestors pray “Give us this day our daily bread” was diminished. Better diet combined with access to clean water contributed to a growing longevity. Once again death was postponed and the population expanded. Our survival anxieties began to be banked.

An enormous boost was given to that longevity process in recent centuries when increased knowledge and developing skills in the healing arts began to defeat the causes of sickness. Once germs and viruses were identified as causative factors in illness, counterattacks were launched against these enemies with penicillin and other antibiotics. Surgical procedures, selective radiation and chemotherapy were developed to fight tumors and cancers. Cardiovascular accidents, now called heart attacks and strokes, were subjected to angioplasty procedures, valve replacements and drugs that opened clogged arteries. Preventive measures such as lowering cholesterol levels were introduced to combat coronary disease. The fact that we talk routinely today of double, triple or quadruple bypass heart procedures only emphasizes the depth of the revolution through which we human beings have moved in the treatment of heart disease. With the introduction of prenatal care for expectant mothers, there has been a sharp decline in the number of women who die in childbirth and a huge increase in the number of healthy babies. All of these forces have combined to change our lives dramatically and to enhance our rate of survival. The result has been a geometric rise in the human population.