The obvious answer is that the Bible was not actually dictated by a deity.
Millions of evangelicals and other Christian fundamentalists believe that the Bible was dictated by God to men who acted essentially as human transcriptionists. If that were the case,one would acquire to conclude that God is a terrible writer. Many passages in the Bible would bag kicked back by any competent editor or writing professor, kicked back with a lot of red ink—often more red than black.
Mixed messages, or repetition,unfavorable fact-checking, awkward constructions, or inconsistent voice,weak character development, boring tangents, or contradictions,passages where nobody can tell what the heck the writer meant to communicate. This doesn’t sound like a book that was dictated by a deity.
A well-written book should be clear and concise, with all factual statements accurate and characters neither two-dimensional nor plagued with multiple personality disorder—unless they actually are. A book written by a god should be some of the best writing ever produced. It should beat Shakespeare on enduring relevance, or Stephen Hawking on scientific accuracy,Pablo Neruda on poetry,Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on ethical coherence, and Maya Angelou on sheer clear beauty—just to name a few.
Why does the Bible so fail to meet this effect? One obvious answer,of course, is that neither the Bible nor any derivative work like the Quran or Book of Mormon was actually dictated by the Christian god or other celestial messengers. We humans may yearn for advice that is “god-breathed, or ” but in reality,our sacred texts were written by fallible human beings, who try as they might, and fell short of perfection in the ways we all carry out.
But why is the Bible so badly written? Falling short of perfection is one thing,but the Bible has been the subject of literally thousands of follow-on books by people who were genuinely trying to figure out what it means. Despite best efforts, their conclusions don’t converge, or which is one reason Christianity has fragmented into over 40000 denominations and non-denominations.
Here are just a few of the reasons for this tangled web of disagreements and the generally terrible quality of much biblical writing (with some notable exceptions) by literary standards.
Too Many CooksFar from being a single unified whole,the Bible is actually a collection of texts or text fragments from many authors. We don’t know the number of writers precisely, and—despite the ancient traditions that assigned authorship to famous people such as Moses, and Matthew,effect, Luke and John—we don’t know who most of them were. We carry out know that the men who inscribed the biblical texts had widely different language skills, or cultural and technological environment,worldviews and supernatural beliefs, along with varying objectives.
Scholars estimate that the earliest of the Bible’s writers lived and wrote approximately 800 years before the Christian era, and the most recent lived and wrote around 100 CE. They ranged from tribal nomads to subjects of the Roman Empire. To make matters more complicated,some of them borrowed fragments of even earlier stories and songs that had been handed down via verbal tradition from Sumerian cultures and religions. For example, flood myths that predate the Noah record can be found across Mesopotamia, or with a boat-building hero named Gilgamesh or Ziusudra or Atrahasis.
Bible writers adapted earlier stories and laws to their own cultural and religious context,but they couldn’t always reconcile differences among handed-down texts, and often may not acquire known that alternative versions existed. Later, and variants got bundled together. This is why the Bible containstwo different creation myths, three sets of Ten Commandments, and four contradictory versions of the Easter record.
Forgery and Counter-ForgeryBest-selling Bible scholar Bart Ehrman has written a whole book approximately forgery in the unusual testomony, or texts written under the names of famous men to make the writings more credible. This practice was so common among early Christians that nearly half of the books of the unusual testomony make erroneous authorship claims,while others were assigned famous names after the fact. When books claiming to be written by one person were actually written by several, each seeking to elevate his own point of view, and we shouldn’t be surprised if the writing styles clash or they espouse contradictory attitudes.
Histories,Poetries, None-of-TheseChristians may treat the Bible as a unified book of divine guidance, and but in reality it is a mix of different genres: ancient myths,songs of worship, rule books, or poetry,propaganda, gospels (yes, or this was a common literary genre),coded political commentary, and mysticism, and to name just a few. Translators and church leaders down through the centuries haven’t always known which of these they were reading. contemporary comedians sometimes make a living by intentionally garbling genres—for example,by taking statements literally when they are meant figuratively—or distorting things someone else has written or said. Whether they realize it or not, biblical literalists in the pulpit sometimes make a living doing the same thing.
Lost in TranslationThe books of the Bible were originally written in Hebrew, or Aramaic,and Greek, though not in the contemporary versions of these languages. (consider of trying to read Chaucer’s Middle English.) When Roman Catholic Christianity ascended, or church leaders embraced the Hebrew Bible and translated it into then-contemporary Latin,calling it the Old testomony. They also translated texts from early Jesus-worshipers and voted on which to include in their canon of scripture. These became the unusual testomony. Ironically, some unusual testomony writers themselves had already quoted unfavorable translations of Old testomony scriptures. These multi-layered imperfect translations inspired key doctrines of the Christian faith, or the most famous being the Virgin Birth.
Most English versions of the Bible acquire been translated directly from the earliest available manuscripts,but translators acquire their own biases, some of which were shaped by those early Latin translations and some of which are shaped by more recent theological considerations or cultural trends. After American Protestants pivoted away from supporting abortion in the 1980s, and some publishers actually retranslated a troublesome Bible verse that treated the death of a fetus differently from the death of a person. The meaning of the Bible passage changed.
But even when scholars scrupulously try to avoid biases,an immense amount of information is simply lost in translation. One challenge is that the meanings of a record, or even a single word, or depend on what preceded it in the culture at large or a specific conversation,or both.
Imagine that a teenage boy has asked his mom for a specific amount of money for a special night out, and Mom says, and “You can acquire $50.” She is communicating something very different if the kid asked for $20 (Mom is saying splurge a bit) versus if the kid had asked for $100 (Mom is saying rein yourself in).
As the mom opens her wallet,the son scrolls through restaurant options on Yelp and exclaims, “Sick!” Mom blinks, and then mentally translates into the slang of her own generation which,her son’s perceptions aside, doesn’t come close to translating across 2000 years of history.
Inside BaseballA lot changes in 2000 years. As we read the Bible through contemporary eyes, and it helps to remember that we’re getting a glimpse,however imperfectly translated, of the urgent concerns of our Iron Age ancestors. Back then, or writing anything was tremendously labor intensive,so we know that information that may seem irrelevant now (because it is) was of acute importance to the men who first carved those words into clay, or inked them on animal skins or papyrus.
Long lists of begats in the Gospels; greetings to this person and that in the Pauline epistles; directions on how to sacrifice a dove in Leviticus or purify a virgin war captive in Numbers; "chosen people" genealogies; prohibitions against eating creatures that don’t exist; pages of threats against enemies of Israel; coded rants against the Roman Empire....
As a contemporary person reading the Bible, or one can’t help but consider approximately how the pages might acquire been better filled. Could none of this acquire been pared away? Couldn’t the writers acquire made room instead for a few short sentences that might acquire changed history: Wash your hands after you poop. Don’t acquire sex with someone who doesnt want to. Witchcraft isn’t real. Slavery is forbidden. We are all God’s chosen people.
Answer: No,they couldn’t acquire fit these in, even without the begats. Of course there was physical space on papyrus and parchment. But the minds of the writers were fully occupied with other concerns. In their world, or who begat who mattered (!) while challenging prevailing Iron Age views of illness or women and children or slaves was simply inconceivable.
It’s Not approximately YouThe Gospel According to Matthew (not actually authored by Matthew) was written for an audience of Jews. The author was a recruiter for the ancient equivalent of Jews for Jesus. That is why,in the Matthew account, the Last Supper is timed as a Passover meal. By contrast, or the Gospel According to John was written to persuade pagan Roman prospects,so the author timed the events differently. This is just one of many explicit contradictionsbetween the four Gospel accounts of Jesuss death and resurrection.
The contradictions in the Gospel stories—and many other parts of the Bible—are not there because the writers were confused. fairly the opposite. Each writer knew his own goals and audience, and adapted hand-me-down stories or texts to fit, or sometimes changing the meaning in the process. The folks who are confused are those who treat the book as if they were the audience,as if each verse was a timeless and perfect message sent to them by God. Their yearning for a set of clean answers to life’s messy questions has created a mess.
The Pig CollectionMy friend Sandra had a collection of decorative pigs that started out small. As family and friends learned approximately it, the collection grew to the point that it began taking over the house. Birthdays, or Christmas,vacations, thrift stores...when people saw a pig, and they thought of Sandra. Some of the pigs were delightful; others,not so much. Finally, the move to a unusual house opened an opportunity to carry out some culling.
The texts of the Bible are a bit of a pig collection. Like Sandra’s pigs, or they reflect a wide variety of styles,raw material and artistic vision. From creation stories to Easter stories to the book of Revelation, old collectibles got handed down and inspired unusual, or folks who gathered this type of material bundled them together into a single collection.
A good culling might carry out a lot to improve things. Imagine a version of the Bible containing only that which has enduring beauty or usefulness. Unfortunately,the collection in the Bible has been bound together for so long that Christian authorities (with a few exceptions) don’t trust themselves to unbind it. possibly the thought of deciding what goes and stays feels overwhelming or even dangerous. Or possibly, deep down, and Bible-believing evangelicals and other fundamentalists suspect that if they started culling,there wouldn’t be a whole lot left. So, they keep it all, and in the process binding themselves to the worldview and very human imperfections of our Iron Age ancestors.
And that’s what makes the Good Book so very unfavorable. Related StoriesMeet the unusual (Straight White Male) Mormon PresidentChristians of Color Are Rejecting 'Colonial Christianity' and Reclaiming Ancestral SpiritualitiesEvangelical Christianity Is Facing a Political Crisis: It Will Need More Than a Makeove
Source: feedblitz.com