The Bible as a literature book

Since the Bible is full of contradictory, erroneous, and often misleading things, we are left to believe that there was only one reason it was created. So the Bible contains factual errors and internal contradictions, as well as teachings that seem contrary to generally held beliefs. These cast doubt upon the belief that the Bible is God-inspired, especially in light of contradictory quotations from God. There is something I have been pondering on. Maybe the Bible was created for the sole purpose of literary symbolism? Maybe it was created to entertain people at the time? Teach stories/morals?

Maybe only the historical part of the Bible is true? Which would be the ‘‘places’’ as an example.

It is literature, because when Genesis was created, the author used a serpent as the devil. Why? The Jews detested the Caananites and the Caananites worshipped a snake symbol. Maybe the Jews wrote that story to teach people not to be with the Cannanites?

The Bible also has literary elements. Just look at all the Greco-Roman myths of gods and goddesses. There is always drama. There is always the rising action. There always s ‘‘tragedy’’ somewhere between the stories. The Bible is a literature book in content. It is symbolic of ‘‘morality teaching’’. Reading it as literature makes sense. As myth, the Bible is concerned with explaining universal truths, and providing an explanation of origins and destinies. Even early history, if we believe Herodotus, contains myth.

Paul Tillich in The Dynamics of Faith says;
“Myths are symbols of faith combined in stories about divine-human encounters”

Thoughts?

I agree with this conclusion, as it is very plausable. It is the nature of humans to disguise propaganda in stories. It doesn’t suprise me how much the New Testament of the Bible is anti-semetic.

Certainly.

Much of what has been demonstrated in the Bible is actually a kind of political propaganda and polemic. And we evidently see that the Bible ws written by various groups with different aims and different ideologies/viewpoints. The victims of genocide in the Bible by different cultures. Whether it be the Jews, Romans, Palestinians, etc is clearly present.

There is a fascinating essay of Paul Tillich that points to Time and Space as symbols of rivalling forces. The Gods of paganism, representatives of stretches of land, cultures, nations and nationalism are the Gods of Space, whose symbol is the circle or sphere. They occupy a certain space and would have a people regard that space, their land, their earth as holy. Such Gods are dictators, imperialists, unjust and demanding and they compete with the Gods of other space, of other countries and cultures.

The God of Time however, is the God of Prophetism, the invisible and univeral God, the God of history who directs its people to the fulfilment of promise and hope. The followers of this God break the vicious circle of repeating the birth-death cycle, they allow the immediacy of justice towards all, they are not bound within borders and precincts, within nationalism and the struggle for power.

Both Israel and the Christian Church have followed this God of Time, were prophetic and visionary, but often fallen back into nationalism and restrictions of space, failing to do without the trappings of space, desiring power, prone to demonic enthusiasm and continually falling into bouts of self-destruction. Often Israel and the Church has been fooled into turning to Ba’al, the God of Space, of nationalism and of the striving for power – even today.

If we were to heed the message of Tillich (1959), we would understand that the mythology of the Bible holds this message for us, in a language that we can understand if we are receptive, which we have not yet lost. The God of Abraham is the God who has people leave their idols and their families bound to nationalism, leave their injustice and seek a future with the nations united and as numerous as the stars in the sky.

Shalom
Bob

Hi Bob.

And where is all that rooted? Human mind, imagination, and emotions. We cannot deny that we humans do have a ‘‘creative’’ imagination that is used in a wide variety of things. Which is why I argue that the Bible is only a literature book that teaches the history of the time, parables, and symbolic teachings.

Yes, and this would be the element of antithesis in literature. All those gods represent what humans feel and/or experienced at a specific time. They most probably attributed their arduous experiences with other cultures to their ‘‘holy texts’’. I see the contrasted propositions express events or states that are incompatible with each other, but do implicate each other in different situations. Such as Time and Space.

The Odyssey" is simply a novel about the imaginary wanderings of Odysseus on his way home from the sack of Troy. Attributing gods, during the Greek times was used to place misfortunes and happenstances on ‘‘gods’’. If we’re getting anything about God at all, we’re getting only Homer’s subjective idea of what the “”“Creator”“” might say, but not even Homer claims to be giving us actual words spoken by the ““Supreme Being”” behind the universe.

Hi Aquarian,

It is rooted in the awareness of the ‘ultimate concern’ as Tillich calls it, which is not necessarily outwardly religious, but is the essence of what religion is. The God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob is the God of development and vision, independant of people and land, who refuses to be an idol, and tries to take a people beyond the idolatry that is widespread and common even today.

The language of the Bible cannot grasp what this ‘ultmate concern’ imparts and uses the metaphor ‘God’ to pass the message on. It is ingenious oral tradition that we have at the beginning of the Bible, using stories and legends to pass on this extremely abstract idea, but which can lead to misunderstanding when it becomes written tradition. It is a thread that has to be continually picked up by following generations.

Shalom
Bob

Aquarian (Aquarian Conspiracy?)

Can you post an example of any two contradictory concepts or principles found with-in the Bible? We should be able to then identifiy where and why the contradiction occurs, and/or dispel weather there actually is a contradiction. Let’s start here, then perhaps we can hit an eroneous example…and then a misleading example.

Ok?

Why does the presence of errors or teachings “contrary to generally held beliefs” lead you, or anyone, to doubt that the bible is “God-inspired”? What you are implicitly suggesting is that something “God-inspired” must be error-free and teach things consistent with what mankind already generally believed. I say both are unnecessary, and based on a false concept of what “God-inspired” means.

Of the teachings, if you want something that is not “contrary to generally held beliefs” then you are not seeking God, but rather something else, namely something of your own creation. It is like you excepting to see yourself in another person, but the other person is certainly the other person. There are things about him that are strange to you. And thus it is ridiculous of you to form expectations of the other based on who you are, and even less to expect him to meet those expectations. And God is certainly not a human being, and surely you can agree to that.

As to the errors, if you think hard about it, there is a wisdom about God “allowing” the bible to be erroneous, as we know errors to be. I give four reasons:1. First the bible is just a collection of books written by various authors, recopied over and over again by a multitude of copyists, and over a long long period of time. So if you want to judge fairly the reliability of the bible, you must compare it to a book that is constructed, written and copied in the same manner and in the same circumstances. Is there a book you can compare the bible to and say that it is a better book than the bible? What I can suggest is the book of Isaiah, as it is found today in contemporary translations of the bible and that discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls. You can check how these two documents compare. That the bible being what it is today is no small miracle, despite the numerous ways it could have gone wrong.

  1. Secondly an non error-free bible is a guard against the tendency of making the bible God, namely bibliolatory. The errors being there to constantly remind you that God is elsewhere and not a book. And I rather trust a book with errors than one that claimed to be the absolute word of God. For in the former I know that I have to use my reasoning and judgement when reading it, and assessing its truth claims. In the latter I am compelled to accept, whatever it says, no matter how contrary it is to my reasons and judgements, on fear of incurring God’s - but mostly men’s - wrath.

  2. And thirdly it is not possible to communicate and transmit truths over ages in multiple languages and cultures despite literal errors? There is really no exact translation of concepts or the sense or the context from one language to another. So even if the bible is error free can you really make accurate translations? Therefore, since God is the giver of languages, and the disrupter of languages (see the story of the Tower of Babel), surely God knows of the true and effective way of getting truth transmitted via imperfect, corrupted languages. And my current belief is that this is by means of stories. Stories are robust to errors. The story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Issac can be told in many ways and the truth of what the fear of the Lord means can still be transmitted accurately, and without error. This also explains why Jesus taught in parables, and that the gospel are stories of Jesus’ life.

  3. And finally the bible is not a dead book. The true author of the bible is a living God, which is accessible even today. That alone makes the bible truly God-inspired.

Aquarian, I disagree with you on the inaccuracy of the Bible, and agree with Dust, – if you want to use it as a premise for general appeal, you should prove it first.

But I think you have something of the truth when saying the Bible should be read as literature. I think Christiian apologist C.S. Lewis handles it something like that. It is “salvation history” – not a science book.

Bob, what an odd thing for Tillich to say. I would have expressed it in Aristotelian terms: material God vs. formal God. Why do you think PT identified God with time – wouldn’t that be Chronus?

Regards,
philosophy hack

Hi MRN,

The Greek gods were gods of space too, according to Tillich:
“Human existence under the predominance of space is tragic. Greek tragedy and philosophy knew about this. They knew that the Olympic Gods were gods of space, one beside the other, one struggling with the other. Even Zeus was only the first of many equals, and hence subject, together with man and the other gods, to the tragic law of genesis and decay.”

He writes that “the turning point in the struggle between space and time in history is the prophetic message. To the birth of man out of nature and against nature corresponds the birth of prophetism out of paganism and against paganism…
The true God who spoke to Abraham cannot be identified with a family or city-god. In the moment in which the danger of such identification arises, God must separate Himself from those who adore him. The representative of this separation is the prophet.”

This is one of the ideas of Tillichs that were appraised as his most original work. I am quite excited by the idea and can follow the examples in the OT very well. We all know that Abraham was a turning point in time, but what it exactly was seemed to be elusive. But according to Tillich, Abraham was suddenly aware of the ‘ultimate concern’, the Mystery, and understood that idols were a sign of foolishness and restricted to areas of land.

Isaac too learns that he has more than space, he always finds space with his God and is not restricted. Jacob is amazed that God is his God even when he is living with his uncle, and not only when he is at home with his Father and Brother. They come to realise that the look into the stars is the direction that God is giving them, away from the restrictions of idols of city-gods, into an endlessness unknown until then.

This shows to me that revelation described in the Bible isn’t to be taken literally, but that those telling about it were lost for words. There is a communication here, but it is far beyond the mythology of the Bible - as holy as these scriptures are to me.

Shalom
Bob

contradictions within the bible:

yep no contradiction in the bible.

and this is only a SMALL amount.

Hi MRN,
I was just out walking the dog in the cold winter night, looking into the stars I thought about the time aspect in the OT and how Abraham is wlling to invest in the future, ‘you will be a nation,’ he is told by the God who is ‘I am who I will be’, that will unite nations too numerous to count. The prophetic vision is exciting but distant, it invokes patience and commitment, building on a hope, driving forward instead of fencing up what we have, trying to gain some more with force, wary of other foes.

Was just a thought…

Shalom
Bob.

How can you say that there are no contradictions in the Bible? :confused:

This should be enough to convince someone that the Bible is riddled and shrouded with contradictions and that should lead people to believe that the Bible is not a trusting source. It was created by people who were educated/knew how to read back then. If God wanted us to know him, he could of let us a more clearer view of him? Atleast he could of given us better clues?

Blind Faith.

Yes, and that is the problem with blind faith. A collection of myths from the pagans and original (by the authors of the bible) was created/published/translated and it became a world-wide phenomenon!

First of all, i think before you post these so called contraditctions in the Bible, maybe you should look into it more deeper and also read around the verse…maybe the whole chapter or the whole book to understand those verses.

Oh and to 1 John 5:18…you didn’t even put the whole verse in…the second part can explain a lot…

18 We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the one who was born of God keeps him safe, and the evil one cannot harm him

Alright I’m sick of people calling them “so-called” contradictions. THEY ARE CONTRADICTIONS!

If you believe otherwise then please DEMONSTRATE that the contradictions posted by Aquarian are invalid. If you can’t then stop being so headstong, and accept that the Bible is not inerrant.

Ahh…sweet!

scythekain you’ve taken me to task. I asked for one at a time, but that’s ok… Let’s take a look at the first contradiction you posted, and see if we can determine definitively, together, weather or not a contradiction of principles or concepts actually exists…

This is a good one to start with. scythekain, this first one here, should be able to establish our willingness and/or unwillingness to view things resonably.

Ok, as I see it, these two verses taken out of context, indeed appear to be contradictory, but I also see that with-in context, the appearance of opposition does not exist. There is no contradiction. Let’s take a look…

Romans 4:2 is a statement reguarding, and immediately following the concept identified in the preceeding verses of Romans 3…which in a nut shell is…We are not justified by what we do, but rather by what God has done, and our faith in Him.

Though we may strive to do good works, we cannot earn justification. Only by faith can we be justified.

James 2:21, in context, is shown to be a principle of that concept…which is…If you indeed have faith, your actions (or what you do) will be a result of it. (For instance…I have faith the chair will hold me, so I sit in it…If I dont sit in it, then my faith is of no effect)

Though it is through faith that we are justified…faith is dead if it is not the kind that results in good works.

scythekain, do you think a contradiction of priciples or concepts exists? If so can you explain?

Aquarian, I read over the examples you posted, and was able to quickly reconcile most of them as not being contradictions of concepts and/or principles. Many of them are not necessarily contradictions at all.

I would really like for you to post a specific biblical concept or principle that you personally feel is a major stumbling block, and even more specifically how it effects your beliefs.

Just one concept and/or principle that turns you off and why? That’s all Im asking.

I want to understand YOUR reasoning, and respond to it with my own.

I’ll let Aquarian address you as well Dust, but I have something that I find as a major stumbling block.

The Christian God is all loving and caring, so then why does “God” test Job’s faith by making Job’s life horrible? Afterall, “God” already knows that Job will remain faithful since “God” is all-knowing.