Appendix to
From Bible Translator to Agnostic
Ken Daniels
10 May 2003
This is the first document I wrote publicly expressing
my doubts. It was originally intended to explain my position to the counselor I
was scheduled to see after our return from Africa. I do not presently stand by
all my assertions—my perspective has evolved significantly since then—but the
document does capture many of the important reasons why I no longer consider
myself a Christian. At the time I wrote the document, I had no doubt that God
existed, but felt that God had simply not revealed himself through any
particular religion.
I was nurtured in the evangelical faith from infancy. My parents met as SIM missionaries in Ethiopia, where I was born. At the age of four I “accepted Jesus as my personal savior.” My faith became real at the age of 13, when I began regularly praying and reading the Bible on my own. I attended missionary schools through the age of 16 and received a BS in computer science and engineering at LeTourneau University, followed by a one-year certificate of biblical studies at Columbia Biblical Seminary. I married Charlene Newton, the daughter of Wycliffe members Dennis and Erna Newton, who translated the NT into a Bolivian language. I have had no university-level courses from a non-Christian perspective, nor had I read any books that would cast doubt on my faith until recently.
At the age of 19, while attending LeTourneau (a Christian institution as you are probably aware), I began to be troubled by what I considered sub-Christian ethical standards in the Old Testament. These questions smoldered in my mind for perhaps a year before I decided to go through the Bible and write down all the problems I could find. I got through Jeremiah before giving up that pursuit. I am unsure exactly why I abandoned my doubts at the time, but looking back it seems that I may have been influenced by the desire to have a dating relationship with a dedicated Christian girl from Columbia Bible College. We dated for about 10 months before I called it off during the spring of my senior year at LeTourneau while I was director of student ministries. Shortly after I applied to Columbia Biblical Seminary, my doubts began to resurface, this time even more intensely. During the summer after my graduation from LeTourneau (1990), I essentially gave up believing the Christian faith and explored other alternatives, including the Unitarian-Universalist Association, which fell far short of my experience in evangelical churches. I recorded a list of doctrines I felt I could still espouse. There was no mention of Jesus, simply an infinite, personal, loving and just Creator-God who somehow ultimately rewards good and punishes evil, but who shows mercy to those who repent. Despite my doubts, I attended Columbia Biblical Seminary in the fall of 1990, and after about three months of deliberating and dialoguing with my professors, came to accept again the authority of the Bible and the truth of the Christian faith. Haley’s Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible was very influential in helping me turn back to the faith.
I met Charlene in 1991 after completing a one-year certificate of biblical studies at Columbia, and we married the next year, then joined Wycliffe in 1993. Though small doubts periodically surfaced in the following years, I did not seriously question the authority of the Bible until around March of last year during my fourth semester of SIL while on furlough. My doubts lasted less than a month if I recall correctly. I received some help from Ken McElhenon at this time. I briefly entertained the idea that God does not exist, the only time in my life I have considered that possibility.
This year Charlene and I decided to read through a chronological one-year Bible. As I read through the Pentateuch, I began recalling all the reasons I had doubted 12 years ago. Many of my concerns were related to ethics, though I also noted what seemed to be pagan understandings of God and culturally conditioned modes of worship, as well as a few anachronisms that pointed to post-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. I will mention more specifically some of my concerns below.
Often when I had been tempted to doubt in the past, I would remind myself of the many fulfilled prophecies of the Bible outlined by Josh McDowell’s “Evidence that Demands a Verdict.” But I was confused as to why on the one hand the Old Testament seemed so ugly while at the same time it seemed to have amazing predictive ability. The prophecy of the 70 weeks of Daniel particularly impressed me because of its accuracy in predicting the time of Messiah’s coming. I figured if these prophecies could be called into question, there would be little reason left for assuming that the Bible is a divinely inspired document. I found arguments on both sides of the issue on the Internet, but the skeptical explanations seemed more plausible.
Not wanting to give up my faith that had been so dear to me for so long, I searched the Internet for some good apologetic articles. I had heard that Clark Pinnock was an apologist of perhaps a more scholarly stature than Josh McDowell, so I searched for his name. Instead of finding something written by him, I found the online book Beyond Born Again by Robert M. Price in which Clark Pinnock is mentioned. Robert Price grew up as a fundamentalist, became an evangelical, went to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, became a liberal Christian because of inconsistencies he saw in the Bible and in the evangelical faith, then went on to earn two PhDs at Drew University Theological Seminary. He was still a liberal Christian when he wrote this book, but I learned later to my disappointment that he became an agnostic after some 20 years as a liberal Christian. In any case, his was the first book I had read specifically attacking evangelicalism, and it was compelling. Not that all his arguments were watertight, but enough of them were convincing to me to throw my faith into a tailspin. I don’t believe I would have been willing to listen to anything he had to say had it not been for my prior “smelling a rat” in reading the Old Testament. Having devoted my life to become a Bible translator, it was devastating to realize that the Bible probably was not God’s word after all. You can only imagine the knot in my stomach and the beating of my heart with every new discovery I made confirming my suspicions that the Bible was man-made from start to finish.
I contacted an old friend from seminary working in another mission here in Cantor[1] to discuss my doubts. He was understanding and reasonable and was able to help some by reading Robert Price and pointing out some inconsistencies. He did not take the same approach as some other well-meaning evangelicals with whom I shared my struggles. Many remind me that we’re in a spiritual battle and the enemy is trying to get the best of me because he doesn’t want me translating the Scriptures for an unreached people. (I grant that this is probably the case if the Bible really is true, but not so if it is not.) Others have said that if I don’t believe it’s because of some sin in my life. Still others have implied that it doesn’t matter how many logical arguments can be brought to bear against the Bible, I just need to accept it by faith. Another took the arguments seriously but interpreted the Bible in such a literal way (young earth, head coverings for women, rigid submission of women to men, etc.) as to make it hard to listen to much else of what he said. I appreciate my friend from seminary for being a friend and honestly helping me confront some of the arguments without judging me. If I ever come back to the faith, it will be through his kind of approach.
I must confess that life had been very busy for us with a lot of moving around (I think we’ve done more than our share!) and I had neglected taking time alone to pray every day for some time. I suppose it could be argued that my struggle was a result of this lapse (though the first time I had doubts 12 years ago was during a period in which my devotional life was very consistent and meaningful). I talked to our director about my problems and requested permission for a two-week vacation, during which time I prayed and read intensively, seeking God and worshiping as I had not done in months. I found in the SIL library Helmut Thielicke’s How the World Began, a series of sermons preached on the book of Genesis. Here was a German scholar of the first order, who, though not perhaps an evangelical by the American definition (and certainly not a young-earth creationist or inerrantist), believed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God who bodily rose from the dead. Somehow in my pride and naiveté I had lost sight of the fact that there really are serious scholars who believe the essential message of the Bible. I also perused Arie Noordtzij’s commentary on Leviticus and Numbers. Though an evangelical, he recognized many of the problems I had noticed in the Pentateuch without facilely brushing them aside. I appreciated his forthrightness in contrast to those who glibly offer strained harmonizations of difficult problems. A notorious example of this is the explanation that the cock crowed after Peter’s denial not once, not twice, but six times!
In reflecting on Thielicke’s book during a prayer time one morning, I broke down and confessed my unbelief in Jesus as God’s son, and I felt a warm presence that convinced me that I was back onto the right track. I was still not persuaded that the Bible was without discrepancies, but soon I stumbled on the idea that, just as God creates handicapped people with defects or blemishes (Lev. 26:16) which I would hesitate to call errors, so the Bible could contain “blemishes” that I would not call errors. This allowed me to consider myself a Biblical inerrantist in conformity with the Wycliffe doctrinal standard while still honestly owning up to the fact that it contains discrepancies. This breakthrough occurred in Troune in April, about a month after reading Robert Price.
We were now free to go back to our allocation to continue language learning. Meanwhile, I had ordered from Amazon.com a number of books on these matters, both pro and con, and they were waiting for me upon our return to our allocation. Titles included Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief, Thomas Morris’ Philosophy and the Christian Faith, Kelly James Clark’s When Faith is not Enough, C. Stephen Evans’ Philosophy of Religion, Donald Bloesh’s Holy Scripture, Larry Richards’ 735 Baffling Bible Questions Answered, Helmut Thielicke’s The Evangelical Faith, Waldemar Janzen’s Old Testament Ethics, John Barton’s Ethics and the Old Testament, Willard Swartley’s Slavery, Sabbath, War & Women, and Cyrus Gordon and Gary Rendsburg’s The Bible and the Ancient Near East. Though I am a slow reader, I spent every moment I could spare devouring these books, feeling an insatiable hunger to know the truth. I still have not read all of them. It was particularly The Bible and the Ancient Near East that plunged me back into my current state of doubt from which I see little hope of escape.
At this point I strongly suspect that the Bible is a human book. Though I recognize the havoc this stance has created and will continue to create not only in my own life but also in the lives of those I love most, I cannot simply choose to believe otherwise, even if I want to. If my life depended on believing that, for example, the earth is flat, I could not by simply repeating to myself, “Ken, just believe it’s flat” so believe and save my life. Likewise, I cannot simply avoid rocking the boat of my (and my family’s) life by trying to convince myself it’s true when deep down in the core of my soul I sense that it is not. Perhaps I could neglect the reading of problem Bible passages and non-Christian books, suppress all doubts, read exclusively evangelical apologetic books, go to an evangelical seminary, pray fervently that God will help me overcome my doubts, etc., etc., but in the end I will not have confronted that stubborn thing called truth, and I will eventually end up back in the morass of doubt. If I come back to the Christian faith without dealing with the problems head-on, I will always wonder in the back of my mind whether my faith is based on the truth or on Christian apologetic pep-talk.
It seems that the more erudite defenders of the Christian faith (e.g., Plantinga, Bloesh) de-emphasize empirical proofs and apologetic arguments such as the fulfilled prophecies McDowell focuses on. They seem to recognize that such approaches don’t lead anywhere but that the real basis for faith is the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit, who testifies to our spirit that the gospel is true. Our intellect is too marred by sin to see the truth of the gospel apart from the instigation off the Holy Spirit. But was it the Holy Spirit I felt when I confessed my unbelief in Jesus back in April? Or was it from a sense of relief that I could now avoid rocking the boat any longer? How does one know? During the past couple weeks I have prayed more diligently that normal and have sought God with all my heart, though without invoking Jesus’ name because I am no longer convinced he is the Son of God. Almost every day during my prayers I feel a tremendous warmth and peace flooding my soul. Could it really have been God in both cases? How do we recognize the “instigation of the Holy Spirit?”
In addition to not wanting to rock the boat, a major reason for my hesitancy to break completely and publicly with the Christian faith is the good I see in many Christians. When I consider all the martyrs and defenders of the faith throughout history, who am I—Ken Daniels, as an essentially proud, selfish and undisciplined person without any advanced degrees—who am I to stand up to those more pious and more learned than I and tell them it’s all a myth? And I do appreciate the warmth and piety of evangelical Christianity. Where else is there such sincere singing, worship, fellowship and attention to do what is right but in evangelical Christianity? I love my heritage. But that doesn’t necessarily make it true. There are apparently “evangelical” type movements in other religions as well. Many Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic Christians seem bound by tradition and have lost the vibrancy of their faith, just as is the case with most Muslims, for example. But then you have the Sufi Muslims, whose emphasis on a mystical encounter with God reminds me of evangelicalism. My knowledge of Sufism is limited, so I may be wrong in drawing this parallel, but in any case there do appear to be Muslims who sincerely seek God as evangelicals do. But where do I find non-Christian or non-Muslim theists with whom to fellowship and worship God with sincerity and passion? That is my greatest concern at present, along with how any changes will affect my family.
In the following sections I will present some of my general misgivings about Christian theology followed by a few specific objections to the Bible. I recognize that most of these arguments are not water-tight or 100% conclusive, but taken as a whole, along with many other objections I have read recently, they create a relentless suspicion within me that I have traveled down the wrong path all my life. Some of my arguments are subjective or speculative, but that is the way Christians often evaluate other religions, so we must be willing to submit to the same kinds of judgment we pass on them. For instance, I had always rejected Islam because it does not emphasize God’s love, or because Mohammed promoted holy war, or because it does not make adequate provision for the problem of sin. These are subjective arguments, but they do have weight. As long as I remained committed to the Christian faith, I was unwilling to listen to subjective arguments against Christianity. But now I must take them into account in evaluating whether Christianity is truly all that it claims to be.
I was previously unwilling to question Christianity because in American society there are effectively only two paths from which to choose: evangelical Christianity, which leads to godliness and a sense of purpose and mission in life, or anything else (atheism, agnosticism, nominal or liberal Christianity, cults), which lead to aberrant lifestyles and purposelessness in life. If one is living a life of dissipation and wants to get turned around, the only way to do so is to accept the gospel and be saved. But a similar choice exists in cultures where other religions predominate. In Cantor, for example, it is the nominal Muslims who are promiscuous, dishonest, and unkind. Those who take their faith seriously are more likely to live righteously. If I continue to question the uniqueness of Christianity, there will be those who, accepting the dichotomy between Christianity and unrighteousness, will wonder whether I really believe in God or whether I have a secret sin or selfish agenda to promote. I want it to be known that my faith in God is unshaken and that my greatest desire and prayer is to know and serve and please him. I respect much of the Bible’s teaching and the good works and activities of the Church. I will continue to enjoy fellowship with Christians as long as they continue to accept me.
A major roadblock to exiting Christianity is the apparent lack of certainty outside of it. I am fully convinced that God exists, but if Christianity is not true, how do we know anything about God? How do we know what is right and wrong if he does not reveal himself specially? This is a legitimate question many Christians ask when I express my doubts. But the idea that revelation is necessary for man to please God does not help the case of those who want the Bible or any particular book to be that revelation. No doubt more people and more cultures over the course of man’s existence (whether 6,000 or 1,000,000 years) have not had access to the Bible than have had access to it. Was it possible for them to please God? I believe so, because I consider that God reveals himself (or herself or neuterself) to all of us through our conscience. We may violate it enough to warp it, but God holds us responsible for how we respond to our conscience as he originally gave it to us, making allowances perhaps for certain cultural factors (e.g., the acceptance of polygamy in the Bible and in traditional societies). Though most have never read the Bible, everyone has an innate sense of right and wrong. For this reason it seems to me that God is more interested in righteousness than in correctness of belief. I happen to believe there is one God, and so do Christians, but certain Hindus who, because of their upbringing accept pantheism, may nonetheless be more kind and loving than certain Christians. With whom is God more pleased? I can wholeheartedly embrace Micah 6:8, nothing more and nothing less: “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
It is plain that there are different ideas of right and wrong in different cultures, and perhaps this is what leads Christians to believe there needs to be a special revelation to dictate what is right and wrong for all time across cultures. But the fundamentals of right and wrong are all to be found in other cultures and religions. Most frown on murder, adultery, theft, injustice, etc. If so, must we have Ten Commandments written by God’s finger on stone in order to be aware of these mores? If the Bible were clear about every ethical issue, then I would be more ready to accept its value as an ethical guide. But it’s hard to name an issue that the Bible clears up completely. Yes, we are not to kill—most people recognize it’s a bad thing to murder. But what about war? Christians are divided on this issue. Pacifists appeal to the teachings of Jesus concerning the need to love our enemies. Those who affirm the possibility of a just war appeal to the OT conquest and to certain isolated verses in the NT. So it seems the Bible really hasn’t helped us resolve the issue. Then there’s lying. Most cultures deplore the bearing of false witness and the use of lies for personal advancement at the expense of others. It hardly needs to be written. Where we do need some guidance is in the gray areas, like whether to lie to protect human life or to say you like someone’s dress when you really don’t or whether to say you’re fine when you’re not. If anything, the Bible seems to advocate a lower standard of truthfulness (e.g., the Hebrew midwives, Rahab, the lying spirit sent out by God) than many Christians who would be conscience-stricken if they uttered any statement that is not objectively true. So again, one may question whether the Bible has really shed significant light on the matter of lying. I could go on in this manner concerning divorce, polygamy, slavery, Sabbath observance, the role of women, abortion, infanticide, prostitution (in the OT), etc.
This is equally the case with theological issues. Can all the differences of opinion of Christians be blamed on their weaknesses, or is it just that the Bible is not clear or is contradictory in many matters? The Bible has not lent itself to a consensus on predestination vs. free will, why natural disasters happen, why the innocent suffer, the nature or existence of the Trinity, eternal security, the age of accountability, the fate of those who have not heard the gospel, the nature of the Lord’s Supper, the relationship between works and grace, the role of tongues, the timing of the filling of the Spirit, etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Because the Bible is two-sided or silent on these matters, Christians tend to gravitate toward the side they prefer. So in the end theology, just like ethics, is governed more by our reason or instinct than by objective revelation. Why is this special revelation then necessary?
As with the Bible, the role of the Spirit in leading us into all truth (John 16:13) seems less than efficacious. If someone or some group has indeed been led into all truth, it’s not at all clear who they are. Likewise, it may be asked how the Spirit helps believers bear the fruits of the Spirit. I enjoy fellowship with Christians in general, but I don’t see a fundamental difference between their behavior and those who strive to live godly lives in the context of other faiths. If there is anything to the power of the Spirit for effectuating godliness, one would expect to find evidence of it at least in Christian missionaries, manifesting fruits absent from people of other faiths. While I agree that missionaries in general are morally better than the population at large, we have to admit reality: they are prone to infighting (our branch is a prime example), sexual misconduct (again, our branch has not escaped this), complaining (a lot of that happens here), and so forth. A typical Christian response is to blame these missionaries themselves for their behavior, not the Holy Spirit. But I would venture to say that most missionaries, even the unsavory ones, desire to please God and want the Holy Spirit to operate in their lives. If this is the case, then it is difficult to argue that the Holy Spirit has any real effect in the lives of believers. For those Christians who do manifest the fruits of the Spirit, could not their good behavior be explained simply on the basis of their motivation to please God? There are Mormons who are similarly motivated and similarly good. Where does their goodness come from? Christian theology has no answer, claiming instead that all unbelievers are totally depraved. So the Christian has to believe that the good Mormon really isn’t good; it’s just a counterfeit mask. But now we’ve descended into the level of pure subjective judgment, and good works can no longer be used as an objective sign to attest to the work of the Holy Spirit. In my time here in Cantor I have found much to criticize in the Muslim culture (just as in my own culture), but there are some individuals who clearly strive to please God, do what is right and who are honest and kind. I think particularly of one Islamic cleric in our allocation whose gentleness puts many Christians to shame, including myself. Perhaps God has given all mankind the ability to choose between good and evil, and it is simply a matter of resolving to make the right choice. Too many Christians are waiting around for the Holy Spirit to help them resolve their problems with anger, impatience, pornography, etc. In effect, they end up blaming Satan or their sinful nature or the inactivity of the Spirit, rather than resolving simply to take responsibility for their lives and cleaning up house. They become so conditioned not to do anything in their own strength that they end up doing just that: nothing! I maintain that belief in God (whether the God of the Bible or of Mormonism or Islam) presents a positive motivation to live right and that we should seek God’s intervention in our lives, but I do not believe that Christians have a corner on goodness through the power of the biblical Holy Spirit.
If there is anything that distinguishes Christianity from all other religions, it must be the atonement. It cannot be love, since other religions also promote love. The necessity of the atonement in Christian doctrine is built on the foundation of God’s intolerance of the slightest sin. Since everybody sins, there has to be a penalty, and everyone is destined to hell apart from the atonement. It sounds pious to emphasize the holiness of God and the gravity of sin, so why not take it all the way and say that one little sin merits eternal suffering in hell? This gives the New Testament writers a convenient way to bring meaning to the unjust death of their Messiah—he didn’t die in vain but to solve this problem of sin[2]. But the notion that even one sin should consign a person to eternal damnation seems profoundly disproportionate and unjust. It’s like condemning a paraplegic for not being able to jump. We are sinners by nature. That’s the way we are, regardless of whether God or Satan or our ancestors or evolution made us that way. My three preschool children are sinners. They are selfish and they exasperate me at times. But I love them just the same. I forget about yesterday’s tantrum when they put their arm around me, give me a kiss, and say, “I love you, Papa.” I discipline them according to their actions in the hope of training them in the way they should go, but it would not cross my mind to consign them to eternal suffering or even eternal separation from me. That would not be proportional punishment. The Psalmist (103:8-14) attests to the fatherly compassion of God, contradicted by the Christian doctrine of God’s intolerance for the slightest sin:
The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever; he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.
Even if one were to accept the necessity of atonement to appease God’s wrath against the creatures he made, it is not clear that justice would be served through a vicarious sacrifice. Suppose that Hitler were caught and imprisoned at the end of World War II, and he expressed sorrow for all he had done. Suppose further that Winston Churchill offered to take Hitler’s punishment in his place. We might be in awe of Churchill’s graciousness and self-sacrifice, but the whole exchange would run contrary to our sense of justice. It is equally difficult to see any relationship between the self-sacrifice of Jesus and our pardon. If God is merciful as the Bible affirms, is it not enough for him simply to forgive penitent humans as he requires us to do of others?
History is full of religious people who seek diligently to appease their deity apart from simply confessing their sins and asking forgiveness of a compassionate God. Every time I have seen a Muslim wearing a charm or washing his body before prayers or going through all the other formalities prescribed by Islam, I have felt like saying, “Don’t you think God can hear you and answer your prayers without all these gyrations? Do you think you can tweak God’s favor by your rituals?” I felt justified in this outlook as an evangelical Christian who rejected ritual in favor of coming to God directly. Yet the more I looked into the Old Testament, the more parallels I found between Islam and Judaism in this respect. The ancient Israelites were surrounded by peoples who believed that the gods created humans in order to receive food from them. So all would be well as long as offered enough food to the gods in the form of sacrifices. The Torah hints that this concept was still present in the thinking of the Israelites:
The LORD said to Moses, “Say to Aaron: ‘For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is hunchbacked or dwarfed, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles. No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any defect is to come near to present the offerings made to the LORD by fire. He has a defect; he must not come near to offer the food of his God. He may eat the most holy food of his God, as well as the holy food; yet because of his defect, he must not go near the curtain or approach the altar, and so desecrate my sanctuary. I am the LORD, who makes them holy’” (Leviticus 21:16-23).
I had always believed that sacrifices were for the atonement of sin (“without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins”), not food for God. But it was never explained to me why in addition to the animal sacrifices, Leviticus calls for offerings of wine or flour mixed with incense as an “aroma pleasing to the LORD.” Or why there needed to be bread sitting continually on a special table in the tabernacle and temple. It seems at least plausible to believe that these are practices were inherited from the Israelite’s neighbors, stemming from the pagan notion that man’s raison d’être is to provide food for the gods.
It appears that Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac formed a bridge between the ancient practice of sacrificing every firstborn child to the gods and the later substitution of an animal for the firstborn (Gordon 1997:120). This helps explain why in Numbers 3:21-33 it was necessary for the Levites to be matched up one for one with the firstborn sons of Israel. Again, this idea seems to have stemmed from pagan practices, even if it was later sanitized. This Numbers passage is troubling also in that the figures do not add up correctly, perhaps due to copyist errors, and the mixing of round numbers with precise numbers helps justify the payment of a significant sum of silver to the family of Aaron, who having built a golden calf idol would appear more deserving of death than the poor fellow who carried wood on the Sabbath in Number 15:32-36. Finally, if there were only 22,273 firstborn sons (and therefore approximately the same number of families), how can we account for the high number of Israelite men 20 years or older (over 600,000 men, likely meaning over 2,000,000 total people)? This would require an average of about 90 people per family.
Another pagan idea accepted by the Israelites throughout most of the Old Testament until the Exile was that gods were territorial, governing only the land and the people over whom they have dominion. Several clues in the OT point to the fact that the Israelites were to worship only Yahweh, the god of the desert separating Egypt and Canaan (Gordon, 1997:145), though other gods did indeed exist. Yahweh was properly to be worshiped in his own territory. This is perhaps why Moses insisted that the people needed to go into the desert to worship their god. After the Exodus, the Israelites sang, “Who is like You among the gods, O Yahweh?” (Ex. 15:11). In the Ten Commandments it is written, “You shall not have other gods before Me…. You shall not bow down to them or worship them because I, Yahweh, your God, am a jealous God” (Ex. 20:3-4). The judge Jephthah, who is praised as a hero of the faith in Hebrews 11:32, reflects the belief in the existence of other gods in addressing the enemy. “Will you not take what your god Chemosh gives you? Likewise, whatever Yahweh our God has given us, we will possess” (Judges 11:24). David’s greatest fear in being chased by Saul was that he should die outside of Israel “far from the presence of Yahweh,” forfeiting Yahweh’s inheritance (1 Samuel 26:19-20). After Naaman’s healing through the ministry of Elisha, Naaman believes in Yahweh and asks Elisha for two mule-loads of Israelite earth to be taken back to his native Damascus so he can worship Yahweh there. He leaves with Elisha’s blessing (2 Kings 5:17-18). According to the Psalmist Asaph, “God presides in the great assembly; he gives judgment among the gods” (Psalm 82:1). As the Israelites became more engaged in international affairs, particularly after being displaced to Babylon at the time of the Exile, they began to understand that Yahweh could be worshipped from anywhere and that he indeed was the only God over all (Isaiah 44:6).
The notion of a general resurrection is a notable example of a doctrine unknown in early scripture but which arose later in the biblical record. Daniel, written in the century BC (according to liberal scholars) or during the exile (according to conservative scholars), offers in 12:2 the first explicit mention of an afterlife in which the wicked and the good are separated. I lean toward the second century BC date of authorship, not simply because it contains explicit prophecies (e.g., chapter 11) whose fulfillment could not be explained naturalistically if it had been written earlier, but because it contains several Greek loan words and incorporates resurrection theology borrowed from the Greeks (Paradise and Hades) during the Hellenistic period. Though I grew up immersed in the teachings of the Bible, the near absence of mention of the afterlife in the Old Testament was never pointed out to me until I stumbled over the following verse at the age of about 20:
Turn, O LORD, and deliver me; save me because of your unfailing love. No one remembers you when he is dead. Who praises you from the grave? (Psalm 6:5-6)
If the OT authors had believed in the afterlife, it seems that the blessings and curses listed in Deuteronomy 28 would have been an ideal place to mention it:
All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the LORD your God: You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country. The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock—the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed. You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out. The LORD will grant that the enemies who rise up against you will be defeated before you. They will come at you from one direction but flee from you in seven. The LORD will send a blessing on your barns and on everything you put your hand to. The LORD your God will bless you in the land he is giving you (Deuteronomy 28:2-8)
But there is no mention of a future reward beyond the grave. This teaching of earthly rewards is not well received by Christians today except in certain prosperity gospel circles. If there was no heaven and hell, then justice had to be served on earth. This led to assertions like, “I was young and now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread” (Psalm 37:25) and a host of other overly optimistic promises of earthly well-being for the righteous in the OT.
It may be contended that certain psalms implied the existence of heaven, e.g., Psalm 23, “and I well dwell in the house of the LORD forever.” But the Hebrews did not have a word that meant “forever” in the way we understand it. The same word used here can also mean “for a very long time” or “to the end of my days.” And the house of the LORD is no doubt a reference to the temple or tabernacle.
I understand the argument that God chose to reveal his truth little by little to the Israelites through the ages, gradually drawing the people from ignorance and paganism to the full light of the gospel. This could be true, but it seems to be more of an ad hoc explanation to save the Bible from the charge that it is merely a human book that reflects the evolving human ideas of its time. If God could require of his people the observance of 613 particular laws in the Torah, then why could he have not taken a few lines to reveal something as fundamental as the existence of the afterlife?
It appears that the Israelites had a concept of life after death in the shadowy netherworld of Sheol, inhabited by the righteous and wicked alike. The dead could even be roused from their sleep with the appropriate summoning:
Then the woman asked, “Whom shall I bring up for you?” “Bring up Samuel,” he said. When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out at the top of her voice and said to Saul, “Why have you deceived me? You are Saul!” The king said to her, “Don't be afraid. What do you see?” The woman said, “I see a spirit coming up out of the ground.” “What does he look like?” he asked. “An old man wearing a robe is coming up,” she said. Then Saul knew it was Samuel, and he bowed down and prostrated himself with his face to the ground. Samuel said to Saul, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” “I am in great distress,” Saul said. “The Philistines are fighting against me, and God has turned away from me. He no longer answers me, either by prophets or by dreams. So I have called on you to tell me what to do” (1 Samuel 28:11-15).
I quote this passage to show how utterly foreign it is to present-day Christian theology. The text affirms that it really was Samuel, dressed in a robe, who was summoned. The author believed it, reflecting the ideas of everyone in his era. I suppose one could invoke some sort of special dispensation to explain this, but the need to posit dispensation after dispensation throughout biblical history casts doubt on the fundamental coherence of the Bible. The whole enterprise of harmonizing the many difficulties like these has become wearying to me. There comes a point when one must finally say, “Enough!” just as Copernicus and Galileo did when the number of ad hoc adjustments needed to account for the peculiarities of the sun’s supposed orbit around the earth became too unwieldy.
Satan is not explicitly mentioned in the OT until after the exile, and then only in Job (whom liberals consider to be written after the exile) and 1 Chronicles 21:1. In the latter passage, the blame for inciting David to take a census is placed on Satan rather than on God as in 2 Samuel 24:1, which was written before the idea of Satan had developed. It appears that the Chronicler, being aware of Satan’s existence, could not accept the idea that God would tempt anyone (nor could James in 1:13), so he changed “God” to “Satan.” It is quite likely that the Jews adopted their belief in Satan from the dualistic Zoroastrians in Persia during the exile. Christians identify the serpent of Genesis 3 with Satan, but the text certainly does not make that explicit. It is a reading of Christian theology into the OT, in the same way that most Christians imagine that the OT saints believed in heaven.
If there were no other problem passages in the Bible, the following would be enough for me to question its divine origin. Why are so few Christians troubled by it? To me it is a grave affront to human dignity and a travesty to ascribe its authorship to God. It is in the Bible and will not go away, no matter how much I wish it would:
If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two [KJV: if he continue a day or two; NASB: if he survives a day or two], since the slave is his property (Exodus 21:20).
Not only was slavery approved of, but it was practiced in conjunction with racism. The implication of the following passage is that it was fine to treat foreign slaves any old how, but Hebrew servants were not to be treated ruthlessly:
Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly (Leviticus 25:44-46).
I wonder how many lives could have been spared in the Civil War, not to mention how many slaves could have had their freedom throughout history, if the Bible had roundly condemned the evils of slavery. Though the abolition of slavery was spearheaded largely by Christians, it seems that their conviction arose more from their conscience than from any specific biblical teaching. In this case conscience has served better than the outmoded biblical texts.
It is well known that women are not accorded an equal status with men in the Bible, in keeping with virtually every traditional society in history. The following passage illustrates this outlook:
The LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘If anyone makes a special vow to dedicate persons to the LORD by giving equivalent values, set the value of a male between the ages of twenty and sixty at fifty shekels of silver, according to the sanctuary shekel; and if it is a female, set her value at thirty shekels (Leviticus 27:1-4).
For me this next passage is a strong contender for the most repugnant passage in the Bible. Surely there were normally enough women to allow each man to have a wife in Israel. But in a polygamous society, there needed to be a greater supply of women, and this was one means of ensuring it. Further, what quality of marriage could be enjoyed with a captive woman whose people you have just destroyed? Finally, it seems to permit if not encourage divorce in the event that the man loses interest in her, contradicting Malachi 2:16, “I hate divorce.”
When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God delivers them into your hand, and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and desire her and would take her for your wife, then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails. She shall put off the clothes of her captivity, remain in your house, and mourn her father and her mother a full month; after that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. And it shall be, if you have no delight in her, then you shall set her free, but you certainly shall not sell her for money; you shall not treat her brutally, because you have humbled her (Deuteronomy 21:10-14).
Almost as troubling is the trial by ordeal for a woman suspected of adultery. What humiliation and injustice for the woman! Yet no provision is made for a woman who suspects her husband of adultery.
…if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure—or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure— then he is to take his wife to the priest… The priest is to write these curses on a scroll and then wash them off into the bitter water. He shall have the woman drink the bitter water that brings a curse, and this water will enter her and cause bitter suffering… If she has defiled herself and been unfaithful to her husband, then when she is made to drink the water that brings a curse, it will go into her and cause bitter suffering; her abdomen will swell and her thigh waste away, and she will become accursed among her people. If, however, the woman has not defiled herself and is free from impurity, she will be cleared of guilt and will be able to have children… The husband will be innocent of any wrongdoing, but the woman will bear the consequences of her sin (Numbers 5:11-29).
It is commonly held that polygamy was sometimes permitted but never encouraged in the Bible. Yet it seems that God played an active role in supplying David his multiple wives:
I gave your master's house to you, and your master's wives into your arms (II Samuel 12:8).
Compared to the surrounding nations, Israel seemed to have a fairly strict guidelines concerning sex. But though Leviticus 20:10-21 lists restriction after restriction concerning with whom one could lie, no general statement is made to the effect that sex outside of marriage is wrong. It was considered wrong for a man to lie with his neighbor’s wife, because that would violate his neighbor’s property. But nowhere in the OT is there a restriction against having relations with a divorced or widowed woman. I would not have assumed that silence was an endorsement of this kind of activity had I not learned that the Butu people, among whom we have been working, have a similar arrangement. Virgins are not permitted to have sex, but divorced women in particular are very promiscuous.
I see many parallels between traditional African and OT cultures—nomadic herding, polygamy, male domination, dietary laws, slavery, etc. It does not seem unreasonable to me that many questionable practices of the Butu were part of Hebrew culture if there was no biblical restriction against it. I would not be surprised to learn that infanticide, common to many ancient and traditional cultures, including the Butu, was practiced by the Hebrews. If infanticide is not mentioned in 613 laws, then it seems that the author of the Torah must not have been concerned to forbid the practice of burying or otherwise eliminating an illegitimate or deformed baby. The same could be said of wife beating, which is very prevalent in African society. The author(s) of the Pentateuch seemed more concerned about the fate of birds:
If you happen to come upon a bird's nest along the way, in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs, and the mother sitting on the young or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young; you shall certainly let the mother go, but the young you may take for yourself, in order that it may be well with you, and that you may prolong your days (Deuteronomy 22:6-7).
I acknowledge that arguments from silence like these cannot serve as logical proofs that the OT writers approved of or accepted these practices. But I have a very strong suspicion that since extra-marital sex with divorced women, which is common to almost all cultures, was not condemned in the OT, it must have been practiced with indemnity.
God’s sanction of holy war in the OT is well known and has troubled many believers. All the rationalizations I have heard for this do not take into account verses such as the following, which is in the context of God’s command to take vengeance on the Midianites:
Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man (Numbers 31:17).
We would not consider the possibility that such a statement could be from God if it were uttered by a religious leader today. Then why does anyone believe that it really, truly was spoken God through Moses? Again the dispensational argument comes to the rescue. But that does not change the fact that God, the God of justice who created humankind in his own image, is presented as the issuer of this command.
As a firm believer in God, I cannot exclude the possibility that God might intervene supernaturally in human events. In all my previous doubting, I had never considered the existence of miracles in the Bible as a stumbling block to faith. In my recent studies, however, I have become more aware of the pervasiveness of miracle and myth in the traditional thinking of all cultures, and I am not prepared to accept their genuineness without good evidence. Before living in Africa, I had no idea how naive a pre-modern society could be. A couple weeks ago when I recounted how a friend lost $1500 after setting it down at a counter at a store, our guard insisted that there are people who employ magic to tele-transport money to themselves when someone takes it out of his pocket. He then mentioned having heard on the radio that when a special soap was rubbed on some women in neighboring Cantoria, the women turned into money! I assured him in the strongest terms that that was impossible and that he should insist on seeing it with his eyes before believing it. But if I take the Bible literally, I cannot so confidently assert that this kind of thing is impossible. Consider the following:
Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron's staff swallowed up their staffs (Exodus 7:10-12).
If this really happened, then how can I confidently exclude the possibility that a woman was turned into money in Cantoria in the year 2000? This Exodus account appears to be part of an epic contest of the gods. The assumption is that the Egyptian gods truly could turn staffs into snakes, but Yahweh’s snakes were more powerful and swallowed them up.
Some Christians would argue that Satan indeed does have such powers (though of course the Exodus text does not mention Satan, since the belief in Satan’s existence had not yet been developed, nor had the belief in the existence of other gods been excluded). But such a view runs perilously close to dualism. Where does Satan’s power end? No less seriously, how do we distinguish between God’s miracles and Satan’s? Admitting that Satan can perform such acts appears to invalidate the gospel’s argument from miracle. If we cannot determine whether a miracle is from God or from Satan, we cannot determine whether the miracle worker is from God or Satan, unless we have already pre-determined in our minds whose side the miracle worker is on, in which case we no longer need the miracle to validate the miracle worker.
Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name (John 20:30-31).
The synoptic gospels do not have such a statement. To the contrary, they downplay the role of signs as a means of leading one to believe:
The Pharisees came and began to question Jesus. To test him, they asked him for a sign from heaven. He sighed deeply and said, “Why does this generation ask for a miraculous sign? I tell you the truth, no sign will be given to it” (Mark 8:11-12).
But he said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:31).
So there appears to be two contrasting opinions in the Bible, one which recognizes the value of signs and the other which minimizes it. One may attempt to resolve the problem by arguing that signs serve to confirm the belief of those who are already willing to believe but are ineffective for those who refuse to believe. What then was the purpose of displaying signs before Pharoah?
Last week I was involved in an accident in which a teenage boy ran in front of our vehicle and I clipped his leg going 110 km/h. It was badly broken and needed surgical intervention to align the bones according the surgeon at the hospital. But the boy’s relatives wanted him instead to undergo traditional medicine (which consists of citing verses from the Koran), to which the surgeon did not object. I objected and asked why the surgeon did not even attempt to reason with the family. His response was, “The traditional healers have powers.” I wanted to ask why he was even in the surgical profession if he believed that. Another nurse said that these traditional powers work as long as the fracture is closed, but it is not as effective in open fractures. That figures. When I told the story to another missionary, she responded by saying, “Well, Satan does have powers.” So that’s how we tell whether a miracle is from God or from Satan: If the miracle is done in the Bible or in the name of our religion, we know it’s from God; otherwise, it’s from Satan or maybe (but not likely) a hoax. This kind of reasoning removes all apologetic value from miracle.
It disturbs me how much power evangelicals ascribe to Satan. But it is not surprising, given that many believe that Satan after the Fall was able to turn vegetarian animals into carnivorous ones. This must not have been a trivial task—consider all the tremendously ingenious predatory and defensive survival mechanisms, as well as all the distasteful aspects of nature, like guinea worms, which grow under the skin the full length of the human leg. Creative power like this puts Satan nearly on a level with God.
When I consider how thoroughly and incurably credulous pre-modern people are, to the point where a whole society can believe a woman was turned into money, I do not think it is overly skeptical to take all their other claims of magic and supernatural occurrences with an enormous grain of salt. Lacking the most fundamental scientific understandings of how nature operates, the natural and the supernatural blur seamlessly together in their worldview. This is true not only of contemporary African society, but also of most traditional societies throughout history. The literature of the Ancient Near East is rife with myth and the supernatural, often with parallels in the Bible. One example will suffice as a representative of many such stories:
One of the tales of wonder that the Egyptians told about the magicians was the case of the lector-priest Djadja-em-ankh who saved the day on the occasion of a royal yachting party. When one of the princesses lost her pendant, which fell into the water, the day was almost ruined. But the hero said his say of magic, parted the waters, recovered the lost pendant on dry land, returned it to the princess, and then brought the waters back together again so that the party could continue (Gordon 1997:148).
What reason do we have to believe that this was not historical but that the parting of the waters of in the time of Moses or Joshua or Elija or Elisha was genuine history? The only thing that distinguishes the latter stories from the former is that they happen to be in the Bible. Far from serving as a impetus to belief, most of the biblical miracles confirm my suspicion that the scriptures are merely a human product of their times. What possible purpose does it serve for me in the 21st century to read about miracles that happened in a age of credulity when I cannot go back in time to verify them? I don’t need to know that an ax head floated on the water to believe that God is all-powerful or that I should worship him alone or that I should love my neighbor. Again, I am not denying that these things could have happened, but I fail to see for what purpose God accomplished them, and I am more inclined to see them as embellished history in keeping with the times. With this perspective, I confess that I now find it simply hard to swallow stories about snakes talking to people that lived to be over 900 years of age (the Sumerians record antediluvian kings who lived up to 24,000 years; African friends have told me that their relatively young-looking uncle was 140 years old); a talking donkey; the sun standing still; the hero Samson killing 1,000 men with the jawbone of a donkey while taking personal revenge on enemies; water turning into wine; or Philip being tele-transported across the desert.
The inclusion of Jacob’s sheep experiment in the Bible makes it hard to argue against all kinds of superstitions and charms in an African context:
Moreover, it came about whenever the stronger of the flock were mating, that Jacob would place the rods in the sight of the flock in the gutters, so that they might mate by the rods; but when the flock was feeble, he did not put them in; so the feebler were Laban's and the stronger Jacob's. So the man became exceedingly prosperous, and had large flocks and female and male servants and camels and donkeys (Genesis 30:41-43).
I can readily accept that the very human patriarchs were prone to such superstition, but I have a hard time with the writer’s perspective that this superstition was rewarded, presumably by God. Is this the sort of activity that we believe God would or should reward today? If not, why should he have done so in the time of Jacob? In teaching this passage to Africans, all I can say is, “That was then; this is now. We don’t encourage such practices today.” But I have no basis for maintaining this position.
I do not have the time or the space to be exhaustive in demonstrating the many parallels between the Bible and the mythological literature of the Ancient Near East. I simply mention here again that my reading of The Bible and the Ancient Near East (Gordon 1997) has dealt a deathblow to my confidence in the Bible’s uniqueness and divine character. The more I probe into the origins of the Bible and its message, the more its mystery unravels and its humanity rises to the surface. It would be unfair, though, not to recognize that it does make unique contributions to our understanding of God and that in many respects it stands above the mythological literature of surrounding polytheistic peoples, but not far enough above for me to consider it inerrantly inspired by the God of all creation.
I will treat etiological myths as a special category. These stories exist in all traditional societies as a means of explaining why certain things are the way they are, for example how the leopard got its spots. It is difficult not to see much of Genesis 1-11 as fitting into this mould. The seven (or six plus one) days of creation serve to justify the importance of the number seven, considered by much of the ancient world to have special power, the basis for the seven-day week, the seven-year sabbatical cycle, and the seven sabbatical cycles followed by the year of the jubilee (Gordon 1997:35).
Why was woman created? Because God saw that it was not good for man to be alone. Why is man intelligent as opposed to the animals? Because he ate magic fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (good and evil serving in Hebrew as an expression for everything, cf. Gen. 24:50; in Egyptian the expression “evil-good” means everything). Why is man clothed unlike the animals? Because of his newfound knowledge and sense of decency. Why is the snake such a despised animal? Because of the divine punishment for his action. Why do men have to work hard? Why do women have to submit to men and suffer in childbirth? Again, a punishment for disobedience. Why does not man live forever? God could not now trust Adam and Eve, having attained knowledge, not to partake of the Tree of Life and inherit immortality like the gods, and he had to thrust man out of the garden before this could happen:
And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil [everything]. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever” (Genesis 3:22).
The story of Cain and Able explains the age-old hostility between herdsman and farmers and justifies the Israelite preference for sacrificing animals rather than vegetables. Why were the Hebrews superior to the Canaanites, and how were they justified in subjugating them? Because Canaan’s father Ham uncovered Noah’s nakedness. Why are there so many languages? Because of God’s displeasure with man at the Tower of Babel. (Linguists have long recognized that the evolution of language is sufficient to explain the diversity of the world’s languages apart from such an incident.)
One of the most oft-repeated arguments in favor of the inspiration of the Bible is that, though it was written by some 40 authors over a period of 1500 years, it is perfectly unified and attests throughout to a common theme, namely the redemption of man through Christ. This kind of statement seems motivated by the way it must be in the mind of a committed believer, not necessarily the way it really is. With enough creative thinking, it can be demonstrated how the OT ceremonial laws and history tie into the NT and to Christ (I believe it was Arthur Pink, the great typologist, who suggested that the three decks of Noah’s Ark were representative of three Persons of the Trinity). But for Christians, much of the OT, particularly the Torah, is entirely irrelevant to daily life. We simply ignore or re-interpret anything that doesn’t fit into Christian thinking. While we may believe that God allowed for Jacob to increase his flocks through magic, we wouldn’t think of doing such a thing today. We don’t adhere to the prosperity gospel espoused in the OT. We don’t make women suspected of adultery drink water with curses washed into it. We don’t engage in holy war against our enemies. We don’t pull out people’s hair and make them divorce their wives from another race. We read these stories and think to ourselves, “Interesting,” but we don’t take them seriously or apply them to our own lives. We judge scripture by our own standards while thinking we believe it all equally. It’s the only way to make sense out of a document that is not internally consistent or consonant with reality.
But I do grant that there is a certain degree of continuity in the Bible, more than if the works of 40 different authors were selected at random to make the Bible. This can be explained, it seems to me, by the fact that the books were not indeed selected at random. The makers of the canon were selective, choosing only works that manifested some sort of general agreement with then-current thinking. Many books were excluded from consideration, and others (apocryphal writings) were deemed only marginally authoritative. If Jeremiah’s prediction of the exile had not been fulfilled, it is unlikely that it would have been included in the canon.
Another factor contributing to much of the Bible’s unity is the intervention of later editorialists. I do not buy into the full-blown Wellhausian Documentary Hypothesis, but I am forced to conclude that there is at least some editorializing. And if some can be proven, then who can say that there was not a significant amount? The clearest example I can think of comes from Genesis 36:31: “These were the kings who reigned in Edom before any Israelite king reigned”. There would have been no reason for Moses to write this, as he lived well before the monarchy. Another is the account of Moses’ death in Deuteronomy 34. A subtler clue can be found at the beginning of the story of Balaam: “Then the Israelites traveled to the plains of Moab and camped along the Jordan across from Jericho” (Numbers 22:1). The phrase “across from Jericho” implies (though does not prove) that the author was living west of the Jordan and was therefore probably not Moses, who never crossed the river into Canaan. There are a number of other clues like these.
Another suspicious passage is Deuteronomy 17:14-17, which provides guidelines concerning the future king:
When you enter the land the LORD your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us,” be sure to appoint over you the king the LORD your God chooses. He must be from among your own brothers. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not a brother Israelite. The king, moreover, must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself or make the people return to Egypt to get more of them, for the LORD has told you, “You are not to go back that way again.” He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold.
I confess to using human judgment here, but it just seems unlikely that any given writer would be concerned to give warnings for a generation beyond his own with no possible application for the day in which he lives. It would be a little like finding in the New Testament a passage like, “When you discover how to do in vitro fertilization, do not use it except in the case of a husband and wife who could not otherwise get pregnant.” (Most prophecies in the Bible, including Revelation, can be shown to have a contemporary fulfillment in mind. But if they were not completely fulfilled in the generation of the prophet, Christians assume that there must be some later or dual fulfillment in view.) If Deuteronomy can give the Israelites guidelines concerning future kings, would it not have been just as helpful if the Bible could have given us some guidelines for uniquely contemporary issues like genetic engineering? But we are left to struggle with them with little help from the Bible. I would guess that the Deuteronomy 17:14-17 passage was inserted by a contemporary of Solomon who witnessed the excesses of that king and wanted to curb them. It simply makes more sense than the alternative.
Believers who maintain at all costs the traditional ideas on authorship of the various books feel indignant and highly skeptical of any scholar who would paint a different picture. Granted, some of the liberal hypotheses have been mere conjecture, but for me the pieces of the puzzle fall more and more into place the more I look into the matter without the traditional presuppositions. The skeptical scholars are not basing all their ideas on idle speculation or on a refusal to believe but in many cases on real evidence that cannot be explained in any other way. I have not even scratched the surface here of what can be determined through historical and redaction criticism.
For many years, fulfilled prophecies formed the strongest basis for my conviction that the Bible was God’s word. But upon closer scrutiny, the case for any miraculous fulfillment becomes more and more thin. It is impossible to verify whether many of the OT prophecies were written before their fulfillment, but we do know that the messianic prophecies were written before the birth of Jesus as attested by the Dead Sea scrolls of books like Isaiah. So I will limit my few remarks to messianic prophecies.
When evaluating messianic prophecies, it should be kept in mind that there are no certain contemporary historical records corroborating the gospel stories. There is a short reference to Jesus by Josephus, but there is evidence that it may have been a later interpolation. I am not denying that Jesus existed, but we know nothing of him apart from what his followers wrote of him. We do not even have any evidence that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote the anonymous gospels traditionally attributed to them. So it cannot be taken for granted, for example, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem in fulfillment of OT prophecy. Discrepancies in the birth narratives cast further doubt on that proposition. Luke has Jesus’ parents traveling to Bethlehem for a census, while Matthew implies the family was living in Bethlehem and later moved to “a town called Nazareth.” There is also an historical basis to doubt the Lukan narrative:
And the notorious gaff placing the birth of Jesus both before Herod's death (4 B.C.) and during the census of Quirinius (6 A.D.) will not go away. Of this last McDowell says, "some now believe that Quirinius served two terms of office, the first of these being 10-7 B.C., which would put his first census at the time, roughly, of Christ's birth shortly before Herod's death in 4 B.C." Some apologists now believe it, but no one else. It is a piece of pure guesswork floated by apologist William Ramsey on the basis of a single ambiguous inscription which noted Quirinius had been rewarded for a great military victory. There is no hint of the nature of this reward, but Ramsey figures it might as well have been another term of office! Yeah, that's the ticket! Sorry, but that's ruled out by the fact that we know who the Roman governors were at the time of Herod's death, namely Quintilius Varus and Sentius Saturninus. And there couldn't have been a census previous to the one in 6 A.D., since the outrageous novelty of that one (to think: that Romans should exact tribute from Jews!), sparked the bloody uprising of Judas the Galilean. A related problem is that no census Quirinius conducted would have involved residents of Bethlehem, since in Quirinius' reign, Judea was a technically independent client state allied with Rome, not subject to taxation, unlike Nazareth, part of the Roman province of Syria. Of all this Josh is as ignorant or as heedless as Luke himself (Price 1997).
I do not believe the gospel writers deliberately invented fiction, but as they wrote decades after Jesus’ death, it is not unlikely that they were simply reporting stories that had developed in the meantime surrounding Jesus’ birth.
Many of the “fulfilled prophecies” were general or vague or were clearly not intended to be messianic prophecies but were applied to Jesus after the fact. Matthew is well known for this. In the context of Jesus family’s return from Egypt, he quotes Hosea 11:1: “Out of Egypt I called my son,” a clear reference to Israel’s exodus from Egypt.
The detailed nature of the prophecies in a single chapter of Daniel (11) and their fulfillment far surpass any of the messianic prophecies. The latter would be more convincing to me if they showed the same level of precision as Daniel’s prophecies. But neither do Daniel’s prophecies convince me, since there are indications they were written after their fulfillment.
Even conservative scholars continue to debate how many if any of the messianic prophecies were originally intended as such. It appears that many if not most of them were written as royal coronation or birth oracles. Israel adopted the institution of kingship from the surrounding nations, all of whom regarded the king as in some sense divine. This is the simplest way of interpreting the traditionally messianic passages such as Psalm 2, 45, 110. Price (Psychics) expresses it well:
Now we are in a position to recognize that several passages which were reinterpreted by New Testament writers as predictions of a messiah were first intended as birth or enthronement oracles, or as coronation anthems. The "messiah" and "son" of Yahve in Psalm 2 is every new king of Judah, as the song was ritually performed by king and levitical singer each time a new king came to the throne. Psalm 110 makes pro forma predictions for military victories by the new sovereign and secures for him the hereditary prerogatives of the old Melchizedek priesthood (taken over by David when he annexed Jebusite [Jeru-]Salem and made it his capital). It (110:3) also makes him, like the king of Babylon (Isaiah 14:12), the son of the Semitic dawn goddess Shahar (translated incorrectly as a common noun, "dawn," in most Bibles). Isaiah 9:2-7 is either a coronation oracle or a birth oracle in honor of a newborn heir to the throne, depending on whether "unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given" (verse 6) refers to the literal birth or the adoption as Yahve's "son" on the day of coronation ("this day I have begotten thee," Psalm 2:7). The epithets bestowed on the king in Isaiah 9:6, "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father [cf., 1 Kings 1:31: "May my lord King David live forever!"], Prince of Peace," are the divine titles of Pharaoh and have been borrowed directly from Egyptian court rhetoric.
Since Isaiah 53 figures so prominently in apologetics as a specific prophecy that was fulfilled uniquely in Jesus, I will quote Price’s (Psychics) assessment of it at length:
We might as well consider Isaiah 52:13-15; 53:1-12 here; nothing in the text suggests any connection with the hope of a coming messiah, and it seems to have had nothing to do with birth or coronation oracles, it does represent an aspect of the royal ideology of the ancient Judean god-king, again, derived from the adjacent civilizations. This time, as Helmer Ringgren shows at considerable length (The Messiah in the Old Testament, 1956) we are dealing with a fossil of the ancient New Year's Festival, which, like its prototype in Babylon, renewed the heavenly mandate of the monarchy by having the king undergo, in ritual drama, the fate of the ancient gods whose kingship he represented on earth. Psalm 74 and 89 preserve substantial fragments of the myth of Yahve's primordial combat with the dragons Leviathan, Behemoth, Rahab and Tiamat, as well as the ensuing creation of the world and ascension of the young warrior god to kingship among his brethren, the sons of El Elyon. Like his analogues in Babylon and elsewhere, the king of Judah must have annually renewed his divine right to rule by ritually reenacting this combat. It is to such continued ritual use that we owe their preservation of such mythemes in the biblical canon at all.
In the same way, the kings of Babylon, Iran, etc., as part of the same ritual, would re-enact the death and resurrection of a god (Tammuz, Baal. etc.), a drama in which the king ritually assumed the burden of the fertility of the land and the sins of his people. Sometimes this entailed a mock death, sometimes the actual death of a poor surrogate chosen by lot, sometimes a mere ritual humiliation, as when the Babylonian high priest publicly removed the king's crown, tweaked his ears, and slapped his face. Protesting his innocence, the king would don his robe and crown again and rise to full power once more, redeeming his people in a ritual atonement in which he himself had played the role of scapegoat. Isaiah 52:13-15; 53:1-12 seems to reflect the Hebrew version of the same liturgy, which gave way after the Exile (with no king on the throne any more) to the familiar Yom Kippur ritual. Another surviving vestige of the worship of Tammuz and his divine consort Ishtar Shalmith ("the Shulamite") is the Song of Songs. Remember that Ezekiel attests explicitly the continuation of the worship of Tammuz in Jerusalem in Ezekiel 8:14.
But what is the function of the text in its present context, the announcement of glad tidings of the impending return of the Exilic community of aristocrats and priests to the Holy Land? The old text has been updated, reapplied to a new situation. As Morna Hooker (Jesus and the Servant, 1959), argues, the text as we now read it functions as part of an apologetic for the returning exiles who sought to enhance their position in the eyes of their contemporaries who had remained in the homeland all this time and had ascribed the deportation of their leaders to the leaders' sinfulness, not their own. The so-called Servant Song of Isaiah 52-53 attempts to turn the tables by insisting that it was the innocent minority (or righteous remnant) which was taken away to punishment not because of their own sins but in the place of those who actually did the sinning, the reprobate who remained behind! Thus did they think to theologize the privilege accorded them by their royal Persian patrons. We are not surprised to learn in Ezra and Nehemiah of severe tensions between the newly-returned leaders, with heir arrogant "take-charge" attitude, and the people of the land who had never left. So Isaiah 52-53 in its present context represents a secondary reinterpretation where by the returning exiles are the suffering servant of Yahve, once mistakenly blamed for their own punishment when, from their own viewpoint, they were taking it on behalf of the very upstarts who condemned them as sinners. It is they who, having suffered on behalf of sinners, will be exalted to the glory due them (in their own estimation, anyway).
Josh McDowell’s exposition of the 70 weeks of Daniel 9 was for long one of my favorite proofs of biblical inspiration. I confess I do not understand its significance, but if it was intended to predict the time of Jesus’ death, why did not the gospel writers employ it as an apologetic device? If Matthew could quote Hosea out of context to highlight one of the events in Jesus’ life, why did he neglect Daniel 9? Furthermore, even among Christians there is debate as to the time of the starting point of the prophecy (apologists tend to choose the starting point they think fits best). And Josh McDowell’s use of 360-day “prophetic years” is unattested in Jewish literature except in the later Christian book of Revelation. It appears to be an attempt to tweak the dates so they will make a precise fit, down to the day. I intend to study this prophecy more to discover its original intent. Perhaps it truly was a prediction of Jesus’ coming and death, even if the timing was not exact, in which case I will need to re-evaluate my doubts. But given the many problems I see in the Bible, it would be premature to make this one prophecy the basis of my faith without first looking into all the available interpretations.
The Jewish response to the Christian interpretation of this passage is rather lengthy, so I will simply refer you to “The 70 Weeks - One Messiah or Two?” at http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/TorahYid/daniel9.html.
Josh McDowell and others attempt to prove the bodily resurrection of Jesus using arguments based on the assumption that the gospel record is reliable. But the contradictory nature of the resurrection accounts undercuts this effort. It is very difficult if not impossible to harmonize the stories in the four gospels. Even important details like where Jesus first appeared to his disciples do not agree. Did he appear to them first in Jerusalem (Luke) or in Galilee (Matthew)? If this conflict can be reconciled, then what contradiction in any religious book could not be reconciled with a sufficiently fertile imagination? John’s account differs so much from the others that one could wonder whether it was referring to the same story.
Christian apologists assert that if the tomb were not empty, the Jewish authorities could have exhumed Jesus’ body to quell the notion that he had risen. But the first recorded proclamation of the resurrection was at Pentecost 50 days after Jesus’ death, when his body would have been sufficiently decayed as to be unidentifiable. There was no more reason for the Jews to exhume Jesus than there is to exhume Elvis to disprove the belief that Elvis has risen from the dead.
There is evidence to suggest that the idea of a physical resurrection arose gradually from a prior belief in a spiritual resurrection or vision (Barker-Horner 1996). Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 uses the term egeiro “to wake up, awaken” instead of anastasis “to resurrect,” which used in the later gospel accounts. “Egeiro” is the same word Paul uses in “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light” (Ephesians 5:14). In none of Paul’s writings does he give details concerning the life of Jesus from the gospel accounts, including the details of the resurrection. He writes of Jesus’ spiritual body:
If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual (1 Corinthians 15: 44-46).
According to Paul, Jesus “appeared” to the disciples just as he appeared to Paul, in a vision (1 Corinthians 15:5-7). Visions appearing to groups or numerous individuals are not uncommon in history. For example, Dan Barker (1996) tells of the appearances of the Virgin Mary in Medjugorge, Yugoslavia June 24, 1981. Six people (Ivanka Ivankavic, Mirjana Dragecevic and others) saw the Virgin on a hillside and were able to touch her. They went back the next day with some villagers, many of whom said they saw a light. The rumor spread and soon many thousands of people came from all over the world to visit this village and be healed by the Virgin. One of the messages she gave was for the people to look into the sun, and they would see it spinning. This story shows how easy it is for myths to get started and spread quickly with little or no basis in reality.
It is interesting that in Mark, the earliest of the gospels, there are no resurrection appearances except in the spurious ending (Mark 16:9-20) tacked on at a later date. The original book ends with the women seeing the empty tomb and failing to tell anyone about it as the angel had commanded. Could this have been Mark’s way of introducing the idea of the empty tomb decades after Jesus’ death and explaining why no one had yet heard of it?
Contrary to the gospel accounts in which Jesus is buried by his followers in Joseph of Aramathea’s tomb, believers in Acts 13:28-29 maintained that it was Jesus’ enemies who buried him. Perhaps the disciples may not have known where he was buried.
The story of Jesus’ resurrection was not unique in its day:
Charles Talbert, in What is a Gospel?, has demonstrated that in Jesus' era philosophers, kings, and other benefactors were often glorified in terms of ancient legend. Heroes of antiquity such as Romulus and Hercules were rewarded for their labors by "apotheosis"-- i.e., they were taken up into heaven and divinized. Their ascent into heaven was supposedly seen by gaping eyewitnesses (as in the case of Romulus) or was at least evidenced by the absence of any bodily remains. The hero might even reappear to his mourning friends to encourage or direct them. Not only were such legends circulating about mythical figures of the past, but the same stories would be applied in popular imagination to more recent or contemporary figures such as Apollonius of Tyana, the Emperor Augustus, and the prophet Peregrinus. In fact, so many contemporary figures were divinized that the whole practice came to be satirized, e.g., in Seneca's The Pumpkinification of Claudius (Price 1987).
Whatever happened after Jesus’ death, there does not appear to be truly compelling evidence to accept his physical resurrection.
The more I study the Bible and its background, the more I see apologetics as an attempt to plug leaks. And it seems that when puts a finger in one hole, another leaks springs somewhere else. The whole ship is riddled with holes, and the only reason it stays afloat is that there are enough good people plugging the holes.
It is immensely painful to come to the realization that all I have devoted my life to is likely founded on myth, on the well-meaning credulity of ancient peoples, passed down through the ages by equally well-meaning believers who see no alternative to faith in these myths. How I wish I had grown up in the one true religion! But everyone must acknowledge that most people are not afforded the privilege of growing up in the one true religion. And yet most of them grow up believing that they belong to the one true religion. Is it beyond possibility that we too are mistaken? I now find it hard to accept that there is one true religion by which we must be reconciled to God.
In my present state of unbelief, I cannot continue my lifelong endeavor to bring the Christian gospel to a Muslim people. I enjoy the challenges of linguistics, language development, and literacy as a means of improving the lot and expanding the horizons of pre-modern peoples, but I cannot continue to work within the context of Wycliffe until and unless I can come to believe again.
I intend to continue seeking God and devoting my life to what is good in the spirit of Micah 6:8. May God help me.
Sources
Barker, Dan and Michael Horner. 1996. Did Jesus Really
Rise from the Dead? [Online].
Gordon, Cyrus H. and Gary A. Rensdburg. 1997. The
Bible and the Ancient Near East. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Price, Robert M. 1987. Beyond Born Again. [Online] http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/beyond_born_again/chap6.html
Price, Robert M. Did Top Psychics Predict Jesus’
Coming? [Online] http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/psychics.html
Price, Robert M. 1997. By This Time He Stinketh: The
Attempts of William Lane Craig to Exhume Jesus. [Online] http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/stinketh.html
Price, Robert M. 1997. Damnable Syllogism. [Online] http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/damnable.html
[1] Sensitive geographical and group names have been changed.
[2] For a more complete treatment of this hypothesis, see http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/damnable.html