Bobbie Kirkhart
BRIDGING THE LEAP OF FAITH
“For God is not the author of confusion...”
—(1 Corinthians 14:33, KJV)
I GREW UP IN A teetotaling Methodist church in the dry state of Oklahoma. This presented a problem, as the Bible is virtually soaked with wine. The miracle at Cana (John 2:1-10), where Jesus turned the water into wine, was a particular enigma. “Why would a nice young god like Jesus turn pure, sweet water into the devil's drink?” Some opined that, while he turned the water into wine, he didn't drink it. For most, this was not a good enough explanation, as he still enabled others to drunkenly ruin a perfectly good wedding reception, when everybody knows that orange juice concentrate with lemonade, canned pineapple juice, and ginger ale is just perfect for the occasion. You can even add some strawberry sherbet to float in the punch bowl for added sweetness and color. Palestine, after all, already had plenty of wine but was severely lacking in strawberry sherbet.
I don't know whether it was my mother, the preacher, or one of the women in the Mary-Martha Circle who figured it out, but the problem was solved when it was decided that Jesus didn't really turn water into wine; he just purified the water. Pure water was scarce in Palestine, the thought went, and people who had never tasted it would surely think it was the finest wine.
As explanations go, it wasn't much of one, but it did solve the problem of cognitive dissonance, that discomfort we feel when we know that what we know just ain't so. Psychologists tell us that we deal with that distress by “discovering” new facts. This idea is not just a facility of Christians—indeed, it is the generator of many of our great scientific discoveries and almost all of our UFO sightings—but belief in ancient holy texts is certainly one good reason for the phenomenon, and the biggest lies we hear are frequently the lies we ask someone to tell us.
“Why would a nice young god like Jesus turn pure, sweet water into the devil's drink?”
By and large, the wisdom of the itinerant preacher, the sewing circle, and the back-porch philosopher has given way to the blogger, the listserv moderator, and the chat-room junkie, so to find out how the world is coping with the Bible's uncomfortable anecdotes, my own experience is greatly enhanced by the Internet. Things look absolutely right and real on a webpage, but the approach to truth doesn't seem to have changed much from when I was a child in the 1950s in the whipping strop of the Bible Belt. When it comes to
logic and truth, the consensus is that two wrongs can make a right.
It is the fundamentalists, clinging to their belief that the Bible is literally true, who need a J.P. Holding to tell them that, yes, the Bible is literally true and a great moral guide, but you just have to understand that it doesn't always mean what it says.
The Bible presents a lot of problems for those who love their families. Indeed, Jesus is supposed to have said, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26, KJV). The wise ones of cyberspace are unanimously sure that when Jesus said “hate,” he really meant, “not love as much as you love me.” Unfortunately, the translators always put “hate”—or the older ones, “hateth”—as the verb. I looked at a dozen translations and didn't find an exception. In the original Greek of the New Testament, the word is miseo. According to Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament—one of the standard works in this area—miseo means “to hate, pursue with hatred, detest.” Still, even for an atheist like me, it's good to think he didn't really mean hate.
Potentially more troublesome is the story of Jephthah (Judges 11:28-40, RSV), who was at war when he was visited by “the Spirit of the Lord.” He promised the Lord: “If thou wilt give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes forth from the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord's, and I will offer him up for a burnt offering.” Well, indeed, he smote the enemy “with a very great slaughter. Thus the children of Ammon were subdued before the children of Israel,” and Jephthah went home. Darn it, who should come first to greet him but his only child, a daughter, “with timbrels and with dances.” Somehow, he hadn't counted on this. Having expected something more disposable, like a dog or a slave, he said, “Alas, my daughter! you have brought me very low, and you have become the cause of great trouble to me; for I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow.” The daughter understood. A promise is a promise, after all, but she asked for a couple of months to go into the mountains and mourn her virginity. Here is the most surprising part of the story: “And at the end of two months, she returned to her father,” and less surprising, if you know the Old Testament, “who did with her according to his vow which he had made.” Interestingly, the narrator thinks it's important to note that she was still a virgin.
J.P. Holding explains that, even though the ordinary reader might think that this is a story of a man who got God to help him kill a bunch of people (that part, Holding seems to find absolutely true and perfectly acceptable) and in return executed his only daughter as a burnt offering, it really didn't happen that way at all.
1 First, and this is obsessively important to Holding, there is no evidence that the Holy Spirit actually inspired the vow. Second, Jep didn't know a person would be the first to greet him. After all, human sacrifice is a bad thing, and if he had known, he would never have made the promise. Holding sort of skates around the question of whether God, who knows everything, knew a human would greet Jep. He says that if Jep had foreseen this, then God would have been guilty “by endorsement.”
All this makes little difference, because, even though Holding concedes that “(m)any commentators think” Jep sacrificed his daughter, he didn't really do it. His proof? The girl lamented her virginity. After all, nobody facing death would care about a little thing like that. Okay, well, maybe Antigone and a few dozen other literary characters, but no nice Jewish girl in Holding's Bible.
Jep's story isn't really a problem for most modern Christians. It's likely that a higher percentage of atheists than Christians know the story of Jephthah, and the average Christian would dismiss it as the primitive fable it is. It is the fundamentalists, clinging to their belief that the Bible is literally true, who need a J.P. Holding to tell them
that, yes, the Bible is literally true and a great moral guide, but you just have to understand that it doesn't always mean what it says. Still, the average Christian is committed to the idea that the Bible is a holy book that teaches right from wrong. While they can dismiss the more preposterous tales, they do run into a conflict with the Bible's parenting advice, which leans heavily toward physical punishment.
“I think that sometimes it comes down to what we mean when we say different words,” says Pastor Crystal Lutton.
2 She's a smart woman who believes in modern parenting techniques, and she knows a lot of meanings for the different words in the Bible. She invests a lot of words, herself, in explaining what Solomon meant when he said, “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell” (Proverbs 23:13-14, KJV). The Hebrew word being translated as “rod” (
shebet) might mean a walking stick, shepherd's crook, or scepter, she explains, but she thinks it is the latter. She has alternate definitions for almost everything except “beatest,” which she concedes does refer to “striking,” but she notes that it is followed by “he shall not die.” Since a person who is beaten can die, she is sure that Solomon is using the term metaphorically.
Short of true open-minded investigation and real testing of conflicting ideas, Pastor Lutton may exemplify the best use of this human facility to develop information that reconciles the dissonance. Modern research is clear that corporal punishment has only short-term results, at best, and does long-term damage, at worst, so I personally applaud anything that enables Christians to become good parents.
Of course, God himself was rather punitive with children. Take this story of the prophet Elisha: “He went up from there to Bethel; and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, ‘Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!’ And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys” (2 Kings 2:23-24, RSV). I’m indebted to Eliezer Segal, who recalls the teachings of the Midrash
3 that, in fact, the fault lies with the leaders of the town who did not give their distinguished guest a proper escort out of town.
4 I guess a proper escort would have overcome the bears, even when they were sent by God. Some interpretations go further, insisting that Elisha's taunters were not children but were adults “with unsavory backgrounds who were guilty of an assortment of heinous sins.” Segal doesn't buy it himself, but his account proves that such rationalizations of scripture are not new and are not exclusively Christian.
In these days when religious belief has become a political issue, the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah gets bandied about a lot. You know the story. Lot took in two travelers, angels perhaps.
But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter: And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them. And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after him, And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof. (Genesis 19:4-8, KJV)
Then God struck the men of Sodom blind, told Lot and his family to leave, rained fire on Sodom and neighboring Gomorrah, turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, and later his daughters got him drunk and raped him, but that really gets into another story.
The idea that the mob wanted to “know” the strangers sexually is so ingrained in modern citings that one cyber-sage comes up with a whole different interpretation of the story, one that goes well beyond the necessary or reasonable.
“Grumpy” writes on a discussion board: “(T)he story is not about homosexuals, it is a story of the conflict between Ba'al and the Jews.”
5 I hadn't heard this interpretation involving the Canaanite deity Ba'al before, so I asked my good friend, Bible scholar Bob Price.
6 He wrote, “Actually, I have never heard of the interpretation you mention.
The daughters’ rape of Lot is wrong, of course, but Rick and Eileen Beltz of
Biblestudy.org ask us to consider the circumstances.
However, even if it were true, it would seem to be yet another case of genocide-mongering. But there is a theory I find quite reasonable re: Sodom and Gomorrah that gives no aid and comfort to anti-gay forces and is probably superior historically anyway.” He makes the point, as do others, that failure to protect the guest in ancient desert tribes was a crime similar to horse theft in the old American West. His argument that “know” was probably not meant sexually is persuasive, “since ‘to know’ means ‘to have sex with’ 10 times out of 900 plus in the Hebrew OT [Old Testament]. It does once even in the immediate context of the story, when Lot describes his virgin daughters as those ‘who have not known man.’ But it also uses it in the other way in the previous chapter, part of the same story, when God says of Abe, ‘him alone of all the earth have I known,’ i.e., chosen. Does this mean God was having homosexual trysts with the Patriarch Abraham? The mere word settles, even suggests, nothing by itself.” Bob adds this note, “And of course the word ‘sodomy’ is not ancient but merely derives from the anti-gay reading (I should say MISreading) of the passage.”
“Grumpy” didn't need his new interpretation, after all.
The daughters’ rape of Lot is wrong, of course, but Rick and Eileen Beltz of
Biblestudy.org ask us to consider the circumstances.
7 “Lot's daughters must have thought it was the end of civilization and that they were some of the only people then living. They were obviously greatly concerned about the future of their family (and possibly the human race). This concern led them to do what they did.” More interesting is their assertion that Lot was not an alcoholic because “Lot is considered a good man, righteous in God's eyes.” Knowledge that the two are incompatible must come as a shock to more than a few people, including George W. Bush, Ted Kennedy, and Mel Gibson.
Lot's wife becoming a pillar of salt prompts another kind of cognitive dissonance. There is simply no known mechanism which turns a human being into a pillar of salt. “Jesus, Dinosaurs and More” bills itself as “a webpage of Scientific evidence supporting the Biblical account of Creation.” In it we learn that the land had many salt deposits, one of which must have engulfed Lot's wife in the explosion.
8 It seems that when God declares war on a town, he, too, may cause collateral damage.
As tempting as the above webpage is, and as entertaining as some of its “proofs” are, most are just that: assertions that claim to prove what the reader already believes, that scientific observation is wrong and the Bible is right. The above attempt to reconcile fiction with fact is an exception.
For most well-educated Christians, the big miracles, such as the Creation or Noah's Ark, are easy to accept as myth. There is just too much knowledge of evolution to square the Bible with reality. It's all those little miracles that conflict with our modern understanding of the world. If God performed miracles then, why not now? Some eagerly seek modern-day miracles and are easily taken in by confidence men of all kinds, especially faith healers. Most, however, note that “modern-day miracles” give way to logical explanations, and they seek to protect the value of the Bible by finding explanations for its miracles.
The crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:21-29) is, of course, a puzzlement. Back in 1992, climatologists Doron Nof and Nathan Paldor offered analyses supposedly demonstrating how a wind could have parted the Red Sea, as described in the Bible.
9 They may have been the first with the actual statistics, wind charts, and oceanographic models, but I remember such explanations from scientists when I was a child, well before 1992. Similarly, many people have suggested that the event might have taken place on the “Sea of Reeds,” a shallow arm of the Red Sea, although there is no certainty about which shallow arm might have been so called. Both of these explanations ignore the complete lack of evidence that the Jews were ever in Egypt, as the Moses story claims.
10I’ve been told that Lazarus was likely entombed prematurely, and Jesus merely cured his illness after he had lain in the tomb for four days.
The press probably pleases the populace with its uncritical reporting of stories that support religion. They rationalize that they later print corrections if the story isn't true, so no harm is done. So it is with the accounts of men swallowed whole by big fish or whales, as Jonah allegedly was, that come up every few decades. Perhaps the most famous one concerns a ship called
Star of the East, which lost, then found in the belly of a whale, a crew member named James Bartley. Never mind that the
Star wasn't a whaling ship, that there was no James Bartley on the register, that the captain's wife said it was a sea tale, or that subsequent versions changed the details. The story was first reported and debunked in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but it is still circulated.
11The New Testament is the source of more serious cognitive dissonance, however. Jesus was God, or he wasn't. Gods can do supernatural things, or they are not gods. (Okay, there is a small but growing group that says their god has no supernatural powers. I’ll let them explain how that is a god, because it certainly beats me.) We live in the real world, or we don't. This brings up problems from virgin births to divine resurrections.
The Christian Virgin Birth is just too hard. The Hindu deity Krishna was born of a virgin. Julius Caesar's mother was a virgin. The Gnostics didn't believe Mary was a virgin. So it is explained away as a cover story for an unplanned pregnancy or it is taken on faith without examination.
Recently, our old friend Doron Nof, of Red Sea fame, came up with an account of how Jesus might have walked on water (Matthew 14:25-32). On
Seed magazine's website he explains, accurately as far as I know (but then, what do I know?), that during the time of Jesus’ life, weather was much cooler and there was a cold spring, so an ice flow on the Sea of Galilee was entirely possible, although not likely at any given time.
12 Quite honestly, Nof explains:
My view is that the Bible is a historical book and was written and re-written many times, probably. I think that (this particular miracle) is perhaps based on something natural that happened, but not frequently enough for people to get used to it. Again, this is my view. It doesn't mean it's the correct view, but that's the view I took before I started that research. It doesn't mean other people need to view it that way.
Jesus’ raising of Lazarus (John 11:43-44) is a problem for several reasons. The point is made that Lazarus had been dead four days. This makes Jesus’ resurrection after three days seem the lesser miracle and raises all sorts of possibilities. Of course, in those times, it was hard to tell if someone was really dead. I’ve been told that Lazarus was likely entombed prematurely, and Jesus merely cured his illness after he had lain in the tomb for four days.
The resurrection of Jesus is the biggest problem, because it is crucial to the whole Christian idea that we can overcome death, that Jesus was (is) God, and all the things that this implies to the true believer. The people I’ve heard rationalize the resurrection are not Christians in that sense. They are much more likely people who want to believe that Jesus lived and was a great teacher. They think the Prince of Peace is a wonderful moral guide, but they tend to ignore the aforementioned “hate thy family” Jesus, the one who has “not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34, RSV).
These folk just can't buy the resurrection. After all, in this very well-documented period of history, wouldn't an executed criminal/cult leader who came back to life have made the papers? Still, if the whole story is untrue, they have lost the last remnants of the faith of their fathers. This may explain why as many as 40 percent of non-Christians told the 2000 Harris poll that they believe in the resurrection of Jesus.
13 I’m guessing that they mean they believe the stories were told by people who believed it. Still, most polls show a significant number of Christians who do not believe that Jesus recovered from his execution. The Religious Tolerance website gives a list of alternate ideas :
14I’ll take rationalism over rationalizationism any day.
• The Swoon Theory: Jesus was only unconscious and was whisked away by followers before the Romans could learn that their execution had failed;
• The Stolen Body Theory: his corpse was stolen by followers;
15 • The Vision Theory: it was all an hallucination shared by many people;
• The Catholic Modernist Theory: “the entrance into life immortal of one risen from the dead is not subject to observation; it is a supernatural, hyper-historical fact, not capable of historical proof”;
• The Reserpine Theory: Jesus used this or another drug to lower his body temperature and give the appearance of death.
They also include the Myth Theory, which says that the New Testament writers made up the whole thing (duh!), and Bishop John Shelby Spong's Midrash interpretation that, yes, they made it up but it has symbolic truth.
This is a pretty good list, but they left out my favorite theory. Some years ago, I heard a lecturer at a Secular Humanists of Los Angeles
16 gathering forward the obvious explanation, overlooked all these centuries—Jesus was a twin!
Oh, well, I guess there's no end to it. The human mind acquires new falsehoods more easily than it discards old ones. When I was a child, my favorite story was the miracle of the loaves and the fishes (Matthew 14:14-21). The Sunday school taught it as “The Little Boy Who Gave His Lunch to Jesus,” but none of the biblical accounts includes a child. The hook for me wasn't the fact that a kid was involved; it was trying to visualize the five loaves and two fish passed among the multitude, being taken and eaten without being consumed. They simply passed them out and yet kept them in the baskets (one wag suggests they cloned the fish). I spent hours trying to visualize this miracle, until one day I heard my mother, a true believer if ever there was one, saying that perhaps the sharing of food encouraged everyone in the crowd to share what they had been hoarding.
This kind of radical thinking in my religious home brought about another kind of cognitive dissonance, one that was finally solved in early adulthood by hard-headed rationalism. Although I have to salute anyone who tries to bring their fictions closer to fact, I’ll take rationalism over rationalizationism any day.
3 Jewish commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures compiled between 400 and 1200 C.E.
6 Dr. Robert M. Price, professor of theology and scriptural studies at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is the author of numerous books of biblical scholarship, including The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts, Deconstructing Jesus, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, and The Da Vinci Fraud.
9 Nof, Doron, and Nathan Paldor. “Are There Oceanographic Explanations for the Israelites’ Crossing of the Red Sea?” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 73 (1992): 305-14. They expanded on this in: Nof, Doron, and Nathan Paldor. “Statistics of Wind Over the Red Sea With Application to the Exodus Question.” Journal of Applied Meterorology 33 (1994): 1017-25.
10 In their articles, Nof and Paldor concede that they're not out to prove that the crossing did or didn't happen, just whether it could've happened. Believers tend to ignore this, citing their research as evidence that it did happen.
11 Adams, Cecil. “Have Any Real-life Jonahs Been Swallowed by Whales and Lived?” “Straight Dope” column, 14 Sept 2001.
15 The motivation for this is not given on the website, but I have heard two: Some think they wanted to create the illusion of a resurrection, while others believe they were sparing the body from desecration by infidels.
16 Forerunner of the Center for Inquiry West.