Damn.
Why am I always so late in coming to these parties?
I read about half of the posts in this thread; I simply do not have the time to slog through them all.
I find that when entering discussions about the Bible, what tends to complicate things is the wide ranging and varied opinions and misconceptions that lay people tend to hold with regards to
what the Bible is, and what it ought to be. If anyone is all that keenly interested in the Bible, where it came from, how it developed, why it is such an influential book, and how and why religions have come to read and teach it the way that they do, allow me, first to make a book recommendation. James L. Kugel,
How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now (New York / London / Toronto / Sydney: Free Press, 2007), is my current favourite popular book on the subject. I also recommend that you check out Prof. Kugel's own webpage:
www.jameskugel.com, which has some good additional resources. An especially good read there is the downloadable appendix that he wrote to the book, entitled:
"Apologetics and 'Biblical Criticism Lite'", in which he launches into a very good critique of the current establishment of biblical scholarship.
So then, what is the Bible? Most would answer that question simply enough by pointing to the 66—plus or minus a couple dozen—books of their leather-bound Thompson Chain Reference that rests upon the shelf. When in actual fact—as photon and some others have already pointed out—there are several "Bibles" within Judaism and Christianity, and their presence along with the sensitive issues behind canonization renders the idea of THE BIBLE somewhat inert. The Bible is a collection of various "Scriptures"—which I would define simply as ancient, sacred writings—that have been arranged according to a foundation of pre-existing theological and philosophical premises. More often than not, the theological premises upon which the individual pieces of writing were collected, edited and preserved will supersede the original intent and content of that book.
For example, the common Christian conceptual framework applied to the story of Adam and Eve from the book of Genesis is founded upon two principles: first, the doctrine of original sin, and second, the initiation of the messianic promise. Both of these ideas are completely alien to the story itself, and both reside on a set of underlying principles and ideas that have been developed over hundreds—sometimes thousands—of years. This is why the common garden snake from the narrative is transformed into the personification of evil, and why the etiological point in Gen 3:15 is trumped up in Paul's writings, and
mistranslated to refer to the victory of God in Christ, in Rom 16:20.
In defining what the Bible
is, one can never stray too far from the very highly developed interpretive matrices that are imposed upon the texts. The Bible is an idea as much as it is a book, and this idea will change and nuance according to whatever interpretive community that happens to retain the Bible as "the Word of God". In recognizing this, one must also acknowledge the enormous flexibility in what the Bible has become, and what it will be in the future. Even within the past 20 or 30 years, large segments within my own Evangelical tradition have subconsciously adapted and altered their own understanding of much of what is in the Bible; hence changing what the book itself in effect actually is.
I'll give you another example: Last year, my pastor preached a series of messages on the book of Ephesians, which is a rather famous piece of writing (that was pseudonymously attributed to Paul, but actually penned some time in the early–mid second cent. C.E.) for its antiquarian ideas regarding women. It struck me as I listened to his sermon on this one sensative passage from Eph. 5:21–33 just how different his message today is from that which I commonly heard growing up, not 25 years ago. Now, in the spirit of equity, the commands of "Paul" for wives to be "subject to your husbands" (v. 22), and for husbands to "love your wives" (v. 33) is applied evenly to both sexes, where not so long ago this passage was read much more plainly.
*It is interesting, as an aside, that in this portion of Ephesians women are not EVER instructed to love their husbands, only they are required to pay them their due respect. This is a bit that is often missed by preachers and even some commentators, but I find it highly significant, and reflective of the culture within which this letter was written, in which women usually were not permitted to choose their own spouse, and were practically always under the power of a man; whether it be her father or her husband.
We tend to take for granted how we think, conceptualize and as a consequence, how we read all kinds of literature. The ways in which we read, understand, receive and interpret texts has in fact changed in the course of the last several hundred years, which in turn changed from how it was over the last several hundred and thousands of years before then. Because we live in a hyper-literate culture, because we have an absurd amount of access to information, and because we receive this information almost entirely
visually has had an effect on how this information is processed. Where the inerrentists perhaps make their most glaring mistake is in assuming that the texts which they treat as Scripture, and in which they read and interpret as "plainly" and straight-forwardly as possible was always understood as such. Quite to the contrary, one of the common characteristics of Scripture in the ancient world and all the way until the Renaissance was to read Scripture symbolically and cryptically: most often, what the text says on the surface is secondary to what the text actually means, and usually it was that underlying "hidden" message that was of primary importance. It was through this method that the author of Daniel 9 (which was NOT written by Daniel!) came to conclude that the prophecy of Jer 25:11–12 and 29:10 was not for an actual physical exile of 70 years, but rather that this was a period of
70 weeks of years or 490 years! It was by the same approach that Paul quite legitimately applied the words of Deut 9 out of context and directly to Jesus in Rom 10:5–9.
One of the real powers inherent within the Bible was always its adaptability to these sorts of exegetical techniques that much of the Christian church now frowns upon. It was precisely because the Bible's meaning was always so flexible that it achieved its longevity. One of my fears, as a Christian, is that the excessively rationalistic programme of biblical literalists and inerrentists will render the Bible itself utterly inert. In their efforts to "conserve" what they consider to be the basic doctrines of the faith, they are playing a dangerous game of progressional cultural ignorance.
If the Bible is to have any contemporary value, and if it is to remain an authoritative religious source, then this flexibility must be retained, and the doctrines of inerrency, infallibility, and literalist or plain approaches must be abandoned.
I have a fair bit more to say about this, but will leave you with that, for now.