Now I know a lot of you don't agree with my point of view. I know this. And I'm not here to try and shove my point of view in your face. No, rather I want to get a serious discussion going. Personally I am an atheist. Don't bother preaching to me I only came here to ask one question. Here goes. So, it's common knowledge that the bible was not written by Jesus Christ. That is a fact. Now according to the Christian faith, people no matter who they are, are imperfect. So my question is basically this: If Jesus did not write the bible, the lessons and text contained therein are an interpretation of his word. So if the word of God was interpreted by a man, would it not be imperfect? If the bible is imperfect, why follow it? Please refrain from getting upset and lashing out at me, I am only interested in serious discussion. I would like it to be known that I do not necessarily disagree with most of the lessons that Christianity can teach us, however I feel that many of those lessons are in almost all cases taken out of context and people put their idea of "God" before the lessons that he supposedly taught. So let's get some serious discussion in here. Why do you follow the bible if it was not written directly by God?
There are a lot of arguments concerning the notion of biblical inerrancy, I'll let those who believe in it to defend and argue their case.
Since biblical inerrancy isn't part of my theological vocabulary, I'm going to approach this perhaps differently:
The Bible isn't intended as an inerrant document that forms the basis of Christian faith. The Bible is not the Christian version of the Qur'an.
What I mean by that is that in Islam the Qur'an is God's Revelation, given explicitly from God, through Gabriel, to Muhammad who relayed it to the people and which was recorded down. It is, as such, a holistic document that is presented as God's Word and Revelation to humanity.
That's not the Bible, at least not historically. The Bible is a collection of disparate texts written by different people at different periods of history in different places. All these different texts are of differing literary genres. We have, e.g., the Books of Chronicles which presents an historical unfolding of Israel's history; we have the the Psalms, a collection of song and poetry; we have Proverbs, a collection of wisdom sayings; we have Job, a philosophical poem asking about the problem of suffering; we have the Gospels, accounts of the Jesus Story integral to the Christian community/communities; we have apocalyptic material such as Daniel and the Revelation of St. John; we have the Prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, calling the People of God to repentance and faithfulness; we have epistles, letters to church communities and individuals exhorting them about specific problems and situations.
The Bible evolved, it developed over a period of time. Specifically it evolved in the context of community and liturgy. Like Jews, Christians gathered together for worship which included prayer, song, and readings from Sacred Scripture. Christian communities not only used Jewish Scripture (the Law, Prophets and Writings), but also began to read the letters of the Apostles. St. Paul may have written his Epistle to the Romans for the Christians in Rome, but it didn't take long for the letter to be copied and sent to other communities, read aloud. The reading of these specifically Christian writings was joined to the reading of the Law and Prophets, and were thus also called Holy Scripture.
Then the Church, as a whole, had to deal with which of these writings should be read and which shouldn't be read. That was the essential question behind the Biblical Canon--what do we read during worship for the exhortation of God's people? Lucky for us we can actually see this conversation happening in the writings of early Christians.
Sometime in the 2nd century an anonymous author wrote about what books were being received in the churches, we call it the Muratorian Fragment, and it's usually dated to the last quarter of the 2nd century (c. 170-200 CE) with some dating it as early as the Bar Kochba Revolt in 135 CE, the Fragment lists accepted books as follows (an English translation of the Fragment can be found
here):
The Four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; The Acts of the Apostles; Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians; Paul's Pastoral Epistles to Philemon, Titus and Timothy; An Epistle Jude, Two Epistles from St. John; the Book of Wisdom [of Solomon]; The Apocalypse of St. John and the Apocalypse of St. Peter (with some regarding Peter as spurious); The Shepherd of Hermas;
Rejected are the spurious and forged epistles claiming to be from Paul to the Laodiceans and the Alexandrians.
Not mentioned: The Third Epistle of John, the two Epistles of Peter, the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Epistle of James.
Through time the Canon became more refined, a process that was quite fluid and dynamic. Until the Council of Trent in the 16th century in response to the Protestant Reformation there had not been an attempt at a formal, final, definition of the entire Canon.
Even as late as the 14th century, when John Wycliffe made his translation of the Bible into English, he included (from the Latin Vulgate) the Epistle to the Laodiceans. The Revelation/Apocalypse of St. John was not fully accepted in the Christian East until the last quarter of the first millennium, with St. John Damascus defending its full inclusion.
The Bible, therefore, is quite messy. Even today Christians aren't in full agreement over what exactly constitutes the Biblical Canon (i.e. do we accept the Deuterocanonicals (whether in full or in part) or don't we?).
The whole point of the Bible, however, was as liturgical texts: Books to be read in the liturgy of gathered Christian worshipers to receive exhortation, teaching, and be built up in their faith in Christ.
In Christianity God's Revelation is not seen as being delivered to us in a book (as in Islam), but rather God's Revelation has been delivered to us as a Person. God's Word became flesh, Jesus Christ. Jesus is God's Revelation, God's Divine Word.
The Bible points us to Christ. It directs us toward Jesus. We believe that this collection of literature is uniquely inspired by God, and that because of this God can speak to us, and what He speaks is His Word (Jesus); and therefore we, in faith, recognize one Word or Utterance, one Sacred Subject of the whole of Holy Scripture: that Word, Utterance and Subject being Jesus Christ Himself.
We don't need a "perfect Bible", a perfect book, for this to hold true. All we need is that God is active speaking to us in these books, and speaking Christ to us, directing us to Jesus Christ the Author and Finisher of our faith. God is perfectly capable of doing this through an imperfect medium. Even in Biblical history we see a grand narrative of God working through fragile, imperfect, faltering human beings: Through Abraham, Moses, David and St. Paul as some obvious examples.
The Biblical narrative continually speaks of God working with messy people and working through messy people to accomplish His purposes and to speak His Word to them. Why should it be any different with this beautiful and often messy tapestry of Holy Scripture which Christians call the Bible?
-CryptoLutheran
