— Daniel Copeland
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One fine day, in the middle of the night,The contradictions which worldly scoffers have claimed to find in these sacred lines are mere confusion, as anyone with true wisdom will immediately see. But in order that the ignorant may have no excuse, I hereby demonstrate how the word of truth is rightly divided.
Two dead men got up to fight.
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords, and shot each other.
You get my point, I think. You can iron the contradictions out of any text, even contradictions that are direct and deliberate, if you bend far enough over backwards. But if you do that, what comes out is not what the original writer meant; it’s an interpretation which you yourself have imposed on the text. This process, applied to the Bible, is what many literalist Christians call “reading in context”. Context, here, can mean only “Scripture, as a monolithic whole”, which literalists generally recommend be applied to modern life without alteration or reinterpretation. This is precisely the opposite of what is usually meant by reading something in context — namely, taking note of the social and political circumstances in which it was written, and the general thrust of the current passage. At the very least, we should consider what the original readers would have thought it meant; if it is a coded message for something else, the author deliberately deceived his audience.Has God ever told us what’s right and what’s wrong? And, if so, what happens to people who do wrong? Christians answer both questions by pointing to the Bible. But the Bible contains numerous discrepancies. Believing readers are invited to ponder the following questions, basing their answers only on Scripture:
Clearly, the Christian consensus on all of these questions is not derived from the pages of the Bible. Like any other social group, the Church has a culture which has evolved over time in response to economic and political pressures. The accepted meanings of its sacred writings have changed accordingly. The “good fight of faith” (I Timothy 6:12) is now read as an inward struggle with temptation, but the Crusaders would have seen it somewhat differently. The phrase “the Kingdom of God” conjures up a particular image for us moderns; it meant something very different to Jesus’ contemporaries, as we will see in Part 5. The concept of faith as a personal relationship between God and the believer dates from the twentieth century. The list goes on.
This reinterpretation issue is the biggest flaw in the Argument from History — the idea that human affairs on Earth ultimately work God’s justice. As Peter Kreeft puts it, “History shows that moral laws are as inescapable as physical laws... Great tyrants like Adolf Hitler flourish for a day, like the mayfly, and perish. Great saints experience apparent failure, and emerge into triumph and joy.” In fact all things in human history are temporary, good and bad alike. Our fondness for emphasizing the passing of the evil and ignoring the passing of the good is one of humanity’s more endearing qualities, but that does not make it accurate. What’s not so endearing is how, on top of that, the successful tend to be whitewashed and their enemies denigrated in hindsight. The winners, as the saying goes, write the history books.
Lord Vetinari sighed again. He did not like to live in a world of heroes. You had civilization, such as it was, and you had heroes.
“What exactly has Cohen the Barbarian done that is heroic?” he said. “I seek only to understand.”
“Well... you know... heroic deeds...”
“And they are...?”
“Fighting monsters, defeating tyrants, stealing rare treasures, rescuing maidens... that sort of thing,” said Mr Betteridge vaguely. “You know... heroic things.”
“And who, precisely, defines the monstrousness of the monsters and the tyranny of the tyrants?” said Lord Vetinari, his voice suddenly like a scalpel — not vicious like a sword, but probing its edge into vulnerable places.
Mr Betteridge shifted uneasily. “Well... the hero, I suppose.”
“Ah. And the theft of these rare items... I think the word that interests me here is the term ‘theft’, an activity frowned on by most of the world’s major religions, is it not? The feeling stealing over me is that all these terms are defined by the hero. You could say: I am a hero, so when I kill you that makes you, de facto, the kind of person suitable to be killed by a hero. You could say that a hero, in short, is someone who indulges every whim that, within the rule of law, would have him behind bars or swiftly dancing what I believe is known as the hemp fandango. The words we might use are: murder, pillage, theft and rape. Have I understood the situation?”
— Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero
Hitler is a bad example here; almost everybody today agrees that he and his régime were evil. Earlier genocides tend to be glossed over and justified by much hand-waving, particularly among the descendants of the killers. Any child who paid attention in Sunday School can tell you that God rejected Saul as king of Israel, choosing David instead, because Saul had disobeyed him. They may not know, perhaps, that the specific command Saul disobeyed was “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” (I Samuel 15:3). The Amalekites’ crime was that, centuries before, their ancestors had attacked Israel’s rearguard on their way from Egypt to the Holy Land (Deuteronomy 25:17–19). But the early Christian colonists in America certainly did know that God commanded the extermination of idol-worshippers from time to time, especially when the idol-worshippers were occupying land that God intended for his chosen. Hence the popular nineteenth-century doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Since virtue is generally redefined to align with the victors, divine explanations of the victory of the virtuous are clearly unnecessary.Generally, when apologists use the Argument from History, the history they argue from is the “history” in the Bible, which, as we’ve already seen, is no freer of the problem of reinterpretation than any other history. But it does, at first sight, have a huge advantage of quite a different kind: prophecy. God inspires prophets to say what is going to happen, and it does happen. Could anything demonstrate God’s power more clearly? Actually, there’s a reason why the Hebrew word for a prophet — nabī’ (נביא), literally “mouthpiece” — was translated into Greek as prophētēs (profhthV), “one who speaks forth”, and not as mantis (mantiV), “soothsayer, fortune-teller”: in most prophecies, the prediction is not the point. What is prophecy?
A prophet is driven by a compulsion to speak the words of God. The “Spirit of the LORD comes upon him” (Judges 6:34). He may “be turned into another man” (I Samuel 10:6), or behave in a conspicuous and bizarre fashion (I Samuel 19:20–24, Isaiah 20:2, Jeremiah 27:2, Ezekiel 4:1–15). He may suffer distress if he is prevented from speaking (Jeremiah 20:9, Amos 3:8). A similar alternative state of consciousness is found in many cultures, especially during rituals where the social order which usually regulates behaviour is temporarily suspended, or among people who are outside of that order altogether — as the prophets generally were. Anthropologists call it communitas. It typically strengthens loves and friendships between those who share it. It also suspends the sense of self, creating a sensation that one’s thoughts are somehow not one’s own — naturally, since the individual self is a product of social living, as we saw in Part 3. This and related phenomena will be further explored in Part 6. In most prophecy (as in much political rhetoric generally) the predictive aspect boils down to either lavish promises conditional on Israel’s obedience, or dire threats of the consequences of disobedience, but, in either case, with no more precision than a moderately observant political commentator might command. Specific predictions are rare indeed... but not entirely absent.
Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE leaving no heir, and four of his military commanders divided his empire between them. Egypt, Arabia and the Holy Land went to Ptolemy, whose dynasty was to last until the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE. Syria, Babylonia and Persia went to Seleucus. There were wars between the two kingdoms, until a peace agreement was reached in 252 with the marriage of Ptolemy II’s daughter Berenice to Seleucus’ grandson Antiochus II. When Antiochus died five years later, Berenice and her baby son were murdered by Antiochus’ first wife Laodice. Ptolemy III responded with a devastating attack on the Seleucid kingdom, taking an enormous swathe of Seleucid territory, much of which Seleucus II subsequently recaptured. Peace was declared in 240 BCE, with the Ptolemies still in control of the Holy Land. Subsequent Ptolemy rulers, notably Ptolemy IV, maintained their control by harsh measures, successfully crushing the rebellions their cruelty inspired.
The Seleucid king Antiochus III made the conquest of the Ptolemy empire his life’s goal, and in 198 BCE he finally took the Holy Land from them. He failed to capture Egypt, because the Carthaginian king Hannibal persuaded him to invade the islands of Greece, where he was soundly defeated by the Romans, who then made him and his successor Seleucus IV pay crippling taxes to Rome. In 175 BCE Seleucus was murdered at the behest of Antiochus’ youngest son, Antiochus IV Epiphanes. He shared his father’s ambition to take Egypt from the Ptolemies, but, like him, was prevented from doing so by the Romans. Infuriated by the Jews’ insistence on remaining culturally and religiously distinct, he instituted the death penalty for Jewish practices such as circumcision and Sabbath observance, and also set about systematically defiling the Temple in Jerusalem. When he sacrificed a pig to Zeus on the altar of God, the Jewish people finally rose in revolt and threw the Seleucids out of the Holy Land.
Those familiar with the Hebrew Bible will already have noticed a more than passing resemblance between the history I have just rushed through and Daniel 11. Daniel lived in Persia long before the time of Alexander, so this passage must be a prophecy from a God who knows the future. Except that this God is a little hazy about the Persian dynasty prior to Alexander’s conquest. And this God is more concerned about Antiochus Epiphanes than all the kings before him put together, if column space is any indication. And, most damningly, this God’s knowledge of Epiphanes’ reign stops short after his occupation of Jerusalem; verses 40 onwards bear no resemblance to the true events. Antiochus’ fate may be read in I Maccabees 6:1–17. All these problems are neatly solved if we suppose that the chapter was written about 167 BCE by someone with ordinary human knowledge of the past. Whether the attribution of his own work to an ancient prophet was deliberate dishonesty or an acceptable rhetorical device is beyond the scope of this article.
With all this in mind, we may turn to the Argument from Authority. Throughout our lives, we must take many facts on trust from others who claim to know better than we do. I have never seen New York City except in film and photographs, and must simply trust those who claim to have been there that it isn’t just a studio set. I have never seen an atom, and so I must trust physicists who have found proof that they exist. Why, then, is it unreasonable to take the existence of God on trust from the saints and prophets of former times? Because the analogy is misleading. If I wanted proof of the existence of New York City, it would be easy, in principle, to travel there and see it for myself. Atoms are slightly more difficult, until you know that scientists debate new theories with startling vehemence; every point in an argument must have reams of evidence to back it up, all of it as checkable-in-principle as the existence of New York City. While I have not personally tested very many scientific hypotheses, I do know that opposing scientists will. I am fully aware that new discoveries may yet blow the current theory out of the water; until that happens I work with the provisional knowledge I have managed to acquire. This kind of attitude is discouraged in Christianity. Believers are not supposed to entertain the possibility, even hypothetically, that God may not exist after all.
Certainly, there are times when trust is more sensible than scepticism. Childhood, for instance. Children believe what adults tell them, with good reason. It would be disastrous to make an independent test of the consequences of sticking a fork in a power socket, running out onto a busy road, or eating oven cleaner. Adults know more about the dangers, and usually have the child’s best interests at heart. A-ha! I hear a believer exclaim. God, likewise, knows more than we do, and he has our best interests at heart. It’s just as sensible to trust him as it is for a child to trust an adult. Unfortunately, this only works if we’ve already established that God exists and wishes us well; and, what’s more, since God seems to prefer to speak through intermediaries, the argument also requires us to have correctly identified those intermediaries. We’re not in the position of children in a classroom taking instructions from a teacher. Imagine yourself, instead, as a child coming to school to find one of your classmates telling you what to do “because the teacher put me in charge”. It is entirely reasonable to verify the source of their authority before taking their instructions on trust.
If Bible writers and translators are the bearers of God’s instructions, then some of them, at least, have abused their authority. When King James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, he embarked on the enormous project of unifying the church to a single doctrine under his headship. To that end he commissioned a new translation of the Scriptures in which every verse stood alone in its own paragraph, with no mention in its margins of alternative readings or obscurities, to remove the potential for dispute. Thus the Bible was authorized by royal fiat, not of God, but of King James Stuart. The concerns of his time are reflected in the translation. Note, for instance, the strictures on witchcraft (Exodus 22:18 and elsewhere). A storm that almost wrecked James’ ship in 1589 was attributed to a conspiracy of witches, sparking the biggest witch-hunt ever seen in Britain. It is probably no coincidence that William Shakespeare’s Macbeth was also commissioned by him. I’ve been using the King James Version for this series, with one exception, not because I think it’s the best translation — it isn’t — but because other people do, and I wouldn’t want them to think I was pulling a swifty by using the wrong Bible. (The exception was the “Golden Rule”, quoted in Part 3. Somehow the KJV’s wording isn’t as familiar: “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.”)
How can we gain eternal life? A very clear answer comes from no less a mouth than Jesus’ own: by giving up all we have for the poor (see Matthew 25:31–46 and Mark 10:17–22, among others). Most Christians throughout history have decided that this can’t have been what he really meant. Catholics today seem rather embarrassed that people used to try and buy their way out of Purgatory. Certain contemporary Protestant evangelists are equally mercenary, and they have discovered that what Jesus actually intended to say was something like this:
But (a believer will object) just because the Bible has been abused doesn’t mean it isn’t reliable, as long as we don’t abuse it. Alas, the process of reinterpretation is evident even within the Scriptures themselves. Take Satan, for example. Isaiah 14 is clearly a diatribe against Babylon, but verses 12–15 are now read as a description of “Lucifer”’s original descent into evil. His name in Hebrew — śaţan (שטן), one who blocks or opposes — is used, and translated “adversary”, in Numbers 22:22 for the angel who stood in Balaam’s path, and in I Samuel 29:4 for David, the opponent of the Philistines. Even as “Satan”, the Adversary is not necessarily bad. II Samuel 24 tells the same story as I Chronicles 21; a supernatural being, wishing Israel ill, inspires King David to perform a nationwide census... but in the Samuel passage the supernatural being is the LORD, and in the Chronicles it is Satan. If God and Satan both want the same thing, is it good or evil? In Job 1 and 2, Satan presents himself before the LORD, and their debate over Job’s faithfulness looks more like a friendly wager than a conflict. Only in Zechariah, one of the latest books of the Hebrew Bible, does he become God’s adversary (see 3:1–2), stirring up factions within Israel.
As the source of dissension among God’s people, Satan came to personify heresy within Judaism. Breakaway groups such as the Essenes in Jesus’ time identified him with the apostate Jewish mainstream. In the Gospels, Satan is definitely Jesus’ enemy, since the preaching of the gospel makes him “as lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:17–18), though it’s unclear whether he wants to prevent Jesus’ death (Mark 8:31–33) or to cause it (Luke 22:3–4). Heresy within Judaism consisted largely of adopting Graeco-Roman culture, and Satan therefore became a symbol of the foreign gods. Revelation refers to the temple of Zeus in Pergamum as “Satan’s seat... where Satan dwelleth” (2:13), and builds an elaborate image of Rome, the “city on seven hills”, as Satan’s whore (chapter 17). This was the real crime of the Christians who were martyred in the Roman Empire. Monotheism in itself was no offence; many philosophers believed that the classical deities were all aspects or avatars of a single God. Christians were famously executed for refusing to worship the Emperor, but that refusal was the evidence of their crime, not the crime itself. Rather, they were enemies of the State because they were enemies of the gods.
But the biggest misappropriation of all, not one instance but a whole raft of them, is the reading of large passages of the Hebrew Bible as predictions of the coming of Christ. Part 5 will discuss who Jesus was and thought he was, so suffice it here to say that that the similarity between prophecy and history is a further example of reinterpretation after the fact. There is, for instance, nothing in Malachi 4:5–6 to identify Elijah with John the Baptist, if you didn’t already know. But I will examine one such prophecy closely. It seems more specific than many, and the gap between the original meaning and the reinterpretation is instructive. I am referring to Isaiah 7:14: “The Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Surely this is an unmistakable prediction of Jesus’ birth as reported by Matthew and Luke — assuming the word virgin is correct. (We’ll pass over the fact that Jesus’ name was Jesus, not Immanuel.)
In the Hebrew Bible, the word bethūlah (בתולה) is used whenever virginity is specified: for instance in Genesis 24:16, Exodus 22:16–17, Leviticus 21:10–15, and Deuteronomy 22:13–30, the last of which I discuss below. Isaiah himself uses it at 23:12 and elsewhere. But at 7:14 the word is ‘ālmah (עלמה). This word simply means “young woman”. It does not entail virginity, as is clear from some of the other places where it appears in the Hebrew Bible. Proverbs 30:18–19 compares “the way of a man with a maid” to other seeming impossibilities such as a snake’s limbless movement and the support of solid bodies by water and air. Song of Solomon 6:8 refers to the young women who are available for the king’s bed. In these two passages, at least, the ‘ālmah is clearly not going to stay a virgin for long.
But Isaiah can’t just have meant that a young woman was going to have a baby — what kind of sign is that? So the argument goes. Here we must again ask the basic question: what would Isaiah’s audience have thought he meant? If I leaf through the pages of a romance novel, and find that the over-sexed aristocratic hero’s stodgily proper parents are shocked at his eye-wateringly detailed affair with the maid, I don’t attribute their surprise to a metaphysical bewilderment based on the fact that the word “maid” can mean “virgin”. Similarly, a Hebrew speaker wouldn’t assume that an ‘ālmah was a virgin just because her giving birth was referred to as a “sign”. The Christian reading is derived from Matthew 1:23, which follows the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, in misrendering ‘ālmah as parthenos (parqenoV). Why would Matthew, a Jew from the Holy Land, use a Greek Bible? Well, it seems Matthew did not write the whole gospel attributed to him. According to the second-century bishop Papias (whose now lost works are quoted by slightly later writers), Matthew “wrote the Sayings in Aramaic, and every one interpreted them as he was able”. The Gospel of Matthew as we know it is in Greek, and includes Jesus’ doings, and his birth, as well as his sayings. Those must have been added by later editors, who could well have been more familiar with Greek than with Hebrew.
So what did Isaiah mean? Let’s look at the whole prophecy, verses 10–16.
Moreover the LORD spake again unto Ahaz, saying, “Ask thee a sign of the LORD thy God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above.”
But Ahaz said, “I will not ask, neither will I tempt the LORD.”
And he said, “Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings...”
Both her kings are Pekah and Rezin, the kings of Israel and Syria, whose armies were harassing Judah at the time. So God told Ahaz to ask for a sign, volunteered one himself... and went on to make a promise which would be fulfilled after Ahaz’ death, and had nothing to do with the situation that Ahaz was supposed to be asking for a sign about. By this interpretation, God is rather less honest than most politicians. Surely the best explanation is that Isaiah was telling Ahaz when he could expect deliverance: by the time any children currently being conceived were born, the people of Israel would once again be saying “God is with us”.The Virgin Birth of Christ is central to the traditional Christian theory of sexuality, and as such will make as good a bridge as any to approach the key idea in Biblical apologetics — the Scriptures as moral compass. Mary was chaste in thought, word and deed, and she gave birth to God Himself. That was the ideal feminine state: celibate and fertile. Sex was unclean, but “fruitfulness” was the foundation of life itself. So far from being mutually necessary, the two were almost seen as opposites. For centuries, Europeans believed that sexual intercourse caused a woman’s milk to dry up and turn sour in her breasts. A woman who was wanton, even with her husband, could not be a good mother. Of course women were penalized more heavily than men; that’s an inevitable consequence of making sex shameful in the first place, because a man can always walk away from a pregnancy (and the more shameful it is, the more likely that he will do so). The rejection of sexuality can be traced back to St Augustine of Hippo, who set out his opinion in the City of God:
And this lust not only takes possession of the whole body and outward members, but also makes itself felt within, and moves the whole man with a passion in which mental emotion is mingled with bodily appetite, so that the pleasure which results is the greatest of all bodily pleasures. So possessing indeed is this pleasure, that at the moment of time in which it is consummated, all mental activity is suspended. What friend of wisdom and holy joys, who, being married, but knowing, as the apostle says, “how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour, not in the disease of desire, as the Gentiles who know not God”, would not prefer, if this were possible, to beget children without this lust, so that in this function of begetting offspring the members created for this purpose should not be stimulated by the heat of lust, but should be actuated by his volition, in the same way as his other members serve him for their respective ends?The same attitude is often found today among those Christians who restrict sex to lifelong marriage, citing I Corinthians 6:15–18:
Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid. What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh. But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.The word translated “fornication” is porneia (porneia), from pornē (pornh), “prostitute”, and the passage is clearly addressed to those who went to “harlots”. Corinth had a temple to the sex goddess Aphrodite, complete with prostitutes, where of course Christians were not to worship — just as they were not to worship idols by what they ate (see chapter 8 of the same epistle). Only much later was this passage read as forbidding any sex act between unmarried people. This became the official position of the church, but not all Christians then or today followed it. Ireland’s Brehon Laws allowed for nine kinds of sexual relationship to be recognised as marriages, including clandestine affairs without the knowledge of one’s family. It was not difficult to dissolve an unhappy marriage, and either partner could initiate the divorce. The English in Ireland evidently found this a much more congenial system than their own; in 1367 a royal statute was passed at Kilkenny, ordering, among other things, “...that no alliance by marriage, gossipred, fostering of children, concubinage or by amour, nor in any other manner, be henceforth made between the English and Irish...” but even so, few complied. Today, although millions of Christians still bow to St Augustine, many others tolerate or even openly advocate alternative sexual practices.
Some of those more liberal Christians appeal to the Torah, which does indeed allow polygamy for men. It is not in fact any less harsh than the Augustinian way. Let’s examine Deuteronomy 22:13–30.
Sure enough, according to Numbers 27:8–11, a woman inherits land from her father only if she has no brothers. It could be argued that this system meant less fragmentation of the land, it being more convenient for a family to have one largish farm than two or more little ones. But the Celts, among others, had a much fairer way to manage that problem. From time immemorial until around 1650, land in Ireland belonged to the whole tuath (clan), according to the Brehon Laws. When a herder died, her or his cattle were shared out among the surviving tuath. Chiefs were elected from their predecessors’ kin, not appointed in linear succession, and there was no favouring of the male line over the female. Consequently, as we have seen, the Brehon Laws were also fairly liberal about sex. Why didn’t God think of that? Unless, perhaps, the Torah is not from God?
So it turns out that the Bible’s moral compass is just as context-dependent as anything else about it; a product of the politics of its time. The Bible-writers themselves, like Christians ever since, reinterpreted the words of those who had gone before them to fit their own moral ideals. Hence, a Bible-based moral philosophy cannot get God off the hook as regards the Problem of Evil. But wait, I hear a Christian reply. I’ve barely mentioned the single most important figure in the Bible story, the central character of all history, the man in whom God’s character is revealed: Jesus Christ. Surely I should discuss his place in the whole business before I dismiss Christianity out of hand? And so I will, in the very next instalment.
| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 |
Last updated: 21 March 2007
