[AUTHOR’S NOTE: this seemed like an important article several years ago when I originally wrote it for Examiner.com, yet it seems even more relevant today. It is a review of sorts of a book I found very enlightening. Modern atheists tend to argue that the Bible is useless fiction, a conglomeration of stories assembled by illiterate farmers and shepherds, while many of their Christian contemporaries will argue that the Bible is the pure, unadulterated word of God. Naturally, I’m a little uncomfortable with both of those extremes. My opinion on the Bible is this: I worship the God that the Bible endeavors to describe to mankind, and I value the Bible. But the carpenter does not worship his hammer. He uses the hammer to make beautiful things. Therefore, I don’t worship the Bible. I use the Bible as a tool that helps me worship the God I want to better understand.]
Encouraging my Christian friends to think
It’s time to don the fire-proof asbestos suit.
We’ve danced around the subject long enough. Is the Bible fact or fiction? The whole premise of writing as the Atlanta Creationism Examiner is to examine the question of whether or not we were actually created. This writer has played favorites for too long, ignoring the objections of my atheist and humanist friends and their criticisms of my preferred, sacred source of information, the Christian Bible.
What about the fact there are two contradictory versions of the creation account in Genesis, they ask? Doing what anyone else would do when asked a question to which they didn’t know the answer: I astutely chose to ignore them.
Here’s a particularly challenging question about the Bible: why do certain passages seem to contradict each other? Now, if you think comments about my articles criticizing evolution theory have been harsh, wait until you read what’s about to come. What this writer anticipates will be said after this article may make those previous insults pale in comparison.
Those comments will seem childish and amateurish contrasted to the professional evisceration by my new legion of critics. And in part I’m basing my fears on what to expect to hear from my own wife and mother.
God only knows what wrath I’m about to inspire from my fellow Christians. I may be more reviled than Fred Phelps by the day’s end. All because I’m about to write something that may challenge our commonly held perceptions about authorship of the Bible and some basically held beliefs about the only important book in our religious faith. Did God write the Bible? As they say in a court of law, does the Bible only contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about God? Is the Bible “beyond belief: fact or fiction”?
The problems with assuming the Bible is complete fiction is the known historicity of the work. No one questions whether Tacitus or Josephus really existed or whether they recorded actual events in time, and both historians reference events mentioned in the Bible. We know there was an ancient Israel, a Roman Empire, a King called Herod and a prophet named Jesus because of corroborating evidence in external sources.
Therefore suggesting the Bible is merely a fantasy collection of mythical stories is completely illogical, rather easily refuted. On the other hand, proving every word in the Bible is the unadulterated truth as dictated by this unseen supernatural creator to Moses (or one other individual human being) seems an equally difficult task.
Is it truly as impossible to reconcile parts of the Bible with others as it seems? Man’s involvement in the production of the Bible makes the assumption that every word is the literal truth about God and his early interaction with man an interesting challenge. Man is a corrupt, fallible creature by nature. Not many people (if any) believe that God literally put ink on paper. The question remains: did the human authors of various books in the Bible allow their personal bias to shape the text of the material they included?
The Atlanta Creationism Examiner has never claimed to be a Biblical scholar. Previously this writer has refused to divulge my own personal opinion on this delicate subject due to fear of the wrath of my fellow Christians. Yes, it was partially attributable to cowardice. Enduring the best slings and arrows from a few atheists are one thing; making my wife mad at me is quite another. It seems an especially foolish thing to do given there was no one else I could conveniently blame for my own personal, crazy suspicions about the Bible. That excuse can no longer be employed.
In his book titled “Who Wrote the Bible?”, Richard Elliott Friedman presents a fascinating hypothesis that may solve the riddle of why some passages and text seem to contradict others.
If his theory is true, it provides a compelling argument by while reconciliation may be attempted for verses that conflict. The Harvard-educated Friedman studied the Bible, learning from six hundred years worth of investigation into the question of who wrote the earliest books in the Old Testament Those first five books collectively known as the Pentateuch, or Torah, have been traditionally identified with Moses as author.
Friedman points out that the books contain information about which Moses could not possibly have written. After all, they include an account of his death and burial. And surely the most humble man on earth would not have identified himself as such (an oxymoron for sure), or Moses did not write the verse found in Numbers 12:3. Referencing the work of Spinoza, Hobbes, H. B. Witter, Jean Astruc and J.G. Eichhorn, Friedman argued the hypothesis that evidence in doublets (repeated stories) and differences in language indicate that four different source documents had been expertly edited to form one single, cohesive narrative.
The separate documents were simply identified as “J”, “E”, “P”, and “D”, coding the narrative according to its suspected authorship. When separated according to code, Friedman’s argument for his theory becomes quite clear and very compelling. Friedman writes, “The document that was associated with the divine name Yahweh/Jehovah was called J. The document that was identified as referring to the deity as God (in Hebrew, Elohim) was called E. The third document, by far the largest, included most of the legal sections and concentrated a great deal on matters having to do with priests, so it was called P. And the source that was found only in the book of Deuteronomy was called D.” (pg. 24)
It was enlightening for Friedman to explain his thought process when he studied a specific section of the Bible. He wrote, “When I worked on a literary question, I wanted to know why the text told the story this way and not another way. For example, consider the story of the golden calf. In the book of Exodus, God speaks the Ten Commandments out loud to the Israelites from the heavens over the mountains of God. Moses then climbs the mountain alone to receive a carved set of the commandments on stone tablets. When Moses delays to return, the people make a golden calf and sacrifice in front of it. Their leader, the man who personally makes the golden calf, is Moses’ own spokesman, Aaron. When Moses returns and sees the calf, he throws down and smashes the tablets in his anger. He destroys the golden calf. He asks Aaron, “What did the people do to you that you have wrought this great sin on them?” Aaron answers that the people asked him to make gods, that he threw their gold into the fire and “out came this calf.” The question was, what would make someone write a story like that? What was happening in the writer’s world that would make him tell a story in which his own people commit heresy only forty days after hearing God speak from the sky?” (pg. 30)
Those are some excellent questions. In order not to spoil the answers proposed by Friedman, one may obtain his book from Amazon.com if the local library doesn’t have a copy. I’d put in a link to the page in this article, but the controls for adding hyperlinks seem to have mysteriously disappeared from the new publishing tool. Perhaps this is evidence that devolution is possible. For moral questions, Friedman asked himself why the text said “behave this way and not that way.” If the question was theological, he asked why the text depicted the deity as torn between divine justice and divine mercy. He asked historical questions about the accuracy of the text compared to the actual events. In doing so, it appears Friedman created an interesting proposal to answer the question: why does the Bible appear to have contradictions? Friedman’s examination side-by-side of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 clarifies his point contending authorship by two different writers, J and E, for the two different accounts of creation.
In Genesis Chapter 1, God creates plants, animals, man and woman in that order. The account in Chapter 2 gives the order as man, plants, animals, then woman. Both can’t be literally true, and Friedman explains the first “version” of the story calls the creator “God” thirty five times; the account in Genesis 2 refers to the creator as “Yahweh” eleven times. Two stories, two writers. Two versions. The author pointed out, “The first version never calls him Yahweh; the second version never calls him God.” Using this knowledge and evidence found in other stories like Noah and the flood, Friedman said, “The investigators saw that they were not simply dealing with a book that repeated itself a great deal, and they were not dealing with a loose collection of somewhat similar stories. They had discovered two separate works that someone had cut up and combined into one.” (p.51)
Many of the stories in the Old Testament that appear to contradict each other are attributed by Friedman to the separation of Israel and Judah into two kingdoms after the death of Solomon. He presents a compelling case for believing the author of “E” was male and an Israelite priest from Shiloh but the author of “J” possibly came from Judean court and could have been female. “E”s stories tell the history of Israel and “J”s tell the same stories from the perspective of a citizen in Judah. The “J” stories are more concerned with women and the female’s perspective than the author of “E”. While somewhat nebulous about the specific identities of J and E, Friedman ventures out on a limb to guess the author D. He speculates the author of up to eight Old Testament books whom he calls the Deuteronomistic writer is actually the prophet Jeremiah.
Friedman points to clues found in the books of Jeremiah, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings that indicate the author of the book of Deuteronomy also wrote those books of the Bible. Friedman makes a powerful argument suggesting that the reign of King Josiah was pivotal in shaping much of the Old Testament, offering important clues to date when the books were first written. When the actual period in time of the writing could be guesstimated, the environment and contemporary culture shaping the perspective of the authors could be better understood. After reading through Friedman’s best effort, this writer is still fairly certain the esteemed scholar would agree with the assertion that he can’t be absolutely certain his theories are true. He can’t be 100% sure that Jeremiah wrote all that he did, or that four or more writers contributed material to Genesis that was written from different points of view.
This writer did not view Friedman’s work as an effort to discredit God, but a diligent, honest effort to solve the mystery of why the Old Testament contains some of its most controversial material. Friedman can safely say with a clear conscience he put forth his best effort to present a compelling argument that merits further consideration. His book deserves more than an preemptory dismissal just because it may challenge one’s previously held personal beliefs.
The author did an outstanding job of writing a very readable, entertaining and informative book, whether or not his theory actually proves to be right. The true beauty of his argument is that he can’t ever be proved wrong, because the only people who knew the answers for sure have (conveniently or inconveniently) been dead for thousands of years and can’t contradict him.
After all, the same holds “true” for evolution theory… As Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
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