Despite being one of the most read and most beloved books in human history, it’s also one of the most misunderstood. Here are some really dumb things that people believe about this ancient book.
1. It’s been translated too many times for us to know what it originally said.
This is a popular argument made by skeptics who simply don’t understand where our English Bibles come from. They assume that the Bible was originally written in an ancient language (if you’re lucky they’ll know it was Greek and Hebrew, but they’ll probably think it was Latin) and was then translated into a new language, somehow destroying the original language manuscripts in the process. Then manuscripts in that new language were translated into another language which replaced the previous language manuscripts, and so on. Finally, we get to English having lost the manuscripts from all previous languages. Thus, “the Bible has been translated too many times for us to know what it originally said.”
Thankfully, that’s not at all how it actually happened. True, the Bible has been translated into many, many languages. However, our English translations are not based on any of these other translated manuscripts. Instead, our English Old Testaments are translated from Hebrew manuscripts (usually medieval since many earlier manuscripts have been lost, though we can compare these medieval manuscripts to Hebrew and Greek manuscripts from around the time of Jesus) and our English New Testaments are based on Greek manuscripts which now number in the thousands, spanning from at least the 2nd century A.D. to the medieval period.
While there are some debates over minor textual variants in the Bible among the many manuscripts we’ve discovered, our English translations seek to be faithful to the original language manuscripts we have and continue to discover.
2. The Bible can be used for divination.
Some people think that the best way to read the Bible is to flip to any page during a time of trouble and stick your finger on a random Bible verse for divine guidance. While it would be presumptuous to say that God has never guided people through a process like this, that isn’t actually how you’re supposed to read the Bible. Every verse is part of a chapter, every chapter is part of a book, every book is part of the whole Bible, and even the Bible itself is part of a historical context which helps us to understand what it means. If you ignore the Bible’s context, you’ll end up coming up with all kinds of weird ideas. So never read a Bible verse…
Out of context, that is.
3. The Council of Nicea put together the first Bible by editing things out that they didn’t like.
For all of the talk about the Council of Nicea in popular culture, for instance in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, very little of it is actually true.
The Council of Nicea was an early fourth century church council called together by the Emperor Constantine to settle a church dispute started by a priest named Arius who was teaching that Jesus was the divine first creation of the Father and not God in the flesh. The bishops who came together agreed that Arius was wrong and crafted a statement about Jesus’ divine nature which we today call the Nicene Creed. What they didn’t do was declare what books should and shouldn’t be considered scripture.
That process happened organically among the churches over time. From a very early period, the church agreed on the four Gospels and the letters of Paul, with some disputes over which other New Testament books should be considered part of scripture. These disagreements seemed to have been mostly settled by the end of the fourth century, though the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches still disagree with Jews and Protestants about some books in the Old Testament (see the article Why Do Catholic Bibles Have More Books?).
4. The Bible should be taken literally
To take words literally means to understand them in their plainest sense without using metaphor or symbolism. If this is how the Bible should always be understood, then Jesus is not a person but a hinged barrier at the entrance to a building (“I am the door.” – John 10:9).
Instead of always taking the Bible literally, we should seek to understand it literarily, which is to say according to the literary rules by which each portion of it is supposed to be understood. For instance, parables read differently than history (and even ancient history may have different guidelines than modern history), poetry requires different rules of interpretation than apocalyptic literature, etc.
While it may be God’s intention to communicate truth using straight forward, literal language at times, it would be a mishandling of any writing to not read it according to its genre and its author’s intention.
5. The Bible is God’s instruction book.
Westerners in particular have a no-nonsense approach to truth. We like to have our truth laid out in simple propositions that can fit on a bumper sticker. It’s no wonder then, that we create actual bumper stickers that say things like, “B.I.B.L.E. = Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.”
But is the Bible simply an instruction book? Well, much of it is narrative–stories about people and places with very little direct instructions for readers to follow. Where there are direct instructions, most of them aren’t followed by Christians today because they involve sacrifices or the Israelite theocratic government which Jesus replaced with the cross and the Kingdom of God, respectively. This leaves some laws from Moses, some guidance from Jesus, and some letters from Paul–but even these often relate to issues specific to their own times which have to be reinterpreted for today’s context if they are going to be read as “instructions” for us.
So what is the Bible if it isn’t an instruction book? It’s a book about how God has dealt with His people, how His people have sought to follow Him, and His plans and purposes from original creation to re-creation in Christ. That doesn’t mean there isn’t guidance for how we should live today, but it comes out of our careful, prayerful, Spirit-led reflection on this ancient text written in times different from our own.