Interpreting the Bible

(A skeptical interloculor gave me some verses to puzzle over. Here are my responses and also his counterpoint.)

Mark 16:18 says that if a Christian drinks deadly poison, it won't hurt him at all. Are you a Christian? If I gave you some poison, would you drink it? Ready to put your money where your mouth is? Ready to "step out in faith?"

This particular verse (actually verses 9-20) is not found in the two most ancient manuscripts, the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. But, accepting that it is in the canon, I would simply interpret it as an admonition to embrace faith and confidence irrespective of the challenges that life throws. I see nothing in that verse commanding self-harm or foolishness.

Not obvious but not unreasonable either.

I read in Matthew 2:23 that it was spoken by the prophets that "He [Jesus] shall be called a Nazarene." Can you find this prophecy in the Old Testament for me, please, or in any other writing that existed prior to 31 AD?

This is a reference most likely to Isa. 11.1, where the Messiah is spoken as "a rod (netzer) out of the stem of Jesse."

This probably is how Jesus came to be called a Nazarene, but it doesn't get the author of Matthew off the hook for ignorance and/or pious fiction, because (i) netzer is Hebrew and doesn't appear in the Septuagint (the Greek translation that the author of Matthew and his audience were familiar with), and (ii) the author of Matthew doesn't think Nazarene means rod, he thinks it means person from Nazareth.

Ecclesiastes 1:4 says that the earth will last forever; II Peter 3:10 says that it won't. Which do you believe?

The former is a reference to the terrestial world which will someday be consumed by flames in distinction to the celestial world which will last forever.

Did you mean "latter"? Either way, both references are clearly to the terrestrial earth.

Do you believe that anyone has ever seen God? Isaiah said he did (Isaiah 6:1); but John said (twice) that nobody has ever seen God at any time (I John 4:12; John 1:18). Who's lying, John or Isaiah?

They are both telling the truth. If you read the chapter in Isaiah, it is clear that he is not seeing the God that John references but a vision of God. John's God is idenbtified with the God of John 1:1 which is Logos-- roughly, spirit or concept.

No. It was presumably a singular occurence that one might have taken for a dream, but the author goes out of his way to specify, "[...] my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."

II Thessalonians 2:11-12 says that God sends a powerful delusion to certain people, causing them to believe a lie, so that they will be condemned (i.e., spend eternity suffering in hell). Isn't this, frankly, immoral? Isn't this what Christians accuse Satan (the father of lies - John 8:44) of doing? If you were God, would you cause people to believe a lie? Why?

You left out the verse prior in which those that perish have within them "all deceivableness of unrighteousness...because they received not the love of truth." There is no immorality, as those who reject God choose to do so "that they should believe the lie." If I were God, I would give people the capacity for self-deception as this section intimates.

It's a confusing passage and the reading you suggest would be possible in isolation, but it's unlikely in view of all the other verses in Paul where God is depicted as forcing people to do evil things and then judging them for it. In particular, in Romans 9, Paul endorses the plain reading of Exodus where God hardens Pharaoh's heart to force him to disobey and then destroys him for disobeying.

I recently saw the 1960 Spencer Tracy movie Inherit the Wind, basically a re-telling of the Bryan-Scopes "monkey" trial. While I admire the movie for its drama, I consider it to be just as dishonest and as fallacious as these so-called contradictions. The person who authored these "propositions" adopted what s/he clearly thought was the most fundamentalist interpretation possible irrespective of whether such propositions are embraced either in mainstream Christianity of even by minor sects within Christianity. No one can read the Bible without acknowledging that vast portions of it are allegory and ambiguity. At the end of the day, the Scopes trial was not a question of science versus religion, but a simple question of law, of which the defendent was correctly found guilty of violating.

The Bible doesn’t interpret itself. We interpret the Bible, and we all read the same words in different ways. A person who claims that the Bible must be read literally hasn’t read enough of the Bible to justify that statement. Some books such as the Song of Solomon make no sense at all unless read allegorically. We can read Biblical justifications for slavery (such as The Epistle to Philemon), polygamy (the biographies of the kings and patriarchs of the Old Testament), the holocaust (from the Gospel of John and the writings of Martin Luther and others), and the flatness of the earth. The Bible’s doctrine of the flat earth, believed by all the writers of the Bible and Jesus as well as Calvin and Luther, is an example of why we must be cautious in applying broad brush principles of interpretations to such a complex book with so many different styles of writing, authors, and messages.

The problem with Biblical interpretation is that the Bible is like an ink-blot. We see what we want to see in them, which is in turn a projection of our own psychology, life's journey, and ways of processing information. Sometimes, the fundamentalist can be closer to the core truth of things that the skeptic. Earlier, I alluded to the Scopes trial, of which William Jennings Bryan was a spear carrier for the creationists. Among those opposing him was the agnostic journalist H.L. Mencken. His caustic columns laid bear the hypocrisy of the fundamentalism of the 1920s. But it was Bryan was who the progressive-- in fact one of the leading lights of progressivism (or what we call liberalism today) at the turn of the last century, fighting for women's suffrage and direct elections and against business trusts and eugenics, whereas Mencken, who was on the right side of scientific truth and a wonderful writer was also a reactionary of the old school, a bigot, an anti-semite, and an apologist of Hitlerism.

When it comes to each individual's epistomology, nothing and no one is entirely right or wrong, truthful or dishonest.

I cannot say for sure that there is no history in some of the more ancient books of the Old Testament. Genesis, for example, may well be tribal campfire stories that borrowed from the oral traditions of many other tribes. They may contain no fact, nuggets of fact, or be completely factual. We have no way of knowing for sure. But we do know that they were preserved for a reason. And one of those reasons is the power that these stories continue to invoke—moral choice in the Garden of Eden, the illusion of human pride in the , hate and bloodshed in Cain and Abel, and man’s long groping struggle to find moral redemption and God that culminates in the Christmas and Easter stories. It’s these sweeping themes that continue to resonate for me in our Brave New World of gas chambers and gulags, atomic missiles, and human cloning.

Without getting into the specifics of different schools of critical interpetation, I would say that a good rule of thumb for myself is that the more ambiguous a passage is, the less spiritually important or morally significant it is. And, needless to say, there are many passages in the Bible that fall into that category.