How did we get the bible?

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 1, 2013

If the Bible didn’t drop out of the sky onto the top of Mt. Ararat, where did it come from? Did God write it? Does it have mistakes? How do we read it as religious liberals?

Call to worship:
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A person will worship something – have no doubt about that.

We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts – but it will out.

That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character.

Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

Reading:
Howard Thurman

In the quietness of this place, surrounded by the all-pervading presence of the Holy, my heart whispers:

Keep fresh before me the moments of my High Resolve, that in good times or in tempests,

I may not forget that to which my life is committed.

Keep fresh before me the moments of my high resolve.

Sermon:

This Bible I’m holding in my hand has power. Power to make a whole roomful of Unitarian Universalists uncomfortable. We have strong feelings about this book. Even the way it looks evokes strong feelings. Its sides flop down when you hold it up. Maybe there is a zipper around the side. For some of us there are things in this book we love: passages that move us, inspire us, strengthen or guide us. Some of us haven’t looked at it in years and won’t again. Some of us fear what’s in here. There are places that can shame us, fill us with guilt, enrage us and sadden us. Some of us have had this book used against us like a club, and some of us have used it that way ourselves at some point along our path.

This book has shaped history and culture, it has inspired the feeding of the poor, the establishment of hospitals and schools, and it has also been used to support slavery and slaughter. As thinking people, we owe it to ourselves not to be merely reactive about this book. Let’s form an educated view. Let’s remove some of the mystery and mis-information that overlay the way we see the Bible.

How Did We Get the Bible?

When did we get it? First of all there’s not really an “it”, it’s a “them”. The first two-thirds of the Bible is the Hebrew Bible, what most Christians call the “Old Testament.” “Testament” means contract, or covenant, an agreement between two parties. The Hebrew Bible is made of books of the history of the Hebrew people, their law, books of prophecy, poetry, proverbs, and a hymnal: the book of the Psalms. The books were written on scrolls, and different synagogues would have different scrolls. Some would have a copy of the scroll of Isaiah, some of Deuteronomy, etc.

Early in the first century of the Common Era a group of Jewish scholars got together and formed the accepted list of the books that would be included in the Hebrew Bible. If you have a Roman Catholic Bible you have all those books. If you have a Protestant Bible you have fewer, because during the Reformation in the 16th century the Reformers took several books out of their accepted list. The scrolls were in Hebrew, but, since after 70 CE when the Romans destroyed the Temple and scattered the Jews to the far corners of the earth, Hebrew ceased to be a living common language, so one could understand them well in Hebrew. A translation in Greek, called the Septuagint, was used until the Latin translation in 400 and the first English one in 1380.

The New Testament is made up of four Gospels, different views of the life of Jesus. Three of them, called the synoptic gospels, are very similar, leading scholars to believe they used the same sources, and one, the Gospel of John, contains stories the others don’t have, and it has much more of a “Divine” view of Jesus than do the others. Then there are the letters. Most of them are letters by a Christian called Paul, St. Paul, the Apostle Paul, to various churches around the Mediterranean. Then there are a few letters by other folks, and the whole thing ends with an apocalyptic vision (meaning a vision of the end of the world) by a man known as John.

In the beginning of the Christian movement when they talked about “The Scriptures” they were talking about the Hebrew Bible. There were numerous Christian writings circulating. There were lots of gospels, lots of letters, lots of Revelations. No one really thought of making an accepted list, or Canon, of scriptures until a man named Marcion popped up un 140 with a list he wanted to make the official one. He included part of the Gospel of Luke and ten of the letters of Paul. That was it. The church responded by calling a meeting at which a new list was drawn up that looked a bit more like what is there today. Over the years books were added. The biggest debates were over the books of Hebrews and the book of the Revelation of John. It was somewhere between 170 and 220 that these New Testament books began to be given the same status as the Hebrew Bible.

In the early days, before the invention of the printing press in the mid 1500’s, few people could read the Bible. Many of the clergy were as illiterate as the people they served. Stories from the Bible were told by traveling troupes of actors, or were pictured in stained-glass windows in the cathedrals. Then the printing press was invented and copies of the Bible didn’t have to be painstakingly written out by hand any more. More and more homes acquired one. More and more people learned to read so they could read their Bibles. More and more people started to get their own ideas about what the things in the Bible might mean. The church’s control was broken.

How Do People Use the Bible?

That is a little about how we got the Bible. Now let me talk about how people use it. There is a wide variety of beliefs in the Christian spectrum about what the book is and how it should be read and used. Some denominations, like the Roman Catholics, Orthodox and Episcopal churches say that the Bible has equal weight with church tradition and dogma. What the Pope says has the same weight as what St. Paul says. Other Protestant traditions, coming out of the Reformation, used as their slogan “Only Scripture.” Church tradition and church leaders’ pronouncements had no weight, only the words of the bible.

If it’s going to be that important, though, you’ve got some problems. If you are living your life by this book, what do you do about internal contradictions? Translation problems? Interpretation problems? Some people, on the fundamentalist end of the spectrum, stand on a belief in “Biblical Inerrancy.” That means there are no mistakes in the whole Bible. They say that the Bible is “the inspired word of God.” “Inspired,” in this case, means that God verbally gave each word to the folks who wrote them down. So you can say about something in the Bible: “God said it, I believe it. That settles it.”

In the middle of the spectrum there are people who believe that it was the authors who were inspired, not the words. The general gist of the writings is from God, rather than each and every word. So if there is a mistake or two it’s less of a big deal. People in the middle of the spectrum can feel more comfortable if women are wearing pants and makeup, even though parts of the Bible forbid that. They are willing to concede that parts of the writings are influenced by the culture and times of the writers, and are therefore less weighty as guides for life than other parts which seem less bound by time and culture. On the other end of the interpretive continuum are people who feel that most everything in the Bible is heavily influenced by the time and culture in which it was written, and that we should read it like we would read the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, with reverence and interest and appreciation, looking for concepts and phrases that inspire us. In that system, the reader is the one who is inspired to see meaning in the text.

If we want to see meaning in the text we can ask ourselves what the writers meant when they wrote it. To whom was it written? What did it mean then? We have lots of cultural overlays that keep us from seeing what’s there. One example of that is the story of Adam and Eve. Women have been portrayed as temptresses for thousands of years because of that story. If you read the story in the 2nd chapter of Genesis, though, you will be hard pressed to find any tempting of Adam by Eve.

Another story where knowing the cultural context makes the story make more sense in is the New Testament story of the woman who has had a flow of blood for twelve years. She touched the hem of Jesus’s garment, and then when he turned around and asked “Who touched me?” she was afraid. Why? Because in those days, when a woman had a flow of blood, it made her ritually unclean. She couldn’t touch anyone in her family, she couldn’t touch any dishes. If someone sat after her on a chair they instantly became unclean also. That meant they had to take a day-long series of baths to get ritually clean again. Jesus was on his way to the home of an important person, because he was needed to heal sickness in that house. When she touched him and he found out, she was afraid because she had just made the rabbi ritually unclean and delayed him in his journey.

Another instance where a whole story has been altered by cultural misunderstanding is the Christmas story. Many of us hear year after year about how Mary and Joseph came to Bethlehem and there was no room in the inn, so they had to move into a stable for the night and Jesus was laid in a manger. All the actual text in Luke says is that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and laid in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. A Bible scholar who has lived among the Palestinian people his whole life says that there is a good word for the hotel type of inn, and that is not the word the author uses. The word translated as “inn” would be better translated as “guest room.” In houses in the middle east back then the animals came in for the night to the same house the family used. The family stayed on a raised platform, while the animals slept on the ground level. Their mangers were around the family area. Someone with family in a town, like Joseph had in Bethlehem, would never have been allowed to stay at an inn. That would have been a disgrace on the hospitality of his family. They would have stayed with an aunt or a cousin. Since the census was being taken, though, and since the whole family was in town at once, the guest rooms were full so they had to sleep in the equivalent of the living room, putting the new baby in one of the mangers that stood on the edge of the family’s living area. It presents quite a different picture, doesn’t it? Much warmer, surrounded by family.

The Bible is a book with truth and meaning, but it is not the only one. It is a book of sacred stories, re-tellings of human interaction with the Divine. We all have a story of our lives, a story of how things happen to us. Some of our lives have miracle stories, stories of coincidences that change the course of things, stories of descending into the deepest wilderness and coming out again, stories of losing our connection with the Source and then finding it again.

I believe we are given many sacred texts, including drama, music, poetry and art. Our own lives are also given to us for study as sacred text. Our experience of life and God is as weighty as inspired writings. In books we study the story of other people’s interaction with their own longing, pride, greed, generosity, bravery, cowardice, and with the Divine. We are all also living stories, seeing those same elements interwoven in the lives we lead. Things can look different if we see them as being in the middle of a sacred story. Not all sacred stories are “nice” stories. They are not all happy stories. But they have power and meaning. I invite you to look at your life as a sacred story – where have you wrestled with the dark? Where have you glimpsed the light? What do you know from experience, not only from being told? It is difficult to pay attention, but that is what we are called to do. As the Talmud says, “If you’re sitting in a window, and you see God pass by, go sit in that window again.”

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776