Desperation to Defend the Bible is Showing



Evidence keeps piling up about the unreliable claims made about the Bible. As it slips in importance and believability, its defenders get more aggressive in their claims.

The link runs through the old series of arguments. The ancients, it says, gave their writing to scribes who copied and recopied it by the thousands. All of the surviving copies written by scribes agree on a few things telling us the entire faith is mostly in agreement.  

This is not really true. The writing in the Bible does not agree across the book. There were new ideas over the time the Bible was written.

It is not necessary to know much about the Bible because it says so many different things and is interpreted in so many ways. Some of the various messages in the Bible are from interpretations from one language into another. This is often complicated by changes in the languages themselves from ancient times to the present. 

There have been best sellers in recent decades written about Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Huge volumes of their personal writing has survived. Included in it are gems still repeated today. One of my favorites is John Adams as a lawyer saying, "Facts are sticky things." Everyone can see, however, words and phrases were different and the meaning of everything written just a couple of hundred years ago is not clear. Paul, the famous but apparently not an actual person, from the Bible wrote the manual on Christianity. Yet, the various people using the name of Paul wrote about 200 years after the time Jesus was supposed to have lived. 

There is an old wisdom instructing us not to build our house on shifting sand. The Bible is shifting sand, never secure in who wrote it or why, and meaning of which has undergone revision since day one. 

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