Bill Darlison's weblog

A Book about which my thinking has changed: The Bible

The letter killeth; the spirit giveth life. (2 Corinthians 3:6)

We didn’t have many books at home when I was growing up. I read a lot, but mainly comics and the odd library book. However, among the few books we did have was a Catholic Family Bible, a huge, leather-bound volume, with glossy pages in the front for recording family details – births, marriages, and deaths – the sort of pages that people intend to fill in but never do. The lettering on the front was in gold, and the pages were edged in gold. My mother had bought it around 1955 at the cost of £10, when £10 was a reasonable weekly wage for a working man, and she paid for it over two years at the rate of ten shillings or so per month. The salesman had told her that the parish priest had recommended this particular Bible and had given him the names and addresses of all the Catholics in the area. We later found out that this was a scam. The salesman had come to our door because he had asked the people in the last house he visited to give him the address of the next Catholic household, the very question he asked my mother at the end of his visit to us.

Although grossly overpriced, this Bible was very impressive to look at and to handle, and I can remember reading it from time to time, particularly when I was ill, or bored or both. But it wasn’t really meant to be read. It was too heavy to be held comfortably and I was always afraid that I’d spill something on it or mark it in some way with my dirty fingers. I got the impression that it was more for display than for study, and that it was in the same category as the picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with the red light at the front, or the crucifix, or my brother’s first communion certificate with the picture of the Last Supper, all of which were prominently displayed on the walls of our sitting room. (Goodness knows what my non-religious father thought of all this Catholic paraphernalia!)

I was dimly aware, even at such a young age, that controversies existed around the Bible. The translation we had was the Douai translation, at that time the only one sanctioned by the Catholic Church. Protestants had their own translations, but these were inaccurate and misleading, I was told, and it was a sin for Catholics to use them. When I went to the non-Catholic grammar school, I was exempted from religious education lessons – which consisted entirely of Bible study – on the orders of the parish priest, presumably because the Bible used in the school was one of these ‘flawed’ translations. And yet I’ll bet that not one Catholic in a thousand – including the clergy – had the faintest idea what the ‘flaws’ were. But, if you’re told often enough that a sheep is a dog, it won’t be long before you think you can hear it barking.

So, I missed an opportunity to learn about the Bible, and this left a marked gap in my education, as I was to find out when I began to study English literature seriously: you can’t make much of Milton, Shakespeare, Blake, or the Romantic Poets without some acquaintance with the Bible. I’d picked up some knowledge of the Jesus story from my days in the Catholic primary school and from mass attendance, but the only bible passages I could recite when I was 16 were those bits which seemed to prove that the Catholic Church was the One True Church. I was left with the impression that, although the Bible was the word of God, to be a Catholic one didn’t have to know too much about it. The Bible is undoubtedly one of the cornerstones of Western civilisation, and the Authorised Version (the one we Catholics weren’t supposed to read) is one of the most beautiful and influential works in the English language, but none of my Catholic mentors seemed to bother about these things.

Some years later, when I was a student in Rome, I began a systematic study of the Bible and I even learned some Greek so that I could tackle the New Testament in its original language, but the main concerns of the approach we took there were apologetic and historical. We learned about the Bible, but we didn’t engage with it as a text; we approached it with our left brain, as scholars, but we never really let it feed our imagination. We also agonised over the supposed conflict between the early chapters of Genesis and science, and the whole matter of the ‘inerrancy’ of the Bible. For example, in Mark 2:26, Jesus mentions that David entered the Jerusalem Temple and ate the bread of the presence when Abiathar was high priest; but, according to the First Book of Samuel (21:2), Ahimelech was high priest at that time. Who got it wrong, Jesus or Mark? Is it really wrong? Could there have been two high priests? Can the Bible really be the inspired word of God if it contains even minor errors like this? These seemed to be important issues.

When I left the seminary, I began teaching the New Testament to ‘A’ Level students, and the syllabus – then as now – was almost entirely concerned with tangential, ‘critical’ matters. Why were the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke so similar? Which was written first? Who copied from whom? Were any of the authors eye-witnesses of the events they describe? Why is John’s Gospel so different from the other three? Who were the Gospel authors? Where were their books written? When were they written? There is absolutely no doubt that it would have been possible to pass the examination on the New Testament without reading a single word of the actual text – and I’m sure some students did this. It was profoundly useless, and I’m quite ashamed that I spent so many years of my life engaged in such activities, which have about as much value as asking whether Shakespeare wrote King Lear with a pen or a pencil, or knowing how many paragraphs there are in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Had the syllabus allowed me to approach the Bible as one would any other work of literature – with the imagination – there might have been some value in it.

Of course, I knew my way around the Bible pretty well by this time, and I can thank my formal studies for this, but my expertise was sharpened by consistent engagement with religious sectarians, principally Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. If you really want to get to know the Bible, get involved in a debate with a Jehovah’s Witness. I had a regular meeting with a man called Ernest Matthews, a Jehovah’s Witness special pioneer (a full time witness), and we argued about the Bible every second Saturday for ten years. Throughout that time, I read the Bible cover to cover every single year, but, looking back, I don’t think I read it sensibly or properly once!

When I became a Unitarian in 1988, I discovered that Unitarians in Britain and America have no belief in the Bible as the revealed word of God, and in the three years Morag and I spent in America, I can’t recall a single time the Bible was used in a Unitarian service. It wasn’t used much in Britain either. I was then, and am now, quite comfortable with this situation, and although I do use the Bible in services, and much of my preaching has been on biblical themes, I too have no belief in the Bible as ‘the inspired word of God’ – or, at least, I see it as no more inspired than Shakespeare or Tolstoy – and it was only when I lost any idea that it was a ‘special’ book that I really began to gain spiritual nurture from it. There are two main reasons why I rejected the notion that the Bible was a source of direct revelation.

First, it is, in the main, a book of poetry and poetry depends for its power on ambiguity, on nuance, metaphor and simile. To translate poetry into history or into prosaic doctrinal formulations is to destroy it. There is no one way to interpret a poem. The fact that we have so many sects in Christendom, each with its own interpretation of certain key texts demonstrates that attempting to find a consensus is futile. And this is particularly true when dealing with translations from another language. The Old Testament is written mostly in Hebrew, the New Testament in Greek. To become an expert in these two languages – plus Aramaic in which some of the Old Testament is written – is a lifetime’s work, and, even then, scholars will have legitimate disagreement. Even native speakers of Hebrew disagree over fundamental matters of interpretation. Someone has said that ‘all translation is commentary’, meaning that there is no such thing as a ‘simple’ translation of anything. You bring your prejudices to bear on every translation.

For example, the student of Hebrew finds out early on that the very first words of the Old Testament are troublesome.  They are: bereshit bara Elohim, customarily translated, ‘In the beginning God created’. But bereshit does not mean ‘in the beginning’. It could conceivably mean ‘in a beginning’ or ‘in the beginning of’ but Hebrew scholars, people who have studied these texts in the greatest depth, disagree over this. And the word Elohim is usually translated ‘God’. But Elohim is a plural form, and God is singular. The verb translated ‘created’ – bara- is singular, too. So, we have a plural noun and a singular verb. Ahh!’ say the Trinitarians. This shows that God is trinity in unity. No it doesn’t, say others. It’s simply the ‘royal plural’, a plural form which indicates majesty and power. You’re both wrong, say those like Erik von Daniken who believe that God was an astronaut. The word Elohim, they say, shows that God wasn’t a single entity, but a group of aliens who planted human life on earth millennia ago! All this and we’ve not read beyond the first line of the text! As we read on we find similar problems; the first two chapters of Genesis alone contain at least half a dozen disputed readings. What chance has the ordinary person of coming to terms with this? Why do we persist in saying, ‘Everybody should be allowed to interpret the Bible for himself’? How can we do it? Even if we devoted a lifetime to it we couldn’t come to agreement.

So, using the Bible as a proof text, as the basis for doctrines and creeds is bound to result – as it has resulted – in fruitless and interminable dispute and division. To imagine that a sensible God would make a person’s eternal salvation dependent upon coming to the ‘right’ conclusions about such texts is beyond belief. In short, to look upon the Bible in this way is to invite trouble.

Another reason why I rejected the notion that the Bible could be used as an inerrant text to support doctrines was my discovery that the 3^rd century Christian writer Origen had declared that, far from being free from errors and contradictions, the Bible was full of them – deliberately placed there, according to Origen, so that we wouldn’t be tempted to take the text literally, so that we would go beneath the surface to discover the poetic depths conveyed by the words. Of course, we have paid no attention whatsoever to Origen’s advice and have continued to spend our time trying to explain away obvious contradictions, anomalies, and absurdities, and fighting with each other over our differing conclusions.

These days, I’m conscious that I shall never be able to grasp every nuance of the Bible’s total message, and I realise that I’ll always have to rely on someone else’s translation, regardless of my own linguistic expertise. But as soon as I stopped thinking of it as sacred I found I could begin to think of it as sublime. I could enjoy it and profit from it without being overawed by it, or even scared by it. The Bible is my friend now, and my companion. I honestly think that, approached in the right spirit, it contains all we need to know about the spiritual life.

But, what is the ‘right spirit’ in which to approach a religious text? An old Sufi story gives us an answer. There was once a brilliant preacher who, when asked why he had become so wise, would always reply, ‘I am wise because I know what is in my Koran.’ This was usually enough to satisfy his audience, but one day a questioner went further. ‘Tell us,’ he said, ‘just what is in your Koran.’ ‘In my Koran,’ replied the preacher, ‘there are two pressed flowers and a letter from my friend Abdullah.’

As long as we keep in our holy book figurative reminders of the mystery and beauty of the earth (symbolised by the flowers), and the mystery, beauty, and importance of human relationships (symbolised by the letter), we will be able to profit from them. As long as we realise that all scriptures are human products, and that, to paraphrase a passage from Walt Whitman, we give life to them, they don’t give life to us, then they can be beneficial to us. If we lose this dimension; if we treat these books as oracles which have dropped down from heaven, they will tyrannise over us and be sources of dogmatism, division, fanaticism, and fundamentalism, those volatile and uncompromising forces which are spreading such havoc in the world.

June 13^th 2010