I have been discussing how I experienced a radical change in my Christian faith, from being a conservative evangelical to being a more open-minded and better informed Christian.  I can now begin to talk about how my new way of understanding the faith intersected with the scholarship I was involved with in pursuing the academic study of the Bible.

As a budding biblical scholar, I had come to see that the Bible was filled with problems.  As a believer with a new perspective these problems were not detrimental to my faith but actually provided important insights that previously I simply had no access to.

To explain that will take a couple of posts.  The overarching point is that the discrepancies, contradictions, and mistakes of the Bible reveal clearly that we are dealing here with different authors with different perspectives, and it is important to let *each* author speak for himself to see what he wants to emphasize.  The viewpoint each one has is important, and it is crucial not to confuse the message of one author with the message of another.

This scholarly approach to the Bible is called “historical criticism.”  I talk about it in my book Jesus Interrupted.  Here is the basic overview I give there:

 

************************************************************

The discrepancies in the Bible are important, in part, because they force us…

To Read the Rest of This Post you need to belong to the Blog.  If you are not a member, JOIN!  It won’t cost much money (less than seven cents for this post!!) and every penny goes to charity.  So why not??