In my previous posts I’ve dealt with some of the critical problems with the New Testament that many students have to grapple with (often for the first time) when they take seminary courses on biblical studies during their ministerial training.  One of the big questions I address in my book Jesus Interrupted (HarperOne, 2009) is why pastors who learn such things in seminary don’t say anything about them in their churches after graduation, not even in adult education classes.  Isn’t one of the objectives of education to get educated?   In this post I continue with an excerpt from the book dealing with comparable problems in the Old Testament.

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These kinds of problems turn out to be even more common in the Old Testament, starting at its very beginning. Some people go to great lengths to smooth over all these differences, but when you look at them closely, they are very difficult indeed to reconcile. And why should they be reconciled? Maybe they are simply differences. The creation account in Genesis 1 is very different from the account in Genesis 2. Not only is the wording and writing style different, as is very obvious when you read the text in Hebrew, and not only do the two chapters use different names for God, but the very content of the chapters differs in numerous respects. Just make a list of everything that happens in chapter 1 in the order it occurs, and a separate list for chapter 2, and compare your lists. Are animals created before humans, as in chapter 1, or after, as in chapter 2? Are plants created before humans or afterward? Is “man” the first living creature to be created or the last? Is woman created at the same time as man or separately? Even within each story there are problems: if “light” was created on the first day of creation in Genesis 1, how is it that the sun, moon, and stars were not created until the fourth day? Where was the light coming from, if not the sun, moon, and stars? And how could there be an “evening and morning” on each of the first three days if there was no sun?

 

That’s just the beginning. When Noah takes the animals on the ark, does he take seven pairs of all the “clean” animals, as Genesis 7:2 states, or just two pairs, as Genesis 7:9–10 indicates?

 

In the book of Exodus, God tells Moses, “I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name ‘The LORD’ [= Yahweh] I did not make myself known to them” (Exodus 6:3). How does this square with what is found earlier, in Genesis, where God does make himself known to Abraham as The LORD: “Then he [God] said to him [Abraham], ‘I am The LORD [= Yahweh] who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans’” (Genesis 15:7)?

 

Or consider one of my all-time favorite passages, the description of the ten plagues that Moses brought down on the heads of the Egyptians in order to compel Pharaoh to “let my people go.” The fifth plague was a pestilence that killed “all of the livestock of the Egyptians” (Exodus 9:5). How is it, then, that a few days later the seventh plague, of hail, was to destroy all of the Egyptian livestock in the fields (Exodus 9:21–22)? What livestock?

 

A close reading of the Bible reveals other problems besides the many discrepancies and contradictions. There are places where the text seems to embrace a view that seems unworthy of God or of his people. Are we really to think of God as someone who orders the wholesale massacre of an entire city? In Joshua 6, God orders the soldiers of Israel to attack the city of Jericho and to slaughter every man, woman, and child in the city. I suppose it makes sense that God would not want bad influences on his people—but does he really think that murdering all the toddlers and infants is necessary to that end? What do they have to do with wickedness?

 

Or what is one to make of Psalm 137, one of the most beautiful Psalms, which starts with the memorable lines “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept, when we remembered Zion.” Here is a powerful reflection by a faithful Israelite who longs to return to Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by the Babylonians. But his praise of God, and of his holy city, takes a vicious turn at the end, when he plots his revenge on God’s enemies: “Happy shall they be who take your [Babylonian] little ones, and dash them against the rock.” Knocking the brains out of the Babylonian babies in retaliation for what their father-soldiers did? Is this in the Bible?

 

The God of vengeance is found not only in the Old Testament, as some Christians have tried to claim. Even the New Testament God is a God of judgment and wrath, as any reader of the book of Revelation knows. The Lake of Fire is stoked up and ready for everyone who is opposed to God. This will involve eternal burning—an everlasting punishment, even for those who have sinned against God, intermittently, say, for twenty years. Twenty trillion years of torment in exchange for twenty years of wrong living; and that’s only the beginning. Is this really worthy of God?

 

I should stress that scholars and students who question such passages are not questioning God himself. They are questioning what the Bible has to say about God. Some such scholars continue to think that the Bible is in some sense inspired—other scholars, of course, do not. But even if the authors of the Bible were in some sense inspired, they were not completely infallible; in fact, they made mistakes. These mistakes involved discrepancies and contradictions, but they also involved mistaken notions about God, who he really was and what he really wanted. Does he really want his followers to splash the brains of their enemies’ infants against the rocks? Does he really plan to torment unbelievers for trillions of years?

 

These are the questions many seminarians are forced to grapple with as they move away from the devotional commitment to the Bible that they bring with them to seminary and begin to study the Bible in light of scholarship. They are questions raised, in large extent, as a result of being trained in the historical-critical approach to the Bible, the approach that is taught in most mainline Protestant seminaries and that is the more or less “orthodox” view among biblical scholars in America and Europe.

 

This view insists that each author of the Bible lived in his own time and place—and not in ours. Each author had a set of cultural and religious assumptions that we ourselves may not share. The historical-critical method tries to understand what each of these authors may have meant in his original context. According to this view, each author must be allowed to have his own say. Within the New Testament, the author of Matthew isn’t saying the same thing as Luke. Mark is different from John. Paul may not see eye to eye with James. The author of Revelation seems to be different from all the others. And once you throw the Old Testament into the mix, things get completely jumbled. The authors of Job and Ecclesiastes explicitly state that there is no afterlife. The book of Amos insists that the people of God suffer because God is punishing them for their sins; the book of Job insists that the innocent can suffer; and the book of Daniel indicates that the innocent in fact will suffer. All of these books are different, all of them have a message, and all of the messages deserve to be heard.