Is the Bible True? What's the Evidence?

 

Steve Marier, on a Facebook site called "No Rules Religious Debate" (July 4, 2022), asks a question. Could any evidence convince skeptics that the Bible is true? Marier, a self-declared atheist, disputes the claim that atheists are closed to evidence. They just haven't seen the right kind.

Marier uses "true" in an obvious sense that, indeed, many believers do. The Bible is "true" if passages from it can be used to establish empirical fact. This assumes that the book validates actionable facts--such as the creation of the world or the state of humans after death--in the absence of other observed evidence. An all-knowing God reveals things that its human writers couldn't personally know. Thus, the Bible is authoritative, and beliefs based on it are "true."

Marier insists that the Bible might say many things that would convince him of its "truth." All kinds of statements that might prove its miraculous origins are absent. This not only fails to prove the book "true" but suggests that it is false. I would not go so far. There are less crass forms of "truth," such as truths of myth, art, and ethics, but the Bible's failure to meet Marier's demands does seem to indicate that the book isn't magically factual--that, in particular, it doesn't make authoritative statements in competition with science, as many fundamentalists claim.

So what might be in the Bible that would convince Marier that it was true? This is where his essay is inventive and humorous.

--Huge ruins of the Tower of Babel, obviously taller than the Great Pyramid because God didn't smite that one.

--An ark on a high mountain (the least of my objections to the Noah story. Didn't local fishermen have boats? How did the kangaroos hop from and back to Australia?)

--An explanation of how people got from Mesopotamia to the Americas (or even the existence of the Americas).

--Useful instructions from loving and all-knowing God, such as "how to make antibiotics, or how to perform an appendectomy." 

--A modern calendar as accurate as the one we use today, not invented until 1582.

--A map of the world, which surely God could see, with its diameter in ancient cubits.

The absence of these, and thousands of other useful things a benign God might have helped us out with, establishes a kind of authority the Bible does not have, but these charming demands are thwarted by the way we know the text of the Bible was transmitted in the millennia before printing. Textual analysis suggests that the early books of the Old Testament are anthologies of older sources finally edited in the aftermath of the Babylonian Exile. For many centuries, every scribe could edit, and today we have only copies of copies of copies. Suppose some prophet had written in 687 BCE that the earth is a spinning ball 30 million cubits in diameter circling a vastly larger star in empty space. The next scribe copying him--certainly the temple editors--would have cried, "What the Sheol!" and cut this craziness from the next manuscript. Scribes copied only what they (or their employers) chose to, and anything contrary to what was "known" or what people believed would be lost in transmission.

This explains why no scientific breakthroughs are revealed in the Bible, but it also guarantees that any revealed religious insights will be contaminated by the preconceptions of the copyists and their patrons. Even if the first authors were individually inspired, divinely or otherwise, the process of collecting and transmitting an orthodox scripture assured that everything, or nearly everything, on its finished scrolls would reflect a collective culture, the needs and character of the temple priesthood and its constituency. A similar, if evolving, culture selected and revised the later stages of the Bible--the books of wisdom, fiction, poetry, and prophecy, and the Christian texts, which weren't established as canonical for at least three hundred years--copied, recopied, filtered, and edited by an emerging international orthodoxy. If the Bible has authority, it is as a folk document, the product of many hands ratified by many more.

It is in this sense that the Bible is true. It is a powerful cultural repository, a consensus of the wisdom of centuries in the Middle East--so powerful that its stories are at the center of Christianity and Islam, espoused by over half the world's population. Judaism, based on its early books, remains a major religion despite millennia as a persecuted minority, an astonishing story of survival. Even if the Bible's wisdom is human, lensed through several cultures, some of them morally repugnant in today's terms, the very width of this lens, focused between the covers of what today we print as one book--that and the selection process over centuries that edited it--make it an important guide to what it has meant over the centuries to be human. It is a book to be studied.

When we read the Bible, we shouldn't be simple minded. It speaks from cultures profoundly alien to ours but with their own sophistication, and even in ancient times, Jews and Christians didn't take it on face value. They understood that, read literally, it said repellent things. St. Augustine, well into adulthood, rejected Old Testament stories about a jealous god with human body parts and accepted Christianity only after he learned to read them as moral and theological allegory: "I heard Ambrose, in his sermons to the people, oftentimes most diligently recommend this text as a rule —'The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life;' while, drawing aside the mystic veil, he spiritually laid open that which, accepted according to the 'letter,' seemed to teach perverse doctrines — teaching herein nothing that offended me" (Confessions, 6.4.6). 

St. Ambrose taught a tradition of non-literal reading that derived from Jewish philosophers such as Philo of Alexandria and church fathers such Origen, ultimately derived from Greek readings of Homer. If scripture is assumed to be a priori true, verses that appear to say something false must be be re-interpreted until they say something else that matches the interpreter's idea of truth. Of course, any complex text read this way becomes true. However, without the a prior assumption of truth, this process uses the text like Rorschach inkblot or crystal ball, a chaos onto which readers project their own pet structures. It reflects the reader's own preconceptions.

The impressive thing about the Bible is that it has served this function well for so many centuries. It isn't just any complex text. The fact that so many ideologies have been able to use it as a touchstone of their highest "truths" is remarkable, indicating a multifaceted kind of truth that makes the Bible a spiritual authority to be revered.