The Bible

My inquiring grandson is a devout Catholic. While all the grandchildren were aware that I did not attend church, they did take note that my familiarity with the Bible was unrivaled in our various households. Thus, his question.I confronted my oldest child with beginning his investigation into the spirituality provided by religion when he was eight. I laid out a plan to make two visits each to a Temple, a Catholic Church, a Baptist Church, and a Unitarian Church. He could then select one and I would attend with him whichever he chose.His response was "No thanks." He explained that the children he was with in school seemed to think that their religion and their particular church, if Christians, made them different from each other. They clearly were not different no matter what religion they followed. He did not need to search for a false but perceived difference between himself and the rest of the class.

What is one of your favorite Bible stories?

         As you know if you have read Dear Children, none of the New Testament was written contemporaneously with Jesus’ life. Jesus never wrote anything. There was no secretary or reporter writing down what Jesus said or what he was doing that made it into the New Testament. The Gospels were written long after his death and, except for Mark, were undoubtedly written to promote a religion founded on Jesus’ “Deity.” Even the last verses of Mark were changed hundreds of year after he wrote the Gospel to add the “fact” that Jesus rose from the dead – it was not contained in the original version because, when written, Mark was not in the business of selling Jesus as a “Deity.”

          The Old Testament is a different matter. The first five books of the Old Testament are the Jewish holy book, the Torah. Thereafter, the books of the Old Testament contain books of history, of prophesy, of poetry, and of teaching. Most were written to record events contemporaneously. Accordingly, most of the stories following the first five books can be relied upon as having actually occurred. Well, not Jonah being swallowed by a whale or Daniel in the lion’s den. Jewish story tellers were not beyond making up a tale to support a moral lesson.

           When we were children, our Sunday School lessons were filled with stories. One would have hoped that some were accurate, but even as a child I found it difficult to believe the stories that were told in what people described to me as “the Word of God”.

           I recall a Sunday School class when I was about ten in which we were discussing Noah and the ark. I asked the teacher how Noah kept the predators that were carnivores (like tigers, lions, and jaguars) from eating all the 200 species of deer. And how did Noah store enough grass and leaves to feed the elephants, giraffes, cows, horses, deer, and plant eating species of dinosaurs. Or is this why all the dinosaurs disappeared – because their sins were so bad that even God could not forgive the entire species and destroyed them in the flood. And what was the point of the story? Was it if God makes a mistake in creation, he destroys it all? Needless to say, the teacher had no answers for my questions and I received a lecture later that day about keeping my big mouth shut in Sunday School classes.

             The “moral” of the story made no sense to me. At least, when Aesop made up a story like “The Tortoise and the Hare” you quickly understood the moral he was imparting. Slow but steady progress is usually better than rushing a job and making mistakes. The careful plodder always wins in the end no matter how exciting the speedster’s initial burst of speed may be.

             Even Jesus knew how to tell a story so the “moral” was clear. The story of God providing three different people with talents – one with ten; one with five; and one with only one – made sense. If you had a talent for music, sports, poetry, carpentry, and cooking, use them to develop even more skills – perhaps composition, coaching, song writing, architecture, and running your own restaurant. In pursuing the non-spiritual aspects of life with dedication, vigor , and stamina, you were fulfilling God’s will just as much as living a spiritually devoted life. If you failed to use even the one non-spiritual talent God provided you, God’s will for you had been thwarted no matter how spiritually devoted a life you had lived. Simple story; easily understood.

              But “God” telling a story like Noah’s ark, or of having inflicted the harm upon Egypt portrayed in Genesis, or the escape from slavery thanks to the parting of the Red Sea followed by the drowning of the Egyptian army chasing the escaping Jews – unbelievable stories with no discernible “moral” as a teaching devise. Accordingly, the Bible for me was interesting as a collection of books put together around 380 years after the death of Jesus by the Catholic Church to provide the backdrop leading to the arrival of the Jewish Messiah descended from David, i.e., Jesus. Choices were made among many competing accounts of the time of Jesus to be included in an accepted Bible – the so-called “Word of God.”. All of this is discussed in detail in my Dear Children.

          It should not surprise you, therefore, that only one story in the Bible survived as a favorite of mine (other than Jesus’ talents story). I loved, and have used in various forms to teach, the story of Solomon and the two competing “mothers.” I was never sure why, as King of the Jews following his father David’s reign, Solomon would be sitting to hear disputes as small as two women claiming to be the mother of the same child. But his resolution of the dispute was a strong lesson in how to discover a liar. When faced with the child being sliced into two halves and each of the women receiving one-half, the woman who withdrew her claim was obviously the actual mother. Little wonder that Solomon became renowned as the wisest ruler of the Jews. His Proverbs along with his father’s Psalms were my favorite books of the Old Testament,

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