Meditations On: Fact-checking the Bible | David Ellis Dickerson TED Talk

I’ve had more than a few Christian FB friends post messages of joy at the passing of laws requiring posting the 10 Commandments in Public School classrooms and/or teaching “the Bible” as part of the curriculum, as if this is the first step in fixing all of society’s ills:

I don’t think that they “appreciate” the can of WTF that they have exposed themselves to and how poorly this is likely to go. First off, I for one, as someone with an education in Religious Studies and an Bachelor’s Degree in Biblical Studies, am all in favor of including Biblical Studies as part of studying ancient literature or as part of studying religions of early civilizations. But, as is communicated in the TED talk video, actually presenting the stories told in the Bible is not exactly a “G” rated/family friendly narrative. There’s a reason that there are thousands of separate Christian sects and denominations (hint: they cannot agree on their own accepted “Truth”). Add to that the Founding Fathers saw the generations of wars fought over religious affiliation in Europe and wanted no part of that waste and foolishness.

I like that the video posted above just centered on one “simple” story that should be easy to agree on: Jesus of Nazareth’s birth narrative. Alas, that story is only in two of the four gospels, none of the “facts,” like the census, are confirmed outside of the two gospels and the two gospels can’t agree on the “facts” themselves. So, historically, one has to ask, what actually happened? Yes, you can “align” the two different stories to make the narrative “fit,” but then you are no longer teaching “from the Bible,” but are adding your own layer to make the two distinct, slightly contradictory stories fit into a logical narrative. But that’s NOT teaching what Matthew or Luke actually wrote, that’s not teaching the Bible.

Jesus’ birth narrative is only one of the stories told in the gospels, with each of the four gospels offer slightly different versions of the same events. Expand that out to the hundreds of stories in the Bible, and if one expects to teach it as literal history, then things are going to get a bit complicated. Whereas if one were to teach the Bible as literature, then one can openly recognize the many reasons that each author chose to highlight the part of the story that they’ve highlighted. But if one is presenting these stories as literal history without error or omission, that’s a bit like what Dickerson said in the conclusion of his TED Talk, in that it’s like our fandom for so-called “Reality TV”, where we are so connected to the stories that we choose to ignore that we know that what we see is highly edited, sometimes coached and not necessarily how things actually happened. The producers of reality TV (or any narrative) have a story that they want to tell and are not opposed to “adjusting” what we see so that we see the story they want us to see. Surprise, this also applies to the Bible.

We would like to believe that what we read is just recorded history, but many of the writers themselves begin their stories telling us the purpose behind their exposition (usually so that we would believe the story they have to tell). This doesn’t mean that none of it is historical, just our beloved “Reality TV,” it’s been edited to tell you the “history” as they remember it. I mean, how many angels greeted the women at the tomb? Did they go back and tell the disciples or not tell anyone? Did the disciples go up and see the risen Jesus in Galilee or did they stay in Jerusalem? It gets messy is one tries to pull all of these different versions of the events into a single narrative, and in the process one isn’t reading what the writer is sharing, but you’re combining it with other writers’ versions and that would not be “literal history,” but your own interpretation of all the different sources and thus to opinion. I’m not sure how this “helps education” or society.

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of Youtube videos from various scholars, such as Dr. Bart Erhman and Dr. Josh Bown, and I appreciate their scholarship and approach to the science of biblical and religious studies. In the following video Erhman discusses how one uses the scientific historical approach to studying the Bible, in that it’s just like studying any ancient literature, comparing it to other writings from the time and using archeology and cultural anthropology. He says that it’s just like how one studies Physics, or Biology or Mathematics. It’s the same whether one is a Muslim or a Christian or a non-believer. One’s personal beliefs should not change ones approach to these disciplines and the same can be true with religious or biblical studies. A friend once joked that he’s never met someone who didn’t study psychology without some personal reason for that person to look into the study. But I would think that ones success would still be determined by ones ability to scientifically approach the discipline, regardless of the reason one first was motivated to explore the study. I find it funny that I’m sure my thoughts on the scientific approach to biblical or religious studies would be equally unwelcome by Christian fundamentalists and radical atheists.

I’ve thought for a long time about how one would approach teaching religion in the classroom and I’m certain that those celebrating the rulings in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana would not care from my anthropological/scientific approach. When I first presented my ideas while getting my teaching credential in the early 1990s more than a few of my professors visibly flinched. I know that we don’t “teach the Bible” in K-12 public schools is because it avoids the headache of which version of the Bible one is going to teach from and all the other complication that proceed from there. Personally, I think it’s a mistake to soft-pedal our nation’s religious heritage and pretend like it’s had no influence on the world we currently live in. I kind of envy the scholars who were able to do their work at state schools of higher learning, where one was held to an academic standard that wasn’t beholden to currying favor from any one particular religious affiliation. I’m just now wondering what might have transpired if I hadn’t quit my own academic pursuits in the mid-1980s. I don’t doubt that I wouldn’t have ended up in the same non-believing position, but it would have been a very different journey. I’m just glad that I don’t have to contend with medieval edicts requiring religious texts being posted in my K-12 public school classroom. Ugh. We can do so much better than this.