I just finished reading God: An Anatomy by British Biblical Scholar, Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou,1 who is currently Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at Exeter University. In the book she strips away centuries of theology and Neoplatonic Philosophy and reimagines a very corporeal deity as would be understood by the ancient Israelites and surrounding tribes when the stories in the Bible were shared and eventually written down. That got me thinking: we seem to be quite comfortable looking at the religions of ancient Northern Europe or Greece or Rome as Myth. But the moment someone applies the same “non-historic/Myth” label to the Hebrew & Christian Bible, faces get red and chairs get overturned. Why is that?

Over the past six-months I’ve been re-examining my Religious Studies/Biblical Studies background with a desire to better understand what these things mean in both my own personal history and world history. I’ve wandered down this path to the extent that I attended The New Insights into The New Testament 2024 online conference in September2 and am in the middle of my second online course at The Biblical Studies Academy,3 both of which were organized by Biblical Scholar Bart Ehrman. I guess it got to the point where it wasn’t enough for me to tell someone in some random conversations that they didn’t know what they were talking about when said random person decided to share what they knew was “in the Bible” or about religion in general. I felt like I needed to put my money where my mouth was and restart my studies versus trying to continue to depend on half-remembered things that I read over forty-years ago. 

This renewed exploration has been challenging and invigorating and I’m delighted in all of the new work being done; work that didn’t exist or I wouldn’t have access to when I was a student at LMU, Biola or Fuller Seminary. I have fond memories of visiting the libraries at the Claremont Colleges when I was doing research for my papers in my final years at Biola. For whatever reason, I had a strong drive to explore the Bible on an academic level, a drive that eventually ran contrary to my Calvary Chapel roots and the fundamentalistic theologies taught at Biola. I had been through this problem before, being thirsty to learn but recognizing that I was asking questions and exploring beyond the areas that I was told to stay within. Going from being a teenage Jesus-freak just reading my Bible on my own, to learning from the Jesuits at LMU, to trying to fly under the radar with the Fundamentalist Professors at Biola. 

I don’t even remember which class it was in, but a non-biblical studies student once challenged one of our old school professors after the professor claimed, based on his reading of the Bible, that there were no other intelligences in the universe beyond humans, who are made in God’s image and God. Given the immense size of the universe (that we barely understood in 1980), this student couldn’t imagine that we would never find intelligent life anywhere except on Earth. I think this came up because the student asked if alien intelligent life would also need to be saved from sin by Jesus or how that would even work. I silently agreed with the student (flying under the radar as usual). This professor seemed to hold to a human-centric universe, where nothing existed beyond us and our relationship to the ancient God of Israel as depicted in the Scofield Reference Bible (King James edition). It did get to a point, many years and at least one degree programs later, that I had to walk away from what felt like an antiquated way of understanding life and existence. I have told friends several times, I wonder where I’d be at if I hadn’t given up the Biblical Studies/Religious Studies journey all those years ago. 

Fifteen years after walking away I gave my faith another try. Personal biblical studies tech had made incredible leaps in those fifteen years (having all of the Bible and multiple version and access to endless texts on one’s computer was mind boggling!). I slowly worked my way through the Gospel According to Matthew and wrote a reflection journal/commentary.4 I learned a lot about the errors I’d made my first 15-years as a Christian (trying to go-it alone and not trusting anyone as a mentor or even companion or community). Alas, five years into version two of my Christian journey and I found orthodox Christianity too intellectually and philosophically confining and a bit too non-sensical. Back into the wilderness I wandered. 

Not to worry, over the last 17-years I’ve found many fellow travelers who’ve grown beyond their Christian roots and are just as decent and caring as they probably were when they identified as Christian. Funny how that works. And I’ve also grown beyond the need to argue and fight with others over differing opinions on texts and doctrines and the minutia of the Faith. But, as I noted several paragraphs before, I’ve chosen to explore my Christian roots to try to better understand them while maintaining my lack of belief in the person(s) described in the Bible. I don’t doubt that being in a time of personal transition from having no time for anything other than teaching to whatever this retirement thing is supposed to be has helped in this current exploration. Finding numerous Religious Studies YouTubers with a myriad of religious and non-religious affiliations was one thing that sparked the “what-if” question regarding ending my Religious Studies academic pursuits. And finally becoming part of a small group of post-Church folks who are on various ends of the believer-atheist continuum, who meet every week to discuss things Biblical and Religious with respect and some level of learning beyond “God told me so” has also greatly contributed to this recent version of the journey.

In fact, I brought up the “why myth here but not here” question in a recent meeting and I was met with a lot of push back that I found surprising. As I said, the group represents several different levels of “belief” and understandably the ones on the “belief” end of the spectrum reacted harshly that anyone would say that the Bible wasn’t some form of “history” and not just “legend.” Archeology showed that many of the places described in the Bible existed and so that was proof that the events described also had to be true. I don’t think that those objecting to my “myth” question even heard me when I said that it was common in ancient lore to set stories of legend in actual real places like Troy or Mycenae or Mount Olympus.5 That was a bit disheartening.

Some time later I realized my mistake. I’d forgotten that while most of my interests when it came to the Bible could be understood as getting back to the original languages, the oldest texts or possibly the original intention of the authors of the text; things that could be scientifically evaluated, explored and evaluated; as a believer what I really wanted was to hear the voice of the person, the God behind the texts talking to me personally and guiding me personally in my quest. The academics had been, at that time, just a means to trying to uncover the mind of God and his specific directions to me, this finite, needy creature on this solo journey on this little planet in an unfathomable universe. That was the prayer, for God to speak through these words to my heart to encourage me where I needed encouragement and guide me where I needed to go next. The academics was a means to an end. And in that paradigm they also needed to be somewhat “historically” true. I guess one should be able to see them as allegory and if there is a God behind them, that God should still be able to speak to the believer directly through the worlds. But maybe losing the historical underpinning means that this God is no better than the other Gods of legend.

It’s not required, but I guess the thought might be that if the God of the Bible can’t get his story straight, why should I believe that he even exists. Either way, I recognize that my “reducing” the Bible to legend somehow appeared to threaten the “reality” of the God who uses the Bible to communicate to believers. I see that now. When I was a believer it wasn’t enough to have original this or that, but to feel like God was using these particular words to say something directly to me. 

I imagine that believers in Asian faiths like Hinduism or Buddhism don’t have this “historical” hang up about their deities, that they exist beyond the words of the text and have meaning beyond the various stories. I’ve learned through anime that characters having multiple origin stories isn’t a problem, but adds to the power and depth to the story (see the multiple Ghost in the Shell origin stories). For a westerner this is interesting but a bit confusing (we can be such simpletons). I think one of my Anthropology professors at CSUF had something to say about this difference between polytheistic and monotheistic religions.

If the texts are reduced to being just the words of men written over centuries, some attempting to correct errors or unclear stories of older versions of these stories, then are these words just as true or untrue as any other words recorded in antiquity? I wonder that a God powerful enough to speak the world into existence with a single word, would require that each and every pen stroke be perfect or else he is unable to get his message to his believers otherwise. Given human imperfection and the frailty of written communication that needed to traverse millennium in hand-written versions created one at a time, is that really an impediment for an all-powerful God to overcome to speak directly to his believers? Again, as a believer I was looking for the “author” beyond the words of the text. And given my enormous ignorance of the context or history or culture of any of these ancient books, thousands of years removed from my working class upbringing in Southern California in the 1970s, how was God going to communicate across all of those hurdles? I didn’t see any of that as being problematic. But then, at all of 16-years-old, I didn’t know any better. 

Now, all I have is trying to get the original languages, culture and intention of the authors/editors. I find this fascinating, even if it’s reduced to the story of ancient cultures and how the smartest and wisest tried to make their way in an often heartless and unforgiving world. It’s somewhat terrifying how little we’ve learned in the intervening millennia. What do you think, why is it so damn important for many that the Bible be treated as history and some fear that if it were to be reduced to legend that Western Civilization would collapse? If you believe in God, does your God require a perfect transmission of text to speak to you? Would it bother you to imagine that  most if not all that passes for Orthodox Christianity today is the result of centuries of evolving philosophies and theologies? Please feel free to (respectfully) weigh in. Enjoy. 

Given that I normally post a video on Fridays, here’s a bonus video interview of Dr. Stavrakopoulou talking about her book. Of all the videos of Dr. Stavrakopoulou online this one was one of the shorter ones. Enjoy.

Sources:

Tags: academic religious studies, biblical studies, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, mythology, video Fridays

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FOOTNOTES:
  1. God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou (2022-01-25), https://amzn.to/4hADBnA[↩]
  2. New Insights into the New Testament – 2024, https://www.bartehrman.com/new-insights-into-the-new-testament-conference-2024/[↩]
  3. Biblical Studies Academy, https://www.bartehrman.com/bsa-academy/[↩]
  4. Biblical Studies: Gospel of Matthew Commentary by Joe Bustillos (2003-2007), https://josephbrucebustillos.com/category/in-bad-faith/gospel-of-matthew-commentary/[↩]
  5. Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination by Paul Veyne (1988-06-15), https://amzn.to/4bSIwiB[↩]