When taken at face value, the Bible offers skeptical readers plenty of reasons to walk away, scratching their heads. Take this little nugget, for example, from the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy:
“If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.” – Deuteronomy 25:11-12
Just to be clear, in the event of a struggle, I’ve given my wife permission to do whatever is necessary to help me survive the fight. But the question here is, “Why in the world would the word of God call for such a savvy wife to lose her hand?” Incidentally, my favorite translation of this passage is the King James version which awkwardly reads:
“When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: then thou shalt cut off her hand…”
Taketh him by the secrets?!
For many skeptics and freethinkers, it’s nearly impossible to believe that the one true God would endorse a book containing such a comically outmoded passage like this, but this is why biblical literacy is so important. When you understand how to read the Bible, it comes as no surprise that its narrative can occasionally seem ridiculous, temperamental, and lacking in detail. After all, it was written by human beings – real people who had real pain, problems, and limitations.
Christians believe the people who wrote the Bible were inspired by God; in fact, we think every word of Scripture is “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16). That does not mean, however, that we believe the entire Bible fell from heaven as a finished product in the King’s English, gilded pages and all. It means that God inspired all the stories, laws, songs, and prophecies that make up our scriptures as they were being written, and He still inspires them now as they are being read.
The divine inspiration of Scripture does not preclude the fact that God’s perfect message for the world passed through a human filter. You can’t read the Bible without seeing its raw humanity; the sporadic examples of textual discrepancies, the occasional shocking misogyny, and the examples of extreme violence leap off its pages. This undeniable fact terrifies biblically insecure Christians and causes us to get defensive, but we should never see the humanity of Scripture as a threat to its veracity. The question is not whether the human element sullies the original Word of God; instead, we should be asking, “Does the humanity of Scripture damage its integrity?”
I don’t believe it does. Before I became a Christian, I used what I thought were flaws in the Bible to poke holes in the Truth claims that Christians hold dear. I would question, for example, why the four gospel writers disagree on the order of events in Jesus’ life. Did Jesus famously turn over the tables in the Temple toward the end of his life, as Matthew and Mark suggest, or was it at the very beginning of his ministry, like John says? Luke says there were two angels in Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning. Matthew and Mark say there was one. And John, the only gospel-writer who was actually at Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning, didn’t mention the presence of any angels at all, which seems like a glaring omission.
I used to think these obvious discrepancies represented the proverbial nail in the coffin for the Bible. No thinking person could ever accept this internally inconsistent collection of ancient books as authoritative or divinely inspired, right?
It’s just not that simple. Once my life changed in Capernaum, I began to revisit some of my deepest doubts about the Bible. God’s Spirit led me to begin asking different questions. Instead of “Why would a perfect God write such an imperfect book?” I started asking, “If the standard of biblical Truth was the absolute absence of discrepancies, why didn’t the early Christians ever ‘clean up’ the canon?”
In my days of dark cynicism, I wondered aloud how any educated person could respect a book as human as the Bible. Then, after my come-to-Jesus moment, I realized it’s the Bible’s humanity that speaks to my skeptical heart the most. Any holy book of any religion that is said to be anything other than human-filtered is a fraud from the start. It’s not the human element, but the supposed lack of it, that negates the sacredness of so-called sacred text. Anything short of a humanized holy book is mere magic, the stuff of fairy tales we tell restless children until they finally give up and go to sleep, or worse: the stuff of false religions we preach to restless adults until they do.
The only Bible worth believing is God-breathed and human-filtered.
In my cynicism, I used to think of the Bible as an imperfect book written for people who think they’re perfect. But since the day I surrendered my life to Jesus I’ve come to see that the Bible is the perfect book for people who know they’re imperfect.
If you call yourself a Christian, but the Bible isn’t a part of your daily life, you’re missing out on the best part. And these days we have no excuse because there are so many great resources at our fingertips – study Bibles, podcasts, YouTube lectures, and more. Find the resources that spark your interest and make Scripture a part of your day, every day.
