But That's Not What It Says!

By Roger Talley

Preachers and evangelists all have a story to tell.
Atheists, of course, will reject the story, since it is founded on a belief they do not share: the existence of a powerful, personal God. Still, some of those will want to engage in conversation. This book provides them with some useful points of contrast to the usual evangelist narrative: if you are going to make claims about the Bible, make them about the whole Bible, not just the parts you want to talk about.
Skeptics, whether secular or religious (as in, from a different Christian denomination) may want to test the assertions and logic of the evangelist’s narrative, and offer alternatives to it. This book intends to help you with that.
In short, this book is about taking the Bible at its word: “Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.” (1 Thessalonians 5:20-22)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312277502

Book preview

But That's Not What It Says!

But That’s Not What It Says!

A Skeptic’s Guide to the Bible

Copyright 2014, Roger Talley

Popea Press

Las Vegas, Nevada

ISBN: 978-1-312-27750-2

Cover mage sources:

The preacher shown on the cover is George Whitefield, 1714-1770.  Picture is in the public domain.  The scales are royalty-free clip art from Clipartbest.com.  The scroll picture, by Pearson Scott Foresman, is in the public domain.

Introduction

We have all seen them:  preachers and evangelists on the street corners of our home town, evangelists and missionaries coming to our homes, hopeful of convincing you.  Television evangelists, religious bloggers and talking heads on Fox News.  Some invite conversation, some have comments sections in their blogs for you to engage them in conversation (at least when they don’t just summarily delete any comment that disagrees).  And sometimes the conversation just has to go on in your own head, since they neither invite nor permit discussion.

All of them have a story to tell, a narrative that they want you to believe.  They may simply ask for (or demand) belief on the spot, or to have you come to their church to get acquainted and hear more of the story.

Atheists, of course, will summarily reject the story, since it is founded on a belief they do not share:  the existence of a powerful, personal God who cares about their lives, and will influence them both in the here and now and in the afterlife.  Reject that, and the narrative becomes unsustainable.  Still, some of those will want to engage in the conversation, and this book is intended to provide them with some useful points of contrast to the usual evangelist narrative: if you are going to make claims about the Bible, make them about the whole Bible, not just the parts you want to talk about.

Skeptics, whether secular or religious (as in, from a different Christian denomination) may want to test the assertions and logic of the evangelist’s narrative, and offer alternatives to it.  This book intends to help you with that.

In short, this book is about taking the Bible at its word:  Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.  (1 Thessalonians 5:20-22)

Discussing the Bible with Evangelists

When you discuss the Bible with an evangelist, the first thing you need to do is set your expectations for what the conversation will be.  Perhaps the best description comes from a different topic:  Allen Ginsberg’s restatement of the three laws of thermodynamics:

You can’t win.

You can’t break even.

You can’t even get out of the game.

You might think the last of those three doesn’t apply, since either side can always simply get up and walk away at any time.  But that’s not the whole of the situation.  This conversation, whether between you and some particular evangelist or not, is one that constantly goes on in our culture, and heavily influences our politics and laws.  It’s not a conversation we can get out of, unless it is simply to cede the argument to the other side.

So can you win?  Probably not.  You see the world, analyze the world, through a particular lens, with a particular set of assumptions about truth, logic, and what constitutes evidence.  The evangelist sees the world very differently, with different assumptions about what is true (and how to tell what is true), and what constitutes evidence.  It is quite rare for either side to convince the other that they are wrong, at least about those big issues.  So winning should not be the point, unless you want to be very frustrated. 

Breaking even is the best you can hope for, and that is possible only if both sides are willing to listen and learn from each other.  Yes, the atheist/skeptic side needs to learn, at least to understand how the other side thinks, what their world view is, and how they view sources of truth and evidence.  With luck, and honesty and respect on both sides – which is hardly assured -  some learning can take place.

If you are to have an achievable purpose in the conversation, it might be this:  To understand more clearly where the Christian evangelist is coming from – how he thinks, why he believes as he does, and the logic of it from his perspective – and to improve his understanding of how alternative thought processes and sources of knowledge, evidence and inspiration work.

None of that is likely to lead to an Aha! moment.  None of it is likely to lead an evangelist giving up his belief in God or the Bible, or even his interpretation of the Bible.  But maybe, just maybe, if you can speak a little bit in his language, using data from his approved source, a bit of understanding can be achieved.

And that’s not a bad outcome.

Limitations of this book

This book is entirely devoted to presenting data from the Bible itself as a resource to answer statements made by Christian evangelists.  The Bible is their foundational book; most believe it to be literally true and infallible, or some variation on that.

Secular researchers, and even a lot of Christian theologians, question the literal truth and accuracy of the Bible.  Whole sections of Biblical history (for instance, Exodus) are generally thought not to have ever taken place.  But for the purposes of this book we will ignore all that and simply take the Bible at its word, assuming for argument’s sake that it is true.  Your evangelist will make and strongly cling to that assumption.  Data from any other source is necessarily subordinate to what is in the Bible:  if the Bible says something is true, it is true, and a finding of science, for instance, that seems to conflict with the Bible is likely to be rejected as wrong.  If you are going to communicate with him it cannot be on the level of rejecting what he takes to be his foundational source document.  That’s not likely to be a fruitful conversation.  If you want to try it anyway, you are on your own; you will get no help from this book.

Similarly, this book makes no argument about the existence of God.  The Bible says He exists, there seems to be no counter- argument available from within the Bible, so for our purposes it is simply accepted as a fact.  The question addressed is not, does He exist? but, since the Bible says He exists, what can we learn about Him from the Bible?  If you want a discussion of the existence or non-existence of God, you will have to find it elsewhere.

The most prominent exception to using only the Bible itself as a source will be inclusion of comments from sources more ancient than the Bible, to deal with foundational claims made by evangelicals.  The book will provide background information in some cases, but only to help readers put Biblical statements in context.

For that reason, this book will not attempt to deal with issues, even pressing issues that have to be resolved outside of the confines of what the Bible says.  Darwinian evolution, for instance, requires outside sources of information.  It is simply not something that can be proven by the Bible.  In terms of where the evangelist is coming from, there is no viable, Biblical refutation of the Bible’s creation statement (other than a critical translation error, to be discussed later).  Homosexuality is another such area.  There are several verses in the Bible that appear to condemn it, but no unambiguous statement to the contrary beyond general statements about loving everyone.  If you want to believe in those kinds of things you will have to find support elsewhere:  science, for instance, or secular philosophy.

This book also will not deal with interpretation in any sophisticated way.  There is a vast amount of biblical exegesis (explanations of what the Bible passages mean) that has been created over the last 3,000 years or so.  It is very complex, if done correctly requires a great deal of linguistic, cultural and background knowledge, and does not agree with itself.  There is a large body of scholarly opinion that the literally correct words of the Bible do not mean what they seem to mean on first reading.  Some of that is undoubtedly correct; telling which, out of the welter of conflicting opinions, is a task even specialists have difficulty with.

There is a related field of apologetics, also stretching back into antiquity.  It is similar to exegesis, but with a different intent.  Rather than trying objectively to determine the meaning of a passage, which is what exegesis is about, it explicitly tries to find ways to show that Bible passages which appear to contradict the doctrine or mythology of the Church are, in fact, consistent with it.  Sometimes exegesis and apologetics come to the same answer.  Often they do not.  Sometimes apologetics answers do not agree with the doctrine of one or more of the Christian sects. When these disagreements occur, the apologetics answer always is in favor of the doctrine of the sect the apologist belongs to.

Apologetics is a remarkably creative field, they have been at it for a very long time, and you can be sure that whatever you find in the Bible that seems to contradict what your evangelist is saying, there is some form of refutation, often using tortured logic, to prove it doesn’t mean what it says.  It is impossible in a book like this to deal with exegesis and apologetics even a little bit competently, so they will be ignored entirely.  If your evangelist is at all skilled, he will be familiar with some of the answers from apologetics.  Unless you are prepared to delve deeply into each question, what the analysis of exegesis and apologetics are, you can’t deal with that except to do what this book equips you to do: say, "But that’s not what it says!".

You have some justification in the Bible for not acknowledging the claims of the apologists:

First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.  (2 Peter 1:21-22) 

That is more speaking to the infallibility of the Scriptures themselves, not of exegesis and apologetics, but there is a talking point in there somewhere. 

And sometimes the evangelist you are speaking with will not know how to resolve the difficulties you have pointed out, and may just for a little while open his mind to thinking about the issue.

Comments on the Bible

Is the Bible Authoritative?

When someone claims that the Bible is the literal (or inspired) word of God, they have to deal somehow with some obvious, irrefutable facts about the Bible, and some other conclusions of academic researchers about the Bible that are not what they want to believe.  For instance:

Errors

Many evangelicals will claim that God controlled the hand of the authors of the original books of the Bible (the autographs).  But they will also acknowledge that they were transcribed by hand over the centuries, through many generations of transcriptions, and that errors were made by the scribes.  One estimate is that of the copies and fragments of the Bible that we have from  before the invention of the printing press there are over 400,000 errors in transcription – more than the total number of words in the Bible.

The great majority of these errors are trivial and easily corrected.  But some do have theological significance.  Even if we grant that the autographs were perfect, we cannot know for sure what they actually contained.

Omissions and additions

Between the thousands of manuscripts and fragments of the Bible in existence there are many cases where words are apparently missing, and others where it seems that a later scribe has added things that were not originally there (referred to as an interpolation).  This book cannot go over all cases, but can give a single example that is significant.

Many of the oldest manuscripts of the Bible do not contain Mark 16, verses 9-20, including the oldest complete versions, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus.  This is a unique account of the first appearance of Jesus after the resurrection to a group of women; it is also the only New Testament reference to speaking in tongues (that is so important to the Pentecostals) outside of Acts and epistles written by Paul. 

It can be argued that Mark 16:9-20 was dropped because the Church preferred the version of the resurrection story in the other Gospels (where women did not play such a prominent role).  It can also be argued that this section was added long after Mark was written, to provide support for Paul.  Since Paul himself spoke in tongues, possibly another symptom of epilepsy, his references to it can be seen as self-serving:  in modern terms,