I would like to quote for you guys an extract out of the book by Timothy Keller called “Reason for Belief” as it is very good on this topic I believe.
You Can’t Take the Bible Literally
“I see much of the bible’s teaching as historically inaccurate,” said Charles, an investment banker. “We can’t be sure the Bible’s account of events is what really happened.”
When I was in college in the late 1960s I took some courses on the Bible as literature and was confronted with the prevailing wisdom of the time. My professors taught that the New Testament gospels originated as the oral traditions of various Church communities around the Mediterranean. These stories about Jesus were shaped by those communities to address the questions and needs peculiar to each Church. Leaders made certain that the Jesus in these stories supported the policies and beliefs of their communities. The oral traditions were then passed down over the years, evolving through the addition of various legendary materials. Finally, long after the actual events, the Gospels assumed written form. By then it was almost impossible to know what degree, if any, they represented the actual historical events.
Who then was the original Jesus? The scholars I read proposed that the real, “historical Jesus” was a charismatic teacher of justice and wisdom who provoked opposition and was executed. After his death, they said, different parties and viewpoints emerged among his followers about who he was. Some claimed he was divine and risen from the dead, others that he was just a human teacher who lived on spiritually in the hearts of his disciples. After a power struggle, the “divine Jesus” party won and created texts that promoted its views. They allegedly suppressed and destroyed all the alternative texts showing us a different sort of Jesus. Recently, some of these suppressed, alternative views of Jesus have come to light – Like the “Gnostic” gospels of Thomas and Judas. This shows, it is said, that early Christianity was very diverse in its doctrinal beliefs.
If this view of the New Testament’s origins and development is true, it would radically change our understanding of the content and meaning of Christianity itself. It would mean that no one could really know what Jesus said and did, and that the Bible could not be the authoritative norm over our life and beliefs. It would mean that most of the classic Christian teachings – Jesus’ deity, atonement, and resurrection – are mistaken and based on legends.
As a student I was initially shaken by this. How could all of these prominent scholars be wrong? Then, however, as I did my own firsthand research, I was surprised at how little evidence there actually was for these historical reconstructions. To my encouragement the evidence for this older, sceptical view of the Bible has been crumbling steadily for the past thirty years, even as it has been promoted by the popular media through books and movies such as The Da Vinci Code.
Anne Rice was one person who was startled to discover how weak the case for a merely human “historical Jesus” really is. Rice became famous as the author of Interview with the Vampire and other works. Raised a Catholic, she lost her faith at a secular college, married an atheist, and became wealthy writing novels about Lestat, who is both a vampire and rock star. It shocked the literary and media world when Rice announced that she had returned to Christianity.
Why did she do it? In the afterword to her new novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt she explained that she had begun doing extensive research about the historical Jesus by reading the work of Jesus scholars at the most respected academic institutions. Their main thesis was that the Biblical documents we have aren’t historically reliable. She was amazed at how weak their arguments were.
Some books were no more than assumptions piled on assumptions … Conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all … The whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified … that whole picture which had floated around the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years – that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read.
The Christian faith requires belief in the Bible. This is a big stumbling block for many. I meet many New Yorkers for the first time after they have been invited to one of Redeemer’s services.
The centrepiece of each service is a sermon based on a text of the Bible. The average visitor is surprised or even shocked to find us listening to the Bible so carefully. Most would say that they know there are many great stories and sayings in the Bible, but today “you can’t take it literally.” What they mean is that the bible is not entirely trustworthy because some parts – maybe many or most parts – are scientifically impossible, historically unreliable and culturally regressive.
