We can’t trust the Bible’s authors

Source: Tima Miroshnichenko

I’ve heard many accusations lodged at the Bible, casting serious doubt over its accuracy and reliability. Some have real merit and deserve close investigation.

Here are the most popular rebuttals I’ve encountered:

• Why were certain books included and others left out?
• How can we trust the Gospel writers when their eyewitness accounts were written long after the events?
• Why do contradictions exist between the genealogy of Jesus captured by Matthew and Luke?
• How can you trust a book with more than 700+ translations (i.e., King James Version, New International Version, New Living Translation, etc.)
• The Bible is authored by a bunch of men with private agendas

Each argument is intricately complex and deserves a separate, in-depth blog post response. In this post, I’d just briefly attempt a response to the last argument: “The Bible is authored by men with private agendas”

Let’s start from the latter part of that statement — the authors were all men.

This is mainly true. Except for a few songs and prayers credited to women, the vast majority of the Bible was authored by men, from Genesis to Revelation (though the authorship of certain books like Hebrews, Nehemiah, Job, Songs of Solomon, Ecclesiastes and a few others are still uncertain).

Not to be taken as any useful defence for the Bible’s authors, but it’s worth considering that gender biases in authorship aren’t exactly peculiar to the Bible. Most books from the ancient era were male-authored. We can credit that to broader socio-cultural and religious norms that gave men preferential treatment for formal education.

Anyways, I digress.

It isn’t far-fetched to worry about yet another misogynistic propaganda piece. History has inundated us with a long record of despotic men using literary tools to push agendas. Some examples are Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China, Benito Mussolini’s The Cardinal’s Mistress, and Saddam Hussein’s Zabiba and the King, to name a few.

It’s not just the author’s gender bias that presents an issue, their cultural heritage presents another worrying bias: they were mostly all Jewish! The only notable exception was Luke (a Gentile), the author of the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts.

That’s two strikes against the Bible if you were keeping track — a gender and cultural bias.

Given this historical context, rushing to the conclusion that the Bible is nothing more than misogynistic Jewish propaganda would only be too easy.

Too, too easy.

If, indeed, the biblical authors were men on a simple mission to uphold men’s superiority and Jewish supremacy, then the Bible would have been a much smaller book. Several recorded events would have been completely stripped out becasue they were at odds with this agenda.

Here are a few:

Mary would not have been the first eye-witness of the resurrected Jesus

• In Jewish tradition, a woman couldn’t stand as a witness in a Jewish court. A pro-Jewish author wouldn’t have entertained the idea of presenting Mary Magdalene as the first eyewitness of the resurrected Jesus. Over his dead Jewish body!

Half of the Old Testament accounts would have been revised to make the Israelites look better than they were

• The Old Testament accounts of the ancient Israelites don’t spare the group much sympathy. It presents them as a very fickle, idolatrous and untrustworthy lot. A community that wasted no time breaking their sacred contract with God at any small opportunity. Jewish writers desperate to preserve the dignity of their kinsmen wouldn’t have allowed many of the stories of the Old Testament to survive into the Bible. Especially not stories of their ancestors bowing down to a mute golden calf!

Jews would never have evangelised the Gentiles

• The Jewish tradition upheld very strict standards of purity. Entering a gentile’s home was defiling. Under those circumstances, it was very unlikely that Jewish men would contemplate mixing with Gentiles. Yet the New Testament text repeatedly shows Jesus’ followers preaching to and even entering the homes of Gentiles. Peter’s interactions with Cornelius and his household were a classic case in Acts 10. If the New Testament’s authors were pushing a Jewish agenda, no such stories would have made it into the Bible. Forget entering homes, the book of Luke and Acts wouldn’t have been preserved in the New Testament because Luke was a Gentile.

Saul of Tarsus (Paul) would never have converted, let alone openly talk about it

• Paul was a devout Jew, a Pharisee and a determined opponent of the new Christian sect. His lifelong dream was to put down those heretics going about claiming a pitifully murdered criminal (Jesus) was God and King of the Jews. This was the very last person we’d expect to do a complete U-turn to become one of the most prolific Christian writers who authored half of the New Testament. He had everything to lose by changing his stance. This sounds more like a guy who denounced his former agendas instead of pushing them.

These events require we reconsider assertions made about the Bible being a misogynistic, pro-Jewish piece of work.

But perhaps what’s most mind-boggling about the Bible isn’t the stories and events the authors included but how in the world the Bible manages to hold a cohesive narrative despite the incredible diversity of its authors.

The Bible was unlike any other book written. Most books are written by 1–5 authors within their lifetime. The Bible was written by 40+ authors over 1,000+ years. Among them were prophets, shepherds, kings, priests, tax collectors, reformed Pharisees, fishermen, etc, living across different continents and periods.

The end product of this generational effort should have been a very chaotic, disorderly puzzle. Instead, the collection of these diverse writings coalesces around a singular narrative, pointing to the pinnacle of God’s creation plan: the redemption of fallen mankind through Jesus’ death on the cross.

Let that sink in.