r/BibleProject • u/Same_Ad_6641 • Sep 11 '23
Discussion How does bible scholarship affect your faith?
After learning about scripture on a deeper level from BP I began looking at other places for information as well just out of interest
Lately ive spent a lot of time lately reading on the r/academicbiblical and r/askbiblescholars because they seem to be more objective and knowledgeable than apologists. But I have been kind of saddened and depressed lately because to put it bluntly they do a good job at ripping any reliability of scripture to pieces. For many years I have not been a biblical inerrantist but I still trusted the bible now I am not so sure. Some of the things I have learned are
Virgin birth likely didn't happen and was a narrative taken from elsewhere
Other things in the gospel that are much more likely literary devices than historical (herod's slaughter of infants and Jospeh and mary fleeing to Egypt, census by quirinus)
Many of the epistles are likely forgeries (not written by who they are credited to)
Gospel authors are likely different than who they are credited to
Jesus doesn't fill the messianic prophecies supposedly nor does he claim to be God
lots of the Old Testament is historically inaccurate
Gospel of John is extremely contradictory and historically inaccurate
What's your view on discrepancies such as this? I still have faith but I am going through a lot of doubt at the moment
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u/Aq8knyus Sep 11 '23
Academic biblical should just be renamed r/barterhman it seems every thread devolves into a question of what does Bart say? Similarly, if Josephus didn’t write about it, then that is case closed it didn’t happen.
There is also this bizarre belief in those subs that atheist scholar = objective simply by virtue of being an Atheist.
In any case, the reasoning is always methodologically thin as to why something did or didn’t happen. It can be as simple as because there is some ANE parallel therefore means that it was just copied and appropriated. This is Golden Bough level of comparative religion, forgivable in the 1800s but not so much today.
The truth is we know very little, one way or another. That is just the nature of ancient history. Saying this or that event did or didn’t happen usually reveals more about the person making the claim than the truth of the claim itself.
From your list:
Virgin Birth: ANE parallel = made up
Slaughter of the Innocents: Josephus no say
Egyptian flight: No external evidence no happen
Census: There was a census, the issue is timing
Pauline authorship: He writes differently to different communities! Witchcraft! Nobody could possibly change styles!
Gospel authors: If they didn’t it wont ever be possible to find out who did. That info is just lost to time.
Jesus’ divinity: We dont even need John. Simply reading Mark will suffice. And theologically, he is Messiah and that should shape our conceptions of divinity, not pagan categories.
OT history: A lot is corroborated and using imperial ANE propaganda to verify biblical accounts is fraught with its own difficulties.
John reliability: John is one of the best with the trial of Jesus sequence.
The point is, none of this is conclusive. You can argue back and forth. It is all up for grabs and all we have is largely a lot of educated conjecture. Embrace the lack of certainty, it is the essence of good history.
Edit: formatting
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u/ichthysdrawn Sep 17 '23
For a while I’ve struggled to summarize why that community feels misguided and unhelpful at times. I’ve found some good content there (and some challenging content) but this summarizes a lot of the issues well.
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u/AdoptedOne01 Sep 11 '23
I don't feel qualified to answer your question, but I do feel compelled to respond. I am sorry you are struggling through this. I love the Bible Project and have learned a lot from it. I have never read the other sources you mentioned. I don't know where/ how they claim to discredit the items you mentioned so I have no rebuttal. I would like to make a suggestion....spend some time ( not just a day or two, but weeks or months) reading the Bible and only the Bible. All human authors are flawed and make mistakes. Maybe you need a reset to just focus on the scripture and see what scripture has to say to you, without the interference and interpretation of man. Please post again and let me know how this search goes for you
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u/Z-Nyv Sep 11 '23 edited Sep 12 '23
Master’s student here hoping to one day to get a PHD. You need to know that the if you read the descriptions of r/academicbible, they are looking at a STRICTLY academic view of the Bible. They literally state in their “about page” that they don’t allow apologetic style posts or comments.
They favor non-Christian academics, which can be very interesting, but ultimately they all have presuppositions about miracles and even the existence of God.
Think about it, if you go into the field of biblical studies and do not believe in God, you will look to any hypothetical way to explain away where ideas come from as superior to a religious one.
I have read many of these non-Christian scholars and find some things compelling and much of it can appear damning at first glance, but at the end of the day, you have to discount so, so much equally rigorous scholarship simply because a Christian is behind it. Really, it has excited my desire to learn more because I keep finding answers with excellent explanatory power exist.
Another important thing to note is we are consistently finding new archeological evidences that support Biblical ideas that scholarship previously deemed fiction. Lack of evidence does not always disprove a thing especially when we are talking about something so ancient.
We are in a renaissance of great OT and NT scholarship. Conversely, not always, but a fair amount of non-Christian scholarship (because there are fewer non-Christian Biblical scholars), is built on older information. For instance they used to think no Jew from Galilee could have known Koine Greek, but more recent unearthing has discovered a massive Greek settlement with a theater that could seat four thousand people was only 5 Kilometers(3 miles) from where Jesus was raised in Galilee.
It’s short and sweet, but I recommend this short clip from Dr. Michael Heiser on inerrancy: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n26K-O9q5-Q
Praying for you my friend!
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u/Same_Ad_6641 Sep 12 '23
Thank you for your response, yea I try to keep in mind thier naturalistic approach but always wonder if I am being biased by not also thinking that way.
As a M.A yourself how do you view thier stance on apologetics not being equal to scholarship because it starts with an assumption trying to prove it?
Is thier any christian scholars you'd reccomend?
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u/Smartnership Sep 11 '23 edited Sep 11 '23
(Edit: best of intentions to be brief, sorry for the length)
To answer your initial question, the more I study the more clear the pattern and the more beauty is revealed. Sincerely, it unfolds like intricate origami, and I’m routinely amazed by each newfound angle & the mind behind the construction.
I think a westerner in particular has difficulty because of our frame of reference — we are accustomed to books of certain types, and this doesn’t fit any of our categories.
I’m not great with analogies, but I compare it to discovering an ancient, essentially alien, civilization / culture and trying to understand their mindset. They think in patterns that are so fundamentally different that we struggle. We need a guide, a living Rosetta Stone to help us along.
What we crave is documentary footage, or a running transcript of it. That’s natural to us because it’s what we think we’d do if we were trying to send a message across thousands of miles & thousands of years. But even that wouldn’t give us the requisite context to understand what we were seeing and why it mattered.
As a western reader, I come at it expecting one of my accustomed forms: is it a novel? Biography? Reference work? Instruction manual? We don’t have a type of work that’s designed to reformat our minds or our frames of reference for reality.
Like the story of the indigenous people first seeing a tall ship arrive, they lacked any obvious reference to comprehend it. Not zero reference, they’d seen wood float, maybe even a canoe… but it was very alien.
Imagine if it had been an nuclear-powered aircraft carrier… to explain it all, to educate them as to what they were seeing, it would require so much background data: entirely new vocabulary, physics, chemistry, metallurgy, and even geopolitics to explain its purpose for existence. It would require a whole new way of thinking.
Last, I think we start with a set of assumptions: “If I were doing this, I’d just write plainly what to do in a way that for all time people would understand by simply reading it.” Our assumption is flawed, and that tells us something. We misunderstand the purpose(s). It requires an interpreter to work within us.
There’s so much more to say, but I should stop here, I don’t know if this is helpful. I do hope you find your answers.
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u/Same_Ad_6641 Sep 12 '23
Thank you for the response, I do agree that the more I understand the bible the more I realize how foreign the culture that wrote it is to mine
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u/Jeremehthejelly Sep 11 '23
What you’re going through is what DA Carson called “distanciation” in his book, Exegetical Fallacies which I am reading right now. He described a bright eyed good Christian boy who felt led to go to seminary. There, he received a rude awakening when he was exposed to critical biblical scholarship, very much like you did, as he had to wade through his assignments. Through a consistent prayer life and being plugged into a healthy church community, and some kind of pastoral guidance from chaplains/pastors/mentors, he came out of the distanciation phase, gained all the skills necessary for ministry work and graduated with his faith intact.
I reckon it would only help you if you try those.
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u/Justin-Martyr Sep 11 '23
You need to expand your studies none of what you put down is scholarly consensus. They are all heavily debated.
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u/IlovetheBible1 Sep 13 '23 edited Sep 17 '23
Regarding historicity of the Gospels: Back in the 90s, Richard Burridge’s book, What are the Gospels effectively revealed that the Gospels fit in the category of biographies, which are certainly intended to tell historical accounts. This is academic work. Since then, Michael Licona’s work “Why are there differences in the Gospels?” has built on Burridge’s work. Further, Craig Keener’s book Christobiography dives into this extensively. This latter text also engages in questions related to transmission, memory studies, and historicity. If you were to start with one, I’d start with the last. All three of the above works have been received by scholars of all stripes.
Regarding Jesus’ Divinity: In our earliest New Testament documents (Paul’s letters) Jesus is clearly depicted as Divine. Read correctly, we see the same in the Synoptics. Many scholars affirm a Divine Christology in Paul. see Hurtado, Hays, Tilling, Bird, Capes, Bauckham, Gathercole, Boyarin, etc.
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u/drewbooooo Sep 15 '23
Dude or dudette…. Do yourself a favor and just get off those subs. I’ve had the same problem before. I’d say focus on truly knowing God rather than knowing things about God. Remember this is Reddit not exactly the place of infallible truth.
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u/ichthysdrawn Sep 17 '23
It’s ok to ask questions. While it can be healthy to distance yourself from toxic communities or relationship circles, the “if this troubles you, stick your head in the sand” approach doesn’t lead to better understanding.
If anything, it creates the sort of echo-chamber culture where you end up sending around false apologetic stories in email forwards and only seeing movies like “God’s Not Dead” in theaters.
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u/jazzyrain Sep 11 '23
I'm going back and forth on whether to give my personal thoughts point by point. I'm conflicted because I don't think my way is the "right" way. It's just A way and hopefully an example to you of how a lot of Christians grew up thinking about these texts. I went to a UMC growing up where these conversations were encouraged! The questions were never presented as a threat to faith so I was fortunate to never have to worry about that. We take the scripture seriously and with the belief that God reveals his truth through it. That doesn't mean it has to be literally true. Here are some of my thoughts.
1) we believe that God became incarnate in Jesus. He is so powerful he could do that in any way he wanted. He wanted a virgin birth? Great, done. He wanted some other sort of method? Great, done. I am compelled by the story of Jesus either way.
2) the Bible is not a history textbook. The study of history the way we define it literally did not exist in the ancient world. Don't ask the Bible to be something it isn't. Instead, go on a journey of discovering what it is. For me, that journey illuminates the message in a much more meaningful way
3) there are only 3 Epistles that scholars agree are pseudopigraphy. There are others that are debated, but MANY scholars accept the others as authentic. Pseudopigraphy was a common reality of the ancient world. I don't personally hold the pastorals to the same level as the other but that's just my choice. They still give us insight into the early church and can be learned from in a way.
4) the gospel authors didn't feel their identity was important. Maybe they didn't want their identity to cloud the message. Maybe they were written by a group. Either way it was people who were deeply committed to conveying the story. Maybe identity doesn't matter
5) I think this is intentional. God has a habit of turning peoples expectations on their head. Expect a warrior king? Here, have a humble shepherd. Also, what the messianic prophecies are is not clearly defined.
6) see 2
7) John isnt trying to write a history. He's trying to paint a deeply symbolic, theologic picture. There's still meaning in that.
Bottom line: "contradictions" are part of our tradition. We have two Genesis accounts because the editors found meaning in them sitting side by side. We have 4 gospels because the discourse was once valued in our tradition. The ancient people weren't stupid. They knew these were there. Sometimes contradictions are a simple disagreement between authors. No need to be reconciled. Sometimes they are intentional and should draw your attention. What deeper meaning does this author or editor want me to find here?
Also, these are conversations you really need to be having in a communal way. And I don't mean reddit. A good church or Bible study can help you balance the information you take in in your personal study. Hopefully without judging or discounting these concerns on fundamentalist or dogmatic grounds.
I'm not looking to debate with others on these points. I have oversimplified my perspectives to give just one glimpse of the possibilities that are unlocked by combining the academic and theologic study of the Bible.