Whether your knowledge of the New Testament is passing or deep, the overarching narrative is most likely familiar: Born to the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, son of God and man, is sent to save humanity through his crucifixion, death and resurrection.
Such is the foundation of all Christianity. Yet suddenly, a slew of true believers are arguing for a reconsideration of the Gospels — and the Old Testament — based on the predicate forever cited by atheists: The Bible doesn’t make any sense.
“Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years,” by Philip Jenkins, is just out in paperback, as is Kristin Swenson’s “Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time,” and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s award-winning “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.”
In January, Pastor Jennifer Wright Knust published “Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions on Sex and Desire,” in which she attempts to explain why the Bible advocates both polygamy and celibacy, and both condones and condemns adultery and homosexuality. Last month, religion professor Timothy Beal published “The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book.” His counterintuitive thesis: The Bible is not a book of answers, but a book of questions. God wants it to be confusing, he says, on purpose.
“It’s not that the hundreds of people writing and editing the Bible were stupid and just ignored the contradictions,” Beal says. “If you think religion is about answers, it’s likely that when you face this material, you’ll reject it. So much of life is really about ambiguity — if you think it’s about the question, as I do, then it’s a richer place to explore.”
In many of these new books, the Bible has been re-framed in just this way, as a deliberately perplexing text meant to provoke self-examination. To many atheists — the fastest-growing minority in America and, according a recent Pew poll, the most Biblically literate segment of the population — this argument merely moves the goalposts, attempting to redefine an all-knowing, judgmental deity (“a celestial North Korea,” to quote Christopher Hitchens) into either a whimsical Socratic teacher or a schizophrenic.
“How do [believers] determine which passages are mistakes?” says Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanists Association. “And if they’re using a filter, does that filter look a lot like humanism?”
This recent spate of books, Speckhardt thinks, is mainly “an effort to hold on to a flock that’s leaving rather quickly.” He’s not wrong: The largest religious denomination in the United States is the Roman Catholic Church. The second largest group by religious identity? Former members of the Roman Catholic Church.
“I think the more we learn about the history of the Bible,” Beal says, “the more we learn about how human-made it is.”
What we know as the New Testament — the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the Acts of the Apostles (the second volume of Mark), the Epistles, and the Book of Revelation — was actually born of thousands of texts and alternate gospels circulated among the early Christians. Of the gospels, Mark’s is believed to have been written closest to Christ’s death, circa 70 AD.
Sometime around 180 AD, Bishop Irenaeus of Gaul, in his work “Against Heresies,” asserted that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the only true gospels, and declared that salvation through God could only be found through the bishops. He also suggests the absolute authority of the pope.
In 382 AD, Pope Damasus commissioned St. Jerome to condense and clarify the various translations of the New Testament into one cohesive manuscript, known as the Vulgate. This version, the Latin Vulgate, was first reprinted by Gutenberg in 1450. (The King James version of the Bible, commissioned by the King of England in the 1500s as a reaction to the anti-monarchical notes in the Geneva Bible, has since been the most dominant translation in the world.)
The orthodoxy of this New Testament was challenged with the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels, discarded Christian texts found in a cave in Upper Egypt in 1945. These writings, 52 in all, date from between 150-300 AD and offer profoundly differing accounts of the life and death of Jesus Christ.
There are references, for example, to Jesus’ twin brother, though scholars also interpret that metaphorically — that a follower of Jesus is his spiritual twin. The Gospel of Philip ridicules the idea of a virgin birth and of Christ’s bodily resurrection from the dead and anyone who would believe either. The Apocalypse of Paul also claims that Christ’s rise from the dead was spiritual, not physical. The Gospel of Mary suggests a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene (which served as the basis for “The Da Vinci Code,” Dan Brown’s loopy 2003 bestseller). Even a canonical text such as Mark’s had many different versions.
“What we used to know about the beginning of the Christian movement is what the orthodox tradition preserved — and that’s a small amount, maybe 2 or 10 percent,” says Elaine Pagels, author of 1979’s groundbreaking “The Gnostic Gospels.” Pagels, a professor at Harvard’s Divinity School and author of many other books on the Bible, helped translate the texts as a graduate student, and she takes issue with Beal referring to the Bible as an “accidental” book.
“It’s very deliberate in the way it’s put together,” she says. “People fought battles over this. You can say it’s arbitrary, but it’s not accidental.”
To her point, the Gnostic texts were suppressed in the struggle for supremacy over Christ’s message. Gnosticism, as with Hinduism and Buddhism, believed that the way to know God was through the self, and that no intermediaries were required. This message undermined those who sought to centralize power and who, in order to do so, cast themselves as Christ’s designated emissaries on earth.
“The Gnostic Gospels — and the Dead Sea Scrolls and other discoveries — are very provocative,” says Beal. The information within, he contends, is “complicated and hard to understand,” and it’s for this reason that they’re not taught in most seminaries.
Not because such information might change an initiate’s mind?
“I’m not so sure that would be so damaging,” he says. Beal recalls an anecdote from his book, in which a young student withdrew from his class because, she said, she couldn’t handle learning about textual contradictions that might shake her faith or cause her to abandon it. Maybe someday, she said, but not now.
“Maybe that story is a parable for our culture,” he says. “Maybe Christianity knows that this [reckoning] is on the horizon, and even though we’re not quite ready for it, we know it’s going to come.”
The Bible, it’s true, remains the world’s best-selling book. The New International Version of the Bible has just undergone its first revision since 1984. (It’s also notably made a selling point of not employing “gender-neutral” language following a backlash from conservative Christians.) The King James version has a 400th anniversary release, with a limited edition replica retailing for $79.95.
Publishers also market what they so humbly refer to as “value-added” versions of the Bible — ones bound in weathered leather and wrapped with duct-tape, designed to look worn out from so much studying and praying — the would-be penitent’s equivalent of distressed denim jeans.
Then there are the condensed, distilled, target-marketed versions: “The Golfer’s Bible,” featuring “32 inspirational messages teed up to reach the golfer’s heart,” and “The Bride’s Bible,” another 32 pages interspersing Biblical passages with advice on wedding planning. It’s all very American and narcissistic — the idea the original Word of God, as it is, just isn’t enough for you.
“That’s probably why sales in North America are so big,” agrees Beal. “The niche marketing of the personalized, individualized Bible.”
Yet high sales don’t translate to actual reading. Aside from that recent Pew poll in which atheists outstripped believers in Biblical knowledge, in a poll conducted by the American Bible Society, a majority of people across the country attributed a quote from the Bible to Bono and Oprah, among others.
“In our consumer culture, what we buy is who we are,” says Beal. “Buying Bibles may be more important than reading Bibles.”
This new spate of books, however, will most likely be read by those curious enough to buy them. They follow a long line of pop-cultural texts challenging the Bible’s authority, from the fascination with Jesus as a historical figure in the 1980s to the shift towards New Age thinking and a personally defined spirituality (led, in large part, by Oprah Winfrey), to the pop-cultural celebrity of such atheists as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
“I think we’re having a cultural reckoning with the Bible,” says Marcia Z. Nelson, religion review editor at Publishers Weekly. “I think we’re still reeling from 2001 — there have been a lot of ebbs and flows in belief and disbelief.”
Pagels sees other contributing factors: The pedophilia crisis in the Catholic Church; the ever-growing awareness of religions around the world; what we’ve learned from relatively recent discoveries in neurology. “I think many people are asking questions about authority,” she says. “They’re saying, ‘Wait a minute — who are you to say what [the Bible] means?’ ” Herself a churchgoer, Pagels admits to grappling with logic and faith. When asked why a divinely inspired book would be so wildly contradictory, she takes a moment. “That question really is the question,” she says. “It’s a big question, a very tough one. It’s one I think about.”
Her revolutionary excavation of the history and meaning of the New Testament, meanwhile, continues. Pagels’ next book, to be published in January 2012, is about the Book of Revelations. And guess what? It turns out there are between 20 and 30 other versions, and most of them have happy endings.
“Many speak of God embracing humanity as a whole,” she says — no hellfires, no damnation, no end time. “But to say, ‘Either you’re with us and saved or you’re damned’ — it’s a good way to make sure people stay in your group.”