Aug. 20, 2006, The Republic newspaper guest columnist contribution "Read Your Bible--Carefully"
by the Rev. Dennis McCarty

If I were sentenced to be stranded on a desert island and had to choose just one book to last me for the rest of my life, it would be the Bible. And not just because I’m a minister.

The Bible is the most influential book in human history. It has everything: religion, history, philosophy, and poetry. Old as it is, it’s never been beat as a statement on what it means to be human.

All the same, I’m put off when people hold up the Bible as a religious talisman unto itself. It’s meant to be studied, not worshipped. The Bible itself warns us against bowing down before graven images. That doesn’t just mean statues and pictures, it means words, as well. Including the Bible.

I’ve heard people say, "You shouldn’t interpret the Bible, you have to take it just as it’s written." Or as the bumper sticker says, "God wrote it, I believe it, that settles it."

Sorry, but that doesn’t settle it. To take every word in the Bible as simple, perfect truth, you have to ignore a great deal of what’s in it.

Here’s just one easy example: at the end of the sixth chapter of Genesis, God orders Noah to take into the ark two of every kind of creature, male and female.

And, it says, that’s what Noah does. Because that was what God wanted.

But chapter seven begins with God ordering Noah to take into the ark, seven(!) of each kind of ritually clean animal--oxen, sheep, and the like--as well as seven of each kind of bird. But of ritually unclean animals, such as pigs, he's only to take one male and one female. So--which is it, two or seven?

It is possible to cough up an explanation on how those two passages don’t really disagree with one another. Some ministers I like and respect, have done so. But at the very least, you have to do some pretty serious interpretation. You can’t just buy those passages "as written."

There are plenty more examples, and not just from the Old Testament. For example, both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew, list the male ancestors of Jesus. But the two genealogies don’t match. Luke’s is more complete, for one thing. But there are different people in them, as well.

Both Luke and Matthew agree that Jesus is the Son of God, so genealogies shouldn’t matter anyway. The more important fact is, Matthew and Luke told slightly different stories.

Luke claims that because of the Roman census, Jesus’ parents traveled to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born.

Matthew never mentions any census. What’s more, there’s no historical record of any such census being taken, certainly not in the year Luke says it was.

On the other hand, Matthew claims that when Jesus was born, his parents fled to Egypt because they were afraid King Herod would kill him. Luke says, no, they took Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem so that he could be presented and circumcised and Mary could be ritually cleaned, according to Jewish Law.

According to the Gospel of John, Jesus chased the moneylenders from the Temple at the beginning of his ministry. According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that happened in the final days of his ministry, right before he was arrested and crucified.

According to Matthew, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, watched an angel roll the stone away from Jesus’ tomb and there was a "great earthquake."

According to Luke, they were accompanied by Joanna, the wife of King Herod’s steward; and the stone was already rolled away by the time they got there.

We could go on and on. But the point is, the Bible is full of disagreements and inconsistencies which can’t easily be explained away. There’s more going on that just, "God wrote it, I believe it, that settles it."

It only "settles it" if you ignore a lot of what you read. I’ve heard some smart ministers say that’s actually pretty easy to do. But it’s not honest.

Jesus’ family history, the details of where his parents went right after he was born, or the literal truth of Noah’s ark, don’t matter much. They only matter if you’re trying to turn the Bible into an object of worship itself--which it was never meant to be.

The Bible isn’t the word "of" God as much as it’s the word of generations of devout people "about" God. What matters, is what it can teach us about our strengths, weaknesses, and how we should live together. Let’s not turn it into a graven image.

The Reverend Dennis McCarty is a Unitarian Universalist minister in Columbus. His opinions are his own, and members of his church may or may not agree with them. He can be reached by e-mail at columnists@therepublic.com