Our culture is awash with Biblical quotations uttered by Biblical personalities. You can quote God, or Moses, or Jesus, or Noah, or any of the dozens of others from the various chapters and verses in the Bible. The question is how much faith can you muster and attribute to the bona-fide accuracy of those you quote? If you’re really honest with yourself, the answer is bugger-all!
Odds are, if you go to church on Sunday, or tune in to a televangelist, or even hold a conversation with colleague, friend or neighbour on the topic of religion, you will hear whoever is speaking quote God and/or Jesus and/or some other Biblical figure about this, that or the next thing. The one and only source for these quotations is of course the Bible. But who was actually there at the appropriate time and place to act as scribe, secretary or minutes taker? The answer is often nobody!
Let’s take one set of particulars. In the first couple of chapters of Genesis, you get conversations between God and Adam, between Adam and Eve, between Eve and the Serpent, between God and the Serpent; between God and Eve; between God and Cain. Who wrote all those conversations down? Did pen and paper even exist in the Garden of Eden and surrounding territory?
Even more puzzling, in the very first chapter of Genesis, God said “let there be light”; “let there be a firmament”; “let the waters under heaven be gather together”; “let the earth bring forth grass”; “let there be lights in the firmament”; “let the waters bring forth”; “let the earth bring forth” and “let us make man in our image”. Who, what mortal might I ask, was there with pen and paper in hand writing all of this down? This was an era way before there was any Pulitzer Prize winning human journalists around looking for a scoop!
Assuming there was no journalist on the spot taking down God’s immortal words “let there be light” for example, then who was God speaking to? Was God talking to himself here? Maybe not because of that “us” reference in “let us make man in our image”, whoever “us” refers to. Maybe “us” refers to the Titan god Prometheus, since that Greek deity is credited with creating humans from clay. That’s only one of many possibilities since one could name hundreds of deities from cultures around the world credited with creating mankind.
Now I don’t believe Noah is accredited with writing Biblical chapter and verses, yet the Bible quotes God talking to Noah, as in “God said unto Noah”. Who wrote that conversation down? Abraham likewise isn’t credited with Biblical penmanship, yet we have “God said unto Abraham”. Then there’s “God said unto Jacob” and “God said unto Moses” (also “Moses said unto God”) and “God said unto Balaam” and “God said to Solomon” and “God said to Jonah” (and vice versa), and so it goes. How remarkable that each and every time “God said” that a scribe just happened to be Johnny-on-the-spot to write God’s sayings down for posterity, not to mention the replies of us mere mortals that He was addressing!
Anytime anyone says anything that’s quoted on down the track, in the days before Dictaphone machines and tape recorders, etc. there had to of been someone there taking down the words verbatim for posterity. If they weren’t written down until well after the fact – well you know how reliable human memory is! What if they got it slightly wrong? What if they got it mainly wrong? What in fact if they made it all up?
Then the Bible (New Testament) says “Jesus said” a total of 65 times. No doubt Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all took secretarial, shorthand, stenography courses in order to accurately take minutes and record the wit and wisdom of Jesus. Except of course there were times when Jesus wasn’t in the presence of any scribes, like when Jesus and Satan had a bit of a private chinwag in the wilderness, yet Jesus is still quoted as if he was carrying around a portable tape recorder to record for posterity the exchange.
Jesus reminds me that there’s another slight problem with Biblical quotations. The Bible sometimes records conversations of a rather highly private and delicate nature where there was no one else was present to take down notes. In fact some of those conversations happened in dreams and thus couldn’t have been transcribed there and then by any scribe. Let’s take the delicate nature of Mary and Joseph’s relationship which was thrown into turmoil by Mary becoming in a family way without input from Joseph.
If one consults Luke, chapter 1, verses 26 through roughly 35, there is a private conversation between the angel Gabriel and Mary in which the later is informed by the former that she will become pregnant without benefit of any intimate relationship of a sexual kind.
Just to make sure that Mary’s husband-to-be doesn’t get all hot and bothered by this, we note the following quotation.
Matthew 1:20: But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.
Now clearly all of this is of a highly personal nature and interviews on the subject are rather unlikely to have been granted. Not by Gabriel or Joseph’s angel of the Lord, and probably not by Joseph or Mary. Would you blab to the press about this if you were in their shoes (or sandals)? So how come all of this highly personal and intimate stuff gets into a public document for all to see and quote?
Here are two more examples within the nature of ‘God said’ via a dream. So who told tales out of school, God or the dreamer? And who did the interviewing and the recording?
Genesis 20:3: But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him, Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman which thou hast taken; for she is a man's wife.
1 Kings 3:5: In Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night: and God said, Ask what I shall give thee.
Finally, the Biblical Book of Revelation has dozens of quotations of various entities spouting off about this, that and the ‘End of Days’ in general. The issue I have with that is that the events in Revelation haven’t yet happened. How can you quote a saying related to a future event, an event and saying that hasn’t yet transpired? Here’s one famous example:
Revelation 1:8: I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.
That quotation doesn’t appear previously – it’s an original to Revelation.
And here’s one more for the road to illustrate the point.
Revelation 8: 13: And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!
Now both God and Jesus are quoted extensively in the Old and New Testaments respectively. Seeing as how nobody had access to tape recorders or other sound recording devices back then, probably not even pen and paper, how can exact quotations from these Biblical deities be taken at face value? Perhaps the authors who penned the Biblical verses just made it up as they went along! It wouldn't be the first time that someone has put words in someone else's mouth! Sometimes making things up results in legal action; perhaps God and Jesus should sue for libel, slander or being quoted out of context.
IMHO the quotable God and quotable Jesus is pure myth. The Old and New Testaments weren't written by God and Jesus respectively. The Old and New Testaments weren’t even written down in real time. In fact the texts of the Bible were written down many decades to centuries after the fact. For example, in the case of the New Testament, the Gospels weren't penned until four to ten decades after Jesus left this mortal plane.
No comments:
Post a Comment