BIBLICAL MYTH AND PRIESTLY POWER

Jerry Harkins

The Bible is an anthology of ancient writings believed to have been “inspired” by God. It consists of 66 “books” produced over a period of about a thousand years and divided into two “Testaments,” the “Old” which antedates the birth of Jesus Christ and the “New” which follows it.  It is, without doubt, the most important book ever produced. However else its contents may be described—history, prophecy, wisdom, etc.—the 66 books were selected or “canonized” first and foremost to be absolutely authoritative.[i] Many modern readers accept them as “inerrant,” a term defined by the 1978 International Congress on Biblical Inerrancy as follows:

 Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives.

Most denominations do not go quite so far.  The official Catholic position has varied slightly over the centuries.  The 1994 Catechism states:

"The inspired books teach the truth. Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confined to the Sacred Scriptures."

Some claim to see a bit of wiggle room in phrasing that seems to limit inerrancy to matters “affirmed” by the inspired authors whatever that means.  In any event, the church now believes that Galileo was right and that even Darwin might have been right.  Galileo’s Inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine, realized that it might turn out that the earth revolves around the sun contrary to what is implied in the Bible.  If that were so, he wrote, “…one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false.”  In other words, scripture can and must be interpreted in ways that may differ from its literal meaning.  Another step back from inerrancy is a common mainstream Protestant position holding that only those truths which are important to our salvation are inerrant.  Occasionally, Jesus gives an explicit indication.  “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” (John 3:3).  By “born again” he was referring to baptism by “water and the spirit” (John 3:5) which is not at all the same thing modern fundamentalists mean by the same phrase.  So, again, it’s a question of interpretation and the power to interpret.

The Bible, of course, is full of metaphors, explicit and implicit, obvious and opaque. “Original sin,” a term that does not actually appear in the Bible, is a metaphor meant to remind us that, though we are made in the image and likeness of God, we are yet incomplete and imperfect, works in progress until we re-join the Creator in heaven.  The virgin birth is a metaphor.  The divinity of Jesus, however ambiguously claimed in the gospels, is another metaphor.   It alludes to the ineffable sense of the transcendent that all of us are born with.  The most difficult biblical metaphors, technically similes, are the 31 parables of Jesus.  They are not easy to interpret.  He says, “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.” (Matthew 13:35).  Thus, we can expect his stories to teach the most esoteric parts of the new philosophy.  They were never meant to be crystal clear.  We are told, “When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, ‘The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.  But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving,  and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’”[ii]

This bewildering sentiment is an echo of a conversation between God and Isaiah in the eighth century BCE (Is. 6:8-10):  “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”  And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’  He said, ‘Go and tell this people [of Judah]:  Be ever hearing, but never understanding;
 be ever seeing, but never perceiving.  Make the heart of this people calloused;
  make their ears dull
and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.’”  From the time the church emerged from the catacombs, this has been its official philosophy.  The idea has been to reserve understanding to the priests who must be obeyed in all things.

At first, the tactics were relatively benign:  maintain the text only in Latin to keep the ambiguities, contradictions and outright errors out of the reach of the simple laity.  That became less successful as literacy spread so the church adopted the position that only the anointed can truly understand and interpret the Bible.[iii]  When the plain language contradicts something the church wants people to believe, the hierarchs invent a convenient interpretation.  A good example is John Paul II’s sophomoric attempt to explain the inferiority of women implied in Genesis 3:16.  Because of her sin, God says to Eve “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
 with painful labor you will give birth to children.
 Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”  The Pope agrees this is something modern women might resent but warns them not to let resentment threaten their “essential richness.”  He does not want a mob of crazed feminists picketing St. Peter’s so he tells them how wonderful they really are and what they stand to lose.  Yours, he says, “…is an enormous richness. In the biblical description, the words of the first man at the sight of the woman who had been created are words of admiration and enchantment, words which fill the whole history of man on earth.”  There is no easy way to say this:  the Pope is lying.  Blatantly.   The Bible says or implies no such thing.[iv]  He is making one of his “definitive” moral statements and feels the need for biblical support so he makes it up.  Whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth! 

One of the principal functions of myth is to establish a moral foundation on which a community can flourish.  At the same time, one of the dangers is that the myth becomes obsolete and counterproductive.  An example is divorce which is interesting because the Bible addresses it directly and reasonably clearly.  The Old Testament allows divorce but Jesus said, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.  So they are no longer two, but one flesh.  Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” [v]

These sentences are a perfect example of two phenomena that recur often in biblical criticism.  First, it is clear that Jesus and those who claimed to be quoting him would have profited from a careful copy editor who might have cleaned up the logic.  Everything he says about divorce hinges on the assertion, derived from Genesis 2:24, that in a marriage the two become “one flesh.”   That is the reason they cannot be separated.  That is why Moses was wrong to allow divorce.  And that, ultimately is why remarriage following divorce is adulterous.  Indeed, that is why men who are seriously interested in going to heaven are better off not marrying in the first place.  But the that is also perfectly nonsensical.  The man and the woman do not become one flesh. God does not wave a magic wand.  They may unite as a spiritual couple but their flesh remains plural.  The two are and forever remain fully independent biological entities and no metaphor can change that reality.

The second and more important problem is one of interpretation.  What exactly was Jesus trying to say?  Who gets the last word on this and on what authority?  These are  important questions because the church has long insisted that divorced and remarried Catholics are living in sin and commit an additional serious sin each time they receive the eucharist.  Jesus claimed that adulterers would wind up in hell (Matt. 5:30) which is understandable in that adultery is a direct violation of what Catholics number as the sixth commandment.  So if Jesus is right that remarriage is tantamount to adultery, maybe the church is being reasonable in concluding that remarried Catholics should be excluded from communion.  The key word is maybe.  Certainly there is no biblical support for such exclusion.  Jesus never said or even implied it.  Quite the contrary, he forgave the woman taken in adultery even though she did not ask for forgiveness (John 8:11).  The moral of that story is simple: “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.”  The church, however, invoking its power to bind upon earth, is unforgiving.  It immediately excludes the adulterer from communion and community, from God’s love and from the hope of salvation.  All on the basis of its interpretation of a seriously flawed metaphor.

What literalists fail to understand is that while all metaphors limp, metaphor constitutes much of the glory and greatness of the Bible.  The theologian Ronald Modras has written, “…the biblical authors realized that their images were metaphors—limp, stuttering attempts to express in analogies the mystery that they called holy and beyond all telling.”[vi]   Jesus’ favorite metaphor may have been that of the mustard seed which he used often in several different contexts.  Most famously, he taught, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field.  Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches” (Matthew 13:31-32). Presumably he is saying that heaven will flourish from what may seem to be insignificant beginnings—he himself and his band of disciples.  Had he lived in a more northerly climate, he might have phrased it in terms of the old English proverb, mighty oaks grow from little acorns.  But heaven does not literally grow.  Nor will the mustard seed ever become a tree capable of sheltering birds in its shade.  Mustard plants are generally inconspicuous weeds two to three feet tall.  But this is only a metaphor.  It cannot carry the burden of philosophy, theology or even botany.  Metaphors are necessarily simple.  Their whole purpose is to simplify the complex.  Everyone in Jesus’ audience had experienced mustard seeds as tiny and mustard plants as much larger. For his modest purpose, it was sufficient.

The hierarchs pretend that the Bible is a single, perfectly consistent narrative which sets forth a divine plan for achieving eternal bliss in heaven.  As evidence for this, they cite the seamless robe of Jesus (John 19:23) as a metaphor for the “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” allocution of the bull Unam Sanctam of 1302.  Writing of the church, the Pope, Boniface VIII, declared, “…outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins, as the Spouse in the Canticles proclaims: 'One is my dove, my perfect one. She is the only one, the chosen of her who bore her,' and she represents one sole mystical body whose Head is Christ and the head of Christ is God.”[vii]   Not surprisingly, that plan, divinely perfect though it may be, requires extensive amplification and even amendment by priests who share God’s power and are called on to exercise it over the lives of everyone else.

Sadly, this is all nonsense.  The Bible contains a smidgen of history.  David, Solomon, the Maccabees, Jesus and his disciples and Paul (Saul of Tarsus) were real people who probably said and did at least some of what is attributed to them.  Adam and Eve, Abraham and Noah, Job and Ruth, Lazarus and the Three Magi are not historical personages.   Others are probably half and half.  Job is a fictional morality tale based on some kernel of truth.  Jesus was a wise man and a teacher but he was not the son of God.  Mary was probably the name of his mother but she was not a virgin when she gave birth.  The Book of Revelation is pure fantasy.

No self-respecting reader can believe that any part of the Bible is inerrant.  In fact, no one really believes that.  Some members of the professional religious class insist only that their particular interpretation of their favorite translation is inerrant which is the same thing as saying they are inerrant.  They put themselves forward as the keepers of the myth, a vital role in any society but one susceptible to the seductions of power.  When challenged, they respond with fury although they no longer burn heretics at the stake.[viii]  Still, it is well to bear in mind the observation of Friedrich Nietzsche that, “All things are subject to interpretation.  Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power, not truth.”

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Notes

[i] These 66 books are but a small fraction of those that might have been included.   There are also about 15 books of Old Testament Apocrypha which are accepted as canonical by some denominations, including Catholic and Orthodox Christians, by others as less than the inspired word of God.  All biblical quotations in the body of the text are from The Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV), © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.

[ii] The scholars of the Jesus Seminar concluded that these are not the words of Jesus but of Mark who was attempting to explain the opaqueness of many of Jesus’s parables.  See:  Funk, Robert W. and Roy W. Hoover, The Five Gospels,  Macmillan, 1993, pp.55-56.  It should also be noted that on another occasion Jesus said,  “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs” (Luke 12:2-3).  The Jesus Seminar doubts this passage also.

[iii] See the encyclicals Providentissimus Deus of Leo XIII (1893) and Divino Allfante Spiritu of Pius XII (1943).

[iv] All Adam says is, “Now this at last: bone from my bones, flesh from my flesh! This shall be called woman for from man was this taken.” (Genesis 2:23).  He does not sound either admiring or enchanted. There is no record in the Bible that Adam ever said a single word to Eve.  There is no hint he found her attractive or even useful.  The Pope here is perverting the truth.  (It should be noted that there are two non-canonical Books of Adam and Eve but even in these Adam has little to say to Eve that is not an admonishment of one sort or another.)

[v] This passage occurs twice.  Here are both versions in context as given by the translators of the NIV:

Mark 10:  5 “It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied. 6 “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ 7 ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, 8 and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Matthew 19:  3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” 4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” 7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” 8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” 10 The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”  11 Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. 12 For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”

[vi] Ignatian Humanism, Loyola Press, 2010, p. 288.  The “limping metaphor” is a principle of ancient Greek rhetoric that recognizes the centrality of metaphor to human knowledge and also the limitation inherent in all comparisons.

[vii] “Canticles” refers to the Song of Songs otherwise known as the Canticle of Canticles, Chapter 6 Verse 8.  Again we encounter papal distortion of the Bible.  The passage refers to one woman (“my dove”) among the “sixty queens and eighty concubines and virgins beyond number” the King keeps in his harem.  The Pope uses this dove or pigeon as a metaphor for the church.  He probably does not want you to think of the church as a concubine.  “Chosen of her who bore her” seems to be an example of pontificating under the influence of a controlled substance.

[viii] The last auto-da-fé took place in Madrid, Spain on May 18, 1721.  Two men and three women were burned alive together with effigies of two deceased heretics.  All were accused of being relapsed Jews.  One, Maria Barbara Carillo, was 95 years old.