Growing up as a Christian I was told a great many things about the Bible – first and foremost of them being that the Bible is the “divinely inspired word of God”. As a child, I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant but it sounded a lot to my young mind as if “God himself wrote the Bible”. And this simple fact should be good enough for me, my parents would say. The logic being of course that if I ever questioned the Bible or what was written in it, that I could rest assured that God himself wrote it and therefore it must be true.
As I later grew up to a young man, this position became a little more convoluted. I came to learn that what “divinely inspired word of God” meant to my particular religious community was that the Bible was not the product of any one man’s imagination but was the exact word for word expression of God himself as he inspired various men (through the Holy Spirit) to write the Bible. Therefore God himself did not literally write the Bible but he inspired other men to write it. Ok, seemed like a small change but in the end what was the difference? Thus I accepted this and moved on.
Still later, as a full grown man, I learned that our little religious community had softened even that stance a bit from the “word for word” position I learned as a child to a much softer “thought for thought” position. In this new understanding, God would inspire various writers with the thought he wanted to convey but he would allow each writer to put those thoughts into their own words. When I asked then how we know the writer got the original thought correct I was told that God was overseeing the entire process to ensure that the original thought remained in tact. With this new logic I came to understand that one cannot rest on a single verse to support a belief but must look at the “totality of scripture” to see what other writers had to say about the same topic. Only by looking at all the inspired writers could one could better understand the original thought that was being expressed. I was also cautioned never to build an entire doctrine or belief on only one verse because, after all, there is room for misunderstanding a single verse.
Later still, when I began to study for myself and read about how the Bible was formed or how things were translated or transliterated into various other languages, or how fights and bloodshed ensued within the church over which words or books to call “inspired”, suddenly this whole process seemed very confusing to me. If God was overseeing it all, why did people literally kill each other over which books to accept or reject? The answer, I was told by my fellow religious community, was that God works in mysterious ways and I must trust and believe that God oversaw that entire process too to ensure that no matter what language the Bible was being translated into, no matter what books were being selected by which group, no matter anything that might happen, that the original meaning and key portions remained in tact. After all, how can God judge mankind if we cannot be certain we received all the correct information? And this too seemed logical enough to me so I accepted it and moved on.
Now, I say all this above not because I’m trying to make the Bible look untrustworthy or to try and shame Christianity. My point of all this is to show that a great many of us who were raised Christian, grew up being told things about the Bible that were not entirely accurate and we had to continually revise our understanding as new facts came to light. If we are truly truth seekers therefore it is important that we have a more correct understanding about what the Bible is or isn’t, how it was written, how it was translated, and so forth if we are ever to be fair with the subjects contained within.
Over the next few months it is my hope to continue to expand upon these topics. To briefly touch upon the differences between translation and transliteration, how the books were selected, who wrote them, who determined which were inspired and which to reject and more. These are huge topics in and of themselves for which entire books have been written. It is not my intent to write the entire book on these subjects (those have already been written) but rather to summarize key components of understanding which might be important to later articles or blog posts I intend to write in the future.
Seeking the truth has always been a huge passion for me and, having grown up Christian, I have a passion to share what I have come to learn as truth with other Christians who might be interested in seeing something new they hadn’t considered before. I hope that somewhere along the line I will share with you a new piece of information you’d never considered before and, as always, I invite you to drop me a personal comment if you’d like to discuss any of this further or seek additional resources (books or video recommendations, etc).