If God really meant for the Bible to provide his doctrines and standards to the world, then he has a lot of explaining to do. Without the Bible, there is no Christian tradition. The Hebrew Scriptures, the gospels, and the letters of Paul solidified what Christians believed in a way that oral tradition and songs had not. I find it odd, however, that the creator of the cosmos entrusted his primary (and only visually verifiable) method of communication into such a human process—writing, literature, and language. This system is easily invented by humans, but far beneath the expectations one should have from an omniscient and omnipotent being with a message for all humanity. Yet Jesus and Paul make it clear that the scriptures (namely that which existed at the time) are the designated antidote to heresy and false doctrine.[1] You cannot have the Christian or Jewish traditions without them.
One thing about the Bible—sometimes it (or parts of it) disappears. In 2 Kings 22, the high priest discovered the Book of the Law and gave it to the king’s secretary. Apparently it had gone missing for centuries. A prophetess told the high priest that God would punish Judah for failing to keep the Law to which it had no access. What we can learn from this story is that if you fail to follow instructions that you don’t have, you are still liable for the ways in which you deviate from those instructions. Even as late as the 20th century, portions of the Bible were yet to be discovered that are intact today, like Psalm 145:13 or 1 John 3:1. They had gone missing from manuscripts and weren’t discovered until later. Lucky you for being born later than your grandparents—you get to have that much more of the Bible than they did. Although in some cases we have too much text in Greek manuscripts that claims to be written by the original authors but was actually written much later by someone else (the story of the woman caught in adultery, John 7:53-8:11, e.g.[2]). Having too much text is not good either. How do we know what’s authorial and what’s an anonymous scribe talking?
Another problem with this system is that nearly everyone in the ancient world was illiterate. They had to count on their religious leaders to read and interpret the Bible for them. The fact that only a very few people could read put power into the hands of irresponsible people. Even the Bible talks within itself about corrupt religious leaders.[3] Jesus tells the scribes and Pharisees, “You lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them,” (Matt 23:13, NRSV). Yet these people had more power over the distribution of the Scriptures than almost everyone. One wonders if Jesus ever considered informing the world of his demands in some way other than literature in an illiterate world.
To put the Word of God into language is to welcome ambiguity and misinterpretation. Ancient Greek writing, for example, was written with no spaces or punctuation, which made words run together. One jumble of words could mean two different things depending on how the reader separated the jumble. Similarly, no punctuation left a lot of room for several interpretations of one phrase; for example, where do you put the comma in “TRULYITELLYOUTODAYYOUWILLBEWITHMEINPARADISE”? Most people think it should read, “*today* you will be…” but Jesus could just as easily have meant, “Truly *I tell you today,* you will be with me in paradise [eventually].” Additionally, there are some phrases in the New Testament that could be translated in several different distinct ways (Romans 3:22, “faith in Christ,” or “faithfulness of Christ”, e.g.?). This is a failure of language to express ideas, yet God supposedly entrusted his Word to language.
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. FYI, there’s a continent on the other hemisphere with many civilizations and tribes who do not know of me or my commands. They’re not accessible by land, only by sea.” Now there’s a Great Commission that would impress me. But God incidentally never bothered to mention the Americas to his missionaries. Exactly what excuse does the creator of the universe have for this oversight? But even today, are you aware that there are still indigenous people groups in the United States that don’t have a Bible in their language? Not to mention the indigenous groups that have never even heard the name “Jesus” at no fault of their own. What a flimsy system—almost as if it were made by humans rather than a divinity omniscient in geography.
I’m not arguing that this system is impossible, but that it is unlikely. If the Judeo-Christian God exists and really intended the Bible to serve as his primary method for communicating his doctrines and standards, then he has a lot of explaining to do. But if men wrote the Bible and falsely attributed its ideas to God, then the issues I have put forth above make perfect sense.
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Footnotes:
[1] Matt 4:4, 19:4, 22:29-32, Mark 12:24-27, Luke 24:27, 2 Tim 3:15-17, etc.
[2] This story of the woman caught in adultery, known as the Pericope Adulterae, is thought by many scholars to have derived from a story told by Papias and a similar story in The Gospel of the Hebrews (a mostly lost text not to be confused with the New Testament epistle). The earliest Greek manuscript to have it dates to at least 500 C.E., and it is written with very non-Johannine vocabulary.
[3] 1 Sam 2:12-17, Jesus’ continuous rants about corrupt religious leaders, etc.
