Frequently Asked Questions (3)
Larry Hart

The following questions and responses (divided into four separate posts) are related to podcasts 19-24 on Larry’s Inklings. If you prefer listening to reading the questions and answers they can be found as audio on Larry’s Inklings (Podcasts 25-28).

Q) What can be said about the dates for the composition of the New Testament, and what does it matter?

A) When the New Testament was written is a significant issue for many who see it as impacting the historical accuracy of the Bible. Non-confessing scholars believe that the later the date they can claim for the writing of the New Testament the more it strengthens their argument that Christianity is the result of a long developmental process. The original autographs, or manuscripts, of the New Testament were not written, they argue, until very late in the first century or early to mid-second century after undergoing many editorial changes along the way. The Gospels in particular, it is argued, are stories and sayings various writers and groups made up after the apostolic era, after the time of the apostles, to serve their own purposes. So, what is the man or woman of faith to make of this?

Dating the four Gospels and other books of the New Testament is difficult for a number of reasons: The Jewish, Macedonian (Greek), and Roman calendars all began at different times of the year. When dealing with intervals of time, whether a day or a year, it is difficult to determine whether the interval is inclusive (the whole day or year), or exclusive (a part of the day or year). Also, dates are frequently designated not by the calendar, but by the time someone ruled or reigned. It is, therefore, commonly understood that dates for ancient historical events may be a year or two off either way. Occasionally, but not as often as we would like, it is possible to coordinate Biblical events with the dates of established secular events.

For example, in 2 Corinthians 11:32 Paul provides this solid time reference. He writes there: “In Damascus the governor under King Aretas had the city of the Damascenes guarded in order to arrest me.” It is known that King Aretas died in 40 C.E. This would mean Paul’s conversion adventures on the road to and in the city of Damascus occurred sometime prior to 40 at the very latest. Most scholars believe Paul’s conversion and time in Damascus actually took place much earlier––probably within no more than one or two years after Jesus’s crucifixion––so in 33 or 34 C.E.

In Acts 18: 11-12 there is another incident which when coupled with an inscription discovered by archeologists in 1905 helps establish the chronology of Paul’s work and writing. This text in the Acts of the Apostles reads: “And Paul was in the City of Corinth for eighteen months, teaching the word of God among them. But while Gallio was Governor of the Province of Achaia the Jews rose up against Paul and brought him before the judgment seat.”

In 1905 nine fragments of a stone were found at the ancient Greek city of Delphi and put together by a team of international archeologists. The inscription on the stone was from the Roman Emperor Claudius to Gallio who was Proconsul of the region or province of Achaia in which the City of Corinth was located. The inscription itself is an order for Gallio to find a way of repopulating the city of Delphi, which had fallen on hard times. The Emperor, Claudius, declares in this inscription that this is the twelfth year since his ascension to the throne. Since it is known from other sources that his ascension was January 25, 41 C.E., we also know that his 12th year, the year of the inscription, covered January 25, 52 to January 24, 53. This means Gallo was serving as Proconsul between January 25, 52 and January 24, 53. This fixes Paul’s eighteen months in Corinth noted in Acts 18:1 as between January 50 and July 51. With this bit of hard data, John A.T. Robinson proceeds, using chronological data provided in Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, as well as that of Josephus, to construct a chronology for Paul’s life and his letters.

Robinson ends his chronology with Paul’s imprisonment in Rome and the writing of II Timothy around 59 to 62 C.E. However, many scholars believe that Paul was acquitted and released from prison, that he then traveled through Spain establishing Christian communities but was arrested and imprisoned a harsher second time. Either way, however, the tradition and consensus are that Paul was beheaded by Nero shortly  after the Great Fire of Rome in 64 C.E. But this is by no means certain. It is possible given the brutal conditions of first century prisons that Paul died sick and alone before that in his cell. But the bottom line is that all of Paul’s epistles were completed before his death which at the latest was in 64 C.E. As noted in one of my earlier podcasts, I believe this includes the Pastoral Letters as well as the Epistle to the Ephesians.

This leads to another logical conclusion. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles is, according to Acts 1:1-7, the sequel to The Gospel According to Luke. Acts ends with Paul waiting for trial but living in Rome in his own rented house. This would indicate, then, that Acts was completed between 62 and 64 prior to Paul’s death. If, as most scholars think, Matthew and Mark are earlier than Luke all three of the synoptic Gospels must have been written before 64.

There is no date more certain or more filled with sorrow for Jews than the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. For the ancient Jews the Temple was the place, more than anywhere else on earth, where God’s presence was to be felt and known and cherished. Their cultural, political, economic, social, and spiritual life was bound up with the Temple. Their very identity was stamped by it as a sacred place. The earliest Christians, like Jesus, were Jewish, and while being Christian meant that Christ was now their center, they steadfastly retained their Jewish identity. It is impossible to read the New Testament from beginning to end without being aware of just how steeped in Judaism it is. My point is simply that for the Christians of this early period the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was, as it was for all Jews both within and outside Israel, a cataclysmic event of unimaginable proportions. It is exceedingly strange, therefore, that not a single book of the New Testament records this historic “shaking of the foundations” (Isaiah 13:13). It is depicted on the Arch of Titus in Rome (81 C. E.). It is there in the early Rabbinic Literature telling of the Jewish Revolt and Fall of Jerusalem. It is there in considerable detail in the work of the Jewish historian Josephus (92-94 C. E.) It is there in the Roman historian Suetonius’s biographies of twelve Roman emperors (121 C.E.). It is there in the third century Greek historian Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius (170). And it is there in Eusebius of Caesarea (290). But it is not in the New Testament. The simplest and most obvious collusion is that the entire New Testament must have been written before 70 C.E.

Now, I am certainly aware of the counter argument to this: namely, that it is mentioned in the Gospels indirectly as an ambiguous prophecy by Jesus:

As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!” “Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down (Mark 3;1-4; see also: Matthew 3:2-3; Luke 21:5-24).

The assumption of the secular non-confessing scholar is that since there is no such thing as the supernatural, there is no such thing as prophecy. Jesus, therefore, could not have predicted the destruction of Jerusalem leaving as the only possibility that his words were written sometime well after the fact. I am not going to debate either the possibility or impossibility of prophecy here, but without getting overly complicated there are a couple of responses that should be made.

First: I am going to argue that one need not believe in anything supernatural at all to believe Jesus could very well have predict the devastation of 70. It is known for a fact that a person by the name of Jesus Son of Ananias went around Jerusalem in 62 prophesying the city’s destruction eight years before the event. The Jewish authorities handed him over to the Romans who tortured him to make sure they got accurate and actionable information. However, they concluded he was a madman and released him. No one today believes he had any supernatural power, but neither does anyone doubt he predicted the fall of Jerusalem before it occurred.

Between the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, I wrote an article for the magazine Episcopal Life in which I predicted America would lose the Afghanistan War. When America pulled out in disarray twenty years later and the Taliban reasserted its authority, no one was at all amazed by my prediction or called me a prophet. There is nothing astonishing about Jesus’s prediction that demands it be explained away as pointing to a later composition date for Matthew, Mark, or Luke. What is amazing is that the New Testament nowhere speaks with any specificity, directness, or detail of the Jewish Revolt of 66 through 70 or the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple as past events, but only as cryptic predictions. If the proponents of late dating are correct, then it seems to me that the authors of those New Testament books supposedly written after 70 (some it is claimed as late as 160) missed a great marketing opportunity. It would have made perfect sense for them to have said in explicit language, “Look! the Lord prophesied the destruction of the Temple and it happened as he said it would.”

My second response to the notion that Jesus’s prediction of the destruction of the Temple indicates a late date for the Gospels is simply that many literary scholars, even if they subscribe to a late dating of the New Testament, believe because the original question of the disciples is never answered, and because of the lack of connection between the disciples’ question and Jesus’s answer, that the text was not written retrospectively.

My third response is to note that not only does Jesus’s prediction, or prophecy, lack sufficient detail, but at times the detail given does not fit events as they actually happened. I will not go into what I believe is the more accurate interpretation of the relevant texts here, but I will point out that in Luke the disciples are told: “When you see the abomination of desolation. . . those in Judea must flee to the hills.” This cannot, as often claimed, refer to the desecration by Titus’s soldiers because by that time it was too late to flee to the hills. Not only this, but we also know that before the war broke out and the city was under siege Christians, believing they were acting on Jesus’s prophecy, fled, not to the hills, but to Pella in the Decapolis which is actually below sea level. So, Jesus’s prophecy of the temple’s destruction lacks the sort of detail to be expected if it had been written retrospectively, and the details that are given do not match up in the way we would expect. I remain convinced that the entire New Testament was written before the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E.

These, then, are some of the reasons I would agree with those who favor an earlier rather than later date for the writing of the New Testament. For those interested in a more thorough investigation I usually suggest reading John A. T. Robinson’s Redating the New Testament, Larry Hurtado’s Introduction to One God One Lord: Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Early Christianity, and also the Introduction to J. N. Kelly’s A Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles.

Frequently Asked Questions (2)
Larry Hart

The following questions and responses (divided into four separate posts) are related to podcasts 19-24 on Larry’s Inklings. If you prefer listening to reading the questions and answers they can be found as audio on Larry’s Inklings (Podcasts 25-28).

Q) If the Bible is an anthology, who compiled the anthology? Who decided what should be included and what should be excluded; and, when and how did they make the decision?

A) Another way of asking this question is, “Who decided the canon?” The Christian canon of Scripture is the set of twenty-seven books considered authoritative by the Christian community for its life and work. Originally the word “canon” referred to a reed that was used as a measuring stick. The canon, then, is the rule or measuring stick which establishes the biblical books as legitimate and authoritative; that is, a book is canonical if found to meet a standard of measurement. This criteria, or standard of measurement, emerged slowly as a consensus. To be recognized as canonical a book had to meet four requirements: (1) It had to be apostolic in origin; that is, it had to be attributed to or based on the teaching of the first generation of the apostles or their close companions. (2) It had to have universal acceptance, meaning that it had to have been acknowledged by all the major communities or centers of Christianity in the ancient world (Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Asia Minor, Caesarea, Damascus, Greece, and Rome) by the end of the fourth century. (3) It had to have been used liturgically––read publicly in Christian communities as they gathered for worship. (4) It had to have a consistent message. It had to be similar to or complementary to accepted Christian writing.

The epistles of Paul circulated as a collection by 100; although they were, obviously, read individually much earlier. The Four Gospels circulated as a collection by 160, and by 200 a set of Christian writings very similar to the New Testament as we know it. In 367 Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, gave a list of books exactly like that of the New Testament today and referred to them as canonized. Synods and councils meeting in 393, 397, and 419 all regarded the canon as closed. So, the process of canonization was a long, slow, organic process.

A number of non-confessing scholars have argued that the canon was a later creation of powerful bishops who imposed it on Christian communities by political force. That simply does not fit the historical facts. Scholarly evidence in the form of theological essays, letters, and histories from earliest Christianity into the fourth century points to a long process of canonization. There was no single church authority or council who authorized, imposed, or had the power to impose, an official set of books. It just didn’t happen, other than in Dan Brown’s fictional novel The Da Vinci Code. I reiterate: The Twenty-Seven books Christians recognize as sacred emerged slowly out of the spiritual dynamics of the faith. If you want to read more, I suggest C. E. Hill’s book Who Chose the Gospels? Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy.

Q) You haven’t said anything about the early Christian communities which gave rise to the Four Gospels. What can you tell me about them, and their importance to interpreting Scripture?

A) I assume you are referring to the idea that the Christian movement did not begin from a single center –– a single faith community or church, in a particular city like Jerusalem, but, instead, there were many different centers where different groups of disciples, quazi disciples, groupies, opportunists, and the curious tried to make sense of Jesus’s teaching, presence, and gruesome end. Each of those groups had a different take on what the significance of Jesus was. They understood his life, crucifixion, and resurrection in a bewildering variety of ways. Some did not focus on the claims of his resurrection at all, but instead concentrated on his teaching and how those teachings could liberate them from political and economic oppression. Consequently, the non-confessing scholar Richard Horsley writes this: “The movements that formed around Yeshua Ben Yosef survived the Roman Crucifixion of their leader as a ‘rebel king’. In fact, his martyrdom became a powerful impetus for the expansion and diversification of his movement.” The origins of the Christian movement according to Horsley, are not to be found in the person of Jesus as the Christ, “but in the large number of ‘peasants’ who eagerly responded to the pronouncements of peasant prophets that God was again about to liberate them from oppressive rulers and restore cooperative community life under the traditional divine principle of justice.” According to people like Horsely and Baur, not only did these groups have different understandings and beliefs, but they were also in competition with one another. From the earliest days of Christianity, according to this view, there is no distinction between orthodoxy and heresy–– just “different strokes for different folks.” Each of the Four Gospels, it is claimed, was written by a leader or leaders of different communities, or churches to answer the questions and serve the agenda of their community; for example, the Gospel of John, it is asserted, emerged from within the church centered in Ephesus which was composed of Jewish Christians who had been expelled from the synagogue.

However, the most striking supposed difference was between those emphasizing a secret esoteric knowledge and the material world as inherently evil, the gnostics; and those we might think of as Apostolic Christians who emphasized God’s love and wisdom made alive, real, and available in the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ.

Now, as the question states, I haven’t said anything about all this, and I haven’t done so for several reasons. For one thing, while this wild hypothesis of communities is now widely assumed to be true by non-confessing scholars there is no real evidence for it at all. It is entirely conjecture, pure speculation. Because it does not rest on anything substantial it is nearly impossible to argue it with those who accept it without feeling like you are going mad. I watched the television series Ivanhoe while thinking about this, and it occurred to that trying to argue with non-confessing scholars on such matters is like trying to answer the cruel Grand Master of the Knights Templar when he has the Jewish physician Rowena on trial for witchcraft. Nevertheless, I find the following problems with this speculative proposal:

1) No one has ever found any such community that actually existed. There are real places with real Christian churches (actual centers of the Jesus Way) named in Acts of the Apostles, in the Epistles, and in Revelation ((Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Laodicea, Thessalonica), but there is no evidence of a concrete, physical, or real Matthean, Markan, Lukan, or Johannine community.

2) One main piece of evidence offered for these different groups, centers, or communities, is the disagreements between Christians reported in the New Testament itself. But to argue that disagreements within a community prove multiple communities simply defies the rules of logic. More reasonable is Hurtado’s observation that differences in the early Christian community, which are obvious in the canonical books, demonstrate a willingness to accommodate a certain amount of diversity as the Apostle Paul urges in the Corinthian correspondence.

3) It is further argued by non-confessing scholars that there could have been no
such thing as heresy because no one center, or group, or church community was in a position to claim its views alone were legitimate, correct, or orthodox; in short, there was no canon by which to measure orthodoxy. That’s really a little silly and unworthy of any serious lay student of the Bible much less a professional scholar. The canon for those who, in spite of his crucifixion, continued to give their heart to Christ, the canon for “those of the Way” as they were at first called, was Christ himself and the Apostles. To the Apostles Jesus entrusted the keys of the Kingdom saying: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16:19). Or, Ephesians 2:19-20, “You are. . . built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.” Certainly, the little Epistle of 1 John is concerned with what it means to live an authentic Christian life. In five short chapters John provides the measuring stick for Christian orthodoxy, for Christian authenticity: Live with purity of heart if you want to see God. If you want to know God live love. Be honest with yourself and with God about your sins. Walk in the light. Do not continue in sin, but “acknowledge the exact nature of your wrongs;” and Christ, through his death and resurrection will forgive you and set right anything wrong between you and God. Keep Christ’s commandments––live his teaching. Acknowledge Christ, give your heart to Him as the “Word of Life” come in the flesh, the eternal life and light from God and which was from the beginning.

Now, we do know from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and the Book of Acts, that there were people in Jesus’s own day trying to figure out who he was; as well as individuals doing their own thing in his name––some of them, like today, charlatans. But if there were whole groups or communities of independent disciples, we know nothing of them. But even if there were it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter how many groups existed or how many different ideas there were about Jesus. The defining characteristic of orthodoxy is continuity with Jesus and his teaching through the apostles.

4) Every casual reader of the history of the Roman Empire is aware of how the Pax Romana, the common use of the Greek language, and Roman engineered roads throughout the Empire wove travel into the texture of the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond. And every casual student of Biblical history is cognizant of the impact of this relative ease of travel and communication on the rapid spread of the Christian message. It is well established that the earliest churches maintained close connections through the exchange of letters, messengers, separated families maintaining their ties, or those traveling for other reasons such as trade, government business, or holy pilgrimage. Yet, the theory that many of the earliest Christian communities were highly diverse, with little exchange between them and other Christian centers, and rather self-absorbed with little interest on how their spirituality impacted the larger world ignores this reality.

5) It seems to me that a fifth factor must be figured into this equation. Both Judaism and Christianity were highly exclusive faiths, and “their demands,” as Hurtado notes in The Origins of Christian Worship, “were at odds with all other religious attitudes of the Roman era.

Finally, I will add just two more very brief observations regarding the composition and transmission of Scripture––”The Book God Breathed.” First: If one regards the Biblical text as wholly corrupted, as does Bart Erhman, then it is impossible to form any intelligent hypothesis about the historical nature of events it describes, or, to deal decisively with such questions as authorship and dating on the basis of style, vocabulary, or grammar. One cannot have her cake and eat it too” (see: Larry Hart, The Annunciation, 2017, 144). Second: When earliest Christianity, and its literature, is reduced to what amounts to little more than small disparate groups of peasants led insurrectionists, or discussion groups of disgruntled Jews debating esoteric Greek philosophy, it is hard to imagine Christianity having the kind of impact on the world it has had.

This is why I haven’t had anything to say about the notion of “literary communities” as envisioned by non-confessing scholars. It is an intriguing and clever bit of sophism, but ultimately a distraction from our spiritual work.

Frequently Asked Questions (1)
Larry Hart

The following questions and responses (divided into four separate posts) are related to podcasts 19-24 on Larry’s Inklings. If you prefer listening to reading the questions and answers they can be found as audio on Larry’s Inklings (Podcasts 25-28).

Q) Since we do not have any of the original manuscripts of the Bible, and it has been translated so many times, isn’t it impossible to know what it originally said?

A) That’s a question I haven’t heard in a long time. Perhaps the first thing I should say is something to clear up a slight confusion that exists in the question itself. I think the question may be confusing the translation of the Bible with its transmission. Translation involves rendering the words or text of one language into that of another. So, the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures were, for the most part, originally written in Hebrew and then later translated into various languages. The New Testament was written in koine Greek, common everyday Greek, and fairly early translated into ancient Syriac, Coptic, and Latin. I would assume, given the work of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, that the New Testament has now been translated into every language in the world. What we do not want to think is that the New Testament was written in Greek, which was translated into Syriac, which was translated into Latin, which was translated into Middle English, which was translated into Elizabethan English which was finally translated into modern English. Transmission refers to the ways in which the Biblical texts were copied, preserved, and circulated before the invention of the printing press. With this in mind, I think the question might be reframed as: Given that we do not have the original documents of the New Testament, and wouldn’t know it even if we did, how do we know that the Biblical text we have today reliably represents what the original text said?

While we do not have any of the original manuscripts, the autographs as they are called, we do have more manuscripts and manuscript fragments than we do of any other great work of ancient literature. We only have 2,000 copies of the Iliad, and only about a dozen each for Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Pliny, and Tacitus. For the New Testament we have 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts catalogued, 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic, and Armenian. About 25,000 in all. Additionally Christian scholars, leaders, and teachers writing in the post-apostolic age, the generation following the Apostles, quoted the New Testament so extensively it would be nearly possible to recreate the New Testament from their quotations.

Since we do not have the original New Testament writings (the autographa), textual critics work with all these ancient manuscripts and fragments in an effort to determine the reliability of the Biblical text as we have it today. The greater the number and the earlier the dating of any ancient book or manuscript scholars have, the easier it is to identify errors or discrepancies and to reconstruct a text closer to the original.

The great Medieval scholar, philosopher, and Catholic theologian Desiderius Erasmus became convinced that the recovery of true Christian spirituality could be greatly helped by recovering the text of the New Testament in its original Greek. He consulted as many old Latin manuscripts of the Bible as well as well as those in the original Greek. He noted and corrected things like obvious copyist errors. Eventually he published a Greek New Testament with a Latin translation. Erasmus’s work was the beginning of what is known as textual criticism and work on  the Textus Receptus (Latin for “received text”) , which forms the base for modern language translations of the New Testament.

New Testament textual critics are concerned with all these ancient manuscripts and fragments of writing we have of the Bible. In short, textual criticism involves the discovery and reading of Biblical manuscripts, cataloguing their contents, and collating the way their text reads in comparison to other copies of the text. The object is to produce a Greek New Testament that represents as closely as possible the original text.

What having so many manuscripts in both the Greek and other ancient languages allow textual scholars to do is to identify whole families of manuscripts and the variants perpetuated within them. That many manuscripts across more than a thousand years serves as a kind of laboratory in which it can be oberserved how and what sorts of mistakes tend to be made; for example, the scribes eye skips a line. When Bart Erhman argued in his debate with Daniel Wallace that the work of later copyists was not as good as those of an earlier period, he didn’t seem to realize he was making Wallace’s point. The question Wallace should have pressed harder than he did was: “How do you know this? How do you know the scribes from one period were better than those from another? How do you know something is a scribal gloss and doesn’t belong in the text? What forms your judgement as to how a text ought best be read? Isn’t it because you have all these manuscripts from across the centuries to analyze and compare with one another?”

Here is what I think we can say with considerable confidence about the textus receptus (the “received tex)t” of the Greek New Testament as it is: (1) The mistakes whether quite minor and inconsequential (as nearly all are), or, those mistakes that represent more serious conscious changes made by copyists, are rather easily detected. I find it amusing that the very reason someone like the agnostic Bart Ehrman can come up with textual mistakes and changes to use in challenging the integrity of the Bible, is that he knows as one professionally trained how the text ought to read. (2) There are no mistakes or textual changes that, when subjected to textual analysis in order to discover the best reading of the text, and when interpreted in the context of the New Testament as a whole, create any difficulty for consistent, coherent, and reasonable Christian thought and practice. (3) There is a high level of probability, As Daniel Wallace argued in his debate with Ehrman, that textual critics have produced a Greek New Testament that is very exact in comparison to the wording of the original autographs. In the debate to which I am referring Ehrman kept replying, “But we don’t know for certain?” He was correct of course. We don’t know for certain because we do not have the original manuscripts for comparison. But Ehrman’s reply is interesting. Notice, he never argued that we do not have a high level of probability, but that we can’t be certain. What all of this results in is not evidence that what the Bible says is true, that’s a different matter, but that the received Greek text used as the basis for translating the New Testament into any modern language is fundamentally reliable and trustworthy in its correspondence to the original manuscripts of the New Testament.

Q) I struggle with the idea that the Bible is metaphorical rather than factual. It feels like that is just a way of explaining away rather than explaining difficulties. I know that it is argued something in the Bible can be metaphorically true but factually false. I have a hard time telling whether you agree or disagree with that?

A) Well first of all, let me say I am disappointed in myself for not being clear about that. I thought I was, but maybe not. I will try to do better in responding to you here.

First of all, I think the ever-changing vocabulary of scholars and the way they make words mean something they don’t ordinarily mean make following them difficult. So, when you read the Bible has to be read figuratively or metaphorically, it does not mean metaphorical in the sense  you learned in your high school English class, rather it is frequently code for saying the events and stories which you read in the Bible are fiction, but they contain philosophical truths and helpful insights for living life.

Now, a story obviously need not be factual in order to express a true principle, moral, or deep meaning. Consider for example, Aesop’s Fables, Dostoevsky’s short stories How Much Land Does a Man Need or The Peasant Marey, the children’s fantasy Little Red Riding Hood, or Biblical parables like “The Good Samaritan,” “The Prodigal Son,” or “The Pearl of Great Price;” none of which are meant to be understood or explored as real events. They are all fictional stories communicating some bit of folk wisdom or spiritual insight. I would say that to read them metaphorically is to read them literally because it respects their genre––their metaphorical or figurative quality if you will. It is how they were meant to be read.

I doubt the Book of Jonah is about a real event. For one thing it lacks some of the elements, like oracles, characteristic of other books of prophecy; and, for another the ending is not really about Nineveh but Jonah’s bigoted attitude and self-centered values. In that narrative Nineveh comes under the inditement of God for its oppression of the poor and is urged to repent or be destroyed. But ironically, in the end Jonah is the one who lacks divine compassion and needs to repent.

There are, then, many stories in the Bible whose factuality (whether they happened in any sense) really does not matter. A fictional story or metaphor can teach true truth. However, there are other stories where whether they happened matters. and matters greatly. The process God used in creating the cosmos is immaterial, but whether God is the source of all the beauty, and goodness and earthly reality in which we are immersed matters supremely; that is, God either was or was not the agent of our creation and which of those alternatives we commit to is of ultimate significance. If the Exodus is merely a metaphor, as popular authors like Marcus Borg and Richard Rohr contend, for the human longing for liberation, then it is only of passing sentimental interests. But if the Exodus, not the Exodus imagined by Hollywood, but the Exodus of real Hebrew slaves led to freedom by Moses happened, if it was a moment in which God acted to effect real human liberation, then it was something unutterably marvelous and consequential.

Let me put it this way. Theologians and Bible scholars have long noted the Bible’s use of what is known grammatically as the indicative and imperative moods. Over time their observations led to the formulation of a profound paradigm which can be concisely stated like this: “The imperative for the person of faith always arises out of the indicative of God.” In Scripture the indicative mood states what God has done, is doing, or will do. The imperative mood is used for what we should do in response to something or someone. Even faith itself, is not so much about belief, as it is our response to what God has done in Christ. If it’s hard for you to grasp faith in that way maybe you can see it by comparing faith to love which is perhaps a little easier to understand as responsiveness, love responding to love. The imperative arises out of the indicative. The popular religion author Marcus Borg likes to argue that God does not intervene or interfere in human affairs. But if that is the case there is  no indicative, and if there is no indicative there is no imperative and we are left adrift on a rough sea without rudder, or oar, or compass.

I will say this as a final response to this question about metaphor and how it relates to factuality. Non-confessing, liberal, progressive, secular scholars, or whatever you call them, are correct in their assertion that we can become overly concerned, obsessed with factuality. What nearly every one of them fails to recognize, however, is that they are as obsessed with factuality as the most confessing, conservative, “born again” fundamentalist. If the conservative Christian is the Scripture addict, the liberal is the co-dependent. I am not saying that facts don’t matter, they do. Truth at every level matters,  but in the end I would rather live Scripture well than debate it well.