I listened to an interview Terry Gross of NPR had with an assistant professor of religion at Boston University, an ordained American Baptist pastor, Jennifer Knust, who has just written a book analyzing the Bible and pointing out not only its discrepancies, but the contradictions within it from writer to writer. The book is “Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire”.

I am a sketchy scholar and am only vaguely recalling some of the most telling points she made, but I came away with a sense of frustration that despite her intellect, she ignores the implications of what she has uncovered. Her premise is that those men who contributed books to the Bible were led by God and had only good intentions, by which I am guessing she is excusing their ignorance but accepting their moral purity.

I excuse their ignorance too because, after all they lived in a primitive time, but by the same token, I do not intend to live by their ignorance, that the devout attempt to do, and certainly try to make everyone else do as well. I also take exception to her conclusion that the authors of the Bible had only love and guidance from God to lead them and were not at all influenced by personal bias, and the jealousies of their very human condition. If this be true, it would be the only time in the history of mankind that such altruism held sway.

Furthermore, if men of God are mostly only doing “the best they can”, why do we have pedophiles, why did jealous priests burn Joan of Arc at the stake (she was upstaging them with her claim that God had spoken to her personally and that couldn’t be borne), and are we to believe that the priests of the Spanish Inquisition were just men of God “doing the best they could”? Why did the devout burn women in Salem, claiming they were witches when what they really wanted was their land and possessions?

Why is this author ignoring the conclusions an unbiased researcher might come to? My supposition is: When she was a child, her mother would read to her from the Bible every day. Together they would sit in a sunny chair and heads together would consider every single chapter and verse, discussing and memorizing and sharing the Bible and each other in a mother-daughter love that is all too rare. What a wonderful mother. And to this child that wonderful mother, with all good intentions, imparted to her child a vast fund of mythology.

She told Terry about that time: (I missed some sentences as I was typing fast while listening). “I grew up with the Bible ... We read every story … What I remember about that was how invitational, friendly, warm it was. We would come up with troubling questions and stories and we would talk about them. And in the process we would think about how God loves us ... and how we wanted to be in our own communities. The Bible remains infinitely fascinating and infinitely love giving and inspiring to me because I read it as a document produced by human beings who are doing the best that they can.”

I am guessing that on a deep level, the author feels that any repudiation of the Bible her intelligence might lead her to, feels like a betrayal of her mother. And she can’t bear that. So much for her scholarship.

And, finally, Jason Coker, on his website Blogs, Scripture and Theology, writes in part,

“One simply cannot take scripture seriously (as Knust puts it) and fail to notice that it often argues vigorously with itself. Historically, it’s the attempt to force scripture into a seamless and systematic convergence of unquestionable control that leads people to malign and maim others in the name of God.”

My own view, of course, is that faith is a convenience for many to excuse and support their basic agenda, whatever that might be, most often personal gain of some kind, self-aggrandizement, and ego-driven claims to speciality. “I believe and you don’t and that makes me special and gives me license to dictate how you should behave.

xx, Teal