What Does the Bible Say about That?
Woodcut, Four Evangelists and Four Apostles, anonymous, 1500-1549, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Public Domain
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It is natural for people to question what the Bible says about any subject, given the importance of the Bible as sacred scripture for so many people. In churches and on social media, there are innumerable claims about what the Bible says. Often these are delivered as absolutes.
The claim is made that if a person does not follow an instruction asserted as a biblical mandate, they are ignoring the mandate of God because “that’s what the Bible says.” However, there are problems with such claims. starting with the question of what the Bible says about anything. Such mandates treat the Bible as a single text.
The reality of what the Bible says is far more complicated. The Bible is not a book, it is a collection of books.
Whose Bible?
We must remember that there are multiple canons of Christian scripture as the Protestant Bible contains sixty-six books while the Catholic Bible contains seventy-three texts. The Jewish canon, the Tanakh, contains what Christians call the Old Testament but in a different order. See the BS&R post on “Is There a Such a Thing as ‘THE Bible’?” for further detail.
Many Books, Many Authors, Many Times, Many Situations
The texts in these collections were written during a period of several hundred years by many authors living in unique situations. Consider how the moral and social questions would differ for an individual living in the United States in 1780 versus 2022.
The same is true of authors whose works were included in the Bible. The times when they were composing their works could range from periods of social stability and power to periods of being under the control of a foreign ruler.
The Hebrew texts of the Old Testament likely began coming into existence after the reign of David, which ended in the early tenth century BCE. They were being composed into the second century BCE.
Many texts recall oral traditions from even earlier. The Greek texts of the New Testament were written during the first and second centuries of the Common Era.
The period in which these books were coming into existence thus took place over a period of at least seven hundred to eleven hundred years. To put that in perspective, the First Crusade was launched at the very end of the eleventh century CE, about nine-hundred and twenty-five years ago. Consider how the world has changed between the launching of the Crusades and now.
Changes, Changes, Changes
The same is true of the time frame in which the books of the Bible were written.
Israel, and the world, underwent significant changes during those centuries that shaped the way people thought.
People who identified themselves as slaves who escaped from Pharoah’s Egypt became the nation of Israel. Then they went from being a strong monarchy under David to a divided monarchy around 931 BCE.
The northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed by Assyria in 722 BCE, with their land becoming occupied by other peoples. The southern kingdom of Judah was defeated by Babylon in 597 BCE and its wealthiest citizens deported to Babylon.
The temple was then destroyed in 586 BCE when Jerusalem was razed, but then Persia overthrew Babylonian power and allowed Judahites to begin returning to their land in a slow rebuilding process, though still under Persian control.
In the latter half of the fourth century, Judah would come under the control of Greece, then be subject to Seleucid control during the period of Hellenization. After revolting against the Seleucids, Israel would establish its first independent kingdom in hundreds of years, only to lose it to Rome in 63 BCE.
How many changed situations can you count here?
Can you see what a complex question this is?
Authors and Viewpoints
An author of the eighth century BCE would have seen the world in different ways than an author in the first century BCE, just as an author in the eleventh century CE would see the world differently than an author of nineteenth century CE.
The author’s situation also makes a difference. One of the wealthy citizens of Judah deported to Babylon would have a different viewpoint from someone who remained in the northern kingdom at the same time just as the perspective of a homesteader in the nineteenth century CE in the United States would differ from that of a wealthy industrialist.
The Bible contains a variety of viewpoints even from the same time.
The Bible as a Collection of Viewpoints, Not Group-Think
This brings to light another important point to consider for the question of “What Does the Bible say?,” the issue of group-think. The authors of the books in the Bible did not all think alike.
Some traditions of interpretation look for a systematic theology in the Bible. This approach assumes that all of the books of the Bible are in perfect harmony, that all of the authors embrace a form of group-think in which they all agree about every topic.
If one book of the Bible states something, then the whole Bible must agree with that conclusion. Such a conclusion is faulty and fails to read the texts comparatively or critically.
Let us look at some examples of disagreement in the books of the Bible.
Example: Different Gospels, Different Views
Examples from stories that appear in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark show how they disagree.
In Mark 5:1–20, Jesus heals a demon-possessed man in the region of the Gerasenes. In Matthew’s version of the same story (8:28–34), he is in the region of the Gadarenes and heals two demon-possessed men.
Mark 7:1–20 presents Jesus in conversation with Pharisees and teachers of the law. Mark depicts Jesus declaring all food clean, effectively ending the idea of kosher foods in the law. Matthew’s account of this conversation in 15:1–20 omits any such claim that Jesus ended kosher foods, claiming instead that Jesus clarified eating food with unwashed hands does not defile a person, which is an entirely different conclusion.
What does the Bible say, then?
What does Jesus say?
Perhaps we should appreciate that the Bible includes more than one perspective.
The Bible allows for disagreement and even invites discussion.
What Does the Bible Say about It?
When we begin to compare all the books in the Bible and their views on kingship, the problem of evil, heaven and hell, Satan, and a variety of other topics, we see an array of thoughts and concerns on any given subject. This is important to remember when people wish to point to one part of one book in the Bible as a definitive statement of what the Bible says.
Exodus 20:13 orders the people not to kill, not to murder, while Deuteronomy 2:34 presents Moses celebrating the Hebrews’ genocide against the Amorites, which included the murder of women and children.
Many examples of such divinely ordained genocide are found in many books of the Bible, meaning a generic reference to Exodus 20:13 does not definitively resolve anything regarding killing others from the perspective of “the Bible” as each text has to be considered.
Today we certainly include many more ethical considerations about genocide than verses from the Bible.
Times have changed.
Better Questions
Insisting that the Bible says only one thing about any subject, and that the books are always all in agreement, is a standard that was applied to those books much later, not by the authors themselves.
Nowhere do the texts themselves make any such claim, nor did the authors write the texts to be included in the Bible. That was a later development.
As the texts were assembled and edited to become what we know as the Bible, many different perspectives were included.
Therefore, when considering what the Bible says, a better question is, “What do the various books in the Bible say about the subject at hand?”
By weighing the various conclusions of the different texts, we can understand how authors over these centuries understood important issues of their different times.
The Bible offers material for our contemporary ethical considerations. We can learn from the varied views of our forebears.
