Is the Bible true?

Some of us come from traditions where as children we sang, “The B-I-B-L-E, yes, that’s the book for me; I stand alone on the Word of God, the B-I-B-L-E!” For us, certainly, the idea that the Bible is both true and that some things in it didn’t actually happen can be jarring and disturbing.

 As a student and scholar of the New Testament, I of course conclude that many things did not happen as biblical texts record them. The questioner asks: “How much of what is recorded in the Bible actually happened as it is written?” It is the word “actually” that raises interesting questions. What do we modern folk, attached to ideas of historical verifiability, mean by saying that something “actually happened”?

While I know and teach that a man named Jesus lived in the first century and that we can know something of his first-century context in Judea and the Galilee, the gospels for example can’t tell us what “actually happened.” Neither can archaeology of the time, or contemporaneous writings, tell us what “actually happened.” The gospels are far less than that—that is, they are not historical reportage. And they are, more importantly, far more than that—that is, they present us with the imaginations of early Jesus followers and their resources for and theological responses to living in a world where the Roman Empire effected violence on Jesus and others. I know and I teach that Paul was an actual man, travelling the Mediterranean in the first century, but just because he characterizes the Corinthian community as schismatic does not mean that this “actually happened.” That the Corinthians were full of divisions was Paul’s opinion—one that was much debated and disputed, as we learn from his later correspondence in 2 Corinthians, where it’s clear that the Corinthians offered Paul a few choice words regarding his opinion of them!

“Everything in the Bible is true,” says the quotation that the questioner offers. For me, the great thing about that truth is that it is plural. The gospels as canonized are four, not reduced to one story that we might be tempted to analyze for historical verifiability. We get four stories, four viewpoints of early Jesus followers, and they don’t always match up. This gives Christians room to look within the canon (not to mention the Jesus sayings and traditions outside of the canon!) for the many truths of earliest Christianity. Paul said the Corinthians were schismatic and morally questionable, and the Corinthians talked back: both are part of the truths of earliest Christianity, which at its very beginning was filled with painful and productive struggles over how to understand God, how to respond to the world, and how to live and engage in religious practice together.

The fact that the Bible cradles gently within itself multiple truths, and multiple and even violently contradictory viewpoints, also means that those who find a truth in the Bible are responsible for explaining how they came to that truth rather than another. We choose to highlight certain verses and traditions over others, and it is incumbent upon us to reflect on and to own up to our ethics that lead to these choices.