Privileging the Bible

One of the real challenges of teaching religion in an academic context is how to face those students who “privilege” the Bible above other texts. (It’s true, many, or most, Muslim students also privilege the Qur’an in this way, but they seem less strident about this, perhaps because as a religious minority in America they are more accustomed to the idea that not everyone values the Qur’an in the same way they do.)

Privileging the Bible in this way is understandable, but it is not appropriate in an academic context. In college, especially in the humanities, one of the things we are supposed to be doing is challenging just such privileging of texts (and challenging certain privileged readings of those texts).

But there is NO REASON to privilege the Bible in that way. There are literally thousands of religious texts around, hundreds of them in my office, and there is nothing special about the Bible. It is a product of human culture.

This doesn’t mean it is not valuable. It is. I read and think about it all the time. But I no longer accept the idea that is a “miraculous book” that contains any kind of direct message from God. What it does contain is a record of many people, over hundreds of years, wrestling with some of the most important issues people face.

When Christians try to defend this privileging of the Bible, they usually do so on the basis of three arguments: the Bible’s supposed inerrancy, fulfilled biblical prophecy, and some kind of personal authentication of the Bible’s message. While these strategies convince those who are determined to be convinced, they don’t convince anyone else.

The inerrancy argument is just wrong. The Bible has many errors of fact and history as well as contradictions. The “privilegers” defend this doctrine on a point-by-point case with elaborate, a-historical arguments that are ingenious, but ultimately unconvincing to most of us because they are so patently desperate, absurd, and even dishonest. (For example, see the problem of who killed Goliath explained by a "privileger" and by a "non-privileger."

The prophecy argument works in three areas: ancient prophecies of O.T. events that have been “fulfilled” in ancient history, prophecies fulfilled by the life of Jesus, and prophecies about the “end times” which we see being fulfilled today. None of these are convincing either.

The so-called fulfilled prophecies of the O.T. are ex eventu prophecies. In other words, these texts “predicted” events that had already happened. There are hundreds of ancient documents that do this. The only ones that people consider valid today are those found in the Bible. This is privileging. It would be like me producing a document I claimed to have written in 1995 that claimed, “the two towers in the great city of the apple will fall, yeah, they will fall in a day.” Nobody would believe that this text was produced supernaturally or after the events of 9/11/2001, nobody claims that for all the other ancient texts, yet Christians want a special privilege for the Bible. They take texts that are clearly cases of ex eventu prophecy and claim they are authentic.

Similarly, prophecies about Christ fulfilling O.T. prophecies are really examples of the gospel narratives being shaped in order to make the events of Christ life fit the prophecies. A an easy to understand example is the birth narratives. Matthew and Luke’s stories are completely different. They only agree on two points: Jesus was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth. Obviously, Jesus did grow up in Nazareth, but there is no evidence that he was born in Bethlehem. Instead, in order to “fulfill” the prophecy in Micah that seems to predict the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, they invented stories (Matthew has Mary and Joseph living in Bethlehem but fleeing because of Herod’s death threats; Luke has Mary and Joseph living in Nazareth but moving traveling to Bethlehem to meet a Roman census requirement [otherwise unattested]).

The most absurd use of biblical prophecies is the attempt to demonstrate that the events we see depicted in our newspapers were predicted thousands of years ago in the Bible. I’ve been following this discussion for thirty years, and the referents for these “prophecies” changes every few years. Besides, it’s completely obvious that virtually every word of Revelation was intended to comment on events that were current in the late first century. Revelation is about the ancient Roman Empire. It has NOTHING to do with our current situation.

The final argument that is sometimes presented is that the Bible is self-authenticating. As you read it you “hear God speaking” through it to you. This seems to me like the only valid argument for the divine origin of the Bible, but because it is so subjective it does not allow one to privilege the Bible in the way Christians do. People hear truth, or Truth, or God, in lots of places and in lots of ways. While this feature of human engagement with the Bible is very important, it is not unique.

So, am I arguing that people should stop reading the Bible? No. Far from it. What I am arguing is that we should stop privileging it—exempting it from the normal critiques and methods of evaluation that are applied to other texts—and start taking it seriously. We are not taking the Bible seriously when we refuse to see it for what it is and attribute some magical quality to a text that is otherwise valuable as a record of the human quest for God and the human attempt to make sense out of our lives here.