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What about the Bible?

 

Continuing with examining the bible …

 

There are different stages to inspiration, and different ways of inspiring.  Unlike the Quran, which Mohammad claimed the Angel Gabriel directly dictated to him, no one has ever claimed God dictated any part of the bible to them.  However, it is believed that people have at times written documents intended to relate the words of God.  The prophetic books for example, are full of quotations from prophets stating, “The Lord said…”.  They were intended to tell the people what the prophet thought God was saying, and have that recorded.

 

So that was God-inspired?

In a matter of speaking, yes.  Compare that directness with the book of Joshua.  Many scholars believe that the book of Joshua is an allegory, attempting to describe not a military conquest put in a historical context, but rather religious conversion which fails through its people, yet nevertheless broadly succeeds because of Yahweh – God Almighty.  The understanding that Joshua depicts military conquest as a metaphor for spiritual triumph over forces opposed to the will and nature of God was written by an early Christian scholar named Origen (early to mid 200’s A.D.), so it’s not just modern scholars who believe this.  Yet the book of Joshua has also been interpreted as a justification for murder, carnage, and warfare.  This brings us to the second stage of inspiration.

 

What’s that?

The Receptive Community.  After someone has written the words, a community must adopt it as foundational to its identity – and how it is to be interpreted.

For more information on the complexity of Joshua and many other early books of the Bible (what we call the Old Testament), a good resource is Opening Israel’s Scriptures, by Ellen F. Davis.

 

Does it make sense that though some writers of our bible would feel more direct inspiration, they all could be inspired by God?   Pick a book of the bible – what do you think the motivation of the original writer may have been? 

 

 

+David