#1john — Public Fediverse posts

I never thought I would be writing a post like this. Before I became a Christian, I never cared enough about the Bible to write such a post, and after I became a Christian, I quickly became convinced that it was inerrantly inspired, so that any errors that may exist in particular copies or particular translations were the results of human sloppiness, not part of the original Bible. I knew that there were some difficulties with the text (e.g. 1 Samuel 13:1: how old was Saul when he became king?), but those were obviously not the original state of the text. I remember seeing other peoples’ lists of “errors in the Bible” and thinking that most of them I could explain rather readily, but that I could supply a more challenging list if I were motivated to do so. I wasn’t.

But now I am writing such a post, for a different reason. This post isn’t motivated by any animosity toward the Bible itself, nor to those who believe what it says. But in the context in which I now find myself, a context in which the group of people most likely to spread lies, to oppose public health measures, and to advocate violent responses to unfavorable election results are also the group of people most likely to say that they believe the Bible, I have been struggling to maintain my faith that the Bible is true. Certain passages to me have come to seem false, not passages about historical facts (for which we rarely have contrary evidence) so much as assertions about spiritual realities. And I have no one with whom I can discuss these issues (I know only one person willing to discuss them, but she can’t discuss them without damaging her health), so I am posting them here hoping that perhaps there is someone out there who can talk some sense into me. I welcome correction on any point, though I can no longer ignore the realities of the society around me, namely that conservative white Christians are the deadliest group in my society. And while I can readily acknowledge that there is so much we don’t know, I can’t pretend that the evidence, such as it is, favors what I used to believe about the Bible.

Of course, in arguing that the Bible contains errors, we must recognize the complexities of interpretation. It is obvious that many interpretations of a particular text may be erroneous without the text itself being in error. Indeed, John 21:23 calls attention to this, as some early Christians were interpreting John 21:22 as implying that the “beloved disciple” would not die (an interpretation maintained today by Mormons, apparently), but the following verse indicates that that is not a necessary interpretation of Jesus’s words. So for someone to conclude that the Bible itself is in error, one must consider all plausible interpretations, and weigh the unlikelihood of progressively less plausible interpretations against the unlikelihood of the Bible being false. (Since some people believe that it is impossible for the Bible to be false, then they will believe interpretations that strike me as very implausible. I will refer to some below.) Nevertheless, there are some places where I cannot come up with any plausible interpretation of the biblical text, and therefore where it seems to me, from my limited perspective, that there are spiritual errors in the Bible.

Christians do not continue to sin?

1 John 3:9 says, “No one who is born of God will continue to sin.” This is a famous verse indicating the incompatibility of Christian life and continuing sinfulness. But it is tricky to reconcile with reality, and comparing different versions indicates numerous small variations in interpretation. Of course we all know that Christians do sin (as affirmed, for example, by 1 John 1:8 and 10!), so this must be saying something else. That is why it is important to interpret the present tense verse as “continues to sin” rather than a simple present “ever sins.” But even so, we see lots of Christians continuing to sin, for example, by continuing to spread lies that extensive voter fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election, or by continuing to oppose life-saving public health protocols. One might be tempted to defend this verse by saying it refers only to Jesus, who was sinless! But that is impossible in context: the following verse says, “By this (i.e. lack of sin) it may be seen who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not do what is right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother” (1 John 3:10). We are clearly talking about plural people, more than Jesus alone. Well okay, someone might say that this makes clear that the election deniers and public health opposers are not of God, not really children of God or begotten by him. I’m open to that view. But if so, then we run into difficulty with 1 John 5:1: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” This sets a rather low bar for people to count as born of God. So in a society where the most consistently evil people are those who believe Jesus is the Christ, it is not possible for both 1 John 3:9 and 1 John 5:1 to be true. Either 1 John 3:9 is false, and people “born of God” do continue in sin, or such people are not “born of God” at all (as per 1 John 3:10), despite believing Jesus is the Christ, and 1 John 5:1 is false. If such a society exists, these verses are not universally true in all contexts. And such a society does exist, where I live.

Ask and it will be given to you?

Matthew 7:7 famously reports Jesus encouraging prayer by saying, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” This is not my experience. I have asked for certain outcomes in prayer and not received them. There are various tactics to try to defend the veracity of these verses. For example, it is often noticed here, as in 1 John 3, that the imperative verbs are present tense, implying a continuing aspect: “Keep asking… keep seeking… keep knocking.” The idea is that if you haven’t received it yet, you just need to keep on asking. Such an approach seeks to make the verses unfalsifiable, since there is no point at which one can claim to have asked enough, but unfortunately the idea can still be falsified by certain changes of situation that preclude further asking. I remember when a pair of very premature twins were born, and we were praying for both of them to recover, and one did while the other died. The end. When Donald Trump caught Covid in September 2020, I prayed that he would recover from the disease and repent of his Covid-minimization. He recovered from the disease, but never repented of his minimization of the disease, and his post-election-day rallies to spread his election lies led to the biggest spike in Covid deaths to that point in the pandemic. And it’s not just me: Paul prayed for healing from some affliction, and was reportedly told by God to stop praying (2 Corinthians 12:8-9).

Some people try to rescue verses like this by claiming that “if you pray, you will get an answer, but that answer might be no.” But in fact this verse and the many others like it (e.g. Matthew 18:19; 21:22; John 14:13-14; 15:7, 16; 16:23-24, and others not by Jesus) are not saying “every prayer will be answered.” They are consistently saying “you will receive what you ask for.”

Some people, no doubt reflecting some of the “if” statements in the parallel promises, suggest that if prayer is unanswered, then there is some defect in the prayer. For example, James 4:3 says, “You ask and you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you can spend it on your pleasures.” Mathew 18:19 suggests that people who agree on prayer will receive what they agree about, although it doesn’t say that a single person praying will therefore not be heard. John 14:13-14 and 16:23-24 suggest asking in the name of Jesus, hence that addendum to many Christians’ prayer. Matthew 21:22 suggests praying in faith, and John 15:7 and 16 suggest “abiding in Christ.” None of these are mentioned in Matthew 7:7, but perhaps they are taken to be implicit. The problem for me is that even when I have prayed in ways that agree with all of those requirements, I still have not received what I prayed for. Either the promises are false, or there is some further requirement not revealed in scripture. But if this promise of granted prayer is never actualized due to some nitpicky defect in every fallen human prayer or person, then it is not a meaningful promise after all. It does not defend the truth of the promise to make it irrelevant.

One last approach may be more successful, after a fashion, and it is that in fact ancient Christian authors like Augustine and John Chrysostom did not understand this verse to be a promise for prayer to be fulfilled in general. Perhaps they took their clue from a gospel parallel. Matthew’s report of the Sermon on the Mount continues, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:9-11). Yet in the parallel passage, Luke identifies the “good gifts” more specifically: “If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13). Whatever their inspiration, Augustine and Chrysostom interpreted Matthew 7:7 to apply only to requests to God for a Christian character (cf. James 1:5). On this reading, these verses are not a general promise that prayers will be answered, but only prayers for godliness will be reliably answered. This might make the verse true (although I must say I have observed many Christians who seem to have prayed to God for a godly character and not received it!), but in any case it does not mean what most Christians today think it means. On this reading, if true, the verses are not a general incentive to pray, and one would have to take a similar deflecting defense to all the many promises of answered prayer. Yet this type of redefinition of the scope of the promise does not seem to me successful with Jesus’s parable of the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8), which Jesus interprets as promising that God will “bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night” (v. 7). Yet we see injustices perpetrated against Christians (especially Black American Christians) that are never redressed (the Tulsa Race Massacre and the lynching of Emmett Till, for example). So I don’t think that this approach, despite its prestigious patristic pedigree, can rescue these promises of answered prayer from being simply false. I would vastly prefer to believe that promises ascribed to Christ were always true.

“There is no peace, the Lord said, for the wicked” (Isaiah 49:22; 57:21)

Jared Kushner, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn might provide evidence to the contrary. Indeed, complaining about the peaceful state of the wicked is a theme elsewhere in the Bible. Jeremiah complained to God, “Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?” (Jeremiah 12:1). Job complained that the poor “glean the vineyard of the wicked man” (Job 24:6). Psalm 73 complains, “I was envious of the arrogant, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no pangs; their bodies are sound and sleek” (Psalm 73:3-4), among many other benefits of being wicked. So I have no idea what these verses in Isaiah could mean, when so many other parts of the Bible testify to the opposite.

Is hell eternal?

I used to believe that hell was eternal. I took no pleasure from the idea, since I was a convert to Christianity who has not been followed into the religion by almost any of my relatives. But it seemed to me that the biblical testimony is clear enough (thinking especially of Isaiah 66:24, quoted by Jesus in Mark 9:48 and parallels, but also Matthew 25:46), and I believed the Bible to be inerrant. I had and have no use for the wishful thinking of people who believe to be true what they wish were true, regardless of the evidence. But I was convinced.

My conviction on the matter has been shaken, in part because of the reality that in a society where the churches are the most evil people around, if God welcomes the churches to eternal life and condemns the non-Christians to eternal hell, then God is participating in wickedness. And if God sends people to hell who have not received revelation (the problem of “those who have not heard”), I now see that that makes God simply unjust. To use an analogy from my line of work, if I as a teacher give students a test at the end of the semester, and some of them I gave instructions and others I did not give any instructions, and those who did not get instructions get an F when they fail the exam, there would be complaints to the school, and rightly so! God is a better teacher than I am.

But reasoning by analogy can easily be faulty. Spurred by such considerations (which I blogged about here), I then reexamined the biblical evidence, and found a plurality of views on what happens to people after death in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The clearest contradictions are the passages in the Old Testament which assert that the dead are not raised (Job 7:9; Psalm 88:10; Isaiah 26:14 but see v.19), and the debate over whether the dead are conscious (Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10; Psalm 6:5; 115:17; Isaiah 38:18-19 vs. Ezekiel 32:22-32; Job 26:5; Isaiah 8:19). And it is possible that the punishment place is permanent without every individual experiencing it eternally, which may suggest that the problem is not the falsity of the text but instead the interpretation. Only “the beast” and “the false prophet” of Revelation are explicitly said to be tormented “day and night forever and ever” (Rev. 20:10), though Isaiah seems to include “those who rebelled against me” among those suffering eternally (Isaiah 66:24). I think that sending most of humanity to eternal punishment would make God unjust and sadistic. I don’t know what to think instead; universal salvation, to my mind, seems equally to founder on statements that God is just. So it seems to me that the Bible is wrong when it speaks of unending torment of the wicked (or wrong when it speaks of God as just, I suppose, but I hope not).

Are God’s Attributes Obvious?

Paul wrote to the Romans, “Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). It is important to his thought that people who do not believe in God are without excuse, because otherwise God would be unjust for condemning the faithless, which is the flip side of Paul’s message of salvation by faith. Now, I have above average education in the philosophy of religion, and there are long debates about whether any argument can demonstrate that God even exists, much less what attributes God might have. Indeed, it seems to me, as someone who wants the existence and attributes of God to be obvious, and who is smarter than the average bear, that I am still unable to frame a convincing argument without simply presuming the conclusion (circular reasoning). The closest I can come is an argument that a powerful personal entity seems to exist and/or intervene sometimes and much of the rest of the time pay no attention or not exist. What is obvious to someone is largely a function of the culture they grew up with, and I did not grow up in a Christian household or Christian culture. Paul did grow up in a household that believed in the God of the Bible, and he (like most ancient people) never seems to have given much thought to the possibility that no god exists. I’m not saying that Paul and the Bible are wrong for asserting that God exists, but it seems clear to me that divine attributes are in fact not universally obvious, as required by Paul’s line of argumentation in Romans 1.

The Book of Revelation

Some parts of the book of Revelation take a lot of explaining to make it not false, not so much for the passages that are obscure, but for the ones that are too clear.  In Revelation 22:7, Jesus says, “I am coming quickly” (cf. 1:3; 12:12).  It has been almost 2000 years.  It seems to me that the only possible way for this to be held true is through a move like C. S. Lewis wrote in the voice of his Christ-character Aslan: “I call all time soon.”  But if that is the case, then “quickly” or “soon” simply becomes meaningless, and the only reason to include the term is deceptive.  There’s also the clear problem that the numeration of the twelve tribes of Israel in Revelation 7 has both Joseph and Joseph’s son Manasseh, which can be explained by understanding Joseph with reference to Ephraim, but then there is also Levi, so Dan gets left out of the list, with no meaning ascribed to that omission.  If “the time is near” (so Rev. 1:3), then the drying up of the Euphrates never happened (Rev. 16:12).  There never was an army of two hundred million cavalry, and now horses are not used in warfare, so there is never likely to be such an army in the future (Rev. 9:16), unless I suppose there is somehow a major technological collapse without a demographic collapse but with a horse-breeding explosion (that would be a miracle).  “The great city which has dominion over the kings of the earth” (Rev. 17:18) was clearly Rome and Rome’s empire, but there were many more emperors of Rome than the seven or eight anticipated in 17:9-11, nor indeed was pagan Rome destroyed until after it had converted to Christianity (Rev. 18:4-8).  While Rome, after Christianization, has been captured, it’s “smoke” does not “go up forever and ever” (Rev. 19:3), nor did the destruction of Rome signal the beginning of the reign of God, in any discernible sense (Rev. 19:6).  Nor could there be a city fifteen hundred miles square at Jerusalem, to say nothing of fifteen hundred miles high (Rev. 21:16).  For all these reasons, it looks like the book of Revelation was simply a false prophecy.

Conclusion

I welcome correction and pushback on any of these points. But it seems to me that the easiest explanation is simply that the Bible contains erroneous theology and spiritual claims at certain points. Nor can one rescue the situation by finding an infallible canon within the canon: one might note that I think there are errors in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, in the words ascribed to Jesus as well as the words of Paul and the catholic epistles and Revelation. There is no portion of the Bible that I think is simply true in all that it teaches.

And if that is the case, then believing the Bible simply because it says something is foolish. The theological claims of the Bible need to be evaluated. But this leads to a major difficulty, in that most theological claims in the Bible are not able to be verified from any other source. The bulk of the Bible’s teaching about God and human spirituality therefore exists in a limbo where it is neither falsifiable nor verifiable. In such a framework, it is all too easy for individuals to take the parts they like, and in the absence of a solid anchor which can be reasoned about, most Christians’ theology is reduced to wishful thinking. I don’t like this conclusion; in fact, I find it horrifying. But at present I see no escape from it.

https://theophiletos.wordpress.com/2023/12/03/spiritual-errors-in-the-bible/

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