eBible Questions 1-What is the Bible?

   We think of the Bible as a single book, perhaps bound in quality leather, with gilded pages.  Some treat this book with awed reverence, while others do not mind if the book gathers dust on a coffee table.  But what is on the inside? and how did it get there?   The Bible was never a golden tablet, etched by some divine laser, parachuted down out of heaven as a finished product.  The word biblia means something like "library," although the image of an oak shelf with books isn't right either.  Very few of the items in the Bible were composed the way books are composed, and they certainly don't fit together neatly the way a nicely published series of books might.  Open the Bible, and you find something far better than golden tablets from the sky, far more precious than nicely bound volumes on a shelf, and more valuable than some ouija board that gives easy answers to all our questions.

   We find, spilling out of the pages of the Bible, a mind-boggling mixture of all kinds of materials, something like the Sunday morning newspaper:  before Church, pick up your paper in the driveway and you'll find stuffed inside news, opinion, ads, features, comics, stories, advice, games, obituaries, lists, horoscope, coupons, reviews - and you're not sure you'll ever get to it all.  What do we find in the Bible?  Stories, historical narratives, genealogical tables, legends, erotic love poetry, songs, somebody else's mail, prayers, jokes, utterly biased biographies, inexplicable visions, excerpts of sermons, tales of dysfunctional families, legends, legal statutes, cooking directions, ballads, a child-rearing manual, and more.  How loving, how tender, how wise was God not to give us antiseptic shining tablets with timeless truths, but something more real, more human, so we might comfortably slip inside the pages and discover that God is not found in some ethereal, invisible realm just above the clouds, but right down here in the reality of mundane life.  The Bible's diverse, earthy contents tutor us in the way God pokes around relentlessly and finds us in the middle of our family squabbles, our falling in love, trying to get some sleep, humming a favorite song, making supper, our wobbly attempts to pray, our plodding efforts to be good.

     And like the morning paper, the Bible really is news.  It's not the same old same old.  This news isn't the monotonous repetition of what we hear all the time in this world; this news isn't a mirror that reflects back to me my biases and preferences.  Something decisive has happened; the world has shifted on its axis, and you miss it until you immerse yourself in the pages of this seemingly haphazard clump of writings that are the Bible.  Nothing is ever the same, and when we get it, we won't even notice the screen door slamming behind us as we take off after the God who chose such a clever way to connect with us.

eBible Questions   2: How was the Bible formed?

   The Bible is different from the Koran (Qur'an), the sacred scriptures of Islam, which claim to be the direct dictation of God's words spoken to Muhammad, written down verbatim by a scribe.  In a future email, we will talk about what it means to think of the Bible as "inspired by God," but for now we can say that the Bible began to be formed long before anything was written down.  Introducing his story about Jesus, Luke tells us that he has done considerable research and wants to put down in writing an "orderly account" of what happened fifty years earlier.  The entire Bible was written by dozens of such people, obsessed with one pretty important question:   What happened?  Something extraordinary, something inexplicable - and over time, lots of things, many kinds of things happened.  People were awestruck.  A man felt profoundly questioned.  A woman experienced a tender, mysterious embrace.  Against desperate odds, the tide of battle turned.  Moses went on a long retreat on a cloud-curtained mountain, and came back visibly shaken, carrying messages.  The lad David toppled the giant Goliath with nothing but a slingshot; yet as a grownup he forgot God a few times.  A shout was raised in worship, so palpable was God's presence in the temple.  A teenaged Jeremiah opened his mouth uttering (as if possessed) "Thus saith the Lord."  The rain fell, the crop came in, our hungry children got to eat.  Mother survived childbirth.  God intervened.  God was noticed.

    Words were inadequate at first.  Are mere words ever sufficient to capture what it was like to come face to face with God?  Mary's settled life was totally disrupted by an angel, and an unexpected child was born.  She didn't grab a pen, or type up anything.  Like 95% of the population, she probably was illiterate.  Instead, she "kept all these things and pondered them in her heart" (Luke 2:19).  Jacob wrestled all night, and could not fathom what had happened for a long time (was it a man? an angel? God himself?) - and nothing was ever the same (Genesis 32).  Time passed; more pondering.  Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth; Jacob found his estranged brother Esau.  They whispered what had happened.  Years later they repeated a maturing story, more deeply understood, to others.  Rumor spread.  Inquirers asked.  The story spread further, by the campfire, during long days of work out in the fields, as parents tucked their children into bed, when worshippers gathered.  Letters were written.

   So, how was the Bible formed?  God formed it, but not via dictation.  God formed it by being God, by getting involved with people for whom God's presence in life was dizzying, transforming, healing.  The Bible is not some author imposing his ideas on others, but a report of people who knew God, and what they pondered, passed along word of mouth for years, centuries, and then finally committed to writing - as we will see in eBibleQuestions 3.

eBible Questions 3: Who wrote the Bible?

     So, the Bible reports what happened with God decades or centuries before anything was written down, and we don't have "authors" who got clever ideas and decided to write about them - so the question of who did the writing seems relatively unimportant. Jesus wrote nothing (except in the sand!). Abraham, Ruth, and Solomon never published anything. Paul dictated to a companion (with the exception of the end of Galatians when he picked up the parchment himself and wrote "See the large letters I am now writing with my own hand!").

The writing of the Bible materials was almost an afterthought, and we are grateful that some flash of insight (provoked by God?) nudged people to get it down in print for posterity. Imagine a world before the internet, before newspapers, before the printing press. In ancient times, very few people could read or write. The printed word was expensive: materials like papyrus had to be imported from Egypt; scribes labored long hours applying ink by hand. Ancient people were a bit suspicious of the written word: Socrates once complained that words on paper get into the hands "not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it... When it is ill-treated and unfairly abused... it is unable to defend or help itself."

Back then, no one had ever heard of (much less expected) a verbatim transcript of exactly what happened. And yet, since people had no printed record on which to rely, memories were strong. Studies show that in pre-literature cultures, the ability of the average person to remember with great clarity exactly what was said or done would amaze us. So the fact that stories and poems were passed word of mouth for decades and centuries before finding a home on a scroll is no criticism of their reliability. What is a scroll? Papyrus was fashioned into long rolls, maybe 10 inches high but up to 25 feet long (like the famous Isaiah scroll, found among the Dead Sea scrolls). A "book" could only be so long, because the technology was limited, and a scroll had to be manageable.

When Jesus stood up in the synagogue of Nazareth to read from Isaiah (Luke 4:16), he lifted a rather heavy object, and it took him a while to unroll it to the proper location for the day's reading! Little wonder Christians were the first people in the world to begin making the codex: a stack of individual pages, stitched together like a book, for they were eager to flip through from one passage to another. Since few could read, most Bible writings were read out loud when people gathered for worship. Israelites thronged into the temple precincts, and heard a priest trumpet in his loudest voice the story of God delivering the people from Egypt. The first Christians huddled in the home of a member, and listened enthralled as a letter from Paul, or the vision of Revelation was read. Perhaps for us to "get" the Bible, we need to hear it spoken out loud, and in the company of others.