The Whacky Bible

While I knew that the bible was a work heavily edited while handed down over the years, I was not aware of both the historical and editorial extent to which it has been altered. i thought the whole interpretation and editing thing was a post- Jesus phenomenon. It was not.

Did you know that the Old Testament as we know it is actually the synthesis of about four separate documents that were oftentimes contradictory to one another? I sure as hell didn't. But it's pretty wild. 

For example, the editor (or more technically, the redactor), had two conflicting (at least for modern readers) accounts of the creation story. Rather than combining them, the dude just lays them out one after another in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. However, for the flood story, he divides up two separate, conflicting accounts, and then mixes them together to make a single, cohesive story. Then elsewhere, he takes two versions of the same story and presents them as separate events, like the story of Mo-dawg (known as Moses in some circles) getting water from the rock (Exodus 17 and Numbers 20). Whoa.

And to blow little Tommy's mind even further, it turns out that the whole Christian conception of God as "master of the universe who at the same time is intimately concerned with the individual" does not rise out of a single community's encounter with God, but is rather due to this redactor guy's parsing job. One Jewish community understood God as a distant, cosmic, lawgiver while another community thought of God as being an up-close-and-personal kind of deity. Basically what happened was the redactor said, "Sweet" (that is a direct translation from the Dead Sea Scrolls) and combined the two views into the notion of God we hold at present. Whoa.

So then, one might ask, what does it mean to be authentically Christian in the face of learning that all the "knowledge" we have have about God handed down to us through our "sacred"scripture is largely the result of editorial decisions?

That, my friend, is a good question.