Sacred Text

Sacred Text

What about the Word of God?
Evidently the angel Gabriel recited The Koran to Mohammad when he was on a mountain. When Mohammad came down from the mountain he recited what the angel had told him to a scribe. This may not be quite right but the idea is that the word went from God to Gabriel to Mohammad to scribe. The Koran is just three degrees removed from God, so one would suppose that The Koran says pretty close to what God wanted.
The same is true of the Book of Mormon. The Words went from God to an angel and tablets of gold, I’m not sure of the order, and finally to Joseph Smith who wrote them down; Joseph Smith doing double duty as both the reader of the tablets and the scribe. The Book of Mormon is also three degrees removed from God and should also be pretty close to what God wanted written.
The books are quite different but are they so different that they contradict each other? Is it possible that both The Koran and The Book of Mormon were dictated by the same god?
Divine texts share a common property. They are all written in such a way as to allow a wide variety of interpretations. This rather complements the human fascination with interpretation. Humans can interpret the Word of God in such a way that the different texts complement each other or in such a way that the texts call for the destruction of any other God; and shades of gray between these two extremes.
I’m not sure about the Vedas. I have been told that the Vedas were existent before the gods and that in the beginning humans were smart enough to remember them. But humans degraded to a point where they couldn’t remember the Vedas and had to invent writing so they could write them down. This seems to beg the question as to where the Vedas came from since they were always there. But this is just what I was told and there may be other versions. I don’t consider the Eastern versions of gods, not because they aren’t cool but because I am, at the moment, considering monotheism.
Except for the tablets on which The Ten Commandments were written, it seems pretty well agreed that the Torah and The New Testament were written by people. The degree of separation from God is more difficult to determine. If I suppose the author of a particular part of The Bible was divinely inspired then the author was, therefore, memorizing or writing exactly what God wanted. The degree of separation between the words we read today and the original words depends on the number of times they were passed on orally and written until the earliest example we have of the written word. I’ll suppose that from the printing press on there wasn’t much error in reproduction.
I suppose the copyists could be divinely inspired but then copy wouldn’t change from generation to generation or recitation to recitation” unless God had reasons for letting a certain number of both random and intentional errors into the copies. Actually, God must have realized that there would be differences between copies. Perhaps God made the meaning of the words remain even after copying errors. As language developed there would be more versions of The Bible. God must have anticipated this.
By the time God started on The Bible, God must have had a pretty good idea of what humanity was like. Cain had killed Abel and the flood had occurred. It was evidently important to leave the story of Noah to following generations, that the first thing Noah after the flood subsided was build an altar and the next thing was plant grapes so he could make wine and get drunk. Perhaps God is pointing out something that is an important universal characteristic of humanity. Perhaps the inner message of these stories is a set of survival instructions. Hidden in the words is the knowledge of how humans could get along. Perhaps Biblical scholars could try to find that message. But God wouldn’t have restricted the knowledge to scholars; the knowledge would be there for anybody. Since copying errors don't affect meaning, the meaning must be in the stories. But that meaning would have to be in all ways to interpret the stories from all over the world. The search would be for nuggets that were common to all stories...which would require knowing all the stories. That should keep some people off the streets and out of the pool halls for awhile.
While the writers of the Torah are often known only by the word they used for God, much more is known about the writers of the New Testament. There were conflicts because there were different memories of how events happened and what was said. But maybe that was part of the lesson.

Instead of starting with an estimate of the veracity of The Bible, I start with what I am reasonably sure is correct. It was written by people.
I can read The Bible and see that it was written by people who were articulate. In my opinion much of the writing shows insight and depth and wisdom. Inspired by God or not, The Bible is a worthwhile read.
So why isn’t that enough? If Jesus really is The Son of God, then the words attributed to Him, the Sermon on the Mount, for example, should be given serious attention, but if Jesus is just a guy like, say, Billy Graham, then His words can more or less be ignored depending on how one feels at the moment of consideration.




Suppose that in some way God created humans. God surely must have foreseen that humans were going to develop scientifically, that they would multiply and fill the earth. Surely God must have foreseen that increasing population and technology would make the way humans lived their lives be quite different after thousands of years. If God were going to give humans something to help them through thousands of years, God had to write a book that would be useful beyond the time of Moses.
When we read a prohibition against eating pigs, it was there because that was a helpful prohibition before refrigeration. But after refrigeration it isn’t so helpful and we see that there is a deeper meaning, it means don’t ingest things that are bad for you, like meth. The pig represents things that may be harmful if you eat them. If the hook worm problem is controlled, eating bacon is no longer prohibited because it is no longer harmful. That prohibition in The Bible should now mean, "Don’t smoke crack.”
God knows, we could use a little direction now. Surely God, who guided the hand of the authors, would make a book that would be useful until humans could survive without it. Come to think of it, he would guide the hands that wrote the Vedas and The Koran. I don’t suppose that every book is inspired but who knows?
The progress of humanity is measured by how well it sees that the books were all inspired by the same god. Or by how well humanity finds the deep insight to find the pigs in their own lives. And maybe there is meaning behind the act of caring about trichinosis.
The stories grow in meaning as humanity ages and human minds expand to see an ever growing meaning in the stories. Would God write a book whose meaning was static? Would God write a book with just one meaning or would God write a book whose meaning grew with the growing experience of successive generations? Maybe God planned for a new edition every so often.
Would God intend the story of Cain and Abel to have the same meaning ten thousand years ago as it does today? Would God intend the meaning of “brother” to mean the same now as it did ten thousand years ago? Would God be so ordinary? Maybe there is lesson in the fact that there are four Gospels and not one.


The mystery of The Bible is how it is ever changing, how each reader reads their own Bible. Surely God meant it to be that way. God knows what humanity is like and wrote The Book for them. Is God’s point in inspiring The Bible to lead to conflict or to accommodation.

There is a concept of consolidation of information which was told to me by a student. The idea is that when you first look at bits of information, each bit is a separate instance. When I start teaching max/min problems the student sees a separate instance in each problem that I put on the board. Each step in working the problem is a separate instance. But I see max/min problems as a single instance. From my point of view, I’m working the same problem over and over. The student sees ideas flying at him thick and fast, I see throwing only one idea.
After continued study calculus becomes a single instance of one idea. The single idea carries all the information.
My friend said that God was that entity that had consolidated everything, the universe into one instance.
It is possible that the consolidation of The Bible into one instance is the path to understanding life. It is possible that that “instance” holds the meaning of it all.
With this possibility at hand, I wonder why sacred writings are read to find differences and not commonalities. Why are the scriptures read in such a way as to ensure perpetual conflict?
Well, The Bible points out that humans are an unruly bunch and not all that quick to learn.