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4.0 out of 5 stars
Back to the basics,
By
This review is from: What Is the Bible? (Hardcover)
There are three good reasons to read Karl Lofmark's "What is the Bible?" even if you are indifferent to religion in general and to Judaism and Christianity in particular. First, the response of infidels to the political challenge of Islam necessarily requires an engagement with the Muslim scriptures. Few or no infidels will accept the claims to divine inspiration of the Koran, but fair dealing then requires an equally skeptical look at the Bible. Second, there is a significant element in American politics that bases its claims on the divinity and supremacy of the Bible. This is associated most explicitly with the Dominionists who have colonized the rightmost wing of the Republican Party and (to the extent that it is unconnected with the Republicans) the Tea Party, but it is an undercurrent of a wider political consciousness. It is likely that this sentiment, like salafist interpretations of Islam, is incompatible with a functioning democracy. Third, a larger and larger fraction of Americans have little to no direct exposure to the Bible, either because they belong to traditions that don't read the Bible, or because even though nominally Christian they belong to homogenized and pasteurized sects that pay little or no attention to what until recently were considered basic doctrines, like eternal punishment or the Resurrection. Though raised in a Bible-suffused western culture, their secondhand impressions of what the Bible is may be very far from what`s really in there. I would also contend that almost all Bible-believing Christians who do think they know what is in the Bible do not really. It is nearly impossible to approach the Bible the way I long ago approached the Mahabharata. In college I spent some time in the hospital. My dormitory roommate, who was from India, kindly lent me his copy of the Mahabharata, which is what he turned to for comfort in times of trouble. I started reading it without any preconceptions, which is the way Lofmark wishes us to approach the Bible. This requires a real effort, and in my experience for many American Christians is impossible, given the saturation of a certain view they had imposed on them from their earliest age. Lofmark calls himself a rationalist, not the happiest name for what he is, which is a freethinker. Not all freethinkers are rationalists, but it is fair to say that Lofmark is. He gets in the face of the Fundamentalists from the start: "When you read the Bible, you will find it full of things which are very hard to believe," not to mention impossible to reconcile with contradictory passages in other parts of the Bible. The early chapters deal with who wrote the books of the Bible, where, when and in which languages. Not a line of what the Fundamentalists call the "original autographs" survives, which sounds like surprising carelessness in handling divine gifts, but -- although Lofmark doesn't mention it -- original autographs of any ancient texts are scarce. Almost everything we have is from copies, in the case of the Bible books, rather remote copies from the originals. Lofmark does make the excellent point that there is a mass of texts written in the same place, time and language as the Bible, on the same subjects, that were early judged not to be divine. This little book is too short to go into it, but the hint that the selection was either arbitrary or partisan or both is well founded. The argument about what is divine has not stopped. "The Five Gospels" by the Jesus Seminar attempts to determine (by a sort of audience applause meter) which statements by Jesus are authentic. (My own view is, none of them, since I do not believe any individual Jesus is the subject of the New Testament stories, which are more likely to be a collection of current tall tales, any more than an individual Paul Bunyan performed miracles in the northwoods that were related by his admirers some time later. (If I am right, then the best the Jesus Seminar -- which comprises a large proportion of professional American biblologists -- can manage is to tease out one thread from among the various kinds of tall tales that were current. It is useful to think of the 1920s, not nearly so remote from us as Jesus, if he was real, was from the writers of the Jesus stories, and how all the famous stories from then attach themselves to either Dorothy Parker or Will Rogers. Anyhow, the Jesus seminarians are no more able to agree than American Idol judges.) Lofmark comments that, "Paul appears to know nothing about the life of Jesus as told in the gospels," which is the sort of obvious truth that you are not likely to hear from a preacher. He has a sense of humor, saying of Revelations that it is "so obscure and mysterious that it might be reasonable to call it anything by a revelation." It would also be a feat of heroic reverse engineering to determine what criteria were used by the bishops and scholars who settled which books really were divine that could encompass both Revelations and Matthew. For people who know little about the Bible and are curious about it, the first half of "What Is the Bible?" will provide a handy, compact answer to the superficial questions about this book -- rather as if one wanted to know the background of the Koran and turned to the humanist Ibn Warraq's "The Origins of the Koran." The second half of the book is a defense of humanism against Christianity. The chapter title, "Does the Bible teach moral truth?" gives a flavor of that, and by now it will be no surprise to learn that Lofmark's short answer is, no.
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