4 HUGE Lies Christians Tell About The Bible

Here's something you probably didn't expect me to write: there's something beautiful about the Bible. For all its faults—of which there are many—and for all the harm it's been used to do—which is vast—there remains something stirring and poetic about an ancient book that is still read and beloved today.

From the very first words to the very last verse, the writings of the Bible document the best and worst of human action and belief. It is a work of literature that can do tremendous harm—but also tremendous good.

This uncomfortable fact is usually lost on those of us who left the religion about Jesus—Christianity—in search of the religion of Jesus. (The former is the invention of rich men trying to control humanity, the latter is the radical and world-changing spirituality and ethical living preached by an ancient prophet.)

Usually when we read or think about the Bible, we are too often confronted with its worst aspects: words that have been used like weapons against us, and the hypocrites who claim every word to be literally true—except the part about loving your neighbor and giving away all your money. Our trauma triggers our own ancient defense mechanisms—which served us well at one point, but may not be doing so now—concealing the beauty this work can reveal if only we can get past the bullshit the church has put in our way.1

And it has spread plenty of bullshit about the Bible. This week, I want to take a look at four specific lies Christianity tells about the Bible, what the truth is, why the church needs these lies to keep working, and what we can possibly gain from reading the Bible on its own terms—instead of a religion’s.

One of the most maddening things conservative Christians do—and a clear tell that they've never engaged the text honestly—is declare that the Bible is their favorite book, as if it were one book at all.

Actually, it’s not—and it’s right there in the name “The Bible.” The Bible is a collection of writings, and the word comes from the Greek biblia, which means “the books,” plural. It’s sort of like saying The Library.

It would be like asking what your favorite Beatles song is and saying Abbey Road. Clearly you don’t know what you’re talking about, because Abbey Road is not one song, but a collection of songs—just as the Bible is not one writing but a collection of writings.

But unlike Abbey Road, each of the writings of the Bible have different authors. (I double checked: almost all the songs on Abbey Road were written by both Lennon and McCartney, except three that were written by George or Ringo.2) And each writing was done in a different location, with different audiences and—wait for it—different purposes.

Perhaps some Christians refuse to acknowledge this, because if the Bible is a collection of writings, that means somebody had to put them together. Looked at through this lens, the Bible becomes much more human—and much more prone to error.

Because the 70 (or so) writings of the Bible3 were written by different authors, for different audiences, at different times and in different places, they don’t always agree with each other. Christianity—sometimes stupidly—wants you to ignore this fact.

These inconsistencies exist in both major and minor form, across the entire text. Starting small: who was Moses’s father-in-law? The Hebrew Bible (the more correct term for the Old Testament) gives us three answers, sometimes just verses apart: Exodus 2:18 says it’s Reuel, Exodus 3:1 says it’s Jethro, while Numbers 10:29 and Judges 4:11 say it’s Hobab.

The willfully ignorant will argue that it’s one man with three names (or two names and a title, or a title, a name, and a brother-in-law), but most scholars know otherwise. We can believe fundamentalists’ convoluted-but-not-implausible theory, or the simpler answer: this is a contradiction that needn’t be explained away. It just exists.

Scholars see this as evidence that, just like the Bible itself, the first five books of the Bible (called the Pentateuch) are actually several pieces of writing smashed together with minimal editing. This theory—called the Documentary Hypothesis—also explains the two contradictory stories of creation in Genesis 1 and 2, and the almost unreadable narrative of Noah in Genesis 6–8.4

On the New Testament side, a minor discrepancy can be found over the question, which apostle was charged with spreading the gospel to the gentiles? In Acts, Peter declares, “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe” (Acts 15:7). Paul, however, wrote, "… I had been entrusted with the gospel for the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel for the circumcised" (Gal. 2:7).

If we can resist the urge to explain it away, we see a clear contradiction in the text. We can also hypothesize about which account is more likely true, but the honest move is simpler: just admit there’s a disagreement here.

Why most Christians probably can’t do that, however, is because there are major disagreements in the text over theology, too. Two very famous and important verses run headlong into each other, and the disagreement they helped fuel literally produced wars.

Most Protestants are familiar with Paul’s famous thesis in Romans, that “a person is justified by faith apart from works” (Romans 3:28). This argument is the basis for Martin Luther’s whole theology, which rips away the authority and sacraments of the Roman Catholic church in favor of sola fide—justification or salvation through faith alone.

Only—that verse stands in direct opposition to James 2:24: “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” This verse was instrumental to the Counter Reformation, which was used to justify the church’s elaborate rituals, sacraments, and—ultimately—authority. James was Exhibit A that Luther was wrong—faith alone wasn’t enough.5

Again, there is no shortage of people trying to explain away this contradiction. But the more intellectually honest position is to recognize it, sit with it, and then make an informed decision about what one believes—instead of trying to paper over it or wish it away.

Another popular belief among unthinking Christians is the blind acceptance of the stated author for each writing. In church tradition, almost every book has a named author, oftentimes one never mentioned in the text.

For example, none of the four Gospels identifies its author by name. The names that appear in every Bible today were added during the second century CE, by early believers who needed some way of distinguishing the many documents that were being passed around from community to community.6

That’s because there’s no internal or external evidence to suggest that any of the Gospels were written by who we were told wrote them—and plenty of good reason to suggest otherwise. Not the least of which is how they disagree with each other and with the other writings we do have. For example, if Luke were written by a close companion of Paul, he would not get the pretty big detail of who was commissioned to take the gospel to the gentiles backwards from what Paul says himself. That's a big thing to either a) mess up or b) take the opposite of your friend on. Again, we can choose to believe the convoluted-but-plausible story, or believe the simpler answer: whoever Luke was, it wasn't a physician close to Paul.

Nor is this confined to the New Testament. There is virtually no serious scholar today—Christian, Jewish, or otherwise—who believes Moses wrote the Pentateuch, as later tradition came to insist. For starters, Deuteronomy recounts Moses's final speech, death, and burial in the land of Moab—not typically material you write about yourself.7

And again the internal contradictions of the text point to multiple authors. For example, does Moses see God face to face or not? In Exodus 33:11, we're told, "the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend." Later, in the very same chapter, God explicitly warns Moses: "you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live" (Exodus 33:20). There are multiple instances of this contradiction. Moses has no reason to contradict himself, repeatedly, over a single detail; multiple authors do.

Rather, it’s more likely that the early “editors” of the Bible had multiple stories that had been passed down in oral tradition, and rather than selecting the “correct” one, they kept both. This is also the working explanation for the two stories of creation in Genesis 1 and 2.8

What most modern readers refuse to accept is that authorship in the ancient world was much different than authorship in the modern sense. “Editors” often attached the names of ethnic heroes—like Moses or Homer—or other people of authority—like people who traveled with Paul or Jesus’s brother James—to give the writing authority itself. It may or may not have represented the beliefs of the stated author, if the stated author existed at all (my Hebrew Bible professor at Yale—a leading expert on the sources of the Pentateuch—argues that the first real person of history one encounters in the Hebrew Bible is King David9).

I can understand, however, why the church would want you to ignore all this. Taken individually, the discrepancies of the Bible, its internal contradictions, and the false claims of authorship are pretty innocuous. But taken together, they add up to a very dangerous prospect, our fourth lie.

There’s a really good reason the church doesn’t want you to see these inconsistencies. Because if you allow that one part of the Bible isn’t true—even admitting that contradictions exist in the first place—cracks start to emerge. And those cracks threaten the whole edifice.

If part of the Bible is wrong about Moses’s father-in-law, or what justifies faith, then what else is the Bible wrong about? Is it wrong about Jesus performing miracles? Is it wrong about Jesus being the Son of God? Is there really no utopia waiting for me after death if I follow all your insane rules??

The church believes it's a slippery slope from one honest question straight out the exit door, into the growing ranks of the religious "nones." And that is a threat to the church, because, at the end of the day, Christianity isn’t about Jesus, or God, or heaven, or moral living. It’s about keeping the great mass of humanity enslaved to the ruling class—the people at the top.

Years ago the people at the top figure out that it’s both expensive and laborious to keep workers enslaved by force. (And when your choice is to either work or starve to death, or not receive healthcare, you are very much enslaved, even if your economic chains are invisible to the naked eye.) Far more cost-effective is to get the oppressed to internalize their own oppression, to use the habits of the mind to build a cell that only a few will ever have the fortitude or the desire to leave.

The jail cell erected by Christianity looks something like: you are born inherently broken and sinful, the only repair is to believe what we say and do exactly what we tell you, those who comply get heavenly bliss forever, and those who refuse get a punishment more terrible than any human being could invent for you. Instill that fear early enough—through Sunday school, parochial school, confirmation class—and the door often stays locked for life. Even when the adult brain can reason its way out of such absurd claims, the frightened child inside never fully sheds the terror of exile so stunningly installed in those formative years.

So Christianity needs you to believe all of it, not just the parts that move you. Because if you start questioning a little—who was really sent to convert the gentiles—you might work your way up to questioning the only thing that actually matters to the people at the top, which is their authority. You might even get as far as noticing that what Jesus preached had nothing to do with heaven and hell and everything to do with turning the world upside down—from the marbled halls of Rome to the hypocritical religious leaders running the Temple. That is far too much risk to permit. So most Christian leaders push back hard, and keep the masses from ever seriously entertaining the four lies about the Bible you've just read.

To be clear, there are Christians who do exactly this—who find that accepting the truth about these lies is not only bearable but freeing. And far from destroying their faith, it deepens it: not faith in the human-flawed church, but in Jesus, in Christ, in God. But even that is unacceptable to most Christian leaders, because it still amounts to rejecting their authority.

And let me be just as clear about this: I find nothing wrong with believing any particular creed, or any set of convictions about Jesus, his resurrection, or the afterlife—so long as the rules you’ve discovered remain yours, held for you, and never handed down to the rest of us as universal truth. My only hope is that you arrived at those beliefs on your own terms, through reading, prayer, and meditation—not out of inherited tradition or fear. Those may be the two most dangerous routes to a belief there are, because they almost always deliver you right back to the status quo. And the status quo, for the great mass of humanity, is pretty shitty. It doesn’t have to be.

When you are able to see the Bible not as one cohesive, unflawed, internally consistent writing—which, at least for me anyway, took a long time—you start to be able to separate the inspiring from the abhorrent. You stop seeing God, and you start seeing ancient texts of people wrestling with God, with why things happen the way they do, and how we’re expected to live together.

We can throw out the deeply disturbing passages of the Hebrew Bible where God calls for herem—the complete and total destruction, aka genocide—against the peoples who previously occupied the land of Canaan.10 We can set aside the household codes, the slaves-obey-your-masters and wives-submit-to-your-husbands passages that were forged into Paul's mouth and then preached for centuries by people who needed the powerless to stay that way.11 We can recognize these as ancient, misguided ethics that have no place in a modern worldview that respects all human life and the freedom of individuals to make decisions about their own lives.

But—and this is important—it's not just a matter of personal discernment. Because the freedom to read this way—to hold a passage up to the light and judge it—is a freedom the church spent two thousand years making sure most people would never have. The frightened child in confirmation class is not invited to decide which parts are abhorrent or inconsistent. That right was reserved, jealously, for the institution, precisely because a population that reads critically is a population that is making a break for it—out, out of the cell. So reading the Bible on its own terms is not the end of the journey. It is the first act of the rebellion.

And when we do that, we start to take a stand. We continue the great work, the work of all human beings, to dismantle oppressive systems that uphold the status quo. A status quo where American lives matter more than lives in the Global South, where children starve to death even though we have plenty of food, where people die because they can’t afford a doctor’s visit—while Wall Street mints history’s first trillionaire. It’s the same work the historical Jesus was doing in his short ministry—just a different time, in a different place.

When we understand, like he did, that institutional religion is one great pillar holding up that status quo, and we begin to intellectually rebel against the jail cell it has built in our own minds, only then can we start to escape. Not just for ourselves, but the untold masses who are still in prison today. Only then are we really living the religion he did—the religion of Jesus.

If you want to go deeper on the Bible like academics do, I want to recommend to you three books we had to read at Yale Divinity School. These books introduce the Bible as a historical document, and try to place each writing in their historical context. They are invaluable to anyone who wants to understand the Bible in a deeper way.

On the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, we read Yale Professor emeritus John J. Collins’ Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (now on its 4th edition). Dr. Collins taught at Yale for years, but sadly had retired by the time I got to YDS. He goes book by book through the Old Testament, explaining scholars’ best explanations right now for how each writing came to be as it is now. A related text, on the history of ancient Israel and Judah is J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes’s A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (2nd edition). Miller and Hayes walk you not through the Bible, but the history of these ancient tribes—and how they came to be (spoiler alert: the Bible is wrong about Israel’s history).

On the New Testament, I cannot recommend Raymond E. Brown’s An Introduction to the New Testament enough. This book is part of Yale’s Anchor Bible Commentary—the cream of the crop when it comes to historical commentaries on the Bible that are (usually/mostly) free from theology. The book is also available in a cheaper/shorter abridged version that is also useful if you don’t want to (or can’t) shell out $80 for a book.12

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