CHARBONNEAU – Christianity and Judaism are not ‘book’ religions

I SOMETIMES get into discussions with Christians when they come to the door quoting the “word of God.” “The Bible was written by man,” I protest, not by God. You only have to read the Bible to get that message, which I did when I was first interested in Christianity.

“It’s a fine piece of literature,” I go on to tell my visitors at the door.

I’m especially impressed by the book of Job, I say. Written in the first person, the book of Job precedes the novel.

The novel, a relatively modern literary invention, reveals the inner world of others. Job’s world is filled with misery:

“My breath is offensive to my wife; I am loathsome to my own family. Even the little boys scorn me; when I appear, they ridicule me. All my intimate friends detest me; those I love have turned against me (Job 17 to 19).”

An Anglican theologian, John Barton, goes further than I would by saying that neither Christianity nor Judaism are “book” religions.

While the Bible is arguably the world’s most significant book, it is not scriptural in the way the Qur’an is, argues Barton in his book A History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book as reviewed by Christopher Beha (Harper’s, November 2019).

The Bible did not instruct the early Jews. Judaism was around for hundreds of years before anything like the Old Testament was written.

The primary Hebrew scripture was only compiled about seven hundred years after Moses is supposed to have lived. It was probably during the Babylonian exile of the Jews, in the sixth century b.c., that various competing strands of old historical, mythological, and legal writing were combined into the primary Hebrew scripture.

The Song of Songs always surprised me in its frank sexuality. The book is an anthology of erotic poetry that makes no mention of God and would not likely be included in the Holy Bible in any other context.

And in the New Testament, none of what Jesus did and said was immediately recorded.

Jesus had been dead for decades when Paul, an educated Jewish convert, wrote the letters that reported what Jesus said and did. I have to wonder how good Paul’s memory was when he wrote to the Christian communities that he founded.

Paul wrote those letters in Greek, which Jesus himself would not have understood.

While the Bible is remarkable in its varied content, the Qur’an is a coherent text composed by (or revealed to) a single person over the course of just twenty years.

The Qur’an is consistent in tone. It is first and foremost “a guidance to the God-fearing,” as an early chapter (sura) puts it.

The Bible is remarkable to me in its varied content; more like a collection of short stories than a guide to live by.

The Bible contains verse and prose, legal writing and storytelling. It’s fascinating in its antiquity; it provokes the imagination with mythological accounts of prehistoric times. It reveals the world as early humans would have perceived it.

David Charbonneau is a retired TRU electronics instructor who hosts a blog at http://www.eyeviewkamloops.wordpress.com.