A Bias against the Bible?
When I was a kid, maybe 10-12 years old, I sometimes during the summer went to a weekday Mass at our parish church (Kids in our parochial school all attended daily Mass every school day during the school year.). The Mass in those days was conducted in Latin, so to follow it, most people needed a “missal,” a book that showed the English translation along with the Lain mass prayers.
I was walking home from Mass one day, stopping at a street corner, clutching my missal – a black book with a black cover. A lady waiting at the same corner remarked, “Isn’t that nice that you’re carrying your Bible around with you.”
“This is not a Bible,” I rudely replied. “It’s a missal.”
A “Protestant” Book?
Hard to believe today, but in my time, many Catholics like me believed the Bible was a “Protestant” book. In most Catholic schools, what kids learned about the Bible was from “Bible History,” which contained inspirational stories from the Bible.
All that changed drastically when at the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s all the world’s Catholic bishops met in Rome and among other things, restored the Bible to a central place in Catholic faith and practice.
It’s hard to believe that so many Catholics virtually ignored the Bible because the Scriptures are so fundamental to the Christian faith. I’ve always liked a subtitle for a book on Scripture that I read in the seminary: “The Word of God in the Words of Men.” (I would change the last word to “Humans.”) It’s a good summary of what the Bible means for us who believe in its divine and human origins.
I believe that many people today, especially among more “educated” people – and still, a lot of Catholics – have a bias against the Bible. They may think of the old term, “Bible thumpers,” to describe people who put great faith in a book that is 2,000-3,000 years old and that, in their view, has no relation to life today. It’s so “old-school,” so geeky, they believe. What’s more, many say, it’s a mishmash of often indecipherable stories and commentary that has little value or authenticity.
Most Intensively Studied
Let’s look at the last claim first. The Bible is arguably the most intensively studied and critically examined book from the ancient world. Its manuscripts, history, language, and historical claims have been scrutinized for centuries and more recently, with the tools of textual criticism, archaeology, history, linguistics, and other academic disciplines.
The Bible, which is more a library than a book, is a mixture of history and myth, with the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, containing more of the later than the Christian Bible, or New Testament. All of it, according to the view of Christian tradition, is written by humans but inspired by God.
Regarding the claim that the Bible has no value for contemporary people, it is, on the contrary, a treasure of wisdom about life and how to live it, as well as containing insights into the nature of God and God’s relation to humans. Its wisdom is timeless.
It includes a great variety of literary forms, including poems, narratives, parables, hymns, history, prayers and travelogues. For people searching for God in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is, in my view, absolutely essential.
A Challenge
However, it is admittedly a challenge for people today, not only because of its antiquity, but because we’re so tuned in to contemporary forms of information, entertainment and inspiration. Fewer people read, let alone read something as challenging as the Bible.
Fortunately for people who want to learn more about it, help is plentiful, and the best and most current views are probably from those same sources to which we’ve become nearly addicted: the Internet and most recently, AI. If you start reading the Bible and get hung up on meanings, you can find answers quickly, and most will be useful. I recommend using sources you can trust and that use modern techniques to understand the Bible.
The search for God, at least in the Christian and Jewish traditions, is pretty much futile if you ignore the Bible. It is the principal way of getting to know God and learning to love him and others.
