Family Stories

Back in my parochial school, we sometimes told Bible jokes – not in the presence of the nuns, of course, although they probably would have enjoyed them as much as we did.

“Who is the most elastic man in history?” went a question that took liberties with the Book of Genesis.

“Abraham. He tied his ass to a tree and walked up the mountain.”

And we didn’t neglect the New Testament.

“Why shouldn’t Christians watch TV?” Because Jesus told his disciples after a mystical experience, “Television to no man.” For the Bible-challenged, the actual quote is, “Tell the vision to no man.”

After a few years of neglect, I just started re-reading the Old Testament, now called by many “the Hebrew Bible.” Those Old Testament people were getting mixed up in my mind – the Jacobs and Isaacs, Rebeccas and Ruths – so I figured it was time to take another look

Irrecoverably Out-of-Touch?

I know. The Bible may seem boring and irrecoverably out-of-touch. How could a book that’s 1,900 to 3,000 years old possibly be relevant to my life? And even if it were interesting, who has the time, right?

I believe many people too easily dismiss the Bible. It conjures up fundamentalists who look to the Bible to answer all their questions, people who are anti-science and irrational. For some it signals people who are politically and socially reactionary. In short, it’s not cool.

I’m finding it fascinating, however, even titillating. Some parts of Genesis read like a soap opera with wives providing their servant girls to their husbands and fathers offering their daughters to strangers to protect male guests. It reflects life at the time, of course, a time when such practices weren’t that unusual but also when it was obvious to people that God was an important part of life.

Ok, so it might be a tad interesting, but is it reliable?

Not “history”

Yes, and no. If you mean reliable in the sense that all is literally true, that the world was created by God in six days, that there is a “firmament” above that God separated from the waters below, that we are all descendants of a single pair of humans called Adam and Eve, that Methuselah lived 969 years… Well, you get the point. In that sense, many events and “facts” in the Bible are unreliable.

But most scholars and religious leaders – including the leaders of my own Catholic Church – agree that the Bible is a mix of fact and fiction with a religious message that is completely reliable.

“All Scripture is inspired by God,” says the Second Letter to Timothy in J.B. Phillips translation of the Christian Bible, “and useful for teaching the faith and correcting error, for resetting the direction of (people’s lives) and training (them) in good living.”

People have come to understand the Bible much better because of studies in disciplines such as archeology, philology, history and ancient geography. They have provided an “Ahah!” moment for people who read the Bible. It’s not a history book, after all, but the Word of God in the words of humans.

A parallel can be drawn between the stories in the Bible and those we may hear in our own families.

Tight with his Money

My great grandfather, who emigrated from County Tyrone in Ireland, became a fairly wealthy man as a farmer in northwest Iowa. But he was known to be tight with his money. My father tells the story of his grandfather having rented a small farm to his son and new wife. The sole source of water for the house and small number of livestock on his son’s farm was an old windmill pump, the kind that used to be seen on farms across the country.

The story goes that someone came by the farm, sought out my great grandfather and offered him $25 for the windmill atop the pump. He accepted the offer, leaving his son and wife thereafter to pump water by hand.

The story brought laughs and head shakes at family gatherings, but did it actually happen, or happen that way? Who knows? That wasn’t the point. The story was strange and entertaining and reinforced the fact that my great grandfather, for better or worse, was a skinflint. Its historicity was irrelevant.

The Bible is far from irrelevant for people searching for God. More a library than a single book, it’s unbelievably complex, full of contradictions and undecipherable material, and yes, much of it is hard to read and hard to believe.

But I don’t see how people seriously searching for God can ignore it, at least if they’re searching for the God of Christians and Jews.