My YouTube Videos on the Bible

Many sincere Christians read the Bible with the conviction that the world’s most popular book is God’s Word revealed to mankind for the eternal salvation of the human race. Those of the Jewish tradition consider the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), along with other pre-Christian writings, as divinely inspired by Yahweh. 

Even the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, admits of divine intervention by Allah in the history of mankind, using names and stories, found in the Bible, familiar to Jews and Christians alike, as an historical basis for the early covenant with mankind by Allah.

Yet in our modern world, there are those who find the Bible a work filled with historical improbabilities. Others question the works included in the Bible as an incomplete list, referring to writings that were left out of the canon, or list, of both the Old and New Testaments.

Recent sensational stories about Jesus, taken from the Gospel of Thomas, or the hypothesis that Jesus was married and sired children, as suggested in Brown’s DaVinci Code and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene — even discoveries that purport to be ossuaries with the bones of Jesus and his family — have all made the New Testament story of the Christ’s bodily resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven appear to be an incredible tale that cannot stand up to archeological discoveries and scientific analysis.

Confronted with these non-traditional views about biblical works, many Christians retreat into a sort of shell, comforted by their faith in the inerrancy of the Bible, and dismiss any questioning of the Bible’s accuracy  as the poison of the age in which we live. Christian fundamentalism is on the rise, and many Christians prefer to view the Bible as what they have been taught to believe about it — the Bible is God’s Word, and that’s that.

Yet is there a scholarly method of understanding the Bible that makes sense of some of the improbabilities, historical contradictions, and imperfect morality found especially in the Old Testament? Yes, there is. Mainline Christian scholars call it the “Historical-Critical Method.”

Definitions draw limits around concepts. No definition is able to be all-inclusive in its few words, no matter how skillfully composed. However, without definitions, there would be indeterminate communication, and misunderstandings would be the rule.

To define the historical-critical method as it applies to understanding the Bible, one might say it is the analytical method biblical scholars use to shed light on the historical processes which resulted in biblical works. The method studies the biblical texts much the same as scholars who study ancient texts from pagan cultures. Without denying the divine revelation attributed to the Bible, scholars using the historical-critical method seek to go back in time and become familiar with the way in which biblical texts were written.

Obviously, God did not use high definition television with Dolby sound to reveal his word to mankind, but rather, by today’s standards of communication, a crude, often imperfect, system of revelation which relied on human beings in various times and places to translate that revelation to the written record of their times.
So, when confronted with the similarities of the birth of Moses, for example, with that of the Babylonian King Sargon thousands of years before, the scholar using the historical-critical method asks the question, “Did the human author, or authors, of Exodus draw upon a well-known story from pagan sources to fabricate an historical event which his readers would recognize?”

Was there anything known about Moses’ birth, or did the author of Exodus have a purpose in describing an event which no one can forget — a cleverly written story of the rescue of an infant who was about to be killed by a ruler, fearful of losing control?

I recently completed a six-part series on “Understanding the Bible Using the Historical-Critical Method.” It’s free and viewable on YouTube, with each session running under half an hour.

1) The Canons, or lists, of Biblical books
2) The Apochrypha
3) Literal vs. Historical-Critical Interpretation
4) The Abrahamic and Mosaic Stories
5) The “Writings” – Historical and Didactic
6) The Gospels, Revelation, and Numeric Symbolism