Stage one When you are first introduced to the Bible as child, you know that it is the word of God. You know it contains a wisdom that is higher than the human mind could ever achieve. And because you have a pure conscience and a simple thirst for truth, you desire to know more about this divine gift. And so you memorize verses. Things like: “Be strong and courageous…” Joshua 1:6 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…” John 3:16 “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble…think about such things.” Philippians 4:8 These become units of truth that you can carry around with you in your back pocket. It’s a very powerful idea, and that’s why it works. The Bible tells you what is true. All you have to do is expose your mind to it, and your mind will change (Romans 12:1-3). You will know God. In addition to memorizing verses, you also read the Bible. Sometimes over and over again. Sometimes you read entire sections of the Bible repeatedly so that God’s perspective will seep into your brain, even if you don’t understand many of the things it says. You also read through the whole Bible from cover to cover because even though there are some parts that put you to sleep and seem irrelevant, like the nine chapters of genealogies in 1 Chronicles, or the mind-numbing and somewhat unclear chapters in the second half of the book of Exodus that describe the furniture of the tabernacle, you know that the problem here is you, not the Bible. If the Bible seems at any point boring, this is your fault. There is life changing spiritual truth here. You just have to find it. The Bible you carry around with you at this stage is large, perhaps leather bound, with your name embossed on it. It has footnotes and study notes. Some really smart and wise person wrote those notes to help you know God. The focus at this stage tends to be on phrases. You read a bunch of stuff that you don’t understand, but then something catches your attention: “The love of God,” or “Pray without ceasing.” That sort of thing. Your write about these phrases in your journal. At Bible study, you talk about how this or that phrase became such an important spiritual insight. At church, you follow along with the sermon, highlighter in hand, and pray that God will help you hear his word. Don’t worry, no one here is making fun of you. Rather, we recognize your sincere and laudable search for something greater, and we applaud it. Stage two You have found so much meaning in the Bible that you want to learn more. You have been fascinated by the idea that there is a deeper level to Bible study, as can be seen when the preacher refers to “the original Greek” or Hebrew and uses these strange ancient words to explain God’s mind. It turns out that the Bible was not written in English. You would have realized this if you had thought it through. Clearly: the Bible was written several thousand years ago, before English even existed. So of course it was written in a different language. This insight opens the door to the idea that ancient words can contain greater spiritual truth. If an English translation has so much insight, imagine what it would be like to handle the “actual words” of the Bible. These are the literal words that God used when he inspired authors in days gone by to pen his thoughts. And so you now set out on a quest to wrestle the words of God from history. You are now approaching the source of truth. But it turns out that this information is only available in complicated books of grammar and difficult to understand “lexicons.” You find them confusing and difficult to master. So you decide to seek guidance from formidable figures called seminary professors. You work hard and save your pennies and now its Fall and you are sitting in a classroom learning about an ancient form of the Greek language called Koine, which is the language of the New Testament. Tomorrow you will start learning ancient Hebrew which is the language of the Old Testament, an exotic tongue that is written backwards, uses bizarre symbols, and doesn’t even bother with vowels. This is all very technical and precise and a long way from the free flowing thoughts that you used to write down in your journal, and the familiar English phrases that you memorized. It’s a strange and difficult path, but you walk it nevertheless. In a way it fits: the strangeness is what one would expect in approaching the thoughts of God. You press on because you know that this is the path to knowledge. And your study is rewarded, for now you can use the tools of textual analysis to dig deep into the treasures of biblical wisdom. You can look up the original Greek or Hebrew words in lexicons and you can weight the different possible meanings. You can see why some translations chose a certain English term render a Greek or Hebrew word, but you can also see why a different translation would have been more accurate. Your preferred bible is now a thin and stark copy of the New American Standard Bible, 1995 edition. This English version of the Bible has no study notes and is known for its somewhat literalistic renderings. You like this because you can discern the grammatical patterns of Greek and Hebrew behind the English translation. You have, in a sense, arrived. You can now hear God’s word in “the original.” And at this stage too, no one will mock you for your earnest search for wisdom and insight. And for the lengths you have gone to in your quest, everyone, whether faithful or heathen, thinks highly of you. Stage Three You have been through all the classes on exegesis, Greek, Hebrew, and hermeneutics. You have studied the gospels, the Psalms, Pentateuch, and apocalyptic literature. You are conversant with the issues of academic theology and you can hold your own in rarified circles where discussions touch on “the Wellhausen documentary theory,” or “the Pauline Christology.” You now know that there are 21 meanings possible for the dative case, so that when the Apostle Paul speaks of being “in Christ” you can sort out which one of those he is using. You can explain why the Masoretic scholars added a their pointing system to the Hebrew text of the Bible, and you know how The Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Old Testament, bridges the gap between the world view of the ancient Hebrews and the more recent Greco-Roman world of first century Palestine when the New Testament was written. Without even realizing it, because no one put it this way, you have become a historian. You are an expert in the cultural mindset of several different times and places, now thousand of years gone by. You can explain how the people in these times and places saw the world, and how their thinking developed over the years. You have read the other ancient texts which never made it into the Bible, like The Book of Enoch, or the Babylonian creation myth called The Enuma Elish. These texts illuminate the meaning of the Bible and show the mindset of its first recipients. Through them you get a peek at the thought patterns, the struggles, hopes and aspirations of people who walked the earth in the distant past. The Bible you now carry around with your is the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland text of the New Testament, which is in Greek. It’s a thin volume and you carry it with pride, as is your right. You could also carry a copy of the Hebrew Masoretic text, the fourth edition of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, but its inconvenient and most sermons in churches focus on the New Testament anyway. You won’t say it aloud to anyone, but large study Bibles make you uncomfortable now for their simplistic and often misleading explanations of textual problems and biblical themes. You now realize that study Bible editors are mostly just uninformed hacks. Maybe in your dorm room you once made fun of them with your fellow seminarians. You now understand, finally, what God meant when he spoke to all mankind through these ancient texts. But you know also understand that everything the Bible says has a historical and cultural context, and makes perfect sense in those contexts. You now see that the Bible is a historical text and that it is the product of people just like you who thought they might have an insight into the nature of the world and an explanation of the divine. And now a thought creeps in which cannot be denied, for you are an honest seeker and all you have ever wanted was to find out the truth of these matters in order to become a better person and experience all that is true and good to the fullest. The thought is that these venerated texts are nothing more and nothing less than the product of other human minds who, like yourself, were also searching for truth. And these texts are, as such, valuable and worthy of our time and effort, and they are a true witness to the human quest for meaning. But they are just that and nothing more. They are not inspired, they are not the word of God—how could they be, since nothing about them is supernatural and everything about them is clearly the result of human thoughts and and passions? Going back to church one day, you sit next to an eager believer armed with her large study bible, a pen and a collection of highlighters, as though prepared for a spiritual feast, and ready to receive the word of God from the pulpit. You might feel a sense of melancholy, a feeling of innocence lost. But it is not your fault that you have arrived at this situation. This is just the nature of the world, and there is nothing wrong with you for recognizing it as such. And has this all been a waste of time and money, to set out in one direction and to find that the true path led in a completely different one? Hardly. This is the definition of learning itself: you cannot know the end of the path at the beginning, and the journey is always worthwhile.