The following is a guest post by OpenDiary blogger Atheist Under Ur Bed. This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Hi! And welcome back to Monday School.

Our continuing motto: “A Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense You Learned Yesterday!”

Picking up where we left off last week -

When it comes to evaluating any written work, it is helpful to know as much as we can about its author(s) and history. When the work claims to include eyewitness accounts of history, it is especially important to know the people behind it and how their words have reached us. When the work asks us to accept its claims and conclusions simply because it asserts them to be true, it is crucial that we know these things.

Given the extravagant claims made by the Bible, we need to hold it to the highest standards possible before accepting those claims as true. Unfortunately, the Bible often seems unable to pass the laxest standards or most casual scrutiny.

Consider:

The Unknown Authors
No one knows exactly who wrote the Bible or when (except for the possible exception of some of the New Testament’s epistles). As such, it is an inherently suspect work, with no sure way for us to determine the qualifications of its authors, the value of their assertions, or what unstated motives they may have had for writing.

The Problematic Oral Tradition
It seems certain that whenever the Bible was written, it wasn’t written “fresh” but was based on an oral tradition. Oral transmission of information is notoriously unreliable, being no more than hearsay of the sort inadmissible in court.

The Special Problems Of A Long Oral Tradition
The longer the gap between the start of an oral tradition and the time its information is finally written down, the more unreliable that information is. Personal experience shows us just how garbled facts can become when a single person or day comes between us and an incident, let alone many people or months. In the case of the Bible, hundreds of years seem to have come between the incidents related in the Old Testament and the time they were written down. Decades elapsed between the time Jesus lived and the time the four Gospels were written. The Book of Acts, dealing in part with the life of Paul, seems to have been written some 30 years after Paul’s death.

Consider this passage from Collier’s Encyclopedia:

“The authorship of the Old Testament books is traditionally attributed to several great leaders in the Jewish past, among them Moses, Samuel, David, Solomon, and various prophets. However, modern scholarship has concluded that many of the books are late compilations of early traditions and writings. The Book of Genesis, for instance, contains many passages composed in the tenth century B.C. that record traditions already 800 years old, but the entire book was probably not written down in its present form until the fifth century B.C.”

Consider this passage from The World Book Encyclopedia:

“The first generation of Christians preserved memories of Jesus’ teachings, deeds, and Crucifixion largely by word of mouth. The story of Jesus was not written down in the Gospels until the second generation of the church.”

Consider this passage from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

“For Paul’s life there are no reliable sources outside the New Testament… Because its evidence sometimes conflicts with that of the letters, some scholars question the historicity of Acts.”

The Lost Originals
What we today call the Bible cannot be traced back to any of the original writings on which it was based. What we have at best is a copy of the original writings, and it’s highly probable that we are far further removed from the originals than that, with innumerable copies of other copies separating us from the first written accounts. As a result, we cannot know for sure how much of what we call the Bible may deviate from the original works it is allegedly based on, but some deviation seems certain. There is proof that many errors crept in as copyist after copyist went to work. Intentional distortions of the original works occurred repeatedly over the ages.

The Mysterious Assembly Process
The various books of the Bible as we know them today were brought together and selected for inclusion in the Bible by imperfect, mostly unknown men centuries after these books were written. These men excluded and included many books for unknown or questionable reasons.

The Questionable Procedures Of Early Church Leaders
While the exact way so-called canonization of the Bible proceeded is unknown, the following story offers some insight into the operating procedures of the early church leaders at about the time canonization was taking place.

One of the hottest doctrinal disputes of the era concerned the exact nature of Jesus: Was he a single person with two natures (one divine and one human) or was he in essence two people? Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, advocated the latter position; Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, was a fanatical promoter of the former. An international meeting of bishops was called to settle the issue in Ephesus in 431 A.D. The Western bishops arrived first and, presided over by Cyril, they locked the doors before their Eastern opponents could show up and decided the issue in haste in Cyril’s favor. At least Cyril didn’t stoop to lynching and inciting riots against his opposition at Ephesus as seems to have been his way when at home in Alexandria.

Bible? WHICH Bible?
Even now, centuries after the basic Biblical canon was established, there are still serious disagreements between Jews and Christians, between Catholics and Protestants, and among the various Protestant sects as to what books should be included in the Bible. The various Protestant sects also disagree about which of the many varying translations of these books should be used. Consequently, one cannot really believe in “The” Bible – one is forced to choose “a” Bible. Given that all allegedly are the word of God, all are basically unverifiable, and all are to some degree mutually exclusive, it is difficult to see how one may make such a choice. Yet throughout history and even today, we are told a choice must be made, and that the consequences of that choice are enormous.

Good luck!