This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Monday! Time once again for Monday School – STILL “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” even on Memorial day!

Today’s Lesson: Who Is Bishop John Colenso And What Is He Doing Here?!

John Colenso was a 19th century Anglican bishop whose rather remarkable story deserves to be known and contemplated far more widely than it is.

Colenso was born in England in 1814. He was raised a good Christian. Indeed, he was raised such a good Christian that I am told he exhibited quite a grim evangelical demeanor as a teen. In 1836, he graduated with honors from Saint John’s College, Cambridge. In 1839 he became a deacon. By 1853 he was a bishop in Natal (part of what is now known as South Africa).

It was there that Bishop Colenso’s true enlightenment began.

“A strict logician, he was led by questions asked by Zulu converts to doubt the historical accuracy of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament. Arguing that the Pentateuch must have been a postexilic forgery rather than a faithful account of Jewish life, he also maintained that numerical discrepancies found in Genesis warranted dismissal of the entire Bible.” – The Encyclopedia Britannica

As Colenso himself puts it: “While translating the story of the Flood, I have had a simple-minded, but intelligent native… look up and ask, ‘Is it all true? Do you really believe that all this happened this… that all the beasts, and birds, and creeping things, upon the earth, large and small… came thus by pairs, and entered into the ark with Noah? And did Noah gather food for them all, for the beasts and birds of prey, as well as the rest?’… I was thus driven, against my will at first… to search more deeply into these questions.”

That search led to answers which prompted Colenso to write The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined. Published in 1862, “It caused a sensation. Within a week the second edition was ready for sale and arrangements had been made for the publication of a further two editions making a total of some ten thousand copies” according to Jeff Guy’s The Heretic: A Study of the Life of John William Colenso 1814-1883. “The public was confronted with the picture of a bishop… stating that the Bible – the foundation of Christian belief and teaching – was not true.”

Colenso was tried for “false teaching” and excommunicated by the local church, only to be reinstated by authorities back in England. Colenso’s position ebbed and flowed as the controversy continued for years. At the time of his death in 1883, he seemed to have lost the battle. It wasn’t long after that, however, that the Church of England came to agree that a literal reading of an allegedly inerrant Bible was no longer reasonable or acceptable. According to Jeff Guy, “The change in viewpoint, when it came, had to come from the hierarchy itself, making clear that it controlled the Church’s ideas, and where and when change could take place” – not from some bishop in a far off colony, no matter how accurate or insightful that bishop’s ideas might be.

Edward T. Babinski’s Leaving the Fold – a book which keeps on giving – provides us with further details.

One watershed moment for Colenso came when he translated the 21st chapter of Exodus for an intelligent Zulu. That’s the chapter, you may recall, in which we are told that if a man strikes his slave, and the slave doesn’t die for a day or two, he shall not be punished because the slave is “his money.”

According to Colenso, “His [the Zulu’s] whole soul revolted against the notion, that the Great and Blessed God, the Merciful Father of all mankind, would speak of a servant or maid as mere ‘money,’ and allow a horrible crime to go unpunished, because the victim of the brutal usage had survived a few hours!”

As horrible as God’s actions are here, however, what really turned Colenso against the Bible is its “manifest contradictions and inconsistencies.” After much study, he concluded that the Pentateuch couldn’t possibly have been written by Moses “or by any one acquainted personally with the facts which it professes to describe….”

Babinski quotes at length the many, many problems and impossibilities Colenso discovered just in the Bible’s account of the Exodus.

Consider: Exodus 12:37 and 38:26 as well as Numbers 1:46 and 26:51 all tell us that at least 600,000 adult male Hebrews left Egypt and wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. That’s twice the size of coalition forces now in and around Iraq. Add to that a like number of women and many thousands of children. Colenso concludes that we’re talking about at least 1,400,000 people. The able-bodied warriors alone “would have filled up the road for about seven miles…. the whole multitude would have formed a dense column more than twenty-two miles long….” Add in all the cattle and sheep the Bible tells us they had with them and one ends up with a huge mass larger than that of 19th century London supported by none of that city’s resources.

What did the animals eat? Where did they get their water? How could only three priests (Aaron, Eleazar and Ithamar) handle all the necessary tasks the Bible assigns them? (Colenso estimates that 250 pigeons would have had to be sacrificed each and every day just on behalf of the newborn children.) How could basic sanitation be maintained? (Deut. 23:12-14 tells us that each Hebrew was required to travel far outside this huge camp just to take a shit.) How could all the aged, the infirm, the sick, the crippled, the pregnant, and the very young have possibly managed this? Yet they must have because “Jehovah thy God walketh in the midst of thy Camp; therefore shall the Camp be holy; that He see no unclean thing in thee, and turn away from thee.”

Deut. 5:1 tells us that Moses “called all Israel, and said unto them.” Joshua 8:33-35 tells us that Joshua did the same thing. Exactly how could over a million people have assembled and heard a single speaker?

The Bible repeatedly tells us that the “whole Assembly” or “Congregation” of at least half a million warriors “gathered together unto the door of the Tabernacle.” Impossible! Colenso calculates 20 miles would have separated the man at the back of the group from the man at the front even if the men packed themselves in close together.

“While it is conceivable that a later writer, imagining such scenes as these, may have employed such exaggerated expressions… it cannot be believed that an eye-witness, with the actual facts of the case before him, could have expressed himself in such extravagant language….” Colenso concludes.

These are just some of the problems of one part of the Bible that Colenso discovered once he began to examine its words with an open mind instead of continuing to attempt to suffocate his rationality with “faith” as he had long been taught to do. The fatal flaws of the Bible that had been immediately obvious to the Zulus eventually proved fatal to Bishop Colenso’s entrenched dogma, too.

In time, these impossible-to-ignore flaws forced a change in the official dogmas of the Church of England itself.

If you happen to be an atheist in our Christian culture, chances are you’re already familiar with the courage and intellectual honesty Bishop Colenso embodied.

If you’re still a fundamentalist Christian, on the other hand… well, exactly what is it that you know that Bishop Colenso, the Church of England, and many others do not?