Is the Bible the word of man?

Dear Editor,

Is the Bible the word of man? Yes would be the response to that question based on actual pen and paper reality. Yet, to assume this letter was also written by somone, and not just a computer typing out things, requires no less faith than believing that men were inspired to write the Bible.

There are gaps that we generally fill because they are natural and reasonable. For example, thousands of years prior to the discovery of the Earth’s shape, or how it is stationed, Bible writers were recording that it hangs upon nothing (Job 26:7 or Isaiah 40:22). These people were writers with no scientific credentials nor professed any objective light in themselves. Yet, ironically, scientific luminaries at the time were claiming a flat Earth held up on the backs of elephants standing upon the back of a great sea turtle! No leap of faith would be needed for filling in the gaps there.

From those ancient times, a defence against COVID-19 would also have been given priority by Bible writers since personal hygiene was aggressively urged in the book of Leviticus, when failure to apply them was seen as aiding diseases.

Often, the conventional view of a man-authored Bible is based on what some see as moral shortfall in some of its accounts, or perhaps on personal conceits or understanding. Yet even to point out the perceived imperfections is unwittingly to support the Bible as inspired, while assuming God as perfect, since humans tend to hide their own sins — sins which were never covered over by these authors. In other words, if the Bible were the word of men, they would write things as they see them; however, most of what is written in the Bible is comparable to writing in your own style what someone tells you to write.

Homer Sylvester Mount Vernon, New York, USA

h2sylvester@gmail.com