The Bible – is it myth or authority?

Is the Bible fact or fiction? The world of Christian religion is being shaken to its very foundations, the Bible, not only by atheists and agnostics but also by the hierarchy of the Church – theologians as well as Catholic and Protestant clergy.

No wonder it is sometimes baffling when one considers that although all the Christian denominations base their beliefs on the only source on which their religion is built – the Bible – one sees so many divisions and diversions of theological teachings, sects, cults and beliefs that differ even from those more generally accepted.

Why this confusion? The Bible is the enigma of the ages. It is the world’s best-seller and the least understood book of all books. One famous writer described the Bible as the book nobody knows. What is so special about this book that has survived the ravages of time? What sinister entity has been trying to eradicate this book? Not even the 30-year war of religion could bring about its destruction.

The Bible has been ridiculed, trampled on and used for making bonfires in public squares. What is puzzling is that even the Vulgate translation from the Greek of the Old and the New Testaments into Latin by Jerome, one of the Church Fathers, was also included in the Catholic Church’s list of forbidden books – and anyone reading or even possessing one, was under pain of excommunication. Even before the Inquisition came into force, Pope Alexander III labelled those who read the Bible heretics and confiscated their property. At the time of the Inquisition, readers of the Bible and even those in possession of a copy of it, were subjected to the most heinous of crimes that man ever invented, and burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition instituted by Pope Gregory IX under the direction of the Dominicans. Later, in the 16th century, this was strengthened by Pope Paul III, and became known as the ‘Spanish Inquisition’ – the more outrageous and horrendous crimes ever inflicted by man on his fellow man by his perpetrators, the Je- suits. It is estimated that millions perished at the hands of the Inquisition. One bizarre story is that of John Wycliffe, who translated the Bible into English in 1407. Thirteen years after his death, a church council declared that his translation was illegal. The Church ordered the exhumation of his corpse which was burned and his ashes scattered in a nearby river.

In my opinion, it is presumption of the highest order that the present Pontiff of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, who professes to be the Vicar of Christ, a substitute for Christ like all the previous Popes, had the audacity of declaring at The Pontifical Academy of Sciences these precise words. “When we read about creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God as a magician with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so.” This declaration nullifies a divine Creation as stated in Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” and also brings to nought the Creation week, and the apex of His creation, man “The Creator shaped man, from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7). And more impor- tantly, God said: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26). When the head of the Catholic Church brushes away a divine Creation as stated in the written word of God Almighty in the Old Testament with such statements, he is also negating the New Testament and our Lord Jesus Christ. It is clearly written in (John 1:1,14): “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” Jesus Christ was known as the Word and was with God from the beginning. It comes as no surprise that the present Pope does away with Creation and embraces the Big Bang theory since the Catholic Church officially accepted it as fact for the first time in the early 1950s.

For centuries, sceptics and scoffers have called the Bible a collection of ancient myths, fables, and superstition. The Bible has been described a legendary story belonging to Israel’s history. Is the Bible unscientific? Is man the product of an accident whose origin was formed in a bowl of a chemical soup? Is our ancestor the tadpole the mouse or could it be our common housefly? Is life as Shakespeare’s Macbeth described it when he wrote: “Life is a passing shadow that frets and strets its hour upon stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Was the Big Bang made up of infinitesimal composition as science describes it, composed of chemical substances which incidentally had already existed, and to which no one can tell their origin, explode into so intricate, so complex, so compatible so interdependent, so organized behaviour as life? Life can only be beget by life as the law of biogenesis ascertain. Even the word biogenesis, the beginning, has a connotation with the Bible. The Bible is not a book about science but though written thousands of years ago it does give basic principles of scientific facts not understood until the last few hundred years. Here are examples. The medieval Catholic Church believed the earth was flat and the centre of the universe. When Galileo presented scientific evidence to the contrary, his facts and theories were branded as heretical. Nowhere does the Bible teach the flat earth theory or that it is the centre of the universe. On the contrary, 700 years before Christ, the prophet Isaiah was inspired to write of the spherical shape of the earth: “It is he that sits upon the circle of the earth (Isaiah 40:22).” The original Hebrew word is ‘ chuug’ which means a compass, circle or sphere.

Until the 16th century and the Copernican Theory, no one understood that the sun is the centre of our solar system and that the earth revolves around the sun. However, thousands of years before Copernicus, in the days of Moses, the Bible uses the expression to indicate the revolution of the earth around the sun once a year. In Exodus 34:22, we read in the King James Version “And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the first fruits of wheat harvest and the feast of ingathering at year’s end.” The original Hebrew renders it “at the revolution of the year”.

Notice also 11 Chronicles 24:23 where the “end of the year” is called in the original Hebrew “in the revolution of the year”.

How can one explain the statement in the book of Job 26:07 speaking of the earth – “He hangs the earth upon nothing”. Was the Bible, 4000 years ago, alluding to the laws of centrifugal force, gravity and motion and that the earth hangs suspended in space?

“When he utters his voice, there is multitude of waters in the heavens and he causes the vapours to ascend from the end of the world” (Jeremiah 10:13). Could this mean the evaporation and condensation of vapour as rain droplets?

“All the rivers run into the sea yet the sea is not full; unto the place from which the rains come, to there and from there they return again” (Eccl. 1: 6-7). Did Jeremiah and Solomon understand the circuits of the winds and of water which is known today as the Hydrological Cycle?

Matthew Fontaine Maury, pioneer oceanographer when reading the Bible, was struck by the words of Psalm 8:8 – “The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatever passes through the paths of the sea.” In 1855 he wrote, “There is a river in the ocean.” He had discovered the Gulf Stream and the prevailing ocean currents and winds enabling ships to save time and money using this path of the sea on their voyages. He was called the “Pathfinder of the Seas”. The Bible was his source of inspiration. How did David, 1000 years before Christ, know such paths existed?

In Job 28:26 we read, “When He made a decree for the rain and a way for the lightning of the thunder.” Only in recent times were we able to understand that a path is formed between the thundercloud and the earth and the difference of electric potential between these points between positive and negative charges creates a bolt of lightning traveling upward and create an optical illusion that it appears going downwards. How did Job know?