Gospel Truth

From Joan Acocella's latest New Yorker article Betrayal: Should we hate Judas Iscariot? :

The religious scholar Willis Barnstone’s “The Restored New Testament,” which will be published in the fall, includes not only the canonical Gospels but also three Gnostic gospels: those of Thomas and Mary Magdalene, from Nag Hammadi, and the Gospel of Judas. But, if we’re going to start rewriting the Bible, where will that end?...

...All this, I believe, is a reaction to the rise of fundamentalism—the idea, Christian and otherwise, that every word of a religion’s founding document should be taken literally. This is a childish notion, and so is the belief that we can combat it by correcting our holy books. Those books, to begin with, are so old that we barely understand what their authors meant. Furthermore, because of their multiple authorship, they are always internally inconsistent. Finally, even the fundamentalists don’t really take them literally. People interpret, and cheat. The answer is not to fix the Bible but to fix ourselves.

Amen. Amen.

***

The above photo of a portion of the Codex Tchacos, the manuscript of the "Gospel of Judas" mentioned in Acocella's article, is a perfect symbol for our knowledge and grasp of Scripture, its history, and its meaning.  We can never see or know the whole truth; much of it is irrevocably lost, and what remains cannot always be fully understood or clearly interpreted.

I've written before about my views on Scripture.  I embrace a contextual rather than literal approach to the Bible.  But part of me does wish I had some kind of scrying glass and could look back on ancient times and see what went on, just to clear up some of the mysteries. I think many of the disputes and differences of opinion that exist today, though, were already alive and well even at the outset:

³As I urged you when I went into Macedonia,

stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain men

not to teach false doctrines any longer

 

⁴nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies.

These promote controversies rather than God's work—which is by faith.

 

⁵The goal of this command is love,

which comes from a pure heart

and a good conscience

and a sincere faith.

 

⁶Some have wandered away from these

and turned to meaningless talk.

 

⁷They want to be teachers of the law,

but they do not know what they are talking about

or what they so confidently affirm.              -1 Timothy 1:3-7

The one time I see a significant impact on my work in medicine from the difference between my approach to Scripture and a literal interpretation of Scripture is when I am asked by Jehovah's Witnesses to avoid blood transfusion even in the case of impending death.  Two Jehovah's Witnesses stopped by my house one morning, and I asked (for my own education) for some information on this, with what I hoped was a polite but clear disclosure of my intention to stick to my own views of faith and Scripture.  The discussion was informative and positive, and I affirmed that from most physicians' point of view, there was a strong ethical imperative to respect the wishes of all adult patients who are Jehovah's Witnesses.  But I'll admit that for many physicians this is one of the consequences of a literal reading of the Bible that's hardest to live with, if only because most of us are deeply motivated to do everything we know how to do in order to protect a life.