Alone and Unobserved

Mormons don’t believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. It’s actually one of their articles of faith:

We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.

Don’t read too much into this apposition; Mormons do still believe in the Bible, and, apart from the Song of Solomon (“biblical pornography!”), they believe that it was inspired, in its original form, before it was translated and changed and altered over the centuries. In fact, towards the end of his life, Joseph Smith was involved in redacting the King James Version of the Bible, allegedly returning it, via revelation, to its pure, unadulterated state.

Notice the assumption that at one point there existed a “first version,” if not of the Bible, then of each of the individual books. Not only that, but Mormons see the Bible as a unit, a self-consistent document that (while written at different times and in different places) has a unified message and point of view. In other words, the Old Testament is a prefiguration and foreshadowing of the New; the four Gospels are four different accounts of the same actual event, and ought to be read and correlated with each other; the authors of the various books are who they say they are; and on the whole, the Bible is the word of God, aside from a few scribal errors and alterations. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is funny that way; one minute, they’re breaking the Christian mold by throwing open the canon and accepting the Book of Mormon and other books as Scripture, and the next minute they are advocating such a traditional approach to the Bible.

I didn’t realize how much this view still influenced me until I began reading Bart D. Ehrman’s beginning textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Did you know, for instance:

• The four Gospels were written anonymously, and it is extremely doubtful that the authors were actually Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
• It is almost certain that Matthew and Luke were partially based on Mark, and partially on another, unknown source (usually referred to as Q).
• When the books of the New Testament are read without no previous assumptions, it becomes clear that each of the authors of each of the books had his own personal agenda and his own personal theology, and these agendas and theologies do not always mesh well or at all.
• A large part of the epistles traditionally attributed to Paul were almost certainly written by other people. When those epistles are subtracted out of the theological discussion, Paul’s theology becomes very different indeed.
• It is very unlikely that the John who wrote the Book of Revelation/Apocalypse was the same person who wrote the Epistles of John or the Gospel of John.
• The story found in John of the woman taken in adultery and the description found in Luke of Jesus sweating blood were both most likely added to the gospels much later.
• The Old Testament prophecies cited by New Testament authors such as Matthew to support Christian doctrine are taken out of context or simply misquoted.

It’s funny that I had never really thought about most of these points before. But then, like Mormon faith and doctrine, my atheism does not stand or fall by the veracity of the Bible.