Friday, October 24, 2008

How I Almost Lost My Testimony of the Bible: rough draft

Putting first things first, I must begin by simply stating that I have a very strong testimony of the Bible and its holy precepts—now. I must admit, I’ve nearly always felt that the Bible was true, but there was a time, recently, when I seriously asked myself, “Why do I believe the Bible?” This seems to be a superficial question, but through the course of this paper I will attempt to take you through a process of thinking that occurred in my own life that had profound implications of whether one should or should not believe the Bible to be veracious, valuable, and inspired of God. It should be understood, also, that I have a testimony of the Book of Mormon and the other scriptures given by God’s prophets. My purpose is not to discuss the truthfulness of scripture revealed in this dispensation, as its process of realization in our day is very different from that of the Bible.

Growing up in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we all learn the importance of Bible. We talk about the New Testament and the Old Testament. In nursery we learn the fun stories in the Bible by puppets and animal crackers. In primary we sing songs to memorize the order of books, to remember the stories, and to learn the doctrine contained in the Bible. Children get the opportunity to give short talks on something dealing with the Bible. The Bible is quoted in the Young Men’s and Young Women’s organizations to teach adolescences how to live. I have vivid memories of Seminary lessons of the Bible from playing a life-size game of Risk to learn about the warring Assyrian, Babylonian, Phoenician, and Philistine peoples of the Old Testament to simple testimonies born about the life of the Savior. I remember the Family Home Evening when we used a flannel-board and paper cut-outs to talk about the story of Noah. Talks and lessons are given in sacrament meetings and Sunday school that refer directly to the doctrines taught in the Bible. General Authorities give discourses in general conference about the importance of the Bible and its teachings. The Book of Mormon even teaches us that its purpose is to testify of the truthfulness of the Bible, and that those who believe the Book of Mormon will also believe the Bible. The eighth Article of Faith states that, “We believe the Bible to be the word of God, as far as it is translated correctly.” Just being an average, ordinary member of the church it is not hard to see the emphasis that is placed on the Bible. I heard the “as far is it is translated correctly,” but never stopped in my childhood or adolescence to thoroughly study why that caveat is included. I, like most of my peers, just assumed that the Bible was a great, usually boring, book that was produced by God through His prophets that magically appeared in my hands in the quadruple combination scripture-set I was given at my baptism at the age of eight. With all these lessons in church, seminary, and at home that taught me of the stories and doctrines contained in the book we know as the “Bible,” never did I question the veracity of the Judeo-Christian society’s most common and foundational book. It is always talked about how one must find the truth of the Book of Mormon and of God’s modern prophets by praying and asking in faith, but I never was taught to seek the truth of the Bible. In discussions with other Latter-day Saints of my age they have told me their experience was similar.

In later adolescence years, even when I began to question the teachings of my childhood including those of the restored gospel and Book of Mormon, I still didn’t question the Bible. Why would I question the other teachings but not the teachings of the Bible? I’ll offer only a few theories. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints receives more scrutiny because of our “revealed scripture.” The world questions things like whether Joseph Smith was really a prophet, whether the Book of Mormon is really an ancient book of scripture translated by Joseph Smith, and whether there really is a prophet in our day. No one in our society, on a large scale, questions whether the Bible is true—after all, it’s been around for so long! Another reason I and others in the Church have not rejected the Bible could be because we simply don’t know it very well. While we do learn some of the stories and doctrines of the Bible, I would say that we are much more familiar with the Book of Mormon. Although the Bible contains the same doctrines, the majority of the teachings of the Church are taught from the Book of Mormon and revealed word. This can make it seem to one who is doubting that these doctrines are unique to Mormonism and different from the rest of the Christian world. At this point in my life my problem was simply that I didn’t yet have a testimony of the Church; i.e. Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, modern prophets, and the doctrines taught by these sources; my ignorance of the Bible actually helped me to not reject it at this time.

This time of wonder and doubt ended with my gaining a testimony of the Book of Mormon and subsequently Joseph Smith and the modern prophets. Because of my curiosity of whether these things were true, I questioned and prayed to know the truth. After I became convinced of the truth of the Book of Mormon and essentially “the Church,” my perspective changed on many things. I read the scriptures, searching for more of God’s truths. I even dared to read in the New Testament about Christ and His teachings although I didn’t get too far at that point. My biggest goal became to serve a mission. This next phase in my life was to teach me more about the Bible than I ever knew before.

I served my mission in the Spain Málaga Mission, the southern portion of the almost entirely Catholic country. The Church has only been in Spain since 1967, when for essentially the first time since before the Spanish Inquisition other religions besides Catholicism were allowed in the country. Because of this, I viewed that religion and God were more a traditional thing than a spiritual thing. When I engaged in conversation with one of these “traditional Catholics” their view was often that if you’re Spanish, then you’re Catholic. “Why did you baptize your infant children?” I would ask. They would more often than not respond, “Because that’s what we do. You know, it’s tradition.” When I asked if they believed in God, they would say, “Well, there is something. Whether we know what it is or not is another question.” When we made reference to the Bible in a discussion they would often run to their shelf, pull a huge gold-lined book out, and in the cloud of dust coming from the book say, “I have the Bible!” Many times, when I asked them to which church they belonged they didn’t even know the name! They said, “You know, the Spanish church; the one that’s been here forever.” These people, spiritually ignorant, made up the majority of the people I contacted on my mission.

On the other end of the spectrum, because of the newly acquired religious freedom and the extreme apathy of that nation towards the Bible and its implications to religiosity, many protestant groups are emerging. Although demographically much less significant than the religiously ignorant, it was also common to find zealous Protestants (and I must add that there were a couple zealous Catholics in there too) willing and able to defend their faith with every verse of the Bible. These less frequent run-ins with the biblically zealous, more than with the biblically ignorant, caused me to take up a great interest in studying the Bible more in depth than ever before. I had never really studied the Bible in such a way. I got to know the scriptures so well that no biblical zealot could gain any ground in a discussion. I admit that I did participate in some Bible-bashing, but this phase quickly died out as I realized the incongruence of Bible-bashing with the gospel of Jesus Christ. As time went by on my mission, investigators and acquaintances brought up questions to which I had no answer—where did the Bible come from? I learned something of the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the Hebrew Tanach. These ideas were somewhat new to me as I hadn’t before much looked into the process of how the Bible came to be. Also, with my studies of the Bible in both Spanish and English I began to realize that one translation didn’t always convey the same ideas that the other did. This arose in my mind the question of whether the Bible was translated correctly. Although still unclear and ambiguous in my mind, this was the first time in my life when I began to see why Joseph Smith added the caveat, “as far as it is translated correctly.” One of my favorite investigators, Malaquias Melchy, was a well-learned man. He told us in our first discussion with him that he had studied the Bible in 20 languages. He had lost hope in the Bible because of so many contradictions he had found. When he began to read the Book of Mormon he said that he found none of those contradictions, that it was the most correct book he had ever seen. At this point I considered for the first time why there would be contradictions. This also was a time when I formed many questions about the Bible and about the nature of scripture in general. I set goals at this later point in my mission to continue to study the Bible and its origin after I returned home. I would get to the bottom of this.

Three weeks after returning home I began my first semester ever as a college student. Besides being a 21 year-old freshman, I fell in love with university learning. I declared my major to be Communications because I wanted to study further how to communicate and the effect of communication on thought, and thus behavior. I didn’t forget my goals of understanding the Bible. At the end of my first religion class, the first half of the Book of Mormon, I asked my teacher, Greg Wightman, if he taught Old Testament also, as I wanted to enroll in that class. He objectively informed me that if I were serious about taking the Old Testament that I must take it from Bruce Satterfield; that Brother Satterfield was by far the most qualified to teach the Old Testament. I wrote his name down and checked it out on the internet, but didn’t think much of it until I could register for my next semester 4 months later. During those 4 months, and while working and living in Tucson, Arizona, I bought a book called Whose Bible Is it? It was a basic history of the Bible, and considered the battle between Christians and Jews of who really is responsible for the Bible we have today. Though I didn’t read the entire book, I read enough to where my interests were sparked even further as to how the Bible came to be. It spoke of how the Bible was most likely spoken before it was written and by this manner it was passed for hundreds of years before being written. In the meantime, while considering this, I began to register for school. Seeing that Brother Satterfield not only taught the Old Testament class, but he also taught the Hebrew Old Testament class; I figured it would be a winning combination so I signed up. The summer of 2006 I will always remember because of the vivid lessons I learned while studying the Old Testament in Hebrew. Along with learning the language, I learned more about the history of the Hebrew Bible. One thing that struck me as quite interesting was that the earliest complete edition of the Old Testament in existence today was made in 1009 A.D. This earliest edition was the base of the Hebrew Bible we used, as well as most of the academic world—the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, or BHS. Considering that the BHS was the academically-deemed most correct version of the Hebrew Bible (at least by virtue of its completeness and age) and only 1,000 years old, I could not help but wonder even more what happened during all the years between completion and this version. Was it changed? Was it translated? Are there other versions out there? Are they different? Why?

During the course of the semester, as well as the following semester when I took the second half of Biblical Hebrew from Brother Satterfield, I learned from translating that there were some differences between what the Hebrew said and what we read in the King James Version of the Old Testament—the English doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, in Joshua 24 we read of when Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem to forcefully renew the covenant made with that generation’s fathers at Mount Sinai. In his discourse, Joshua talks about the many ways the Lord has shown Israel mercy. In the King James Version we read, “Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time,” and “I took your father Abraham from the other side of the flood, and led him throughout all the land of Canaan, and multiplied his seed.” The word that King James’ translators interpreted to men flood actually means river. This may seem trivial, but there is a rich meaning to be taken from the correct translation. When it talks about the fathers on the other side of the river (vs. the other side of the flood, meaning pre-Noah) we are to understand that they were the fathers of Abraham that were idolatrous. The Hebrew also connotes that the “other side of the river” would refer to what we might call, “the other side of the railroad tracks,” a strange, foreign place representing the world. God brought Abraham from the world to the Promised Land, and He also brought the Children of Israel from the world to the Promised Land. Another example of this is in Genesis 22, the story of Abraham being commanded to offer up his only son, Isaac, as a burnt offering to the Lord. One of the first words in the first verse in the King James Version says, “God did tempt Abraham.” The word tempt was probably not the best choice for this situation. The word used actually signifies “to test, try, or prove” included with a connotation of intensity. God didn’t tempt Abraham, nor did He merely test him; God REALLY tested (intensely) Abraham with the intent of proving his worthiness. Joseph Smith’s comments on this verse show his understanding of the true meaning of the verse when he said that this trial would be the most heart-wrenching of all to prove to God that He valued Godhood above all else. In verse 3, after receiving the command of the Lord, the King James Version says, “And Abraham rose up early in the morning.” While our imaginations can make assumptions about the reasons why Abraham “rose up early,” the Hebrew verb used in this instance actually brings with it a feeling of eagerness. Abraham was eager to do the will of God. These inferences, plus myriad more, and what they mean for us spiritually as well as intellectually cannot be understood by reading the English Bible alone. Are we all then doomed to read the Old Testament in Hebrew because of mortal, imperfect translators who often erred, or at least failed to convey the entire meaning of the original language?

Brother Satterfield is a very knowledgeable man, especially when it comes to anything Bible-related. One of the greatest reasons for this is because of his large amount of experience studying in the Holy Land. When he read about a place in Hebrew, he visited it, and sometimes helped in archeological digs of such sites. He knew every inch of the sacred space we read about, or at least it seemed so. My mother had done the study abroad semester in Jerusalem in 1976 when she was attending BYU. Between my mother’s pictures and stories, and the obvious appeal related by Brother Satterfield, my mind was soon made up that if the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near-Eastern Studies ever opened again, I would do whatever it took to go there. That was in the fall of 2006. The winter 2007 semester was the first in 6 years that the Center finally accepted students, ruling that it was safe once again to study in Jerusalem. When I became aware of this I jumped for joy! I started considering what I would have to do to be able to go. I heavily considered transferring to BYU just to be able to apply to go to the Center as it was only available to BYU students in the beginning. During the summer of 2007, while working in Bloomington, Illinois, after reading my scriptures and praying I just happened to out-of-the-blue look at the BYU Jerusalem Center’s website. There was a new announcement on it stating that the Center was now accepting applications from BYU, BYU-Idaho, and BYU-Hawaii. I jumped for joy again! I printed off the application and after completing them, mailed them from Jackson County, Missouri while on a family trip. Ironic, I thought—applying to visit the Old Jerusalem from the New Jerusalem. In a short while I was informed that I was indeed accepted to go to the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near-Eastern Studies.

Before arriving at the Center I never quite knew exactly what kind of experience it would be. I thought it would be cool to see the places I have read about in the Bible, both New Testament and Old Testament. Just like any experience in life, my experience at the Center was not what I thought it would be in so many, mostly good, ways. One way, among many, of describing my experience at the Center was that it was academic. In my time there I learned about the Old Testament, New Testament, and all of their correlating history by some of the Church’s greatest scholars: Richard Draper, David Seely, Ray Huntington, and Craig Ostler. I also participated in Palestinian and Israeli history classes, taught by a Palestinian and an Israeli, respectively. If there ever was any impression that this semester abroad would be a vacation, it was proven wrong in the first week. Between all of the rich classes, field trips, and exploring of the Old City, there was hardly any time for the rigorous homework schedule we had to maintain in order to keep our heads above water in the classes. One of my favorite parts of being there at the Center was being able to pull aside these great scholars and ask them questions that I couldn’t figure out. For example, when I learned from one student about the idea of a Deuteronomist, a theory scholars use to explain the authorship of a good portion of the Old Testament, I was able to pull David Seely aside to ask him what this meant. David Seely was at the time writing the article on the book of Deuteronomy for the Anchor Bible series, the most prestigious collection of biblical writings in the world. When I had a question about the meaning of a passage in the New Testament, I pulled Richard Draper aside to ask him about it. Richard Draper is considered by many, including the dean of Religious Education at BYU, to be the Church’s foremost scholar on the book of Revelations. It was in this context that I was able to further my education of the history and origin of the Bible. We covered in depth the beginning of the writings now included in the Bible, the transformation from Archaic Hebrew to Classical Hebrew, the change in culture of the Jews which led to the need for a Greek Bible for them, the stories of the translation of the Septuagint, the emerging of Christianity and the changes it caused to the Jewish Bible, the Jewish Canon set in Council of Jamnia, and the Christian Canon set in Council of Carthage. I would like to briefly discuss these events.

Assuming that the first 5 books of the Old Testament were indeed written or dictated by Moses, this makes the first attempt of collecting scripture around 1600-1200 B.C., depending on which academic theory you subscribe to. The language used at that time was Hebrew, but its script (or written letters) was archaic. We know of Archaic Hebrew mostly from ancient epitaphs at tombs and very few other writings using this script. This script gave way to the easier-to-read Aramaic script during the Babylonian exile. When they came back from exile, they still used Hebrew to write the Bible but used Aramaic characters. It must be kept in mind that during the existence of these sacred writings the only way to preserve was to make copies. These copies were made by hand, copying character after character and consuming a lot of time. An interesting side note is that the Dead Sea Scrolls were also written by hand and one can see on the scrolls the many mistakes they made as they crossed out portions and wrote in margins. It was expensive to attain the materials needed for the task of making writings of considerable length and was not feasible to start over when a mistake was made. There are numerous examples of this in the Masoretic texts and Dead Sea Scrolls. It was shortly after the return from exile that the last prophets of the Old Testament wrote, around 450 B.C. Later when the Persian Empire fell to Alexander the Great and Palestine became subject to Greek culture and language, it was not long before the majority of Jews, now spread across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, were more fluent in Greek than in Hebrew. Appealing to the people, it was decided that a Greek version should be made so that all Jews could continue to read the Bible. This Greek version of the Hebrew Bible is known as the Septuagint, meaning 70 in Latin, denoting the fantastic story that 70 Elders of Israel made individual translations within the same 70 days and all of them were identical. After Christ came to fulfill all things launching the Christian movement and tension with the Romans escalated in Palestine the most popular school of thought among the Jews, that of the Pharisees, won by survival of the fittest. This group, the early formations to what we now know as Judaism, was allowed to leave the city of Jerusalem when besieged before the Roman destruction of the city. They travelled North-eastward to a city called Yavneh. Because of the success of Christianity, around 90 A.D. questions were raised as to what constituted scripture. The Jews now had a fairly large collection of scrolls and writings of different prophets and scribes. What resulted was the Council of Jamnia (Yavneh). This council was held to decide upon, for the first time, the canon of the Hebrew Bible. They had to decide which doctrines to incorporate, which writings to include, and which books in total to include.

When Christianity continued after the death of Christ the authoritative leaders were spread thin across great geographical areas and large congregations. This resulted in many letters being written by Apostles or missionaries to the members of the different congregations. This is essentially the beginning of the New Testament. After all the Apostles had died or been killed, the main authorities of Christianity were called the Apostolic Fathers. These were not men with authority, but they were men who personally knew the Apostles. Each Apostolic Father had writings of certain Apostles. These, like the Hebrew texts of old, were copied and re-copied for a time. When Constantine decreed his kingdom to be Christian, he made all of the different Christian schools of thought get together to work out their differences. Eventually, in the Council of Carthage in 397 A.D., after the first creeds were formed, the New Testament was given its canon. It was much like the Council of Jamnia where the men made arguments for why or why not certain books should be included. With this council, we essentially have the Bible as we know it today, the Old Testament from the Jews and the New Testament from the Early Christians.
Included in my education in Jerusalem was the informal education of exploration. One of my favorite sites to see in Jerusalem was the Israel Museum. The museum was and still is under construction for renovations that are taking place to some parts of the museum. My favorite site to see at the museum, nonetheless, was the Shrine of the Book. The Shrine of the Book is an entire section of the museum (its own building) that is dedicated to the history of the Bible, mostly through the Dead Sea Scrolls. I visited the Shrine of the Book 3 times in the time I was living in Jerusalem; I found it fascinating to read about and look at these scrolls and try to read the Classical Hebrew written on them. Most scholars agree, the Dead Sea Scrolls were the most significant archeological discovery of the century, maybe even in history. Why were the Dead Sea Scrolls an important find? Because like I had learned in my Hebrew class, the earliest extant complete version of the Bible was finished in 1009 A.D. Scholars have long suspected the Jews of changing the Hebrew Bible in the first century A.D. to fit their own theological ideas, or at least to not as easily fit the theological ideas of Christianity when it first came to light. There is a story, found in the letters of the early Apostolic Fathers, where one Christian missionary is persuading another Christian missionary to stop using the Jewish Bible so much to convert Jews. He apparently had become so good at using the Septuagint (the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek by the Jews) to convert Jews, that the Rabbis were pushing to stop using the Septuagint and go back to the Hebrew text. This confident missionary replied to the persuader something to the effect of, “Let them switch, and I’ll prove Christianity’s truthfulness in that Bible too!” What he didn’t know, the persuader later informed him, was that the Jews were at that very instant changing the Hebrew text to make it harder for Christians to evangelize to the Jews. When the Jews made the switch back to Hebrew, Jewish convert numbers dropped. The Dead Sea Scrolls are important because they were created sometime before the first century B.C. and contain all of the books of the Hebrew Bible as we know it today except for the Book of Esther. This means that we can do a comparative study between the first century B.C. Dead Sea Scrolls and the eleventh century A.D. Masoretic text (traditional version handed down from the Masoretes) to see what kinds of changes have taken place. Needless to say, the findings have been significant. As far as I know, there is no religious group in existence today that uses the Dead Sea Scrolls as canon. The King James Version of the Bible’s Old Testament was mostly translated from Masoretic text.

Another sight to see at the Shrine of the Book was the Aleppo Codex. Made in the tenth century A.D. this version of the Hebrew Bible is older than the more widely used version from which the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia was made. It is not used because it is not complete. The complete version, called the Leningrad Codex, is used because it is complete. Even still, with all of my new learning about translations, scrolls, codices, and councils I found it quite upsetting that although the Old Testament was completed about 450 B.C. we don’t have a pure, virgin copy of what those prophets said.

In this adventure of my acquaintance with the Bible, I learned there are many reasons to discount the Bible. At first it only helped me to appreciate the purity of the Book of Mormon. As my knowledge grew of the history of the Bible as a text, I became increasingly discouraged and began to seriously wonder, “Why on earth do we believe this book?” This is how I almost lost my testimony of the Bible.

Since these experiences I have come to appreciate the Bible, despite its many flaws. The Joseph Smith Translation has been given to clear up points of doctrine where needed. The Lord has given us the Spirit to discern by. After a brief conversation with one of my professors at the BYU Jerusalem Center, I realized that just with the Book of Mormon, faith is required to believe the Bible. I continue to ask myself, “Why do I believe this book?” not from a disbelieving standpoint, but from a believing standpoint. I now know that the Bible is true. What an adventure.