Wonders and Miracles
I was starting to ask God about the history of the Bible the other day, and she stopped me, she told me it just wasn’t worth putting in that much effort thinking about it. She went on to give me a new perspective, she equated the Bible to a modern counterpart, so that I could more easily grasp its import.
We’ve discussed the Bible before and she’s explained to me how a lot of the problem is with people who want it to be one thing, and one thing only. Generally that means that they want it to be the inerrant word of God, the first word and the last word, from which all of God’s intent can be divined. But it’s really a collection of things strewn together not so much because they are of a piece as because the book was sort of intended (by man, not God) to be a full curriculum for the scholars of the day. In its way it was intended to be the whole library that you could carry in your satchel. Sort of a farmer’s almanac for the cultivating of humanity.
So scattered throughout the texts that make up the Bible, we have histories, we have fiction, we have genealogies, laws, and gossip. One of the most predominant things though is fiction masquerading as truth. So what does all this suggest as a modern equivalent? Well that last item should really give it away. The Bible is the historical equivalent of a “best of” from the “National Enquirer.” Like any good tabloid the Bible has just enough fact and just enough substantive reporting to cast a thin veneer of possibility across all of its made up stories, just enough to keep people wondering.
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