History and the Bible and Facebook

Blundered into a discussion on Facebook about the historicity of the history of the bible, the accuracy of its science. My adversary sounded pretty reasonable at first, but it took about two exchanges for him to pull back his arguments behind the walls of inerrancy. The enterprise is a hopeless and unnecessary welter of contradictions. A biblical literalist who wishes to present the “history” of the bible as actual history must apply the most baroque and fanciful interpretations to passages he pretends to be taking literally. He asserted that the Apostles prophesied all history between them and us. In order to achieve that stunning bit of generalization you have to interpret at fifty miles an hour; you have to assume that certain words are at once allegorical and literal, contemporary and prophetic, and that the plain-speaking Apostles were tying knots of gnosticism that would baffle a Jesuit; you have to retool the interpretations of individual passages to include events at other times and other places: Rome must be not only Rome but New York and Moscow and Las Vegas and the city councilman who wouldn’t give you a zoning variance. If you point out that nothing in the Hebrew scriptures (saving Omri and the second temple) is verified by any other source, you have it pointed out that the bible does mention historical persons and events– Cyrus, Assyria, etc. But this is like saying that my rich fantasy life, peopled by unicorns and visited by aliens, suddenly becomes history if I mention television or Barack Obama from time to time. My contention was never that the bible is “wrong,” but rather that it presents sacred and not scientific history. That it is a kind of novel. Archaeological discoveries are irrelevant to the believer; you would not say the same of the historian. A believer whose faith is strengthened by the discovery of a fragment of stone with marks on it which might be part of the name “David” is really missing the point. My friend was not ignorant of history. He was able to say, for instance, that God allowed Sumer to exist because out of one of its reconstituted cities came Abraham. The most fanatical Christians are the most worldly and the least imaginative ones. They have never gotten the point that there is spiritual truth as well as physical truth, and are thus constantly trying to shove the spirit into bodies it was not meant to inhabit. Oddly, they see the awkwardness, and must declare the limping enterprise divinely ordained in some way, raised above healthy critique. It’s like my being a bad carpenter (which I am) and insisting that God prefers my crooked shelves and loose screws in mysterious ways that you would acknowledge if you really loved Him.