Harsh words, no? However, they simply reflect the truth about an old uninformed, pre-scientific biblical literalism that remains championed by Jesus-for-the-right believers - and criticized by their more sophisticated opponents.
Contemporary Biblical Scholarship
What then about the insights of Jesus-for-the-left scholarship? How does it deal with the objections so familiarly rehearsed in "Jesus for the Left, Jesus for the right?"
Like all modern science, it's complicated. But I'll begin here.
At the simplest level, modern scholarship holds that what we call "The Bible" (The Book) is not a book at all, but a collection of books. It is an entire library written by different authors at different times, under vastly different circumstances, and for different and often contradictory purposes involving what we call today "class struggle."
No wonder then that we often find an upper-class God supporting the royal classes with their debaucheries, exploitation of the poor, and bloody wars all fought (as they are today) in the name of their deity. That's what oppressors do.
All of that becomes even more complicated when we realize most of the literary forms within the Bible are far from history as we understand it. Yes, there are "Annals of Kings" (like Saul, David, and Solomon). But those represent the work of court historians whose job was to glorify their employers, not to tell the truth; all of them must therefore be taken with a grain of salt.
But besides such "histories" the Bible also contains myth, legend, debate, and fiction. There are letters, complicated Hebrew poetry, and ancient laws that seem superstitious and ludicrous to moderns. There are birth stories and miracle accounts that all follow predetermined patterns. There are prophetic texts and wisdom literature including proverbs, jokes, and plays on words. And then there's that strange literary form called "apocalypse" which, scholars tell us, was a form of resistance literature written in code during times of foreign occupation and oppression.
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