Who Wrote the Bible?

A very cool and respectful Bible documentary from Britain's Channel 4:

The answer to 'Who wrote the Bible?' turns out to be complex. For a start, the Bible isn't a single book, but contains 66 separate books which were collected over something like 1,200 years. Christians and Jews have usually been careful to say that the scriptures weren't delivered from a passing cloud, but were, they believe, written, edited and compiled by human beings under the inspiration of God. Even so, what Robert Beckford discovers on his biblical road trip is much more complex than anything he learned in Sunday school.

Take the Five Books of Moses, which open the Bible and include the world-famous stories of the creation, the Garden of Eden and Noah's flood. Known in Hebrew, the language they were written in, as the Torah, these books contain the foundations of Judaism and Christianity. It turns out that the Books of Moses weren't written by Moses at all, but by four anonymous writers, each with his own particular view to promote. These writings were only brought together when an Israelite king found them useful to promote his political agenda, many centuries after the time of Moses. Says Beckford: 'King Hezekiah turned the Bible into a party political manifesto for monotheism. He definitely knew something about spin.'

And

There have been many TV programmes that have tried to bury the Bible – but this is no hatchet job. We get a clue about this when we see Robert Beckford at the tomb of Christ, inside Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre. As he stoops to leave the tomb, he wipes tears from his eyes. 'I was really moved by the experience,' he says. 'I am a Christian; I believe in the teachings of Jesus, so to be in a holy place, contemplating life, moved me.

Click here for more on the program.

Of course, I say "respectful" because Beckford treats his subject matter with the reverence of a believer, but he ultimately concludes, and deftly illustrates, that the Bible cannot possibly be taken as literal truth: for some parts of Christiandom, like my former denomination the Southern Baptists, such a point of view is tantamount to blasphemy. I guess it all depends on your point of view. But this really is good stuff. I really love the documentary's assumption that, even though we know for sure that the Bible is far more allgorical, far more mythological, than it is historical record, there is still a great deal of important human meaning contained within its covers. Of course, the skeptic in me says that there's lots of meaning in Greco-Roman mythology, as well as the tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, or Spider-man for that matter, but that doesn't invalidate the point.

Actually, given my own past association with Christianity, I found this show, which debunks even while it finds deeper truth, to be somewhat inspiring, almost as though it gives me permission to love the Bible again, to stop viewing it as a document of ideological hatred.

Go check it out here, courtesy of Throw away your TV.

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