Discovering truth and hope in biblical myth
I was in middle school when I first noticed something was “off” about the Bible. It was in Genesis 4, which contains the strange story of Cain killing his brother Abel, or humanity’s first murder.
If you need a refresher, Cain and Abel bring offerings to the Lord. God likes what Abel brings, but Cain…not so much. A reason why is not given and Cain kills Abel in response. God confronts Cain and sees to it that the ground curses him. Cain grows worried that “I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” God puts “a mark” on him to signal to all who find Cain that they should let him live. Cain then heads to the land of Nod, where he “knows” his wife (i.e. they have sex and she becomes pregnant) and founds a city.
The disparities aren’t hard to miss. At this point in the biblical story there are no other humans walking the earth besides Cain’s parents, Adam and Eve. Why, then, does Cain fear someone will kill him? Where does his wife come from? And the people living in the city he founds? Scripture itself implies there are other people in the world separate from Adam and Eve’s lineage, even as the story simultaneously leans away from the possibility.
Many people start running into issues with their faith because of hypocrisy in the church and relational turmoil stemming from it. But that’s often just the beginning. A search for the why behind the pain they feel resurfaces oddities they’ve noticed in the Bible and have long-suppressed, sending them down the rabbit hole of questioning what the Bible even is and what it says. Along the way they discover “problems” in the Bible and their church’s theology and culture that seem to obliterate the claim of the sacred book being without error.
This month I want to take a swing at the Bible part of the mess so many of us have inherited. My goal is threefold: to try to 1) articulate what our challenges with the Bible are, 2) explore a healthier way to approach the sacred book, and 3) offer a few practical first steps folks can lean into. Let’s see where this goes.
Strange stories from a complex Bible
You don’t have to be a biblical scholar or theologically trained to notice that the Bible is full of odd stories that often contradict themselves. There’s a talking serpent, water turning into blood, arbitrary and excessive punishment, a big fish swallowing a dude who somehow lives through the whole ordeal, and accounts of similar events that contradict one another. The story of Cain and Abel is just one of many stories that are both strange and hold contradictions.
Some of these are small and easy to overlook, perhaps even inconsequential. There are differing views on Israel’s leaders presented in the accounts of Kings and Chronicles. Judas’ manner of death is different in Matthew 27 compared to Acts 1. The crucifixion scenes between Matthew 27 and Luke 23 have different interactions between Jesus and the others being killed that day. More examples abound, but you get the point.
Other contradictions in Scripture though are much more serious in light of our context today. It’s generous to say that science and the creation narrative in Genesis don’t exactly see eye-to-eye. At the end of Job —pay close attention to 42:7, especially— God Himself openly rejects most of the theology found in the Old Testament. The Gospel of John provides a starkly different dialogue, events, locations, and even identity for Jesus than Matthew, Mark, and Luke do. By Romans 11, Paul has more or less written himself into a corner and simply embraces mystery in doxology, writing “For who has known the mind of the Lord?” The latter is deeply alarming considering so many Christians in my neck of the woods point to select passages in Romans as the absolute truth for how salvation works.
Saying these things out loud can induce anxiety. How can we trust the Bible if it isn’t 100% historically and scientifically accurate? Doesn't this mean the Bible is lying to us? That Christianity is a charade?
It’s human nature to push these questions down in exchange for a false sense of certainty. But sweeping our concerns under the rug and even punishing people who ask questions —which is the default response in many American evangelical churches, especially— is like dropping a lit match on gasoline. This is a conversation people should be able to have in community with others. Ironically, a lot of churches in my neck of the woods are some of the least safe places to have serious conversations about the Bible.
What these questions are is instructive in what they tell about ourselves. Many have been taught to take the Bible literally in the modern, historical, and scientific use of the word literally. If the Bible is not literal fact, then it is false, and so is our faith. But our faith is right so the Bible must be true. This circular logic can run like a well-oiled machine for a time in closed church environments, but it quickly fractures when coming into contact with the real world.
So, the question I want to pose is this: why does the Bible have to be these things?
Exploring our problematic approach to the Bible, and the broken church culture it creates
There’s a lot of language out there that gets used to describe the Bible: the Word of God, inspired, inerrant, infallible…we could go on. These terms do not mean the same thing, both in and of themselves and how people and churches think in practice. Here in much of the American South though, such descriptors are often used interchangeably as meaning the Bible is perfect, historically accurate, and the only authority for all matters in faith and life.
Setting aside the fact that both the Christian faith and New Testament writers point to Jesus as the final authority, not the Bible, the way in which these terms are often used remains problematic. For starters, because this language in our context implies that the Bible is historically and scientifically accurate, it is no surprise that a lot of well-meaning folks believe it is. Secondly, phrases like “the Word of God” or “inspired” are used in such a way to imply that the Bible came down from heaven itself and was written directly to us in our context today. The reality that human beings wrote these words down millenia ago —even if divine revelation or inspiration did play a role— and that they have been translated countless times since makes “the Word of God” by its very nature limited by human insight and ability.
Saying such a thing should not be controversial, but in many American evangelical spaces it very much is. The literal existence of four diverse Gospel accounts shows human fingerprints on the text and speaks to the fact that early followers of Jesus understood his life and words to be so time and location-conditioned that adaptation was going to be needed if the story was to be understood in new places and changing times. And times back then were a-changin’, from the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70CE to the Church becoming more and more Gentile as it spread, and beyond.
Put another way: this tendency to confuse inspiration with historical or scientific fact denies literal human involvement in the creation of the Bible, from the original writers to editors to translators who have lived across millennia. Without these people and more, there literally would be no Bible.
Another relevant development concerns human access to the Bible. Literacy rates are exponentially higher today than they were when the stories of the Bible were being written down, or even just a few hundred years ago for that matter. We take for granted that not only can we just pick up a Bible and read it, but that we can access Scripture in print, on our computers and phones, in audio and visual formats, and more. Historically speaking these are very new developments; for most of human history the masses have not had such direct and easy access to the Bible. But because there are more eyes on the Bible than ever before, there are more people who are going to notice that the hyper-Sola Scriptura they inherited is a very flawed way to approach the Bible. And this can be the source for tremendous conflict today.
It isn’t just that people are coming out of churches that read the Bible in a hyper-literal way, it’s that such an approach is embedded in the preexisting cultural views and desires of that place, driving them to interpret the Bible in a way that provides certainty to those views and desires. This fragile understanding of Scripture creates a church culture steeped in suffocating, outward expressions of pietism and exaggerated traditionalism in service to the status quo. The culture itself is placed above God, the story of Jesus, and the work of the Spirit and worshipped in open idolatry, almost always without people realizing it.
The emotional fragility that hides just beneath the surface in churches like this easily implodes into conflict when even minor differences of opinion arise. Real people are harmed because the Bible is being used as a mere rulebook. Views of what truth is are not spoken or acted out in love, prophetic calls for justice and repentance are quashed, and faith in community is destroyed by abusive and controlling behavior. Ironically, all of this is unbiblical even by the hyper-literal standards of such churches (Ephesians 4:14-16).
This tendency to treat the Bible anthropomorphically leads people to declare they have a “high view” of Christ and Scripture when, in reality, they have a very low view of both. In practice, Christ is rejected as being the Word of God (John 1:1-18) in ways that range from hilarious —such as people who really should know better saying folks need to “marry the Bible”— to destructive, like the now endless stories of people being ejected from churches for merely asking simple questions.
Needless to say, for many who are in or coming out of more “conservative” traditions where these things are happening, the cultural baggage is so heavy that they can’t even look up to see there are better paths. An authoritarian approach to Scripture inevitably leads to and stems from authoritarian faith communities. Those who are departing do so disillusioned and broken. In today’s world where people in such spaces have more access to biblical scholarship and other approaches to Scripture than ever before, more and more people are on a collision course with reality.
Yet many still force these literal expectations onto the Bible despite its pages rejecting such a treatment. We only set ourselves up to fail as a result. The good news is there are paths forward out of hyper-literal readings of Scripture and the authoritarian church cultures they produce. It involves taking the Bible literally…for what it is.
Embracing the Bible on its own terms
The Bible is an ancient collection of stories and letters written in different times, places, and languages spanning at least 1,300 years. It’s difficult to pin down an exact moment when the Bible as we know it today started to come together, but the earliest date could be as far back as the Babylonian exile. We don’t know who wrote most of the individual books and letters, but we do know some of the stories were likely passed down orally for generations before people started transcribing them.
We have to understand what the Bible even is at a historical and literary level, not just what we consider its meaning in our lives to be. Scripture contains multiple voices and literary genres. The Bible does have real history, but it also contains myth, poetic flare, apocalyptic literature, and references to lost documents that would be incredibly useful, such as Paul’s earlier letter mentioned in 1 Corinthians 5:9. The Bible as we have it today does read as a unified story; however, that does not mean it automatically has a single voice or single purpose, or that it must fully agree with itself at all times and be 100% accurate in the ways we want it to be. The Bible’s true unity is found in the centuries-long conversation on its pages about who God is, where we come from, and how the Kingdom of God and humanity will become one in the future. We can and should participate in that conversation instead of reading the Bible as if it was written directly to us as complete, literal historic fact with a bunch of rules to be followed.
Put another way: imposing modern historical and scientific expectations onto the Bible is a recipe for disaster simply because the Bible is not a modern book. We have much more of a historical consciousness today thanks to the hard work of biblical scholars, archeologists, anthropologists, historians, and comparative religious studies. We can also lean on sciences such as astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, meteorology, and more to learn about who we are, where we live, and where we are going. Our view of reality is very different from what the ancients believed reality to be.
Does this mean the ancients were stupid? Of course not. Their wisdom and creativity gave us a solid foundation and trajectory that humans have been building on ever since. Humanity is on a timeline of discovery and we’re simply further along on it. Our view of factual truth is different today because it is supposed to be! Personally, I think we should be grateful that people across millennia have tried to reach beyond their own limits and available tools to explore the divine. We wouldn't be where we are today without them.
In many ways, this is why we are living in an incredibly exciting moment. We’re able to do more with Scripture in more ways than the ancients could ever have dreamed of. We have the opportunity to push forward a conversation that has spanned thousands of years due to new understandings coming from the Bible itself and historical and scientific advancements. Yet many people feel the exact opposite, disillusioned even, because it has been hammered into their heads that the Bible has to be something it isn’t: perfect by our modern standards. As such, we fail to hear the multi-vocality in Scripture and do not see the literary genres at play that speak to deeper truths and a deeper reality. Let’s briefly explore one of the Bible’s most misunderstood genres in my neck of the woods: myth.
Understanding myth by walking in Eden
When many of us hear the word myth we think of something that is false or untrue. We are not wrong to do so. In modern American English this is a very common way to understand and use the term. But when it comes to the Bible, myth represents something much deeper and older in a literary sense.
Myth is one of the oldest forms of human storytelling. It artfully blends together tradition, imagination, and existential reflections into a single narrative, offering wisdom and guidance that spans time itself. Myth draws our attention to the problems with the way things are by using gods, villains and monsters, heroes and noble beasts, and more to explore universal themes like where humans come from, love and hate, and the struggle between the good of creation and the evil trying to overrun it. Literature such as the Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia come to mind when we look for examples of stories that contain myth.
The Bible is steeped in myth and mythic elements mixed with history. Both resonate deeply with the human experience, even today. It can be very difficult to see where history ends and myth begins in parts of the Bible; but, again, the Bible is not a modern book, so this “problem” is largely of our own making. Understanding myth can help us overcome this challenge. The presence of myth in the Bible does not make the book an outdated relic of the past, but a powerful narrative we carry with us as we move through an often confusing and painful world, a narrative that roots us into our own humanity and God with meaning and purpose.
So, let’s look at what is likely the most famous mythical story in the Bible. Walk with me in the Garden of Eden, would you?
Genesis 1-2 contains a truly beautiful story that Jews, Christians, and plenty of other people have pored over for millennia. I encourage you to take a few minutes and read the full passage before continuing while keeping everything above in mind. When you do, you’ll notice a few of those oddities alluded to above.
Genesis 1 provides a structured and orderly overview of God bringing chaos into order during the creation process. It ends with a brief nod to his creating both male and female humans together and placing them in charge of the earth. The plants and animals are created before the humans, and Eden is not mentioned. The focus is on everything God is doing, both directly and in calling on the “earth” and “waters” to “bring forth” life, highlighting the grandeur of His work and power over everything. This is a God who has everything figured out. Must be nice.
In Genesis 2 this narrative is flipped in multiple ways, with the broad focus being much more on the creation of humans and their relationship with God and each other. The details are starkly different as well. After making the heavens and the earth, God creates a single human alone who is placed in the Garden of Eden, and the plants and animals are brought into being afterward. And only then does God create the woman from the rib of the single human after realizing “it is not good that the man should be alone.” The focus is much more on the relationship between God and humans —as well as the two people themselves— and much less on the rest of creation. This is a God who is more human, more curious, and who doesn’t have everything figured out from the outset. One empathizes.
Here we are, only two pages into our Bibles, and the hyper-literal reading of Scripture as scientific and historic fact has already failed us. “The facts” are openly contradicting each other. The creation orders are not the same, we are presented with two very different pictures of God, and a pretty critical detail —the Garden of Eden— is left out of Genesis 1 entirely. Indeed, even the style of language between Genesis 1 and 2 is noticeably different. Genesis 1 is more formal and liturgical, while Genesis 2 is a narrative.
Uh oh?
Again, this is only “a problem” if we demand that the Bible be historically and scientifically accurate. Responsible biblical scholars and some translations are quick to point out what is going on here: these two stories are so different because they are two separate accounts that came into being in different contexts. Exactly when and by who, we do not know. But it is widely agreed that stories like these likely started to be written down sometime after the establishment of the monarchy in Israel in the 10th century BCE, and that was after they had been passed down orally before that. Some of the parallel stories found in the Old Testament, like this one, came together after the monarchy fell in 586BCE and Judean leaders were living in exile in Babylon. And this grafting together of two stories occurred when the exiles returned to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple and needed a single, common Torah to unite around. Rather than ditching one story in favor of the other, they embraced the deeper truths and beauty in both by keeping them.
Perhaps a metaphor could be helpful. A good seamstress brings together different pieces of cloth that seem incomplete on their own to make a beautiful, colorful quilt. But if you look closely you can see the seams, maybe even the individual stitches. This is more or less what is going on here: these contradictions are the seams and stitches of the Bible.
It is exactly because we have the seams and stitches that we can see a deeper reality and the hopes that myth gifts us. If all we had was Genesis 1, we would miss out on a picture of a more personal God who deeply loves us and walks among us. If all we had was Genesis 2, we would have a much harder time seeing His power and the fuller beauty and goodness of the earth and universe. And these differences obviously come to a head in Genesis 3, which explore long contentious themes of temptation, free will, the relationships between men and women, and the consequences of failure and disobedience.
This is the conversation we are invited into, a conversation that has been ongoing for millennia now. Who is God? Who are we? Where did we come from and where are we going? Why do things often feel so broken? Will we ever get to something like Eden? How do we even try?
The mythic themes found in and around Eden can be found elsewhere in the Bible and ancient literature. This tells us something about how our ancestors thought about reality. In myth, we see a God meeting people where they are in their time and their place —not where we want them to be— in a way that makes us ask questions of ourselves thousands of years later. Not only do we get at deeper truths and a view into a different reality this way, the Bible itself becomes much more interesting to read and ponder over!
So, was there an actual Garden of Eden or a moment like it? I don’t know because I wasn't there. If hard evidence ever emerged that there was I’d take it seriously, but right now all we have is a mysterious story with at least two voices to discuss, one that both draws us to the God of the cosmos who also happens to walk among us. Even though Genesis 1 and 2 tell us this story is myth, it is still —as Paul or likely one of his followers writing as Paul notes— “inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:14-17)
Put another way, Genesis 1 and 2 do not have to be historically and scientifically accurate by our own standards today to be inspired and useful.
Reasons for reform, and to hope
The past several decades of church life here in much of the American South have been dominated by a rejection of older and newer ways of thinking about the Bible rooted in an authoritarian culture to prevent good and needed reform. But today’s world is making it impossible to keep this going at scale. Again, ordinary people have more access today than ever before to Scripture, responsible biblical scholarship, and increasingly diverse Christian voices. These can be purged time and time again —and indeed they have been— but they return in some form and fashion with every new generation. The key difference now is that these trends are accelerating. The tools authoritarian church leaders have long used to keep at bay the reality God is bringing His people into become less effective with each passing year.
While I can’t predict the future, I do believe the communal destruction underway in countless churches and younger generations walking away from them is just as much the end of something old as it is the beginning of something new. I don’t know if or when the day will come that the purges and fighting give way to a wider, slow and painful assimilation. My sense is that it won’t be this decade. It’s entirely possible that the new will continue being built outside of the old, and the old is left to die an agonizing death. History suggests it will likely be a grinding mix of both.
Indeed, we are already seeing signs of this grinding transition. Even many who say they take the Bible literally as scientific and historic fact give away that they do not in the language they use. The “seven days” of creation are now often described as “a day being an age.” When is the last time you saw an abusive pastor or elder taking Jesus literally? I don’t see any of them cutting their hands and feet off or gouging their eyes out after sinning, or drowning themselves after causing another to sin (Matthew 18:6-9). And many genuinely good and kind people who have semi-departed a harsh, literal approach to Scripture are still trapped by the language of the church culture they are in. Transitions are messy, and they take time.
But rather than sitting around and waiting for things to feel better, it would be much more healthy to prepare ourselves for the future by leaning into that deep truth found throughout Scripture: that God met ancient people in their times and places in ways they could understand Him. Jesus exemplifies this well throughout his life, perhaps most obviously in his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4. Here, the Messiah reveals himself in such a way that sets a new pattern for the future, one in which all people —men and women, Jews and Gentiles, religious outsiders and insiders— stand as one before God in worship, peace, and unity.
With this hope in mind, I want to offer four practical steps folks can take to begin moving toward the Bible in a way that respects the Bible for what it is and restores a truly high-view of Scripture we should have:
1. Get a really good study Bible. By really good I don’t mean one that promotes self-serving theology or merely tries to ascribe meaning to certain texts. I mean a study Bible that draws deeply from biblical scholarship and provides background history, explores in detail the culture and issues of daily life in biblical times so we can better understand what the Bible is, and is honest about translation challenges and contradictions. Personally, I have found The New Oxford Annotated Bible to be insightful and encouraging.
2. Read Scripture in community with others who have truly different life experiences than you. Feel free to read the Bible quietly by yourself —I still do— but Scripture is meant to be explored first and foremost with others because the Christian faith is inherently communal. If you find yourself in study settings where everyone always agrees and different points of view are unwelcome, then people aren’t there to grow and be challenged so much as to be assured of their preexisting beliefs. Find or start a new space that makes room for the Spirit and fellow believers to stretch you.
3. Learn how other Christian and Jewish traditions today and in the past approach the Bible. If you’re ready to breathe a sigh of relief that there has always been more than one way to read the Bible, all you have to do is look beyond the bubble you’ve felt trapped in. The vast majority of devout and inspiring Christian and Jewish thinkers today and throughout history do not reside in American evangelical fundamentalism.
Want a solid Catholic perspective? Here you go. An incarnational approach to Scripture that takes biblical scholarship seriously? Here you go. Deep exploration of biblical themes in their ancient context and what they could mean for us today? Here you go. Heck, want a mythical story inspired by some of the mythical stories found in the Bible, one that will help you understand some of the myths in the Bible? Here you go! These are just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Go, be free of the past!
4. Discover and use new language about the Bible. As we come to a better understanding of what Scripture is, we can get stuck using basic terms from our past without thinking about what they mean to us now and how other people might still understand them. This can cause all kinds of misunderstandings and relational issues when we are trying to articulate something we see in Scripture. I have found that it is sometimes best to stop using old language entirely. For example, while I believe the Bible we have today is more or less what we are meant to have at this moment in time, I don’t use words like inerrant and infallible anymore because of the negative, culture-warring baggage attached to them.
Much like the ancients, God still meets people where they are today, including in how we read and talk about our Bibles. We just have to get out of our own way and pay attention to what He is putting in front of us.
Closing Thoughts
I don’t know where myth ends and history begins in the Bible. No one walking around today does. Generally speaking, the further back we go the more mystery there seems to be about specific events and human origins. History and science still have plenty of unanswered questions, too. I can’t help but smile that the Bible is in good company in this regard. But I think the obvious place to wrap this up is with Jesus. If the Bible is not 100% historically and scientifically accurate, can we trust the story of Jesus?
I think we can.
Did the writers of the Gospel accounts take some creative liberties to help people in their context better understand who Jesus is? Based on what we know of ancient literature, probably. Did those who actually saw and hear Jesus remember some details differently than they saw or were told? Probably. There’s a reason that in so many of our Bibles the titles of the four gospels are The Gospel according to… Christians have long recognized that the Gospel accounts give us brief snapshots and conversations of moments in his ministry. Much like our own lives, the vast majority of Jesus’s life was not recorded. Perhaps other moments were documented but have since been lost to the sands of time.
I know this answer can be frustrating. If there is one part of the Bible that we need absolute certainty on, surely this is it! But the messiness of the Gospels is exactly what makes the Incarnation easier for me to believe. If the Gospel accounts were packaged neatly with a pretty bow on top, I —like many people— would find that highly suspicious. That the Church embraced four different stories from the outset is encouraging. It shows that these weren’t problems for the writers of the Bible and early Christians, but opportunities to point to and clarify a deeper reality.
Perhaps C.S. Lewis put it best when he wrote this in his essay Myth Became Fact:
“When we translate we get abstraction-or rather, dozens of abstractions. What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level. Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionist. Or, if you prefer, myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.
Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens-at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other…
We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘pagan Christs’: they ought to be there-it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic-and is not the sky itself a myth-shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.”
I’m with Lewis. I don’t understand how so much of the story of Jesus works. It’s just too big for one mind to grasp, but that’s why I keep coming back to it. That the myth becomes reality truly is the miracle. The story of Jesus is one I am willing to be wrong about because, Lord knows, this world needs a place where “the heaven of legend and imagination” meets “the earth of history.” With no such myth becoming reality, there is no hope.
Thankfully the Bible invites us into the journey that we need, even if it is not the certainty we demand.
I explore faith and church culture in the American South from Memphis, TN. Never miss an article by signing up for my newsletter and subscribing to the podcast. You can also become a member or leave a tip to help keep this site free and open to all.
