Interpreting Scripture

There is something universal inherent in each religion that sets believers free from the local, concrete details of everyday life. Most books of faith have teachings and prescriptive elements, rules for living that help to ensure the divine's participation in our everyday lives. Most religions also advocate asking questions about the meaning of those teachings.

I believe in the power of asking questions. For me, asking questions about spirituality led to the revelation that no single religion is either entirely right or entirely wrong. If one religion were entirely right, the world would not be in the state of turmoil that it is in today. If one religion fit everyone and had all the answers, we would be living much different, more harmonious lives.

It is the asking of questions that leads to answers. There is a long history of searching for answers through religious study and scholarship. People have been asking questions about our holy books for as long as they have been in existence. I hope that the answers I discover through my ongoing search promote discussion between people from all walks of life about the nature of religious belief, and that they hold out the very real promise of spiritual harmony.

Who Wrote the Scriptures?

The Bible is God-inspired. But what does that mean? God-inspired creativity can be as simple as the sidewalk painting done by a child. The Bible is an interpretation of God's message. It contains many voices and contributions; no one person wrote the Bible in one fell swoop under the direction of God himself. There are volumes and volumes of books about who wrote the Bible and when. For centuries before they were written, the books and stories that now make up the Bible were widely circulated as part of a rich oral tradition.

Have you ever sent a secret message around a room one to one, whispering ear to ear? Try it if you haven't before. By the time the message gets to the seventh or eighth person, it is very different from the original version. I think the stories in the Bible are like that. How do we find the true meaning?

As well as being passed from mouth to mouth, from voice to voice, over the ages the Bible's messages have been translated from language to language - Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, English, and more recently into many others around the world - as well as altered according to the geography, culture, and politics of the times. It's impossible to know what has been added to and what may have been lost from the original stories.

Was There an Agenda?

Each of the men who wrote the Bible - as well as those who wrote the Qur'an (the Koran) the holy book of Islam; the Torah, the scroll containing the Hebrew word of God; and the holy books of other faiths - had a personal set of internal filters that evolved as they grew into adults. Their family, friends, community, and environment influenced these filters or points of view. We call this a worldview. It is our way of seeing and explaining our world and our particular culture. Like other people, the men who wrote sacred texts also had personal political agendas.

Each time the Bible was translated and rewritten, it has been subjected to a different set of filters and political agendas. For example, many illustrations show Christ as a white man with blue eyes. But did he really look like that? If he did, wouldn't the Bible mention that his skin and eyes were a different color than those of the other people of the Middle East? Why do we portray Christ as a white man? Could it be because of our political agenda?

All of us have a political agenda of one type or another; it's an unavoidable part of being a functioning human. My political agenda is to convince people that we are all equal and basically good - that we could accept each and every person for who they are, regardless of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, education level, or religion. I also want people to take personal responsibility for what they attract into their lives and to start learning from each other in matters of spirituality and faith, instead of judging and causing harm.

I wonder about the scholars who wrote down the words of others in the Bible or the Qur'an. What were their social and political agendas? I think their intentions may have been similar to mine, although ideas about social issues probably differ due to living in different place and times. Their longing for peace on earth is shared by me and many others today. We still haven't attained that goal.

Without question, however, our knowledge has advanced since those times. Attempting to explain concepts like communication or energy force without the words we have now must have been more difficult back then; for example, they didn't have terms such as gravity, electricity, or radio waves. How limited was the vocabulary? What did the words that were used actually mean in the context of the times?

Did these scholars ensure that their stories reflected events exactly as they happened, that the words of others were recorded exactly as spoken? Written text rarely reflects the exact spoken word; often what we say doesn't make sense on paper, nor clearly state what the speaker meant to say. In official records, such as those kept by our government today, people are employed specifically for the purpose of clarifying and revising the spoken word.

What happened to concepts, particularly culturally specific concepts, in language translations? How many times was a simple thought or concept lost? How many times has the Bible been rewritten by different men with different worldviews? The Bible was written by men - what about the views and opinions of women? The gender of the writers brings up questions of patriarchy and the gender norms of the times. All of these questions raise doubts about our ability to interpret the Bible literally.

What About the Disclaimers?

The Bible itself has disclaimers. In the King James Version (Collins Publishers) there is a disclaimer before Revelation:

Yet, however difficult its interpretation in detail, the theme of the sovereignty of God is stated clearly. [italics added]

Later the disclaimer states:

Irregularities in expression and style may reflect an Aramaic original of which our present Greek text is a translation, or they can be adequately accounted for by the nature of the material or the probability that in exile the Apostle was unable to avail himself of an amanuensis or scribe as he had done for his other compositions. [italics added]

These disclaimers point to scholars' understanding of the potential for mistranslation. What we have long understood to be the parting of the "Red Sea," for example, is now known to be a mistranslation of Reed Sea.

How many original messages were somehow mistranslated or misinterpreted by scribes and storytellers? It is impossible to say how many or how great the effects have been; for example, red and reed mean two entirely different things.

I think we could reinterpret the Bible a thousand more times and each time get something different from it. That is partly why many people refer to the Bible as the "Living Word." It is a text that becomes relevant in a thousand different ways to each new generation of spiritual seekers. A hundred years from now, we will think differently about the Bible just as we think differently about it now, in the twenty-first century, than we did in the past.

What Was the Original Message?

Maybe we read more into the stories than we have to. The messages may be simple. I consider the Bible to be a collection of myths, legends, and stories written to explain historical events and the beliefs and concepts of the times. For example, the story of Adam and Eve is a myth meant to explain that people have the power of choice; this story is told to help us remember to use that power wisely. I do not believe the divine intended that this story give humankind permission to blame women for the original sin.

The story of the immaculate conception demonstrates that miracles really can happen. In our historically patriarchal western society we seem to have adopted the belief that this story somehow means sex is impure - that a son of God could enter our plane only if he were conceived without the baseness of sex.

Why have the names of sexual acts and body parts become swear words? What is the purpose of defiling sex? These questions need answering. Our sexuality is part of a good and creative purpose. What we have done over millennia is to make people - especially women - feel dirty and impure when they choose pleasure or passion.

Stories in the Bible and other sacred books are shared to enable us to see options for the choices we have to make every day. Our power to choose is one of the greatest gifts we have. It is what gives us the power to attract whatever we want into our lives.

Choosing What to Believe

I choose not to believe that the divine intended to burden us with the guilt of the original sin or that there was (or will ever be) only one woman worthy of bearing a son of God. I choose to believe that we are all sons and daughters of the divine.

Choice is our gift and the pleasure of sex is something to be grateful for. Not just because it creates life. It's okay to enjoy all the fruits of wealth the divine offers on this planet when we choose wisely, when we are grateful and follow the universal golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

To help me better understand the Bible's messages, I search for information in many faiths. When I find similarities - connections between ideas, extensions of ideas, related ideas - I explore them further. I find myself picking out phrases from passages I've been referred to in various religious texts and finding meaning in those.

Spirituality is a personal and unique journey that we undertake with the divine - one that leads to new knowledge, new choices, new thoughts, and new feelings. As we ask questions, receive answers, make choices, and ask more questions, we weave an increasingly rich fabric of faith and belief. Soon this fabric begins to take shape, and patterns begin to emerge. We become aware of who we are in spirit. Infinite growth becomes reality.

As individuals we have choices that no one can take away from us. Each day we have the opportunity to become more self-aware and to get better at how we live our lives. Life is about practicing. We practice living so we can enjoy the paradise that the divine has provided for us, so we can feel the love that permeates our soul when we connect with another human. We practice living in order to get to know our spirit.

But what is our spirit? What is it that gives us energy and life? If humans were created in the image of God, we can begin our search for answers by exploring the nature of the divine.