The Bible Is A Historical Document

And why that's frustrating for everyone.

The more I’ve thought about this simple statement—The Bible is a historical document—the more I’ve come to realize how simultaneously helpful and frustrating this reality is. On the one hand, it has tremendous explanatory power when thinking through how to read the Bible, but it is that exact same explanatory power that makes the Bible’s placement in history frustrating to both sides of the ideological spectrum.

In the conservative environment I was raised in, I was taught a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. What you see is what you get. The “plain” reading is the most faithful reading and is all you really need. It may or may not be helpful to have some understanding of the culture at the time it was written, but it doesn’t do any good to try and get at the world behind the text because frankly, it doesn’t matter. Exactly what you read is exactly what happened, take it or leave it.

The issue here is that this isn’t how the Bible is written. The biblical authors wrote the Bible from their unique, individual perspectives, employing common and complex literary styles, and responding to the cultures around them. Before you think this is me falling off the liberal slope, this is exactly what the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy says.

Article VIII

We affirm that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared.

We deny that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities.

This isn’t a liberal view. This is within the view of biblical inerrancy. The Bible was written using various genres of writing, literary devices, and was aware of the world around it. The creation account was written partially as a response to the Enuma Elish, Babylon’s creation account. The prophets employ apocalyptic literary devices in their writings to symbolically portray God’s judgment and blessing on them. Jesus lived 400 years after Plato whose teachings were interacted with by Paul. That means that in order for the Bible to be coherent, we really do need to have some insight into their world. It’s not that someone needs to understand their ancient setting in order to understand what the Bible is teaching, but many pieces of the full Biblical puzzle will remain missing until you start to dive into their world and thought. Which makes things much more messy and complicated than many conservatives are comfortable with.

But all of this is equally true for those with more progressive inclinations. Because the Bible is history. It may not be the video camera footage that conservatives want it to be, but it is nevertheless historical. The sheer fact that they are religious documents doesn’t preclude them from also being historical documents. It’s hard to make any serious claim that we have no historical record of Jesus’ existence when the New Testament itself is a historical record of Jesus’ existence. Jesus himself references the stories and figures in the Old Testament as things that happened and people that existed. The events in the Old Testament happened in the minds of the people in the New Testament. That doesn’t mean that the stories haven’t been recorded using literary styles from the perspective of the people who were there and are trying to communicate theological truths through the stories. It’s possible for all of those things to be true and actually to have happened. It does no good to spiritualize things that Jesus and his followers believed were really see-it-with-your-eyes and touch-it-with-your-hands real.

All of this is to say that it's unnecessary to pit the literary design, theological truthfulness, and historical witness of the Bible against each other. You actually can have your cake and eat it too. Read the Bible through all three lenses: historical, literary, and theological. In fact, I believe this is the best way to read it, allowing the Bible to be a complex book with layers of significance.

If the Bible truly is both human and divine, then nothing about this should be surprising. But for some reason (okay lots of reasons), these things are always pitted against each other and forced into a false either/or dichotomy. I simply refuse to separate what I believe God has joined together. I’m not convinced that trying to relieve the tension the Bible holds actually relieves the tension in our spirit and conscience. Holding these things in tension is where the magic is. Maybe God’s word really is true, trustworthy, and accomplishes what it sets out to do: transform us into his image.