extract from http://www.quango.net/brinsmead/RELIGIONANDMYTH.htm

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… There are two ways to approach the New Testament. You can come to it with a religious belief, that is to say, you can entertain a mythological view of the New Testament which exists independently of any investigation of what the documents say for themselves. You can treat the New Testament like the “scholars” of the Middle Ages treated the horse’s mouth. Rather than take a look at the real mouth, you entertain religious belief about that mouth and that is the end of the matter. You resolve not to look, not to ask questions, and God forbid that you doubt the religious belief.

The other approach is to see what the New Testament documents say for themselves. This is the scientific method. This is a literary science. It employs not just a grammatical interpretation but the historical interpretation of reading each passage in its historical context. (See my 1983 Verdict essay, The Historical Method.

For instance, you may approach the Bible with the religious belief that it was verbally inspired or dictated by Mighty God, and that for all intents and purposes it dropped straight out of heaven free of all human idiosyncrasies, cultural conditioning, social context, world views etc.

But if you examine the documents on their own terms, you will see the cultural, even educational aspects of the various authors on display, even displaying their own social conditioning, their education or lack of it. That part of literary analysis is easy.

You may have a religious view that the New Testament is the Word of God and as such can never err or be contradictory. You assume that one part has to be in perfect harmony with any other part, etc. because it is the inerrant Word of God. That is a religious pre-supposition. It is a mythological view imposed on the New Testament. When you take up an individual New Testament document you can’t find any hard evidence that the writer (or writers, perhaps editors) are making these claims. They don’t give any evidence of a consciousness that they are writing Holy Scripture. They don’t claim infallibility. They don’t claim their literary production is “The Word of God” The church has made these claims at times for the documents, but the documents themselves stop well short of a claim to holy canon status.

Paul Achtemeier (The Inspiration of Scripture) says that we have to see that the New Testament is the product of the early church. Most of the authors are unknown to us. The different books were the product of different community. Each book reflects not only the historical circumstances but the theology and the ecclesiology of each community.

God did not write the Bible. The church did! Some books were possibly composed by the whole group of people. We need to stop thinking in terms of an inspired individual writer and think of the books as the product of inspired communities. So the church wrote the New Testament and the church canonised the New Testament. Wake up for goodness sake! The Bible is not a reflection of God’s authority but the church’s authority. All the claims which have ever been made for the Bible and about the Bible even which books are included in the Canon rests on church authority.

The church was not infallible back then any more than it is infallible now!

Classical Protestantism has the religious (mythological) belief that the Bible and the Bible only is the all-sufficient rule of faith and practice.

But if you let the Bible speak for itself it doesn’t make such claims. It is not always clear whether some commands or requirements are temporary or permanent, if they apply to an historical people in an historical situation or to all people in all situations: and it is also silent on many social and ethical problems faced by us today.

As for the great doctrines of incarnation, trinity, atonement, etc, if they were always as clearly stated in the Bible as it has often been affirmed, why has the church in all ages resorted to Creeds. The Creeds, it is said, state what the Bible teaches. So when people believe say the Athasascan Creed and what it says about the Trinity, they go to the Bible and sure enough they find the texts which confirm the Athanascan Creed. The SDA’s too find their 27 Fundamental Beliefs in the Bible including the idea of an “investigative judgment” beginning in heaven in 1844 while the JW’s can find that Jesus came secretly in 1914 – “its all clearly spoken of in the Bible”.

The fact is that anyone can find in the Bible exactly what he has been conditioned to find there by his religious biases.

The Bible as such, according to the Bible, is not the Word of God. The Word of God is God and the object of worship. Bibliolatry is a form of idolatry – nature worship.

God’s Word is spirit and life and can only be disclosed in a person and through a person. The living person is the locus for the revelation of God. The New Testament declares that the person who reveals God is Jesus Christ. In a secondary sense the Word of God, especially in the book of Acts is the orally proclaimed message about Christ. (See also Romans 10:8 “The Word of faith which we are preaching.”) Scripture is testimony or a witness to Revelation.

Judaism was the religion of the book – variously called law or Scripture (graphe) or letter (gramma) meaning, the written or inscribed text. Sometimes Scripture is said to consist of the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, but sometimes Law means any part of the Old Testament Scripture, as in John 15:25. (See also Galatians 3:22,23 and Galatians 4:21-30 where Law is equated with Scripture).

Jesus did not write Scripture nor did he instruct his disciples to write Scripture. Nowhere does Jesus, especially in his last discourse in John 13-16, instruct his followers to live out of or by Scripture. And neither does Paul in all his letters exhort Christians to study or live by the Bible.

To early Christians Jesus was living Word, Light, Shepherd, Bread, Water etc. – and all those things which Judaism had claimed for the law (see Psalm 119). Early Christianity existed, spread and thrived without a book, without a New Testament. It was not, as in later Protestantism, a religion of the Book. The Fourth Gospel is a repudiation of a religion of the Book. (See John 5:39)

Paul too repudiates a religion of book/law/letter which are all the same. (What Paul calls letter in Romans7:6, Timothy 4 calls “Holy Scripture”.)

The Galatian heresy was the reversion to a book/letter/law religion. II Corinthians 3 is a repudiation of living by the gramma – the written or inscribed text. Paul’s “not under the law” means not under gramma/ graphe/torah! So too for Paul as for “John”, the word of God is not equated with the written or inscribed text. To be led by the Spirit (Gal 4:22) is not living out a book religion. Nowhere, absolutely nowhere, does Jesus, “John” or Paul advocate anything that remotely approaches a Protestant Sola-Scripture which is really a kind of Judaism redivivus. This kind of religion has actually made the Bible their Christ, and it has to be said that those who make all these fantastical claims for the Bible are in reality very very ignorant of what the Bible claims for itself. ….

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