Is Scripture Literal?

[Loburt]

Suicide bombers blow themselves and innocent bystanders to bits in part because they believe they will be rewarded with 70 virgins in the afterlife. They interpret the Koran literally - as fact.

In several threads in the Religion and Philosopy forum, people have posted passages from the Bible, citing them as factual historical evidence.

Are sacred texts such as the Bible, the Koran and the Ramakien literal history or intended to be open to interpretation?

Here is the view of Karen Armstrong, a respected author on religion. This appeared in today's The Nation newspaper.

Distorting Sacred Scripture, Literally

Human beings in nearly all cultures have long engaged in a rather strange activity. They have taken a literary text, given it special status and attempted to live according to its precepts. These texts are usually of considerable antiquity, yet they are expected to throw light on situations that their authors could not have imagined. In times of crisis, people turn to their scriptures with renewed zest and with much creative ingenuity compel them to speak to their current predicament. We are seeing a great deal of scriptural activity at the moment.

This is ironic, because the concept of scripture has become problematic in the modern period. The Scopes trial of 1925, when Christian fundamentalists in the US tried to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools, and the more recent affair of ?The Satanic Verses? both reveal deep-rooted anxiety about the nature of revelation and the integrity of sacred texts. People talk confidently about scripture, but it is not clear that even the most ardent religious practitioners really know what it is. Protestant fundamentalists, for example, claim that they read the Bible in the same way as the early Christians, but their belief that it is literally true in every detail is a recent innovation, formulated for the first time in the late 19th century.

Before the modern period, Jews, Christians and Muslims all relished highly allegorical interpretations of scripture. The word of God was infinite and could not be tied down to a single interpretation. Preoccupation with literal truth is a product of the scientific revolution, when reason got such spectacular results that mythology was no longer seen as a valid path to knowledge.

We tend now to read our scriptures for accurate information, so that the Bible, for example, becomes a holy encyclopaedia, in which the faithful look up facts about God. Many assume that if the scriptures are not historically and scientifically correct, they cannot be true at all.

But this was not how scripture was originally conceived. All the verses of the Koran, for example, are called ayat, or parables; its images of paradise, hell and the last judgement are also ayat, pointers to transcendent realities that we can only glimpse through signs and symbols.

We distort our scriptures if we read them in an exclusively literal sense. There has recently been much discussion about the way Muslim terrorists interpret the Koran. Does the Koran really instruct Muslims to slay unbelievers wherever they find them? Does it promise the suicide bomber instant paradise and 70 virgins? If so, Islam is clearly prone to terrorism. These debates have often been confused by an inadequate understanding of the way scripture works.

People do not robotically obey every single edict of their sacred texts. If they did, the world would be full of Christians who love their enemies and turn the other cheek when attacked. There are political reasons why a tiny minority of Muslims are turning to terrorism, which has nothing to do with Islam, but rather with the way people read their scriptures, with strident, misplaced certainty. Reading gives people the impression that they have an immediate grasp of their scripture; they are not compelled by a teacher to appreciate its complexity. Without the aesthetic and ethical disciplines of ritual, they can approach a text in a purely cerebral fashion, missing the emotive and therapeutic aspects of its stories and instructions.

Solitary reading also enables people to read their scriptures too selectively, focusing on isolated texts and ignoring others that do not chime with their own predilections. Religious militants who read their scriptures in this way often distort the tradition they are trying to defend. Christian fundamentalists concentrate on the aggressive Book of Revelation and pay no attention to the Sermon on the Mount, while Muslim extremists rely on the more belligerent passages of the Koran and overlook its oft-repeated instructions to leave vengeance to God and make peace with the enemy.

Most of us have neither the talent nor the patience for the disciplines that characterised pre-modern interpretation. But we can counter the dangerous tendency towards selective reading of sacred texts. The Koran insists that its teaching must be understood ?in full? (20:114), an important principle that religious teachers must impart to the disaffected young.

Muslim extremists have given the jihad (which they interpret reductively as ?holy war?) a centrality that it never had before and thus redefined the meaning of Islam for many non-Muslims. But in this, they are often unwittingly aided by the media, who also concentrate obsessively on the more aggressive verses of the Koran. We must all ? religious and sceptics alike ? become aware that there is more to scripture than meets the cursory eye.

Karen Armstrong is the author of ?The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism?. This article originally appeared in The Guardian.

Karen Armstrong

[scutfargus]

There are many religious texts as well as tens of thousands of books written about religion. Most opinions here are, these are simply books written by men, some better than others. Most people in this forum would not consider any book to be the Word of God.

So, let me ask: what would a book have to do or what would a book have to be or what would have to be found in a book for some of you to consider it to be the Word of God?

Here, I am not saying there is a Word of God out there; I am simply posing a theoretical question: if there was a Word of God, what would it look like to you? How could you tell it was clearly the Word of God?

[Loburt]

Religious texts can be the word of God without being literal history.

[CiaranM]

So, let me ask: what would a book have to do or what would a book have to be or what would have to be found in a book for some of you to consider it to be the Word of God?

Here, I am not saying there is a Word of God out there; I am simply posing a theoretical question: if there was a Word of God, what would it look like to you? How could you tell it was clearly the Word of God?

it would need to be written by somebody proven to be god or maybe even somebody claiming to be god. to the best of my knowledge no such book exists.

and books written by FRIENDS of god more than 100 years after he died don't count ......... sorry about that !!

[Loburt]

I think it's a bit too dismissive to say it simply doesn't count.

It's possible that a text written 100 years after Jesus's death could reflect the Word of God if Jesus did in fact carry the Word of God.

But I have to think that a text written decades or centuries after Jesus's death has probably altered or distorted Jesus's original message and the events of his life.

Parts of it may be accurate, but to assume all of it is, well, that requires some faith now, doesn't it?

I don't have that faith. Which is not to say I automatically believe Jesus didn't exist or wasn't divine. I'm saying I don't have faith that someone setting down what he did or said quite a while after the events will necessarily portray those things accurately.

Everyone has seen the simple experiment where there is a line of people and someone whispers a message in someone's ear and it gets passed down the line. By the time it reaches the last person it rarely resemble the original message. So much for oral tradition.

And any lawyer or judge will tell you that in a court case eyewitness testimony is often the most unreliable testimony.

[johnno]

according to scutwhatsisname, Jesus is God (cloning? don't know). so according to scut....whatever is said to have been uttered from Jesus is the word of God.

does that make sense to you? doesn't to me.

but scut....... knows a lot more about this than me (obviously)

[Anthony]

Joeseph Campbell once said of taking crisis resurrection as literal "is a mistake in reading the symbol"; it is to read "the words in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry," and to read "the metaphor in terms of the denotation instead of the connotation". In fact, Jesus' ascension into heaven,

metaphorically interpreted, means that "he has gone inward -- not into outer space but into inward space, to...the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within"

He also compared taking religous texts literaly as eating the menu instead of the meal that ir represented.

[Loburt]

Excellent points, Anthony, and I'm a big Joseph Campbell fan.

But I'm sure there are many who regarded him as a dangerous heretic.

Follow your bliss!