Semi-Random Musings (45)

I’m on the fence about the compulsive need of Western Christian minds to harmonize every instance of apparent contradiction in the Bible’s historical accounts. On the one hand, the critics need to be defanged and each upcoming generation of young believers inoculated from the skepticism they breed. On the other, I am personally comfortable with the knowledge that the originals of these manuscripts passed muster with generations that lived much closer to or even during the events these accounts preserve.

If these believers did not find fault or write defenses to similar criticisms in their own day, why would we imagine we are better at spotting errors than they were?

I came across yet another instance of apparently-contradictory scriptures pleading for my harmonization chops this morning. Luke records three accounts of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, two in the first person and the first and most famous in the third. The alleged contradiction and suggested resolution are as follows:

Luke, from Acts 9: “And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.”

Paul to King Agrippa in Acts 26: “And when we were all fallen to the earth, I heard a voice speaking unto me.”

Suggested resolution: They all fell at the first flash of light, but Saul’s companions stood up again while the Lord was speaking to him.

My thoughts? Awkward, unlikely and unnecessary. The shortest distance between two points is always a straight line.

The Greek word translated “stood” in Acts 9 is the verb histēmi. Its literal meaning is to stand, but the writers of the NT frequently use it figuratively. One example: The KJV of Matthew 2:9 says a star “stood” [histēmi] over where the young child was. Stars, as we all know well, do not have feet. A better translation might be “remained”, since that’s obviously what occurred. Again, Luke 5 has two ships “standing” [histēmi] by the lake unattended. Ships don’t have feet either, but they do remain where you moor them. Yet again, in John 8, the Lord says the devil does not “stand” [histēmi] in the truth, which is a figure of speech indicating he is not consistently truthful.

Accordingly, I suspect what Luke was trying to tell his readers in Acts 9 is that Saul’s fallen companions remained speechless as they lay on the ground. No “get down get back up again” required.

But come on, Luke wrote all three accounts. He’s hardly likely to have missed such an obvious conflict if it actually represented a substantive difference to the narrative in first century Greek.

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Critics often unfairly accuse Christians who take the Bible literally of wanting to put homosexuals to death because the Law of Moses teaches it. This is probably because some Christians do, like this guy here, this guy here or this guy here.

For the record, I take the “not my circus, not my monkeys” approach to the issue (and no, the monkeys in question are not the LGBT crowd). As a Gentile Christian, I do not live under the Law of Moses and I am certainly not responsible for enforcing it. I have lived for over six decades, mostly quietly and obediently, under governments with which I disagreed wholeheartedly about most issues involving the execution of justice, voting in accordance with a conscience informed by the understanding that, unlike Israelites, I do not live in a theocracy. I don’t expect that will change until the Lord returns.

Obviously, not all professing Christians agree with that approach. Some believe in “discipling the nations”, and more than a few of these would-be disciplers talk a tough game.

Would a society modeled on the Law of Moses be morally preferable to the one we’ve currently got? Certainly, provided our legal system followed Moses all the way down the track. The key is consistency.

We might think that following some provisions of the law would always be better than following none, and incomplete adherence to Moses better than ignoring him. That would be an error, and I think so because the Lord Jesus did. Inconsistent justice is injustice, just as stoning a woman caught in the act of adultery while failing to prosecute her adulterous partner would have been unjust. So “neither do I condemn you” was the Lord’s unlikely answer. In saying this, he was not repudiating Moses or winking at adultery, but condemning Moses’ inconsistent and hypocritical followers for their selective dedication to the pursuit of justice.

Like the garment for which the soldiers cast lots around the cross, the Law of Moses is all of a piece. It’s a package that can’t be kept in bits and pieces. “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it,” wrote James. What then shall we say about a nation that kept the laws it found convenient while ignoring whole swaths of law it did not? What kind of society would execute gays and lesbians while not even criminalizing adultery? Not one I’d like to spend much time in.