Yesterday I was listening to a secular
scholar again. (Okay, it was JP.)
He was speaking about the Bible, its value
as a text and its importance in human history. At the same time, he was
expressing disbelief about how it had persisted. It’s a “strange old book”, he
said. It’s “contradictory” and “cobbled together”. He puzzled over how it was
possible it could ever have “such an unbelievable impact on civilization”. But
at the same time, he concluded, “However educated you are, you are not educated
enough to discuss the typological significance of the biblical stories.”
And then he went on to try.