The Bible - an excellent source of words

Someone once said to me “Even if you don’t believe in God, you have to admit the Bible contains a lot of wisdom”. This sounds like a reasonable argument until you examine the facts. Does the Bible actually contain “a lot of wisdom”?

Unlike most Christians I have actually read the Bible cover to cover. I did this over a period of a year in my late teens when I was a Christian. Most Christians place more emphasis on the New Testament than the Old. (After all Jesus is more important than Moses.) So like many Christians I was pretty familiar with the stories and talking points of the New Testament. But I was curious to learn what was there in the 800 pages proceeding the so-called “good news” of Jesus Christ. So I diligently slogged through those ancient books. If you think slogged is too harsh a verb, you have obviously not read the Old Testament.

Sitting on my desk is a copy of the King James Bible. It is over 1000 pages long and I’m told it contains nearly three-quarters of a million words. That a lot of words, but how many actually express wisdom? 

Other than fundamentalists, who have selectively memorized the Bible chapter and verse -more often for promoting creationism, homophobia, bigotry and hatred, than for wisdom’s sake- most typical Christians would be hard pressed to identify more than a few dozen parts of the good book that are in fact, wise. These are usually the popular quotes we hear at weddings, funerals and Sunday sermons.

 We might all agree that there is wisdom in the ten commandments, in the Beatitudes, in many, but certainly not all the words attributed to Jesus, and perhaps a few gems scattered randomly through out other parts of the Bible. One could realistically say perhaps a few thousand words of the Bible would be considered “wisdom” by even the most generous definition of the word.

Yet for every wise word, we find hundred pages of meaningless genealogy, tribal rituals, and horrific justification for war, rape, slaughter and slavery. We find all types of rules, laws and advice that are not only unwise, but, in fact, outright stupid and dangerous.

 So the answer is, No, I don’t find the Bible an excellent source of wisdom. The ratio of wisdom to nonsense, of wheat to chaff, is really no greater than any other collection of stories, myths, poems and oral histories. The one thing I have learned from the Bible is that if we raise people to believe something is true, it will be accepted as truth. I am not sure that is the same thing as wisdom