I recently finished eight years of a “walk through the Bible,” a very slow walk indeed. I also recently finished a book called Uninvented: Why the Bible Could Not be Made Up, and the Evidence that Proves It. Having spent so much time mining for gold in the infinitely rich soil of God’s word, I decided I needed a big picture view again, so I started at Genesis 1 and have been reading 2 or 3 chapters a day. I had become so addicted to writing about my thoughts on the Bible, it has been hard not to jump on to my computer and type away. I have resisted that temptation, until now. However, I’m not going back to a daily grind of chapter-by-chapter analysis, as tempting as that is. Rather, I’m going to connect Uninvented to my current reading so I can continue to write about Scripture and promote my book as well.
Speaking of promoting, I would be grateful if you might share my posts on social media and with friends and family, if you think they’re worthy, because promoting a book when you’re a “nobody” is really hard, even a book as worthy of the attention as Uninvented. There is nothing like it out there, and most Christians don’t know why uninvented as a concept is such a powerful defense for the veracity of the Bible. If you’ve read it, a comment on Amazon would be much appreciated as well.
In Uninvented one of my objectives is to encourage Christians to read the Bible apologetically, specifically related to the psychology of the characters and the authors. That means in layman’s terms for those who are not “into apologetics,” that the veracity of the text, it’s truthfulness as history, is revealed in what the characters do and say, and how they act. In the book I encourage readers to see the verisimilitude in the text, which simply means does this read real, like it could have actually happened, as real people thinking and doing real things, not like fiction merely made up to further a religious agenda. And we must remember as we’re reading our Bibles that fiction (historical or otherwise) didn’t exist in the ancient world. Myths and legend did, as did epic poems like The Iliad and The Odyssey, but the Bible reads like none of those.
As I’ve been reading through the Pentateuch, as in the rest of Scripture, I see verisimilitude everywhere, including how many times the author (traditionally, Christians believe it is Moses) refers to the Lord, or Yahweh. According to biblegateway.com the numbers in each book are as follows:
- Genesis (183)
- Exodus (354)
- Leviticus (281)
- Numbers (358)
- Deuteronomy (442)
If my math is good, and my fingers and iPhone work, the Lord is referred to 1,618 times in the first five books of the Bible. If these references are not true, if the Lord did not in fact speak to Moses and his people, then we must believe whoever wrote these books is a liar, or are liars because going all the way back to Spinoza biblical critics declared Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch, but numbers of people did much later in history. This came to be called by liberal biblical scholars the documentary hypothesis. I find this hard to believe given one of the Ten Commandments is, “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” Yet, if we’re to believe the critics over the last three hundred plus years whoever wrote the first five books of the Bible were in fact liars. Does that pass the smell test to you?
The reason these references to Yahweh stood out to me was not only that there are so many of them, but that Yahweh is telling the Israelites through Moses what to do. Another word added to Yahweh and repeated stood out to me later in Exodus as the Israelites were building the tabernacle, the place where Yahweh is to dwell. Over and over Moses says, “As the Lord commanded.” Doing a word search we see the following:
- Genesis (12)
- Exodus (48)
- Leviticus (24)
- Numbers (29)
- Deuteronomy (33)
Most of these 146 references are the Lord commanding. Again, if as the critics insist this is myth and legend, then all the references to the Lord commanding or doing anything are made up, pure invention, or in other words lies. The reason they would be lies, and not just inspiring stories of a people’s founding, is that the author(s) clearly intend to convey these things really happened.
As I argue in the book, skeptical critics come to the text with a “question-begging anti-supernatural bias,” which means before they ever come to the text, they assume miracles can’t happen. If they can’t, then of course the Lord didn’t actually speak to Moses, or command him to do anything. The entire Exodus narrative would have to be fiction because, well, miracles can’t happen. Understanding where this anti-supernatural bias comes from is important for us to understand so we can see how arbitrary it is. In the first chapter of the book, I do a short historical overview of biblical criticism, and how it is based on philosophies, like rationalism and empiricism, that will not allow even the consideration of something outside of the so-called natural world. Such assumptions are nothing if not arbitrary and should be rejected by any honest observer. If we let the text speak for itself we can draw the most plausible conclusions, and will likley find in the text something historically reliable, and thus uninvented.
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