Why is the Bible So Badly Written? …Wait, What??? (Part 1)

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine messaged me on Facebook, “Did you catch the Salon article on the Bible, before it got pulled?”  I said, “No, what did it say?” He replied, “Oh it was so bad,” and proceeded to tell me a bit about it and told me if I was able to find it, I should do write a post on it. Well, I proceeded to dig around on Google, and lo and behold, I was able to find the article in full, on the author’s own blog. So guess what? I’m writing a post on it.

The article was written by psychologist Valerie Tarico, and it was entitled, “Why is the Bible So Badly Written?” And yes, as I read it, I concurred with my friend—it really was quite bad. Simply put, it displayed an incredible amount of ignorance about some of the most basic concepts regarding what the Bible is. Or, if I can put it a different way: even if I was not a Christian and didn’t believe the Bible is inspired, I would still find Tarico’s comments to be absolutely sophomoric. The fact that even Salon.com pulled the article should tell you all you need to know.

The first red flag came in the very opening sentences of her piece, when she conflated Evangelicals with Fundamentalists, and then claimed that they believed “the Bible was dictated by God to men who acted essentially as human transcriptionists.” If that were so, Tarico said, then God must be a really bad writer.

The fact is, though, Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are not the same. Yes, by and large, many right-wing Fundamentalists do essentially believe that God dictated the Bible—and they are just plain crazy. Not only is that not the view of most Evangelicals, but such a view has never been held in Church history. Now, I think there a number of problems within Evangelicalism, but believing in the “dictation method” of inspiration is not one of them.

But What Makes the Bible So Badly Written?
In any case, Tarico then proceeds to make her case that the Bible is badly written. She says the Bible gives “mixed messages,” is “repetitive,” has “bad character development,” has “boring tangents,” and has “passages where nobody can tell what the heck the writer meant to convey.” Therefore, she concludes, “This doesn’t sound like a book that was dictated by a deity.” If it was really written by a god, it should be “some of the best writing ever produced”—more enduring than Shakespeare, more scientifically accurate than Stephen Hawking, more poetic that Pablo Neruda, more ethically coherent than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and more beautiful than Maya Angelou. Therefore, because Tarico feels the Bible isn’t as good as those works, that it, just like the Quran and the Book of Mormon, was clearly not dictated by a god.

I’m sorry, but Tarico’s criticisms amount to that of a sophomore pothead who is flunking the Romeo and Juliet unit in English class saying, “Shakespeare’s dumb! I don’t get it! Why can’t it be written more like the Divergent series? If Shakespeare really was that good, why didn’t he just make a movie?” Only with Tarico it amounts to, “The Bible is dumb! I don’t get it! If God really wrote it, it would read more like the modern writers I read!”

Furthermore, her equating the Bible with the Quran and the Book of Mormon shows a shocking amount of intellectual laziness. Islam does claim that Muhammad essentially “took dictation.” Mormonism does claim that Joseph Smith simply translated golden tablets. But Christianity has never claimed that the inspiration of the Bible ever entailed anything like what Islam and Mormonism claims.

Different Interpretations = Bad Writing?
Another reason why Tarico thinks the Bible is badly written is because people have interpreted it in different ways. That certainly is a strange rationale, to say the least. Using that logic, she would have to conclude that Shakespeare was badly written—after all, for the past 400 years countless writers and scholars have written thousands of books about various Shakespeare plays, and they don’t all agree in their interpretations of Shakespeare’s various plays.

In fact, it is generally agreed that really great literature has the power to evoke different responses and interpretations by the readers. That’s what makes great literature so alluring and captivating. I can read T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland or Four Quartets twenty times, and on the 20^th time I’ll see something I did not see before. The same holds true for the Bible. One of the most intriguing things about the Bible for me is precisely the literary creativity and genius of it. It is undoubtedly a literary masterpiece. For Tarico to claim that the Bible is poorly written because not every interprets it exactly the same, therefore, is just laughably ignorant, because truly great literature evokes different responses and interpretations.

Too Many Cooks and Too Many Contexts
Yet another criticism Tarico has of the Bible is that it is not a “unified whole,” but is rather a collection of writings written by different people, writing in different situations and cultures, and writing to different people. She also points to the fact that many believe, despite Church tradition that attributes the gospels to the figures of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that the gospels themselves are anonymous—i.e. there are no claims of authorship actually in the gospels.

How any of that counts as an argument that the Bible is badly written, though, is beyond me. Does mere anonymous authorship entail bad writing? No one knows who actually wrote Beowulf—does that mean it is poor writing or bad literature? Of course not.

And what about her complaint that the writers wrote according to their own cultural and religious contexts? Again, how is that even an argument for “bad writing”? For that matter, how else is any writer at any time able to not write within the context of their own culture?

Tarico also parrots the standard complaint made by hyper-skeptical source critics that the Bible is really just a bunch of early sources that have been haphazardly thrown together—hence two different creation myths, three sets of the Ten Commandments, and four “contradictory versions of the Easter story.”

It is quite obvious (to me, at least) that Tarico is wholly ignorant of the last 30-40 years of biblical scholarship that has made great strides in understanding the literary artistry of the biblical authors. I cannot go into the details regarding the above examples in this post, but I will say that her charge that the Bible is “badly written” because of these things stems from the obvious fact that she has failed to read and appreciate these parts of the Bible as literary compositions. Or more simply put, she clearly doesn’t know how to read ancient literature.

Genres? You Want to Talk About Genres…and Translations?
Then there was another bizarre criticism Tarico made of the Bible: “Christians may treat the Bible as a unified book of divine guidance, but in reality it is a mix of different genres: ancient myths, songs of worship, rule books, poetry, propaganda, gospels (yes, this was a common literary genre), coded political commentary, and mysticism, to name just a few.”

Apparently, Tarico thinks this is news. Anyone who has taken even the more rudimentary of Bible classes at the college level knows that the Bible is a collection of various writings and genres. Heck, I’m willing to bet most everyone who has even leafed through a Bible would know that there are different genres in the Bible. In any case, I’m at a loss as to how this constitutes “bad writing.”

And what about translations? Well, Tarico informs us that the Bible was actually originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek (thanks, I never knew that!), and therefore, since there can be problems in translating…the Bible is badly written. I’m sorry that makes no coherent sense.

She also states the Bible is badly written because some of the things in it, although they may have had relevance to Iron Age Israelites, are wholly irrelevant to her. She complains about the genealogies; she complains about Paul’s greetings to “this person and that;” she complains about the instructions in Leviticus—she complains about a lot of things that aren’t directly applicable to her and her needs, apparently. The thing I noticed was that her complaints weren’t really so much about the Bible being poorly written, as they were about something else.

…but that “something else” deserves its own post…tomorrow.