Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

by Rachel Held Evans

The truth is, the Bible isn’t an answer book. It’s not even a book, really. Rather, it’s a diverse library of ancient texts, spanning multiple centuries, genres, and cultures, authored by a host of different authors coming from a variety of different perspectives. These texts, like others from antiquity, have undergone edits, revisions, copies, and translations through the years. No one has the originals. Before they were canonized, they circulated as disparate collections of scrolls and codices, and before that, many were passed down as oral traditions. The Scripture Jesus knew and taught looked nothing like the specialty Bibles we sell in our Christian bookstores or even the giant, leather-bound heirlooms we treasure in our churches. Jews were still debating which texts should be canonized in their Scripture a century after Jesus’ death, and Christians were arguing over the shape of their canon well into the Protestant Reformation. (Luther wanted to leave out the book of James, for example, which he called “an epistle of straw.”)6 Ask a Catholic monk, an Orthodox priest, an evangelical pastor, and a Reform rabbi how many books are in the Bible, and you’ll get four different answers. These various traditions sort their books in different ways too, because Scripture consists of stories, poems, proverbs, letters, laws, genealogies, parables, and a host of other genres that can be difficult to categorize since they emerge from a culture so different from our own. Because of ...