Self Defense from Bible Bullies

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I often run into survivors of spiritual trauma. More specifically, I run into people who have been wounded by biblical bullying.

By “Bible Bully” I mean people who have the letter, but not the spirit, of scripture and who use the text as a power tool to make other people feel bad about themselves.

Let’s be clear. If someone takes the Bible literally, they are actually being illiterate. The picture attached to this post shows two pages from my Greek Christian Testament. Even if you do not read Greek or Hebrew you can see the pages are divided into two sections. The bottom part of the page contains short hand notation for all the variants on that page.

In other words, there is no original surviving text of the Jewish or Christian scripture. What we have are thousands of partial manuscripts. Bart Ehrman estimates there are 200,000 to 400,000 variants in the Christian scripture based on something like 15,000 Greek and Latin manuscripts. So the top half of the pages in our picture, what biblical illiterates take literally, are somebody’s best guesses about what the original message might have been.

Whatever the ancients meant by “God’s unchanging word” could not have meant the biblical text. Just looking at the King James Version shows how English has changed since the original writing. It is staggering to think about how language has changed over much greater span of time and across various cultures and languages.

A study of the actual texts that comprise scripture make literal understanding impossible. The text it self warns us against biblical literalism when it says, “The letter of the law kills, but the spirit of the law gives life.” I had a wonderful professor in seminary, Eugene March, who joked that God hid the original text of the bible so we wouldn’t beat each other to death with it.

So, if someone is bullying you with a bible please realize that the person doesn’t even know what the bible is. If someone does not love you, they have not understood the first thing about Jesus. The stories of Jesus make it perfectly clear that if we ever must choose between loveless religion or religionless love we must choose love every time.

The Rev. Jim Rigby is minister at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church - Austin, Texas. This post is republished with permission from his Facebook page.