Originally printed in the Summer 2010 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "From the Editor's Desk - Summer 2010." Quest 98. 3 (Summer 2010): 82.
George Orwell's Burmese Days, based on his years as a policeman for the British Empire, tells of the book wallah, a peddler who wandered through upper Burma , selling and trading books. But there was one book he would not accept. "No, sahib,' he would say plaintively, no. This book...with a black cover and gold letters"this one I cannot take. I know not how it is, but all sahibs are offering me this book, and none are taking it. What can it be that is in this black book? Some evil, undoubtedly.'"
The book wallah knew what to do with the Bible. Our civilization is not so lucky. Although this scripture remains the cornerstone of Western thought, we no longer know how much of it to accept, or how.
These problems extend far beyond the much-publicized quarrels over the creation story in Genesis. In the first place, the text of the Bible"written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek"is in many ways in bad shape. Some parts are simply missing. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, include a missing passage from the standard text of 1 Samuel 11 that explains an otherwise baffling war between King Saul and the Ammonites. The original ending of the Gospel of Mark (dealing, probably, with the resurrection of Christ) has been lost, as you will see if you consult most versions of the New Testament, which include the various alternate endings that were written to fill the gap. Other passages of the biblical texts have been altered or corrupted, by accident or by intention.
Then there's the Bible as a historical record. A generation ago, scholars believed that the parts that recounted history from, say, the Exodus on (generally dated to the thirteenth century BC) bore at least some resemblance to factual events. But it turns out that this resemblance is extremely faint. The children of Israel , for example, could not have fled from the hands of Pharaoh to the Promised Land of Canaan as the Bible describes. Why? Because Canaan was an Egyptian province in the thirteenth century BC, complete with forts and garrisons. It would be like claiming that someone today escaped from the United States to Puerto Rico.
As for the Temple of Solomon , whose floor was allegedly "inlaid with gold, within and without" (1 Kings 6:30), there is no archaeological evidence for its existence. In fact archaeological evidence indicates that Jerusalem was practically uninhabited in Solomon's era (the tenth century BC): "not only was any sign of monumental architecture missing, but so were even simple pottery sherds," observe the Israeli archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in their book The Bible Unearthed.
I could make similar points about the New Testament: the Jesus Seminar, for example, has pared down its list of the authentic sayings and deeds of Jesus to a skeletal minimum. While the Jesus Seminar is highly controversial, it is rarely recognized that they are doing little more than mimicking the findings of German scholars of the nineteenth century.
What I have just said is the sort of thing any student would learn today in a mainstream seminary. Herein lies the problem. These findings are rarely communicated to lay people in any clear way. Instead the facts are pushed into the background, and the result is a vague sense of something missing. This, I suspect, is a main reason for the decline of the mainstream churches: their leaders know that the historical facts are not what they seem, but they are hesitant to admit as much. The evangelical churches do not have this problem. Their clergy still believe in the literal truth of the Bible (or are supposed to). As untenable as this position is, at least they are consistent.
No one drawn to Theosophy can find this news shocking; after all, H. P. Blavatsky criticized the Bible far more vitriolically than this. But we are forced back to the question of what to do with this text. Should it be chucked out as a fabrication? Should it be read merely as literature?
There is at least one other possibility that has long been known but needs to be reemphasized: the Bible was never meant to be literally true but was written to symbolically convey higher truths. In the third century ad, the church father Origen wrote: "Who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, ‘planted a paradise eastward in Eden ,' and set in it a visible and palpable ‘tree of life,' of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?" Rather, he said, "these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries." The same thing, he adds, is true of the Gospels as well.
Origen himself, the most learned of all the early church fathers, was one individual who appreciated these mysteries. Others include Philo of Alexandria; the Kabbalistic sages; Emanuel Swedenborg; and Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater. This tradition has gone on, very likely unbroken, since the beginning of European civilization. But it has usually been shunned by authorities who believe that historical truths are the only kind there is. Backed into a corner now by archaeology and textual evidence, they may have to open themselves to an entirely new perspective on that strange black book.
—Richard Smoley