If you’ve ever read the Bible dispassionately and neutrally, you’ve probably wondered about the questionable morals described throughout. Perhaps you’ve also wondered about the stilted writing style. Sam Harris makes this observation:
Bible Writing Quality
- Post author:Erich Vieth
- Post published:September 7, 2020
- Post category:Religion
- Post comments:1 Comment
Erich Vieth
Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.
I believe that, as with all history, context is needed to interpret the intent of contemporaneous accounts. I know no one who would argue that the New Testament was not written by humans. The same applies, with a few notable exceptions, to the Old Testament and the Koran.
We know that the Old Testament was written mostly in Hebrew, a living language whose current form is not the same as when it was used to write the Testament. As vowels were essentially optional, we’re not certain what it sounded like. And words changed meaning, grammar is always in flux, and if it sounded anything other than stilted I would be suspicious. But the Old Testament is the easy one.
The New Testament was written variously in Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Aramaic was the language of Jesus, but Hebrew and Greek were both commonly spoken. The writers of the Gospels are almost certainly not the Apostles whose names they bear. The Epistles are all (we think) written by Paul, originally known as Saul, who was enroute to Damascus to persecute the Christians there, when he had the original Damascene and became a Christian. We’re fairly certain that parts of the new Testament were initially written in Latin. What might have been parts of the New Testament were written in Greek, but were left out of the book when a vote was taken on which Gospels to include. The four chosen were mostly in agreement, and the other (Gnostic) gospels weren’t
When all of that is homogenized into a single modern language, it has to be stilted.
Even that is easier than the Koran. Devout Muslims say that it was the word of God as dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to an illiterate named Muhammad. I am a theist who recognizes that all monotheistic religions have to be worshiping the same God or god. Devout Muslims claim that every word in the Koran is directly dictated by God, thus cannot be questioned. It can also only be understood in Arabic (frankly, I don’t disagree, because every translation changes the original). Arabic has many forms, and the classical Arabic spoken and written on the Arabian Peninsula fifteen hundred years ago isn’t a conversational language today. When read in any modern Arabic dialect it sounds stilted, and nobody actually speaks the language in which it was written.
The context of the origins of all three books is a hardscrabble existence in a largely desert environment, where rules to protect public health were made religious rules to increase the probability of them being followed.
I’m absolutely convinced that if we subjected the original human authors of any of the three books to a reading in English of the King James Version, we’d have the highest-rated comedy show ever.