{"id":1041,"date":"2013-11-29T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-29T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/11\/christians-have-not-been-reading-the-bible-this-way-for-2000-years.html"},"modified":"2013-11-29T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-29T12:00:00","slug":"christians-have-not-been-reading-the-bible-this-way-for-2000-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/11\/christians-have-not-been-reading-the-bible-this-way-for-2000-years.html","title":{"rendered":"Christians Have Not Been \u2018Reading the Bible This Way For 2,000 Years\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
Whenever I write something critical of the relatively recent dogma of \u201cbiblical inerrancy,\u201d someone always responds by insisting that Christians have been reading the Bible this way for 2,000 years. That\u2019s not true. It\u2019s not possible. Christians haven\u2019t been reading the Bible this way for 2,000 years, because for most of the last 2,000 years, most Christians weren\u2019t reading the Bible at all.<\/span><\/div>\n
For the first of those 20 centuries, Christians weren\u2019t reading the New Testament because it was still being written. Even 1,900 years ago, many of the texts we refer to as the New Testament were still a work in progress.<\/span><\/div>\n
It took another 200 years after that for those texts to be collected into anything like a formal canon. That only came about after Emperor Constantine made Christianity Rome\u2019s official religion. The next step, then, was to translate the Bible into Latin so that every Roman-therefore-newly-Christian could read it. Jerome didn\u2019t finish that project until 405.<\/span><\/div>\n
At that point \u2014 1,600 years ago \u2014 it might finally have become possible for Christians to start reading the Bible in the same way that white evangelical inerrantists read it today, but that\u2019s not how they read the Bible. Take a look at Augustine or any of the other early church writers from the first five centuries of Christianity and you\u2019ll find all kinds of approaches to the text \u2014 wildly inventive allegorical schemes, symbolism, reinterpretations of the New Testament almost as radical as the NT authors\u2019 reinterpretations of the OT \u2014 that would give contemporary defenders of \u201cbiblical inerrancy\u201d the howling fantods.<\/span><\/div>\n
Well, then, what about after Augustine? How did Christians read the Bible in the next several centuries?<\/span><\/div>\n
Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I write something critical of the relatively recent dogma of \u201cbiblical inerrancy,\u201d someone always responds by insisting that Christians have been reading the Bible this way for 2,000 years. That\u2019s not true. It\u2019s not possible. Christians haven\u2019t been reading the Bible this way for 2,000 years, because for most of the last 2,000 years, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nChristians Have Not Been \u2018Reading the Bible This Way For 2,000 Years\u2019<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Whenever I write something critical of the relatively recent dogma of \u201cbiblical inerrancy,\u201d someone always responds by insisting that Christians have been\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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