I\u2019ve spent a lot of time over the years talking to Christians who have lost their faith or who are wavering in what they believe and considering for the first time a life without faith. Many of these tales follow a similar pattern:<\/span><\/p>\n 1. I was raised Christian or I\u2019ve been a Christian for [insert large number] years. <\/p>\n 2. At some point, I realized I had never read the Bible \u2014 at least not closely. So I decided to read it. <\/p>\n 3. Holy crap! Have you seen what\u2019s in the Bible? Now I don\u2019t know what to believe . . . <\/p>\n I can relate. When I was 19 and a very zealous evangelical, I took a job running the lights in an auditorium, which on some nights meant I had a stretch of hours with very little to do. So, with my newfound piety close at hand, I read the Bible. And in short order, I became very, very confused about what was in the text and what I had been taught about the text \u2014 and why those two things did not seem to align. I became filled with questions that the text wasn\u2019t answering. I had started with the New Testament, and before I got halfway through the Gospel of Matthew, I became scared of the Bible. Jesus was enigmatic (intentionally so?) and fierce in ways I had not been led to expect. The footnotes didn\u2019t help and the concordance invited more confusion.<\/p>\n I just wanted to believe in and love Jesus, but the Bible was making it really, really hard.<\/p>\n It\u2019s even harder for my friends who start in Genesis, especially if they\u2019ve grown up being taught that the Bible is a work of exact history. Once they read it, they find that it doesn\u2019t conform to their expectations. It doesn\u2019t even feel historical \u2014 a talking snake appears on one of the first pages, and then \u201cgiants in the land\u201d a few pages after that, just before a worldwide flood from God destroys all he created so lovingly in the beginning; a little later, God inspires a diversity of language in order to confuse and separate people. In addition to presenting a God who doesn\u2019t seem much like the one you\u2019ve been singing to in church, these first few chapters just don\u2019t read like history. They read more like the ancient myths you studied in English class or like another kind of storytelling altogether.<\/p>\n When you\u2019re a believer feeling confused about these things, that\u2019s a pretty troubling thought. That\u2019s the kind of thinking that could lead to Jesus not being real.<\/p>\n