Is the Holy Bible literally the word of God? Do we even know who wrote it?

Alas, many of you have judged my Christian faith and found it wanting. But I understand your visceral reaction to my Friday commentary entitled Why believing in the Bible is like believing in Santa Claus.

Therefore, I apologize unreservedly for my unwitting offense against your Christian faith. And this, even though your letters are conspicuous by their distortion of facts and failure to address the main question I asked in this commentary, namely: Do you believe every word in the Bible is the true word of God?

Never mind that I could have raised an even more provocative issue by asking: Do you know who wrote the Bible? For if you believe, as most Christians do, that it was written by “Holy men inspired by the Holy Ghost”, then how do you explain the internecine struggles (and patently political motivation) that led to so many passages being purged over time from the “original” Holy Bible. (E.g., what about the Septuagint, Apocrypha, etc…?)

Indeed, who ordained that we should believe the Jewish canon, from which we derive our Christian Bible, constitutes the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the word of God?

And, more to the point, whose intelligent design is responsible for us having stories about Abraham and Hagar, but none about Adam and Lilith? Or for us having accounts about the Acts of the Apostles, but none about the Acts of Paul and Thecla?

Ultimately though, is it not Talibanical of you to call me an apostate for merely asking these questions, when, according to the Bible, the questions the disciples asked Jesus could be considered far more “heretical”?

At any rate, I feel obliged to disabuse you of your most egregious inference. And it pertains to your assertion that, as a professed proud son of a preacher man, I must have rejected my Christian faith.

In fact, my Christian faith has never been stronger. However, it is based on my personal relationship with God; not on fables of dubious inspiration and provenance. And I look to Him as the sole arbiter of my faith.

But I find it more than a little curious that you had nary a word of rebuke for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, or the ordained Baptist minister and Republican presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee. After all, their dismissal of portions of the Bible as “legend” and “allegorical” fairytales, respectively, is what provoked my commentary in the first place.

But since ‘tis the season to be jolly, here’s to all of the shopping and festive parties you’ll no doubt partake in to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

God bless.

NOTE: Please spare a little of your loaves and fish for the still starving multitudes in Africa….

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