There's a post I've been working on for a while, since late November. I'm a little ashamed to say that it's only about 800 words long, and it's not the best thing I've ever written. It's one that I really wanted to be good though.
The post focuses on Conservapedia, that bastion of anti-knowledge, and their Bible translation wiki. It's a neat idea, an open source translation of the scripture, but what's scary about it is that the point of Conservapedia's translation is not to perfectly carry the wording and meaning from the original language into English, but rather to re-write the Bible in such a way a to cause it to present ultra-conservative political ideas. I'm not making this up. They want to write it out so that Christ mentions Socialism as a great evil, homeschools the disciples, and votes Republican. Then they want to claim that that is perfect, God-spoken, inerrant Scripture.
One of the things that really bothers me about the Biblical inerrancy mess is that it not only builds an idol, it builds an idol into whose mouth anybody can put words. It scares the shit out of me.
Today at the unit this one E-5 was going around talking about the Apocrypha of John. He claimed it was a book of the writings of St. John that the Catholic Church(soooo scary) had kept out of the Bible because... well, he wasn't exactly sure, but mainly the Catholics are always up to something, so why wouldn't they try to hide the word of the Lord? He said that this book had been found in some sort of archaeological dig, and shined more light on the Bible.
Now, at first I thought he might have been talking about the Secret Book Of John. It's an interesting bit of Gnostic literature, if you find that sort of thing interesting. It starts out with St. John praying for guidance, then Jesus shows up and tell a long version of the Gnostic creation story, the one in which there are hundreds and thousands of Aeons, little gods that spring from the One Unknowable God. Eventually a Bad god, a blind stupid one named Yaltaboath comes into existence and builds the physical world as a prison for is mother Sophia, the god representing divine wisdom. It's crazy stuff. Heavily metaphorical. Occasionally beautiful, but strange to the point of uselessness. One of the big ideas of Gnosticism is that some people are vessels for the imprisoned Sophia, the divine wisdom, and other aren't. The folks who aren't they're no different than animals.
My basic problem with Gnosticism is that it assumes that there's one group of people, the inner circle of the church, who are wiser and more holy by their very nature than the rest of us. It's kinda ugly.
Of course, this E-5 wasn't talking about the Secret Book Of John. No, in his non-canonical John book you have Jesus specifically talking about abortion, saying that it sends the souls of the infants automatically to hell(God apparently has bad aim with the punishment), Jesus talks specifically against homosexuals, and Jesus talks about the glorious wonders of war.
Now, I haven't seen this book, and I'm just going on what this E-5 excitedly told me, but friends, this mess worries me. It sounds like a lately written book, one written in the worst traditions of pseudepigrapha. This mess sounds like it is written by someone who wants to make a point, but is too damn lazy to make a cogent argument.
And in the same way the first and second century Gnostics had this idea that they were special, that they had some secret wisdom and goodness that put them a rung or two above the rest of us, well, it sounds to me like the writer of that E-5's book is doing the same thing. “Hey, here's the rest of the story,” he says, “the bit everybody else doesn't know. Now that you know, well, ain't you grand? Ain't you big? Don't you know something? 'Cause those other people, they tried to keep you from knowing, they tried to make you figure it out yourself, but now instead of thinking, you can just know. And that makes you a little better.”
One of the big dangers with making an idol out of scripture is that anybody can get in on that game, anybody can claim the voice of God for themselves. All you have to say is, “Well, this bit of scripture says X,” and then for the folks following the idol, X is absolutely true. But anybody can say that scripture says X. Anybody can say that anything is scripture. People can have proof of or an excuse for anything once they get themselves a re-recordable idol.
It scares me.
Comments