Six Even More Stupid Things People Thinks the Bible Says, Which It Doesn’t
Here is the 2024 installment of the six stupid things series. Skeptics love to claim the Bible makes these absurd statements, when in fact, it says the opposite.
1. Jesus denied being God.
The conversation between Jesus and the rich young ruler is important since all three Synoptic Gospels mention it, but it’s badly misunderstood by some. Two misconceptions will be addressed here. First, when the rich young ruler says, “Good master (i.e., Teacher), what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?” Jesus answers, “Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but one, that is God” (Matthew 19:16-17). I’ve heard it said that Jesus here is denying being God and being perfect. That would be inconsistent, however, for someone who claims the angels as His own and challenged His harshest critics to convict Him of one sin (John 8:46). I think Jesus says this for two reasons. One, He’s telling the rich young ruler, “You’re not good, so you can’t work your way into eternal life like you suppose.” Two, He’s saying, “If I’m good, it’s because I’m God.” He’s basically anticipating what C.S. Lewis would write 1,900 years later, that someone who makes the kind of claims Jesus makes can’t be just a Good Teacher like the rich young ruler calls Him. He must either be crazy, an evil deceiver, or God Himself. See my post on Lewis’s trilemma at https://deliberationsatmimirswell.blog/2017/10/03/lewiss-trilemma-defended/.
He’s saying, “If I’m good, it’s because I’m God.”
2. Christians are to give away everything they own.
In the story of the rich young ruler, Jesus also tells him to sell all His possessions and give to the poor. Some have felt that all Christians are obligated to do this. St. Anthony’s reading of this is what started the monastic movement. While Jesus has the right to order such a thing from everybody, I think the Bible as a whole teaches that this was a specific challenge to this young man at his particular idol rather than a prescription of poverty for His entire Church. It’s true the Jerusalem Church practiced a form of Christian socialism at first, but the Greco-Roman Church did not. Note how in I Corinthians 16:2 Paul tells the Corinthians “to lay something aside,” not “lay everything aside.” In I Timothy 6, Paul gives instructions to rich Christians to be rich in good works and not to trust in their riches. The fact that he’s instructing rich Christians as rich Christians would make no sense if Jesus had prohibited all Christians from being rich at all times. Otherwise, Paul would have simply repeated Jesus’s command for them to sell all they have. Christians are called to be the most generous people on earth, but God has not chosen to overrule completely man’s propensity to appropriate. He even protects it with two of His Ten Commandments by banning theft and covetousness.
3. The Apostles didn’t think of Jesus as God.
Those who seek to deny Christ’s lordship will come up with the wildest interpretations of clear Scripture to avoid the plain fact that Paul and the other first Christians thought of Christ as God. Even a hostile witness like Pliny the Younger wrote a little after the New Testament period that the Christians were singing hymns to Christ like a God. No, Paul did not think of Jesus as a particularly exalted angel. He specifically calls Him God in Titus 2:13 and Romans 9:5. Throughout his epistles he says things about Christ no monotheistic Hebrew of the Hebrews would dare say about an angel: “Who, being in the very form of God” (Philippians 2:6); “according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself” (Philippians 4:21); “And He is before all things, and by Him all things consist” (Philippians 1:17).
Throughout his epistles he says things about Christ no monotheistic Hebrew of the Hebrews would dare say about an angel.
4. Jesus commands us to hate our family.
Jesus often spoke in a shocking and hyperbolic fashion that people take at face value to their peril. One commentator I heard of took deep umbrage at Jesus’s teaching in Luke 14:26: “If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Anyone with any sense of context of Scripture knows Jesus is not literally commanding any of His followers to hate anyone. If we are to love our enemies, how much more our family? Clearly, Jesus means that love of Him must be above and paramount to any other allegiance, so much so that earthly loves are “hatred” by comparison, and we are to always take Christ’s side over our family’s when they conflict. Jesus did not hate His own parents. He “was subject unto them” (Luke 2:51), and even during the agony of the cross, He found time and precious breath to provide for His mother’s care after His departure.
5. The Bible prescribes faith plus works for salvation.
James writes, “Ye see then, how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only?” (2:24). Latching onto this, the Roman Catholics made their formula of salvation faith plus works. Martin Luther found this book so inconvenient, he called it “an epistle of straw.” Time to let Scripture interpret Scripture. Paul, in a much more in-depth look at justification in Romans, states, “Therefore by the deeds of the Law, there shall no flesh be justified in his sight” (3:20). Jesus repeatedly tells the recipients of His healing, “Your faith has saved you.” James cannot be saying that we become right with God by producing works to add to our faith. (What could we possibly add to Jesus’s righteousness?) Rather, his point is, as he writes earlier, “Show me thy faith without thy works, and I will show you my faith by my works” (2:18). The kind of faith that God uses alone to save us will of necessity evidence itself in works. It’s not that you need to add works to saving faith; it’s that if you don’t have works, you don’t have saving faith.
6. The Bible commands that we do penance for our sins.
One popular stereotype of Christians in the unbelieving world is Christians harming themselves in penance for their sins. Take the self-flagellating monk in the Da Vinci Code or, with rather less excuse, my favorite YouTube channel Studio C’s depiction of the Puritan roommate. In the Roman Catholic tradition, prayers and other less self-destructive deeds are used to atone for sins. While penance (of a violent kind or otherwise) did develop as a tradition of the Middle Ages, there is not a hint of it in the New Testament. The closest thing you find to it in the Old Testament is fasting and wearing sackcloth, which are a lot less dangerous than flogging yourself. In the New Testament, with Christ’s perfect sacrifice to atone for our sins, there is nothing we can add to that. We are commanded to mourn for our sins and turn away in hatred from them to do good works, but none of the Apostles tell us to do anything to get right with God other than believe in Jesus’s all-sufficient work.
Have you heard any of these from skeptics of the Bible? Yes, they are stupid things to say, but, no, the Bible doesn’t say them. In fact, it says the opposite.