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The Gospels and Punctuation
by John Shelby Spong
Elizabeth Robinson, a friend of mine who teaches English as a second language to the children of immigrants in New Zealand, recently sent me an exercise on the importance of punctuation that she has used in her class. Please note that the words in these two examples are identical, only the punctuation has been changed.
1. Dear John:
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we are apart. I can be forever happy - will you let me be yours? Gloria
2. Dear John:
I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you I have no feelings whatsoever. When we are apart I can be forever happy. Will you let me be? Yours, Gloria
Why would I use this column for a lesson on punctuation? Because it illustrates a primary problem we have with biblical fundamentalists who make excessive claims for the accuracy of the Bible. Stick with me to the end of this column and the connection will be clear.
Recently, I had a television debate with Dr. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky. In that debate, he proclaimed, "I believe that every word of the Bible is the inerrant word of God." It was such a astonishing statement that I responded by asking him if he had ever read the Bible! Yet his words are not dissimilar from those voiced by such fundamentalist media evangelists as the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson. They are also regularly recited in the belief system of that part of the country called the 'Bible Belt,' in which I was reared as a child. This claim is not, therefore, unfamiliar to me.
Yet when I hear this evangelical rhetoric today, I am still stunned. It is so uninformed that I cannot believe that people who make this claim actually read the same Bible I read. Is it the word of God when Paul writes to the Galatians, "I wish those who unsettle you would mutilate themselves (Gal. 5:12);" when women are ordered "to keep quiet in church (II Cor. 14:24);" or when the Bible calls for the execution of all homosexuals as it does in Leviticus (20:13)? Do fundamentalists not know that the Bible has been quoted to justify slavery, to encourage war, to diminish women and to vilify Jews, among many other evils?
The claim is even stranger when one inquires about which version of the Bible is the inerrant one? Is it the New International Version, clearly the favorite among the fundamentalists? Or is it the Jerusalem Bible that Roman Catholics prefer because it does not challenge the dogma of that Church in regard to the Virgin Mary? Is it the King James' Version, that the traditionalists so love or the Revised Standard Version, that scholars seem to prefer? Is it the New Revised Standard version that attempts to remove sexist language from the various texts? How can there be an inerrant Bible if there is such variety in the available translations?
When pressed, the fundamentalists will generally say that inerrancy is in the original text not in the translations. Fair enough, I respond, so now allow me to examine that claim. Does anyone have a copy of the original manuscript of any book in the New Testament? Perhaps fundamentalists do not realize that though we have earlier fragments, the oldest full text we have of any book of the New Testament dates only from the seventh century C.E. In those days, without printing presses, the Bible had to be hand copied by a scribe. Is it possible that no scribe in seven hundred years of copying ever made a mistake or added a clarifying word? The fact is that in various ancient texts of the Bible, there are thousands of places where the oldest texts we possess disagree with one another. In the notes at the end of the chapters in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, time and again there is a statement informing readers that other ancient manuscripts differ on this particular word or passage. John 7:53 - 8:11, in most Bibles is, for example, the story of Jesus rescuing the woman taken in the act of adultery. Yet this story does not appear in manuscripts of John's Gospel until very late in medieval history. In other ancient documents it comes after Luke 21:28, but with a number of variations in the text itself. In Mark 14:24, where Jesus is described as instituting the Last Supper, he says, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many." Some ancient texts, however, add the word "new" before covenant. A minor change, one might say, but an example of how a word might have been added by a scribe, to address a later conflict between the followers of Jesus and the traditionalist Jews. Does the original text of Mark's Gospel open (Mk. 1:1) with the words, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ," as the majority of our available manuscripts suggest or does it say, as others argue, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God?" I can think of far more reasons why that phrase would have been added than I can for a scribe leaving it out. Surely some scribes took liberties in their copying by inserting words to make the text conform to later teaching. No passage from any book in the Bible can be guaranteed to be the exact copy of the original author's work. How then, knowing this, can anyone claim inerrancy for a text, the accuracy of which could never be guaranteed?
Beyond these truths, fundamentalists must contend with the fact that Jesus' earthly life seems to have ended around the year 30 C.E. Mark, however, wrote no earlier than 70 C.E. and John the final Gospel is dated at the turn of the century, so every word attributed to Jesus in the gospels, and every gospel story about Jesus, floated in oral transmission during that 40 to 70 year period. Were the words or stories always repeated identically? Hardly! The gospels themselves are not even in agreement with one another. Both Matthew and Luke had Mark in front of them when they wrote their later narratives. Yet they omit some things that Mark had included, change others with which they do not appear to agree and add new things to Mark that perhaps he had not known. Where there is a clear textual disagreement in the gospels themselves, can the claim be made with any credibility that any particular version is the inerrant word of God?
The difficulty does not stop there. Jesus spoke Aramaic, yet all the gospels were originally composed in Greek. So every word of Jesus that we have has undergone a translation. Is there such a thing as a perfect translation? Of course not! Every language is deeply acculturated so that few words in any language can be translated exactly into another language. Anyone ascribing inerrancy to the Bible apparently has no knowledge of these elementary facts.
Now let me come back to the punctuation exercise with which I opened this column. The final thing that fundamentalists do not seem to understand is that in the earliest manuscripts of the gospels, there is no punctuation! They have no chapters, no verses, no paragraphs, no capital letters, no commas and no periods. There is not even a space between the words. These manuscripts are simply row after row of Greek letters. If a word could not be completed on a line, it is simply broken wherever the space ran out, without a hyphen, and the remaining letters of that word continued on the next line. There is nothing to indicate to the reader that a word has been broken. So when we read the gospels today, we need to be aware that every paragraph, every comma, every period and every word division that we find in the New Testament today has been imposed on the text hundreds of years later by interpreters. Did those interpreters always get it right? The suggestion that they always did defies rationality. Punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence dramatically as we saw earlier.
This brief analysis of textual problems we have with the Bible is not designed to be an attack on the Bible that I treasure. It is rather an attack upon an idolatrous, irrational attitude by which fundamentalists seek to transform the words of the Bible into some magical, inerrant authority for their religious claims and thus to be able to use that authority as a weapon with which to attack their religious enemies.
One can only hold to a fundamentalist view of the Bible if every rational faculty is suspended. This mentality also requires a refusal to acknowledge any idea that destabilizes one's prejudices. That is why fundamentalism is always marked by hysteria, defensiveness and hostile attacks on those who do not share that point of view. Fundamentalist religion is ultimately a search for security, not a search for truth. This is what makes real dialogue with fundamentalists, whether it is over evolution or homosexuality, so unbearably difficult. No rational basis exists upon which to explore an issue, if one believes that quoting the Bible is the way one arrives at conclusions. Those who are convinced that they possess the whole truth of God will always be imperialistic. For those who disagree with fundamentalists are, in the minds of the fundamentalists, disagreeing with God. That is also why fundamentalists will ultimately employ violence - whether that violence is expressed in 'Holy' Wars, by burning heretics at the stake or by using suicide pilots to destroy the World Trade Center...
