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How (Not) To Read the Bible: An Interview with Author Dan Kimball

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What are some biggest difficulties people have with the Bible? In this interview, pastor Dan Kimball responds to some of the toughest challenges regarding science & faith, violence in the Old Testament, and the many odd commandments in the Bible. Enjoy!

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44 Comments

  1. The "tough passages" are only a problem for those who believe that the Bible is the inspired word of an all-knowing and loving God. But if the Bible is read as a collection of books written by patriarchal and often misogynistic, tribal, Iron Age men who knew less about the natural world than today's third graders, it's easily understood.

  3. Well, being able to do a Flannel Graph after reading the Bible is a good way to read the Bible.

    If I was going to Flannel Graph the abrupt ending of the Gospel of Mark, I would put up the Empty tomb on Easter Morning. Then I would put up 16 Roman soldiers and a centurion sprawled in front of the tomb and knocked out by the shared vision of the Talking Cross, And the sun is just beginning to peek above the horizon and a shaft of ligth is falling on the Young Man sitting in the tomb and a group of women that includes Jesus's mother, Mary of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene and others and Mary of Zanareth recognizes the Young Man as the angel who had seduced her as recorded in Matthew and Luke. The Young Man is the Holy Spirit. And, just then, the soldiers begin to wake up and arise out of the ground mists and frightened the women, who rean away without a by your leave.

    Tje Gospel of Mark is a ghost story and that Cornelius presents as a war story he's passing up the chain of command about this whole Christian super powers event under Pilate. The point of the Resurrection was to capture the imagination of the Romans and validating the God Hypothesis. When Cornelius wrote The Gospel of Mark, he expected Rome to be understood literally All these things happened and had been captured by the Roman military intelligence function of the X Legion in an otherwise routine surveillance file Before Jesus was arresteded. It's like Jesus was being monitored by a multitude of porch, security and trail cameras programed to record everything going on.

    When it comes to women in the Bible, Moses corrupted the Commandments to suppress and dominate women. To say the Bible is anti-women is cosmic understatement Women were not worshiping the Golden Calf: they were celebrating the emancipation of their uterus from the yoke of the Pharoah;s which was not part of Moses's program, so he adulteredn the 7th Commandment from something like "Thou shalt not adulter the Law to posses what you covet of your neihbor. his wife and cattle, to Thou Shal Not Commit Adultry and THow Shalt not Covert Your Newighbors Possessions.

    This created women as brood mares and 2nd Class Citizens that has been reflected in Sam Alito's Dobbs decision. The point of the ending of the Gospel of Mark is the women led The Way into the Kingdom of Heaven, beginning with the Mary of Nazareth and the Young Man in the Empty Tomb.

    Anyway, that's how I read the Bible.

  6. The mitzvah is repeated in Torah 3 times forbidding my ancestors to boil a kid in it’s mother’s milk. Generally it’s interpreted by observant Jews as meaning we shouldn’t mix meat and dairy so when an observant Jew eats meat the rabbinical halakhah says to wait 6 hours before consuming dairy and when consuming dairy wait 3 hours before consuming meat because if one eats meat he might in his stomach if it’s beef boil the cow that was slaughtered to produce the beef in dairy that came from it’s mother

  7. That’s the problem with reading the KJV or any English translation and not looking at the original Hebrew and Greek. Plus just like with the issue of slavery if ppl read the American version of slavery in recent centuries or other modern customs into Ancient Jewish slavery customs or any ancient cultural norms it’s a very wrong thing to do because we can’t judge the ancient world by our modern standards. Even as recently as some of the very prejudiced white supremist statements of Abraham Lincoln over 158 years ago we can’t judge him by our modern standards because for his times he was actually very progressive and benevolent towards ppl of color. The same is true for the mitzvot in Torah. Things like the mitzvot regarding the Sotah in Numbers 5 were actually meant to protect wives who were suspected of having committed adultery without proof being killed by their husbands as an honor killing. In Torah it took 2 witnesses to testify to a crime happening for a person to be convicted and it needed to be adjudicated by judges. It took 2 ppl to testify to having witnessed a married woman committing adultery and unlike the code of Hammurabi where only the woman got executed for adultery both the man and the woman were to be executed. If 2 witnesses were found to be bearing a witness of falsehood against their neighbor then the 2 false witnesses received the same punishment that the person they falsely testified against would have received had they been telling the truth

  13. This is the 4th person I've heard this past month explain the 6000 year vs evolution vs what was the purpose of Genesis creation account story (Tim Mackie, Michael Heiser, even a reformed guy from Theocast, and now Dan Kimball.) I'm convinced and have changed my mind that it's not talking about the age of the earth but who made the earth and which God the Israelites were to worship.

  15. This is so humorous inasmuch as the fundamentalist's hermeneutical and exegetical approach to the Bible is disastrous for producing a correct understanding of any biblical text. It is an approach laden with presuppositions guaranteed to lead one astray.

  16. The church Dan pastors is near my apartment and I love to hear him preach, he has a rare gift from God to make scripture relevant and relatable on deep levels his understanding of the Word is profound. I go to another church but on the rare occasion I was blessed to hear him speak my entire perspective was changed for the better. Rarely have I seen such humility and gentleness in all my 57 years. In coming back to Christ he seemingly effortlessly encourages and instills hope in in the sinner crushed by conviction and raw from repentance. What can you say about a man like Dan Kimbal? God bless his soul; and thank God for men like him.

  18. Thank you so much for this talk! I've definitely thought about the violence in the Old Testament and feel that the Lord gave me an answer, I also studied the Bible a lot, of course 😊) that is not emphasized very much regarding it. From a biblical and a Christian faith perspective, death is preferable in many ways. Paul said that he'd rather be with the Lord then here on earth. Jesus on the cross told the thief that he would be with Jesus in Paradise. In every instance in Scripture, when there is a hardening of heart or killing orchestrated by God, there is always a greater good. So for believers, death is not the worst thing that can ever happen. I can honestly say that if the Lord ordered another people group to kill Americans, although I love life and being on earth because that is God's will for me right now, I would be happy to go be with the Lord (be killed) because that is much better and would trust Him that He would bring a greater good in history for it that would last in eternity. Anyways, I hope this might help someone who is struggling with this issue like I once did. Much grace and peace.

  19. We Christians need to demonstrate love and grace and concern for Justice for the poor and mistreated and peacemaking and charity and forgiveness- the stuff Jesus demonstrated and commanded us to do. Then people will believe us when we tell them that these ugly and cruel and petty portrayals of God that they claim are in the Bible are not true.

  22. Something to remember in regard to the slavery argument is in historical context these laws were made AFTER they came out of Egypt. When they were in Egypt what we think of with the Atlantic slave trade is what would have been happening with them. So it doesn't make sense to have God go OK I'm going get you out of there because I'm not ok with that abuse, but also I'm actually ok with you abusing your fellow Israelites as well as any foreigner that you get like you were. And as Dan said there is the law that if you kidnap someone you are killed. The Bible also says if you find someone who has been kidnapped you are required to help hide them from from the person they are running away from, as well as multiple verses reminding the Israelites to remember how it was in Egypt. There is obviously a lot more to this than meets the eye so just doing a cursory glance of it and then making a blanket judgment isn't the way to go.

  24. My people perish from a lack of knowledge. You know not because you ask not. Know what? Who God is? How can you ever know anything if you don't even try. We go to school and study the subjects out of books year after year. We go to college and study more books and get a degree which is recognized by the world. Because of our education we like to think we are knowledgeable in our field of study. As believers, we can't even read the one book that matters. The one book that will allow all of us to know God the creator of all things. We don't know Him because we don't read the book! The world leans on it's own understanding to form an opinion about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Because we are NOT reading the Word of God we are just as lost as they are. Look at YouTube and all the ministries that contradict what the Word actually says. If God is not the author of confusion then who is? How is it that Holy Spirit filled believers lack unity? I'm talking about fundamentals not parables or subjects that need real study. Let it be said like this…My people perish because they are not reading the Word of my Father. In other words if everyone studied the Bible like we did our subjects in school we would all know what to do…but we don't.

  27. Yup. "The Resurrection Factor" was one of the main reasons I stuck with my Christian faith after a long, hard, painful period of questioning .. backed up by "Evidence That Demands a Verdict" 🙂
    Thank you, McDowells! 🙏🙏🙏

  35. Why doesnt God clarify all the confusion. There are people like me and im sure millions other that get confused by some of the contradictions in the bible. Doesnt he care that people are perishing bc of the confusion. He use to talk to everybody back in those days but not anymore.

  36. Surfing the web was a good example, although it misses the point. When computer scientists talk about “surfing the web” there is a direct translation to “browse content from web servers located on the interconnected network” or some very unambiguous term with technically stipulated meaning. Surf the web is something that was culturally determined possibly in the late 90s among internet users but people can very well say “go on the internet” , “browse the internet” etc. with the point being that the technical stipulation is necessary to avoid the natural language ambiguity. We do this so there is a common reference point. We have also realized that this is necessary for common communication across space and time, so references aren’t ambiguous and we don’t have to resort to “words are culturally and contextually determined” . The inspired word of God to me should mean as little ambiguity as possible, perfect communication across all audiences. Sense, reference, and semantics should be non vague. Which brings us back to one of the original issues being that there are no original copies of the Greek Bible, errors have propagated with every translation (since interpretation and translation are almost entirely inseparable) , to the point where anyone can assign any reference to ambiguity. Anything that isn’t assessed favorably in the Bible ends up being reinterpreted into the best possible light given current standards. It is endless. When I pick up a document at work, if it has any sort of ambiguity or lacks technical specification, and I cannot resolve it, we are at a stand still or worse can make bad decisions on miscommunication. If fundamentally, the Bible is ambiguous, how can we possibly make decisions based on a world view shroud in infinite interpretative possibilities. Surf the web has a clear meaning to specialists, we can say that Bible specialists know the exact meaning but the word specialist obviously is being appropriated because in the former case the specialists invented the thing and in the latter case the it is a person who reads the Bible and argues for a specific interpretation (which is equally culturally and contextually bound given the prevailing assumptions of the era) and whoever has a convincing argument will win people over on that specific interpretation. Notice this is incredibly different to the analogy proposed. Systems engineers or computer scientists have come together to specify the original meaning and then “surf the web” came after the computer became commercial for personal use. This is not the case for biblical exegesis. The Bible was not initially technically specified to avoid ambiguity and then after the fact, people in past contexts started to use phrases colloquially. The analogy is false. The entire point being, many people do not have the patience to hear long drawn out explanations as to why “slave” in the Bible doesn’t actually mean slave but something completely innocuous. Anyone can easily propose a counter argument claiming the word slave is applicable. When this happens again and again all throughout the Bible, it’s easy to see why someone might say “hey the frequency at which this sort of thing occurs seems to indicate something else, perhaps it wasn’t divinely inspired but maybe it was written by a man who had an agenda”, or insert any other plausible explanation. I mean, if I shouldn’t take the word “slave” to be literally true, why should I take other claims to be literally true in the Bible; for example why can I simply choose to interpret one reference non literally “slave” but have to treat any of the other words (anything about creating bread out of thin are for example ) as literal and not subject to historical context? I mean take the initial example of unicorn; we know this to not be a real thing so okay we interpret it to mean wild boar or whatever. We also know that it’s impossible for many other things in the Bible by modern standards, but still accept those as literal translations rather then also embedding them into their historical contexts? The entire enterprise seems arbitrary and selective, possibly to reaffirm the pressuppositions of the world view.

  37. Interesting talk. I really appreciated most of what Dan said. His desire to help people see how context is critical to understanding the Bible, it’s time and peoples is so very important. Having said that I felt his discussion on the age of the Earth was very weak. I’m surprised Sean brought it up with so little time left in the program. Nevertheless, many good things here.

  39. Future generations to understand? How about people of the times? Many rejected God and the Bible because they wanted to live their lives from their own doctrine. This hasn’t and will never work simply because many people have their own doctrines that frequently oppose others thus leading to disharmony, wars, crime, etc. People heard or read passages from the Bible, but rejected it outright. This is happening today just as it did a thousand years ago.

  40. Isn't the reason bring up shellfish listed as an abomination in Leviticus is that people point to the same book to condemn homosexuality. Similar to your explanation of unicorn, the concept of homosexual orientation is only something understood recently, and the word homosexual not being coined until the 18th century. The point of then bringing up slavery (better translated as servitude) or shellfish and pork being an abomination (unclean as they are the garbage eaters of the sea and earth), is that we should also do so for the clobber passages re: homosexuality, but many conservatives will simply read it superficially and then use the claim that "the bible is clear" to justify discrimination and oppression.