When Reality Knocks

Greetings all, Henry here. The most religiously conservative people I have known are prison inmates. I was chaplain in a county jail for two years and have visited and worked a lot in federal penitentiaries. Why are inmates so conservative religiously?

Unfortunately, many people who end up in prison don’t have a lot of education, and what religion they have they usually got almost completely as children at mother’s knee or a church Sunday school. All children take everything in the Bible story literally, because that’s how they think. I remember a child in Sunday school who said he was going to draw a picture of the fact that God lives in all our hearts. He worked away diligently for a long time and then came to show his masterpiece. He had drawn a stylized valentine’s heart with steps leading up to an open door in the heart. It was a great picture and illustrated that, like all children, he had to see the Bible stories literally. Concrete, rigid, totally literal and almost always hopelessly off-track.

So what do we do with the discovery of a series of first century coffins that a filmmaker is saying are the coffins of Jesus of Nazareth, Mary Magdalene and their children?

There are some serious problems here with the argument. 1) The coffins were found 30 or more years ago, archeologists looked at them at the time and found them uninteresting. 2) Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, as did the rest of Palestine, is very hard to transcribe and the writing on the coffins is indistinct and very difficult to read. 3) Jesus was a very common name in first century Palestine, like in South America at present.

The literal emphasis of this new movie would do credit to a prison inmate with a minimum of Sunday school training. Once we get this movie out of the way, there should be others on the finding of the ark, Moses’ burning bush, and geological proof of when the sun stood still for Joshua.

As we saw most recently in The Da Vinci Code, for centuries, people have felt the need to find concrete proof of the Bible, to find some artifact, lost document or secret code that will get rid of all confusion. The problem with all this is that the Bible is symbolic and can have deep meaning for people that way, but when taken literally, it just turns into a bunch of confusing, unlikely stories. All one can hope is for more people to remember that the Bible stories are not about recording literal history, but about spiritual history. They record the symbolic stories of how God engages humankind. It might be archeologically interesting, but it doesn’t usually do much for people’s spirituality to find an old tomb or what might be part of a ship.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 12:22 am and is filed under Hearts and Minds, Religious Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.