The Bible Is Too Human to Simply Worship… and Too Important to Simply Dismiss
You don’t have to believe the Bible is the Word of God to take it seriously.
For thousands of years, these writings have helped shape cultures, laws, moral assumptions, literature, politics, relationships, and ideas about what it means to be human. If we want to understand the world we’ve inherited, the Bible is simply too influential to ignore.
However… taking the Bible seriously doesn’t mean treating it as sacred or infallible.
It means being willing to examine it as a profoundly human collection of texts. It’s sometimes insightful, sometimes troubling, sometimes beautiful, sometimes contradictory, and always worth asking questions about.
That’s what Mythologizing the Bible (MTB) is all about.
What Is Mythologizing the Bible?
MTB is an ongoing CODA Project series that examines biblical writings as “sacred myth” rather than “divine revelation.”
I follow the Sunday readings from the Roman Catholic Lectionary, which provides a three-year journey through many of the Bible’s best-known passages. But instead of beginning with the assumption that these texts were inspired by God, I approach them as human creations.
Who wrote them? Why? What was happening in the world around them? How have these writings changed over time? What does history tell us? What does textual scholarship reveal?
And then I ask the question at the heart of the CODA Project:
What, if anything, in these ancient writings deserves to continue guiding us today?
Myth Doesn’t Mean Meaningless
Calling the Bible “mythology” isn’t the same as calling it worthless, or even saying that every story is simply “false.”
Human beings have always used stories to make sense of things.
Our myths can reveal what people feared, hoped for, valued, misunderstood, struggled with, and dreamed about. Our stories can preserve remarkable human insights. On the other hand, they can also preserve ancient prejudices, cultural assumptions, political agendas, and ideas that haven’t aged all that well.
We don’t have to believe a story literally happened to learn something from it.
And we certainly don’t have to find a timeless lesson in every story, either.
Sometimes the most valuable thing an ancient text can teach us is how far we’ve come.
Looking Through a Different Lens
MTB approaches the Bible using history, textual scholarship, critical thinking, human experience, and the CODA Project’s Foundational Values Framework.
That Framework uses five values—Cooperation, Empathy/Compassion, Fairness, Integrity, and Curiosity—as a lens for examining the ideas that we’ve inherited.
Sometimes that lens helps uncover wisdom worth carrying forward.
Sometimes it raises uncomfortable questions about traditional interpretations.
Sometimes historical or textual evidence suggests there’s more going on than we were taught.
And sometimes, an ancient teaching simply doesn’t hold up very well when examined against the values we’ve developed through centuries of additional human experience.
That’s okay.
The goal of MTB isn’t to prove the Bible right. Nor is the goal to prove the Bible wrong.
The goal is to understand this ancient text through a values-based lens and then decide for ourselves what deserves to come with us into the coda of our lives.
Why Am I Doing This?
I spent 39 years involved in Catholic ministry, eventually earning a master’s degree in Pastoral Studies and serving for more than a decade as a Director of Youth Ministry.
So these aren’t unfamiliar texts to me.
For much of my life, I approached them as sacred scripture. Today, as an atheist and secular humanist, I get to return to those same writings with very different assumptions and very different questions.
I’m not interested in trading religious certainty for atheist certainty.
I’m interested in following the evidence, asking questions I once didn’t think to ask, and seeing what happens when we allow these ancient texts to be thoroughly, fascinatingly, and sometimes frustratingly human.
And Then There Are the Afterthoughts...
Sometimes one of those questions deserves more attention.
That’s where Afterthoughts comes in.
These bonus episodes give me room to dig deeper into the history, textual development, contradictions, cultural assumptions, power dynamics, and difficult questions hiding behind (or sometimes right on top of) the week’s biblical readings.
They’re an opportunity to follow an interesting thread wherever the evidence takes us.
Sometimes that reinforces the lesson I found in MTB. Sometimes it complicates it. And sometimes it changes the conversation completely.
Again: that’s okay.
Changing our minds when the evidence warrants it isn’t a failure of critical thinking. It’s the whole point.
Bring Your Questions
You don’t have to be Christian to explore Mythologizing the Bible.
You don’t have to be an atheist.
You don’t need to defend the Bible, and you don’t need to hate it.
All you really need is a willingness to be curious about one of the most influential collections of writings in human history, and then be willing to think for yourself about what you find there.
Bring your questions. Bring your skepticism. Follow the evidence. And make up your own mind. Let’s take this journey together!