For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account. (Hebrews 4:12-13 ESV)
On occasion these fun little links for bloggers will float through social media. One particular site promised to identify the age and gender and a few other characteristics of the person writing the blog. I thought it’d be fun to put in my web address and see how close it could get to guessing details of my life.
Now, my birth certificate tells me that I’m a man in my thirties. According to this website, however, I’m actually a middle-aged woman—at least based upon the few articles that I had submitted to their handy little algorithm. I thought it’d be fun to try a few more and I found that my writing must be all over the place. At one point it had me as a teenage boy. More times than not it did correctly identify me as a man in his thirties.
Given my propensity to have delusions of grandeur I imagined what it would be like for someone one hundred years later going through my writings. When they went through the rigors of source criticism and textual criticism I’m confident that some dolt somewhere would postulate that this blog was actually written by a host of people—one being that jaded middle-aged woman and another the highly emotional teenage boy. The main author—perhaps the compiler of it all—would be that thirty year old man.
Of course this whole thing is folly. I’m not—nor ever will be a middle-aged woman. My writings as a teen are happily housed in tattered notebooks hidden from the world. I take full credit—and all the shame that accompanies it—for my writing on this blog.
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There is a branch of biblical scholarship (scholarship being a fancy word for denying-orthodoxy-ship) which liked to go back through the Bible and discover the various different authors and sources of the gospel of Matthew. Rather than believe that a guy named Matthew—through actually living with Jesus—wrote a gospel account, they believe multiple authors contributed and that someone named Matthew (Lord only knows at what date), sat down and put this whole thing together. Once the church got their slimy hands on it and it got redacted and redacted we eventually have what we now know as the gospel of Matthew.
And they’ll do this with every book of the Bible. Making claims like Paul didn’t actually write Ephesians, and things of that sort.
Why do they believe this?
One reason is because sometimes a letter like Ephesians just doesn’t sound like Paul. Perhaps it sounds a bit more like a middle-aged woman. And so Paul cannot be the author. It has to be someone else, we are told.
But I’ve been on the receiving end of this silliness. It was an innocent little program but it used much of the same methods of source critics looking at the Bible. How did it get the whole thing wrong? Why did I at times write like a middle aged woman and at other times a teenage boy? Because I’m a complex human being—just like every other person. I’m complex emotionally. I’m living. I’m active. I say different things different ways at different times.
So is it not possible that the living God might communicate similarly? Is it possible that rather than seeing multiple authors in the gospel of Matthew that we are just seeing a complex and multi-faceted God? Maybe the God’s Word isn’t something static and lifeless. Maybe it can’t be put under a microscope and analyzed the same way we can determine which printing of Shakespeare’s first folio we’ve got in our hands. Maybe it’s a bit more living and active than that.
I know this isn’t all that can be said about source criticism. And it really is a bit simplistic—but maybe I’m writing as a college-aged simpleton this day. All I’m really trying to say is that we don’t necessarily have to jump to the conclusions that source critics would force us to jump to. Just because it “doesn’t sound like Paul” doesn’t mean it necessarily isn’t. A living Bible demands a bit more of us.
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Photo source: here (I imagine this is how that site viewed me as a middle-aged woman)
