The Biblical Literacy Project

September 11th was a wake-up call for many, a life changing event. For me, it was a day of lost opportunity. My publisher had arranged book signings for my two novels in several major bookstores in the Charlotte North Carolina metropolitan area. It was an opportunity to take the sales of these books to a new level.

The drive to Charlotte from our home in the North Carolina mountains takes about two hours. When I arrived at the first store at 9:45 a.m., the news was both horrifying and shocking. People were glued to television sets throughout the store. Few customers were interested in buying books, no one was interested in conversation with an author. My four appearances were cancelled.

On the drive home, I reflected on the events of the day. They were scary, deeply disturbing, hard to believe. As a self-declared religious scientist, the one thought that kept coming back to me was that a religion of certainty is extremely dangerous. Radical Islam has both distorted the teachings of Mohammad, and lashed out in ways that are very dangerous for the peace and security of the world. In acting this way, the Islamic terrorists violate both the teachings and the spirit of their great founder.

A corollary to this idea also occurred to me on that trip home: fundamentalist Christianity has produced similar negative consequences. If religious people of all stripes are honest with themselves, you cannot escape the conclusion that religion has more often been the cause of societal and global problems than the solution. In the case of Christianity, the examples of the Crusades, the Christian inspired anti-Semitism in Europe that allowed Nazism to develop and thrive (a future blog topic), Rwanda, the recent violence between Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia, and gay bashing (another future blog entry) readily come to mind.

On that trip home, I vowed to fight religious fundamentalism. If God is transcendent, beyond human definition and control, black and white answers to religious questions are not possible. Religious scripture in all its manifestations is a human creation. Scriptural literalism can be hazardous to the health of your neighbor, a situation that flies in the face of Jesus’ great teaching on the subject, and the similar teachings of all of the world’s spiritual founders.

The Biblical Literacy Project will fight this problem as it relates to the New Testament. We will proceed book by book. In many ways, the weekly entries posted each Monday morning will serve as an introduction to the New Testament. I will focus on the central themes that dominate each New Testament writing, and the religious issues that derive from these writings that interest me. I hope that the blog entries will be both informative and provocative.

I am not a New Testament scholar with certifiable credentials. I spent most of my career as a university professor with a Ph.D. in Latin American politics from Tulane University. On the other hand, the study of the New Testament has been my passion for the last forty years. I have taught an adult Sunday school class in two Protestant churches. I have also written a book on these issues entitled The Case Against Evangelical Christianity published by Charles River Press.


There is no better way to present this material than in a blog because a blog allows for written feedback, responses from you the reader, that are shared and available to all readers of the blog. Because I am not an expert on these questions, I hope you will be encouraged to respond. The wonderful thing is that no one is an expert when it comes to a transcendent God. Such a God is discovered in mystery, in an encounter of awe and wonder. Human writings can never capture this experience. Instead the best we can do is write about the experience in ways that reflect our many limitations as human beings.

In developing my positions on New Testament issues, I will cite biblical references to illustrate the major points I make. These references will come from The Jerusalem Bible, a book I purchased more than forty years ago at the recommendation of the college professor teaching the New Testament course in which I was enrolled. The Jerusalem Bible is written in a contemporary literary style, which may mean that the text will vary somewhat from the one you are using. This should not present a problem; but if it does, you will have entered the realm of New Testament scholarship. Discovering an accurate rendering of the text is often the first task in interpreting a New Testament passage.

So please join me in this collective attempt at illumination. We begin next week with Mark. For those of you who come on board once the blog is in progress, I recommend that you start at the beginning with “An Introduction to Mark.” Later blog entries will assume information introduced in earlier blogs.