Why reading the Bible literally is impossible

I'm always amazed at people who claim to read the Bible literally. My first thought is, "wow, it's great that you know all about the life and times of that era as well as Hebrew." Inevitably, these people are neither historians nor linguists, but they don't let that stop them from believing that what they've read is completely true.

When I was very young, I asked my mom a lot of questions about the stories I read in the Bible. I had trouble believing that everything actually happened as it was written, and I was beginning to think that the whole thing was a complete farce. My mom then told me that she learned to analyze what she was reading rather than take everything at face value. She explained that a lot of the stories were parables, and that they were meant to teach people to understand the end rather than the means.

Over time, I learned a few things that basically made me think the same way:

• The Bible was written by many different people, all of whom had individual biases that affected what and how they wrote.


• The Bible was translated into many different languages along the way, causing a loss of meaning and again introducing biases from translators.


• There are many different versions of the Bible, which were subject to outside influences such as political leaders (such as the King James Bible).


• The Bible was written in a different political climate and culture that we don't understand today without additional information.


• The Bible is made up of both actual events as well as stories intended to illustrate how we should act and treat one another.

However, it wasn't until I was reading the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss that I added one more reason to my arsenal. In ancient languages, punctuation was used far less and in a much different way than it is today. Punctuation was used to indicate pauses in literature for actors, chanters, and those who read aloud. She says, "Perhaps the key thing one needs to realize about the early history of punctuation is that, in a literary culture based entirely on the slavish copying of venerated texts, it would be highly presumptuous of a mere scribe to insert helpful marks where he thought they ought to go."

She points to the following two (differently punctuated) phrases from the Bible:

"Verily, I say unto thee, This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise."

or

"Verily I say unto thee this day, Thou shalt be with me in Paradise."

The placement of the comma in the second passage indicates the existence of Purgatory (the Catholic view), while the placement of the comma in the first passage indicates that one would go directly to heaven to be with God (the Protestant view). Truss points out a few other passages that leave us with similar questions all because of missing or ambiguous punctuation.

So, this just gives me one more reason to look at the Bible and say that we need to look deeper into what was written instead of taking everything literally. I just wish that other people would do the same and stop imposing their "moral values" on our country when we supposedly have freedom of religion, and my version of religion may have a different interpretation than another due to differing punctuation.