Fixing the Bible

The Bible is full of “contradictions, false logistics—doesn’t make sense,” says River Tam from Joss Whedon’s Firefly. According to Stephen Stein in “America’s Bibles: Canon, Commentary, and Community,” the most popular method of dealing with the faults and moral or intellectual offenses of scriptural texts is to explain them away or simply ignore them and focus on the agreeable sections of the canon. Jefferson’s Bible illustrates another strategy of dealing with these difficulties—cutting them out to deal only with “the human side of Jesus and his role as a teacher of ethics” (180). But even after ignoring and editing these issues, the question remains: Do these reactions make sense? Can we fix the Bible?

In episode four of the series Firefly, the brilliant but troubled River Tam gets her hands on Shepard Book’s Bible. Upon reading it, she recognizes fallacies and contradictions in the text. For example, she concludes that “Noah’s arc is a problem…. We’ll have to call it early quantum state phenomenon. Only way to fit 5000 species of mammal onto the same boat.” She believes the Bible to be broken and sets about fixing it. In response to River’s red markings and tearing of pages, the preacher is understandably alarmed. “You don’t fix the Bible,” he says. “It’s not about making sense. It’s about believing in something…. It’s about faith.”

The responses of River and Shepard Book to the inaccuracies of the Bible seem to illustrate the reactions of many other readers—ignoring or revising the problem spots to fit their needs. The pages that River tears out of the Bible and the logic she attempts to apply to its problems relates to Jefferson’s rationalism in the creation of his Bible. But even with this rational approach, sections are removed from the text to make it make sense or to establish a particular focus so that the revision also discounts and removes elements of the text. And while the Bible clearly holds great importance to many people, Shepard Book’s seemingly blind faith may not be the best approach to the issue of Biblical inconsistencies either. Rather, the Bible should be considered holistically, acknowledging the difficulty of interpreting sections and exploring the reasons for the contradictions without explaining them away and ignoring them or trying to rationalize them with reality.