Q.
48
Did God write the Bible? If so, why didn’t
God simply create it miraculously, rather
than using so many people over thousands of
years to write it down?
Gary Peluso-Verdend
A.
I once saw a cartoon that pictured God (depicted as a male) in the
heavens with a megaphone. Tubes extended from the megaphone
to the earth, where four men sat at typewriters reproducing at the
keys the words they were hearing. The cartoonist was trying, positively, to
express the claim that the four gospel writers were transmitting what they
heard from God, word for word.
I think the Bible is an inspired text but not in the way portrayed in
the cartoon.
From one of the opening stories in the Bible—Adam and Eve—we learn
that God chooses to work through and with human agents. One could argue
that God could care directly for widows and orphans, feed the hungry, and
house the sojourner. Instead, God chooses to work through us.
So it is with the scriptures. I believe God inspired persons and communi-
ties over the nearly two thousand years of history contained in the Bible. They
were inspired with ideas and stories, with laws and morals and values, and
with an understanding of a God whose character is love and who has created
humankind to refl ect the divine character.
When writers recorded the pieces that other writers and scribes stitched
together over time into what today is our Bible, they included the words
of God, the hopes and dreams and anger of their own communities, their
insights, and both their cultural biases and their wounds.
What we have in the Bible is a community of interpreters of the word of
God. It is exciting and challenging, in our day as in any day, to join that com-
munity and to dare our interpretations.José F. Morales Jr.
A.
Short answer: No. God did inspire it, but did not write it
(2 Tim. 3:16).
God used peoples and communities over time to give birth
and breath to what we now call “the Bible.” Before the written word was the
spoken word, that is, oral stories and traditions that were transmitted within
Israel and the early church. Israel understood its holy identity through these