I realized that I didn’t have a category for yesterday’s post about the Obama/Anti-Christ video, so I created a new one called “Ignorance.”  Such a category shouldn’t have only one entry, however, so I feel inspired to create a few more entries in the “why are Christians so dumb sometimes” vein, what my friend Brooke calls Bible Woo.  Perhaps I should change my category to match his. Hmm…

Anyway, today’s entry is about that venerable best-selling sack of shit called The Bible Code. That is a link to the original book, but the idea has metastasized all over the place, so you might start

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There has been a lot of interest in the idea of hidden messages encrypted in the Bible, but my sense is that most people don’t understand 1) why it is alluring to modern Christians, and 2) why it fails as a faithful hermeneutic of the Bible.  Searching for Bible Code in Google yields almost 17 million hits, and searching for “Bible Code debunked” yields only about 51 thousand.  That’s a lot of hits, either way, but the fact is that debunking biblical stupidity doesn’t generate nearly as much traffic as reporting it breathlessly.

The idea behind the Bible Code is that… ah, heck, let me just quote Wikipedia:

The primary method by which purportedly meaningful messages have been extracted is the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS). To obtain an ELS from a text, choose a starting point (in principle, any letter) and a skip number, also freely and possibly negative. Then, beginning at the starting point, select letters from the text at equal spacing as given by the skip number. For example, the bold letters in this sentence form an ELS. With a skip of -4, and ignoring the spaces and punctuation, the word SAFEST is spelled out backwards.

Often more than one ELS related to some topic can be displayed simultaneously in an ELS letter array. This is produced by writing out the text in a regular grid, with exactly the same number of letters in each line, then cutting out a rectangle. In the example below, part of the King James Version of Genesis (26:5–10) is shown with 33 letters per line. ELSs for BIBLE and CODE are shown. Normally only a smaller rectangle would be displayed, such as the rectangle drawn in the figure. In that case there would be letters missing between adjacent lines in the picture, but it is essential that the number of missing letters be the same for each pair of adjacent lines.

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This is enough to demonstrate why no sane person should take this stuff seriously.  There aren’t that many letters in the English alphabet (and even fewer consonants in Hebrew), so arranging the text in this way can generate any word you want to find.  Also, notice that the code “researcher” has the option of changing the text width!  In other words, you don’t have to keep what you have.  Making the margins smaller or larger gives you a fresh deck, much like shuffling the cards in your Solitaire hand in the middle of a game.

But why are people intrigued by this notion, at least enough to buy the books and keep these idiots in business?  Because Bible Code-style hunting around for non-existent connections is already at the heart of much contemporary biblical interpretation.  Consider these assumptions:

1. The Bible, as God’s Word, is one thing.  It says one thing only about any subject, and thus there is no historical or theological distinctions to be made when reading the Bible.
2. There are subtle references to Jesus throughout the Old Testament, independent of the text’s place in Israel’s history, theology, or literary development (think Genesis 3:15).
3. Although the Bible was written way back when, it is actually God’s direct word to us in a direct and applicable way.  For example, apocalyptic references to beasts, wars, and corrupt human leaders have nothing to do with the people who wrote the text, but are one-to-one descriptions of modern events and people.

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There is more to be said here, but these assumptions are at the heart of much modern Christian preaching on the Bible, and of almost all Christian preaching that appears in the media.

My argument is that once you are comfortable with flipping through the Bible to find individual verses that relate to each other without regard for historical or literary context, why not flip around to find individual letters that go together without regard for context?

Scholars bear a lot of the blame for this because we have perpetuated the idea that the Bible is an obscure puzzle to be solved by trained and gifted interpreters.  What people need is someone smart and insightful to show them what is REALLY there, because they have no chance of seeing its real significance themselves.  In my opinion, there is little conceptual difference between the Bible Code and hard-core source criticism or the Jesus Seminar.

What Christians need is honest, humble, and faithful explication of the Bible’s books in their contexts.  This works well in small groups, but rarely finds its way to the NYT Best Sellers list.