Of course, the Bible is Not Fact –
This is going to be a screed.
A fair number of people in this country know very little about Christianity or the Bible. Of those who do, many have never actually encountered it in any meaningful way. And among those who have, a good portion have rejected it outright—for a very simple reason:
The Bible is a myth.
And by “myth,” they mean false. Not factual. Not historical. Not true. Case closed. The verdict is delivered with a certain satisfaction, as though a 2,000-year-old tradition has finally been exposed as a fraud and can now be swept into the dustbin of history. The self-appointed arbiters of truth stand alone, confident in their clarity.
So—here goes.
The Bible is Scripture.
And “scripture” means only one thing: something written down. That is all. When ancient authors refer to “Scripture,” they are not making a claim about divine dictation or historical accuracy. They are pointing to words that have been preserved—committed to parchment, copied, transmitted, and read within a community.
That simple fact matters more than we like to admit.
Before printing presses and mass literacy, writing was rare, copying was laborious, and reading was specialized. To produce and preserve a body of text required a structure: writers, copyists, readers, and the institutions that sustained them. It required time, money, and authority. Scripture is not just words—it is words that have survived because a community decided they must survive.
And once a community decides that, something happens.
The text becomes holy—not because it dropped from the sky, but because it is held, guarded, repeated, and used. Its authority is not located in its factual precision, but in its continued function. When someone says, “It is written,” they are not appealing to a footnote. They are invoking the weight of a tradition that has chosen to treat these words as meaningful.
The power of scripture is not in its factuality.
The power is in its usability.
This is where both sides of the modern argument go off the rails.
There are those who insist that every word must be historically and scientifically accurate, as though God celestially dictated every sentence to human stenographers. This is not reverence—it is anxiety dressed up as certainty. It is an attempt to secure control over something that was never meant to function as a laboratory report.
And then there are those who notice the cracks and declare the entire enterprise bankrupt. No talking snakes? No parted seas? No verified census under Quirinius that lines up neatly with the Nativity story? Well then—out it goes. Myth equals falsehood. End of discussion.
Both positions miss the point entirely.
The content of the Bible is saga, poetry, law, and reflection. It spans cultures and centuries that operated with no concept of “objective history” as we understand it. To read these texts as if they were written by modern historians is to misunderstand them from the outset. To reject them on that basis is to compound the error.
We have had something like modern historical consciousness for a few hundred years. The biblical tradition stretches across millennia. Every generation that encountered these texts interpreted them through its own lens, reshaping and re-understanding them in light of its own world. That is not corruption—it is the very mechanism by which scripture lives.
Which brings us to the word “myth.”
We have trained ourselves to hear that word as a synonym for “lie.” That is a remarkably shallow achievement. Myth is not the opposite of truth; it is a different vehicle for carrying it. Myth does not aim at factual precision. It aims at meaning—at rendering the human condition in a way that bare facts cannot.
And we know this perfectly well.
No one demands that every detail in a great story be historically verifiable before allowing it to speak. We read The Lord of the Rings without insisting that Middle-earth appear on a map. We recognize that a secondary world can illuminate our own with startling clarity. Courage, corruption, loyalty, sacrifice—these are not diminished because the setting is imagined. They are sharpened.
The same is true—more so, not less—of scripture.
The difference is not that one is “true” and the other is “fiction.” The difference is that scripture has been carried, preserved, and used by communities over centuries as a primary lens through which to understand existence itself. It is not merely a story; it is a sustained conversation.
And like any conversation, it can be mishandled.
There are those who weaponize scripture to maintain power. There are those who defend it with brittle literalism. There are those who discard it entirely, congratulating themselves for having outgrown it. Each group, in its own way, reduces something vast to something manageable.
The real loss is not that we fail to prove the Bible true.
The real loss is that we stop asking what it is trying to say.
Critical thinking is a powerful and intoxicating tool. It allows us to dismantle naive beliefs, to expose contradictions, to reject what cannot be supported. But it is not an endpoint. If all it produces is negation, it leaves behind a wasteland—clean, empty, and sterile.
Most of us encounter this early on. We learn that George Washington did not, in fact, chop down a cherry tree, and we feel a small thrill at having punctured a myth. It is a necessary step. But if we stop there, all we have done is trade one form of simplicity for another.
With time—if we continue—we begin to see more clearly. The story was not trying to record an event; it was trying to illustrate a virtue. Later still, we discover that the real Washington was far more complex than the myth suggested, and far more interesting. The myth did not survive because it was factual. It survived because it was useful.
That is how myth works. That is how scripture works.
Not as a record to be verified.
Not as a lie to be discarded.
But as a lens to be used, with deeper meaning to be experienced.
The childish move is to mistake myth for journalism.
The adolescent move is to sneer at myth for not being journalism.
The adult move is to ask what truth the myth is carrying—and whether we are willing to see it.
That is where scripture begins.
