Changing My Mind …[1]

The Things I Didn’t Know That I Didn’t Know

[Note: This is a shorter version of a previous post, now deleted, with the details in the footnotes, so that the seven points are more clearly delineated.}

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I’ve been thinking a lot, recently, about what changed my mind and led me to abandon more than 30 years of not only embracing conservative Christian theology but being a defender of it. It was no one thing, but a combination of issues, about which there were so many realities I thought I knew but I really didn’t know or fully appreciate. Bit by bit, step by step, the very foundations of my conservative Christian theology were revealed to be fundamentalist dogma hanging by a few threads. The more I learned, the more these threads unravelled and broke.

What things did I come to know which I didn’t know that I didn’t know? Here are some broad categories of historical and biblical realities that resulted in gradually, but decisively, changing my mind.[2]

1. The paradigm shift that took place in the field of biblical textual criticism in the last three decades or so.[3]

2. The evidence regarding the persistent pluriformity of the biblical texts from the earliest manuscripts to the present day.[4]

3. The central importance, and the high regard, that the earliest centuries of Christian leaders and scholars had for the Greek translations of the Hebrew biblical texts, often referred to as the Septuagint.[5]

4. What archaeology has revealed, and not revealed, about much of the biblical narrative prior to the 10th century BCE.[6]

5. The rich Jewish literary heritage of the Second Temple Period (i.e., ca. 536 BCE to 70 CE).[7]

6. The pluriformity of the collection of authoritative biblical texts from the earliest codices through the “canonization” processes that persist today.[8]

7. The impact of biblical multivocality as evidence of various, and sometimes contradictory, perspectives on, and portrayals of, God’s nature, working, and will.[9]

In a recent “Misquoting Jesus” podcast, Bart Ehrman shared about his “de-conversion” from fundamentalist Christianity to atheism. This process took place gradually over quite a number of years and, while many factors came into play, he stated the number one thing that changed how he viewed and read the Bible.

And I think the largest, I think the most significant, discovery of modern times about the Bible, the most significant discovery is not archeological finds, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s not manuscript discoveries of the New Testament. It’s not, I mean, you can go down the things that have been hugely significant.

The most significant thing is the record, in my view, is the discovery that the Bible is not a single book. That it’s a collection of different books written by different authors at different times, in different places, with different points of view, different theologies, different beliefs, different perspectives; like they’re different. And once you recognize that, it completely revolutionizes how you try to understand the Bible.

And it allows you to understand it much better because you take each author seriously for what he has to say, rather than assuming that he’s saying something that every other author is saying. If you see the Bible as this kind of unified whole, and it’s all the same thing, then you don’t really understand any part of it. You may think you do, but what you’re doing is you’re reconciling all the parts, and you’re constructing this unified whole out of something that’s not a unified whole.

So, you’re imposing your own views on it. And so, once I realized that it changed everything for me. And in a sense, it opened up questions for me, because now the Bible is not the inerrant revelation, and to know the truth, all I have to do is understand the Bible.

So, I think that that’s the biggest thing that my scholarship did, is it made me recognize how you go about studying the Bible, really to understand it, as opposed to imposing some other perspective on it.[10]

These are “the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know” which collectively, gradually resulted in changing my mind. I know virtually all my many conservative Christian friends and former colleagues will disagree with me, regarding all, or at least some, of the above, and that’s OK. For me such “pervasive interpretive pluralism” is further corroborating evidence that the biblical texts are humanly multivocal, not “divine, inerrant, internally harmonious, perspicuous, and intent on revealing infallible truth to humankind?”

I am currently revisiting each of these topics in detail to both remind myself why my mind has changed and to learn more about the things “I didn’t know that I didn’t know.” Perhaps, along the way, I’ll drop some posts about what I’m learning/re-learning.

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[1] Apologies to the esteemed David Gushee, whose pervasively and persuasively honest book, Changing Our Mind, certainly changed my mind about “the Bible and Homosexuality.”

[2] Check out the lengthy footnotes (3–9) following each numbered point for an overview explanation or each, along with some key sources.

[3] The further textual critics go back in time the more pluriform is the manuscript evidence. Brennan Breed refers to “the original text—or one of its aliases, such as an authoritative copy, archetype, or final form”—as a “phantasm” which “only constructs borders where there were none before.” Textual criticism does not lead us on track toward an autograph or original text. Either there never was an “original text” of any book of the Bible or they are so deeply lost it would be impossible to confidently reconstruct what the original text said.

[4] As Eugene Ulrich states over and over again through his publications, “The text of the various books of Scripture was pluriform, and there is abundant evidence that this pluriformity was widely accepted. The textual form for each book that was later incorporated into the MT [i.e., Masoretic Text] was simply one of several forms of the text as they circulated in Judaism during the Second Temple period.” [Eugene Urlich, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Developmental Composition of the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 171.] The scriptures existed in pluriformity throughout Israel’s history, into the time of Jesus and his earliest followers and continues through the ante-Nicene, post-Nicene, medieval, reformation, enlightenment, modern, and post modern periods. There simply is, and never has been, no ONE Bible, or even ONE form of any book of the Bible.

[5] As Timothy Michael Law states, “[T]he Old Testament translation of almost every modern English version of the Bible is based on the Hebrew Bible, but the form of scripture used by the New Testament authors and the early Church was most often the Septuagint.” [See: Timothy Michael Law, When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4.] Even as late as Augustine and Jerome (ca. 394–419 CE), Christians leaders and scholars believed that the Septuagint was inspired by God. In fact, Augustine tried to convince Jerome to make his Latin translation of the biblical texts based on Greek, not Hebrew, texts. [See Sean Kooyman, Letters Between Augustine and Jerome (Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2018).]

[6] The data show that there are no archaeological data that supports, as historical, the creation or flood myths, the stories of the patriarchs, the four hundred years of Hebrew slavery in Egypt and the Exodus, the wanderings in the wilderness, the conquest of Canaan and much of the early monarchy. [See William Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It: What Archaeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2001).]

[7] These writings clearly demonstrate the multiplicity of theologies that arose and influenced the rise of the Jesus movement. As Henze states, “[S]ince Jesus and his followers were deeply rooted in the Judaism of their time, modern readers of the New Testament need to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of that Judaism in order to be able to make sense of Jesus’s life and teachings. This knowledge won’t come from studying the Old Testament. The books of the Old Testament were written hundreds of years earlier, and their religion is therefore not the Judaism of Jesus. … How does our reading of the New Testament change when we take the Jewish world of Jesus seriously … with an understanding of the specific historical and religious context in which it was written, the Judaism of the Second Temple period?” [See Matthias Henze, Mind the Gap: How the Jewish Writings between the Old and New Testament Help Us Understand Jesus (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), 180, 183. See also George Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2005).] It was during the Second Temple period, influenced by its Jewish literature, when certain topics and theological perspectives which were either absent, or barely mentioned in the Jewish Scriptures became “hot topics” in the writings and teachings of the earliest Christians. These hot topics include, the multiplicity of Jewish sects, the rise of messianism, angelology, demonology, apocalypticism, eternal judgment, reward and punishment, resurrection of the dead, and more!

[8] Canonical pluriformity is further evidence of what Christian Smith refers to as “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” As Smith states, “Why and how, we might ask, would the Bible be so easily misread by so many believers if, as biblicism believes, it is divine, inerrant, internally harmonious, perspicuous, and intent on revealing infallible truth to humankind? …If the truth of the Bible is really sufficiently understandable to the ordinary reader, then why do so many of them—and countless biblically and theologically trained scholars besides—find it impossible to agree on what that truth is?” It is pervasive interpretive pluralism that factors into why certain texts were chosen as authoritative in one “canon” but excluded in others. [Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012 ), 39.]

[9] As the late Walter Brueggemann stated, “[T]he text, taken as a whole, seems to have no sustained interest in sorting matters out or bringing to resolution many of the contradictions that mark both Israel’s faith and Yahweh’s character. … There is evidence that Yahweh is a conundrum of contradictions.” [Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 82, 362.]

[10] Quotation from the transcript of the “Misquoting Jesus” podcast, titled, “Why Study the Bible as an Atheist?” and dated September 22, 2025, Episode 153: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmutpnyeVQcrRNOzPWdEothXcCVo2Npfv