My Bible

Somewhere on my preaching travels, I left my personal Bible behind.   Hopefully I will come across it again somewhere as I travel my circuit.   Meanwhile I had to buy myself a new one.    Perhaps I had never looked properly before but in the new one, the Old Testament, what we now call the Hebrew Bible takes up most of the space - 692 pages long, while the New Testament, the Christian Bible has only 205 pages.
As the years have gone by, I have come to wonder why the Hebrew Bible is so important to Christianity.   It is after all the Bible of the Jewish faith.     The early church was anxious to confirm that the prophesies of the Old Testament were all pointing to the New Testament - but really the teachings of the New Testament have nothing to do with those of the Hebrew Bible.
It is a different God.   The New Testament does not talk about the Promised Land, or the anger of God against the people, or about the chosen people.
The New Testament is all about personal religion and personal relationship with God.   To me the two books seem quite different.   The only concession that can be made is between the esoteric writings of Daniel and Ezra and the Book of Revelation.
However there is something appealing about the Hebrew Bible but I could not accept that it is the divinely dictated word of God.   It is fascinating because of the characters in it -  the patriarchs, the judges, the prophets and the kings.
Everyone of them is a flawed character.   Weaknesses as well as strengths.  They are characters with excess of human frailties - larger than life.  Their stories are adventure stories; stories of  wars where they either score great victories or suffer ignoble defeats;   Often their God is present in the foreground of the stories, but more often in the background.    They are always trying to second guess the expectations of their God and they mostly get it wrong and blame themselves..
 I often read the events of the Hebrew Bible as sand table stories - they are individual cameos where familiar characters have an adventure - when it is over the sand is smoothed over and the next story begins - or they disappear from the stories altogether.   We can look at these stories and the characters and analyse what they did right and what they did wrong - we can try to guess what might have changed if their God had intervened - or been listening to them - or if they had prayed to their God for guidance.
Jacob fascinates me.   He does everything wrong - he cheats his way along in just about everything - so his God blesses him.
Joseph in his dream coat is perfection - pure of heart and mind, spiritual, devout, prayerful - and his story just fizzles out - just an episode of one rare good man -
And the stories of the kings are wrapped up in the ancient mythology of the region.
When Saul became king, his character defects led him to all sorts of trouble - his jealousy of David led to a prolonged civil war.
Saul spent much of his time fighting the Philistines and all the neighbouring tribes.   In the end he didn’t know what his God wanted him to do.  It was as if he had lost his faith and felt abandoned.   He decided to to see a medium and asked her to summon up the spirit of his old advisor, the warrior priest Samuel. 
Witches had been persecuted so he was lucky to find one - and she did call up Samuel who appeared to Saul as if he was in the flesh.    Samuel only had bad news for Saul, saying that he would soon be killed in battle - and he was - along with all his sons.
David is a mixture of piety and recklessness.   His killing of the giant Goliath is from the folklore  of when there was a race of giants on the earth - David eventually kills the last four  of them - all brothers of Goliath, they had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.        At one time David was ready to fight with the Philistines against Saul but they do not trust him, so he takes his merry men and goes off to attack another tribe.
When David does become king, he then has to go to war again against his own son, Absalom who wants to take the kingdom for himself.
And so each story goes on.
Is there really a spiritual message in them?   Is their God a loving God, is he a constant God?, Is he a fair God or does their God care only about the chosen Israelites and is happy to see others in the region slaughtered ?
They are good stories but they are strange stories - and they are very human stories about heroes and villains - and often a main character is both hero and villain.
All those Hebrew heroes have weaknesses as well as strengths
I suppose it is such heroes that are the attraction.   We love our heroes, we love their achievements and we seem to love them even more if they are flawed heroes.
We prefer our scallywag heroes to the perfect ones. -Their faults are so easily accepted and forgiven.   Maybe it is their humanity that makes them so popular and loved.
And it tells us too that we crave to have leaders - we like having princes and princesses to reign over us.  
So I have 692 pages that tell me the story of a people, their myths and legends and their relationship with an unseen God who is mostly dissatisfied with them - and their heroes.    There seems to be little evidence to show that any of the events were real or true.
What a contrast is the New Testament with its 205 pages - and of these the gospels are but 90 pages divided into four sections - four esoteric stories of a teacher who was sometimes a human, sometimes a manifestation from the God of light, surrounded by a tale of a mythical birth and a death that was not a death.   He is a hero and like all the heroes of mythology he has to die and then return to save the world.  
This  hero is so different.  This is a hero of peace and love - a hero without flaws, without human cravings to make him like any one of us or like any of the heroes of old.
In actual fact he is not a human hero at all - he is more like a guru.  A holy man who teaches a way of spiritual life through miracles and sermons.
That is what I like about the New Testament.   It is a spiritual lesson book - one of the earliest Christians, Origen, wrote that the New Testament had to be understood at many different levels.    At one level it is simply the story of a Jewish man who wants to change the religion he was brought up in.   Then it becomes a religion that is not only for the Hebrews but for all people.  It becomes a universal religion.  
It is about personal spirituality; it is about connection to a God who is not a tyrant - but a loving God.   It is recognising the worth of each individual - no longer just part of a number in a large faceless tribe.
The sad thing for me is that the loving God of the New Testament was said to be the same God of the Hebrew Bible.   So for generations people have been brought up to fear the God of the New Testament  as the God of the Hebrew Bible. 
As if God offered punishment and as if God directed the lives of every single person on this earth - that at a whim, a country could be destroyed, or an earthquake unleashed on an unsuspecting and innocent population.
The New Testament offers none of this - it offers a personal relationship with a deity who was only known as Abba, the loving father.
But people were not used to Gurus who taught simple things.
They wanted a hero like the old mythological heroes -  so the Guru of the Gospels was transformed into an heroic God who would return soon to punish the wicked.   The Guru became a Greek God and so Christianity ended up as something new - Jesus the Guru becoming a transcendent God who was part of the Hebrew God. 
    I often wonder why it is so important for Unitarians to insist that Jesus the guru and prophet did not become a God - or was a God all the time - or that his spirit lives on on earth.
When you cut away all the history; all the reactions and changes that happened to this new religion, it remains a pretty good one.
It tells us that each person is a valuable individual - and they should show it, it teaches us that race or gender or status in the world means nothing - we are all equal with our problems and needs - and often we need healing from what worries us.
It is what the guru taught that really matters - that we are spiritual beings in a spiritual universe.
It taught that there are no rules that say, you cannot eat this, or you cannot do that on a certain day.    Every day is a sabbath day and every sabbath day is an open day, a free day, an every day.
As a Unitarian I am not defined as a card carrying Christian - nor do I want to be part of a religious organisation based on a punishing God.
What I want to be is a follower of that New Testament teaching, where everyone who is hurt should be healed, where everyone is my brother or sister, and there is a reason to live that is beyond the simple existence of surviving on this earth and that I and all of us are urged to let our light shine in the world - and it is told over and over again - in just 90 pages.