A longer version of this article appears in today's Church Times.

The reason the disparate books of the Bible came together was not, initially, because they were thought to be divinely inspired. It was because of what readers were doing with them. They were grappling with the meaning they intuited lay between the lines. They found that when they did so, they gained a sense of enlightenment, of presence, of ecstasy. The paradox is that if the Bible had suddenly appeared as if handed down from heaven, and moreover had been read as straightforwardly true, it could never have delivered such an experience; it would never have become holy scripture.

To put it another way, ask yourself why there are four gospels that vary so wildly about the Jesus story. Any attempt simply to iron out the differences overlooks that the word on the page is designed, as it were, to force the reader beyond, and towards the Word of God. Without that dynamic, a living tradition of faith becomes dry and academic. Jeremiah was so worried about this possibility that he talked of the ‘lying pen of the scribes’; he believed that the new covenant should be written on hearts not parchment.

Interestingly, Plato made a similar argument, refusing to write anything for many years fearing the words would kill a philosophy that could transform lives. Dialogues were his solution because at least they portrayed individuals engaged body, mind and spirit. The ritual recitation of scriptures, such as during a gospel procession, is a religious way of minimising the same risk. Such performances of the word prevent ineffable matters becoming textual certainties.

The strategy worked well for many centuries. Until the nineteenth when something went wrong. It was then, explains Armstrong, that believers started to espouse views such as a literal six days of creation. Talmudic scholars and Church Fathers alike would have laughed at the idea. But what they didn’t have to contend with was the scientific revolution and a modern worldview in which meaning had changed. In particular, factual and logical language ??" the language of the natural sciences ??" triumphed. What was lost was the power of myth, the language that deals with the symbolic and paradoxical. Thus, a centuries-old way of reading the Bible that delighted in the indissoluble, irreducible and uncertain became suspect.