I used to work in an office with my father. Back in these days, I still believed the Bible was literally true—written by God through inspired men, inerrant and (therefore) reliable.
One slow day, a random thought crossed my mind.
“Hey, Dad,” I said. He looked up. “The Bible gives us two genealogies of Jesus, right?” He nodded. “And they both say they’re following Joseph’s line, right?” He nodded again, clearly waiting to see what I was getting at. “Well…” I said, forehead creased in confusion and slight dismay, “then we don’t have Jesus’s genealogy at all, do we?”
My father blinked. I plowed on: “Because Joseph didn’t have anything to do with—Mary was his human parent, not Joseph. So Joseph was descended from David, but Jesus? We don’t know.”
“Actually,” he said, “we do.” He stood and began to pace. I waited for him to impart his wisdom upon me. Finally he had his thoughts together, and began. “You see,” he said, gesturing in his normal preacher-y way, “one of those genealogies is actually the genealogy of Mary!”
Quite disrespectfully, I interrupted him immediately. I couldn’t help myself.
“But,” I pointed out, distressed, “the Bible says they’re both the genealogy of Joseph!” Remaining unspoken were the questions: Would the Bible lie? Could it be wrong?
My father stopped and stared at me. His expression was distinctly unfriendly. Lost in horrified religious preoccupation, I barely noticed. This was the foundation of my whole understanding of reality: that this one book was entirely accurate and trustworthy, that it never lied or misled or got things wrong.
“So,” I continued, half terrified, “either the Bible is wrong when it says they’re both the genealogy of Joseph, or it’s wrong when it says it’s telling us who Jesus was descended from on his human side!”
I could feel my understanding of reality crumbling. I felt like I was going insane.
The Bible has to be wrong about at least one of these things, because it can’t be right about both of them, but the Bible is always right about everything, but it’s not logically possible for it to be right about both whose genealogies these are and that they tell us who Jesus was descended from, but it has to be right, but it can’t be right, but….
From this sanity-shredding horror, almost laughing on the brink of madness, I looked up at my father—hoping against hope that he would have an answer.
How dare I? I wasn’t genuine in my pursuit of knowledge! I was only interested in trying to disprove the Bible! I was a sinner who wanted to be able to throw out the Bible so I could sin without moral condemnation: I hated God, and I hated the Bible, and this was why I was deliberately looking for even the smallest things I could misunderstand, to give me an excuse for non-belief!
This shook me to my core. Was I really misunderstanding? Was it possible that I was so overwhelmingly deceived that I was seeing contradiction where there was none? Was God himself sending me a powerful delusion so I might believe a lie?
In the moment, I backed down.
He was so sure. And I… I was most emphatically not. I felt mentally unstable just considering that the Bible might not be entirely reliable, that everything it said was so might not be so.
I thought—I thought that it was impossible for Luke to be honest when he said Joseph was the son of Heli if he actually meant that Mary was the daughter of Heli. I thought that it was impossible for Matthew to be right when he said this was the genealogy of Jesus if he was listing the ancestors of a man who passed none of his genes to Jesus. I thought that it was impossible for Matthew and Luke to be covering the same span of time between David and Jesus, since Luke records fifteen more generations there than Matthew does—I thought that it was impossible for both accounts to be accurate.
But the wisdom of man is not reliable. And the word of God is always true. And the Bible is an inspired book, and God would not have allowed lies to be written in it as truth. Somehow… somehow… Luke saying “Joseph, son of Heli” was exactly the same as him saying “Mary, daughter of Heli.”
I didn’t see how it couldn’t be! But I felt my grasp on reality shaking, and knew in that moment that I couldn’t trust my own reason. So I backed down.
I said I was sure the Bible was true, and that maybe the people recording the genealogies had just made a mistake, one little mistake in the Bible, no big deal, and I believed nothing I was saying even as I desperately wanted to believe it. And my father was satisfied, and he went back to his desk, and we finished out the work day as normal.
Unfortunately, one thing my father really drove home during my upbringing was this:
That you should seek the truth. Always seek the truth, no matter how uncomfortable, no matter how frightening, no matter how inconvenient. Pursue it whatever the cost. Even when you don’t want to. Especially when you don’t want to.
And so… I couldn’t let the matter rest.
It niggled at me day in and day out. The problem was always at the back of my mind. What was the truth? And eventually I accepted the obvious.
The Bible is not infallible. It is not reliable. No book that says "Jesus was not fathered by Joseph" and "the genealogy of Joseph is the genealogy of Jesus" is telling the truth both times. No book that says "Joseph is descended from Solomon" and "Joseph is descended from Solomon's brother, not Solomon" is telling the truth both times. No book that says "Joseph is the son of Heli" is telling the truth if, as my father claims, that's not true.
The more I studied the Bible, the more things like this I saw. I didn't want it to be true, but it was: my entire understanding of reality was inaccurate. The very foundation of it was rotten.
This wasn't fun. But I've always been a truth-seeker—and in the end, that meant I had to discard the Bible. It's not true. And frankly?
