#123 – “The Exodus”: Sunday School version or scholar’s version?

Science now makes the former no longer tenable, leaving three options for believers: ignore the problem, reject the Bible, or revise one’s theology.

The story of “the Exodus” has traditionally been seen to involve millions of Israelites following Moses out of Egypt: this image is derived from a literal reading of the Old Testament, with more than a little help from Cecil B. DeMille’s iconic movie. However, scholars have given us several other versions of this story which are much, MUCH smaller in scale and quite different in many of the details … and which are much more believable, especially given that they’re based on actual data (archaeological; literary; genetic). This puts many believers in a difficult position: setting aside what they see/saw as the Biblical version forces them to devalue the Bible and possibly to reject their faith. In this episode, we talk about why the “Sunday School version” is really no longer tenable, and how to revise one’s theology to accommodate that paradigm shift. Discussion points included:

• how people respond when they grow up with one version (usually the “Sunday School version” and then later are confronted with a very different one (usually one of the scholar’s versions).
• “the numbers” that argue against the literal version (the “Sunday School version”):
  • (1) the numbers that the text give us which are just too hard to believe (several million Israelites marching out of Egypt? the logistics for a horde of this tremendous size)
  • (2) the numbers that you’d expect to find if the Sunday School version was historical, but which are nowhere to be found (the trail of dead bodies and garbage; surrounding cultures would have written something about this event)
  • (3) the numbers that we do find which point to a very different version (the Levites as late-comers to Canaan from Egypt; the genetics of the inhabitants of Canaan at that time)
• the perceived risks of rejecting the Sunday School version of the Exodus story:
  • need to reject the whole Bible (the inerrancy/infallibility problem)
  • need to reject core aspects of Christian faith (if there was no Passover event, then what do we do with Christ’s death on “Passover”)
• [Black] Liberation Theology resonates profoundly with the Exodus story
• many listeners gave great feedback to our question: “if you have/had to reject the Sunday School version of this story, what impact would that have on your Christian faith”
• people feel lied to by Christian leaders who know or should know that the traditional Sunday School version is suspicious
• the first step in coming to grips with this problem is recognizing that the Old Testament was written by Jews, and to Jews; we can debate the extent to which this on-going in-house conversation is open to us 21^st century Westerners.
• constitutional lawyers and Supreme Court judges are faced with the very same situation when interpreting the US Constitution: either stay absolutely true to the original wording, or see it as a living document that breathes and changes as the American population changes through time and encounters new situations
• we also see the same thing in the four corners of the Wesleyan quadrilateral: two corners that are wooden and unbending (scripture and church tradition) are balanced out by the flexibility of the other two corners (reason and church experience)
• Fundamentalists and Literalists already occasionally take scripture non-literally whether they realize it or not (the sun orbiting the earth? Hell is underground? the sky is a hard dome holding back an ocean of water? our soul resides in our liver?)
• the ancient Israelites and 1st century Christians fully believed that God needs blood to absolve sin; but many Christians today call into question Penal Substitutionary Atonement and God’s need for blood

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like Episode #57 (the writing of the Old Testament), #101 (Divine Inspiration), #112 (Passover as the context for Christ’s death on the cross), #19 and #20 (Atonement Theory), #15 (how ancient Jews understood things so differently from us today).

Movie promotional image from Paramount Pictures (modified).

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