If Jesus gave us parables — why do we answer back with creeds? (Maren C. Terabassi, “Parabler’s Creed,” Gifts in Open Hands, accessed November 6, 2026)

Years ago, I attended a conference that brought together philosophers and Bible scholars. I remember thinking that before the conference was over there might be blood on the floor. The disagreements were heated. One in particular I remember was about pseudepigraphy—writing under another name. Pseudepigraphy is a feature of some ancient writing. There are lots of levels to this practice (on this, see Hindy Najman, Scriptural Vitality, 2025, p. 43ff). Pseudepigraphy was a way of writing. It presented certain imaginative possibilities. It was not then what today would be plagiarism. But all that is a topic for another day. At the conference, though, the philosophers were mostly having none of it, at least not with respect to the Bible. Pseudepigraphy seemed to them perilously close to lying, and if lying, then unworthy of the Word of God.

As I recall (it’s been a long time and my memory may be faulty), the discussion centered on the authorship of letters attributed to Paul but long thought by Bible scholars to come from later dates, say, 1 Timothy. 1 Timothy begins, as these letters always do, with the name of the person (supposedly) writing the letter: “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope.” While there are dissenting opinions (for example, Luke Timothy Johnson in his Anchor Bible commentary), the consensus among New Testament scholars is that in the case of 1 Timothy this is a literary fiction. The philosophers at that long-ago conference wanted to challenge that consensus, not on the basis of the evidence but rather by philosophical argument.

The conversation went something like this:

Philosopher: [1 Timothy] claims to be a letter of Paul, right?
Bible scholar: Yes.
Philosopher: Why not accept that Paul wrote it?
Bible scholar: Well, there are matters of language and theology in the letter
that seems to point to a later author.
Philosopher: Is it possible that Paul wrote it?
Bible scholar: Possible? I suppose so.
Philosopher: Do you accept the Bible as the Word of God?
Bible scholar: Yes.
Philosopher: If you accept the Bible as the Word of God, why not assume
that what it says is right?

The philosopher’s argument in brief was that belief should predispose us to certain conclusions. The belief that the Bible is Word of God should predispose us to take what the Bible says as true. If 1 Timothy claims to be a letter of Paul, we should take it as such. Or, at least, have very strong evidence to the contrary, in which case we may want to rethink the epistle’s place in the canon. In making this argument, it’s often implied that those who question the Pauline authorship of books like 1 Timothy are in fact predisposed in the opposite direction. Their conclusion that Paul did not write certain epistles rests ultimately on their own assumptions. They have surreptitiously imported secular humanism into their analysis of authorship.

The idea is that it’s mostly a matter of presuppositions. In the tradition in which I grew up there is a long legacy of this sort of argument. It’s often expressed as a “world-and-life” view. Where you end up, so the argument goes, is a matter mostly of where you start. I’ve never found this argument particularly persuasive, but that’s for another day. I’ve opened with this story not to challenge the philosophical argument but to open a larger topic: how the Bible works. And how it doesn’t work. And, perhaps, how different minds respond to how it works. Oh, and to talk a bit more about the way Homer came to influence how the church thinks about the Bible.

What I want to defend in this post are two claims about the Bible. The first is that the Bible is literary. I prefer “literary” to “literature,” because the Bible as “literature” puts the Bible in a category, literature as opposed to, say, history or theology. That’s not what this is about. What I have in mind by “literary” is that the biblical authors avail themselves of the whole array of literary devices available to them, including at times pseudepigraphy. In short, the biblical authors (include editors in this) are writers, and like writers everywhere and always, they love turning a good sentence, making a bad pun, or alluding to something else they read. There is in good writing a certain playfulness, even when the subject is serious. The second claim is related: the Bible resists reduction to a single theological (or philosophical) system. The Bible resists being tied down to a single truth. And this is a feature of the Bible, not a flaw.

What brought to mind the long-ago argument between philosophers and Bible scholar was my recent foray into Homer, prompted by the Christopher Nolan movie, The Odyssey. Homer is a long way from the Bible. (On the differences, it’s still worth reading Erich Auerbach’s introductory essay in his 1940s book, Mimesis (translated by Willard R. Trask, 1953)). But like the biblical writings, these wild poems with their wild gods and flawed heroes formed a cultural, if not religious, canon. They were revered, recited, taught to children. But what to do with them? How to read them? The problem was that they didn’t conform to what serious-minded people thought should be taught and celebrated. Like Plato. Or if not Plato himself, Plato’s protagonist in The Republic, Socrates.

The argument against Homer comes in Book X of The Republic. In it Socrates circles back to a topic he first raised in Book 2: whether poets should be allowed in the ideal city. Socrates admits at the outset in Book X—here at least I think he is speaking for Plato—that he has long loved Homer. It pains him to say that the poets should be excluded from the city, but that is what he believes he must do.

His argument is that the poets dangerously misrepresent the truth. He says that poems are like paintings: at best a third step from truth. Take beds, the example Socrates uses. The truth of beds is what he calls a form: the idea of bedness itself. One remove from this idea or form are actual beds, the ones on which we sleep, constructed by ordinary artisans. Still another remove from the form of tables are representations of table in art, like Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom.” Socrates argues at length that all such representations of beds are faulty (they are two- dimensional while actual beds are three-dimensional, mere imitations, etc.) but the best of these are at least faithful representations of beds. They look like beds. The Plato of The Republic would not have thought much of Picasso’s cubist deconstructions of visual reality.

(Vincent Van Gogh, The Bedroom, Arles, 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Vincent Van Gogh Foundation)

Poetry is also like this, Socrates goes on to say. It’s a representation of reality in words, like paintings two full removes from truth. But what’s worse is that the poets he loves, including Homer, do a bad job of representing reality. They tell lies about the gods and about ancient heroes. They entertain people with stories that are unedifying. They are fun, but for that reason they are the more dangerous. People might begin to think the gods are petty and arbitrary, that heroes are flawed, that the great victories won by the Greeks were not great victories at all. Rather than risking that sort of thing, better to ban poets from the ideal city.

Socrates’s argument is still being made. Books are banned because children might get the wrong ideas. This is a backhanded compliment to art. Art, whether pictorial or verbal, is dangerous because it is powerful. And so with heavy heart, Socrates drums Homer out of his make-believe city. He says, “. . . We’ll behave like people who have fallen in love with someone but who force themselves to stay away from him, because they realize that their passion isn’t beneficial” (Book X, 279, translation here and below by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve, 1992).

Reading this, one wonders whether Plato is being ironic. His Socrates, the character he has created to carry his arguments, is as much a product of literary imagination as anything in Homer. Is Plato having a joke at our expense? Perhaps not, though I wonder. Socrates in The Republic far too often comes off as schoolmarmish. He puts me in mind of some lines from Auden:

And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.
‘The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning’

Before I get even farther afield, let me bring this conversation back to the Bible—and to beds. Socrates insists that paintings of beds are of no great value. They are merely “imitations.” “Imitation,” he says, “is far removed from the truth, for it touches only a small part of each thing and a part that is itself only an image [of the original form]” (Book X, 598). But as anyone who has spent time with and in Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom” knows, paintings have their own truth, a different sort of truth. It’s not of beds but of the painter. To look into Van Gogh’s Arles bedroom is to look into his life, the aching loneliness of it, the beauty of it, and the sparse simplicity of it. It conveys truth not just about Van Gogh but about life. Having seen it, we see bedrooms and beds differently.

And this is how literature works. Take Homer. In Homer the will of the gods plays off against the will of mortals. It’s never clear how much is divine and how much human. How much of the foolish petulance of Achilles is Achilles’s own foolishness and how much the product of the agreement between Zeus and Thetis, his divine mother? With this in mind, we see the world differently. We see what war does to warriors for good and ill, and how at times events seem to choose us rather our choosing them. Poetry makes its truth by indirection—and by drawing our own lives into the story.

My argument is that the Bible is more like this, more like Van Gogh’s bedroom and Homer’s poems than what theologians (and sometimes philosophers) come to the Bible looking for.

Like Socrates in The Republic, they come to the Bible looking for edifying lessons, and there are some such. But the Bible is larger than that, more literary than that, more various, more honest.

Take the story of David. Auerbach in his essay on Homer and the Bible draws our attention the poor, pathetic David in his final chapter (1 Kings 1) who, in the memorable phrasing of the King James Version, “gat no heat.” At the end of his life, we see him, beautiful, young, Abishag draped over him to keep him warm. What a long human distance between that final image and the image of the young David, celebrated by the likes of Michelangelo and Bernini, with the head of Goliath in his hand. And yet he remains David, and in the next verses acts at the prompting of Bathsheba to elevate Solomon to the throne. The underlying biblical theme is the magnificence and tragedy of human life.

The Bible presents us with many such images. Abraham with the knife poised over Isaac, caught between religious fanaticism and obedience. Or the concubine in Judges 19, raped and dead, with her hands on the threshold of the house in Gibeah, just short of making it home. Or Jesus praying in Gethsemane. Or Paul, trying to buck up the church in Philippi while worrying that he himself may not have the stuff for martyrdom. Or John of the Apocalypse seeing Jesus on Patmos. On it goes, shattering our complacent lives with the flashes of divine illumination. The Bible almost never is “plain cooking made plainer still by plain cooks.” It’s imaginative and literary. It sucks us in whole. And because the Bible is this, it rarely if ever can be reduced to a final truth.

In the debate at that conference with which I began, the argument was about whether books written in another name—pseudepigraphical works—could still be Bible, still be Word of God. It would have been better if the question had been about what the ancient writers were attempting to do with this device. Everyone could have agreed about the pseudonymity of works like the book of Enoch, since Enoch is hardly in anyone’s Bible. What are the assumptions and the possibilities that the ancient writers brought to the works they created. And how do these assumptions and possibilities play against our current ways of thinking and writing. And then, with these literary possibilities in mind, returned to the disputed texts and asked, how do these works read differently if we believe them to be pseudepigrapha? If the Paul of 1 Timothy is a pseudonym, a way of applying the authority of Paul to a later time in the church, what does that suggest for how Paul can be read in today’s church?

Or to ask this in another way, what if we were to find God in the play of words itself? God delighting in literary possibilities. The scripture that comes closest to suggesting this is Proverbs 8, a take on the creation story. In the poem, Wisdom, whom John later calls Word, says:

I was daily his [the Lord’s] delight,
playing before him always,
playing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race. (Proverbs 8:30-31, NRSV)

That sounds suspiciously like fun.

Clay