God Changes His Mind

If God is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Mal 3:6, Heb 13:8, James 1:17), why did he change his mind about some stuff? I'm referring to Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount where Jesus, apparently, makes some corrections to the Jewish scriptures that Moses wrote. For example, Matt. 5:21-22, Jesus cites the 6th commandment, "Do not murder," then says, "but I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgement." He goes on to make a similar correction regarding adultery (vv 27-28): not only should you not commit adultery, but if you even think about it you're already guilty.

Then he makes what I find the most interesting correction to the law. In vv 31-32 he changes the rule about divorce. The law said a man could divorce his wife if he found something displeasing or indecent about her (Deut 24:1). Jesus said no you can't unless she was cheating on you. Otherwise any subsequent marrying would be considered adultery. So the really interesting aspect of Jesus' position on this happens in Mark 10:2-10 where the Pharisees come to question Jesus about this issue. The discuss in terms of "what did Moses tell you", not "what did God tell you in the law".

This is a can of worms opening in my mind. Now we seem to be talking about scripture, the books of God's law that Moses recorded, as if it is not the unerring word of God, but it is the possibly fallible word of Moses - which clearly needed some later correction. Then you get into trying to figure out which parts were from Moses and which were actually said by God. Who is qualified to make those decisions? I'm not and I wouldn't trust anyone else to do it either. Perhaps not all scripture is "God breathed"?

Or did God change his mind on those matters? "Crap. I really wasn't strict enough when I made those rules. I'll have to fix that when I send my son to earth."

I'll grant that those are not huge flip flops on the issues, but I would expect God would get it perfect the first time, no revision needed. What does this do to the idea that God doesn't change? Perhaps that doesn't mean he doesn't change his mind?

So the ultimate question for me is: Are the books of the Bible really the words of God, written essentially by human mediums? Or are they the words of humans, parts of which may be inspired by God, and perhaps none of which are inspired?

Misquoting Jesus

I like to listen to books on CD during my 1 hour per day round trip commute. Right now I'm listening to a book called Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman who is a biblical scholar. The book is about all the accidental and purposeful changes made to copies of New Testament books as they were copied over and over again. It's quite interesting so far. I'm maybe halfway through it, and up to this point he hasn't gotten to the real meat of what things were changed that changes the meaning of the Christian faith in any way. I'm eager to hear that part and so I hope it's getting to that. So far it's mostly talked about minor mistakes in copying and slight word changes. That's what I've always heard: There have been changes to the New Testament books over the centuries, but the vast majority of them are minor (e.g. speling errors) and anything more significant doesn't really change anything to do with basic Christian doctrine.

One good point he brings up though, is that while we may have lots of really old copies of these texts, we still don't have the originals (the autographs) of the original authors. And if these texts are the word of God himself, the exact wording of the exact originals is the only authority on what God really said. While I understand, if you have faith, you would argue that God has intervened to ensure that the text has been preserved, that would seem to be an assumption that can't be supported by actual facts. (I'm open to being wrong there, I'm not an expert after all.) And not having the original words of God would seem to be a bit of a problem for a religion that based almost entirely on books and the precise wording of those books (because they are THE word of God).