18 And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech.
19 And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah.
–Genesis 4:18-19
36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
–Matthew 22:36-40
If I had to say which of the two passages above is more central to Christianity, that would not be a difficult choice.
There are, roughly speaking, three ways to read the Bible:
- Infallibilism: Everything in the bible is God’s word, true and without error.
- Critically: The Bible was written by fallible humans and contains all kinds of stuff, including both wisdom and error.
- As garbage: The Bible is a bunch of crap written by ignorant goat-herders and should be ignored in its entirety.
It seems to me that number 3 too blithely dismisses a good chunk of human history and culture, but whatever: If that’s your approach, then what follows might not be of much interest to you.
Adherents of the first two views are coming from vastly different places, but one thing they share is placing more emphasis on some passages than on others. All Bible passages, whether or not they are equally true, are not equally important. Where there are apparent contradictions, an infallibilist will use the more important passages to shape their understanding of the less important passages. Even in the absence of apparent contradiction, an infallibilist will spend more time and energy contemplating the more important passage. An adherent of the second approach might use the more important passage to simply dismiss the less important one.
So how do you go about determining which passages are more important than others?
One way would be to use clues within the text itself. For example, an item in the middle of a long list [say, a list of begats], might not be as important as an item that has a whole story leading up to it. Or an item that is often referred to in later passages, might be more important than an item that is never again mentioned.
Questions:
- What other textual cues might say, “this item is more important than that one?”
- Is assigning greater weight to some passages than others the same as “picking and choosing?” Is that a bad thing?
- What passages are most important to you?