I am a Bible believer, but I believe the Bible we have, not the one we wish we had. I love it, do my best to live by it, and believe it is inspired by God. That is why I make every effort to be honest about what it says.

The Bible we have says Joseph and Mary’s home town was Nazareth in Luke 2:39, but Matthew 22:23 is clearly implying their home town was Bethlehem. The census Luke described that caused Joseph and Mary to go to Bethlehem almost certainly happened when Jesus was around 20 years old, not at the time of his birth, and no one has been able to discover a census at the time of his birth for 2,000 years.

The Bible we have says that the sky is a hard dome (Job 37:18) with the sun, moon, and stars in it and waters above it (Gen. 1:6-8; 14-18). It says that dome is set on pillars (1 Sam. 2:8). A few centuries ago Luther, Calvin, and the Catholic Church argued against Copernicus because Joshua commanded the sun to stand still in the sky rather than commanding the earth to stop its revolution around the sun. Besides that, Psalm 104:5 says the earth cannot be moved.

I know that we tell ourselves that we were alive at that time we would not have misused those verses … but would we really?

When we insist on making Genesis a science book, we lose what Genesis is actually trying to say to us (e.g., Wes Huff, John Walton). But even that is not the deepest tragedy. The most important thing is that Paul and John warn us 4 times not to be deceived into thinking that we can live in the flesh and still inherit eternal life (1 Cor. 6:9-11; Gal. 6:7-9; Eph. 5:5-7; 1 John 3:7-12). We pit verses against each other and explain those warnings away because they belong to a Bible we don’t really want.

Way too many of us don’t like the real Bible; we only like the one we imagine and wish for.