5 Misconceptions I Was Taught About the Bible
I spent nearly a decade preaching the Bible and somewhere in there I was also, without fully realizing it, preaching a set of assumptions about the Bible that I had never actually examined. They came with the tradition. They were baked into my education. Nobody handed them to me as a package and said here is what you will believe about Scripture. They just accumulated over years of Sunday school and classes and sermons and small group discussions until they felt less like assumptions and more like the air I breathed.
Unlearning them has been one of the more disorienting and ultimately freeing experiences of my theological life. And it wasn’t because I love the Bible less than I used to. It was because I finally started taking it seriously on its own terms instead of the terms I was handed.
These are the five that did the most damage and took the longest to see clearly:
1. The Bible Wasn’t Written to You
This is the one that changes everything else once it lands. The Bible was written for you (Christians have always believed that) but it was not written to you. Every single book of the Bible had an original audience, a specific historical moment, a set of cultural assumptions, and a particular set of questions it was trying to answer. When Paul wrote his letter to the church in Rome, he was writing to actual people in first-century Rome who were navigating real tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians in the shadow of the emperor. When John wrote Revelation, he was writing to seven specific churches in Asia Minor who were living under Roman imperial pressure and needed a message encoded in apocalyptic imagery they would have recognized immediately.
None of those authors were writing to Americans in the twenty-first century. That doesn’t make the text less meaningful for us, but it makes understanding the original context more important, not less.
N.T. Wright has spent his entire career making this case. That you cannot understand what a text means for us today without first understanding what it meant for them then. Pulling a verse out of its historical context and applying it directly to your life or your politics is not taking the Bible seriously. It’s actually doing the opposite. You’re flattening a living document into a fortune cookie.
2. Inerrancy Is Not an Ancient Doctrine
Most people who grew up in evangelical churches carry the impression that the church has always believed in biblical inerrancy the way their tradition defines it (that it’s ancient, settled, and essentially synonymous with taking the Bible seriously at all). The history tells a more complicated story. The formal doctrine of inerrancy as most American evangelicals hold it was codified at a conference held at a hotel in Chicago in October of 1978. That document, called the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, was signed by around 300 evangelical scholars and leaders and was explicitly designed to push back against what they saw as liberalizing trends in evangelical scholarship.
That’s a document younger than the original Star Wars. And even among the scholars who signed it, there has been fierce and ongoing debate about what it actually means. Evangelical New Testament scholar Michael Licona lost his job at Southern Evangelical Seminary after suggesting that a passage in Matthew 27 might be apocalyptic in genre rather than literal history, and he believed in inerrancy.
The debate about what inerrancy means, how it applies, and which manuscripts it even covers has been simmering inside evangelical scholarship for decades.
What gets handed to people in the pew is a cleaned-up version that makes the doctrine sound simpler and more ancient than it actually is.
3. The Bible Is a Library, Not a Book
When you pick up the Bible, you are holding somewhere between 66 and 73 books depending on your tradition, written by dozens of authors across roughly a thousand years, in three different languages, spanning multiple literary genres that require completely different reading strategies. There is poetry in there. There is apocalyptic literature. There is law, wisdom writing, gospel narrative, personal correspondence, prophetic speech, and ancient genealogy. These are not the same kind of writing, and they do not work the same way.
Reading the entire Bible as if it were one flat document with a single consistent literary register is like walking into a library, grabbing books at random, and reading them all as if they were instruction manuals.
You would walk away very confused about what instructions you were supposed to follow. The Psalms are not instructions. Job is not a theology textbook. Revelation is not a newspaper about the future. When you read poetry as history, or apocalyptic literature as journalism, or ancient Near Eastern cosmology as science, you are not taking the Bible more seriously. You are actually misreading it. The authors knew exactly what genre they were working in. Paying attention to that is one of the most basic forms of respect you can show the text.
4. You Are Always Interpreting
“I just read what the Bible says” is the most common thing I heard in evangelical spaces, and it sounds humble but it carries a hidden assumption that doesn’t hold up. Nobody reads the Bible without interpreting it.
Interpretation is not something that happens when “liberals” get their hands on the text. It happens every single time any human being reads any piece of writing ever.
The question is never whether you are interpreting, the question is whether you are doing it honestly, with good tools, and with some awareness of the assumptions you are bringing to the page.
Plus, every translation you read is already an interpretation. The translators made thousands of decisions about Greek and Hebrew words that have ranges of meaning, and every choice they made reflects a theological and linguistic judgment. The way you divide up a passage, the verse you decide to emphasize, the ones you skip over, the context you bring from your tradition, all of it shapes what you see in the text. Acknowledging that makes you a more honest reader. The most dangerous interpreter of Scripture is not the scholar who admits she has a method, it’s the person who is convinced they have no method at all.
5. The Bible Was Not Written to Answer the Questions You’re Bringing to It
This one might be the most pastorally important. A lot of people walk away from the Bible feeling like it failed them because they brought it questions it was never designed to answer. They wanted it to resolve the age of the earth, or tell them exactly what happens to people who never heard of Jesus, or give them a clear position on every contemporary political issue. When the answers felt forced or contradictory, they assumed something was wrong with them for asking.
The Bible is not a science textbook. It is not a political platform or a comprehensive answer to every question human beings might generate across every century of history. It is a story (a remarkably coherent one when you read it as a whole) about God’s relentless movement toward humanity and humanity’s slow, stumbling movement back to God.
I have heard it descrbed as a drama in multiple acts, and that’s a helpful frame. You don’t read a play expecting it to tell you the boiling point of water. You read it to understand something true about what it means to be human and to be in relationship with God. When you come to the Bible looking for that (for a living encounter with the God it testifies to) it delivers in ways that are hard to exhaust. The people who find the Bible most alive are almost always the ones who stopped demanding it be something it never claimed to be.
These five things barely scratch the surface. Each one of them could sustain a much longer conversation, and honestly, that’s exactly what I’m planning. An entire chapter of my upcoming book is dedicated to this. It will cover what the Bible actually is, how it was put together, what its authors were trying to do, and what it looks like to read it in a way that takes it seriously on its own terms rather than forcing it to be something it was never designed to be. I’ve been working on that chapter for a while now and it’s the one I’m most excited about. More on that as we get closer.
In the meantime, this Friday I’m releasing something for paid subscribers that I think is going to be genuinely useful. It’s called the How to Read the Bible Without Losing Your Mind guide, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. A practical, accessible guide to approaching Scripture in a way that is intellectually honest, spiritually alive, and a lot less anxiety-producing than what most of us were taught. If you’ve ever felt confused, frustrated, or vaguely guilty about your relationship with the Bible, this one is for you.
If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, this is a great week to become one. You’ll get the guide on Friday 5/22/26, early access to book content as it develops, and you’ll be directly supporting this work so it can keep going.
Great thanks Beau. I think the one verse that, to me anyway, is fairly unambiguous and doesn’t seem to need too much sophisticated interpretation is Jesus’ command to love your neighbour as yourself. Yet it remains one of the most ignored teachings of the Bible.
Critical 5 assumptions. So much damage done by not having this framework.