Considering the fact that the Christian Bible is the most popular book in human history, it's surprising how little people know about what's actually in it. Or maybe not -- it's a complicated text compiled over thousands of years, and it's as long as the first five Harry Potter novels combined. Even for an expert, there's a lot in there to process ... and a vast ocean of stuff that isn't in there.
You see, as we've discussed, a whole lot of the stories and characters people associate with the Bible were actually cobbled together from centuries of pop culture and garbled readings of the original. Go grab a Bible from your bookshelf or your nearest hotel nightstand, and you won't find ...
#5. Sodom And Gomorrah Getting Destroyed For Homosexuality
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If you ask someone to point out a part of the Bible where God specifically condemns homosexuality, they're likely to refer you to Genesis 19, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the San Franciscos of the ancient world. The popular story is that God destroyed these two cities due to rampant homosexuality (in fact, that's where the word "sodomy" as we know it today comes from) and sent two angels like a heavenly SEAL team to extract Lot, the only non-gay citizen, and his family before the wrath came down.
This is why, for instance, you'll hear preachers today insist that hurricanes target cities that hold Gay Pride parades:
Compared to the military precision of Lot's extraction, this seems like overkill.
The only problem is that there is absolutely no reference in the Bible to anyone in Sodom being gay, and even if they were, that's never given as one of the reasons God wanted to wipe the place out. If anything, the biggest sin of the people of Sodom was that they really hated foreigners.
In the story, God sends two angels in human form into Sodom to visit Lot's house and inform him that he might want to pack his bags because some serious Old Testament shit was scheduled to happen the next day. This was because the people of Sodom were "wicked" and their sins were "grievous" -- they didn't get more specific than that. But when Lot's neighbors caught wind of the fact that he had out-of-town visitors, they gathered their torches and pitchforks and paid him a visit, demanding to be given a chance to give the foreigners some old-fashioned Sodom hospitality (read: beating and raping them).
Francois-Rolland Elluin
"Oh, y'all must have lost your me-damn minds!"
Now, it is true that the Sodom lynch mob issues a clear rape threat against Lot's (male) visitors. The quote from the King James Bible is, "Bring them out unto us, that we may know them." In Bible talk, "knowing" someone doesn't exactly mean meeting them over coffee. Many interpret this as evidence of how crazy they all were about gay sex, that the very fact that there were dudes in their city who they hadn't sexed up yet drove them to violent insanity.
Wikimedia/Phillip Medhurst
"Hark! There is one among us who has yet to experience the earthly pleasures of butt stuff!"
But one rape threat against anyone doesn't make someone gay so much as an asshole (see: any prison) and that one line is the only reference to any kind of sexual activity in the whole story. When the Bible clarifies later what Sodom had done to piss off God, it says it was the fact that people of Sodom were lazy, arrogant, and uncharitable. Here's the quote from the King James version:
Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: Therefore I took them away as I saw good.
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Yet pizza shops haven't been too keen on denying service to lazy people.
Whether or not he thought too many people were doing it in the butt isn't given so much as a footnote in the list of God's grievances. But the only thing anyone remembers about the sins of Sodom is that one guy who shouted out that he wanted to pork some angels -- to the point that this is how "sodomy" wound up in modern language. So here's a fun exercise: The next time your Christian friend refuses to give money to a poor person, say, "Hey, you just sodomized that guy!"
#4. The Seven Deadly Sins
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You probably learned the "seven deadly sins" from the movie Se7en, even if you've never set foot in a church. These are supposedly the seven worst sins that you can commit: gluttony, pride, lust, greed, wrath, sloth, and envy. If you're flipping through your Bible looking for them, you'd maybe expect to find them right after the Ten Commandments (the part where the Bible has all the rules listed, right?). But flip all you want; they're not in there. If somebody had just told that to Kevin Spacey's character at the start, it would have saved him months of work.
If you really think about it, these seven sins seem awfully broad, almost like pretty much any kind of wrongdoing that you can think of falls into one category or another. And, in fact, that's exactly the point -- the seven sins, officially known as the cardinal sins, aren't a list of rules taken from the Bible, like the Ten Commandments. They were actually formulated by the medieval Church as an easy way to categorize all sins.
Wikimedia/Leinad-Z
"Where should I put 'Letting Your Bastard Spawn Stomp Around Upstairs On A Weeknight'?"
Rather than a simple how-to guide dictated by God, they were intended more as a kind of Cliff's Notes for the Bible to make its 10-billion-strong list of rules a little more digestible for the general public, almost none of whom owned an actual copy. Remember, the idea of everyone actually having a copy of the Bible only goes back a few hundred years -- before that, books were painstakingly inked out by hand, one at a time. They had to have a way to boil things down, verbally.
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The books shortened significantly after the local printer developed carpal tunnel.
So, the cardinal sins were first dictated in the sixth century by Pope Gregory I, whose intention was to come up with a short list of basic sin elements, kind of like the Periodic Table Of Pissing Off God. Then, as with a whole bunch of stuff you wrongly assumed came straight out of God's holy ink well, the seven deadly sins made the transition from obscure mythology to Bible canon when Dante wrote his epic poem The Divine Comedy, best known for its most popular and most metal chapter, "Inferno." It divides Hell into seven circles based on which of the seven deadly sins the damned fell afoul of. Those seven circles, of course, are also nowhere to be found in the Bible.
#3. Purgatory
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Purgatory is supposed to be the place that you go to if you're not wicked enough to deserve Hell, but also not quite holy enough to ascend to Heaven. It's kind of like an airport boarding lounge on your way toward salvation -- if God's not quite confident that you're not packing a shoe-bomb full of sin, then you need to get a full pat-down by the TSA of righteousness before you board that flight to eternal happiness.
In reality, purgatory isn't something that the Bible literally describes; it's more something that Catholic doctrine suggests must exist in order to solve the problem of where people go after they die if they haven't fulfilled the entry requirements of either Heaven or Hell. According to official Catholic doctrine, the existence of purgatory was decided upon during the Council Of Florence in 1431, because the Bible didn't specify its terms clearly enough.
Pasquale Cati
Don't worry, we're sure God was cool with them editing his word as they went along.
But theologians soon discovered another problem with scripture: Where do babies go when they die before they have a chance to be baptized? And what happened to the righteous who lived and died before Jesus was born?
El Greco
"Also, how hard specifically are we allowed to beat slaves? Oh, that's already in there?"
Regular Catholic lore suggested that they went straight to Hell without collecting $200, but those who figured that God wouldn't be so cruel conceived of the concept of limbo, which, as distinct from purgatory, was the temporary holding cell of souls for those who deserved to go to Heaven but either died before Jesus' crucifixion or were too dumb (e.g. babies) to realize that they were born into sin.
And given that the concepts of purgatory and limbo were invented after the Bible was written, they never entered into the popular discourse until ... Dante wrote about them. Shit, at this point we're willing to suggest that Dante invented more of Christianity than Jesus did.
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