Reading bibles is no easy task. It takes hundreds of PhDs in different fields of study who spend decades curating different editions, writing lexicons, producing translations, etc., just to get them into our hands. Many people may have the impression that one can just pick up a bible, open it up, and immediately begin to understand its contents and the message the different authors wished to convey; but they’d be dead wrong. If our bibles are an obscure, ambiguous, difficult to translate, hard to read and understand collection of ancient texts that require tremendous effort from truly brilliant minds just to translate, how much more difficult or impossible would it be for children to read, let alone understand them?
One of the main issues, as I see it, is that people learn how to “use” their bibles before they even understand what they are. As recently as 2017, 71% of Americans share the view that bibles are either the literal word of God or, at the very least, divinely inspired. Research done by conservative Evangelicals shows that despite most Americans having such a high view of their bibles, they don’t know much about them. The average bible loving person will no doubt be able to quote favorite, isolated verses out of context simply because that’s what they are trained to do by their church leaders. Given that most people invest their bibles with such a high level of authority, it would come as no surprise, then, that they would also want to instill these views in their children. This is evident by simply going to http://www.christianbook.com and refining a bible search to ages 0-12, which would result in 935 bibles to choose from for that age bracket alone!
Ephesians 6:17 states that the “Word of God” is the sword of the Spirit. Leaving aside the fact that the author of Ephesians did not have access to the biblical canon most Christians hold in their hands today, so he/she could not have been referring to a modern bible, there is much to consider with this analogy. Swords are sharp and heavy. In the cultural context of the biblical authors, the Ancient Near East (ANE), swords were killing machines, used for slashing or thrusting an enemy. Clearly, swords have never been regarded as something that children should be allowed to play with. Most modern parents would be appalled at the sight of their children playing with such a dangerous device. To wield a sword, one would have had to have been part of an army and go through special training to demonstrate a capacity to responsibly use one. Like a sword used by an untrained individual, so too bibles in the hands of the uninformed can have devastating consequences.
Bibles contain ancient texts that are ambiguous and difficult to understand for even the most advanced of biblical scholars. The contents of our bibles are the results of centuries, if not millennia, of deep thinking on the part of ancient cultures so far removed from us that many would recognize that getting at the exact meaning or intention of an author is practically impossible. Much of our bibles’ contents would be rated R in today’s culture. In our bibles, we find divinely commanded genocide of entire peoples, rape, murder, child sacrifice, lying, trickery, the objectification of women as male property, a total disregard for animal life, racism, slavery, etc. The list could go on and on. Given their contents, throughout history, lacking even a basic understanding of the biblical texts has led many to use them as justification for all sorts of atrocities (racism, slavery, disregard for the environment, gender inequality, etc.).
Given the nature of the biblical texts, exposing them to children would require a watering down of the content. Instead of honestly and transparently sharing the stories of many of the main characters (e.g. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, David, Jesus), we would have to resort to presenting them in a silly and cartoonish manner. This would be a disservice not only to our children but to the biblical texts themselves. On the one hand, giving children a censored version of the text, one which the authors/redactors/compilers never intended, would only maintain the great chasm between what people believe about their bibles and what they actually know about them. We would simply be raising up another biblically uninformed generation of credulous believers instead of rational, deep thinkers who take the text serious. On the other hand, this would only perpetuate the caricature views of the biblical texts that many in non-believing communities have about them.
In the end, it is my contention that exposing young children to the biblical text is not only irresponsible parenting, but also a failsafe way to ensure that children remain as ignorant of their bibles as the parents who wish to shove them down their throats.
