The Bible and Star Wars

Please also read: Another Perspective on Religion.

Back when I was about seven or eight, I had a collection of Star Wars toys, which I'd play with incessantly.

Despite all three films having been released in the cinema, at that point in my life, the only Star Wars film I'd actually seen was the original one, which was occasionally shown on television early enough for me to watch it.

Nevertheless, I was instantly caught up in the saga of Luke, Leia and the battle against the Death Star and thought Darth Vader was a fearsome baddy. As I played with my action figures, I was dying to find out more about the story.

My brother used to do the 'older brotherly' thing occasionally and play with me - concocting Star Wars adventures with my toys. I distinctly remember him once acting out a whole part of the Star Wars story that I'd never heard of before (and wouldn't until Revenge of the Sith hit the cinema screens in 2005.)

It was the story of Darth Vader and how he got to be in that funky black helmet of his.

The Fall of Darth Vader

I'm not quite sure where my brother had learnt about the tragic fall of Darth Vader, but there was plenty of material floating about in the form of novels and comic books. It turns out that George Lucas had created the back story to Luke's father way back in 1977, the same year the original Star Wars film got released.

So twenty years before the events were immortalised on celluloid, my brother acted out the fall of Darth Vader with my four-inch action figures and thrilled me with the climactic story that saw Obi Wan Kenobi hurl Vader into a pit of molten lava at the end of an epic light sabre battle.

It might not have looked that dramatic if you'd been peering over my shoulder, but in my mind, the story was every bit as epic as the version you'll see on the big screen.

My brother's always had a way with words and I could imagine Obi Wan (who of course looked like Alec Guinness, since Ewan MacGregor was only a teenager at the time) battling it out with my blurry mental image of Anakin Skywalker (who, in my imagination, looked a bit like my father's colleague Ian Shield.)

In the end, Vader was dumped into the bubbling magma and Obi Wan disappeared off with his light sabre, leaving the Emperor to come and scoop up Anakin's remains and pour them into a cybernetic suit roughly the same size and shape as British actor David Prouse.

And until I went to the cinema twenty years later, to see George Lucas' version of the story, the way Darth Vader was defeated played out exactly as I saw it in my head. My brother had continued the tradition of oral storytelling as it's been done for millena. Except his version was better because it had light sabres in it.

There is a point to this story.

The Point to This Story

The way my brother had taught me about Darth Vader (who coincidentally was immaculately conceived by a virgin mother) was the same way as the oral history of the Middle East eventually found it's way into written form and became the origin of the book we know today as The Bible.

The Old Testament of The Bible, which tells the story of the creation of the world and the early saga of the people of Israel and Judah, is generally agreed to have been complied from various sources between 1,200 and 200 BC. Some of these sources were written - parts of the Old Testament were discovered in The Dead Sea Scrolls.

Other aspects of The Bible, such as the Israelite's Exodus from Egypt, appear to be a recorded version of oral history (since there is little recorded evidence even from Egyptian sources recording these events.)

The New Testament of the Bible is generally believed to have been written between 70 and 100 CE. The accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are clearly not first hand. Even the earliest recorded copies of the Gospels were written after the disciple's deaths and historian Richard Gerberding in 'Medieval Worlds: An Introduction to European History' admits: "Our prime sources about the life of Jesus were written... ...by people who knew people who knew him."

So their historical accuracy - although pretty good for accounts of that historical period - are very far removed from what a historian would deem 'primary evidence.'

Let's Get the Story Straight

A good example of how blurry these accounts must be involves The Nativity. The birth of Jesus is an event recounted by both Matthew and Luke, neither of whom were actually there. As a result, they're entirely contradictory.

Neither of them can agree on where Joseph and Mary came from (Luke claims that they were only visiting Bethlehem, while Matthew says they lived there) and while Matthew mentions the terrifying King Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents, Luke doesn't find the systematic murder of all Bethlehem's children even worth mentioning.

Bonus Features

What makes it all that much more complicated - even ignoring the existing contradictions between each of the 27 canonical books - is that there's a ton of additional material that somehow never made it's way between the pages of the New Testament.

During the first few centuries of Christian Tradition, there were additional gospels like that of Thomas, The Egyptians and even Judas, but they ultimately 'didn't make the cut.'

The Shepherd of Hermas, Barnabas and Peter had input too, but in the first few hundred years of the Catholic Church, the bible proper was trimmed down to it's current form.

Abridged Version

It was Emperor Constantine who pretty much decided what went into the 'official' version and what didn't. That's like me taking 38 different hand written copies of the 38 plays of William Shakespeare (all of the copies dating back a century or more) and paring out the fifteen which best represented his 'canon.'

You can see the historical problems present in a situation like that. For example, who's going to get the reference to Falstaff in Henry V if you were forced to exclude Henry IV or The Merry Wives of Windsor from 'the canon?'

But having acknowledged the problem of getting an accurate account in the first place and then picking and choosing which accounts are worthy of inclusion, we're presented with the additonal problem of translating the whole thing.

Language Issues

The earliest copies of the Bible were written in post-classical Greek. The Old Testament was further translated into Hebrew (since Christians share the 'Torah,' the first ten chapters of the Bible, with the Jews) and the original 'complete' Bibles, dating back to the days of Emperor Constantine, were written in Hellenic Greek.

In fact, it wasn't until the 8th century that the Codex Amiatinus finally saw the whole Bible together in one place. At least six centuries had passed since the events in question and the details included in the book had been transcribed via countless penmen. At this stage, the Bible itself was very far from The Word of God.

It had never been The Word of God. It had originally been The Word of God as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Which in turn had become The Word of God as told by Somebody Who Knew Somebody Who Knew Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Which in turn, had become The Word of God (as copied by a scholar) from documents written by Somebody Who Knew Somebody who Knew Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Which finally became The Word of God as translated from a different language by one scholar, from another document copied by a previous scholar, as written by Somebody Who Knew Somebody Who Knew Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (abridged edition.)

It was another eight hundred years before King James 1st of England commissioned scholars to translate the (somewhat) original Greek bible into Shakespearean-era English.

In the 1970s, it was decided that the King James version (which had been translated by the apparently inadequate 'word for word' method) was again translated into a 'thought by thought' version known as the Good News Bible.

So basically, the version of the Bible we hold in our hands today is very far removed from it's original sources. Every single word, syllable and punctuation mark has journeyed through the centuries to find it's way onto our page.

Context. Now with 32% added spaceships.

Consider the journey Jesus' story has taken in comparison to the story my brother told me about Anakin Skywalker.

My brother's version of events was removed by six or seven years from the original author's imaginings. It had come to him from a novel, comic book or somebody else relating the story they'd seen in a novel or comic book. That's how I'd learned the story of Darth Vader.

As it turned out, most of everything my brother told me was more or less factually accurate - but when I saw what 'really happened' on the big screen, there were some fundamental differences.

In Revenge of the Sith Obi Wan Kenobi was played by a different actor, for one thing, and he hacked off Darth Vader's legs and arm in the course of the battle.

Far more graphic than the version my brother had told me!

Plus, it all took place on a fiery volcano world and in the final moments, it wasn't a pool of lava that Darth get hurled into, but merely a bank on the shores of a flowing river of magma.

Unfortunately Anakin's clothes weren't fireproof and 'whoosh' went the troubled teenager like a Christmas pudding soaked in brandy.

Chinese Whispers

In short, my version of events and what actually happened [Star Wars did not actually happen - Editorial Bear] ended up being very different. It's amazing how much stories can change when they are are passed from one person to another. Imagine, then, how much the story of the Bible might have shifted as it journeyed through the mouths and pens of generations of Biblical scholars.

Those who claim their Bible (the King James or Good News sitting beside their bed) to be the absolute, literal 'Word of God' are very clearly wrong. Even worse are the people like potential president Mike Huckabee, who claims the Bible to be absolutely infallible.

How can it be infallible if there are contradictory errors in it?

Did Jesus came from Bethlehem or Nazareth? If the Bible can't even get that fact straight, how can we trust any of the either minute details contained within?

Factual Accuracies. With Light Sabres.

But that being said, my experiences with Anakin Skywalker have taught me one thing. Despite certain important aspects of the story changing as it journeyed from the brain of George Lucas to my childish imagination, the basic details went unchanged.

Anakin Skywalker turned to the 'dark side,' betrayed his mentor Obi Wan and was horribly injured by lava as a result, emerging as a man/machine known as Darth Vader.

That's the essential core and truth to the story of Star Wars. And if that story's solid enough to last a game of Chinese whispers, I imagine the important stuff in the Bible is, too.

The REAL message of The Bible.

We might not be able to count on the finer details, but there's enough to believe the BASIC story of the Jewish exodus and the ten commandments and even Noah's Ark have some origin in historical fact - and therefore have relevance in today's world.

Even more so, the philosophies of Jesus Christ - who preached peace, love and tolerance - are clear enough to have survived centuries of editing and translation.

Whether you believe he's the son of God or not, the beliefs he preached - like not judging people and turning the other cheek - are all valid philosophies that are probably 'pretty much' what he originally said back in the day.

What that conclusion does prove, however, is that there's something deeply wrong and inherently misleading about people who quote scripture and try to justify hatred by using sections taken from English translations of the Bible.

Jesus loves unconditionally (terms and conditions overleaf)

Many Christians, for example, try to illustrate that homosexuality is inherently evil by quoting from the Bible.

The ridiculous part of that is that the 'important' part of the Christian Bible (the New Testament) does not feature Jesus mentioning homosexuality once. NOT EVEN ONCE.

And the section that does mention it? Romans 1:26-27? It features Paul the Apostle writing against those who worship false idols, not homosexuals specifically.

And Paul never even met Jesus.

But let's not discount the poor guy - although over the intervening nine hundred and fifty years since Paul's death, it's possible one of the countless copiers or translators of the Epistle to the Romans might have been putting words into his mouth.

After all, the only other 'so-called' damnation of homosexuality in The Bible is to be found in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 although even the most conservative scholar admits that the condemnation could be against homosexuals, sodomites, prostitutes or paedophiles depending on the translation. [Even Sith lords - Editorial Bear.]

Think Big.

It's important to look at the big picture of the Bible, rather than doing what angry, frustrated hatemongers do and pick strips of scripture out-of-context and try to use them to spread a message of intolerance and hate.

Whether you believe he was the son of God or not, the basic philosophies outlined by Jesus in the Bible are those of love, peace and tolerance. That's the important thing to take from a study of the Bible - not an obsession with typographically suspicious minutiae.

Other historical records seem to match the story of the Bible and offer evidence that much of what is written about occurred in one form or the other. We'll never know the details and to pretend otherwise is just willful ignorance.

But it's still a great story and it's lasted the test of time. Next time somebody says something out of turn, it's worth considering 'turning the other cheek.' If you see somebody in need, it's worth thinking about being a good Samaritan.

But likewise, the next time your hear somebody claim that 'God' is 'against' something, or hateful of a particular type of person, it's equally worth remembering that the Bible is just a book - a very, very, very old book - and the person trying to use it to justify their message of hate is probably just full of shit.

It's also worth remembering that the Path to the Dark Side normally ends in a fiery pit of steaming magma, so you apprentice Jedis out there might want to avoid that.

Sermon over.