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This blog is a follow-up to my last one in which I challenged the kind of Christianity Oregon bakery owner Melissa Klein and Kentucky Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis practice in their refusal to provide services to same sex couples.

Based on what they have said to explain their actions, it is clear that they think what they believe is true because it is what they also believe the Bible says.

There are two significant problems with their claim. The most obvious one is that believing something doesn’t make it true.

This is because religion is not about what is true, but about what people believe is true. Quite literally religion is an organized system of beliefs. But beliefs are not facts. They are, well, beliefs, convictions assumed to be true, but beyond the reach of verifiable proof.

That is the nature of faith, but fundamentalist Christians ignore it. Instead they speak as if the rest of us should accept what they believe as true because they say it is.

The second problem with the actions of these women and Christians like them is that they stem from a certainty about what they Bible says that actual facts contradict.

Not even the best scholars are so bold as to declare their understanding of scripture as unassailable precisely because of the facts they know about the composition and development of the Bible.

Here is what they know.

1. Believing the Bible is the word of God doesn’t make it so.

The Bible was written by human beings. It became the sacred text of Christians because we declared it to be so. That is true for the sacred texts of all religions, whether it be the Torah, the Qur’an, the Hindu Vedas, or others.

Members of different religions are free to believe what they believe about their sacred texts, but that does not make what they believe about those texts true. And for sure it does not make what they believe the sacred text says binding on those who disagree with them.

2. Claiming the Bible is inerrant is a modern belief, not an historical fact.

The nature of biblical authority has been a subject of debate for centuries, but inerrancy, a complicated doctrine, did not gain official status in the Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council in 1962. While some Protestant scholars and groups have insisted scripture should be regarded as inerrant since the 16th century, it was not until 1978 that a group of Protestant fundamentalists with no official status declared scripture to be inerrant in what came to be known as “the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy.”

3. Believing the Bible is “inspired” is not the same thing as believing it is inerrant.

2 Timothy 3:16 says all scripture is “inspired,” but the word means “God breathed,” just as Genesis says God “breathed” life into human beings. That is very different from saying God wrote scripture. Moreover, because “the Bible” didn’t exist when these words were written, exactly what “scripture” is being referred to is speculation.

4. Christianity existed three hundred plus years before the Bible as we know it existed.

It was not until the fourth century that it was translated into Latin (the Vulgate), and then another eleven centuries passed before texts were translated into German, and English. Thereafter controversy about certain books continued well into the 16th century and the Protestant Reformation.

So when anyone says, “The Bible says…” the next question should be, “Which one?”

5. There were originally numerous books like those that became the Christian Bible.

We know there were numerous “gospels,” perhaps as many as fifty. In addition, the Hebrew books called the Apocrypha because they are “stories” without reliable historical grounding were excluded by Martin Luther and then other Protestant translators, but are included in the Catholic Bible.

6. No original manuscripts of any of the books in the Bible exist today. We only have copies, and most of those are partial and impaired.

7. Every “Bible” is itself an interpretation.

Translators draw from literally thousands of texts, biblical and extra-biblical, which means the accuracy of all versions of the Bible are only as good as the translators.

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These, then, are established facts about the Bible any student of scripture learned in seminary, facts that should make all Christians reluctant to say, “The Bible says…” for the simple reason that they are talking about beliefs, not facts, and, thus, could be quite wrong about what a text says.

So the next time you hear a fundamentalist Christian declare, “The Bible says…” remind him or her that what they are actually saying is what they believe the Bible says, nothing more.

If they answer, “So you don’t believe in the Bible?” you can respond with confidence, “No, I just don’t believe what you believe.”

If they persist then you might have to get tough with them and say, “Listen, I believe in God, and since you are not God, I am not willing to accept what you say as if you are.”

End of story.