In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with biblical scholar Leslie Baynes about C.S. Lewis and the ways his literary background, imagination, and theological commitments shaped how he interpreted the Bible. They explore Lewis’s approach to biblical scholarship, his tendency to harmonize the Gospels, and the tension between his acceptance of biblical contradictions and his reluctance to recognize differences between the accounts of Jesus. Together, they consider what Lewis got right and wrong about Scripture, why the Bible should be read through a lens of love for God and neighbor, and how his understanding of myth, story, and faith can challenge familiar assumptions about biblical authority and interpretation.
Mentioned in This Episode
Books:
Between Interpretation and Imagination: C.S. Lewis & The Bible by Leslie Baynes
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
Miracles by C.S. Lewis
Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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Pete: [00:00:00] You're listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
On today's episode, we're talking about C.S. Lewis' surprising takes on the Bible with Leslie Baynes.
Pete: Yeah, Leslie is an associate professor at Missouri State University and author of the amazing book Between Interpretation and Imagination: C.S. Lewis and the Bible.
Jared: Let's dive in.
Leslie: Any kind of human doctrine is putting it into man's words instead of God's story.
So it all starts there at the end of 1931 for Lewis, where he's stuck with systematic theology, theology, and doctrine, and the story breaks through for him.
Pete: [00:01:00] Leslie, welcome to the podcast. It's wonderful to have you.
Leslie: Thanks for inviting me. I'm glad to be here.
Pete: And we're really excited to talk about C.S. Lewis a little bit, you know, that figure that pretty much everyone has heard of. Even people not of the faith have heard of C.S. Lewis. Um, and he's known as an apologist, I think for good reason, you know.
Uh, he's done a lot of that. He's taken as understood to be that, but, uh, you also make the strong case that he's really, I mean, fundamentally maybe a biblical interpreter. So, so what do you mean by that? Explain that.
Leslie: Well, I think anyone who reads the Bible is a biblical interpreter. Anyone who reads anything has to interpret it.
Nothing interprets itself. So even though C.S. Lewis never took a course, never had a class in biblical studies or theology, uh, he became very, very, very well-known for talking about theology in particular, and sometimes he would bring the Bible into it. Um, [00:02:00] my guess would be that Lewis has had more impact on more people in terms of theology and biblical studies than probably any biblical scholar ever has.
Pete: Hmm.
Jared: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, his ability to take, I think, a lot of these and reach out to the average reader and the average person definitely helped him spread that. So as you were doing that, what... You know, uh, because, uh, I think a lot of people don't think of him as a biblical interpreter, what surprised you the most while you were kind of researching this Lewis and the Bible and his take on the Bible?
What, what was surprising?
Leslie: A lot of things surprised me, but if I had to identify one of them, it would be the fact that Lewis often relied on his memory when he was using and quoting the Bible instead of going to the scriptural text itself to look up and confirm what he was talking about. And while he had a really great [00:03:00] memory, it wasn't very exact sometimes, and sometimes when he dealt with the Bible in a way that wasn't completely correct, it didn't matter a whole lot.
But there were other times when it really, really did, and he could go completely off the rails. So, uh, the best example of that is when he tries to say that Jesus went about saying that he was God in his lifetime, and he thinks that he has scripture verses to support that. But in fact, what he does over and over again is to conflate different verses of the Bible and then add his own stuff that is completely made up, that never appeared in the Bible. So that was the thing that surprised me the most.
Pete: Yeah, that's a little disturbing, isn't it? Actually, you know, I think, um, not to defend Lewis, I think a lot of people do that- And some would say the New Testament writers [00:04:00] did that as well. They went by memory of whatever. But still, you know, in this, in our historicized, uh, and, and, and modern point of view, you wanna be accurate in what you're quoting, and you wanna try to understand that and get that across to people.
And it's surprising to me to hear what you just said. I didn't know that about Lewis.
Jared: Well, I think, and maybe this is a little bit of a segue, but, you know, his background as a literary scholar I think plays into that as well because I think of these themes and the thematics and the bigger story probably matters a little bit more than, like, the historical accuracy of these th- I, I'm just curious about how that plays into it.
'Cause when you were saying, I actually was thinking of the character from Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye, who was, like, often quoting these traditions- in this, like, really joyful and playful way. And not as a way to be flippant, but because it matters to him in his walking around life.
And I kind of, I don't know, I picture C.S. Lewis doing it more in that style or more in that vein. So, yeah, maybe how did him [00:05:00] being a literary scholar shape some of how he handled the Bible?
Leslie: It really affected everything in how he handled the Bible. Uh, first of all, Lewis, when he was a young man, more than anything else, wanted to be a poet.
And he grew up reading a lot of books, and he wrote poems as a young man, and he really loved language. So when you see him coming to the Bible, uh, at the beginning of his adult Christian life, which would have been around 1930, 1931, he focuses on the literary beauty of the Bible. Uh, he loves its poetry.
He's especially fond of Psalm 19 with, uh, the heavens declare the glory of God. He called it one of the most beautiful pieces of poetry ever written in the history of the world.
Jared: Hmm.
Leslie: He was really interested in genre, and he, following an Anglican priest whose books he read a lot of, named Charles Gore, he believed that the Bible contained fiction.
So, uh, this guy, Charles Gore, wrote an essay in a book that he edited and published that argued that Jonah and Job were fiction instead of being historical fact, and Lewis kept that idea the rest of his life. He said, "You can have sacred fiction as well as sacred fact." So he brings all of this literary type of milieu into how he reads scripture.
Pete: I, uh, that sparked a question, a side issue maybe. Uh, Lewis knew Greek. Um but was it more classical Greek, or was it... I mean, if you do classical, you can do biblical as well, but, um, was it-
Leslie: Great question ...
Pete: or, but I don't think he knew- He didn't study Hebrew at any point, did he? So he's sort of stuck there.
Leslie: He did not.
Pete: Okay. Yeah. So- He might have a different view of Psalm 19 if he did these, those kinds of things, but anyway. Yeah, [00:07:00] yeah.
Leslie: Yeah. So, um, it's my understanding, people who know more about this than I can correct me, that in order to get into Oxford, you had to pass an exam in Greek.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: Um, so I would expect that a lot of the boys, and it would've been boys at that time.
Pete: Right.
Leslie: Right. Um, yeah. A lot of the boys only studied enough Greek to pass the exam, then promptly forgot it, but Lewis really loved Greek. He loved languages, and he majored, we would call it, they don't have majors at Oxford.
They say you've read.
Pete: Yes.
Leslie: He read classics, so he dove a lot more into Greek, and, uh, you know, Pete, you and I as biblical scholars, we're required to take advanced exams in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic in order to pass, and it's not just, like, to jump through a hoop. We have to have it. And I don't know about [00:08:00] you, but when I first started studying Greek, I did Classical Greek.
Um, I still got my little textbook that I got, and we started with Xenophon- ... which was really boring to me.
Jared: Yeah.
Leslie: Uh-huh. Uh, but Lewis, of course, did mainly Classical, and when he tried to get to Koine Greek, Koine means common. Um, it was the Greek that was common to the people, say, of the 1st century when Jesus was living.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: Lewis put down Koine Greek, and this is another weird mistake he made, and I hope I'm not picking on Lewis here too much, because I love Lewis and he gets a whole lot of things right, so I don't want people to think that I'm just picking on him.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: But, uh, to go a little bit into the woods here, um, there was a huge pile, it was literally a trash heap, of Greek manuscripts that were [00:09:00] found at the end of the 19th century, right when Lewis was born.
He was born in 1898, and before that, people had thought that the Greek of the New Testament, which is Koine Greek, the Common Greek, had been, like, they would call it Holy Spirit Greek because they hadn't seen much of it. And then they uncovered this huge landfill with things written just by the common people.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: And they found out that Koine Greek was, in fact, Common Greek. It's what everybody did, and Lewis never seems to have realized that.
Pete: Yeah.
Leslie: He wrote at the end of his life, like 1962, he died in 1963, that, um, the Greek of the New Testament was a Greek that no one spoke. It was never spoken around the fireside.
It was never spoken out in the world.
Pete: Really?
Leslie: Interesting. Just, I, I have to shake my head at that.
Pete: You know, that's weird, because, you know, he wrote the preface to JB Phillips's translation of the New Testament, which was sort of like good news for common man [00:10:00] kind of stuff, and he- 'Cause he's praising there the fact that, you know, the, the Bible comes to us in sort of an unlettered way, which is what you would expect in an incarnational kind of way of thinking. And it's not, it's not flowery. It's not Elizabethan English. It's just the language of the common people. But he, maybe he just forgot he wrote that.
Leslie: Maybe he forgot.
Pete: Yeah, seriously. Yeah. You know? That's all
Leslie: I can
Pete: say. He was getting older. I mean, whatever, you know, but, um, a g- a complicated character. And, you know, uh, also just hearing you talk, Leslie, um, I wanna mention and get your thoughts on his, the role of imagination for him, and imagination as being indispensable for theology.
I have to say, I agree with that. I think that's an important part of doing theological inquiry. Um, but- Imagination, I don't know about your background, but I know and Jared knows very well, you don't say imagination in certain churches, 'cause you're now gonna deny the Bible, and that's where the devil gets [00:11:00] you, in your imagination.
So talk about Lewis's influence of the value of imagination in theology.
Leslie: All right. That's interesting, because you and I have very different experiences there. I grew up Roman Catholic, and I don't think Roman Catholics can be faulted for not having imagination in the arts.
Pete: True. Yeah. I won't say how I grew up. I don't wanna hurt people, but yeah, it wasn't that. It wasn't that. Yeah.
Leslie: Lewis grew up as a nominal Anglican.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: Uh, people think of him as being English, but in fact he was Irish. Uh, when he was a little boy, though, he was sent to English boarding schools, so he would definitely, um...
As he moved over to England permanently, he would become part of the English Anglican Church, so to speak. And I've never been an Anglican, [00:12:00] uh, but I would say just very off the top of my head, Anglicans too would probably encourage imagination more than anything else.
Jared: Hmm.
Leslie: Um, I don't think he got anything anti-imaginatory.
Is that a word? From the Anglican churches that he would have been forced to attend when he was a child and a teenager.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: Uh, just by the by, again, Lewis grew up in a nominally Anglican home, but as a young teenager he became an atheist. So he was not really interested in scripture or churchy things or, or doctrinal things until 1930, when he made a conversion to theism, and then 1931, when [00:13:00] he moved from theism, believing just in God, to bringing it over into being a Christian, uh, believing that Jesus was God is how he defined Christianity.
But he was, uh, in himself, he had this split that he talks about in his book called Surprised by Joy which is about his early life and conversion, you can't really call it an autobiography because it leaves out too many things, but it does talk about the things that were important to him from when he was born up until when he returned to the Christian faith.
And he loved, loved, loved imagination. So when he and his brother were growing up, uh, evidently it was the thing when it was rainy to keep kids inside. They thought that they would catch cold, and he and his brother would stay inside and draw [00:14:00] and make up stories. And Lewis had this, uh, world that he called Animal Land where he had what he called dressed animals, and we can see where that goes.
Jared: Yeah.
Leslie: Um, his brother was very pragmatic and had a land called India. His brother was interested in boats and trains and things like that. But Lewis loved talking animals. And he loved mythology, especially Norse mythology, but any kind of mythology at all.
Um, at the same time, he thought that the world of the imagination wasn't real, so it was not as important as the real world. But the real world really depressed him, and, um, he grew up with kind of a pessimistic father, and he was not in any hurry to grow up. He thought that the adult world of reality was going to be absolutely awful, so he found himself kind of caught in a bind between the world of [00:15:00] imagination that he adored and the world of reality that he didn't, and he had to fight to put them together.
Pete: Yeah, I mean, so why... Given that, why does he think that imagination is indispensable to theology?
Leslie: So gradually, um, he starts thinking more and more about myth. And the famous story is, uh, the one of when he takes a walk with two friends, J.R.R. Tolkien, and a man named Hugo Dyson, who is not nearly as famous as Tolkien, and this is in 1931.
And Lewis is already what we would call a professor at Oxford in English literature. So is Tolkien. Um, unfortunately, I don't remember what Hugo Dyson did. And they went out after dinner and did what a lot of us can do when we're young and, young and single, [00:16:00] just stay up all night talking. So you remember that, right?
Pete: Barely.
Jared: Yeah. I was gonna say, that was a long time ago.
Leslie: Yeah. So they're in their early 30s, and, uh, they walk and they talk, and- Lewis and Tolkien both love myth, but Lewis is still fighting against myth. Tolkien later writes this poem, and in it, he addresses it to Lewis, and he calls Lewis, sorry for this, misomythos.
Miso meaning hate, and mythos meaning myth. And he addresses the poem philomythos, myth lover, that's Tolkien, to [00:17:00] misomythos.
Jared: Uh-huh.
Leslie: That's Lewis, the myth hater.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: And even though Lewis loves myths, he is not ready to accept that a myth can be anything other than a false story.
Jared: Hmm. Interesting.
Leslie: So he defines myth the way a lot of people would define it today, when you say, "Oh, that's a myth."
Jared: Right.
Leslie: Which means that's not true.
Pete: It’s not true. Yeah.
Leslie: And Tolkien did not hold that idea at all.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: And Lewis is gonna take over Tolkien's idea that a myth is something that tells the truth more deeply than any historical or scientific truth can do.
Pete: Okay. Mm-hmm. So he gets to that point.
Leslie: He does in 1931.
Pete: Okay. Yeah.
Jared: Okay. So then, because a, a lot of people think about the Bible as a place to go for information and doctrine, how do [00:18:00] we see, does, does that evolve for C.S. Lewis over time, where in his early Christian days, that is kinda what he's looking for, and, and as it continues to move, that it becomes something bigger than that?
How does that affect his view of the Bible?
Leslie: If someone out there is a lover of C.S. Lewis and has read a lot of his nonfiction, you know, like Mere Christianity and Miracles and stuff, you haven't read Lewis until you've read his letters. So, um, there are three huge volumes of Lewis's letters. They're, uh, about 1,000 pages each.
He wrote a lot of letters.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: And what we know about his movement from being the myth hater to the myth lover is basically in his letters in 1931, 1932. And he has a very good friend back in Ireland whose name is Arthur. And, um, volume one of the letters is from [00:19:00] his birth to 1931, and a huge proportion of that volume is made up of his letters to Arthur.
So he writes Arthur about this walk and talk he had with Tolkien and Dyson, and he describes the walk and talk, and then he sends Arthur More and more letters through the end of 1931 into the beginning of 1932, where you see him working through these ideas of myth and fact and Christian doctrine and Jesus.
And he says basically, "What had kept me away from Christian faith was that I couldn't get my head around the idea of the atonement." I'm putting this in my own words here. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's not how he says it. Um, he says, "I just couldn't do it. I could look at a myth of a dying and rising god in any kind of mythology."
He names Baldr, which is [00:20:00] a, uh, a Norse god who is killed, and then Baldr's brother goes down and tries to get him out of the land of the dead. Uh, and other Greco-Roman gods that he thinks also died and rose from the dead. He said, "I could do it with every god except Jesus," because he thought that he had to believe in a particular systematic doctrine called the atonement.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: But then he said, this is a huge realization for him. You can see it pop off the page when he writes about it. He said, "But I can just believe it as story."
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: He says, "The story is so much richer and so much better," because in Lewis's opinion, it's given by God. It's God-given myth, and it is so much better than any kind of [00:21:00] human-worded doctrine.
And he says that any kind of human doctrine is putting, I'm gonna be sexist here because this is the language that Lewis used, putting it into man's words instead of God's story, which is always going to completely overwhelm in terms of goodness any kind of systematic doctrine.
Yeah. So it all starts there at the end of 1931 for Lewis, where he's stuck with systematic theology, theology and doctrine, and the story breaks through for him.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: And, uh, a lot of that comes from Tolkien.[00:22:00]
Pete: Oh, we could talk about that for hours. That, to me, that's a fascinating topic. Let's, I wanna move on from imagination and talk about the notion that Lewis misunderstood the biblical scholars that he might have had issues with, and maybe we can flush that out a little bit. Like, did he understand what he was critiquing?
Was he really engaged in biblical scholarship? Um, how did that work for him?
Leslie: It is both yes and no to those questions.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: Some people will say, there's a biography, a famous biography by a guy named A.N. Wilson on Lewis where Wilson says that Lewis never engaged in looking at any kind of biblical scholarship.
I found out from my work that that's absolutely not true.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: It is true that he doesn't talk about it much, but we can see in his letters, and [00:23:00] especially in his physical library that was preserved for the most part, at a place called the Marion E. Wade Center. That's right across the street from Wheaton College.
They were lucky enough to buy the vast majority of Lewis's library, about 2,500 volumes. Not all of it, but most of it. And one of the things that I did when I wrote this book was to look at the list of the books that the Wade Center possesses and take a look at every one of them that might have had something to do with the Bible.
And even more than that, I was able to go to the Wade Center and get my hands on these copies, and Lewis often writes notes and marginalia and all kinds of things in his books, and look at how he interacted with the biblical scholarship that he read. So 1931, 1932, early 1930s, Lewis is reading a fair [00:24:00] amount of the standard biblical scholarship of his time.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: And in fact, he dies in the year 1963, and in the year 1963, he reads a book in a series. I can see it over here on my shelf. No, I don't have it there anymore. Um- ... it is a book on the history of the Bible. It was put out either by Oxford or Cambridge, and he was reading that the year he died.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: So he did read some modern biblical scholarship. However, basically, he took what he liked and he left the rest. So, um, if he didn't agree with the biblical scholar, he would just disregard it, and some of the stuff that he disagreed with was pretty standard biblical scholarship. So for example-
Jared: Yeah [00:25:00]
Leslie: One of the guys that he read a lot, I mentioned Charles Gore. Charles Gore said essentially that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which are called the Synoptic Gospels because they present the stories of Jesus in a very similar way, sometimes in the same words have a huge number of differences with the Gospel of John.
So you've got the Synoptics on one side, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John on the other, and between the two you have some very different stories of Jesus, and Lewis didn't like that, so he never accepted it.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: And he actually wrote actively against it.
Jared: Interesting. Was there any sense of what the rubric was?
Like, what was his guiding principles that would say yes to this scholarship, no to that scholarship? Like, was there anything that we could decipher as to why he's picking and choosing these certain things?
Leslie: When it comes to the Bible, it's really kinda complex and, uh, [00:26:00] slightly puzzling. And I hope I've got it right, and if I don't, I'm more than willing to change my mind, you know, if I see something that makes more sense.
Um, in a letter that he wrote to someone, and when he became famous in the early 1940s, we think of Lewis as being famous because of The Chronicles of Narnia, which were all published in the 1950s. He was super famous from the early 1940s with The Screwtape Letters. Wow. Uh, he started getting a lot of letters from people, and that's why we have, you know, three volumes of about 1,000 pages each of his correspondence.
Uh, so he wrote a letter to a woman, and she was concerned about whether One is saved by faith, as she understood Paul to say, or by works, as she understood the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew [00:27:00] 25 to say. And when Lewis wrote back to her, he said, "I hold it as a first principle that we should not interpret the Bible so our interpretations contradict."
Jared: Hmm. Okay.
Leslie: Now, what makes this complicated is that Lewis said repeatedly, in published works as well as letters, that the Bible contains contradictions.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Oh. Right.
Leslie: So it was really hard for me to try to put this together, and all I can come up with is, yes, the Bible contains contradictions. Yes, Lewis accepted that.
But when we read the Bible, our interpretation should not contradict what the Bible says. And again, I am willing for, [00:28:00] to gain more clarity on this at any time.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, it seems, again, I think putting Lewis in that context as a literary scholar who cared a lot about these things and- just he, he wasn't a, he wasn't a biblical scholar.
And so I could see him, he's sort of putting together his own hermeneutic, and that's sort of what he lived by. And so in some ways, that consistency, I don't know, I guess, I wonder if it's not useful to hold him to that standard. Um, I mean, I guess in some ways because he's speaking pretty authoritatively on these things. But I, I don't know. I think I have a little bit more grace for Lewis than I should.
Pete: Well, who knows? We should have grace for everybody. Yeah. You know, I mean, Leslie, I don't know if this is on this very topic. Um, I seem to recall that early on in his Christian walk, he got into a public debate with a [00:29:00] philosopher.
I don't remember who it is.
Leslie: Elizabeth Anscombe ...
Pete: and he pretty much got his head handed to him. Um, because he was arguing probably the way he was thinking, in an academic circles, that doesn't work very well. And I wonder, I've wondered if maybe his digging into biblical scholarship and other things was to shore up his ignorance in certain areas so he could talk more intelligently perhaps.
And then, you know, as you said, I think rightly so, only perpetuating those things that fit into his paradigm, and things that don't, he would sort of dismiss that pretty quickly. But I, I-
Leslie: Which everybody does, right?
Pete: I know we all do that. So, Jared, lighten up a little bit, okay?
Jared: I'm the one who said to have grace on him, all right?
Pete: Well, you said you weren't sure if you should have grace on him. That's what I heard anyways.
Jared: Well, maybe I, can ask this as a broader conversation, because I think kind of, I don't know, Pete, I would think at least as you got older, your tradition was this way. But, but Lewis was seen as [00:30:00] a bit of a paragon of faithfulness to the tradition in a scholarly li- we're always looking for, like, super smart people- An intellectual ... in culture who can, like, validate what we do. But, uh, it just seems like, I guess, where in your studies of Lewis and kind of like these things that are head-scratchers and then maybe a little bit baffling, like- where do we put Lewis...
Like, what category does Lewis fit in in terms of our pointing to him as this paragon and saying, "Here's areas where we might wanna look up to, to Lewis and see what he contributed, and here are areas where, you know, maybe he didn't get it quite right." Um, and I didn't have that nuanced view, so I'm curious in all of your in-depth research if you've come to some ideas about that.
Because again, for me growing up, it was sort of like he's an untouchable and he's super smart and he's this apologetics and he kinda knew everything. Um, not only did he know everything, but he also was able to translate it to us [00:31:00] common folk in certain ways. So I'm curious if you have a more nuanced view of Lewis in this way.
Leslie: When I was reading Lewis when I was growing up, I started with The Chronicles of Narnia as a kid, then went on to all of the nonfiction that I could get my hands on before I went to college, and I would've had that same view of Lewis that you talked about, really holding him up. He's perfect. Uh, you know, not only does he know all of this stuff, but he can get it across in such a great way.
It's fun to read. All of this is fantastic. And then I get a PhD in Biblical Studies, and I start looking at some of the ways that he uses the Bible and find a little bit to be desired there. So do you want me to start with what I think we should imitate or what I think we should not?
Jared: Uh, I'd love to get to both. Yeah. So as long as you get to both, I don't care where you start.
Leslie: Yeah. Okay. Um, well, it's always nice to conclude more positively. So [00:32:00] I'll talk about what I don't appreciate about Lewis.
Jared: That's great.
Pete: He's dead, Leslie, by the way. In terms of his biblical scholarship, he's dead. You don't have to worry about it. So he's not listening right now. We're good.
Leslie: One of the things that I disagree with Lewis on is, I've already brought it up, the idea that he held to the end of his life and fought against publicly in print, that essentially there's no difference between John and the Synoptics.
Mm. That they present Jesus in the same way, et cetera. Let me give an example of one of the first places where this really popped out to me early on in my research He was writing a letter to a woman who was suffering, and Lewis himself suffered a lot in his life. He went through the Great War as a combatant, went through World War II, lost his mother when he was a kid.[00:33:00]
Um, he had all kinds of pain in his life, and he said that one of the things that he loved is that Jesus suffered in the Garden of Gethsemane. And he said, uh, I can't quote this verbatim, but he said basically, he talked about the cup prayer where Jesus prays, you know, "Please, Lord, take this cup from me, but not my will, but your will be done," in Matthew and in John. And if you know the differences between the Synoptics and John in the Garden of Gethsemane, you know that in the Gospel, well, in the Synoptics, well, in Mark and Matthew.
In Mark and Matthew, Jesus suffers tremendously in Gethsemane. And then when we get to the Gospel of John, Jesus doesn't suffer at all. He doesn't have any time to pray [00:34:00] the cup prayer, and in fact, at one point he even says, "What should I say? That this cup should be taken away from me?" So the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, in my opinion, the author of the Gospel of John is specifically refuting and contradicting the idea that Jesus suffers in the garden, and that he would ever pray that his suffering and death be taken away from him. And Lewis just never sees it. Because he does something that people call harmonizing. That is, um, instead of reading each gospel as its own portrait of Jesus, or even if you want, reading all three Synoptics kind of as one unified story, and looking at John as another story, which it is, he interlaces all of [00:35:00] them together.
And Lewis, like many, many Christians, will harmonize through the lens of the Gospel of John. They will read Matthew, Mark, and Luke with a John lens on. And they will read stuff from John back into the Synoptics and vice versa. And Lewis does this all the time, and that is something that I would say I do not think we should do.
I am not a big fan of harmonizing, and I've already gotten some pushback there, when I argue very strongly against harmonizing and critique Lewis for being a harmonizer. Because this is something that some Christians do in order to preserve the idea that the Bible is inerrant and it all speaks with [00:36:00] one voice, and it can't contradict. You have to use harmonizing if you're going to hold those ideas.
Pete: You know, the thing, I mean, before we get to the other part of that we were gonna discuss, it's just, that's, that's so striking to me, what you're saying. And, uh, you know, I believe you.
You're right. I just, I'm thinking, I forgot where he wrote this, but he talks about the nature of the Bible, and he says, you know, "This isn't an encyclopedia. It's not an encyclical. It's written by people with fallible knowledge doing the best they can. And but the whole thing taken as a whole is the word of God, not the individual things are sort of at times corrupt or full of errors."
And you'd think somebody who has that kind of an insight into the text would be able to look at the synoptic problem and say, "Well, they're coming at it from different points of view." Now, together, taken together, the four Gospels make up the story that we wanna adhere to and, and wrestle with and struggle with.
But it's almost, I'm getting a sense of Lewis as being [00:37:00] unsettled in his own mind even, what he thinks about some of this stuff.
Leslie: Yeah. Absolutely so. Um, he is much more open to saying that there is fiction in the Hebrew scriptures-
Jared: Yeah, I was gonna say that.
Leslie: ... like Jonah and, and Job, like I just talked about. Yeah. He'll admit that the parables of Jesus are fiction.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: But he does not want to allow any more fiction in the New Testament. And he is fine saying in his little book called Reflections on the Psalms, that the Bible is full of naivete-
Pete: Yes. Yeah ...
Leslie: error, even wickedness. That's the quote I was thinking about.
But he will not say that about the New Testament-
Pete: Right. Right ...
Leslie: because he's a Christian.
Pete: Yeah. Yeah.
Leslie: The Hebrew scriptures, you know, he's no Marcionist. A Marcionist is someone who puts a separation, big separation between the God of the Jews [00:38:00] and the God of the Christians, supposedly. He takes the Hebrew scriptures as being sacred, but he can't loosen up as much as he does with the Hebrew scriptures in the Christian scriptures.
Pete: I've found that's true of a lot of Christians who have-
Jared: I was gonna say,
Pete: ... PhDs in Hebrew Bible. And then I remember being pushed by John Levinson, one of my professors, just to put my critical faculties to work when I also read the New Testament.
And that was a step that I had to think through and really sort of count the cost of that. But I can see why Lewis would do that, but that doesn't make it right.
Jared: Yeah. I mean, I think in a lot of ways, he would be at home in a lot of the conversations that we have, where even here in our audience at The Bible for Normal People, they're all gung ho when we apply these critical tools to the Hebrew Bible and these stories, and then you can [00:39:00] feel the reticence as you get to the New Testament and the stories about Jesus. So I think it is pretty common. Right. Yeah.
Pete: Miracles and things like that. Yeah. So yeah. Right.
Jared: Yeah, yeah.
Leslie: Yeah. So Lewis fits very well into that community.
Jared: That's interesting. Okay, yeah, I wouldn't have thought about that.
Pete: Yeah. Thank you for taking C.S. Lewis away from us, Leslie.
Jared: No, we're gonna get there. We're gonna get there.
Pete: I'm just teasing.
Jared: We're ending with the positive-
What about some of the things that are, or a thing that's at the top of the list on what he gets right?
Leslie: Okay. Can I say more than one thing?
Pete: Yes.
Leslie: Yes.
Jared: Yes. Of course.
Leslie: There are at least two that I want to talk about.
Jared: That's what I want someone to say about me. There are at least two things you've gotten right.
Leslie: At least two things. At least two good things about that human being.
Pete: Yeah. That's redeemable. All right.
Leslie: So he [00:40:00] consistently, repeatedly, vehemently rejects biblical inerrancy.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: He thinks that there are mistakes in the Bible, and he even says, "Oh, and here's one in the New Testament." Okay. So he even says that the Bible can be wrong about religious things, and even Jesus can be wrong.
So it's one thing to say, "Oh, you know, did 100,000 people die in that battle or 200,000?" Lewis says that doesn't matter. He doesn't care. Who cares?
Jared: Yeah.
Leslie: But he will look at Jesus saying, "Within this generation, these things are going to happen" at the end of Mark chapter 13, in Jesus' discourse about the end of days.
And, you know, the Son of Man is going to return, and he says Jesus was wrong [00:41:00] So he thinks that Jesus can be wrong, and he says that makes him believe in the trustworthiness of the Gospels more because the people who wrote the Gospels were willing to put in something where Jesus doesn't come across in the best light.
And of course, for those of us who have done studies of the historical Jesus, one of my teachers in my doctoral work was John Paul Meier.
Jared: Mm.
Leslie: And rest in peace. Uh, Father Meier wrote these huge tomes combing through each individual word. Did Jesus say it? Did Jesus not? And, uh, he used something called the criterion of embarrassment where if there's something in a text, let's just say, um, Mark, and the writer could choose to put it in or leave it out, and the writer decides to put it in even though it reflects [00:42:00] poorly on his main character, then it's more likely to be true.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: So Lewis knew nothing about the criterion of embarrassment. Um, I don't know if that phrasing had been developed by then. Uh, but he, he got it. He got that. So another thing that he says is that scripture is not the word of God.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Leslie: Jesus is the word of God. Uh, I, I love that, and as I was researching my book, I found that that was at about the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, and for some people still today is a live issue.
Jared: Yeah.
Leslie: That they get really upset-
Jared: Yeah ...
Leslie: at the idea of scripture not being the word of God. So the last thing that I think is fantastic with Lewis in terms of his interpretation of the [00:43:00] Bible is that he says basically what Augustine said, Saint Augustine back in the fifth century AD. Um, when you're reading something in the Bible, take it literally if doing so will lead to love of God and neighbor.
Do not take it literally if it won't.
Pete: I can hear gasps from our listeners. And now both Lewis and Augustine are boom, boom, boom, boom.
Jared: Yeah.
Pete: But, I think that's, um, perceptive.
Leslie: So when Lewis read the Bible- I have been privileged enough to read multiple copies of his Bibles.
Like a lot of us who are interested, we have lots and lots of Bibles that we cycle through throughout our lives. And, um, I've had these Bibles in my hand and been able to look at his markings on them. And he put [00:44:00] a very heavy double vertical line next to a verse in James that says something like, "Real faith is this, to take care of widows and orphans in their trouble."
Pete: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Leslie: And he was really big on the Matthew 25 parable of the sheep and the goats.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Leslie: And you can see that particularly, I have to throw in a bit of Narnia here. Um, in the last Chronicle of Narnia, in The Last Battle there is a character named Emeth. And if you know Hebrew Emeth or Emmett, however you wanna pronounce it, is the word truth in Hebrew. And this guy is a Calormene who worships a god named Tash, and he was brought up to love Tash and hate Aslan. And when Emeth meets Aslan, the lion who is the Christ figure in The Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan says to Emeth, [00:45:00] "Whatever you did to Tash in truth and goodness and purity of spirit, you did to me."
And in my book, I argue that Lewis is quoting the parable of the sheep and the goats there. Ah. "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me."
Pete: Huh. I love that.
Leslie: Yeah. Because he wrote about that parable, and he said in that parable, it means that many people who didn't know Christ are going to find out that they are, I'll just not use Lewis's words, of Christ's party.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Leslie: And he said that this was giving hope for the heathen.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Leslie: So in the Chronicles of Narnia, the Calormenes are heathen. So I am 100% positive that Lewis is quoting the parable of the sheep and the goats in the last battle when Aslan speaks to Emeth
Pete: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, Leslie, I think, um, that's all the [00:46:00] time we have, unfortunately.
I'm learning a lot about Lewis that I didn't know. That's the definition of learning, right? Um, but I'm glad that I do. I'm glad I understand him more deeply, and I hope our listeners too feel the same way.
Jared: Yeah. Yeah, thanks for coming on. I think that was a great way to end in terms of a good way to send us off with that story.
I think it's great. So thanks for doing all that work, Leslie. It's been great.
Leslie: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. This has been a lot of fun.
Pete: Good. You bet, Leslie. Thank you. Right, honest moment here, folks. We've been making this podcast for 10 years, and one thing that's hard is hearing from our listeners that they don't have anyone to talk to about it.
The podcast goes out to thousands of people, millions over the years, but then there isn't often a place to process and talk about it.
Jared: That's why we built the Society of Normal People, because we wanted there to be a place where the conversation doesn't just stop.
Pete: There are about 1,500 people in the society already who didn't want the [00:47:00] conversation to stop either.
We hope you'll join them.
Jared: The link is in our show notes, or go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
