10 Common Biblical Misconceptions
A lot of what you believe about the Bible is, well, wrong.
- Jesus was born in a stable
Only two biblical writers mention Jesus’s birth, and one of those — the writer of Matthew — tells us that Jesus was born in a house. This makes sense because, for Matthew, Jesus and his family lived in Bethlehem. It was only much later, according to Matthew, that the family moved to Nazareth.
Luke is the writer who tells us the family lived in Nazareth and only traveled to Bethlehem, where Jesus was ultimately born.
However, even Luke doesn’t mention a stable.
Luke only says that Mary gave birth in Bethlehem, and because the guesthouses were all full, she had to lay her newborn in a feeding trough.
This statement could imply a stable, of course, but there’s no reason it needs to. In 1st century Jewish towns, animals were tied to posts on the street, where mangers were often erected, or kept in the courtyards of larger homes. Stables would’ve been out in the countryside, not within the town.
2. Moses wrote the Torah
The Torah is made up of the first five books of the Old Testament — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
And Moses didn’t write any of it.
Despite both Jewish and Christian traditions attributing these books to Moses, historians have identified at least four different authorial strands within these books. Each strand likely has multiple writers and was produced in different time periods over hundreds of years.
None of the strands dates as early as the life of the historical Moses. If the figure of Moses is based on a real person, that person probably lived three hundred years or more before the first word of the Torah was ever written.
3. The gospels were written by the disciples of Jesus
Although this is a common belief among Christians, even Christian tradition only attributes two of the four gospels to actual disciples of Jesus — Matthew and…
