Mob Behavior, or Why the Bible Seems So Bizzare

Jonah and the Fish - History or Fancy?

Anyone who has had occasion to read the Bible has certainly experienced moments when its contents ring insincere, its logic flawed, its credibility suspect. I think those portions of the Bible that inspire such reactions vary from reader to reader. Some persons find it difficult to swallow the resurrection of the dead; others - the notion of a world-wide flood; others - that three men could survive unscathed in a lion's den. I submit that what we, as individuals, perceive to be truth is often largely a function of cultural conditioning. To a typical westerner, dog as food is abhorrent, but dog is delicacy for many Asians. Which "truth" about dog flesh is true? Post-modern man attempts to resolve this dilemma by asserting that all truth is relative, but this so-called insight about the nature of truth easily collapses under pressure - a man who claims all truth is relative will simultaneously insist that it was absolutely wrong that someone stole his property, or violated his wife, or that George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential contest against Al Gore.

I submit that the reason the Bible does seem, in certain passages, bizarre, is that it is the one document wholly true, and truth is a phenomena so foreign to us that we have trouble recognizing it.

The Bible is, of course, a history. About history French social psychologist and sociologist, Gustave Le Bon - in his best selling work, La psychologie des foules (The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1896) said this:

...works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination. They are fanciful accounts of ill-observed facts... 

Now Le Bon, in his opinion may not be easily dismissed - Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and modern mass media have made profitable (for them) use of Le Bon's ideas. Le Bon insist that the very fact of multiple witnesses to a historical event make it suspect -

To say that a fact has been simultaneously verified by thousands of witnesses is to say, as a rule, that the real fact of is very different from the accepted account of it.

Has the reader ever witnessed the transformed behavior of an otherwise friendly dog, once introduced to a pack? Group behavior, group mentality, is something altogether different from the thoughts and behaviors of a solitary individual. Consequently, history, which is usually the record of the accounts of multiple witnesses, often, if not in fact, usually, is the product of a group-mind or recollection, not of individuals. And group-think is unreliable, as is the attitude and behavior of a mob.

What is unique about the process of recording the books that comprise the Bible is that the flawed consciousness of mobs and individuals is purged by the Holy Spirit leaving us with a perfect record of what actually happened, and what is important for us to know. This last has always been a source of marvel to me - the things that God chooses to include and leave out of his history of the world defies logic. The Bible bears God's fingerprints, and we have trouble recognizing those prints; we are accostomed to the man's grimy prints.