What the Bible’s Heroes Were Really Like
By Nathan Nelson
I look forward to my Sabbath School class each week. I teach occasionally, but most often, I’m just an eager discussion participant. Part of what I enjoy so much is bringing a slightly different perspective to the class, and seeing which ideas resonate with people, and which don’t. Lately we’ve been digging into Matthew, and it’s interesting to watch the same patterns emerging from week to week.
What I’ve noticed, is that nearly all of us in my class have developed a few bad habits when it comes to the Bible. We like to whitewash things. We grow up hearing stories of our Bible heroes, how God loved them and blessed them, and we see the paintings in our children’s books that show them clean-cut, well-groomed and sometimes even with halos or shining rays of “God’s Glory” around them.
It’s pretty, and inspiring. But it’s not real.
One of the most poignant examples for me is Peter, Andrew, James and John, four of Jesus’ disciples that started off as fishermen. We hear their names, and quite often, I think the first picture we have is that of rather peaceful followers of Jesus. That may be how they ended up, but it’s not how they started.
According to the bible, Jesus recruited all four of them, apparently out of the blue. He walked up and said “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” It’s easy to imagine that this was a magical moment, that they were struck by the Holy Spirit, and moved to follow Jesus as a result. If that image works for you there’s nothing wrong with that.
But I’ve always thought that picture felt a bit inauthentic. So I try to imagine what that scene was really like. Think for a moment what they were doing. Peter and Andrew were casting their nets into the lake (Matt. 4:18), which means they were actively fishing. They weren’t sitting around talking about the day’s catch: they were in the process of catching. They were hard at work—and getting interrupted.
Let’s try to fill in the picture of that day a bit more. If you know anything at all about fishing, you know a few things in particular:
1. It’s extremely messy. Fish are slimy. They’ve been hauled out of the water violently, and frequently are still alive and panicking, meaning they’re flailing that slime everywhere. They’re also usually bloody from that violence, from hooks in their mouths or nets tearing their gills, and when they’re out of the water, they very quickly start smelling not so wonderful. The fishermen I know have told me you just get used to being covered in disgustingness a large part of the time.
2. It’s hard work. No matter how you go about it, you are hauling huge weights of fish out of the water, none of which are much inclined to come willingly. They’re fighting every step of the way. Doing it in volume with gill nets involves pulling in literal tons of fish at a time. There are stories in the Bible of catches so large they threatened to capsize the entire boat. Even using machinery to aid the process, it’s body-breaking work. It always has been, and likely always will be. You sweat and get very tired.
3. It’s dangerous work. Ropes under tension, knives, water, boats, hooks—even rival fishermen. This is dangerous work at its best. If you don’t get tangled in a weighted net, you could always drown anyway by accident. And the sea of Galilee, where so much of this fishing happened, is known for having some pretty impressive winds, which have a lot of energy, which its shallow depth doesn’t dissipate easily, making for very large waves. And if you survive all that, you still have to deal with all those fish, which involves knives and cutting, all while covered with the aforementioned slime. Let’s just say I’m certain cuts and serious injury were not unfamiliar to these men.
Now, imagine the type of men who make a living doing this. You actually don’t have to work very hard at it. Pull up a couple episodes of “Deadliest Catch” and take a look. There’s all sorts, but the one thing the successful ones all have in common appears to be a high pain tolerance, stubbornness, and determination, usually with a fair bit of attitude and “salt” sprinkled in.
We have this characterization confirmed in the Bible for us, too! Look at how impulsive Peter always was, flaring up at slight provocations. Look at James and John, the “Sons of Thunder”, and imagine the kind of brawls they got into that earned them that name. We already know they argued incessantly about their standing with Jesus. And we don’t get to back out of this “salty” image by imagining Jesus searched for the mildest or least imposing he could have chosen from. Keep in mind that as Jesus and his disciples spread the gospel, it took grit and stubbornness and determination to keep on going, even in the face of the Roman empire, of unreceptive audiences, of threats of violence. Look at how many of those disciples died violent deaths spreading the gospel. For that matter, consider that God recruited Paul, someone who had persecuted and killed Christians, to be one of his most energetic supporters.
No, Peter and Andrew, and James and John were no pushovers. These guys were gnarly.
And Jesus impressed them enough, they left it all behind—instantly!
With all that information, now put yourself in the role of a salty, grizzled, tough-as-nails fisherman, sweaty, breathing hard, and covered in fish slime and blood as Jesus walks up to you—in the middle of your work—to say:
“I’ve watched you work hard at this job. You’re among the best I’ve seen, you put everything you have into it. But doesn’t this seem pointless some days? You catch fish, break your body, then sell your catch at the market so people can eat. You spend the money you make on food for your own mouths, so you can be strong, so you can come back to this body-breaking work for yet another day. Your work never stops. But what if your work changed people? What if you could feed people’s souls instead of just their bodies? What if I could show you how to take that hard work you put into hauling those same nets every day, and put it into something far more valuable? You spend your life catching fish. I can show you how to catch men!”
Those words aren’t in the Bible. That may not have been what he said exactly. And I’m sure there was some back and forth. But you get the idea. Fill in the gaps for yourself until the conversation works; until you can just imagine those tough-as-nails fishermen hauling their catch home for the day — earlier than usual — and telling their co-workers and families, “Sorry guys, I’m done. I have somewhere important to be tomorrow, and every day after.”
Once that’s done, I’m willing to bet you have a slightly different picture of Jesus (and Peter and Andrew) than you had 10 minutes ago. And I’ll be even you might follow Him if he walked up to you out of the blue!
Now, try the same thing with some other Bible characters until each one pops into life in your head:
Picture David. He raised some truly horrible children, sent a man to be killed so he could steal the guy’s wife, and was renowned as a fierce warrior as well as a king. Imagine a man who could stand toe to toe with a giant, 9 feet tall, and kill him with a sling. He may have been trusting in God to help him prevail, but I guarantee you he wasn’t serenely singing hymns as he charged Goliath, killed him, and beheaded him. Armies don’t run away, not even from someone who kills their mighty warrior, unless that person inspires fear!
Imagine Jacob, the runt of his family, especially compared with his big, manly, hunter brother Esau. Imagine what went through his head when his mother came to him and said “You could steal your brother’s blessing, if you’re clever enough!” And when he succeeded, earning mom’s approval, and learned the lesson that brains can indeed beat brawn, he went on to develop that cleverness to razor sharpness, as he swindled Rachel and Leah’s father, Laban, out of his herds and his daughters!
How about Esther? Do you really think she simply walked into the king’s presence, hoping he was in a good mood? Maybe she did a bit more to make herself more “appealing” to the king.
What about Mary of Bethany? What was going through both their minds when Mary poured perfume on Jesus’ feet, and wiped it with her hair? That cannot have been a casual or insignificant moment for either of them.
The gospel of John ends with these words: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” We don’t know what those many other things are, especially when what little we have of the things that were written down are so fragmented, abbreviated, and incomplete. We haven’t been given all the details to know who these people really were.
But we do know there were normal, everyday people, just like ourselves. They felt the same emotions, they were just as intelligent, and for every moment of their lives recorded in the Bible, there are literally thousands of others that are not. Those people, in those in between moments, ate meals, stole kisses, had fights, told jokes, and cried. The Bible, in its many translations, elevates those simple acts to epic levels simply by using different words: they ‘wept’, they ‘jested’, they ‘were filled with wrath’ and so on.
The whitewashed, haloed, elevated version of these figures is largely something we have created ourselves. In real life, they were real people, doing real things. All we have to do is use a bit of imagination, use the clues we’ve been given, and what we know of how people are today, and these rather one-dimensional caricatures we have can come alive in our minds.
On the days when I’m feeling like I can’t possibly measure up, it helps to look at those Bible characters and see them as real people, instead of untouchable saints. After all, if God loved that batch of screw-ups, ne’er-do-wells, and thugs, well, maybe I still have a chance!
Nathan Nelson makes a living programming computers for Nike, the sports shoe manufacturer. He grew up as an Adventist but is not sure how to classify himself these days, perhaps “a non-member, semi-reformed, not-quite-backslider.” He writes from the Portland area.
If you appreciated this piece, please consider giving a donation to Adventist Today to keep this quality of content available!
While you were studying the book of St. Matthew last quater, did you notice the author’s comment concerning the time the book was written? “After all, writing many years after the events, why didn’t they use this opportunity to . . . . . . . . . . ”
This account, like other accounts, were supposedly written by largely unschooled men who likely spoke Aramaic as did Jesus. However the New Testament writings themselves were skillfully written by expert Greek linguists who our professors in college claimed to have written in “Holy Ghost Greek” because of its supeior quality.
Michael,
So do you think the story is unreliable and essentially untrue?
Nathan,
An excellent reminder of just how human the Disciples were! Thank you for giving us that reminder.
Life is full of reality and the sooner we realize that God’s great and powerful redeeming and transforming love are real and available to us, the sooner we can become empowered to minister it to those who live in a very real world just as Jesus did. We never see Jesus holding a public evangelistic crusade, so why would we imagine ministering His love in any other way than by touching real people where they live and work?
What a great reminder that the Bible characters were real people! It seems to me that if we’d understand that, we’d have a lot more graciousness toward the real people around us. And to ourselves.
Nathan,
You write: The whitewashed, haloed, elevated version of these figures is largely something we have created ourselves. In real life, they were real people, doing real things. All we have to do is use a bit of imagination, use the clues we’ve been given, and what we know of how people are today, and these rather one-dimensional caricatures we have can come alive in our minds.
Without a disciplined, historical, imagination all you will do is create new and different one-dimensional caricatures. Real people doing real things minus historical imagination means people who think and behave just like you and me. That will not yield an accurate understanding of persons throughout history.
Biblically, Jesus of Nazareth is without a sense of humor and without sexual desire. If you start filling in the blanks with twenty-first century American ideas about humor and sex you will be imagining a very inaccurate personality. Esther surely got cleaned up before appearing before Ahasuerus, but the real preparation was prayer and fasting, and the real risk was immediate death. Modern ideas about Esther and King Ahasuerus doing real man and wife stuff is wildly inappropriate. The fate of nations is hanging in the balance.
You and I have jobs. We participate in a complex economy. We naturally think along those lines. Did Andrew, James and John? What was their attitude towards their work? Did Jesus ever tell carpenter parables? It sounds like you are imagining Jesus offering His disciples other employment. Were Jewish fisherman the same as gentile fisherman? Exactly how did status and identity devolve onto Jewish Fishermen from Galilee? How is it that John the Galilean fisherman was known to the High Priest’s household. Does The Deadliest Catchhelp us better understand the mind of Peter?
You are identified in this article as a programmer working for Nike and writing from Portland. You are an uncomfortable Adventist. I learned quite a bit about you, reading your brief bio. I learned nothing about your family, are they unimportant? What importance should I affix to you and your family? What do you suppose Jesus’ fishing buddies would make of your biography? Without historical context your bio is meaningless, isn’t it?
We should read the stories about the real people in the bible with some real humility about our real lack of historical perspective. History isn’t easy and it has a humble object: to understand how people thought in the past.
William Abbott,
Nathan had info about his family in his original, longer bio. Often I change a person’s bio from month to month, including some things one month and others another time, simply to provide some variety. This month I left employment and left out family. It signifies nothing.
I wish you would cut people some slack. At least as much as you’d like us to give you. We don’t know anything about your family, either, but we let you talk all you want here.
Loren
Loren,
Chill. You are right. I read quite a bit about Nathan’s family in his last piece, Why I Take My Children to Church. I know AT editorial policy determines the bio content, not the author. Nothing offensive intended. I know more about Nathan than I let on.
Let’s say I was employing a rhetorical device. I wanted the reader to think how easily one could use the imagination to draw an erroneous, even a meaningless, picture about Nathan from his short bio. Context, essentially historical context, is needed to understand the real sort of person Nathan Nelson is.
I’m always disappointed when people take my writing wrong. It is why I avoid sarcasm. So blame me Loren, you aren’t being overly sensitive, I’m just a bad writer.
I was writing about the imagination’s need for historical perspective. The point of Nathan’s article is spot on, we have to fill in the blanks with our imagination. I’m not criticizing him or his idea. I’m expanding on it. Do I really draw the lines too tight? I’ll cut everybody some slack, which lines should I cut?
William, “history isn’t easy, to understand how people thought in the past”, that being so should you not cut Nathan a little slack?? He didn’t say he had given up on God, just that he is having problems remaining a SDA. He was not presenting a detailed Bio.
@Earl and @Loren,
While I appreciate the quick step to my defense, Mr. Abbot does have some interesting points. I am strong in my faith, even if I don’t fit the molds people have come to expect of a Seventh Day Adventist, and his observation doesn’t change that, even if it is correct. However, I took it less as a personal attack, and more as a demonstration of how using our imaginations to fill in incomplete information can lead us to misleading conclusions.
To that same point, William, I absolutely agree that we have a duty to make ourselves aware of the historical context as much as possible as we exercise our imaginations while interpreting the Bible. Part of the fun (for me, at least) of Bible study, as well as historical study, is discovering where my imagination was inaccurate and trying to correct my picture of the past to take that new information into account, while still keeping those characters as vibrant and colorful as possible.
However, being PERFECTLY aware of historical and cultural context will be impossible for many of us who are balancing careers and families and many other concerns. In that case, I’ve found that filling in the gaps in our understanding with human traits that are consistent with the world around us isn’t a bad way to go.
You provide the warning that “Modern ideas about Esther and King Ahasuerus doing real man and wife stuff is wildly inappropriate” and while I agree that you’re probably correct, it might be worth noting that in the same story of Esther, the king had already sent away queen Vashti because she wouldn’t show up on his whim so that he could show off her beauty. That one fact speaks volumes to me about where Xerxes priorities were when selecting a queen. While Ester certainly drew on the spiritual strength provided by the acts of fasting and prayer, it’s certainly NOT inappropriate to assume that she went forward courageously in an attempt to be as appealing to the king as possible, including appealing to the sexual urges he so prominently demonstrated throughout the story. In fact, to assume otherwise would be quite naive of us. In fact, by the end of the story, we’ve seen that Esther has clearly mastered the art of manipulating the king, to the point where he executes a prominent advisor at her word. You can be sure she used every tool of manipulation at her disposal, including her wits, her words, her faith, and her body.
You also ask can Deadliest Catch help me understand the mind of Peter. The answer is, I’m not sure, but I suspect yes. I look at Captain Keith Colburn and the passion and dedication he brings to his profession. He’s fiercely protective of his crew, but is prone to flares of temper and even at times unfairness. He’ll jump in headfirst firing off words in haste, then feel great genuine remorse later, all the while never losing sight of his ultimate goal of earning a living for his crew and getting them all home alive, and hopefully well.
Keeping in mind that again, it’s a TV show, and “reality” is very much a matter of perspective, I do believe we can see plenty of clues about the type of person Peter might have been. When he denies Jesus for what seem the right reasons at the time, but turn out to be wrong, when he slices off the ear of the High Priest’s attendant, when he walks on the water to Jesus, but then loses his head and starts sinking — these are all stories that reconcile nicely with the image I get from seeing fishermen from today.
Are these pictures perfect? No . . . but I’m willing to change them as I learn more. And with such vibrant images, I find I’m more excited to KEEP learning. And I’ve seen that same tendency in the people around me.
Nathan,
Recognizing that the people we read about in scripture were real people makes me want to keep learning about God. What was it Paul wrote about them, that their stories were shared for us as examples? They’ve left us some pretty human examples showing us both their weaknesses and God’s amazing love that reaches past our failings to redeem us. Keep looking up to God and being a good teacher drawing our attention upward, too.
Nathan,
Exactly! Perfection is not of this world and that is why history is such a humble art. Nobody can imagine the real contextual differences of mind. History is like a foreign country you can never visit. We have to remember not too grant our imaginations too much authority. Imagining we know something, when honest people know they can never know.
I get to ‘talk’ here at AT all I want, (see Loren’s post for confirmation). Mostly what I say is, ‘try and remember Jesus was a Jew.’ Try and understand Jewish thinking and the Jewish mind and you will better imagine Jesus.
That is what Christians have to do: Imagine who Jesus Christ was and imagine how they might imitate Him.
Dear William as in Abbot … you sure have captured a lot of attention here and what I like most about your stimulation by Nathan is your embrace of the term ‘uncomfortable Adventist.’
We are all worthy of that adjective in one way or several it seems … and it wonderfully spotlights the mission of Adventist Today.
Whoa! I just ask myself, is there such a creature as a ‘comfortable Adventist’?
Please advise …
Bill,
There are ‘comfortable’ Adventists. They are living unexamined lives.
Using my imagination in Bible stories is helpful and makes it, not just real, but I can relate more to the setting and the meaning. It doesn’t need to accurate–it can’t be–for that is only relevant for the historian and not as much for one’s spiritual meaning and application. Even though thousands of years separate us, in our feelings we are quite similar don’t you think? I like to imagine how the character feels when confronted by Jesus.
Ella,
….in our feelings we are quite similar don’t you think?
My wife of forty years consistently tells me that is a false assumption. I have been informed, “You don’t know how I feel.”
There is quite a difference in how Jesus ‘confronts’ women compared to men.
Dear Nathan,
I so enjoyed reading this article and was refreshed with the reminder of how real those men were and how when I fail, I can think of those men and how they failed too, but yet how Jesus loved them and could use them. Thank you for this invigorating reminder of who Jesus is — how He doesn’t call the perfect people.