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Did God write the Scriptures?

Several readers asked me the following: how can we be sure that a scripture is the Word of God? Was a particular scripture edited or altered during the centuries?

Usually I avoid such question as both the question and the answer of this sort may offend people who worship religion in place of God. Nonetheless, someone should bring this matter into the open.

How can we determine that a scripture is the Word of God? The only person who can attest to the authenticity of a holy book is one who is in clear communication with God. Only a person who has been freed of his or her individuality, i.e., united with the Divine, can corroborate or deny the teachings of a religious text.

For instance, Paramahansa Yogananda, a well-known sannyasi (monastic yogi) from India who lived in the United States for over thirty years (1920-1952), frequently quoted the Bible and compared it with and explained it based on the Bhagavad Gita, and vice versa. No scripture was a mystery to him because he could talk with God the way we talk with friends. He could ask God: "What does this verse mean?" and receive a direct answer. His books are eloquent evidence that he was intimately attuned to and comfortable with the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran and the poetry of several mystics of various religions, such as Omar Khayyam.

Such saints’ testimony, however, is still second-hand knowledge for us ordinary mortals. For, until we achieve the state where we can commune with God ourselves, we will have to depend on someone else’ statements about a scripture and will, therefore, remain in the same predicament. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that the only person who can confirm the accuracy of a map is the person who has traveled the area well, we do hope that a scripture we choose is a good map for our spiritual journey.

Do the sacred texts change through time? As a person who knows a few truths about human nature, I would be very surprised if each succeeding generation of priests did not alter the texts to suit their mortal fancy. Religious history is full of examples of scriptural censorship and amendment. And the intentions of the censors range from malicious to altruistic.

For example, at the end of fourth century there was a large gathering of church Fathers in Constantinople—where the fate of the Bible as we know it today was decided. One of their tasks was to standardize (canonize) the Bible—it was necessary to select from a larger body several credible testimonies about the life and teachings of Jesus. It was a complex task: how do you confirm the credibility and authenticity of the sources three hundred years after the fact? Those early church sages did what they could in a very difficult situation!

Then what was to become the New Testament was edited. All the yogic teachings about meditation and reincarnation were removed from the Bible. (These teachings remained as an oral tradition and were later persecuted as heresy.) References to reincarnation were edited out because the church Fathers were concerned that people would become lazy: "I do not have to make an effort in this life—there will be many others." As you sow, so shall you reap is just about all that remains from the ancient teachings on karma. From the tantric teachings of Jesus Christ, there remain only some vague references to mantras, chakras and certain methods of meditation at the beginning of St. John’s revelation. The church Fathers, who where not Buddhists, missed many Buddhist teachings quoted by Jesus, and they remain in the New Testament to this day.

Neither did the sacred scriptures of other religions escape the editors’ hands. My master dedicated several books to the teachings of Lord Krishna and Lord Shiva and how their teachings were distorted through time, sometimes beyond recognition. The text of Bhagavad Gita (the Song Divine) was "influenced" by the later Sankhya philosophy. The great Vedantist, Shankaracharya, who perfected Vedanta philosopy reinterpreted the Gita to suit his sectarian needs.

The Vedas—mankind’s oldest sacred compositions—were partially lost because, even after the discovery of writing, their oral keepers had considered it a sacrilege to write the Vedas down. And, in a more modern time—during the noted Cultural Revolution in the 60’s, the Chinese used perhaps the historically most favored method of altering the sacred texts—destruction. They leveled several thousand monasteries where the rarest spiritual documents were stored, and these documents are now lost forever. Fortunately, Tibetan refugees fleeing to India smuggled out many important texts.

Many scriptures we consider revelations from God show definitive evolution. The Old Testament shows philosophical influences of Sumerian concepts of morality and includes a close rendition of a Sumerian creation story, which was the philosophical avant-garde of that time. The poetic style of the book of Psalms imitates the Egyptian verse of the same period.

Nonetheless, the scriptures are valuable as spiritual and emotional encouragement, as a counsel, and as a testimony that others have come before who succeeded in their spiritual endeavors. The holy texts document the highest achievements of mankind. Studying sacred scriptures can inspire and guide our spiritual search.

— Anatole