What are some of the most common pop culture misconceptions about the Bible? - Podcast Episode 121

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Hello, welcome to the Got Questions podcast. My name is Jeff. I'm the managing editor of BibleRef .com

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and joining me today is Kevin. He's the managing editor of Got Questions Ministries. Hey Jeff.

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Today's topic is going to be something a little bit different than we would normally do. A little less serious but also interesting.

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And today the discussion is going to be pop culture, in a sense. Really what we're doing is we're looking at the idea of what happens when something in popular culture, whether it's movies, music, songs, or just the way we were raised in church, starts to override the things that we believe.

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So are these representations accurate? Is this really what the Bible teaches? We're going to sort of count down today through the top 10 things that pop culture gets wrong about Christianity.

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Now, there's a lot of angst and disagreement sometimes about things that the Bible teaches. And surprisingly, a lot of those things are issues that Scripture doesn't even teach.

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They're things that Christians don't even believe. And sometimes that can be a problem. And it's always some sort of lack of discipleship or careful reading or myth.

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A lot of the mental images that we have about the Bible, a lot of things that we believe and think about Christianity, are in that category.

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They're just a tradition or it's something that somebody just used as poetic license. Sometimes it's deliberate spin.

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Somebody is purposefully trying to make something look bad. Just to give a couple examples of the vague idea of what we're talking about, we can see this even in things without the

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Bible. I'm Scottish. Laird is my last name. And you notice that a lot of movies you see people around the 1200s,

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Braveheart, King Arthur, the Pixar movie Brave. You see Scottish people with blue face paint and tartan kilts.

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Well, the blue face paint was several hundred years before that time period, and the tartan kilts were several hundred years later.

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You see this in representations of pirates, pirates of the Caribbean, Peter Pan, Treasure Island. You know, we have this stereotype with patches and hooks and peg legs and so on and so forth.

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That's not really what pirates were like. Vampires were sort of thought of these romantic individuals, you know, allergic to silver and garlic and sunlight.

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And prior to Bram Stoker's era, they were thought of more like animals, a little bit more like what we think of werewolves right now.

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Same thing with things like Disney. We see some versions of the fairy tales there that are a little bit different. The point is that we can see how the perceptions that we get in pop culture change those things.

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And as individual Christians, we run into that fairly often as pastors run into that.

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Kevin, have you had any experience where people have been deeply confused or meaningfully confused because of something that pop culture told them rather than the

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Bible? Well, I mean, coming to mind is things like, you know, disagreeing with the

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Bible because, you know, of course, Cain. The Bible says Cain had a wife. Well, of course, there were no other people on earth.

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How did Cain have a wife? Stuff like that sometimes. But, you know, specifically things that I have run into have been things like an acceptance of orbs, you know, and trying to fit orbs into the

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Bible because, you know, because of pop culture. Because they saw a picture on the

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Internet or something and they're thinking, you know, angels or maybe demons and stuff like this.

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And so it creeps in. The pop culture ideas start creeping into people's belief systems.

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And it's always important just to get back to Scripture and let the Bible speak for itself. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a general idea of what we kind of like to do today.

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We're going to count down these top 10. Now, these 10 are not necessarily in some order of theological importance.

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They're vaguely in an order of a combination of importance versus how common they are. But they're mostly just here because it's good to put them down and give people an idea of what we're talking about.

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So let's start with this one. Number 10 is the idea that Adam and Eve ate an apple.

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Now, that's not an incredibly impactful idea, but it is really common. And the reason that we have this misconception is that we see that very often represented in things like medieval art.

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When you see old paintings, old portraits, you typically see a fruit that looks like an apple.

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And there's reasons for that. Some of that is because the terminology in the phrasing that was used in Latin translations of the

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Bible uses words that can be very easily confused. And instead of seeing something just as a fruit, people thought it said specifically an apple.

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That's a really good example of something that just sort of took on a life of its own. Scripture never actually tells us what sort of fruit it was.

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It just says that they ate a fruit, but it doesn't tell us exactly what kind.

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So you're saying it's okay for me to go ahead and eat apple pie? I don't have to worry about disobeying

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God with that. I'm glad to know that. We don't know what kind of fruit it was. Another misconception that sometimes people have is about the age of David when he slew

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Goliath. I was just speaking in a chapel service yesterday where I went through the story of David and Goliath with the kids.

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And I didn't talk about his age, but a lot of times people get the impression that David was very, very young.

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You pick up a toddler's Bible, children's Bible, and it'll be illustrated.

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And a lot of times they'll have David being the age of the target audience for those kids.

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And that's why the publishers do it. They're trying to have this Bible story relatable so the kids can identify with David and things like that.

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And that's fine. That's good. But David was not a toddler. He was most likely a teenager at the time when he had his confrontation with Goliath.

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And then the sling itself. I've made slings before to illustrate children's sermons or whatever.

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These little things that made up shoelaces, a little bit of leather, a little rock in there.

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And it was nothing like that that David was using. I mean, the slings of those days were bona fide weapons of war, and the rock would have been a good -sized rock.

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And that sling would have been a good -sized sling. My little representation that I used for the children's sermon was nothing like what

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David would have used to kill Goliath. So that's just another one.

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The age of David. He was probably older than what he is usually depicted as. Yeah.

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And the point about the sling is one that people often miss. It's not that David took a little tiny pebble the size of a thumbnail and flicked it and hit

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Goliath and supernaturally, miraculously knocked him down. If you think of a high school pitcher in baseball and you give him a baseball -sized rock, and instead of having him throw his fastball with that, you have him throw it using a three or four foot strap of leather.

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So now he's throwing a baseball -sized rock at 120 miles an hour and he hits somebody in the head.

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That does some serious damage. Oh, yeah. This one's semi -important in a sense because sometimes we get confused and think that the idea is that the big point of David's defeat of Goliath was a supernatural superhero empowerment.

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Obviously, there's empowerment by God, but a lot of that really has to come down to just faith. David had the guts and the courage to stand up and do what

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God expected him to do and other people didn't. Now, people don't get that one wrong on purpose.

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Like you said, it's coloring books, it's comic books, and stuff like that. But sometimes people are a little bit different on the next one.

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So our next one is the idea of the Spanish Inquisition. We hear this one a lot. We've seen representations of this in The Pit and Pendulum from Edgar Allan Poe.

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We've seen it in comedy movies like History of the World. We've seen it in sketches like Monty Python, things like that.

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Usually the thought is that the Spanish Inquisition was the terror of the age, that everybody lived in constant fear of the

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Inquisition. And it was known for brutality and sadism and torture and burning witches and forced conversions.

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In truth, while the Inquisition was not a good thing, most people were not particularly affected by it.

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It was sort of a political tool that was used by kings against their political enemies. As a matter of fact, the common people very often criticized the

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Inquisitors for moving too slowly and being too lenient. Wow. The common people actually had a stronger view, a stronger stance against things like witchcraft than the

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Inquisitors does. As far as the Inquisitors were concerned, most cases of witchcraft were just nonsense. We're going to get into a reason for that as we get down here later.

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It's also interesting to notice that there were times where there are records that mobs broke into the jails where prisoners of the

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Inquisition were being held and took them out and murdered them because they were angry that the

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Inquisitors had not actually done more than they had done. And again, the idea is not to say that what happened in the

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Inquisition was a good thing or that it's defensible. The idea is just to point out that it was not quite as silly or ridiculous as people think it was.

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I think the Inquisition is used a lot of times just as an easy way to criticize religious people or Christians in particular.

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We see the same kind of thing with the Salem witch trials. How many people know the actual facts of that case and what was the history surrounding it?

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Here's another one that we sometimes run into with pop culture ideas creeping into what the church believes.

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That is that people go immediately to either heaven or hell when they die.

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Now, I want to be careful with this one because we do not believe in soul sleep.

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We do not believe in a purgatory or anything like that. The Bible does not teach those things.

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But as far as being immediately in your permanent place, your eternal state once you pass away is not taught in Scripture.

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In fact, I think it's pretty clear in Luke chapter 16 where Jesus tells the story of the rich man and Lazarus that both these men died and each of them went to a place, an actual place.

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Lazarus went to a place of blessing that Jesus in that story calls Abraham's bosom.

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So he goes to a place of comfort. Abraham is there. So we assume the righteous dead are there.

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And then the rich man goes to another place, a place of torment. And Jesus speaks of that place as having flames and the man is in torment.

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Now, these are not the permanent places for either of these men because the Bible also speaks later of after there's going to be a resurrection, there's going to be a final judgment.

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And then the unsaved, the unrighteous will be cast into the lake of fire. And in the book of Revelation, there's a distinction made between hell and the lake of fire.

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And then also what we think of as heaven where Lazarus was or paradise is going to give way to the new

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Jerusalem. The new heavens and the new earth and the new Jerusalem is our final state.

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And so the idea that we go someplace and we never move again after we die is not quite biblical.

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There is a place of blessing and a place of torment. But it's not quite permanent yet.

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That will happen after the final judgments. And I'll just throw this in here too.

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This one really bothers me with the idea that when people go to heaven, that they are sitting on clouds playing harps.

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And everybody has his own little cloud and things. And I know those types of depictions are usually made tongue in cheek, but it is like nothing like what the eternal state is going to be.

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It's not going to be boring at all. It's going to be the most exciting, fulfilling, abundant life that you could possibly imagine.

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So there's another one we need to take a look at. Yeah. And it's interesting to see that, like you said, a lot of those depictions are sort of tongue in cheek.

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You see a Tom and Jerry cartoon where one of them gets hit with an anvil and all of a sudden they've got the little halo with the stick sticking up behind their back and they're sitting on the puffy clouds.

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And it's meant to be a little bit humorous and almost sarcastic. But when that's the representation people constantly see, that's the one that they kind of get into.

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Now, that idea is something that we do need to remember. But like you said, it's also not a super critical one.

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Yeah. I try not to get my theology from Tom and Jerry cartoons too often. I'm real careful about that.

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Yes. Yes. Not a good idea. See, now there's where the next one of our points comes up.

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Number six on our list is the Crusades. Now, this is another one where people get a lot of their information from popular culture.

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Now, this one especially comes in media, video games, movies, television shows and things like that.

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And the mistake about this is the idea that the Christian Crusades were these exceptionally gory, sadistic wars that were fought by Christians to expand territory against peaceful Muslims.

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Now, here again, like we say with the Inquisition, the idea is not to say that we should look at the Crusades and say, yes, this was a wonderful thing.

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This was a great thing. But the truth was that for centuries prior to the Crusades, the

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Islamic Empire had expanded greatly from the Middle East all the way into southern

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Europe. And for the most part, Europe responded to that just by shrugging its shoulders. At some point, there started to be some persecution of pilgrims going to Jerusalem.

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And the very first crusade was actually intended just to liberate Jerusalem for the purpose of keeping pilgrims with their ability to move back and forth.

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Now that devolved over time as the Crusades, they are plural, went on. They did become more political.

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They did become more crass, I guess you could say. But the idea that Muslims were just standing around minding their own business is not part of the actual thought.

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The other thing that a lot of people forget is that in Islamic history, the

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Crusades were not considered to be that big of a deal. The literature and the discussion in the Islamic world of the

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Crusades leading up to the colonial time. In other words, the 18 -1900s. Until then, they weren't really concerned with Crusades, partly because they usually won.

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It was confined to a really small geographic area. It was the Mongol Empire that was really the one who damaged and destroyed the

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Islamic Empire. So it wasn't until there was this pushback against Western Europe that the idea of the

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Crusade and the Crusader started coming up. So here again, we can get our misconceptions if we just accept this cartoonish caricature of an idea instead of actually getting the information from legitimate history.

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I think we're ready for number five on our list. And that would be the idea that hell features literal, physical punishments and tortures.

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And so you'll see depictions of demons in hell, putting people on the rack, stretching them out, putting people in boiling oil, using whips and spikes and all kinds of different things.

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I mean, some of the stuff is pretty creative, getting devoured by worms, huge, giant worms and things like this.

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Go back to Dante's Inferno, which had a lot of very creative depictions in a literary form of what the tortures of hell would be like.

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A lot of medieval artwork. And then, of course, things carry over into our present age with cartoons and movies.

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I'm always interested to see the depictions of hell that show up in movies.

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I haven't seen any that are biblical per se, but it's always interesting to me to see how it's being predicted, how it's depicted.

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But the Bible doesn't give us a whole lot of detail about what hell is like.

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We don't have ever any mentions of torture in the Bible. We have torment that's mentioned and pain.

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And Jesus speaks of fire and it speaks of unending agony and unending smoke coming up from the pit of hell.

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But we don't have a whole lot of ideas about what it will actually be like for the people who are there.

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So I think we can just take all of the instruments of torture that we see and just kind of consign that to fable and myth and people's imaginations.

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And especially this idea that the demons are going to be in charge and the devil is the top one.

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He's overseeing it all. He's not the king of hell. Satan is going to be the one who is punished the most in hell.

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Jesus said that hell was prepared for the devil and his angels. It was a place of torment for them primarily.

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And so they're not in charge of anything there. They're going to be experiencing that torment more than any person,

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I believe. Right. Well, that brings us up to number four, and that's one that we definitely hear a lot in discussions of the value of Christianity and the concept of science.

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And that's the idea of Galileo. And the cartoon or the myth that we hear is that Galileo proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the sun was not rotating around the earth.

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And after he proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt, he was immediately thrown in prison for daring to question the obvious teaching of the

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Bible. That's the cartoon version of it that we hear in actual history. Galileo had a model and his model had some notable mathematical errors.

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He could see that there were some inaccuracies, but he talked about those ideas for decades with Catholic scholars, including representatives of the pope for quite a while.

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And some of them were very receptive to the idea. What got Galileo in trouble was at one point, a new pope came along who was a little more resistant.

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And Galileo made the mistake of writing a book where he put really, really bad arguments in the name of a character that basically he named stupid.

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And the arguments that he used were almost verbatim quotes from the pope at the time.

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So he got himself in trouble in a political sense. Again, the idea that he would be put under house arrest.

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Nobody's defending that. But we have to remember, Galileo did not come down and instantly perfectly prove something and then get thrown in jail right away for daring to question the

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Bible. It was the it was the result of a long process that had more to do with politics than anything else.

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And politics is also one of those issues that comes up in the in the next issue we have, which

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I think, Kevin, you're going to handle, which is the one about the writing and translation of Scripture. Yes. How about this one?

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The the idea that there was a cabal of powerful men who got together and said, we're going to we're going to consolidate our power by creating this religion and having people follow it.

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And so they they wrote the Bible, you know, translated it and then retranslated it and made sure that they put all of their ideas in there to create this this following of people who were just going to be duped into following their their new religion.

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People in authority grasping for power. You know, that's how the church started. Well, the facts of history are are quite different from that.

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In fact, the the Bible was written after people believe. I mean, people believed first. People saw the resurrected

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Christ. And and there were 300 at one time,

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Paul mentions. And he invited people to go and check it out for themselves.

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You can go talk to these men. You can interview the eyewitnesses who saw the miracles.

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And, you know, Paul tells one of the rulers that he is speaking with at one time, you know, these things were not done in a corner.

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Jesus in his his ministry was not done secretly and quietly. This was this was something that everybody knew about and everybody could check out for themselves.

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So people believed. And then the the Bible was written, you know, in that first century.

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But there was already a following of Christ. And it was quite large, just based on the apostles preaching and and what people had seen for themselves.

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And there were many infallible proofs, Luke mentions. And so the faith was there.

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And then the scriptures were coming in that first century. And then by the time we get to, you know, three, four hundred years later, when we've got the start of of the state church, the scriptures were already so widely distributed.

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There was no way to go back and change those things. We know from the science of textual criticism today what the original languages said.

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We can know in almost every case, in every passage of Scripture, exactly what the original wording was.

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It's it's verifiable. And it's it's unfortunate that people would try to change history and and lead people astray today.

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But with this idea of some kind of a secret group or, you know, an ancient

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Illuminati that was trying to lead people astray. Right. Yeah.

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And it's it's also important for us to remember that we have copies of Bible manuscripts that predate some of these supposed events.

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So we have entire copies of the Scripture that come before the government really had any interest in it.

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So it's like you said, if somebody today tried to convince the entire world what the text of the Declaration of Independence was, that would be basically impossible.

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It's it's the text is so widely distributed in so many. I've got it in my pocket right here. Even if somebody tried to change it.

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Yeah. Yeah. We'd be able to figure it out. So now this one comes down to number two.

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Now, number two is pretty broad. Number two is basically the pop culture gets wrong.

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Pretty much how everybody and everything in the Bible looks. We've kind of seen that as a theme in what we're doing here.

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But we see things like this where Samson, the judge, is portrayed as a bodybuilder.

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Satan looks like a dragon. Jesus looks like a hippie. Angels look like naked, chubby white babies.

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Or they're wearing white robes and they've got gold donuts over their heads. You know, God looks like the bearded old man in a white bathrobe and sandals.

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The men like Noah look like shriveled up, hunched over old men. And again, we have art, we have coloring books, we have adaptations and things like that.

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And again, this is a place where Scripture just doesn't tell us much of anything. Samson, the

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Bible tells us that he was given supernatural strength because of the Holy Spirit. It doesn't tell us that he looked like a bodybuilder when he walked around.

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Now, he may have had an intimidating look to him. It's not to say that he looked as athletic as me.

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But he may have looked intimidating. He may not have. We just don't know. Satan's a spiritual being. So are angels.

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So is God. We've had conversations in recent podcasts about the idea of what angels do and don't look like.

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The idea of Noah. Yes, he was 500 years old and he lived to be over 900. He probably looked like a middle -aged guy rather than somebody who was old.

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And those misconceptions aren't super important, but they are definitely something that affects us.

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I was just reading last week about a church that really went through a lot of wrangling internally because the congregation couldn't decide what picture of Jesus to hang in the hallway.

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And so there you go. What did Jesus look like? I think that church dispute could have been handled so easily by just, you know, picking out the picture of Jesus that looked most like him, right?

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Yeah, if we were only given a description that we could go with. And there again, the problem with those is that, again, we take those and we tend to run with them.

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We make assumptions about them. Then we go forward. Now, before we get to our number one on our top 10 list here of things that pop culture gets wrong about Bible and Christianity, we have a couple of honorable mentions to go through.

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These are ones that necessarily we couldn't fit into a podcast like this, but they're worth doing. Kevin, I'd like to kind of hit you in sort of a lightning round version with these.

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We'll go through these pretty quick, but I'm going to ask you about these and you can give me a brief response for the listeners.

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You ready? Yes. Go ahead. Shoot. All right.

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Here we go. OK, so do we have to pray with our heads bowed and our eyes closed? Not at all.

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That is a tradition. There's nothing in Scripture about having that posture of prayer being a requirement.

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All right. What is the name of the last book in the Bible? I try not to let this one bother me, but it is

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Revelation singular. There's no S at the end. Yes.

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Yes. Revelations. That's a pet peeve for us word nerds. Does the

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Bible include the phrase, the lion will lay down with the lamb? No, it does not. Although you hear this a lot.

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The actual passage in Isaiah speaks of the wolf lying down with the lamb and then the lion eating straw like the cattle and things.

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So it's close and it still communicates the same type of idea, but it's not actually the wording of Scripture.

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That's right. Let's see. The King James. Was that the first Bible translation or at least the first English translation?

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No, it wasn't. There were several translations of the Bible in English before the

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King James version was translated. We had the Wycliffe edition and several other editions of the

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Bible as people were translating Scriptures into the language of English. How about Cain?

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Sometimes I've heard people say, hey, you know, Cain killed Abel with a rock. Is that what he used? Well, he killed

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Abel, Scripture says, but Scripture never says the weapon that he used. So it could have been with his bare hands.

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Could have been a rock. We don't know. But we just don't know. The rock is an imaginative addition to the story.

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Sometimes I hear people bring up that in the Bible times, there were a lot more miracles, a lot more supernatural experiences, or people were just more gullible back then.

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What does Scripture actually say about that? This is an important one, actually, because, well,

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Scripture does record miracles, of course, and we're kind of naturally drawn to those passages.

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We like to read about those. But when you take a look at the grand scheme of things, miracles were few and far between.

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They were very rare. It's one of the reasons why we call them miracles. They were out of the ordinary.

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In fact, they really only happened when God was doing something very different to change the course of history.

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And so, of course, we have the Exodus from Egypt. So there were miracles during the time of Moses and Joshua as God was changing history and creating a new nation, a new people unto himself.

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And then during the time of Elijah and Elisha, there were miracles. And what was

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God doing then? He was bringing the nation of Israel out of Baal worship back to the worship of the one true

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God. And he used these two prophets to do so. And then, of course, Jesus and the apostles.

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The time of Jesus and the apostles was a time of many miracles. What was

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God doing? Changing history again by establishing the church and laying the foundation of Christ the cornerstone and the apostles.

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And so, really, those three epics of history are when we see most of the miracles in Scripture.

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And out of the whole history of the world, that's not a whole lot. Yeah, people also have to remember, we hear sometimes the angle about people being gullible or being dumb.

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Well, people believed in miracles back then because they didn't know better. Well, people 2 ,000 years ago knew the dead people didn't come back to life and so on and so forth.

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To me, that's particularly ironic because if you took a person from 2 ,000 years ago and dropped them into the wilderness today, they'd have a much better chance of surviving than a modern -day person.

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They knew how the natural world worked pretty well. And they understood the difference between what could have and could not have been from a natural standpoint.

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So, that brings us to our number one. And this one, you're going to see some pulling together of themes that we've seen in lots of different places before.

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So, the number one pop culture error that seems to have invaded people's perceptions of Christianity involves

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Moses. And this is the idea that Moses didn't know that he was

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Jewish. And secondarily to that is the idea that Moses is the one who is doing all the talking when he sees.

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Now, when we see movies like The Ten Commandments or The Prince of Egypt, we see Moses suddenly discovering that he's a

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Hebrew, which he never knew. And then he comes back and he stands in front of Pharaoh and he gives all these eloquent speeches.

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Well, that's not what the Bible actually says. The Bible's got a couple of different points to make on that.

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One of which is that Moses was always aware of who he was.

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He was, in fact, raised from the earliest years of his life by his birth family on behalf of the

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Pharaoh. Now, he had all the advantages of being connected to the Pharaoh and his family and so on and so forth.

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But there was nothing in scripture that suggests that he just didn't know what his background was.

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The one that's more complicated is the idea that Moses was the one doing most of the speaking.

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The Bible actually has Moses when he's approached by God and God says, you're going to go say this and go say that.

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Moses basically says, I am terrible at speaking. I'm really not good at that.

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In fact, some theologians think he may have even had a speech impediment because he was that resistant to talking.

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So it was his brother, Aaron, who was the one who actually did most of the verbalizing when they were talking with Pharaoh.

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Now, we understand reasons for that dramatic license. Having an 80 -year -old man stand off to the side while his brother talks is not nearly as dramatic as a square -jawed 45 -year -old standing there giving an eloquent speech about let my people go in front of Pharaoh.

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But that is another one of those that has just invaded things to the point that everybody seems to just assume naturally, even in church, even people who are teaching, that they just sort of assume that this came as a surprise to Moses, which it really didn't.

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It's so easy to fall into those assumptions, though, and that's why we have this podcast today to kind of deal with some of these things, these ideas that come from pop culture, most of them, and have crept into the church and crept into our thinking.

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They've colored the way we look at Scripture sometimes, and it's always good to fact check, always good to go back to Scripture.

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Be like those Bereans that heard the Apostle Paul, and they said, we're going to check the

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Scriptures to see if what this Paul fellow is, if he's telling the truth or not.

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And so they were noble in doing that, these Bereans, and we need to be more

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Berean -like and be checking with Scripture about what Scripture says and what it maybe doesn't say.

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Yep, and that's why it's important, because some of these sound like they don't make much of a difference, and some of them don't, but some of them do.

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So in everything that we do, we should test all things, we should test ourselves, we should examine things to see what the

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Scriptures actually say, and separate that difference between tradition, pop culture, versus what

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Scripture really, truly, actually says. So, as we always say, we hope that the conversation's been enlightening, that it's been useful to you, maybe a little fun, different than the way we typically do things.

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Once again, my name is Jeff, Managing Editor at BibleRef, and I'm joined by Kevin, who is the

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Managing Editor of Got Questions Ministries. Today we've been talking about our top 10 things that pop culture gets wrong about Christianity.

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You can definitely look for more information on our websites about these things. So this has been the Got Questions Podcast. Got questions?