It's kind of an impossible question.

It's the kind of question that requires more of an explanation to ask than to answer, which is a little bit strange.

So I thought, the Bible is not a book.

It's a library.

And like any good library, it contains an amalgamation of different genres.

And so asking if the Bible is true, you might as well ask if the corpus of Shakespeare is true.

It sort of betrays a misunderstanding of how people interact with the text.

So I thought, will Dinesh argue that the Bible is literally true, historically true, allegorically true, morally true, theologically true, metaphorically true?

And I suppose the only thing for it is to sort of try each one on for size.

So maybe beginning with Genesis in an attempt, clearly not at historicity, but rather allegory and metaphor, we can deal with one of our types of truth here.

We're introduced to Adam and Eve, who are told in no uncertain terms by God not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

You may begin to wonder why knowledge of good and evil is such a bad thing, but the thought is interrupted by the introduction of the serpent, who says to Eve, did God say that if you eat of the tree, then in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die?

And Eve says, yes.

And the serpent says, well, that's not going to happen.

God just knows that if you eat of it, you'll become like him, knowing good and evil.

And he doesn't want that at all.

You're not going to die.

So Eve famously takes the fruit, eats some, gives some to Adam, and what happens?

Do they die in the day thereof?

Some people say in a metaphorical sense, yes, we'll get to that in a second, but at least on the surface of it, no.

What does happen?

God tells us himself.

He says, now the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.

He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and eat from the tree of life, lest he inherit eternal life.

And with this, Adam and Eve are banished from the garden of Eden.

So who's telling the truth here?

This story is quite mystifying to me, and I'm not the first to point this out.

There's actually an apocryphal gospel discovered near Nag Hammadi in Egypt in the 1940s, dated to around the second or third century, called the Testimony of Truth, a gospel that didn't make it into the New Testament, which identifies the serpent, interestingly, who's never called Satan in the text, by the way, identifies the serpent with Jesus.

I don't know if I'd go quite that far, but it does seem that the sort of allegorical truth of the story leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm told that maybe Adam and Eve died a sort of spiritual death, or mortality entered the world.

But then we need to ask why it is that God had to proactively banish them from the garden of Eden.

This isn't some natural result of sin that mortality entered the world, they're banished.

And the implication is that they could have just as easily reached out and eaten from the tree of life, but God didn't want this to happen, so he guards the gates of Eden with a cherubim, with a flaming sword.

I find this quite strange, and I'd like to know what Dinesh thinks of it.

Moving on quickly, I suppose, to the events of the later Old Testament, skipping over Exodus, we're introduced to another form of truth that I want to potentially engage in, and that's the concept of moral truth.

That's another one that I spoke about in the beginning just there, the concept of moral truth.

When we look at some of the military conquests of the Old Testament, bear in mind that the promised land pledged to Abraham is not an empty plain.

Its indigenous inhabitants had to be, shall we say, displaced by a series of military campaigns, ordered by God and carried out by his prophets.

Thus, we have such commands as in Deuteronomy, chapter 20.

When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace.

Sounds promising to start with.

If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor, and shall work for you some peace.

If they refuse to make peace and engage you in battle, which, why would they do that on these terms?

Lay siege to that city.

When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it.

As for the women, the children, and the livestock, and everything else in the city, they get to go, no, sorry, hold on.

You may take these as plunder for yourselves.

That's right.

And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies.

Likewise, in 1 Samuel, we have the destruction of the Amalekites.

The order, now go attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them.

I'm told sometimes that this is actually an exercise in hyperbole.

God didn't mean everyone.

It continues, do not spare them.

Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.

And if you think that this is hyperbole, consider what happens when Saul does conduct the destruction of the Amalekites as ordered and decides to leave alive the king as well as some of the best of the livestock.

He leaves them alive.

For this small act of mercy, God responds by saying to the prophet Samuel, I regret that I have made Saul king because he's turned away from me and has not carried out my instructions.

So not even the animals can escape this genocide.

So I'd like to ask Dinesh, I suppose directly, which is it?

Is this a morally corrupt series of events?

Or do I have to dispel with my moral intuition that genocide, including of innocent children, is a bad thing?

There's plenty more to talk about in that regard.

I don't want to take up too much time.

This isn't, of course, to mention the advocacy and explicit instructions around slavery in the Old Testament.

Hopefully we can get onto those too if we want to go down the moral path.

But I think that the most natural interpretation of the question is the concept of historicity, the literal truth of the Bible, that is.

This is where I think we have to move to the New Testament because the genre of the gospel seems to be historical biography, unlike the mythology of a book like the Psalms or Genesis or Job.

And here there's a lot to talk about.

We begin with the birth narratives.

There are two birth narratives in the gospels, in Matthew and Luke.

Both give different accounts.

Both have a genealogy of Jesus, for example, but the genealogies are different.

I'm told this is because one records Mary's genealogy and one records Joseph's.

You can do this if you like.

It doesn't seem like the most natural reading of the text if you're not already predisposed to synchronize the accounts.

Then we have, for example, the flight to Egypt, which is only recorded in Luke, which is difficult to reconcile with Matthew's account that they went to the temple in Jerusalem instead.

But more importantly, Matthew then says that the family traveled to Nazareth and he says, so was fulfilled what was said through the prophets that he shall be called a Nazarene, quoting the prophets.

Now you'll notice if you read an online Bible that where the Old Testament prophets are quoted, there's a little footnote telling you what the prophecy is.

In this case, you won't find one because the prophecy simply doesn't exist.

It's not there.

There's no such thing.

So there are two options here.

Either Matthew made up this prophecy or got it wrong, in which case the New Testament is mistaken, or the prophecy does exist, but for some reason fell out of our scriptural tradition and now no longer exists, which makes the accuracy and at least the completeness of the Old Testament suspect.

So again, I'd like to ask directly which it is.

Finally, I suppose I should mention the contradictions that a lot of people point to in the Gospels.

Some of these, I think, are legitimate, some are not.

I'll give you some examples very quickly of Gospel contradictions that I do think are real contradictions.

First, the date of Jesus' crucifixion.

Was it before the Passover, as John states, or was it after the Passover as the synoptic Gospel state?

Second, Jesus is sending out his disciples to teach.

In Mark, he tells them to take nothing with them except a staff.

In Matthew and Luke, he says, take nothing with them, including no staff.

So do they take a staff or do they not?

A pedantic contradiction, but a contradiction nonetheless, and one that's led people like Barnabas, Ahern, to write entire articles on this.

And Augustine himself actually distinguished between a literal staff and a metaphorical staff to explain this difference.

Anything, I suppose, except considering the possibility of even the most minor of Gospel contradictions.

Third, Jesus flipping the tables at the temple.

A famous story, but did you know that in the Gospel of John, this takes place at the beginning of Jesus' ministry.

In the synoptics, it takes place near the end.

So when did that occur?

Mary Magdalene, after the resurrection of Jesus, runs to the disciples in John's Gospel and says, they've taken the Lord, and we do not know where they have put him.

Strange thing for her to say if, as the Gospel of Matthew recounts, she's visited by an angel at the tomb who tells her exactly where Jesus is going.

And then she's met by Jesus herself on the way to the disciples to bring them the news.

Strange for her to then say that they've taken the Lord and we do not know where they've put him.

There's more to say on this.

Interpolations, things which seem not to be in our oldest manuscripts, but end up in newer manuscripts of the New Testament, such as the adulterous woman, let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Most scholars agree that this was not in our earliest manuscripts and was added in at a later date.

And if we can see that the Gospel stories were edited after they were written down, there's no reason to think that they couldn't be edited before they were written down as oral traditions too, as well as the entire ending of Mark 16.

There's a longer version and a shorter version because the longer version simply isn't in our earlier manuscripts.

These documents don't seem to have the historical reliability either.

So in conclusion, I've probably spoken for too long here.

Are we talking about allegorical truth, moral truth, metaphorical, theological truth, historical truth?

I suppose what I want to say to Dinesh is take your pick and I'll probably have something to say about it.