BIBLICAL RELIABILITY & THE MYTH OF SHAKESPEARE

On the bookshelf in my home office is a book titled The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.  This book claims to contain the word of a 16^th century British author.  However, the copyright date makes it abundantly clear that this book was published in 1980.  On top of that, further analysis shows that the book is the 3^rd edition, clearly a copy of a copy copied by an earlier scribe.

If my house was the main site of research into this alleged “Shakespeare,” and the third edition of his Complete Works was the only copy found in excavations, would we still believe in Shakespeare?

Would we conclude that since the oldest surviving copy was printed in 1980 then obviously its quotations were unreliable?    

Would professors of the Shakespearean mythos profess that our belief in Shakespeare as an author is far too literal since multiple editors writing hundreds of years after Shakespeare’s death had obviously added their own words to his plays?  

Would experts argue that the same man could not have written of honest witches in the book of Macbeth and of a peacemaking priest in the book of Romeo & Juliet? 

Would scholars applying critical literary analysis conclude that Shakespeare was a myth, that no one could have written that many plays in a time before laptops? 

Nah. 

Because obviously the copyright date doesn’t give the original date that a text was written.  It only tells when a particular company pressed another set of books.  Obviously finding a copy of an author’s words doesn’t tell us when his words were originally written down.  Obviously, finding copies made 100 years after the fact only proves that 100 years after the fact people were STILL making copies.  Obviously, a circa 1980 copy of Shakespeare’s words doesn’t mean that Shakespeare didn’t live and speak in the 1600’s.  It just proves that what he wrote was important enough for people to preserve it over hundreds of years as opposed to all the other things written during the same time period that have been ignored and lost to time.

Obviously.

Obviously?

Then why isn’t it obvious that the date of a copy of the gospels only tells you the date the previous copy was copied down?  It doesn’t tell us the date of the original eyewitness’s narrative.

Why isn’t it obvious that finding a 2^nd century copy of a copy of Jesus’ words doesn’t prove that Jesus was misquoted?  It just proves that Jesus’ words were important enough to keep repeating and sharing via the only printing method available----- hand scribed copies.

It’s obvious that only fool or a rabid conspiracy theorist would use my 1980 copy of Shakespeare to question the authenticity of the Bard of Avon?

However, if you use a single scrap of a single page which doesn’t even claim to be the original manuscript and just happened to not get lost with the millions of other undiscovered 1^st century scrolls  to claim that you know when the Bible was ORIGINALLY written down, you’re not a fool.  You’re not a rabid conspiracy theorist.   You’re a scholar and a theologian.

Obviously.

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Hall Memorial CME Church in Montgomery, Alabama, executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO) and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

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