James Harding explains why the Bible should be taken seriously.
According to what ''the Bible teaches'', the world was supposed to end on Wednesday, October 7, 2015.
This was the claim of Chris McCann and the eBible Fellowship.
It is easy to mock such claims as those of a crank, not just because we are still here (with the gift of hindsight), but because people have made such claims frequently over the past two thousand years, based on what they think the Bible teaches, and so far they have all been wrong.
Yet while they are wrong, such people are rarely stupid.
More often, they bring intelligence and good faith to what is, to many of us, the strange and misguided task of divining when God has decided the world will be judged and brought to an end.
It would not have seemed bizarre, though, in the ancient world of the book of Daniel, which presumed that, with the gift of divine insight, events in the future could be predicted.
But most of us do not live in such a world, which raises the question: why should anyone bother with an ancient relic like the Bible?
I have devoted my working life to trying to understand the Bible, how it originated, and why people believe what they do about it.
Moreover, I am a priest, which means, among other things, that I ''believe that the Bible contains all that is essential for our salvation, and reveals God's living word in Jesus Christ''.
I believe this passionately: but why?
There are mundane reasons why we should all take the Bible seriously.
The Bible continues to have a covert influence on an awful lot of what we think, say and do, whether we realise it or not.
When we consider weighty issues such as euthanasia, for example, the appeal to the idea that human life is sacred is one that has strong biblical resonances.
Likewise, many of those on both sides of the marriage equality debate held opinions that can be traced to a reading of the Bible.
These examples could be multiplied, wherever the Bible has been read.
It is important to understand the effects religious texts have, even on people who no longer realise they are under their influence.
A major challenge comes from the fact that the Bible does not speak with one voice.
It contains the voices of many different authors, writing in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, over a period of several hundred years.
These voices are not wildly different from one another, but they are different.
Some of them confront us with ancient traditions that are frankly terrifying: a God who commands his servant to kill his only son (Genesis 22:1-19), horrific stories of sexual and ethnic violence (Genesis 34:1-31; Judges 19 to 21), announcements of judgement from a God who is pictured as a jealous husband, assaulting his wife and then wanting her to come home (Hosea 1 to 3).
We should not pretend these traditions are any less disturbing than they are, or that the apparently more hopeful parts of Scripture - Psalm 23, say, or Matthew 11:25-30 - somehow cancel these other parts out.
In the Bible, we enter into an intense dialogue, which took place over many generations of ancient Israelites, about what it means to live a life faithful to God.
This dialogue was handed on to many more generations of Jews and Christians.
Reading these scriptures faithfully today does not mean passively accepting everything we read in, or are told about, the Bible.
It means having the moral courage to wrestle with it honestly, wrestling like Jacob for a blessing from God (Genesis 32:23-33), and refusing to let go until then.
There is a thread that runs through Scripture that gives grounds for this sort of moral courage, though it does not put to silence the darker parts of Scripture.
In Genesis, God creates human beings in the divine image, which has moral consequences for every person, without exception.
This can be summed up with the words ''Do not kill'', which reflects the value God places on human life created in God's own image (cf. Genesis 9:6).
This God wishes his servant to teach his children ''righteousness and justice'' (Genesis 18:19), a standard against which God himself will be held to account (Genesis 18:22-33).
The idea of human beings bearing God's image also lies behind the command to love both your neighbour and the foreigner who lives among you (Leviticus 19:18, 34).
In a world scarred by all kinds of violence in homes and between nations, and further unravelled by the moral cowardice of individuals and governments in the face of the plight of refugees, there may be something here for us to learn.
We may find that the Bible, strange and ancient though it is, contains strands of wisdom that we cannot afford to ignore.
• James Harding is a senior lecturer in the department of theology and religion at the University of Otago, and an Anglican priest in the diocese of Dunedin.
