The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

by A. J. Jacobs

  Here, I try out strategy number four: Do not objectify. This one I got from downloading an excellent sermon about lust by a Unitarian minister. The minister suggested that you can battle your urge to objectify women by focusing on them as a complete person. So I look at Fetish Girl and think about everything but her body: her Israeli childhood, what might be her favorite novel, how many cousins she has, whether she owns a PC or a Mac.

  But she won't stop looking at my payot. This isn't working. In a panic, I switch to the less evolved but more efficient method: Think of her as your mom. I feel nauseated. Victory.

  I've also noticed a strange phenomenon. I figured it'd get more and more difficult to suppress my sexuality. I figured it'd be like water building up behind a dam. But quite the opposite: it's more like my sex drive has evaporated. I'm sure it'll come roaring back like a dragon--to use the metaphor in my book When Good Men Are Tempted. But for now, it's pleasantly tranquilized.

  And it makes me feel spiritually spotless. It makes me realize I have a hidden Puritan streak. On some level, I do consider sex dirty, or else why would I feel so buoyant when I've stamped it out? There's something lovely about putting your libido in storage.

  And there's another advantage: The thousands of watts of energy devoted to sex are suddenly free for other pursuits. Sublimation is real. I've never been so productive as I have been in these past weeks. I can crank out two thousand Esquire words a day on this no-sex diet.

  "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?" --MATTHEW 18:21

  Day 287. Tonight, at nine-fifteen, Julie leaves our bedroom door open. I have repeatedly asked her not to do this. I can't sleep unless the room is Reykjavik-level cold, so I always shut the door at seven and flip the air conditioner on high. Julie, who could sleep anywhere and anytime, always forgets, leaves the door open, and lets my precious cool air slip out.

  I snap at her. "Please shut the door!"

  Huh. That came out a little too sharply. To soften things, I throw in a biblical literalism joke. "I forgive you this time. But if you do it another four hundred eighty-nine times, I won't forgive you."

  Julie shuts the door without asking me to explain my wryly cryptic statement. So let me do it here.

  I was referring to a passage in Matthew 18: "Then Peter came up and said to him, 'Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?' Jesus said to him, 'I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.'"

  In other words 490 times.

  When I first made my list of biblical rules, this was actually part of my plan. I'd take everything literally, even those sentences that were clearly metaphorical. I would forgive someone 490 times, despite the fact that Jesus almost surely meant you should forgive an infinite number of times.

  I revised that plan for a couple of reasons. First, it would involve chopping off various parts of my body (see below), which I was reluctant to do. Second, it soon became clear that I could make my point--that biblical literalism is necessarily a selective enterprise--without intentionally warping the meaning of the Bible.

  But here is a sample of the even more bizarre life I could have led:

  * I could have plucked out my eye, since Jesus says, "And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell" (Mark 9:47). This is generally interpreted by Christian leaders to mean that you should get rid of those things in your life that cause you to sin. "If you are addicted to internet pornography, you should consider getting rid of your computer," says Dr. Campolo. Though as with most passages, there have been people who have taken it at its word. A psychologist of religion named Wayne Oates writes of mental patients who attempted to pluck out their eyes in literal compliance with Jesus's words.

  * I could hate my parents, since Jesus says, "If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26). Here the idea is that given the difficult choice between God and your family, you should choose God--not that Jesus condoned parent hating.

  * I could avoid uttering the word good for the rest of my year, in literal adherence to this passage from Luke 18:18-19: "And a ruler asked him, 'Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' And Jesus said to him, 'Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.'"

  This approach reminds me of one of my dad's wacky practical jokes: He'll start pouring a glass of water for one of my friends and tell the unsuspecting chump "just say when." The chump will say "Stop," and my dad will keep pouring. The chump will say "That's enough!" and my dad will keep pouring. My dad will keep pouring till the water spills over the edge of the glass and splashes on to the table. Then my dad will look at him in faux bewilderment and say: "You never said 'when.'" A classic.

  And here's the amazing thing: Those who overliteralize the words of God get mocked in the Bible itself. I learned this while reading a book called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, who refers to the following passage in the Gospel of John:

  In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."

  "How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus [a Pharisee] asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!" ( John 3:3-4, NIV).

  Nicodemus is like a sitcom dunderhead here. Born again? How is that possible? How can an adult squeeze back into his mother's uterus? He can't see that Jesus's words were figurative and poetic, and he becomes the butt of a joke.

  "The truth will make you free." --JOHN 8:32

  Day 290. Ever since my lying spree on the Falwell trip, I've recommitted myself to extreme honesty. In response, Julie has come up with a way to make my honesty more palatable. She's started to ask me a singularly terrifying question: What are you thinking about? We'll be walking to the playground, and she'll spring it on me:

  "Hey. What are you thinking about?"

  I can't just respond "nothing much." I have to tell the truth, the unvarnished truth.

  "I'm thinking about that rude guy at the Judaica store on Broadway, and how I should have told him, 'You just became a villain in my book.'"

  "Sounds like vengeance. Isn't that biblically forbidden?"

  Julie loves her new trick. It's as if she's found a peephole into my soul and can discover who she's really married to, no deceptions. Or, as she puts it, "I feel like I've picked up a chance card in Monopoly."

  We'll be unpacking groceries, and suddenly I'll hear: "What are you thinking about?"

  "Oh, business stuff."

  She's not falling for that. "What business stuff?"

  "That I wish I could time travel back to 1991 and buy up hundreds of internet names like flowers.com and beer.com and cabbage.com, then I could sell them for millions of dollars to the flower and beer and cabbage industries, and then I'd never have to work again." (This is an alarmingly common fantasy of mine.)

  "That's the saddest daydream I've ever heard. Plus, that's greed."

  She's right. I'm wasting my time with greedy and angry thoughts. Not always, mind you. Sometimes, when Julie pops the question, I'll be thinking about something noble, like the environment or our son's future. In fact, compared to my prebiblical life, the percentage of brain space allotted to gratitude and compassion has inched up. But I still have way too many thoughts like this:

  "What are you thinking about?"

  "The Bible, actually."

  "What about the Bible?"

  "The story of Esther."

  "What about the story of Esther?"

  "Well . . . what it would be like to be the king in the Esther story and get to spend the night with each of the most beautiful women in the kingdom, like a test-drive or something, and then get to choose your favorite."

  "You've really evolved."

  In the la
st couple of days, I've been focusing on cleaning up my brain. It's possible that God is monitoring my thoughts, but it's certain that Julie is. So I've commanded myself to think positive thoughts. And today, it paid off.

  "What are you thinking about?"

  "How lucky I am to have a healthy wife and a healthy son and two so-far-healthy babies."

  Julie pretends to gag. But it was true, that's what I was thinking.

  Of making many books there is no end . . . --ECCLESIASTES 12:12 (NIV)

  Day 292. I've got a decent biblical library going now. Perhaps a hundred books or so. And I've divided them into sections: Moderate Jewish. Fundamentalist Jewish. Moderate Christian. Fundamentalist Christian. Atheist. Agnostic. Religious cookbooks.

  I've tried to keep the conservative books on the right side and the liberal ones on the left. When I started my year, I thought that nothing would go to the right of my Falwell collection. But of course, I was wrong. I just got in a book called A Handbook of Bible Law by a man named Charles Weisman.

  I'd try to summarize it, but the subtitle does a pretty good job, so I'll just type that in: An Indexed Guide to over 1500 Biblical Laws, Commandments, Statutes, Principles, Admonishments, Exhortations & Guidelines under 22 Different Subject Headings.

  When I found The Handbook of Bible Law: An Indexed Guide to over 1500 (etcetera, etcetera), it seemed the perfect Fodor's guide to my spiritual trek. All the laws in one place! It was so well organized, I figured it might be worth talking to the author. So today I Googled Charles Weisman, and I found out that he probably does not want to hear from me. And vice versa.

  Weisman runs a small publishing company in Burnsville, Minnesota, that distributes such gems as The International Jew, a collection of antiSemitic rants originally published by Henry Ford. You can also buy a tome called America: Free, White & Christian, and books about how the "white Adamic race have [sic] been the innovators and builders of all advanced civilizations throughout history." You get the idea.

  And when Weisman publishes The Handbook of Bible Law, it's not out of academic interest. He wants a theocracy in America now.

  Weisman's got company. There are thousands of beyond-the-pale fundamentalists who want to set up a biblical government based on both Testaments. As in a society that executes homosexuals, adulterers, and blasphemers. As in one that shuts down every synagogue, mosque, and moderate church. They are the American Taliban. Not all are racist like Weisman--in fact, most claim not to be--but all scare me. Unlike mainstream Christians, they don't believe that Christ's death voided much of the law. And unlike mainstream Jews, they don't mute the harsher Hebrew Bible passages, the executions for adultery and blasphemy and the like.

  So they are on the fringe, yes. But perhaps not as much as I'd hoped. The movement is called reconstructionism or dominionism (the differences are subtle, but as far as I can tell, dominionism is for the slightly less-extremist extremist). And writers such as Garry Wills and Salon's Michelle Goldberg argue that dominionism has undue influence on some more respectable members of the Christian right. It's an influence they say far outweighs their numbers: Dominionists were a driving force behind the home-schooling movement and have helped shape Pat Robertson's worldview.

  They're doing what I'm doing, but they aren't doing it as part of a spiritual quest/book project. They make me appreciate the comparative graciousness of the Falwell folks even more.

  They will pick up serpents . . . --MARK 16:18

  Day 297. If you want to slam Christian biblical literalism, I've noticed, the go-to epithet is "snake handler." As in "The religious right is filled with knuckle-dragging snake handlers."

  In fact, most evangelical Christians I met disapprove of snake handling. But it's easy to see why this small sect has become shorthand for religious extremism in America. You watch the Appalachian snake handlers on the Discovery Channel, and they look as weird as the guy on Coney Island who hammers six-inch nails into his nostrils, or Nick Nolte after a couple of vodka tonics.

  I knew the basic idea behind serpent handling. I'd once assigned an Esquire article on the topic to Dennis Covington, a writer who penned a wonderful serpent-handling memoir called Salvation on Sand Mountain. As Dennis explains, the serpent handlers take their inspiration from a passage spoken by Jesus in Mark 16:17-18, which reads: "And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them . . ."

  Most Christians read the phrase "they will pick up serpents" to be a metaphor: Faith will help you overcome life's "serpents," its challenges and bad people and temptations. The serpent handlers don't see it as figurative. They show their devotion to Jesus by picking up snakes-- venomous snakes--during their services.

  You may criticize them for a loopy interpretation, but one thing is for sure: These are not the type of biblical literalists who had a preconceived political agenda and then dug up a few Scriptural passages to back up that agenda. They simply read a passage in the Bible and did what it said. They are the ultimate literalists. I needed to visit them.

  I called up a man named Jimmy Morrow, whose phone number I got from a professor of religion at the University of Tennessee. Jimmy was happy to hear from me and told me to come on down anytime.

  "Will I have to handle snakes?" I asked.

  "Absolutely not," said Jimmy. "You can come to the church for one thousand years and not handle a single snake."

  After church, "if all goes OK," Jimmy says he's having a picnic, and I'm invited. If all goes OK. That's a scary concept. These snakes are real. Though it's uncommon, people do get bitten and die--more than sixty of them in the last century.

  So, on a Saturday night, I fly to Knoxville, Tennessee, wake up in the morning, and drive ninety minutes to Del Rio, one exit past the WalMart. I pull into the driveway of the Church of God with Signs Following. It's a small, wooden one-room structure. Outside a white-painted sign quotes Mark 16:17-18.

  Jimmy arrives minutes later. He hugs me and invites me inside. He's a tall, gray-haired fifty-one-year-old with a big, jutting Clintonian chin. And he has the thickest accent I've ever heard. It takes me a while to adjust my ears--for the first half hour, I have to strain the same way I do when Shakespearean actors first start spouting their Elizabethan English.

  Jimmy is the humblest fundamentalist you'll ever meet. Even his slightly stooped posture radiates humility. "I'm just a mountain man," he tells me. He peppers his speech with a lot of "Well, I think" and "It's my interpretation."

  "I just tell the word of God, and people can take it or reject it," says Jimmy. "I've had Mormons here--I treat 'em good. I've had people from Finland here--I treat 'em good. I don't say anything against 'em. Just tell 'em the word of God."

  Jimmy was saved when he was thirteen. He saw a snake in the road, and the snake tried to bite him, but "God locked the snake's jaws. So that's when I knew it was true." Since then, he's amassed what he believes is the largest archive of serpent handling material in the world. He unlocks a large church closet to show me. It's crammed with yellowed newspaper clippings, black-and-white photos, and videotapes of National Geographic documentaries. Here you can read about how serpent handling started--in 1908, when a Tennessee preacher and ex-bootlegger named George Hensley heard the word of God. You can read about how, since then, it's spread to nine states and Canada, with about two thousand followers.

  Jimmy gets out his Bible. It's the King James Version, and nearly every passage has been highlighted in one color or another: pink, yellow, blue. He shows me Mark 16:17 and reads it so fast that it sounds like it's one long word.

  I ask Jimmy what else serpent handlers believe. Some practitioners also drink strychnine because the passage says, "if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them." They also avoid jewelry in accordance with 1 Timothy 2:9--". . . Women should adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold,
or pearls, or costly array." Some greet each other with a "holy kiss"--a kiss on the cheek or mouth--as instructed by Romans 16:16.

  Jimmy's handled thousands of poisonous serpents. Most of them he picks up in the mountains right outside his house. He's taken up copperheads, cottonmouths, rattlers, an eight-foot king cobra, and a "two-step Vietnamese viper." Which is? "If you get bit, you fall in two steps. But God gave me victory over him."

  He has been nailed, though. Twice. First in 1988. "It was just like a blow torch. I couldn't sleep for five nights. It throbbed like a toothache." The second time, in 2003, a northern copperhead got him in the chest. But he didn't feel a thing.

  Jimmy built this church himself. It's a simple church: There's a linoleum floor, an electric organ, some wooden benches, and a dozen or so tambourines, some with crosses on them, one with a Fisher-Price turtle. Since I told him I'm Jewish, he points out a Bible passage on his wall written in Hebrew. "We believe the Jews are the chosen people," he says.

  The Church of God with Signs Following doesn't quite fit into my oversimplified liberal versus conservative evangelical schema. Politically, Jimmy's a fan of LBJ-style Democrats. Theologically, he's more in line with Robertson, with an emphasis on end times.

  The parishioners are trickling in. And I do mean trickle. Only about a half dozen show up, which makes me kind of sad. Jimmy doesn't seem to mind. "One time nobody showed up. I still got up on the pulpit and preached. And this guy walking by, he stuck his head in and said, 'What are you doing? No one's here. No one can hear you.' And I said, 'Well, you heard me, didn't you?'"