I led a seder today, as requested by the leadership of the Student Christian Fellowship. And while I was drawing up the plans for it, I realized that I couldn’t have a real conversation about the theological and ethical significance of the Confederacy without looking at the Passover story. The Passover story is a memorial of the birth of the Jewish nation, starting with the spectacular and violent deliverance of an enslaved ethnic group from the hands of its oppressive slave-drivers. This is a central story, undergirding, influencing, and casting light on all the rest of the Bible. In the first half of Genesis, Abraham is assured that one day his descendants will be enslaved, only to be freed later. Exodus is about the freeing of the slaves, and God’s Torah being given to prepare them to navigate the choices they will have in free life. Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy outline where the slaves were sent after bondage and the ethical and ritual principles that were to govern their national life. Joshua explains where they found rest after their slavery, and Judges outlines their ongoing struggles to keep their freedom. Samuel and Kings illustrate how the free declined once they sacrificed their freedom for security. The prophets seek to stop the Israelites from losing their freedom, and they tell a story of regaining freedom after the Babylonian captivity. Throughout, God repeatedly presents his credentials by saying, ‘I am YHWH who brought you out of Egypt.’

The Torah is given upon the deliverance of the Israelites, and the ten commandments open with ‘I am YHWH who brought you out of Egypt.’ It underlies everything for Judaism. This is underlined by the annual nature of the Passover meal. A lamb is slaughtered, blood is smeared on doors, and the Angel of Destruction passes by and does not kill the Israelite firstborns. An annual rehearsal dinner is instituted, its goal being, among other things, to teach the children so that the community as a whole can continue to remember, collectively, the deliverance. The Exodus self-consciously makes the deliverance underlying framework which supports the relationship of God with his people.

Now, I realize that some will object, saying that the Bible actually supports slavery and that there’s passages to prove it. And those objection will be dealt with in good time. But for the present, let’s keep the laws regulating slavery on the periphery, where they belong, and let’s keep the central thing in the center. God, the central narrative tells us, wants to free do so people from oppression and will go to extravagant lengths to do so. The central cry of the Bible is for freedom, from slavery, from serfdom, from sin, from division, from hatred, and from all that holds us back in running the race of life, from fighting the good fight.

A passing knowledge of the Hebrew Bible is enough to make clear the centrality of the seder story to the Jewish religion. But it’s there in the New Testament, undergirding it too. The New Testament is built on the Old, and Jesus himself was crucified after eating a passover meal. That last supper was a seder, and the institution of the Lord’s supper which he established was done with the bread and wine of the traditional Passover meal. Easter, celebrating the death of Jesus Christ, envisions him as a Passover sacrifice and makes Easter a transformed memorial based on the original Passover. 1 Corinthians 5, combating corruption in the Church, explains the need to avoid malice, evil, and boasting by comparing it to leaven, which leavens the whole loaf of bread. It urges us to make our metaphorical bread unleavened, and in case anyone has any doubts that combating corruption is not assisted by the Passover metaphor, we’re told that we are to purge out the leaven ‘because Christ, our passover, has been sacrificed.’

Later in the same letter (1 Corinthians 11), Paul goes spends eighteen verses regulating the reconstituted seder of the Church, threatening sickness or even death to those who do not take seriously God’s memorial of his deliverance of his people.

Jesus was also very conscious of his role as the one who frees. When in Luke four he came out of the desert after defeating the devil’s attempts to tempt him, Jesus went into a synagogue and announced the debut of his ministry through powerful freedom language, language so forceful that it resulted in an attempt on his life:

The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to evangelize the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to announce liberation to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty the broken.

Through and through, Christianity is permeated by the seder story and all its variants. The Bible spends a massive amount of ink telling one central story: God has, God does, God will set his people free from what enslaves them.

What I want to draw attention to is another project which goes on in the minds of people, one I will call “Build a Jesus.” There are many people who talk well of Jesus, saying perhaps that he was a wise teacher who taught us to love each other, but nothing more. Now, the four gospels say otherwise–they consider him the Son of God. So where do these people who speak of Jesus as a mere wise man get their Jesus? Believe it or not, there are no other major records of Jesus life anywhere in the world independent of the four gospels. So what people do when they reject the gospels’ claims about Jesus while still building a picture of him from the gospels–and there’s no other picture of him available–they are using the gospels as a selection of parts to Build a Jesus.

Therefore we have all sorts of people who have built their own Jesuses. And I don’t find a Jesus that I’ve constructed on my own worth listening to. That’s another reason I believe in the accuracy of scripture.

The Tanakh is composed of twenty-four Hebrew books, divided into thirty-nine in today’s Bibles. First in the Tanakh are the five books of the Law: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.  Next in line are the eight Prophetic books: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve.  Today, Samuel and Kings are divided into two books each, and the Twelve is divided into twelve books, one each for its authors: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. And the third group is the Writings: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles.  Today Ezra and Nehemiah are two separate books.

The New Testament is divided into four groups, which are agreed upon by the Churches throughout the world: Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox. First among the books are the four gospels, biographies of Jesus’ life: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Next is a book that is the sequel to Luke: Acts, a book of early Church history. Following Acts are two groups of letters, the General Epistles, which include James, First Peter, Second Peter, First John, Second John, Third John, and Jude. The other group of letters is the Pauline Epistles, letters by the apostle Paul: Romans, First Corinthians, Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, First Thessalonians, Second Thessalonians, First Timothy, Second Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. It is debated whether the book of Hebrews is part of the Pauline or General category. Finally, the New Testament is ended with the book of the Revelation, by John.

This is the canon: an official count of what books are a part and what books aren’t.  But there’s still more to discuss concerning the limits of what is and what is not scripture.  More on that later.