I received an article this week in my inbox dealing with the American president’s tweets supporting teaching Biblical literacy.

My knee jerk reaction was “oh no, something I agree with him on.” I love the idea of teaching Biblical literacy to high-school aged students, and would have jumped on such a class if it was offered in my school. I think most people are lacking in Biblical literacy, especially those who grew up with a Biblically-based faith tradition. I group myself among them. The Bible is an ancient, cobbled together text with roots in a hundred fertile grounds, and it is incredibly difficult (although worthwhile!) to even attempt to understand it.

The problem with these classes, and this is something the linked article brings up, is that people promoting these kinds of classes are rarely teaching a genuine kind of literacy. Instead, the curriculum deals with a narrow presentation of stories that support one particular view of the text–a treatment that does a tremendous disservice both to competing faith traditions, and to the Bible itself.

The thing that lit a spark in me for this subject, the thing that made me want to learn everything I could about the Bible and its origins, as well as the millenia of exegesis and commentary surrounding it, was learning that there is not one but actually two creation stories in Genesis.

If you haven’t read it in a while or if, like me, you grew up with a tradition that only taught the one, let me refresh you. (if you know what I’m talking about, you’ll have to forgive me the recap. I genuinely get excited about this)

So Genesis 1 starts with God on his lonesome, above a formless void. He creates light, then the sky, then the land and the seas, then swarms of living creatures and plants, and so forth until finally, on the sixth day, “God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” It continues “So God created humankind in his image/in the image of God he created them;/ male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:26 to 1:27, New Oxford Annotated Bible).

But then, record scratch, in Genesis chapter 2, there’s a whole new version of events. In this one, “when no plant of the field was yet in the earth…then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils.” So we have a different timeline, and a completely different manner of creation. Before, God spoke and it was so. In Genesis 2, God has to form man, and give him breath. We have a more physical picture of God here. Perhaps most importantly, as this is the detail that was stressed in my learning of the story, and the thing that continues to echo today, it is not until Genesis chapter 18 that woman is created. “Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” (Notice the depiction of God questioning his own creation). God presents man with all of the beasts of creation (another difference from Genesis 1), before finally putting him to sleep and creating woman from one of the man’s ribs.

That’s the version I learned, the version that was used to teach me why women were subservient to men and why wives had to obey their husbands. Learning there was a second version, a completely different version, was exhilarating to me. This text that I thought I knew–that I thought, frankly, was pretty boring–came alive to me then. How interesting, how complex could my Sunday school discussions have been if this information had been included? How exciting would it be for interested students to learn the challenging and engaging truth behind a book that many of them see as stodgy and monochromatic?

That’s the way Biblical literacy should be taught, but the prospect is scary for people who think that the text will lose meaning if you begin to point out the inconsistencies. The truth is though, something doesn’t last for thousands of years just because nobody noticed its faults. It lasts because generation after generation discover the mystery and the wonder wrapped in and around those perceived mistakes–it lasts because people have engaged with it.