Sunday school was where many of us first met the Bible. The trouble is, a lot of what we met there was not actually in it. Felt-board stories, children’s Bibles, Christmas plays and centuries of art filled in the gaps so thoroughly that most people today could not tell you where scripture ends and tradition begins.
So we went back to the text. Here are some of the best-known “Bible facts” that turn out to be something else entirely, with links to the actual verses so you can check for yourself. Fact-checking, after all, is a habit worth keeping.
1. There were three wise men
Every nativity play has three of them, usually in dressing gowns with tea towels on their heads. Matthew’s gospel, the only one that mentions them, never gives a number. It describes “magi from the East” who bring three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh (Matthew 2:1-12). The number three seems to have been inferred from the gifts. They are also not called kings, and by the time they arrive, the text says they enter “the house,” not a stable (Wikipedia: Biblical Magi).
So the traditional nativity scene, with shepherds and three kings all crowded around the manger on the same night, is a mash-up of two different gospels plus a fair amount of later tradition.
2. Eve ate an apple
Genesis only ever calls it “the fruit” of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 3). The apple became the standard image much later, especially in Western European art. One popular explanation is a pun in Latin, where malum can mean both “evil” and “apple” (Wikipedia: Forbidden fruit). Fig, grape and pomegranate have all had their supporters over the years. The apple just had better marketing.
3. The serpent in the garden was Satan
In Genesis 3, the tempter is a serpent, described as more crafty than any other wild animal God had made. That is all. The text never calls it Satan or the devil, and its punishment is to crawl on its belly and eat dust, which is a curse aimed squarely at snakes (Genesis 3). The identification of the serpent with Satan came from later Jewish and Christian interpretation.
4. Jonah was swallowed by a whale
The Book of Jonah says a “large fish” swallowed him, and he spent three days and three nights inside it (Jonah 1:17). The whale came later, from translations and retellings. Whales are mammals, not fish, but we are going to let that slide, because the bigger biological problem with the story is not the classification.
5. Noah took the animals two by two
This is the one most people would bet money on, and it is half right. Genesis 6 does say two of every kind. But a chapter later, God tells Noah to take seven pairs of every clean animal and seven pairs of every bird, and one pair of the unclean ones (Genesis 7:1-3). Scholars generally explain the difference as two older versions of the flood story woven together. Sunday school simply went with the version that fits on a felt board.
6. Mary Magdalene was a prostitute
This one did real damage to a real figure’s reputation for about 1,400 years. The gospels describe Mary Magdalene as a follower of Jesus from whom “seven demons had gone out” (Luke 8:2), and she is the first witness to the empty tomb. Nothing in the text says she was a sex worker. That idea is usually traced to a sermon by Pope Gregory the Great in 591, which merged her with other unnamed women in the gospels (Smithsonian Magazine). The Catholic Church quietly separated the figures again in its 1969 calendar reforms (Wikipedia: Mary Magdalene).
7. “God helps those who help themselves”
Plenty of people assume this is a Bible verse. It is not. The phrase appears in various forms in ancient Greek writing and was popularised in English by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1736 (Wikipedia: God helps those who help themselves). Some theologians would argue the Bible’s message points closer to the opposite.
8. “Cleanliness is next to godliness”
Every parent who ever wanted a tidy bedroom has deployed this one. It is not scripture either. It was popularised by John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, in an 18th-century sermon, and the idea itself is older (The Phrase Finder).
9. “Spare the rod, spoil the child”
The Bible has something close: “Those who spare the rod hate their children” (Proverbs 13:24). But the catchy rhyming version comes from Hudibras, a 17th-century satirical poem by Samuel Butler (The Phrase Finder). Somewhat fittingly, it started life in a satire.
10. “Money is the root of all evil”
The actual verse is “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). The short version drops the most important two words. Make of that what you will next time the collection plate comes round.
11. The lion will lie down with the lamb
A lovely image, and a very popular one on greeting cards. Isaiah actually says the wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion will be together, led by a little child (Isaiah 11:6). The lion and the lamb are in the same verse. They just never actually meet.
Why this matters
None of these are earth-shattering on their own. Nobody’s faith rests on the headcount of the magi. But together they show something interesting: most people’s picture of the Bible is built far more from culture, art and repetition than from reading it. Plenty of atheists say that reading the whole thing, cover to cover, was the moment the doubts really started.
So here is a low-key suggestion for anyone curious, religious or not: pick one story you think you know, and read the actual chapter. You might be surprised what is there, and what isn’t.
What did you learn in Sunday school that turned out not to be in the book at all? Let us know on the Facebook page.