There are a lot of things that aren’t in the Bible, but for some reason everybody assumes they are.
Old Testament stories
The Bible doesn’t say Adam had another wife named Lilith. The only “lilith” mentioned in the Bible is some kind of creature that Isaiah said would haunt the ruins of Edom. Possibly a demon, or maybe just an owl. And the word Isaiah uses is plural, so it’s not an individual. The idea of Lilith being a wife of Adam seems to have come from an 8th-century work of satirical fiction.
The Bible doesn’t say Adam and Eve ate an apple. It just says they ate a certain kind of fruit that was forbidden. You don’t think eating apples is forbidden, do you? I’m not sure why anyone would assume the fruit that was forbidden was an apple, when they don’t regard apples as forbidden in any other context.1
It doesn’t say that nudity became sinful when Adam and Eve sinned, or that their sin was actually discovering sex, or anything like that. The first thing God ever said to humans was telling them to reproduce, so he clearly didn’t have a problem with sex. And it never says God thought there was anything wrong with people being naked. That was Adam and Eve’s own sin-induced perception, which God didn’t really seem to agree with.
It doesn’t say Cain and Abel were Adam and Eve’s only children. They were their first, but it says Adam had other sons and daughters. Noah, and therefore everyone after him, was descended from Adam and Eve’s son Seth, not from Cain. (At least not patrilineally.)
It doesn’t say the mark of Cain was a curse of any kind. It says God cursed Cain, but then agreed to also give him a mark that would prevent people from killing him. Having the mark was desirable for Cain. It also doesn’t say Cain’s mark was the origin of dark skin. The Bible never says what the mark looked like. It doesn’t say Ham or his son Canaan had dark skin, either.
The Bible doesn’t say the dove brought back an olive branch to Noah. It was an olive leaf. Only one English version I know of mistranslates it as a branch.
It doesn’t say Job was patient. In fact, Job specifically rejects the idea that there’s any reason he should be patient. His resolve to refrain from criticizing God lasts no more than the first two chapters. Then for the next thirty chapters or so, he does almost nothing but rant about how cruelly and unjustly God is treating him, and how he can’t wait to meet God so he can let him know what God has done wrong.2 I have no idea why people think of Job as patient. What could he have done that would show less patience?
It doesn’t say God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of homosexuality. The Sodomite men in the story do seem to be gay; they all want to have sex with the men visiting Lot, and they aren’t interested when Lot offers to let them have sex with his daughters instead.3 But the Bible never says that was why God destroyed Sodom.
There are two passages in the Bible that give specific reasons for Sodom and Gomorrah being considered evil. One is a list of failings that have nothing to do with sex. The other says they were punished for sexual immorality, but it doesn’t specify what kind of acts they were being punished for.
The Bible doesn’t say Joseph was the youngest son of Jacob. Benjamin was the youngest.
It doesn’t say God killed Onan for masturbating. It says God killed him for refusing to impregnate his brother’s wife. He could have completely avoided any kind of sexual act, and God still would have killed him. It doesn’t say Onan ever masturbated, and God never said there was anything wrong with masturbation anyway.
It doesn’t say Moses grew up not knowing he was a Hebrew. There is no scene in the Bible where he finds out he was adopted.
It doesn’t say the Pharaoh that Moses freed Israel from was Ramesses II. Most Pharaohs mentioned in the Bible, including that one, go unnamed.
It doesn’t say atheists are fools, or that they’re uncommonly evil. That verse in the Psalms says fools are atheists, which is not the same thing. If all fools are atheists, it’s still possible that most atheists aren’t fools. And it says everyone in the world is evil, not just the atheists.
It doesn’t say Jezebel was a prostitute. Apparently some people think she was because it mentions her putting on makeup once?? But in context, it certainly doesn’t seem like she’s trying to seduce anyone.
It doesn’t say Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Every translation I know of calls it a fish. Not that the ancient writers of the story would have even been aware of that distinction. And the mention of the fish in the book of Matthew does sometimes get translated as “whale”. But still, that’s not what the actual book of Jonah says. So why do people always call it a whale?
New Testament stories
The Bible doesn’t say anything about an “immaculate conception”. It does mention a virgin birth, of course, but the immaculate conception is something entirely different. Immaculate conception means being conceived without inheriting sin, which some Christians believe is true of Jesus’s mother Mary. But that didn’t become an official part of Catholic belief until the 19th century, because the Bible says nothing about it.
It doesn’t say how old Mary was when she married Joseph. Getting married at 12 wouldn’t have been anything unusual in the past, but the Bible doesn’t actually mention her age. Or his.
It doesn’t say Mary and Joseph were immigrants when Jesus was born. Some American liberals like to call them “undocumented immigrants” or “refugees” for some reason. They were not any of those things. At least not until they fled to Egypt a couple of years later, which I’m pretty sure is not what those people have in mind.
It doesn’t say Mary and Joseph had to stay in a stable because there was no room in the inn and they couldn’t go somewhere else because she was about to give birth. It just says she gave birth “while they were there”, not necessarily the night they arrived. And it doesn’t even mention an inn or a stable at all! All it says is that Mary put her baby in a manger “because there was no guest room available“. More likely, they were staying with relatives. With the livestock that the relatives had brought into their house, because people did that back then.
It doesn’t actually mention any animals being present when Jesus was born, though.
It doesn’t say Jesus was born on the 25th of December. Winter seems like an unlikely time for a Roman census. Or for shepherds to be out in the fields at night. Based on what the Bible actually says, it’s arguably more likely Jesus was conceived around that date, and born in September.4
The Bible doesn’t say three wise men visited baby Jesus, much less say what their names were. It just says the wise men (however many there might have been) brought him three gifts. It doesn’t say the wise men were kings. They were Magi, which might mean they were mathematicians, astronomers, priests, astrologers, alchemists, or magicians, but not kings. And it doesn’t say the wise men came on the night Jesus was born. It was more like two years later.
The Bible doesn’t say Mary was a virgin all her life. It says Joseph married her, and abstained from sex until Jesus was born. (The author wouldn’t have included that qualifier if he hadn’t mean that they did have sex after Jesus was born.) And later, it says Jesus had brothers and sisters.5
It doesn’t say Christ was Jesus’s last name. His followers called him by the title Christ, because they believed he was the Messiah, which is what Christ means. But other people wouldn’t have called him that. To everyone else, he was Jesus of Nazareth, or Jesus son of Joseph.
It doesn’t say Jesus had long hair.6 According to the Bible, long hair on a man is disgraceful. It doesn’t say Jesus dressed in white, either. The Bible doesn’t say anything about what he looked like. Unless you count the alleged Old Testament prophecies about him, which call him horrifyingly ugly.
It doesn’t say Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. Just about all it says about her is that she saw Jesus die and she saw him after he rose and she used to be possessed by seven demons. So where did people get the idea that she was a prostitute? Well, Luke and John both have stories where a woman pours perfume on Jesus’s feet. Luke’s story describes the woman as sinful, and in John’s story the woman is Lazarus’s sister Mary.
But to conclude that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute based on that, you would have to make three questionable assumptions: that both of these stories are supposed to refer to the same event even though they take place in different locations, that Mary Magdalene was Lazarus’s sister (note that there are several different people named Mary in the gospels), and that the “sinful” woman was specifically a prostitute.
The Bible doesn’t say the Jews killed Jesus. At least not directly. It says they wanted to,7 but under Roman rule they weren’t allowed to execute anyone themselves. So they had to convince the Romans to do it. Pilate tried to put all the blame on the Jews, even though he could have easily overruled their wishes if he really didn’t want Jesus to die. But anyway, the Bible says it was really God’s idea. Blame him.
It doesn’t say Saul of Tarsus changed his name and became Paul when he converted to Christianity. He just always had two names, a Hebrew name and a Latin name, because he was born both a Jew and a Roman citizen. He may have used the name Paul more often when he was traveling outside Judea to preach to the Gentiles, because he wanted to be relatable, but he never stopped being Saul.
Laws and sins
The law of Moses does not contain 613 rules. A certain 3rd-century rabbi claimed there were exactly 613 commandments in the first five books of the Bible, but that’s not what you’ll find if you actually count them. That rabbi never actually provided a numbered list of 613 commandments. He just decided that was how many there were, because that was equal to the number of days in a year plus the number of bones in the human body. (Which is neither true nor relevant.)
Nobody bothered to try actually counting the rules until centuries later. By then, the 613 idea was well-established dogma, so of course they always managed to find ways to force the number to come out that way. It’s hard to say how many rules there actually are, because it’s not always clear where one rule ends and another begins, or whether two similar rules should be considered the same one. But anyone trying to honestly count them without the preconceived idea that there have to be 613 of them is very unlikely to find that exact number.
The Bible doesn’t say there are seven deadly sins. The early Christians thought there were certain sins that would condemn you to hell, but those were different ones. The original spiritually deadly sins had more to do with the Ten Commandments. In the early Middle Ages, a pope came up with the list of seven kinds of sin… which actually include all sins, because it was meant to be a way to categorize sins, not a list of specific particularly bad sins that can be avoided. But then those seven categories got conflated with that idea of spiritually deadly sins.
The Bible doesn’t have a law against drinking or getting drunk. It does sometimes say drinking is bad, but more often it says it’s good. There was never any kind of actual ban on alcohol in the Bible.
It doesn’t say priests, monks, bishops, etc. have to be celibate. The Bible mentions priests having wives, and it doesn’t say there was anything wrong with that. Peter, who is considered the first pope, is also implied to have had a wife.
It doesn’t say it’s wrong to have sex outside of marriage. Non-marital sex may have been frowned upon in ancient Israel, but it was not forbidden. The Bible doesn’t even require you to later marry the person you have sex with. Jewish law allows people (and not just kings) to have sexual partners who they aren’t officially married to, called concubines. Abraham and David had concubines, and God approved of everything those guys ever did.8
Some versions of the Bible do forbid “fornication“, but that’s a mistranslation of a word that originally meant prostitution, and later came to mean all kinds of disapproved sexual activities. Other versions of the Bible, including the one I’m working with, translate that word as “sexual immorality“. That’s probably a more accurate translation than “fornication”, but it’s also too vague to mean anything. When the Bible says you should abstain from “sexual immorality”, all it’s saying is that the sex acts that are bad are bad. It doesn’t say which ones those are. So that’s a pretty pointless thing to say.
If only married couples were allowed to have sex, the Bible wouldn’t have whole chapters full of rules about who you shouldn’t have sex with. There would instead only be rules about who you shouldn’t marry, which would make all those rules about sex redundant.
The Bible doesn’t say contraception is wrong. It may have rules against some specific methods, but it’s not clear that the birth control aspect is actually the point of those rules. And there may be stories in the Bible where God isn’t happy with someone who used some kind of birth control method in a specific situation where that specific person had a duty to have children, but it never says that no one is allowed to use birth control ever.
It doesn’t say polygamy is wrong. If fact, the Bible has almost nothing but good things to say about polygamy. As long as you’re not the king of Israel, God’s law allows you to have as many wives as you can provide for. And even kings weren’t limited to just one wife. David had quite a few wives at the same time, and God approved of everything David ever did. The Book of Mormon condemns polygamy, but the Bible does not.
The Bible doesn’t say gambling is a sin. Gambling is in fact a bad idea,9 but the Bible has nothing to say about it.
Proverbs and sayings
The Bible doesn’t say “God works in mysterious ways”. That’s a misquotation of a hymn written in the 18th century, and it’s not based on any Bible verse.
It doesn’t say “Cleanliness is next to godliness”. Somebody came up with that saying just a couple centuries ago. But apparently people who don’t read the Bible assume it’s in the Bible because it has the word God in it.
It doesn’t say “God helps those who help themselves“. That’s a monotheistic version of an ancient Greek proverb.
The Bible doesn’t say all sins are equal. It says some sins are greater than others. It says some sins lead to death and others don’t. It says God is willing to forgive some sins and not others.
The Bible doesn’t say “spare the rod and spoil the child”. What it says is that if you spare the rod, you hate your child. No version of the Bible I know of uses the word “spoil” here. The “spoil the child” quote actually comes from a 17th-century satirical poem by Samuel Butler. Who was probably using it to mean something quite different from what people mean when they quote him and think they’re quoting the Bible.
The Bible doesn’t say “Pride comes before a fall”. The actual biblical Proverb consists of two statements that both mean the same thing as that. But neither of them puts the words “pride” and “a fall” together in the same statement.
It doesn’t say “This too shall pass”. That’s a Persian proverb, that somebody misattributed to Solomon at some point.
Jesus didn’t say “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime”. That saying is based on something in a book written in the 19th century.
The Lord’s Prayer doesn’t say “forgive us our trespasses”. Well, it does say that in one version of the Bible, the Matthews Bible. But who reads that version? It’s from the 16th century, and the archaic language is pretty hard to read. The New Testament part of the Matthews Bible has been updated into more modern language, but that was just eight years ago at the time I’m writing this. So I doubt everybody got the idea that it says “trespasses” by reading the old Matthews Bible, and certainly not the New Matthews Bible. Most English versions of the Bible, including the King James, say “debts“, not “trespasses”.
The Bible doesn’t say “To err is human; to forgive, divine”. That’s from an 18th-century essay by Alexander Pope.
It doesn’t say “Hate the sin, love the sinner”. Augustine’s the first person I know of who said something like that, a few centuries after Jesus didn’t say it.
It doesn’t mention a “straight and narrow path”. Jesus describes both the gate and the road to life as narrow. But some versions translate one or the other of those descriptions as “strait”… which is an old word that means narrow, not straight. Thinking he’s calling the path straight misses the point, which is that the road to life is more difficult than the road to destruction.
It doesn’t say “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”. Paul does say something to that effect, about how he likes to be all things to all people, but the quote about the Romans isn’t from the book of Romans or any other of Paul’s letters. It comes from Ambrose a few centuries later.
It doesn’t say “charity begins at home”. The Bible does express a similar idea, but that quote itself is from the 17th century.
It doesn’t say money is the root of all evil… It says the love of money is the root of all evil.
Angels and demons
The Bible doesn’t say Satan used to be a regular angel named Lucifer. Some versions of the Bible use the Latin word “lucifer” (which can mean either “light-bringing” or “the planet Venus”) to refer to both an oppressive Babylonian king and Jesus. It calls Jesus Lucifer. But it never calls Satan that, and there is no origin story for Satan in the Bible.
Jesus does mention having seen Satan fall from heaven. But in context, that seems to be a more recent event that explains why Jesus’s disciples have power over demons. It’s about Satan recently having been made less powerful. It’s not an explanation of where Satan came from to begin with.
It doesn’t say the snake that tempted Eve was Satan. It introduces the snake not by saying he was the devil in disguise, or anything like that, but just by saying that snakes were more crafty than the other animals. So it’s just another animal, but a particularly clever kind.
If it had actually been Satan, why would God curse snakes for what Satan did? He doesn’t punish Satan, he punishes the snake and its descendants,10 making them the most cursed of all animals. That would be completely unreasonable if it had actually been Satan. Snakes would be innocent, unless it really was just a snake that did it.
Whoever was responsible for tempting Eve was cursed to crawl through the dirt on his belly, and to be at risk of being crushed by humans. Doesn’t sound like Satan at all. Satan is free to roam all over the world and even visit heaven when he feels like it. Satan wouldn’t even be able to stand if he was subject to that curse, yet he is later described as standing.
The Bible doesn’t say anything about a god or demon named Baphomet. The whole idea of “Baphomet” originated in the 14th century, when some confused Christians thought Mohammed was a pagan god that Muslims worshiped. And then they started getting the name wrong too.
It doesn’t say the ghost of Samuel that talked with Saul after being summoned by a medium was anything other than the actual spirit of Samuel. Christians tend to speculate that it was really a demon pretending to be Samuel or something. Because Christians can’t accept what the Bible says when it disagrees with what they think the Bible should say. But there is absolutely nothing in the Bible itself that indicates that it wasn’t the real Samuel.
Look at what ghost-Samuel says. He reprimands Saul and tells him why God is displeased with him, which is consistent with what we already knew God thought. He points out that God has done what he said he would do. And he accurately predicts what else God is about to do. What was demonic about that? He just sounds like a prophet of God.
The Bible doesn’t say cherubs look like winged babies. It says cherubim (which is another plural form of the word “cherub”) are fiery creatures with up to four faces (mostly the faces of animals) all around their heads so they never have to turn around. They have at least four wings with hands, gleaming calf-feet, and eyes all over their bodies. They also have big, sparkly, eye-covered, intersecting wheels next to them that move along with them.
Most angels in the Bible do look fairly close to how you’d expect, though. Well, it doesn’t say anything about halos, and none of them look like women or babies. And some of them have excessive amounts of wings. But it’s mainly just the cherubs that look really weird.
Aside from a couple of mentions of an archangel, the Bible doesn’t say anything about any kind of hierarchy among angels. Or among demons. Christians made up a hierarchy of angels in the 5th century based on the hierarchy of the Roman government.
It doesn’t say angels play harps. That idea comes from the 17th-century poem Paradise Lost.
It doesn’t say the devil makes deals with people, offering them special abilities in exchange for their souls. The closest thing to that in the Bible is when the devil “tempts” Jesus with various offers, which are not really very compelling. Jesus never accepts any of them, of course, because the devil sucks at making deals.
It does say the devil is red and has horns… More specifically, he’s an enormous red dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns. That’s the only description of Satan’s appearance in the Bible. It doesn’t say anything about a goatee, hooves, or a trident.11
It does not say 666 is the number of the devil. That’s the number of the beast. The beast is not the devil. The dragon is the devil. They may look rather alike, but the dragon and the beast are two distinct characters. And apparently the beast represents a human, since it specifically says the number of the beast is “the number of a man”. Not Satan.
It doesn’t say Satan lives in or rules over hell. It says he lives in the city of Pergamum. (Or maybe in heaven?) And one day, he’s going to be sent to hell as a punishment, to be tortured forever. The Bible also never says anything about any demons living in hell. Or about Satan or the demons doing the torturing. (Why would they punish people for sinning? Isn’t that what they want people to do?)
Apocalypse and afterlife
There is no book called “Revelations” in the Bible. It’s Revelation.
The Bible doesn’t say that “wars and rumors of wars” are a sign that the world is about to end. What Jesus was saying was the exact opposite: When you hear about wars and rumors of wars, don’t be alarmed, because the end still isn’t here. (There have always been wars and rumors of wars, so how could they be a sign of anything unusual?)
The Bible doesn’t give names to any of the four horsemen of the apocalypse other than Death. It doesn’t even hint that one of them is “Pestilence”.
It doesn’t say there’s going to be an individual called “the Antichrist”. The Bible only uses that term a few times, and it pretty much just uses it to mean anyone who opposes Jesus. Or even anyone who isn’t a Christian. It says there are many “antichrists” in the world already. There are prophecies in at least three different books of the Bible that people say are about “the Antichrist”, but none of those books themselves actually use that term.
The Bible doesn’t say hell is in a cave beneath the earth. And it doesn’t say hell is divided into nine circles. Dante made that up for his Divine Comedy, which is yet another work of satirical fiction that Christians can’t tell apart from the Bible.
The Bible doesn’t say people in hell will be given fittingly personalized punishments. That sounds more like Tartarus from Greek mythology. The Bible just says they’ll be burned.
It doesn’t say “When there is no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the earth”. That’s just the tagline for the movie Dawn of the Dead.
It doesn’t say there’s a purgatory for people who God decides need to suffer a bit before they can be allowed into heaven. Nor a limbo so that people who never got a chance to be saved don’t quite have to go to hell. The Catholic Church decided that purgatory was a thing in the 15th century. And limbo isn’t really an official doctrine at all.
It doesn’t say there’s going to be a Rapture where all the good people will get taken to heaven while the bad people get left behind. Jesus did say something about some people being taken and others left. But when asked where they would be taken, his “answer” sure didn’t sound like anything to do with heaven. One of his parables makes it more clear: The first people who will be taken away at the end of the age will be sinners being taken to hell.
It doesn’t say Saint Peter is the gatekeeper of heaven. The only person who takes that role in the Bible is Jesus.
It doesn’t say humans become angels when they die. All it says is that we will be like angels, in that we won’t reproduce anymore.
And the Bible doesn’t say the lion will lie down with the lamb. It says the wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the goat, etc. But it says nothing specifically about a lion and a lamb together. The lion and lamb version seems to have originated in the song “Peace in the Valley”, written in 1937 and later popularized by Elvis.
Related: I’ve also made a list of things that some English translations of the Bible do say, but that differ from the source material they’re supposed to be translated from. And a list of ideas Christians have about morality that have no basis in the Bible.