A friend informed me recently that he believed in Jesus Christ as his Savior but thought the Bible was deliberately written as myth in some parts. As an example, he gave the Old Testament account of the parting of the Red Sea.

I knew from a previous conversation with him that he had been reading the book, "Battle for God," that discusses religious history in terms of "mythos" and "logos."

Written by Karen Armstrong, the book purports that people in the premodern world had a "different view of history" and were more interested in bringing out an "eternal dimension" to a story than reporting the facts of it. Hence, the Bible story of the Israelites escaping Egypt by crossing the Red Sea that Moses miraculously parted in half is, according to Armstrong, a purposeful myth "to be linked with other stories about rites of passage, immersion in the deep, and gods splitting a sea in two to create a new reality."

"One could say that unless an historical event is mythologized in this way, and liberated from the past in an inspiring cult, it cannot be religious," she writes. "To ask whether the Exodus from Egypt took place exactly as recounted in the Bible or to demand historical and scientific evidence to prove that it is factually true is to mistake the nature and purpose of this story."

If the Bible is meant to be taken as myth in certain parts, why doesn't it tell us so? Instead we are told it is God's Word (written with capital letters) and is synonymous with the truth.

When you give testimony in court you must swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why would God give us less than that?

How do you put any stock in a book that forcefully and repeatedly says it fully represents the only true God and is Him but is actually full of myths the reader is left to distinguish from on his own? By my thinking, it's either God's Word or it's not.

Of course the Bible says God requires faith in order for belief in his Word to become real:

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen - through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." (Heb. 11: 1-3)

As Romans 10:17 says, "Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God."

One of the most succinct and all-encompassing definitions of God in the Bible actually tells us He is synonomous with His word: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God." (John 1:1)

Similarly, the account in Revelations prophesying the second coming of Jesus Christ relays, "And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called the Word of God." (Rev. 19:13)

In an intercessionary prayer to God before his crucifixion, Christ exhorts, "Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth." (John 17: 8; 17:17)

After his resurrection from the dead and just before his ascension into heaven, Christ briefly appeared in the flesh before a small group of people who expressed grief over losing their savior on the cross.

Upon eating in front of them to prove he was Christ in their midst, he stressed to them, "These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me…thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day:" (Luke 24:44; 46)

Jesus Christ was relentless in stressing the need for faith in the Scriptures as coming from God and even foretelling Christ's birth and ministry as the Messiah. When defending his Messianic claims before a group of disbelieving Jews, for example, Jesus Christ explained, "The Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of me - and ye have not his word abiding in you: for whom he hath sent, him ye believe not. Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me." (John 5: 37-39)

A few verses down in the same passage, Christ actually argues, "For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?" (John 5: 46-47)