Understanding the Bible + Bible scholarship

One of my great frustrations in reading most modern Biblical scholarship is that a fundamental error in logic has crept into the modern mind, rendering most of their results fallacious. The problem has resulted from the blurring of two separate lines of study. The first legitimate line of study is called “textual criticism,” which is the responsibility to make sure that the text that is handed down is the most accurate, and that it is well understood where errors in copying or translation may have taken place. This is an extremely valid challenge, one that the ancients themselves had to deal with. Remember that the few copies of Biblical text that existed were laboriously hand copied and distributed over large areas, and thus many versions with many errors were in circulation over the centuries. For example read this quote from Boadt’s “Reading the Old Testament:”

There were quite a variety of copies of the Hebrew Old Testament available by the time of Jesus. Since copying had gone on for a long time already, many different editions circulated, some longer with sections added in, some shorter with sections omitted. All had some change or error in them. Since a scribe in one area often copied from a local text, the same error or change often appeared regularly in one place, say, Babylon, but not in texts copied in Egypt. Thus, at the time of Christ, three major “families” or groupings of text types could be found: the Babylonian, the Palestinian, and the Egyptian. The Babylonian Jews, for example, treasured their texts which had a very short, tightly-knit edition of the Pentateuch, while Egyptian Jews used a ricer and more expanded text. Only at the end of the first century A.D. did the rabbis decide to end the confusion and select one text, the best they could find, for each part of the Bible. In the Pentateuch they chose the Babylonian tradition, but in other books, such as the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, they followed the Palestinian-type text.

Let this very well written paragraph (from a larger and very well written chapter on this topic) sink in for a moment. At the time of Jesus Christ himself there were many different editions of the Old Testament in circulation. People relied on their local copies, which have been copied and recopied over and over, creating what you can almost think of as dialects. Everyone was still speaking the same “language,” since the facts of the Bible were not in dispute, but sections were dropped, pieces repeated or mistranslated, annotations in the margins by scholars were erroneously thought to be part of the text by the next generation of hand copiers, and so forth. The effect as like the same language developed with regional dialects. One could still rely on the “word of God” accuracy of the Old Testament, but human hands and the frailty of the technology allowed the development of these differing editions, which you can think of as “dialects.”

I’m reminded of when I was touring the Tower of London about twenty years ago and I overheard an American tourist tell her fellow companion, in an obvious thick American southern drawl, “I can’t understand a word he is saying” about their English Beefeater guide. They both speak English, and if they were talking face to face they’d have little trouble understanding each other, but the guide’s voice transmitted over distance and with difficulty hearing made comprehending their shared language a difficult chore. The Old Testament in the time of Jesus was easy to share and understand if people had two editions side by side in front of them, so it is not as though accuracy of the word of God was ever risked or in question. Rather, the “one local copy” was passed down with a type of dialect flavor in each region, and those differences had to be reconciled, focusing on determining, if one could, where an error, mistranslation or deliberate editing occurred.

As an aside, this is one reason why genuine Biblical scholars need to be skeptical whenever a new discovery of ancient Biblical text is found. This modern generation thinks that every archaeological dig reveals the “truth” or the “oldest and thus purest” form of something, including Biblical text. However, remember that one might be excavating just a very old copy of one of the “dialects” that had evolved in a region. Orthodox Jewish Biblical scholars, in my opinion, have the greatest integrity in this regard since they have preserved continuity of the faith and cultural context against which they can determine the origin and the context of any newly excavated text.

So to summarize, the first of the two valid focuses of Biblical research and study is the determination of the accuracy of both the text and the translations that have occurred. Boadt quotes Pope Pius XII in his encyclical letter “Divino afflante spiritu” (1943) who quotes St. Augustine (354-430) that the main responsibility of biblical scholars is to produce a corrected text. So the Catholic Church is “on the record” as stating with consistency over a period of more than fifteen hundred years that an accurate Biblical text is the highest priority of Biblical scholarship. Boadt quotes Pope Pius XII as stating that the “text be restored as perfectly as possible, be purified from the corruptions due to the carelessness of the copyists and be freed, as far as may be done, from glosses and omissions.” I focus on this continuity of thought in the Catholic Church because I resent the implication by some modern non-Catholic children of the Reformation that the Catholics are anything but the guardians of the accuracy of the complete Biblical text. The Bible that the children of the Reformation use is the result of such Catholic Church guardianship.

The second valid area of Biblical scholarship is called exegesis, which is the study of the content of the Bible within its cultural and historical context. This is obviously necessary because one cannot understand the faith message within the Bible if one does not understand the cultural context. Regular readers of mine know that I often have to explain a cultural analogy or parable so that modern readers understand the gist of what the Biblical passage is stating. For example, this generation that knows little of agriculture has difficulty grasping some of the agricultural references in their deepest meaning. I recently wrote to explain the custom and the religious requirement for farmers to leave some harvest in the field so that the poor and the traveler can obtain food for free. This is an important cultural context to have when understanding the Jews who criticized Jesus and the disciples for availing themselves of that food on the Sabbath. Reading that passage as many moderns do without that context drops much of the importance and nuance of the conflict in faith between Jews and Jesus, focusing on the forbidding of work on the Sabbath without understanding that they were also criticizing all of the poor who actually “performed work” to feed themselves and their families on the Sabbath. Yes, the Jews were arguing that the poor should go hungry all day on the Sabbath if they did not plan ahead to store up food that they could just eat without effort. Without understanding cultural and historical context one misses much of the faith information that is being conveyed in the Bible. Here are two paragraphs from Boadt:

The Bible is much more than a “text” to be restored to its original beauty; it is the literature of a living people. And because authors in every age and every culture express themselves differently, modern literary-theory must offer us ways of understanding ancient writers. There is, for example, the basic distinction between prose and poetry. Some thoughts are best expressed by poetry: love songs, hymns, intense pain of sorrow and loss. Others are better expressed in prose: biographies, historical records, and lists. Some human expression can take either form: describing the beauty of nature, heroic sagas of famous people or prophetic warnings of doom. What type an author selects is determined by how he feels that he can best communicate what he wants to say (p. 75).

The problem of introducing totally new information was even more acute in the ancient world when culture was much more traditional than now. People depended much less on looking up information for themselves in books than in listening to and mastering the passed-down wisdom of the ancestors. Communication in the ancient world was mostly oral, and societies that rely on oral tradition took at knowledge and history far differently than do peoples accustomed to reading.

First of all, their memories were generally much better than ours. We are lazy about memorizing things because we can look them up. Nevertheless, even they did not in our sense “memorize” every word… Rather, the ancient people often heard stories and events told in a communal setting, either on special feast days when religious leaders would recite the ancient traditions, or in schools where masters gave and interpreted the laws with vivid examples, or in gatherings for entertainment. Very rarely were any of these simply recited by rote memory…In the Old Testament we shall run into quite a number of “wonders” and strange tales…In these we expect to find some “mythic” elements, because through them the story-teller preserved the real meaning: that God gave these men supernatural help. Moreover, human memory does not recall exact details for long-perhaps a generation or two… Source criticism studies the specific problem of whether there are written documents behind our present text…The use of two distinct names for God in Genesis led eighteenth century researchers such as Jean Astruc (1753) to conclude that Moses must have used two or more different written sources when he composed the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers…Other differences were soon noted. Source critics showed the contradictory styles of writing that appeared side by side in a single book, for example, calling the covenant mountain Sinai in one line and Horeb in the next (p 77-81).

Here is where we have a legitimate field of study that very quickly gets into trouble. The first problem arises when scholars depart from holding the Bible in the unique position that it exists, and start through the use of “literary tools” comparing it to other literature and oral stories, such as mythologies. It is one thing, for example, to observe and study the use of poetry in the Bible. It is quite another thing to therefore deduce insight into the “accuracy” of the Bible by comparing it to the motivations and cultural context of other poets “in other cultures” through the ages. Likewise the use of a shared cultural myth about a wondrous event must not obscure the fact that the Bible is documenting an actual instance of God providing supernatural help, even if the details “match” a story told in another culture’s mythology. So we have a problem when scholars use secular “reasoning” tools, such as literary devices, to the point where they forget that in the Bible the purpose is to use the literary device to nonetheless preserve God’s word and thus the truth within a framework that, thanks to the faithful priests throughout the difficult time of the Israelites, guarded the integrity and continuity of the message of God. This is why all “literary devices” throughout the Bible are punctuated with factual lists of the people who lived and who witnessed to these events. Poetry and myths in other cultures do not do that.

A second problem is too rapidly drawing conclusions about the ability and most importantly the motivation of the Israelites to memorize. Boadt is an example of a scholar who compares what the Israelites must have been like to studies of non-religious other culture oral historians and story tellers, and thus surmises some conclusions. However, one need only look at the first Muslims for the counterexample. From the very beginning in the 7th century the entire contents of the Qur’an were memorized, word for word. The first generation of companions of the Prophet (PBUH) worked to ensure that different written editions of the Qur’an were quickly reconciled, kept to the common standard and memorized. To this day there is a vibrant worship tradition that consists of memorizing the entire Qur’an. So there is a problem when scholars deduce possible or worse conclude “probable” customs about the Israelites by comparing them to, let’s say gypsy story tellers, rather than comparing them to those who had similar motivations, the preservation of Divine revelation, the Muslims. The way that the Muslims handled their sacred literature is much more likely to be consistent with the ancient Israelites than to compare them to mythical story telling traditions and, worse, contemporary observations about “human nature.” Everything is different when it is sacred generational literature that is being preserved, and one must always maintain “apples to apples” comparisons.

The third problem is the mental slippery slope that many modern Biblical scholars find themselves on, usually unaware, where they now equate “source” to “who put pen to paper,” or in this case, pen to scroll. For example many, as I cited above one example, just assume that Moses copied what he wrote from older written sources. That is an egregious error in logic. Moses did not copy from older written works, dummies. Moses spent years in the company of God in person, not only on the mountain but in the meeting tent. What do you think they “talked about?” Moses received all of his information about what had transpired before his time not from written scraps from that time but from God himself. I mean, duh. They weren’t talking about the weather and they weren’t discussing how someday “football” would mean different sports to Americans and the British.

When it became the hot scholarly rage to analyze and identify different written sources in the Bible, back in the 1970’s, I thought that was great. One learns a great deal about the cultural context (and has more information to preserve accuracy in translation, etc) if one identifies the differences between those who are putting pen to scroll. But whoa, wait a minute, I just about fell out of my chair when decades later I noticed that people are now assuming that who holds the pen is the determining factor in “the sources.” What? How dumb is that? I pointed out the first problem with that above, where it’s not an endless chain of physical writers going back in time, each being “the source” to the next. Moses is the beginning, where he received the oral history from God of humans’ faith history. It’s not like Abraham left some ragged old scrolls of family scrapbook lying around. Everything was oral previous to Moses receiving oral history from God and then having that put to scroll. I mean, gosh, it is what it is. Many Biblical scholars yak and yak about the oral tradition of the ancients, but then when it comes time to research, they assume that it’s all a paper trail. With that assumption they then totally misunderstand what the Bible is actually sitting there and recording for them in explanation of what happened. God told Moses all there is to be shared about human creation and faith history (remembering that God was not going to dictate the first physics text book) and Moses had that transcribed.

So this is the fourth problem, which is to misunderstand the whole role of scribes even though you can hardly turn a page in the Bible without finding mention of a scribe! This is becoming a generational problem with moderns today, and by no coincidence this misunderstanding arose right around the time that managers and other professionals stopped having secretaries who took dictation. The last secretary I had who could take dictation was in the 1980’s and even then she hardly ever did it. Thus it is no wonder that modern Biblical scholars totally do not understand that holy people had secretaries, I mean, duh. They were called scribes. They took dictation, when the holy person could not or would not write down their own words themselves.

The most obvious example is when modern Biblical scholars question and criticize the high literary skill of the Gospels, Acts and the Epistles by the Disciples of Christ. Do I have to hear one more time, “How can poor dumb fishermen write such sophisticated works?” First of all, people were not so dumb and uneducated when it came to the matter of scripture and faith in those times as you all have come to assume. But, duh, once again, people did not run around performing miracles, avoiding or meeting scourging, persecution and martyrdom, and evangelize over hundreds of miles, and then sit down and put pen to scroll in their spare time. They used scribes, fellow disciples, dummies. So when you are studying a given section of the Bible by a particular “unknown” author, you are studying an amalgamation of the oral dictation to the writing scribe. I mean, why is that so difficult to understand? The poor and the illiterate went to professional scribes when they had to draw up a document, and that continued into medieval times. Obviously among the many Israelites of the Old Testament times and the early Christians of the time of Jesus Christ were many scribes! You can hardly get through a chapter of the Bible without tripping over description or mention of scribes. Do you think maybe that is a clue?

Thus, one of the worse abuses and now unconscious habit of many Biblical scholars is to equate analysis of the writing style and technique of the thread of a particular author as being enlightening regarding the “validity” or “source” of the God inspired information contained within. Like I said, I just about fell out of my chair when I noticed that what had been sound and interesting analysis of the pen work of various Bible inscribers and their insight into therefore the culture and linguistics of the time turned into an assumption that the scribe is the source. This generation forgets the old saying, when someone is asked to do a job that is “beneath them,” “I don’t take dictation.” Too many modern scholars assume that every holy person actually sat down and put pen to scroll them selves. Many did (St. Paul when he had lots of time on his hands and access to materials while in prison, for example). But you can be assured that many did not.

How can anyone ignore the example of the Book of Proverbs? The Book of Proverbs is an anthology of sayings and teachings in order to provide Wisdom, and so it draws upon many sources, including King Solomon. How difficult is it to understand that King Solomon would have said many wise things, which other people would remember, and then later write down? Some of the sayings of King Solomon would have been unique to him, in expression of his God inspired wisdom, but he would have quoted older sayings of wisdom too. Later the scribe of the Book of Proverbs would pull together these many sources of Wisdom and create this God inspired book. No one makes the mistake of studying the words and writing style of the author of the Book of Proverbs and thus deduces they are studying the actual “source” of the proverbs themselves, especially because the author cites the sources of entire sections of Proverbs. But for some reason many modern scholars disregard the entire history of scribes and assume that studying the writing style of an author “reveals” the “true or implied source” of the content of the text. Worse, they assume that changes in “style” (such as in the works of the Apostle St. John) “reveals” that they are “different authors.”

Here’s a simple example of how limiting in intellect are those assumptions. When I was a student in university in the early 1970’s we all used typewriters. Making a typo was a real pain, and I would make one particular typo over and over, which is to transpose two letters in the word “student.” That typo plagued me throughout college, but later it gave me no problem. Today, thirty years later, my most frequent typo is to transpose two letters in “the.” Now, suppose some genius scholar of the distant future had a copy of one of my typed works, with lots of white out of “student,” and a copy of one of my text processing works thirty years later. They would see that I made lots of errors about “student” in the early document, but none at all in the later document. Could they conclude I am a different person? No, of course not, since even if I made the same “student” typo today as I did then, I have a word processor that fixes it before printing. Likewise it is not illogical that the same Apostle could have written by his own hand one document, and given dictation to a scribe another document thirty years later. St. John the Apostle is such an obvious case that I am astonished at how willfully ignorant or conspiracy oriented some modern “Biblical scholars” seem to be. Would you write with the same tone and mannerisms as you did decades before, if you were of extreme old age and had just been taken to heaven to witness the Apocalypse? I mean, not to repeat myself, but duh. But this is the type of sloppy intellectual “scholarship” that plagues much modern Biblical scholarship or exegesis.

Pope Benedict XVI discusses much of the problems with modern exegesis in his introduction to “Jesus of Nazareth” and I will quote him here.

As historical-critical scholarship advanced, it led to finer and finer distinctions between layers of tradition in the Gospels, beneath which the real object of faith-the figure [Gestalt] of Jesus-became increasingly obscured and blurred. At the same time, though, the reconstructions of this Jesus (who could only be discovered by going behind the traditions and sources used by the Evangelists) became more and more incompatible with one another: at one end of the spectrum Jesus was the anti-Roman revolutionary working-though finally failing-to overthrow the ruling powers; at the other end, he was the meek moral teacher who approves everything and unaccountably comes to grief. If you read a number of these reconstructions one after the other, you see at once that far from uncovering an icon that has become obscured over time, they are much more like photographs of their authors [my note: by this the Pope means the Biblical scholars] and the ideals they hold. Since then there has been growing skepticism about these portrayals of Jesus, but the figure of Jesus himself has for that very reason receded even further into the distance (p. xii).

This is such a powerful observation by Pope Benedict and one that is unsparingly correct in its imagery. Indeed, when I read much of modern Biblical scholarship, rather than seeing a picture of the prophet or Jesus or other Biblical figure emerge (to say nothing of further understanding of God), I see a photograph of the Biblical scholar him or herself, and he or she imposes their own bias and often anti-faith very secular world view on the very Biblical material they purport to study. The Pope continues:

All these attempts have produced a common result: the impression that we have very little certain knowledge of Jesus and that only at a later stage did faith in his divinity shape the image we have of him. This impression has by now penetrated deeply into the minds of the Christian people at large. This is a dramatic situation for faith, because its point of reference is being placed in doubt: Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air (p. xii).

“Without anchoring in God, the person of Jesus remains shadowy, unreal, and unexplainable” (p.322). [Pope Benedict is quoting from another book.] This is also the point around which I will construct my own book. It sees Jesus in light of his communion with the Father, which is the true center of his personality; without it, we cannot understand him at all, and it is from this center that he makes himself present to us still today (p. xiv).

I would like to sketch at least the broad outlines of the methodology, drawn from these documents, that has guided me in writing this book. The first point is that the historical-critical method-specifically because of the intrinsic nature of theology and faith-is and remains an indispensable dimension of exegetical work. For it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events. It does not tell stories symbolizing suprahistorical truths, but is based on history, history that took place on this earth. The factum historicum (historical fact) is not an interchangeable symbolic cipher for biblical faith, bu the foundation on which it stands: Et incarnates est-when we say these words, we acknowledge God’s actual entry into real world history (p. xv).

So the Pope is saying, yes, of course one must study the Bible to analyze and match the historical component to as much of recorded secular human history as possible, since they are both reports of the same history. I personally very much enjoy reading about Biblical archaeology, for example, but I have developed great disdain for the rancorous quarrels and insults that competing archaeologist and scholars hurled at each other over various personal ego based clashes, and so I stopped reading magazines and so forth on those topics.

If we push this history aside, Christian faith as such disappears and is recast as some other religion. So if history, if facticity in this sense, is an essential dimension of Christian faith, then faith must expose itself to the historical method-indeed, faith itself demands this (p. xv)… The historical-critical method-let me repeat-is an indispensable tool, given the structure of Christian faith. But we need to add two points. This method is a fundamental dimension of exegesis, but it does not exhaust the interpretive task for someone who sees the biblical writings as a single corpus of Holy Scripture inspired by God. We will have to return to this point at greater length in a moment. For the time being, it is important-and this is a second point-to recognize the limits of the historical-critical method itself… The historical method not only has to investigate the biblical word as a thing of the past, but also has to remain in the past. It can glimpse points of contact with the present and it can try to apply the biblical word to the present; the one thing it cannot do is make it into something present today-that would be overstepping its bounds. Its very precision in interpreting the reality of the past is both its strength and its limit. This is connected with a further point. Because it is a historical method, it presupposes the uniformity of the context within which the events of history unfold. It must therefore treat the biblical words it investigates as human words. On painstaking reflection, it can intuit something of the “deeper value” the word contains. It can in some sense catch the sounds of a higher dimension through the human word, and so open up the method to self-transcendence. But its specific object is the human word as human (p. xvii).

In these words from the past, we can discern the question concerning their meaning for today; a voice greater than man’s echoes in Scripture’s human words; the individual writings [Schrifte] of the Bible point somehow to the living process that shapes the one Scripture [Schrift]. Indeed, the realization of this last point some thirty years ago led American scholars to develop the project of “canonical exegesis.” The aim of this exegesis is to read individual texts within the totality of the one Scripture, which then sheds new light on all the individual texts. Paragraph 12 of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on Divine Revelation had already clearly underscored this as a fundamental principle of theological exegesis: If you want to understand the Scripture in the spirit in which it is written, you have to attend to the content and to the unity of Scripture as a while. The Council goes on to stress the need for taking account of the living tradition of the whole Church and of the analogy of faith (the intrinsic correspondences within the faith). Let us dwell for the time being on the unity of Scripture. It is a theological datum. But it is not simply imposed from the outside on what is in itself a heterogeneous ensemble of writings… This is a process in which the word gradually unfolds its inner potentialities, already somehow present like seeds, but needing the challenge of new situations, new experiences and new sufferings, in order to open up (p. xix).

The Pope is explaining that there is a great difference between reading the Bible and seeking to use a historical-critical context that is somewhat biased and tainted by current agendas and mindsets, versus turning to the Bible for enlightenment that can be stimulated by current situations and mindsets. Pope Benedict uses the wonderful imagery to describe how the Bible, even though it is of separate writings, has the Divine unity and must be considered as a whole, has within it seeds, seeds which open up understanding of God and the situation of humankind. I think this analogy is enormously helpful in those who through excessive focus on the secular and historical facets of human hands writing human words have lost comprehension of how the diverse books of the Bible form the unified inspired word and will of God. The image of the seeds that are throughout the Bible, unnoticed and unseen until one turns to those pages in light of a current situation and reading is marvelous and I would say remarkably accurate.

“Canonical exegesis”-reading the individual texts of the Bible in the context of the whole-is an essential dimension of exegesis. It does not contradict historical-critical interpretation, but carries it forward in an organic way toward becoming theology in the proper sense. There are two further aspects of theological exegesis that I would like to underscore. Historical-critical interpretation of a text seeks to discover the precise sense the words were intended to convey at their time and place of origin. That is good and important. But-aside from the fact that such reconstructions can claim only a relative certainty-it is necessary to keep in mind that any human utterance of a certain weight contains more than the author may have been immediately aware of at the time. When a word transcends the moment in which it is spoken, it carries within itself a “deeper value.” This “deeper value” pertains most of all to words that have matured in the course of faith-history. For in this case the author is not simply speaking for himself on his own authority. He is speaking from the perspective of a common history that sustains him and that already implicitly contains the possibilities of its future, of the further stages of its journey. The process of continually rereading and drawing out new meanings from words would not have been possible unless the words themselves were already open to it from within (p. xx).

You see, this is what I mean when I explain that the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, cannot be compared to either historical documents, although it contains them, or mythological or symbolic stories, though it sometimes alludes to them. Scholarship methods that rely on critiquing the Bible in comparison to either historical documents or mythological/story telling endeavors totally fail because they do not understand that the Israelites and the Gospel authors were writing, as the Pope explains, “from the perspective of a common history that sustains him and that already implicitly [the seeds] contains the possibilities of its future.”

At this point we get a glimmer, even on the historical level, of what inspiration means: The author does not speak as a private, self-contained subject. He speaks in a living community, that is to say, in a living historical movement not created by him, nor even by the collective, but which is led forward by a greater power that is at work. These are dimensions of the world that the old doctrine of the fourfold sense of Scripture pinpointed with remarkable accuracy. The four senses of Scripture are not individual meanings arrayed side by side, but dimensions of the one word that reaches beyond the moment. This already suggests the second aspect I wanted to speak about. Neither the individual books of Holy Scripture nor the Scripture as a whole are simply a piece of literature. The Scripture emerged from within the heart of a living subject-the pilgrim People of God-and lives within this same subject. One could say that the books of Scripture involve three interacting subjects. First of all, there is the individual author or group of authors to whom we owe a particular scriptural text. But these authors are not autonomous writers in the modern sense; they form part of a collective subject, the “People of God,” from within whose heart and to whom they speak. Hence, this subject is actually the deeper “author” of the Scriptures. And yet likewise, this people does not exist alone; rather, it knows that it is led, and spoke to, by God himself, who-through men and their humanity-is at the deepest level the one speaking (p. xxi).

I hope that you have found this helpful. Modern humans, even when supported by good intentions, and not just egoist personal agendas, are notorious for counting trees and missing seeing the forest. It is, in fact, one of the reasons for the crisis in faith of these times, which has alarmed me so very much as I see more than anyone the profound damage that it has done. This is why I wanted to take the time out today to help those of you who are reading and who are willing to reorient yourself with the most correct and spiritually fulfilling view of reading and understanding the Bible, and yes, even studying it. I started this post with specific examples so that you find it easier to break away from the hypnotic lure of modern thinking that there is only one way to view and analyze what has gone before. I then relied on the explanation of Pope Benedict XVI, whose presentation of the problem and the correct view I could not do better than myself, and can only endorse wholeheartedly.