I've been meaning to blog about this since Sunday when the scripture I will reference was discussed in Sunday school. Here are the scriptures describing the two separate occasions when Jesus fed thousands of people by miraculously multiplying a tiny amount of food.
Mark 6:39-44
And he ordered them to make all the people recline in groups on the green grass. And they reclined in groups of hundreds and of fifties. And he took the five loaves and the two fishes and, looking up to heaven, blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and the two fishes he divided among them all. And all ate and were satisfied; and they gathered up what was left over, twelve baskets full of fragments, besides what was left over of the fishes. Now those who had eaten were five thousand men.
Mark 8:1-9
In those days when again there was a great crowd, and they had nothing to eat, he called his disciples together and said to them, "I have compassion on the crowd, for behold, they have now been with me three days, and have nothing to eat; and if I send them away to their homes fasting, they will faint on the way for some of them have come from a distance." And his disciples answered him, "How will anyone be able to satisfy these with bread, here in the desert? He asked them, "How many loaves have you?" And they said, "Seven."
And he bade the crowd recline on the ground. Then taking the seven loaves, he gave thanks, broke them and gave them to his disciples to distribute; and they set them before the crowd. And they had a few little fishes; and he blessed them, and ordered them to be distributed. And they ate and were satisfied; and they took up what was left of the fragments, seven baskets. Now those who had eaten were about four thousand. And he dismissed them.
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Alright, there are so many things that one should discuss and understand about these two miracles, but I have found that a very common error in approach to understanding these miracles derails most of the modern discussion of these events away from their core spiritual and literal meanings. Sure enough, right after reading one of these passages our Sunday school teacher (who I really like, so this is no criticism) almost immediately fell into the derailment by reading what all these highly educated commentators have said about these miracles: *I'm rolling my eyes* .... "the symbolism of the number of loaves and fishes".....*I'm rolling my eyes again, as I can't even repeat this without being frustrated, argh*
He then starts to repeat what "they" (the wonderful commentators) have "analyzed" about the "meaning" of how many loaves and fishes they were, and what holy numbers they symbolized, blah blah blah. I interrupted him right there and said something like, "I know all the commentators discuss it but they are wrong: there is absolutely no symbolism in either of these miracles by Jesus." I briefly stated why and here I will explain it to you.
First of all, let's discuss why people get so easily misled into missing the events and then worthy analysis of the miracles' greater meanings (not "symbolisms" as a greater meaning is different than "symbolism.") One cannot discuss a greater meaning of these events without first agreeing on the facts. So that is what Mark and the other gospel writers set forth when they wrote about Jesus: first the facts, then what Jesus actually did, and then any greater meaning (John's Gospel tends to include more of that kind of thought), including any explanation of how/why that Jesus provided. There are two reasons modern people are so easily mislead into discussing ridiculous things like the "meaning" and "symbolism" of "how many" loaves and fishes were used by Jesus. First of all, people today do not understand why such trivial data is supplied, unless it has a "deep" and "heavy" "symbolic" "meaning." That is because they no longer understand that detailing such small items (which happens throughout the Bible) is what people were taught to do, back when only oral history and verbal contracts existed, which is to "bear witness." I include the label here "witness" where I have previously explained this.
So what modern people think is either a trivial point (who cares if it was five loaves) or a big heavy "symbolism" (ooooh, it must have been "five" for "a reason," yeah, a "mystical reason..." followed by profound and eerie music and nods of agreement by the scholars who are paid and make names for being so smart) the reason it was recorded down to the number of loaves and fishes is that.... that is what actually happened, and the people of those times were all taught by their families and teachers to be scrupulously accurate in bearing witness to great events. It's part of the accuracy record, to them, and that is the automatic mindset.
One reason it is important to be accurate is so that readers (or those who hear the Gospel verbally) understand exactly how big or small an event just took place. Look at the two extremes in an analogy. If Jesus fed 5000 people with let's say 1000 loaves, that would not be such a huge miracle, would it? On the other hand, if Jesus fed people with no loaves, making the loaves out of thin air, it would be a huge miracle (but not more huge than what actually happened.) What, you say... why is that? Why would in theory no loaves be equally as miraculous as feeding from five loaves? Remember the Exodus, when Moses asked God to feed the people and manna fell from the skies. The Jewish people would all have been VERY mindful of that seminal miracle in their faith history, when God provided the bread of manna out of nothing, as it rained down from the sky. They thus would have viewed Jesus as having done the same thing, mediating between the hungry people and God, who provides for them out of nothing. So anyone alive during that time who carried witness either verbally or in writing would have routinely recorded how many loaves and fishes because it allowed the listener or the reader to put what happened in the proper context with the facts.
The second reason modern people, including supposedly smart scholars, fall into the trap of putting numinous and irrelevant meaning on the number of loaves and fishes is, well, there is no subtle way to put it, they are a bit weak in their faith. Either consciously but (to give them the benefit of the doubt) unconsciously, they tend to think that the number is important because it is contrived. I'm not saying they full out think this is a made up story, but there is always the temptation to disbelieve something so incredible, always nibbling and gnawing in the back of the mind. So these commentators figure, "Well, just in case this actually did not happen, we can still derive a 'greater spiritual lesson' by 'analyzing the meaning' of what the 'authors' (not God) did 'present.'" You see what I mean? When there is even a five percent of doubt of the literal accuracy of the Gospel in one's mind, no matter what a believer and a "scholar" you are, your understanding of the plain words will be mislead and warped. Previous generations could discuss "meaning" and "symbolism," sure, but they did so on the firm basis of 100 percent believing the facts of the miracles: that is the sad difference between then and these smarty pants modern times.
So how did I bring an abrupt halt to that line of thought? I will explain it to you now and offer it to you as a faith and reasoning case study. I said something like this. Well, if the numbers are so "symbolic" and "mean something else," does that mean that if only four loaves were there instead of five, Jesus would have hit his forehead and said, "Darn! Now I can't do the miracle! It's the wrong symbolic number of loaves!" Or if they had loaves but no fishes, would Jesus have said, "Wish I could help, but it's just not the right holy symbolic numbers of ingredients." Ha ha ha, yes, my readers, I did see a few fellow Sunday school members narrow their eyes at me ha ha when I said that ha. But they have to see in parody, sometimes, how silly they are being (or how easily misled). I mean, this is deadly serious: Jesus Christ, born of God by the Holy Spirit overshadowing the Blessed Virgin Mary, healed, performed miracles, and conquered death, resurrecting after being crucified and ascending into heaven. The facts are mighty just as they are, I mean, duh. The facts don't have to also be "symbolic" of like lucky numbers or something. The way to detox from such thinking (that there is some "formula" or "bigger meaning" to the small facts, the insignificant number of the loaves and fishes) is to test the theory that the number of each item is instrumental to the miracle taking place. That is what I did, by making the people answer, "Well, if those numbers are so symbolic, does that mean Jesus could or would do the miracle only if a certain number of the items were there?"
Would Jesus "not be able" to do the miraculous feeding if there wasn't the "holy symbolic" number of items? Of course not. Jesus could do it with zero loaves or 1000 loaves.
Would Jesus refuse to feed the hungry people because there isn't the "right number of 'holy symbolic' items there?" Imagine that, Jesus saying: "Oh oh, there is supposed to be five loaves because that's a really holy important number, and you have only four loaves, so sorry, I'm not going to do the miracles and you have to walk home hungry, hope you don't hit your head on a rock while you are faint with having followed me for days." Obviously not, and I included the passage where Jesus states his concern for the health of people who had been fasting for so long already (and that is the motivation for the miracle, not to demonstrate his power and authority).
You see, that is what people ought to be gleaning from their personal reading of the Bible, the facts, the context, Jesus' words and explanations, and the Gospel writers words and explanations. Young people who use computers, you know WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). The Bible must be read and understood that way, that what you see is what you get, and also "it is what it is." Jesus was followed by many people, on two different occasions, to remote areas for several days where there was no fresh food to gain after what people had brought with them had run out. Out of concern for them Jesus takes whatever is found and turns that through his miraculous God given ability into much food for the multitude. All that is documented so that the listeners and readers of these events comprehend how big and precise a miracle this was, so that they get it even though they were not there.
The key to the miracles is that Jesus demonstrated he can make do with what people provided. If it was no loaves or many loaves or, as in the reality, just a very few loaves, Jesus can and did work with whatever people had.
That, then, is the larger meanings of these miraculous events because yes, sure, there are the events and then there is the larger meaning to glean from it, but it's not "magic" or "holy" "numbers" kind of meanings. I can write more about them some other time as I really want to keep this confined to the case study of understanding how to avoid the pitfall of missing the really important facts and points of a Biblical event by derailing on something unimportant and thus not seeing the outline of what one should indeed contemplate. So here is in closing just a list of how to mindfully approach the "bigger and greater meaning" of the miraculous events.
1. Notice the circumstances and think about them. People obviously were so committed to hearing what Jesus said that thousands followed him into barren areas with no thought of their food or water.
2. Notice Jesus' motivation for the miracles, which is simple plain love and humanity for their plight, after showing such commitment and attention to him. This is far away from the nagging scribes and Pharisees, so Jesus is not performing these miracles in order to demonstrate his God given authority. It is plain and simple loving need.
3. Notice that Jesus uses whatever is available, for he has the might of God with him, and lots of bread and fishes or no bread and fishes, God can do anything.
4. Notice that Jesus gives thanks and don't slide over that thinking that is like saying grace before food, for it is not a pre-meal prayer of thanksgiving to God. Jesus is thanking God for the ability to perform what, only through God, he is about to do, which is feed the people. Jesus is thus both on his own thanking God for what is about to occur, but also giving the people a role modeling of how always to be so whenever one uses one's God given abilities, to be thankful first and foremost to God.
5. Notice that Jesus gives the food to the disciples to distribute. Of course some of that is logistics, as many hands can distribute the food faster. But the greater meaning is that Jesus is a) preparing the disciples and the people for the time when they can do some of this themselves, for remember all the Apostles and original disciples became able to perform miracles and b) that the word of God needs to be carried and spread by everyone, not just, as we would say today, the "guru." Jesus is always modest and that was a sincere modesty because he never for a second of his life forgot that everything he was able to do was directly from God the Father. Thus Jesus did not have to "showboat" and hand out the food himself so people would be grateful to him and impressed by him.... Jesus always demonstrated that a) all power and glory go to God alone and b) his disciples were extensions of him and Jesus did not always need to be "the one." Remember that Jesus himself did not baptize, but his disciples baptized their followers. Jesus was always showing how the faith community was to come together and function, as it would have to when he was no longer there.
6. Notice that they record what fragments remain. This is part of what I explained about the witnessing to the facts of what happened. It is also OK and valid to ponder the greater meaning that even after Jesus through God provides all that is needed, there is even more leftover. God's grace is always more than expectations and there is always more than the bare minimum of human needs.
I hope you have found this helpful! Do not be afraid to discover that even wise experts, in these modern times in particular, miss the forest through the trees. (That's an old saying, for those of you who are English second language or may not have heard it, meaning that some people are so obsessed with details that they notice one or two trees without ever realizing those one or two trees are accompanied by many trees in a forest all around them.) Glomming onto an imaginary importance of how many loaves is like missing the entire event because your mind is hijacked into thinking it's all about those loaves "conveying" a "numeric" "message" "from God," and thus you don't get points 1-6 at all as you look just at that diversion.
*Sigh* Like I said, much of this comes from lack of understanding the simpler times when people really did just write down the facts without an agenda.
Oh, that makes me realize something I can add quickly here, which is "spotting agenda." Here is a quick example that merits a huge amount of writing elsewhere.
OK, you've seen Jesus, and his Apostles, and all the events that took place. Maybe you are a distant relative of one of the disciples. The focus would be entirely on documenting exactly what happened. No one would have an agenda (except, as we saw, the Jews and Romans who put Jesus to death, for they covered up that he resurrected by bribing the guards and spreading the story that his body was removed and "hidden.") So the Gospels and the Epistles (the letters) of the New Testament are all agenda free because people in a really verbal and oral culture were attempting to get precisely in writing exactly what happened. What happened was so detailed and astonishing that for brevity much is left out that is repetitive. By that I mean that for example Jesus performed thousands of individual miracles, but the means to write down details of every one of them would have been impossible then. People memorized and shared the data of the essentials, writing down what people needed to know for the faith that had factually occurred.
But now let's imagine that some hundred years or more has gone by. Someone in your family may have been that relative of a disciple I mentioned (imagine if you belonged to Judas Iscariot's family descendants!) Now you have to watch for agenda. This is the problem with so called Books that people wave around once in a while and claim that they are "true" and "give the real story" of "what happened." These are well known, and a few years ago media manipulators tried to get everyone all excited about the Book of Judas with claims that he and Jesus had an agreement, blah blah blah. The same has popped up about Mary Magdalene and others. There is of course more pious versions such as the stories of the Blessed Virgin Mary and how Joseph selected her (or she him) with like a flowering wand or something like that. These are all written many years, often centuries, after Jesus, of course, was actually alive, by people who were not there.
How do I know they weren't there? Use logic my friends. If they were there it would have been in the Gospels, Acts and Epistles, duh. People were doing agenda-free documenting of all that needed to be known about Jesus (we don't know what side he slept on or what cereal he liked best) but we know absolutely everything about his ministry and the nature of the New Covenant with God. So anyone who actually had been on the scene and had a significant role would have been documented accordingly.
So through dating but also pure logic we know that all these extra books are ancient but not comtemporary with Jesus. Anything that pops up centuries later and claims to contain secret or "real" information is bogus because no one had any need to "hide" anything when Jesus was alive (except the Jewish religious authorities after he resurrected, ha). Jesus lived an entirely open life surrounded by hundreds of people constantly, and Jesus was doing a continual stream of teaching and role modeling, preaching and ministry at all time: there were no secret deals or any such imaginings. That would have lost the entire point anyway. Jesus did not have to arrange with Judas to be betrayed (it would be funny if it was not so faith warping) because, duh, the Gospels document how often Jesus had to flee or dodge people who wanted to kill him right then and there (even in his hometown).
So this is why you have to use a little common sense to discern agenda. The Gospels and rest of the New Testament had no agenda except to document and communicate the marvelous events that had happened, plus the teachings of Jesus. Anything from a later date that is not part of the Christian community communications via letter, sermons and so forth is going to be a combination of two very modern phenomena: 1) Spin doctoring by people who wanted to get their piece of celebrity action, so like I said, I bet Judas' descendant family members would have wanted to write a 'he didn't do it' saga and 2) Genuine remnants of memories of things like the life of the Virgin Mary, but now glossed with all sorts of sentimental fiction to romanticize her genuine purity and virtue (in other words, the "cute meet" story between her and Joseph that is supposedly preserved).
Thus remember, which is why I brought this up, the disciples had no agenda as they authored the Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles, and Revelation, rather than to record precisely what had occurred as this was a nearly total verbal culture and society in the world. The model for such precision in writing was of course the Torah and all the books of the Old Testament. People used witnessing to get the facts in writing to reach those areas they could not achieve through travel, and also to preserve and hand down the information to the next generations of what had actually happened. Likewise God had no "agenda" other than send his Son, the Savior and Messiah, to do what he did. God did not have to plant "significant numbers" or "hidden meanings" or any such thing because that is self defeating and remember that God is all perfection. God is what he is. So don't get diverted thinking there is hidden or arcane meaning to be "gained" in the scripture, since, well, think about it, God seems to have to hit humans over the head again and again and again with the simple truth. Subtlety is lost on humans and God would have no reason not to make things very, very, VERY plain over and over and over. Points 1-6 rather than "oooooh, the number of loaves 'means something!'" Finally spot agenda before it spots you. Use common sense to discern the difference between people who were part of the fact checking witnessing of the group of disciples who were actually there versus writings by some sort of imaginary hanger oners years and centuries after the fact who have obvious "My grand pappy's neighbor's shepherd knew them too!" types of motivations (or like Judas Iscariot's poor family descendants, ugh, who would want to have been them?)
I hope this helps.
Showing posts with label Biblical "scholars". Show all posts
Showing posts with label Biblical "scholars". Show all posts
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Sunday, November 30, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
A phrase that REALLY annoys me
"Most modern scholars believe..."
That phrase is usually the first part of some a*** compulsive "analysis" of Biblical texts to discern who the "real" authors are, and the one that infuriates me the most is the theory that the works of John the Apostle are by three different Johns, due to differences in "writing style" etc. That is so sophomoric an analysis that it really beggars even a reply.
All of the Biblical works attributed to John were written by the one and only John the Apostle, who did indeed live to a very long age, just as Jesus prophesied. Thus anyone with any knowledge of people realizes that one's style and word usage varies over the decades, according to the purpose of the document, and also to the degree that the author is actively inspired by the Holy Spirit while in the writing. Also, successors will often edit sections to make them more readable.
Revelation reads so differently than the Gospel and the Letters of John because obviously it is the result of complete guidance by the Holy Spirit. I've mentioned this before but will repeat that the scroll that St. John swallowed is the "means" by which he then recalled and wrote the complete telling of the Book of Revelation. That is obviously a different set of circumstances than when he wrote the Gospel of St. John, which serves a separate purpose, and the Letters of St. John, again, different purposes. You cannot mistake, however, the style in all of them, not the "grammar" but the level of spirituality. The Gospel of St. John has the same tone as the Book of Revelation. There are no mysterious "other" "Johns."
*special place in hell for certain 'modern scholars'*
No one should claim to be a Biblical scholar if they are approaching the material with a stance of "agnostic faith," as in, "prove it to me using modern criteria." That is so annoying and is just another attempt to erode the faith.
*rant over (for now!)*
That phrase is usually the first part of some a*** compulsive "analysis" of Biblical texts to discern who the "real" authors are, and the one that infuriates me the most is the theory that the works of John the Apostle are by three different Johns, due to differences in "writing style" etc. That is so sophomoric an analysis that it really beggars even a reply.
All of the Biblical works attributed to John were written by the one and only John the Apostle, who did indeed live to a very long age, just as Jesus prophesied. Thus anyone with any knowledge of people realizes that one's style and word usage varies over the decades, according to the purpose of the document, and also to the degree that the author is actively inspired by the Holy Spirit while in the writing. Also, successors will often edit sections to make them more readable.
Revelation reads so differently than the Gospel and the Letters of John because obviously it is the result of complete guidance by the Holy Spirit. I've mentioned this before but will repeat that the scroll that St. John swallowed is the "means" by which he then recalled and wrote the complete telling of the Book of Revelation. That is obviously a different set of circumstances than when he wrote the Gospel of St. John, which serves a separate purpose, and the Letters of St. John, again, different purposes. You cannot mistake, however, the style in all of them, not the "grammar" but the level of spirituality. The Gospel of St. John has the same tone as the Book of Revelation. There are no mysterious "other" "Johns."
*special place in hell for certain 'modern scholars'*
No one should claim to be a Biblical scholar if they are approaching the material with a stance of "agnostic faith," as in, "prove it to me using modern criteria." That is so annoying and is just another attempt to erode the faith.
*rant over (for now!)*
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