Christ

by Jack Miles

  The paradigm that had to break down if a vision like Frei’s was to be accommodated was the paradigm by which historical and theological criticism so divided the hermeneutical terrain between them that there was no room for a kind of critique that was neither historical nor theological in intent. Historical criticism understood itself to be the only school of criticism that was both serious and secular. It took theological commentary to be serious but nonsecular by definition. It took literary commentary other than the kind that was ultimately in the service of historical criticism to be secular but trivial. Canon criticism, trying to break the stranglehold of this dichotomy, sought to write a theological critique of the Bible that was also historically impeccable. But to do that was to grasp only half the problem. The other half of the problem—or, rather, the germ of the whole problem—was the need for a secular rationale for the study, under any rubric, of the works of the canonical Bible and those only.

  When secular historical criticism arose in the eighteenth century, its first order of business was to insist on treating the books of the Bible just like any other books. Logically, the implication of this leveling was that the biblical canon—which assigned a privileged status to a group of books not necessarily different from other books of the same sort from the same period—should be disregarded. What happened instead was that the books of this historically arbitrary canon continued to receive far more attention from historical critics than other, comparable ancient works did, notwithstanding the fact that, once the examination began, canonical status guaranteed ever less in the way of special treatment. It was only in the late twentieth century that historical criticism of the Bible became self-conscious enough to call this uncalled question about its own inner consistency in even a preliminary way. Historical critics tended to dismiss canon criticism as the recrudescence of theology, and they were half-right about that, but something larger was ultimately at stake. If the canonical books of the Bible were to continue to receive on some secular grounds the disproportionate attention that religion had originally dictated they should receive, what grounds, if any, were available? Ancient history provided none. Where else might one look?

  Without a secular rationale for the canonicity of the biblical canon, there can be no secular literary critique of the Bible as a finished, ended work of art. This is the question that Frank Kermode broached—brilliantly, if indirectly and in an unexpected context—in The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction.11 Twenty years later, he addressed the same question explicitly in an essay entitled “The Canon” in The Literary Guide to the Bible. In that essay, he argues that the canonical works of the Bible deserve disproportionate attention—more attention than other, comparable works surviving from antiquity—because they have disproportionately influenced the literature and the consciousness of the West during the intervening centuries. Moreover, he further argues, they deserve this attention as a canon because it is as a canon that they have exerted this influence.

  Kermode—in this, an exception among critics of modern literatures—is at pains not to dismiss classic historical criticism of the Bible. All the same, en route to his nuanced defense of the Bible as an integral whole legitimately subject as such to literary criticism, he sees fit to quote with approval the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer:

  As … Gadamer has put it, the historical critic is always seeking in the text something that is not the text, something the text of itself is not seeking to provide; “he will always go back behind [the texts] and the meaning they express [which he will decline to regard as their true meaning] to enquire into the reality of which they are the involuntary expression.” But it is possible to take an interest in the text and its own meaning; that is literary criticism proper [italics added], and Gadamer believes that it has for too long (in these circles) been regarded as “an ancillary discipline to history.”12

  Philosophically as well as literarily, it seemed that there was something wrong with always and only seeing through the Bible. One way of righting that wrong might be to allow the ancillary discipline to assume, for a change, the dominant position.

  Learning how not to see through the Bible

  To the premodern mind, the opposite of truth was not fiction but falsehood: deception, fraud, the deliberate lie. The only meaningful external question about scripture, then, was whether or not it was all a gigantic hoax. Once that question was settled in scripture’s favor (and it was, of course, a question that after the first few Christian centuries scarcely arose), the mind was free to explore the Bible from within as if it were a wondrous garden whose paths and glades and ponds and grottoes all intersected in endlessly surprising and delightful ways. Peter J. Thuesen, in a recent book entitled In Discordance With the Scriptures, writes perceptively of Hans Frei’s dream of re-creating some form of this response.13 Frei’s method, Thuesen writes, “does not exclude truth-questions but brackets them in favor of exegesis that treats the Bible as something like a realistic novel. For Frei, the biblical novel’s individual stories are to be read not primarily for their external referents in ‘real history’ but for their internal relations as part of a larger narrative.”

  A realistic novel, as an enclosed, complete text, is like a garden in that doubling back to an early chapter is an experience rather like strolling back toward the garden gate to refresh one’s memory of something already seen and to fix the plot (both gardens and novels are plotted) more satisfyingly in the mind. Kermode addressed the relevance of this question to biblical criticism in The Genesis of Secrecy, a work appearing five years after Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative:

  It may be said that in principle any Old Testament text had a narrative potential that could be realized in the New Testament. One might well suppose such an arrangement to be without parallel; but it is not altogether unlike the relation obtaining between the early pages of a long novel and its later pages. The earlier ones contain virtualities or germs, not all of which grow; there is a mass of narrative detail, existing in its own right and, like the Old Testament, viable without later “fulfillment,” though it may be fulfilled. A special kind of novel, the classic detective story, actually depends on our ability to distinguish, like the witches in Macbeth, which seeds will grow and which will not, sometimes puzzling us by making one kind look like the other.

  The novel, exploiting such intermittent fulfillments, is a form of narrative inconceivable as anything but a book in the modern sense; it requires, in principle, that we be able to turn back and forth in its pages. A novel written on a roll would be something else. So it is of interest that the Christians, from a very early date, preferred the codex to the roll.14

  Whether the Bible is read seriously when it is read as a work whose pleasure and value are established by inner articulation rather than outer validation may depend on how seriously a given reader is capable of taking finished art of any kind: any poem in which the last word has been written, any painting in which the last brushstroke has been applied. When the closed canon of scripture is allowed to function as a finished product, whether or not any individual did the finishing, it excites a response different in kind from the one it excites when it is taken as a great historical problem toward whose solution there is always “much work still to be done.” There is no work still to be done on Michelangelo’s David; the chisel has touched it for the last time. When the Bible is taken, despite its raggedness, as a closed canon to which no scriptures will be added and from which none will be subtracted, it may induce an emotional response as intense as the idolatry that the David can induce in a postsophisticated viewer.

  I use the word idolatry by design, because it so well calls the question of the place of art in religion. The Bible’s own attitude toward art, to the extent that it may be said to have one at all, is an attitude of indifference rising on occasion to hostility, and this may have something to do with the resistance of religiously motivated biblical scholarship to the aesthetic. The most relevant passage, in my opinion, is Isaiah 4
4:13–17:

  The wood carver takes his measurements, outlines the image with chalk, executes it with the chisel, following the outline with a compass. He makes it look like a human being, with human standards of beauty, so that it can reside in a house. He has cut down cedars, has selected an oak and a terebinth that he has grown for himself among the trees in the forest and has planted a pine tree that the rain has nourished. Once it is suitable to burn, he takes some of it to warm himself; having kindled it, he bakes bread. But he also makes a god and worships it; he makes an idol from it and bows down before it. Half of it he burns on the fire; over this half he roasts meat, eats it, and is replete. At the same time he warms himself and says, “Ah, how warm I am watching the flames!” With the remainder he makes a god, his idol, bows down before it, worships and prays to it. “Save me,” he says, “for you are my god.”

  This late prose addition to a book otherwise written as poetry quite probably reflects an era in which many in the Greco-Roman world, not just a few in the Jewish corner of it, were asking new questions about the place of sacred images in religious practice. In its day, its question was pathbreaking, but our own world has moved beyond that question to ask a comparable one about the place of sacred texts in our contemporary religious practice, a question that might be expressed in a parody of the biblical parody:

  The scribe takes up his scroll, scores it in sepia, and writes upon it with quill and black ink, spacing the letters with measured exactness. He writes realistically, by human standards of plausibility, so that his words will persuade in the hall. He has slain livestock, has selected a calf and a lamb that he has raised for himself among the animals of the herd, and has nurtured a kid that the grass has fed. Once an animal is suitable for slaughter, he takes some of it to feed himself; having slaughtered it, he roasts the meat. But he also makes parchment of its skin and worships the parchment; he writes a scroll upon it and bows down before the writing. Half of it he tans for tenting; under this half he shelters and is at ease. He lies under the canopy and says, “Ah, how cozy I am here in my pavilion!” With the remainder he makes a scroll, his scripture, enthrones it, dances around it, swears upon it, and proclaims, “This is the Word of the Lord.”

  The Bible does not see writing as the art of writing in the way that it sees sculpture as the art of sculpture. When considering sculpture, it insists on seeing the sculptor in every demystifying detail of his work. The product is demeaned by being thus intimately linked to its merely human producer. The Bible never insists on seeing the writer in any similarly demeaning, demystifying way. The production of the written product is never comparably linked to its merely human producer.

  In the West, modern literary criticism has made this linkage by intensifying stages. A case can be made, I think, that the demystification of the text in the eighteenth century was followed by a counter-mystification of the author in the nineteenth and then, especially in the latter decades of the twentieth century, by a demystification of the author—text and author alike being seen as reflexes of larger, impersonal sociocultural forces. This last stage—the inside-outing of literature—came to a climax of sorts with the publication in 1967 of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie, and has now begun to subside.15

  In biblical criticism, which sometimes anticipates and sometimes lags behind general literary criticism, the demystification of the text in the eighteenth century was followed, in the nineteenth and twentieth, by a mystification of the postulated author (or school or community): thus, “Dtr,” the postulated Deuteronomistic Historian; the postulated “Johannine School”; the imagined “Q-community” of early Christians or “Jesus people”; and so forth. Biblical criticism will fall into step with general literary criticism if and when it begins to “de-authorize” the entities it has been “author-izing” for a century and more. The recent, still somewhat tentative move toward social history may or may not portend such a change.

  Meanwhile, general literary criticism, weary of its own demystification of the author, has begun to place a new emphasis on the work as a work and on the value of cultivating an aesthetic response to it. It has begun to move, in a word, to a new emphasis on beauty. The historical criticism of the Bible—a process that I have compared to the examination of a rose window, pane by pane, for signs of the absence of stain—may yet prove a paradoxically good preparation for this old/new kind of criticism, for, obviously, if you have checked every pane hoping to find one without stain, you end up knowing something about every pane as well as a great deal about stain. Traditional Bible scholars, though their research has almost always been at least nominally in the service of history, have, de facto, studied the development of images and motifs, noted allusions, explicit and implicit, and performed a thousand other services crucial to the literary appreciation of the Bible—so much so, indeed, that some of what is offered as literary criticism by those who lack their training and have not combed through the text as meticulously as they have may quite understandably strike them as too simple-minded for serious comment. But rather than dismiss literary criticism as sciolist dilettantism, historically trained critics could become literary critics themselves and try to improve the neighborhood.

  The largest change to be realized from such a paradigm shift might be the introduction of courses and degree programs in the Christian Bible. It is strange but true that advanced degrees are not offered in this subject, and even undergraduate courses are rare. Jews take advanced degrees in the Tanakh, or Jewish Bible, but Christians must choose a degree either in the Old Testament (usually listed as “Hebrew Bible”) or in the New. Advanced degrees in the whole of Christian scripture are simply not available. After completing their degrees, Christian scholars trained in either Old or New Testament seldom teach or publish on the far side of the pedagogical divide. The institutionalization of this divide, which rightly surprises scholars of literature and religion outside the hypertrophied culture of biblical research, has survived even the impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a large and astonishing body of literature that falls, in every sense, between the Old Testament and the New. A pedagogical bifurcation of some sort may be defensible if the goal is to write historical criticism of the Bible or outright history using the Bible as one source among others. After all, a thousand years of cultural evolution do separate Saul ben Kish, the doomed king of First Samuel, from Saul of Tarsus, the Apostle to the Gentiles. We do not expect a historian of France to specialize in both Charlemagne and Charles de Gaulle; why should we expect any comparable feat from a historian of ancient Jewry? If, however, the goal is not historiography but literary appreciation—the focused, stereoptic perception of the Old Testament and the New as a single, synthetic work in which the two Sauls have indeed come to rest between one pair of book covers—then pedagogical bifurcation is indefensible.

  If there were such a thing as an advanced degree in the entirety of the Christian Bible, those seeking it might arguably not need to learn Hebrew and Aramaic so long as they mastered the Greek of the Septuagint and read the scriptures in the language in which Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul knew them. (See Appendix I on the status of the Septuagint as a divinely inspired “original” text for Hellenistic Judaism long before the birth of Jesus.) Obviously, however, it would be better if students of the Christian Bible did know Hebrew, and indeed far more fruitful for them to have read the Tanakh in the original Hebrew than to have read fourth-century Gnostic codices in the original Coptic. One has the distinct impression at gatherings of New Testament scholars that mastery of Coptic is more nearly de rigueur for the consummate New Testament scholar than is mastery of Hebrew and that, as a result, allusions to the Old Testament in the New are undervalued and sometimes missed altogether. Even scholars who are determined to stress, above all else, the Jewishness of Jesus are more likely to do so by reconstructing the Judaism of his day than by hearing echoes of the Tanakh in the New Testament. The institutional segregation of advanced study of the Old Testament from advanced study of the New Testame
nt can scarcely avoid having a variety of such untoward consequences. Reference works preserving a heritage of theologically motivated intertextual noticing do not obviate the need for a New Testament scholar to be imaginatively steeped in the Old Testament: No reference work can substitute for a habit of mind and a well-stocked memory.

  In the study of the Bible, historicism is still very much in the saddle. Though Hans Frei was respectfully read by intellectual historians during his lifetime, his impact on biblical studies was minimal then, and even now remains modest, because historicism has made the appreciation of the Bible as art seem trivial by comparison with the elaboration and confirmation of the Bible as history or, paradoxically, even with its disconfirmation as such. A bit ruefully, Frei called the liberals and fundamentalists who once fought (and sometimes still fight) so fiercely over the historical reliability of the Bible “siblings under the skin.”16 In their particular opinions they differ, but in the importance they assign to history they are one. Much the same may be said of the kind of postmodern literary criticism of the Bible that sees itself as attacking classic historical-critical scholarship from the left but is itself best described as neohistoricist. Frei is no more a prophet for that kind of postmodernism than is Eric Auerbach, whose 1946 Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature Frei admired.17 Like Frei, Auerbach is a thinker whose ideas, ever focused on aesthetic appreciation, have been more admired than applied, perhaps because they rest on an acquaintance with literature so anachronistically broad and deep as to defy imitation.