by Timothy Beal
“Think of the Hebrew word for question, she’elah,” he continued. “There is ‘el (God) in she’elah. God is in the question. But to give the answer? Keep asking the question.”
Is this not also the lesson of the book of Job? Job’s friends are trying to answer for God against Job’s accusations, but they are ultimately scolded because they did not “speak rightly” to or about God. Job, after all, is the only one who has insisted on maintaining his questions against all answers.
“God seems to be saying to the friends, ‘who are you to answer for me? Who do you think you are?! Who asked you?!’ And God takes the side of Job. God does not tell him the truth, but God does take Job’s side over against the friends. In a way, God at the end of Job is saying, ‘look who I have to defend me!’ How pathetic are these defendants! And in The Trial of God, it is not Beresh’s friends but Satan alone who will be God’s champion. Imagine, at the end of The Trial of God, God saying, ‘look who is my defendant!’ As in Job, this shows the pathos of God, the tragedy of God. And so all the questions are there—even God’s.”
The book of Job is like a fault line running through the Bible. In it, the moral universe affirmed in texts like Deuteronomy, according to which righteousness equals blessed well-being and disobedience equals cursed suffering, is shaken to its core. It’s a book of theological horror.
Yet Job is no more the final word than is Deuteronomy. Neither does the psalmist of disorientation have the final word over the psalmist of orientation. The contradictory voices remain, as do many others that approach this problem from other perspectives and experiences. Contending with this, the most profound of theological questions, the Bible remains entirely unsettled, and unsettling. The argument goes unresolved. The question is canonized, sanctified. God is in the question—and in the argument, even when it is against God.
Weak Rope Theory
The New Testament is no more univocal than the Old Testament. Compare, for example, the empty-tomb stories in the four Gospels. Who went to the tomb and discovered it was empty? In Matthew, they are Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary.” In Mark, they are Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. In Luke, they are Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and “the other women with them.” And in John, Mary Magdalene is the only one. What did they see? In Matthew, they see an angel who looked like lightning come down from heaven and roll away the stone while the guards freeze like dead men. In Mark, they see that the stone has already been rolled away and they find a young man dressed in white sitting inside. In Luke, they see the stone rolled away and two men standing beside them in dazzling clothes. And in John, Mary Magdalene sees only that the stone is rolled away. What did they do? In Matthew and Luke, they go and tell the disciples that Jesus is risen. In Mark, they run away in fear and tell no one. And in John, Mary Magdalene runs back to tell the others that someone has stolen the body. These are just some of the more glaring differences in the empty-tomb stories. There’s no obvious way to harmonize them.
Or compare the three different versions of the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus in the Acts of the Apostles. The first is told by the narrator (Acts 9), and the other two are told by Paul to different audiences (to Jewish authorities in chapter 22, and to King Agrippa in chapter 26). Set the three versions side by side. What happened to him? In the first and second versions, a great light descends and shines around Paul, he alone falls to the ground blinded, and Jesus says, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Jesus then commands him to go to Damascus to receive further instructions. In the third version, a light “brighter than the sun” shines around him and his companions, they all fall to the ground, and Jesus says, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” but then adds, “It hurts you to kick against the goads.” Jesus does not send him to Damascus, but explains then and there what his mission will be. Meanwhile, what did Paul’s companions see and hear? In the first version, they remain standing, speechless “because they heard the voice but saw nothing.” In the second, it’s reversed: they see the light but don’t hear the voice. And in the third, they see the light, which knocks them to the ground along with Paul, and apparently hear the voice too. These are only a few of the discrepancies in the three versions. To be sure, there may be literary reasons for them. The narrator’s version may be taken as the historically correct account, and Paul’s two versions of it may be seen as rhetorically “spun” in order to address his different audiences. Perhaps, too, there were different accounts of that story told among early Christians, and this was a way to incorporate them all within a single narrative. In any case, the contradictions stand without an obvious way to explain them away.
Another well-known New Testament contradiction concerns what happened to Judas Iscariot after he betrayed Jesus to the authorities. In Matthew, Judas commits suicide by hanging himself, indicating remorse for his act of betrayal. In Acts, by contrast, he trips over a rock and is disgorged, indicating divine judgment. Some seem unable to accept that the Bible could contain such a discrepancy. Thus was born the “weak rope” or “weak bough” theory. According to it, Judas hangs himself, but the rope or branch he uses is weak and breaks before he dies. He then stumbles around, half-asphyxiated, falls on a rock, spills his guts, and dies. So, obviously, both passages are true!
We could go on multiplying examples of biblical polyvocality almost endlessly. Some, like the question of Judas’s fate, are simple matters of what happened when: different chronologies of kings and prophets (e.g., discrepancies between Kings and Chronicles), different sequences of events in the Gospels. Others involve different metaphorical images of the divine, which sometimes also imply very different theologies of the character of God: warrior, mother, nurse, jealous husband, loving daddy, rock, still small voice. There are also different names for God: El, Eloah, Elohim (literally, “gods”), El-Shaddai (often translated “God on high,” but more literally “God of breasts”), Adonai, and the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton, Yhwh. Still others, as we have seen, elaborate very different, mutually incompatible responses to some of the deepest and most fundamental human questions. How did the world begin? Why do innocent people suffer? What is justice? And so on and on.
Some see this rich polyvocality and contradiction as a problem to be solved. Many labor tirelessly to explain away all potential discrepancies, to get it all to say the same thing. Bibles like the Quest Study Bible and The Apologetics Study Bible go to great, tedious, sometimes ingenious lengths to explain them all away. Both of these, by the way, adhere to the weak rope theory, with Quest adding the lovely point that the only way Judas’s guts could’ve “burst” was if he’d already been rotting and distending for a good long time before the rope broke. Many other such explainings-away are at least as desperately creative. Desperate, in that they speak to the desire of many Bible readers to establish univocality within a deeply, richly, irrepressibly polyvocal collection of Scriptures. Creative as they are, they nonetheless stifle the rich complexity of biblical literature. They impoverish the text, and the faith that lives and moves and has its being in relation to it.
Is the Bible a Failure?
In many ways, those dedicated to removing all potential biblical contradictions, to making the Bible entirely consistent with itself, are no different from irreligious debunkers of the Bible, Christianity, and religion in general. Many from both camps seem to believe that simply demonstrating that the Bible is full of inconsistencies and contradictions, as I have just done, is enough to discredit any religious tradition that embraces it as Scripture. Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits. They agree that the Bible is on trial. They agree on the terms of the debate, and what’s at stake, namely its credibility as God’s infallible book. They agree that Christianity stands or falls, triumphs or fails, depending on whether the Bible is found to be inconsistent, to contradict itself. The question for both sides is whether it fails to answer questions, from the most trivial to the ultimate, consistently an
d reliably.
But you can’t fail at something you’re not trying to do. To ask whether the Bible fails to give consistent answers or be of one voice with itself presumes that it was built to do so. That’s a false presumption, rooted no doubt in thinking of it as the book that God wrote. As we have seen, biblical literature is constantly interpreting, interrogating, and disagreeing with itself. Virtually nothing is asserted someplace that is not called into question or undermined elsewhere. Ultimately it resists conclusion and explodes any desire we might have for univocality.
We don’t know, and will never know, many details about the history of the development of biblical literature. No doubt there have been countless hands, scribal and editorial, involved in writing, editing, copying, and circulating the various versions of various texts that eventually were brought together into a canonical collection. Nor do we know very much for certain about the ancient life situations—ritual practices, oral traditions, legal systems—in which these texts had their beginnings. Nor do we know everything about the complex process by which the canons of Jewish and Christian Scriptures took form. What we do know for certain is that the literature now in our Bibles was thousands of years in the making.
Given how many hands have been involved in so many contexts over such a long time in the history of this literature, can we honestly imagine that no one noticed such glaring discrepancies? Can we believe, for example, that the seam between the first and second creation stories in Genesis, as well as the many other seams found throughout the Torah, were not obvious? That if agreement and univocality were the goal, such discrepancies would not have been fixed and such rough seams mended long ago? That creation stories would have been made to conform or be removed? That Job would’ve been allowed to stand against Moses? That Gospel mix-ups concerning who saw what after Jesus’s resurrection would have been left to stand? That Judas would have died twice, once by suicide and once by divine disgorge? And so on? Could all those many, many people involved in the development of biblical literature and the canon of Scriptures have been so blind, so stupid? It’s modern arrogance to imagine so.
The Bible canonizes contradiction. It holds together a tense diversity of perspectives and voices, difference and argument—even and especially, as we have seen, when it comes to the profoundest questions of faith, questions that inevitably outlive all their answers. The Bible interprets itself, argues with itself, and perpetually frustrates any desire to reduce it to univocality.
Faith in Ambiguity
I’m reminded of the famous parable of the Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The story is told by Ivan, a cynical atheist, to his younger, mystically minded Christian brother, Alyosha. In it, Jesus appears in the city of Seville during the Spanish Inquisition, just as a huge crowd gathers to witness a mass execution. He never says a mumbling word, and yet everyone immediately recognizes him. Throngs gather around him, and he blesses and heals them. A tiny white coffin passes by, and the child within it is revived.
Standing in the cathedral doorway, the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor also sees Jesus, and immediately has him arrested. “Such is his power over the well-disciplined, submissive and now trembling people,” explains Ivan, “that the thick crowds immediately give way, and scattering before the guard, amid dead silence and without one breath of protest, allow them to lay their sacrilegious hands upon the stranger and lead Him away.” In the evening, the Grand Inquisitor visits Jesus alone in his prison cell, and explains to him that in the morning he will be burned at the stake “as the most wicked of all the heretics; and that same people, who today were kissing Thy feet, tomorrow at one bend of my finger, will rush to add fuel to Thy funeral pile.”
The reason, explains the Inquisitor, is that Jesus came to give people freedom, but that’s not what they want. What they really want, he says, is to be told what to do and believe, and to be fed. “For fifteen centuries, we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and over for good.”
Are Ivan and his Grand Inquisitor right? Would we rather not be free, to think and question for ourselves? Sapere aude! proclaimed the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. “Dare to know” or “be wise,” to release yourself from your self-incurred tutelage under the authority of others and think for yourself, to trust your own reason and imagination. To be sure, such a calling is both empowering and intimidating. Would we rather be told what to do and think? Do the questions make us nervous? Do we thirst for the answers that will put our restless spirits to rest? Is that what we really want religion to be, or rather do, for us? Is that what we want from the Bible?
A few years ago I had the pleasure of doing an interview with National Public Radio’s Michele Norris about my book, Roadside Religion. That book tells the story of my family’s “blue highways” exploration of roadside religious attractions, from the World’s Largest Ten Commandments and Holy Land USA to Precious Moments Chapel and Golgotha Fun Park. Norris knew that I had grown up in a conservative Christian environment, and wondered what kinds of thoughts and feelings these places evoked for me. Her final question was meant to bring our conversation around to this topic.
“As an avowed atheist . . .” Norris began.
“Um, wait. I’m sorry. I’m not an atheist. I’m actually Christian.”
“Really!? Your publicity kit says you’re an atheist at least twice.”
Later, I asked my publicist why the kit described me as an atheist. She said that she got it from the book’s introduction, where I wrote that there were days when I could “atheist anyone under the table.” That’s true. But to say that is not to say that I am an atheist. In fact, what I’d written was, “Although I can atheist anyone under the table on some days, I remain a Christian, and I remain committed to the church . . .”
The interview cleaned up nicely, and the confusion was worth a good laugh. But I think it belies a more significant, popular cultural understanding of what faith is, and what religion is. There is a widely held, simplistic definition of faith as firm belief. To many, especially nonreligious people, faith is seen as absolute certainty despite or without regard to observed facts or evidence. Yet, as anyone trying to live faithfully in this world knows full well, there is no faith without doubt. Doubt is faith’s other side, its dark night. Indeed, in an atheisting match, I’d put big odds on the faithful any day. People of faith know the reasons to doubt their faith more deeply and more personally than any outside critic ever can. Faith is inherently vulnerable. To live by faith is to live with that vulnerability, that soft belly, exposed.
Likewise the Bible. The Bible can atheist any book under the table on some pages. It presumes faith in God, yet, as we have seen, it also often gives voice to the most profound and menacing doubts about the security of that faith. The Bible is not a book of answers but a library of questions. How rare such places have become in a society addicted to quick fixes, executive summaries, and idiot’s guides. The canon of the Bible is that kind of place.
Ambiguity is the devil’s playground. Let it creep into your faith life and all hell will break loose. So some say. For them, faith is essentially a battle to keep up the wall of certitude against the immanent floodwaters of chaos. Uncertainty is a crack in the dam of faith. Elie Wiesel obviously disagrees. His Satan figure, the only one willing to defend God against life’s most profound questions, is the Grand Inquisitor’s soul brother. Contrary to them, faith deepens not in finding certainty but in learning to live with ambiguity, as we ride our questions as far into the wilderness as they will take us. Biblical literature hosts that journey.
Nothing but a Burning Light
Gospel singer, preacher, and pioneer of the blues Blind Willie Johnson understood the power of the honest question, and he perceived its flame in the Bible.
Johnson was born in poverty in 1897 and blinded at age seven when his stepmother, in a fight with his father, threw lye in his face. He died in poverty in 1945, sleeping on a wet bed in the ruins of his house, which ha
d burned down two weeks before. Thankfully, between 1927 and 1930, he recorded a number of his biblically based blues songs with Columbia Records. These have inspired countless rockers, from Led Zeppelin to Beck. In 1977 his “Dark Was the Night—Cold Was the Ground,” a hauntingly inarticulate meditation on the crucifixion, was sent into deep space on the Voyager 1 as part of the Voyager Golden Record, a collection of music representing the sounds of Earth to any potentially interested extraterrestrials. The time capsule left our solar system in November 2004 and is scheduled to be within 1.7 light years of two nearby suns in about forty thousand years. The closest thing to timeless any musical artist could possibly achieve. Mercy, how we do so often love to immortalize those despised and forgotten in life.
Johnson’s uniquely spiritual blues music is driven by the deepest questions, often finding voice through an encounter between biblical tradition and his own life experience, which was well acquainted with sorrow. The Bible peopled his imagination. It was his wellspring of imagery. It empowered him to call this world into question and to envision another. On at least one occasion the powers that be recognized how potentially explosive such an inspired combination of biblical language and lived oppression could be: he was arrested in front of a New Orleans city building for inciting riot simply by singing “If I Had My Way I’d Tear the Building Down,” a song about the biblical hero Samson, who tore down the house of the Philistine lords after they had gouged out his eyes. To the officer who arrested him, the ancient story suddenly sounded dangerously contemporary.
In his well-known song “Soul of a Man,” Johnson growls out the question he has pursued his whole life, knowing that no one can really help him find the answer: Just what is the “soul of a man?” Indeed, what is soul? It’s a question filled to overflowing with other questions. Am I more than my mind? More than my body? More than the sum of my parts? Do I have a soul? Does it live beyond this mortal coil? What am I? Who am I? Why am I here? Such profound questions are often asked, but too often are followed by erudite answers from someone who claims to know. Rarely by someone who honestly does not know. As none of us do.