Reading the Bible again for the First Time
Page 31
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8. The shift in pronouns in the last verse is puzzling. “She” obviously refers to woman/women; “they” could refer to women, or it could refer to the children born of “childbearing.”
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9. The Catholic prohibition of ordaining women as priests has a different basis.
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10. Exod. 20.17 and Deut. 5.21.
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11. Important clarification: I am not saying that the meaning of a biblical text is confined or restricted to what the ancient author or community said. As I will say in the next chapter, a metaphorical reading of the Bible yields meanings beyond the ancient historical intention of the text.
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12. For a superb treatment of the meaning of “scripture,” see Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993). Smith argues that scripture is “a human activity,” a phrase with several meanings: the writings that become scripture are produced by humans, are then declared to be scripture by a community, and then function to shape the lives of the people who regard them as scripture. See also the helpful book by John P. Burgess, Why Scripture Matters (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998).
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13. I do not wish to provide a comprehensive list, but an example of each may be helpful. (1) Paul’s counsel about whether it is permissible to eat meat left over from pagan sacrifices was relevant to his time, though not very much if at all to our time. (2) I cannot believe that it was ever God’s will that the women and children of one’s enemies in war should be slaughtered, to use an example from the Hebrew Bible; or that it is God’s will that the majority of the earth’s population be destroyed at the second coming of Christ, to use an example from the New Testament.
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14. This is how the Bible functioned in earlier periods of Christian history. See the comment by Rowan A. Greer in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 5, p. 1028: During the period of the early church, “Scriptural authority was not so much a matter of propositions or of the application of principles to cases as a question of the way in which the lore of the church’s past persuasively shaped the corporate lives of Christians.”
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1. Source criticism is the attempt to discern earlier sources of some biblical books. Form criticism is the study of oral forms of tradition and their setting in the ancient communities that produced the Bible. Redaction criticism focuses on the intentions of the author(s) (redactor[s]) who put the document into its final form. Canonical criticism seeks the meaning of passages within the context of the canon as a whole.
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2. Many scholars date the earliest portions (found in the Pentateuch) to the 900s BCE and date the latest portion (the book of Daniel) to about 165 BCE. The earliest New Testament document is probably Paul’s first letter to his community in Thessalonica, written around 50 CE, and the latest is II Peter, written perhaps as late as 125 or 150 CE.
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3. Leslie P. Hartley, The Go-Between. (New York: Stein and Day, 1953).
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4. I explicitly exempt Walter Wink from this category, even though he wrote a now-famous book that begins with the sentence “Historical biblical criticism is bankrupt.” The Bible in Human Transformation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), p.1. As Wink’s subsequent work makes clear, he is a skilled practitioner of historical criticism.
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5. “Metaphor is poetry plus, not factuality minus” builds on a Swedish proverb cited by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and attributed to Krister Stendahl in Smith’s What Is Scripture? (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), p. 277, n.2. The original proverb is “Theology is poetry plus, not science minus.”
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6. An example of the relationship between archetype and society: the ancient cosmic combat myth is an archetypal narrative that tells the story of a world that has fallen under the rule of a brutal oppressive lord, the advent of a hero who defeats the evil power, and the restoration of the rule of the good lord. As I will suggest later in this book, this is a major structural element in the book of Revelation: the conflict between the lordship of Caesar and the lordship of Christ is portrayed in these terms.
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7. Robert M. Grant and David Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible, second ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), pp. 85–86.
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8. Origen, De Principiis IV.1, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979, reprint of the 1885 edition), pp. 360–73.
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9. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1987) pp. 99–229.
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10. Luke 10.29–37. Augustine’s interpretation is found in his Quaestiones Evangeliorum II.19, paraphrased from C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom, rev. ed. (New York: Scribner, 1961). Dodd uses this as an example of how not to interpret a parable.
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11. Mark 8.27–10.45.
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12. Mark 8.22–26. So also, in the following text, as Mark tells the story, the disciples and Peter see who Jesus is in two stages (Mark 8.27–30). (1) Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” and they respond with various reports. (2) Jesus then asks them, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter responds with, “You are the Christ” (Christ = messiah). As with the blind man of Bethsaida, their “seeing” who Jesus is involves two stages.
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13. Mark 10.46–52.
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14. See my Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), chap. 6.
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15. I have treated this topic in previous books—briefly in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, pp. 6, 17, 24; more extensively in The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), co-authored with N. T. Wright, pp. 247–49. I treat it again here because of its importance for this book.
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16. Precritical naivete is thus very similar to the natural literalism that I described in chap. 1.
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17. It can be resisted. Fundamentalism is the refusal to apply critical thinking to the Bible. As a form of conscious literalism (see chap. 1), fundamentalism sees the corrosive effect of modern critical thinking on the Bible and insistently rejects it.
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18. See George Papashvily, The Yes and No Stories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946).
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19. For a fuller exposition of this way of reading the birth stories, see The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, chap. 12, pp. 179–86.
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1. The Hebrew Bible and the Protestant Old Testament are identical in content, though divided differently. In the former, there are twenty-four books; in the latter, thirty-nine books. The Catholic Old Testament includes another twelve books, commonly called “The Apocrypha” or “Deuterocanonical” books. Orthodox Christians (often called “Eastern Orthodox”) include another four.
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2. This rejection came about in what is known as the Marcionite controversy. Marcion was a second-century Roman Christian who rejected the Hebrew Bible as un-Christian and affirmed a very abbreviated portion of what later became the New Testament.
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3. See quotation from the third-century Christian theologian Origen later in this chapter.
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4. The dates he calculated still appear in the margins of some Bibles.
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&
nbsp; 5. See George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 17–26; Ian G. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 96–104, and Religion and Science (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), pp. 49–74.
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6. For an analysis and critique of “scientific creationism” or “creation science,” see Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science (Atlanta: Knox, 1984). His book as a whole is an excellent study of the creation stories, integrating modern biblical scholarship, science, and myth.
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7. For a discussion of precritical naivete, see chap. 3.
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8. And, of course, we now know of humanoids much older than the ones I heard of when I was a child.
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9. To speak of them as historical figures does not imply that the stories about them are straightforward historical reports, or even that we have any accurate historical information about them. Rather, it means that Israel located the story of Abraham and Sarah in a recognizable historical context.
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10. Let me explain why J is the common abbreviation for the “Yahwist” source of the Pentateuch. The source theory of the Pentateuch originated in German biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century. The German language, which does not have the letter Y, uses the letter J for the sound made by the English Y. Thus in German the name of God is “Jahweh” and the abbreviation is J. But it is conventional in English to spell “Jahweh” as “Yahweh.” Hence the odd result that the Yahwist source is the J source.
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11. In this section I accept what has been the common scholarly understanding of the sources of the Pentateuch for over a century. Recently that understanding has come under review and revision by some Hebrew Bible scholars. Though P and its dating in the 500s are still widely accepted, there are serious questions about whether J should be thought of as an early connected narrative or as a mixture of traditions from many periods of Israel’s history, with some of it as late in date as P. For a summary of the case made by several scholars for regarding much of J as late, see Joseph Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch (New York: Doubleday, 1992). Some recent scholars continue to see J as early. See, for example, Terence Fretheim’s commentary on Genesis in The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 319–674. Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg’s The Book of J (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990) is based on an early date for J (and somewhat provocatively and eccentrically argues that the author was likely a woman). If the debate among Hebrew Bible scholars concludes with a later date for J, my analysis would not be affected in any significant way, for my comments on J do not depend upon an early date.
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12. Gen. 1.1–2.
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13. Gen. 1.3–5.
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14. The sequence of creative acts points to the impossibility of reconciling the Genesis stories of creation with modern scientific knowledge simply by extending the timeframe from days to geological epochs. Note that light is created on the first day and yet sun, moon, and stars are not created until the fourth day. Indeed, the creation of vegetation (day three) precedes the creation of sun, moon, and stars.
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15. Gen. 1.26–27. The use of the plural pronouns “us” and “our” has often puzzled people: Who is God talking to? Though Christians have sometimes seen this as a reference to the Trinity, that is impossible in an ancient Hebrew story, roughly a thousand years earlier than the notion of the Trinity. Most scholars think that the passage makes use of the image of God as a king surrounded by a heavenly council, such as we find, for example, in I Kings 22.19–23.
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16. Gen. 2.4–7. Note: whenever the word Lord appears all in capital letters, as it does here, it is a translation of “Yahweh,” the Hebrew sacred name of God.
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17. Gen. 2.17.
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18. Gen. 2.18–23.
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19. Gen. 3.1–24.
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20. Gen. 1.6, 14–17.
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21. Gen. 7.11.
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22. For other hymns of creation in the Hebrew Bible, see Ps. 8, Ps. 104.
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23. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta: Knox, 1982), pp. 24–27. His exposition of Gen. 1–3 is filled with brilliant insights (pp. 11–54).
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24. If J is early, then the possibility of exile is a warning. If J is late, then exile has happened. And whether or not the J material is early, its integration into the P narrative occurs during or after Israel’s actual experience of exile.
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25. Origen, De Principiis, 4.1.16. Translation is mine; parenthetical material added. For an older English translation, see The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979, reprint of 1885 edition) vol. 4, p. 365. Origen also says that the Bible contains “countless instances of a similar kind that were recorded as having occurred, but which did not literally take place.” Even “the gospels themselves are filled with the same kind of narratives.” Origen also strongly affirms that he sees much of the Bible as historical.
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26. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
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27. H. and H. A. Frankfurt, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 8. The quotation continues by affirming that myth is “a form of reasoning which transcends reasoning.”
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28. But not of everything that happens. The distinction between “everything that is” and “everything that happens” is important. To say that God is the source of every existing entity is not to say that God is the cause of everything that happens. This applies especially to human behavior, but also to “natural” occurrences such as weather, earthquakes, hurricanes, and so forth.
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29. Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Warner Books, 1980), pp. 105–6. The literature on the relationship between religion and science is vast. Among recent books that I especially recommend are Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science (see note 6 above); Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web (Harrisburg: Morehouse, 2000); Philip Clayton, God and Contemporary Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997); Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).
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30. For the two models, see Sallie McFague, The Body of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), pp. 151–57. See also her Models of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), pp. 109–16.
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31. This view is not to be confused with pantheism, commonly understood to mean the identification of the universe with God. The roots of panentheism are very ancient. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, the roots go back to the Bible’s affirmation of both the transcendence and the immanence of God. For my description of the differences between supernatural theism, pantheism, and panentheism, see The God We Never Knew (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), chaps. 2–3. As an explicitly developed concept, panentheism is becoming more and more common among mainline Christian theologians. See, for example, Clayton, God and Contemporary Science, pp. 82–124.
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32. Acts 17.28.
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33. Gen. 3.19
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34. Some historians of culture have argued that the modern domination and destruction of nature has its roots in the Bible as the sacred text of Weste
rn culture, especially the creation story with its affirmation of God-given human dominion in Gen. 1.28: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” The indictment has some substance: the dominion text was often cited to legitimate modern Western “development” of the world. But it is probably not fair to the text itself. Walter Brueggemann comments that the dominance referred to in Gen. 1.28 “is that of a shepherd who cares for, tends, and feeds the animals” and notes that it pertains to “securing the well-being of every other creature and bringing the promise of each to full fruition” (Genesis, p. 32).