Readers Reply

“Did we do the right thing?” we asked BR readers in our August 1999 issue (see sidebar to “Did Eve Fall or Was She Pushed?” BR 15:04). We had printed a detail of Hans Baldung Grien’s painting Eve, the Serpent and Death as the opening illustration in Susan L. Greiner’s article, “Did Eve Fall or Was She Pushed?” BR 15:04. Eve is shown smiling suggestively in an openly sexual pose. The painting well captures Eve in the role popularly—but not biblically—assigned to her: the sexual temptress responsible for bringing sin and death into the world. The only thing missing from the scene was a fig leaf, and we opted to crop the painting just below Eve’s navel.

Did we act in our readers’ best interests, avoiding unnecessary offense and sparing children from something not appropriate to them? Or did we become prudish censors, preventing readers from fully appreciating a serious work of art? We turned to you for your comments, and you responded in record numbers. In the largest outpouring of letters in memory, you let us know that, for the great majority of you, we did not do the right thing: 70 percent said we should not have cropped the painting, while only 20 percent approved of our action; another 10 percent expressed no direct opinion. Two-thirds of the writers were male, and ten percent were clergy, of both sexes and of both opinions. A sampling of the range of opinions follows.—Ed.

I. You Were Wrong

Is Michelangelo Next?

As a longtime subscriber, I have been an ardent admirer of the color illustrations in the magazine; I know of no other journal that can match it. These illustrations plus the editorial content, which is both stimulating and challenging, have put BR at the top of my list of favorite publications.

But now you have censored my copy, and I wonder whether I should get in touch with my curator friend in Rome and ask him to drape Michelangelo’s David. Please! No more “prurient cropping”! As I would exercise my own judgment on the editorial content, so I want the full spread on the pictures.

Your action has not, however, diminished my admiration for your journal.

Recall St. Catherine

“When the artist hasn’t provided a fig leaf, what should we do?” We might recall the words of Saint Catherine of Genoa: “True love wills to stand naked, without any kind of cover, in heaven and on earth, since it has not anything shameful to conceal.”

The Rest of Us Can Handle It

Those who would object to the artistic representation of the human body in all its glory have probably already cancelled their subscriptions anyway. Therefore they will not even have the opportunity to see the art that you think they might find objectionable. Please give the rest of your readers the chance to view the great art of the ages in its totality. We are adults and able to handle it.

Male Nudity vs. Female Nudity

The painting beautifully illustrated the article and your cropping of it beautifully illustrated how completely we have swallowed the extrabiblical perversions of sex and human sexuality that, contrary to Genesis, have “turned sex into a sin and Eve into a sexual temptress.”

Susan L. Greiner rightly points out in her excellent article that Adam and Eve’s “sexual relations have no negative connotations. Rather, they are dictated by God.” Even more basic than that, Adam and Eve’s sexuality, like ours, is envisioned, designed and given by God. That should be a cause for celebration, not an occasion for offense.

Curiously, you were concerned that some readers might be offended by seeing a full frontal representation of Eve. Yet William Blake’s pencil drawing of a rape in progress is graphically more sexual and explicit. Is technicolor nudity more offensive than black-and-white sexual exploitation?

Then there is Michelangelo’s Tree of Knowledge fresco. What are we to conclude from your hesitation to show all of Eve in light of your apparent willingness to show Adam in all his glory? That male genitalia are less offensive to your readers than female? Would readers who might shudder to think their children might see a full frontal female nude not shudder to think they might see a male one? Why the double standard? Or were the noncanonical seduction stories cited by Greiner right after all—is it the female sex organ that causes all our problems?

Whether you did the right thing or the wrong thing with respect to the Grien painting is morally immaterial. What is worth thinking about is how your selection and use of works of art to illustrate the article reflect the ambivalent thinking and feeling of most of us when it comes to the divine gift of sex and human sexuality.

When faced with similar editorial decisions in the future, this reader would suggest that you just trust us. We can handle it.

Expurgating Shakespeare

How would you feel if I reprinted a BR article but left out views I disagreed with or thought offensive? Those omissions could present a totally opposite view of what had been originally written. Should a playhouse leave out the suicide in Romeo and Juliet because it is worried about the effect on teens in the audience?

Entire Picture Required for Full Appreciation

You insulted both my intelligence and the artist’s. I understand your vacillation about cropping supposedly embarrassing body parts; however, as a historian and art lover, I firmly believe that art can provide and explain both historical and religious concepts. The artist rendered an idea and a feeling, and the work needs to be fully exhibited for true appreciation. BR’s editors may have feared harming children or offending adults. But I suspect that they were really afraid of receiving negative criticisms from naive, puritanical readers. In your August issue, political correctness drowned intelligence.

Grow Up!

Oh, come on! If the readers of BR are not adult enough to see Eve in her fullness, then they should not be reading BR at all.

Will Devil’s Picture Cause Nightmares?

I can’t believe that a nude Eve could be so offensive! I would be concerned only that the depiction of the devil could cause nightmares for very young viewers.

A painting is not a completed jigsaw that can be dismantled at the will of a squeamish editor.

BR vs. Our Daily Menu of Filth

It is ludicrous when society in general is subjected to a daily menu of unrestricted filth from so many sources that BR readers must be shielded from a legitimate work of art because of a missing fig leaf.

Adult vs. “Adult”

BR is an adult magazine, not an “adult” magazine. Anyone who sees these paintings as anything other than art is reading the wrong adult magazine.

In God’s Image

The answer lies in “Did Eve Fall or Was She Pushed?” BR 15:04: “…in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Who are we to be embarrassed by an image of God?

If You Wish, Deny Children Access

I am a subscriber to both BR and her sister publication Biblical Archaeology Review. I find the articles, without exception, entertaining and of the highest academic standard. I am an undergraduate in theology at Oxford University, with a specialization in both the post-Exilic period and studies on the “historical Jesus.”

Censorship of any form is undesirable. Regarding the postulation that children may come across such pictures, some parents may not mind, whilst those that do retain the ability not to allow their children access.

Teaching Children About Sexuality

I am offended that you did not include the entire work. I am offended that a journal of scholarship would pander to the pseudo-politically correct religious right and their cohort of narrow-minded lemmings who seek to impose their truncated worldview upon us all. What they, and by extension BR, have done is to fall into the precise trap so well documented in “Did Eve Fall or Was She Pushed?” BR 15:04. They have failed to distinguish between human sexuality as a gift from God and the use of our sexuality in exploitative and self-destructive ways not in keeping with the Bible.

As to the question of children viewing works of art, there is nothing shameful or damaging about children seeing depictions of anatomically correct human beings. Children who are taught that our sexuality is a gift from God, to be used according to his will, develop a spiritual and emotional view of sexuality that is both healthy and natural. Honest answers to children’s questions about our genitalia and sexuality are essential for them to become well-integrated psychosexual adults.

Cut the Article in Half?

No, you did not do right in truncating the painting at Eve’s waist. Did you consider cutting the article in half?

Offended at the Question

Those who advocate censorship really need portable fig leaves to be dropped strategically before their eyes, protecting themselves from “occasions of sin,” as one person I know describes all art museums, most cinema and television, and, indeed, most of the world around him. As for me, I am offended that the question was even asked. Fortunately, I have seen the Grien painting elsewhere, but I am offended that the editors should have felt so intimidated as to have curtailed the power of that image to enhance and further explain the fine article it accompanied. Of course it is necessary to consider the audience in any publication—but why should the prejudices of the censorious prevail in such a decision?

The Wrath of the Prudes

It is a shame that a classic painting cannot be reproduced in its entirety in a periodical targeted at intellectuals without risking the wrath of the prudish. For that reason, you probably made the right choice—from a publisher’s point of view. Much of the message of the artist has been lost, as is usually the case when puritanical types feel they must sanitize the world. It’s unfortunate that a few ruin it for the rest of us.

II. You Were Right

BR Is Not Playboy

To fig leaf or not to fig leaf? Your handling of Eve was appropriate and in good taste. BR does not have to sink to Playboy levels. Good work.

Lust Leads to Belief that Women Are Evil

I agree with your decision to crop. Most presentations of nude women are rather perverse, and great paintings are no exception. Women are usually depicted the way men like to see women, and the way they have been taught to see is fantasy. And because women don’t fit these roles, men develop other ways to control them: by creating a belief system in which women are evil and inferior, by upholding laws that ensure their dependent status and by acting violently toward them.

The lustful feelings men have are their own feelings, their own reactions to women. Because this sexual attraction has overwhelmingly been portrayed as women’s evil power, many men never learn this.

You Showed the Important Part

You did the right thing.

The detail you presented illustrated the article beautifully without introducing sexually explicit material into the home.

Thanks for making that choice and thanks for asking.

Protect Her Children

You did the right thing in cropping the painting Eve, the Serpent and Death. In fact, I wish you had done the same with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco and Dürer’s The Fall of Man. Why? My children, ages 10 and 13, enjoy thumbing through the magazines I subscribe to. I don’t feel this issue is one I can leave on the coffee table for them to enjoy.

BR Filthy Trash

When I ordered BR, I thought I was getting a decent biblical magazine that I would be proud to have my children and young grandchildren read. In the past I have enjoyed the issues, but I am appalled at this last issue. This issue is pretty well like Playboy or the magazines that show pornographic scenes.

I would not dare let my ten-year-old or six-year-old granddaughters pick up this filthy magazine. No thank you, I don’t want any more of this trash. You may have it back.

A Stopping Point

I do believe in being honest, but there is a stopping point, I guess.

Even Great Artists Breach God’s Standards

In Matthew 5:28 Jesus said, “But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Sexuality is not sinful but a blessing in the context of God’s design and direction. It becomes sinful and destructive outside of these constraints. Neither great artists nor religious themes justify choices that breach God’s standard of morality. Kindly cancel my subscription.

Not Necessary

These pictures are totally unnecessary. Shame on you. Please cancel my subscription.

III. You Were Right, but You Were Wrong

Right Decision, Wrong Reason

You were right to crop the painting—but for the wrong reason. Cropping allowed the upper half to be presented larger and therefore in more detail, including Eve’s grasp of the serpent’s phallic tail.

Show, but Don’t Deceive

As committed Christians, we see nothing wrong with the publication of uncropped versions of a true work of art. The artist does not create his work to be seen only through rose-colored glasses.

But the editorial staff must demonstrate common sense in describing the illustrations. When editors go all out to point to every nuance of a nude illustration—the position of fingers and various body parts, and what they are supposed to mean—the reader may see sensualism where there is none. In other words, the less said, the better! But don’t deny your readers beautiful art.

Art vs. Social Conventions

The question you ask regarding the cropping of reproductions of works of art has very little to do with art and everything to do with social conventions and pietism.

Images are cropped all the time by editors, designers and even the artists themselves. Rarely does it contribute to the detriment of the whole, certainly not when it is represented as a detail of the original. Cropping is, in fact, standard procedure if one wants to study part of an image up close, as you did with Hans Baldung Grien’s Eve, the Serpent and Death. It amounts to no more than quoting from Ecclesiastes rather than printing the Preacher’s entire text. I dare say that few artists would be offended by this any more than they would be offended at a museumgoer’s getting up close to carefully study a small part of an original.

However, if the cropping is done for the reasons you suggest—to protect your readership, and possibly their children, from the potential offense of seeing Grien’s representation of Eve’s pubic hair—then I think that you most certainly did not do the right thing.

If this is your motivation, then you are acquiescing to the disturbing notion that the human body and its representations are prurient, tawdry and even evil. In a time when dismemberment, decapitation and other offenses to the human body are part of the standard fare for public entertainment, and when the words sex and violence are ubiquitously paired, responsible journalists should seize every opportunity to offer enlightened antidotes.

Is It Relevant to the Point?

Cropping is in order when nudity is not necessary to convey the meaning of the picture or to bring out a point in the text. However, that doesn’t mean you should cut the heart out of the picture just to avoid nudity.

Your August issue shows perfect judgment on this issue: You cropped the picture and put the focus where it belonged—on the contrast between the death and decay brought by Satan and the health and vigor of the unsinful Eve.

Potpourri

Kepler, Not Newton

Whatever the theologians may say about the infallibility of the Bible, I regret that we cannot extend such infallibility to Ronald S. Hendel’s column in the August 1999 issue (“Going Around in Circles”). Alas, it was not “Isaac Newton who later realized that the planetary orbits were ellipses, not perfect circles”; that was instead the discovery of Johannes Kepler, a contemporary of Galileo.

Distinguishing Poetry from Science

At first I thought Ronald Hendel was merely representing the viewpoint of 16th-century ecclesiastical authorities when he referred to the Bible’s “endorsement” of a geocentric cosmology. However, he then declares that “the Bible’s picture of the physical cosmos is [scientifically] false.” Apparently, he believes that the cited biblical references (Ecclesiastes 1:5; Psalm 24:1–2 et al.) were intended as science, not poetry. Really, I didn’t know that Hendel was such a literalist.

Tell Us What You Really Think

If you truly wanted to have a magazine that is a review of the Bible, you would have a spectrum of opinion, not just the postmodernist, deconstructionist crap BR is full of.

Thanks All Around

Whom do I address with my compliments? If I choose [editor] Hershel Shanks, I neglect [executive editor Steven] Feldman and [managing editor Molly] Dewsnap, who, I’m sure, did all the work—well, had all the pain and little acknowledgment. I just finished the August 1999 BR. It got better and better as I read through. I really ought to quit now, because I’m certain that you will never outdo that issue or even equal it again.

Reader’s Dilemma

Just as I was debating with myself whether or not to renew my BR subscription, you published a blockbuster issue (August 1999). Although you deal with rehash on rehash of biblical minutiae, it is interesting. You strain for the scriptural gnat while you are blind to contemporary, catastrophic planks. My debate is one of conscience: Should I drop my subscription and save trees or continue to be titillated with biblical trivia?

As the architect Walter Gropius said, “God is in the details.”—Ed.