The Great Gulf Between Scholars and the Pew

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Three great intellectual revolutions of the 19th and early 20th centuries have profoundly shaped and transformed the way we think of ourselves and our world. The first is Marxism and its derivative, socialism. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the changes in Eastern Europe may appear to have thoroughly discredited Marxism; such is the message of a letter I recently received from the Campus Crusade for Christ, which headlined its plea for funds with the message “Marx is out, Jesus is in.” But many Marxist principles, such as “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” have unalterably changed the social systems of the world, including our own. The particular 045Marxist system known as Communism has failed, but Marxism in its most basic sense has not.

The second revolution was launched by Charles Darwin’s synthesis of evolutionary theory, The Origin of Species (1859). Despite occasional and even sustained attacks on the book and its ideas from fringe groups, it is recognized as a turning point, a classic formulation not just of where we came from but who we are. Darwin was right: The fact that monkeys have hands should give us pause.

The third intellectual revolution is that of Sigmund Freud, in some respects the most original. His explanations of the workings of the human psyche have become part of our vocabulary. Terms like ego and id regularly appear in crossword puzzles; Freudian jargon such as inferiority complex, passive-aggressive, and anal-compulsive is commonplace. Though Freud’s psychological theories have been considerably modified by subsequent researchers and practitioners, their essential insight holds: As Freud himself is reported to have said of his opponents, they may disagree with us in their writings and lectures, but in their dreams they prove us right.

A fourth major intellectual revolution of the last century and a half has had surprisingly far less impact; it has to do with the Bible.

For almost 2,000 years, the Bible was widely regarded as a unified text, unequivocally the word of God and thus by definition consistent and free from error. The Bible was viewed as an absolute authority, and later, for Protestants, as the sole authority for belief and practice. Biblical views on everything from God to money were accepted without question; in Christian tradition the church in the broadest sense was the indispensable and authenticating interpreter of the Bible, but the Bible was its necessary foundation.

The first challenges to this traditional understanding of the Bible came in the 17th century, from philosophers like Thomas Hobbes¹ and Benedict Spinoza² and clerics like Richard Simon,³ who began the modern study of the Bible in a critical way. (By critical I do not mean negative, but rather free of presuppositions—or at least self-conscious about one’s presuppositions.) These pioneers challenged traditional views about the Bible’s authority and authorship by appealing to common sense, logic and historical method. By the 19th century their approach had gained considerable momentum. One of the most significant books relating to the New Testament was The Life of Jesus (1839) by the German scholar David Strauss, who, for the first time, provided a clear statement of the relationships among the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke. For the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament, the most influential work by far was the Prolegomena to The History of Israel (1878) by another German, Julius Wellhausen. During the same period thousands of ancient texts—in languages such as Assyrian, Babylonian, Aramaic and later Sumerian and Ugaritic—were excavated, deciphered and translated. Many of these texts had close or even verbatim correspondences with biblical passages, so that the view of the Bible as a unique document without parallel came under irrevocable challenge. Finally, there was an exponential growth of scientific knowledge: The Bible was simply not true, or not simply true, in the sense in which it had for so long been considered. Its cosmology, anthropology and chronology were often just wrong.

For the most part, scholars engaged in this new criticism were not only believers but ordained clergy, generally teachers in seminaries. The results of their work may be summarized as follows: The Bible is not one book by a single author, but, as the Bible itself clearly indicates, it is many books, by many authors who wrote over the course of more than a thousand years. Moreover, the Bible contains different points of view and often contradictory understandings and formulations of the nature of God and of our relationship with him and with other human beings. The Bible is not in any simple sense the word of God, but rather the words of Amos and Isaiah, of Luke and Paul.

Nor is the authorship that the Bible credits to various ancient figures historically accurate. Moses did not write the Torah (the Pentateuch, that is, the first five books of the Bible); David did not write most of the Psalms; Solomon did not write the Song of Solomon or Ecclesiastes; Isaiah did not write the entire book attributed to him; Paul did not write the letters to Timothy or Titus or several others published under his name; and it is unlikely that the apostles Matthew, James, Jude, Peter and John had anything to do with the canonical books ascribed to them.

Closely related to issues of authorship and even more significant is the question of consistency. It became clear, for example, that there was no way to harmonize certain conflicting biblical details. For example, was the conquest of the land of Canaan by the Israelites a rapid series of military victories or a slow process of assimilation? Was Jesus born in a stable or in a house? In Bethlehem or Nazareth? Did his active career last several years or only a few months? Was he absolutely or only theoretically opposed to divorce? Freed from dogmatic constraints, some scholars also pointed out that the Bible did not speak with one voice on more profound theological issues as well. There were different views about the paternity of Jesus, different interpretations of the confessional statement “Jesus is the son of God.”

The result, then, of what is now called the historical-critical method was an understanding of the Bible as a collection of historically conditioned documents, reflecting the biases, backgrounds and 046idiosyncrasies of its authors. But this understanding has had remarkably little effect on the way most people in our culture, whether religious or not, think of the Bible. This is evident in the way it is quoted by politicians, popes and pundits, and is most evident to me in the students I have taught for the last 20 years. The intellectual revolution that can be summed up in the phrase “the historical-critical method” has had virtually no impact; most people today view the Bible not very differently from the way scholars and laity alike viewed it before the Enlightenment—natively and precritically.

Why have the results of the historical-critical method, though broadly accepted by biblical scholars, had so little influence? Partly because the churches correctly perceived the results of biblical scholarship as an implicit and even explicit challenge to their authority. If the Bible is not true in any simple sense of that term, not free from error and not consistent, then so too must be subsequent formulations, whether conciliar, pontifical or episcopal. Christian leaders especially have therefore restricted the exposure of most people to the Bible. Although the Bible is acknowledged in theory as an authority, much of it has simply been ignored. For centuries there has been a kind of canon within the canon, a selection of biblical texts read in liturgical contexts that are therefore the principal contact most believers have with the Bible. Conspicuously absent from lectionaries are most or all of such books as Joshua, with its violent extermination of the inhabitants of the land of Canaan at divine command, or Judges, with its horrifying narratives of patriarchy and sexual assault in chapters 11 and 19—to say nothing of the Song of Solomon, with its charged eroticism, or of Job, with its radical challenge to the dominant biblical view of a just and caring God. Imagine if one Sunday these words were read from a pulpit as the day’s lesson:

“So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and be merry, for this will go with them in their toil through the few days of life that God gives them under the sun…. Everything that confronts them is vanity, since the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean to those who sacrifice and those who do not sacrifice. As are the good, so are the sinners; those who swear are like those who shun an oath. This is an evil in all that happens under the sun, that the same fate comes to everyone. Moreover, the hearts of all are full of evil; madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. But whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion. The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 8:15; 9:2–6 [NRSV]).

The skeptical theism of Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) with its apparent hedonism has been a scandal almost since the book was written, as the scribal note at its end attests;^a it is no wonder that Ecclesiastes has, practically speaking, been dropped from the Bible used by the churches.

Nor do wedding ceremonies any longer feature one of the typical, and relatively few, extended biblical texts about marriage:

“Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands” (Ephesians 5:22–24 [NRSV]; compare 1 Corinthians 11:3; Colossians 3:18).

How can this be reconciled with Galatians 3:28: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”?

Similarly, can the sadistic torture at divine initiative of “all who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads” (Revelation 9:3–5), or any number of other passages from that book of fantasy, be reconciled with the command to be merciful even as the Father is merciful (Luke 6:36; compare Matthew 5:43–45)?

Biblical passages like those just quoted are not the words of the Lord, at least not in the sense that Christians hear them as such. But they are in the Bible, and by what criterion are they less significant or less authoritative than others? There is a contradiction in the attitude of Christians toward the Bible. On the one hand it is an icon, to be venerated—according to a recent survey more than 90 percent of households in the United States own a Bible; on the other hand, it 047is ignored, or at best sanitized and bowdlerized, reduced essentially to what people want it to say or think it should say.

Students regularly ask me, “Why weren’t we ever told this is in the Bible?” In part, the answer is that they could not be trusted to read the Bible: It is a dangerous, even subversive collection. Exposure to such texts would require considerable explanation of the Bible as an inconsistent text with various, and in some ways incomplete, views on such topics as divine justice and mercy, the afterlife, and the status of women.

The idea of a canon within the canon is an ancient one, first formulated by Marcion in the second century. Based on his reading of Paul, Marcion cavalierly rejected the Old Testament as heretical. Although Marcion’s view itself was rejected, it nevertheless had considerable influence. If “the righteousness of God has been disclosed apart from the Law” (Romans 3:21) so that “now we are discharged from the Law” (Romans 7:6; compare Galatians 2:21), then what significance could the Law—the Torah—have for Christians? No matter that Paul’s view is debated within the pages of the New Testament, in the letter of James and especially in the Gospel of Matthew (5:17–19), where we find what can best be understood as a direct attack on Paul’s teaching by a Jewish Christian writer.

Thus, most Christian thinkers, following Paul rather than Matthew or James, have rejected the binding force of hundreds of biblical laws. Their only enduring significance is predictive or typological: They point somehow to Jesus. Still, most Christians have accepted, more or less, the enduring authority of such laws as the Ten Commandments. I say more or less, because although if asked, most Christians would claim to observe them, they have not read them; one commandment, at least, is consistently and institutionally violated, that prohibiting the making of images (Exodus 20:4–6). The long tradition of religious art depicting biblical heroes and even God clearly violates the second commandment, as the ancient iconoclasts and the more recent Puritans recognized.

Thus, within institutional Christianity, we can discern a selective approach toward biblical texts, as well as a resistance to the texts motivated by an at least unconscious fear of the implications of the historical-critical method. That method is correctly perceived as calling into question not just the authority of the Bible, but also the authority derived from the Bible.

But institutional Christianity is not the only party responsible for this situation. That widely accepted scholarly ideas have not penetrated the thinking of the laity is partly the fault of biblical scholars themselves. One area especially lacking in courage is Bible translation. Many translations do not convey exactly what the original biblical languages—Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek—say. In this way translators avoid shocking people by making the Bible seem like one book with internal consistency, rather than an anthology exhibiting development of doctrines and a concomitant inconsistency.

For example, the high mythology of some biblical traditions is often softened by a backreading of monotheism, a principle that developed only relatively late in the biblical period. Thus biblical texts repeatedly refer to a group of divinities called “the sons of God” (see, for example, Job 1:6, in Hebrew), associated with Yahweh, the personal name of the God of Israel. Most translations render the phrase with something vague like “heavenly beings” (NRSV, Job 1:6) or “members of the court of heaven” (REB, Job 1:6), obscuring the idea of a high god presiding over an assembly of other deities, a concept the Israelites shared with their ancient Near Eastern neighbors.

Another example is the repeated references to angels. The development of an elaborate angelology is, like monotheism, a late phenomenon that should not be retrojected anachronistically. The angels who appear in biblical texts dated prior to the fifth century B.C.E. are simply minor deities, messengers of the assembly of the gods, much like Iris, Hermes (Mercury) and other gods of classical mythology.

Similarly anachronistic is reading every reference to the “spirit” of God as though it referred to what later came to represent the third person of the Trinity. As in Genesis 1:1, the translation “spirit” is often just wrong. It is not “the spirit of God” that swept over the waters (see, for example, the REB translation), but simply “a wind from God” (see also Genesis 8:1). In many translations we find a tendentious capitalization of the word “spirit,” as in Matthew 12:28 (casting out demons by the “Spirit of God”).

To preserve the uniqueness of Israel, translators draw overly sharp contrasts between Israel’s practices and those of its neighbors. Various forms of a Hebrew root meaning “to prophesy” are used in the Bible for both prophets of Yahweh and prophets of Baal, the Canaanite storm-god. Both Elijah and his adversaries on Mount Carmel are prophets, yet in most translations of 1 Kings 18:29 the latter “rave” rather than prophesy, though the Hebrew word is the same.

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For the author of the Gospel of Matthew, as for most of his Christian contemporaries and their successors, the Hebrew Bible was essentially a set of codes decipherable only with the key of Christian belief. Matthew applies this principle with a wooden literalism that can have comic effects: According to Matthew 21:7, Jesus sat on two donkeys at the same time when he entered Jerusalem. This is in fulfillment, as the text tells us, of Zechariah 9:9, which contains a prophecy that the author of Matthew misread.^b Only the most recent translations of Matthew 21:7 honestly render “he sat on them,” traditionally softened to “he sat thereon.”

This tendency to bowdlerize the Bible also appears in the inclusive language of newer translations. The Bible is overwhelmingly patriarchal. But how different it sounds when the psalmist’s or Paul’s exclusively male language is broadened to include women. “Happy the man who…delights in the Law …” at the in the beginning of Psalm 1 becomes “Happy are those who …,” as if women could study the Law; and Paul now routinely addresses his “brothers and sisters” rather than just his brothers, as in the original (Romans 1:13; 1 Corinthians 1:10; Galatians 1:11; 1 Thessalonians 2:1, etc.). Such changes may be defensible for a Bible used in a liturgical context, when the words are understood to address a modern audience, but surely some Bible translation should accurately render the imperfect, gender-specific language of the original books.

Biblical studies have also been both sidelined and trivialized. Most biblical scholars, like me, became interested in the Bible for what may be characterized as essentially pious reasons. But a modern, critical study of the Bible can be discomforting. Because study may lead to disbelief, it is easier to focus on the constant new discoveries instead of the Bible itself. (Those discoveries should of course be interpreted not just for their relevance to the Bible, but in their own right.)

The Bible is probably civilization’s most over-studied book. Since academics have to publish to get jobs and keep them, and since there are fewer and fewer original things to say about the primary texts, biblical studies have often moved, understandably, to the fringes. Enormous amounts of time and energy are spent performing minute analyses of texts, themes and artifacts that more sensible historians regard as insignificant, or on studying studies of the Bible.

The timidity and centrifugal force of such studies have also resulted in a lack of popularization, perhaps better termed “accessible scholarship” by Richard Friedman. Biblical scholars often feel that expressing their methods and results in nontechnical language is beneath them. To some extent this is a product of the American academic system, which values the esoteric over the elegant. Thus biblical scholars often leave the field to the pious and ignorant.

For the latter the Bible is too often little more than an anthology of quotations to be sampled and drawn on as argument or emotion requires. The result is that in religious education, as in political and often even theological discourse, as well as in hierarchical pronouncements, the role of the Bible is to provide support from presumably unquestioned authority; it is essentially a series of proof texts.

But absolutizing part of the Bible, quoting it out of context, is risky and misguided. If the Bible is accepted as an unquestioned authority, appealed to in support of a position against, say, abortion or capital punishment—these activities are wrong, it is asserted, because the Bible says: “Thou shalt not kill”—then on what basis is the Bible not followed in its support of slavery or the subordination of women? But if we recognize that at least some of the Bible’s beliefs and practices are a product of their times and hence irrelevant for a contemporary audience, then the process of biblical criticism has begun, and its consequences are far-reaching.

The impact of biblical criticism is not solely negative, however. To study the Bible critically, not as the word of God in a simple sense but as the words of human beings, is to recognize the essential task of historians and believers as well—seeking meaning in experience or, in the classic formulation, faith seeking understanding. The Bible is a record of such quests, by men and women who are our forebears as well as our predecessors: We belong to their community.

To put it somewhat differently: Whether viewed positivistically or seen as an inspired text, the Bible is the beginning of a trajectory leading toward full freedom and equality for all persons. This movement has its initial historical stimulus, perhaps, in the Exodus, the liberation of Hebrew slaves from Egyptian bondage. This event which they saw as divinely caused, has served as a model for ancient Israel and its heirs, Judaism, Christianity and Islam—a model for 055interpreting subsequent events such as the repeated deliverances of Israel and of the Jewish people, the “exodus” of Jesus (for that is what Luke 9:31 calls his death) and the hegira of Muhammed. It has also served as a model of conduct: “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9); that is, you should treat others as God treated you. Or, as Jesus is reported to have said, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). Or, as another prophet was told: “Did he not find you an orphan and shelter you? Did he not find you wandering and guide you? Did he not find you needy, and giveyou abundance? So as for the orphan, do not oppress him, and as for the beggar, do not scold him; and as for your Lord’s blessing, declare it” (The Qur’an, Sura 93).

Viewed as a historically conditioned anthology, then, the Bible can be understood not as a complete and infallible guide to the details of human conduct, but as a series of signposts pointing the way to a goal that its authors, like us, had not yet reached but were moving toward. There is, in other words, a continuity between our times and those of Moses and Amos and Jesus. Their formulations, like ours and all those in-between, are imperfect, but that too is reason for optimism: They were not specially privileged, their experience of the divine was not qualitatively different from our own.

Three great intellectual revolutions of the 19th and early 20th centuries have profoundly shaped and transformed the way we think of ourselves and our world. The first is Marxism and its derivative, socialism. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the changes in Eastern Europe may appear to have thoroughly discredited Marxism; such is the message of a letter I recently received from the Campus Crusade for Christ, which headlined its plea for funds with the message “Marx is out, Jesus is in.” But many Marxist principles, such as “from each according to his abilities, to each according to […]