Bible Books

048

Rebecca’s Children. Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World

Alan F. Segal
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) 207 pp., $20.00.

This book presents a first-rate summary of the history of the Jews, inclusive of the earliest phase of Christianity, from the destruction of the First Temple to the end of the first century of the Common Era. Segal surveys these topics: Israel between empires; society in the time of Jesus; Jesus, the Jewish revolutionary; Paul, the convert and apostle; origins of the rabbinic movement; communities in conflict; the ways divide. The book is well researched and written to be read.

The good news about this book is that it presents an absolutely first-class account of current research on its subject. The bad news is that the book contains not a single proposition that may confidently assigned to its author’s original research.

More good news is that the book invokes current social scientific theories to interpret the data. The bad news is that the theories vary from chapter to chapter, and more often than not contradict one another.

Rebecca’s Children unfolds like a sequence of episodes of a TV series, following a clearcut and successful formula. First, Segal follows a comprehensive topical outline. On Jesus, the Jewish Revolutionary, for example, he starts with an account of apocalypticism; then the book of Daniel; Christianity as apocalyptic Judaism, Jesus and political revolution; Christianity as a messianic movement; and finally, Christian exegesis of the Hebrew Bible. The chapter is somewhat episodic, but it does flow. Then Segal interprets his data, holding some (but not all or most) of them together by appealing to one or another theoretical system in the study of society and religion.

For his entreé of social science theory in connection with Jesus, Segal serves up apocalyptic movements in the modern period, “particularly those in Melanesian and North American Indian religions,” which supply “clear sociological commonalities,” exhibiting “some of the same social forces. They, too, had to deal with problems of acculturation and disorganization brought on by European domination, in ways similar to those used by ancient Jewish society in dealing with the problem of Greek culture and Roman domination.” While not representing Christianity as a cargo cult, Segal does wish us to see Christianity in the contemporary context. He turns for explanation to theoretical models, many of them appealing to sources of explanation different from the “apocalyptic” appeal Segal finds in the cargo cults. His survey of the broad range of analytical possibilities, contradictions and all, gives a broader context for his narrative and thus proves more enthusiastic than judicious and informed. Still, in all fairness, whether or not he does it well is precisely as important as whether a dancing elephant is graceful: the spectacle is the thing.

In the balance Segal has given us a fine picture of the most up-to-date scholarship on its subject, a picture easily accessible to the lay reader. The publisher points to “startlingly new insights into the origins of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.” To readers uninformed about scholarship in the past two decades, that is in a measure true, but what is new is (startlingly!) not Segal’s, though the presentation, with its admirable literacy and balance, assuredly is—and that is much to his credit. While utterly derivative and bearing no scholarly interest whatsoever, Segal’s work deserves a wide reading among interested laypeople.

Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1984)182 pp., $17.95

Those who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, written once and henceforth never-changing, will not like this book. For Schüssler Fiorenza’s concept of the Bible is very different. She does view it as inspired by the word of God, but she also sees it as a historical prototype that nurtures and sustains the ongoing divine inspiration: as bread, not as stone. Each generation, each community reads and has read the Bible differently, through its own interpretive prism. It has often done this subconsciously, believing that it was reading the “plain sense” of the text. But there is no way of reading the Bible (or anything else) noninterpretively, and we should make explicit the ways in which we read and interpret. This is Schüssler Fiorenza’s thesis.

Schüssler Fiorenza writes as a Christian, and addresses herself mainly to the Christian question of the adaptation of Christian scripture to the growth of theology. She writes, furthermore, as a woman, and writes for what she calls the women-church, which is the “gathering of all those women and men who, empowered by the Holy Spirit and inspired by the biblical vision of justice, freedom and salvation, continue against all odds the struggle for liberation from patriarchal oppression in society and religion.” 049This is her hermeneutical principle, the way in which she reads the Bible.

In our own society, the Bible is read in different ways. There is the doctrinal way, which views biblical revelation as verbal inspiration. There is the scholastic or historical-factual way, which views the Bible as a collection of more-or-less historically reliable writings, And there is the dialogic-pluralistic model, which sees the plurality of voices in the Bible as reflecting the multifaceted life of historical communities. This model attempts to locate the “canon within the canon,” the truly authentic texts that can be used to measure and evaluate the other texts. Schüssler Fiorenza goes one step further, for she locates the authentic divine voice outside the biblical writings, in the experiences of women struggling for liberation from patriarchal oppression. The Bible is the formative root-model of the struggle for liberation; but revelation is ongoing and takes place for “our salvation,” and therefore we must remember and transform our biblical heritage.

Schüssler Fiorenza approaches the Bible not only as a biblical scholar, but also as a theologian, and in fact believes that there should be no separation between the two. All too often, says Schüssler Fiorenza, faith communities have treated the Bible as a miraculous book, and biblical scholars have concerned themselves only with historical factualness; it has been left to the individual minister to try to mediate between the “value-neutral” exegesis and the fact of the Bible as scripture. She would like to chart a new paradigm of interpretation in which it is recognized that there really is no value-free study of texts, and that the biblical texts themselves are responses to particular situations, rather than reflecting either timeless principles or journalistic records. Schüssler Fiorenza’s new method of interpretation, which she calls the “pastoral-theological paradigm,” seeks to translate the meaning and context of the biblical texts into today’s situation. The Bible is the root-model with many voices; we should preserve and teach all the biblical traditions, but we should proclaim and preach only those meaningful and relevant to the Christian community today.

Schüssler Fiorenza comes out of (and explains to the reader) the newest currents in historical and biblical studies, which have recognized that there is a circle of historical learning (the hermeneutical circle) in which the scholar is engaged in a dialogue with the material. An interpreter may be convinced and then decide, on the basis of the evidence, that the original interpretation was wrong; the interpretation may then be modified, but the interpreter is always operating within his or her own limited psycho-social mode of thought. If this is true of all scholarship, it is particularly true of biblical scholarship, which must give attention to the questions and needs of faith communities, and which must validate or reject these questions.

Another important component of Schüssler Fiorenza’s thought comes from liberation theology, which maintains that all theology is by definition always for or against the oppressed. Just as value-neutral, objective historical scholarship is impossible, so intellectual neutrality vis-a-vis the oppressed is impossible, and one should make one’s advocacy stance explicit. The explicit advocacy stance of liberation theology (and of feminist studies) brings out into the open the hidden perspectives of other approaches, as well as its own. Liberation theology holds that one must read the Bible through the eyes of the oppressed, for God is the God of the oppressed. But, holds Schüssler Fiorenza, liberation theology can present a “hermeneutics of consent” because the God of the Bible is the God of the oppressed poor.

In the case of women, however, we do not have clear statements in the Bible in favor of equality. The norm for evaluating biblical traditions cannot be derived from the Bible or from the biblical process of learning, but from the experience of the struggle for liberation of all oppressed. Feminist biblical interpretation must insist that only the nonsexist and non-oppressive traditions of the Bible and of biblical interpretations have the theological authority of revelation. Knowing that the biblical texts are androcentric, we must find those traditions and interpretations that have transcended this. In this way, the Bible will be a resource for solving moral problems, and generating moral challenges. This kind of study also enables those seeking gender equality to deal with the fact that the Bible has often been used to justify female subordination.

Feminists should not ignore the Bible, for this assumes that women have no authentic history within biblical religion, depriving women of their history in religion, Feminists must develop feminist biblical hermeneutics as a critical-evaluative hermenetic. Being woman and being Christian is a social, historical and cultural ecclesial process. An evaluative hermeneutics of liberation ultimately aims at “the emancipation of biblical religion from patriarchal structures and ideologies” so that the “gospel” can again be recognized as “the power of God for salvation.” We have to mine the Bible, to break the silences of the texts and find the liberating message. We must suspect all texts, and analyze them for 051what lies behind them, to recover biblical history as memory and tradition for people of today and tomorrow.

This is a very honest book. It explicitly addresses the problem of what to do with a biblical passage that offends modern theological sensibilities. It advocates what the author calls a “paradigm shift” in attitude towards the Bible in which the Bible ceases to be the final authority against which we measure everything, but a living history and resource in which God’s word informed and informs us today. To maintain texts that are oppressive and thereby legitimate oppression is to believe that God desires oppression. This Schüssler Fiorenza cannot do, and since the community out of which she comes and for which she writes, the Christian feminist community, must believe in a liberating God, it must find the voice of this God in the Bible. Biblical texts that portray the voice of God as bespeaking submission and inequality must be remembered and taught, but they must ultimately be seen as not representing God’s word. Schüssler Fiorenza makes explicit what developing and growing religions have done before as they grow within a tradition but seek to learn from the tradition in order to adapt it and grow with it. She calls on biblical scholars, with their allegiance to the meaning of the text, not to abdicate the important role of interpreting the text for today.

Rebecca’s Children. Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World
Alan F. Segal
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) 207 pp., $20.00.