Bible Books

010

Jesus of History, Not the Christ of Faith

A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus

John P. Meier
(New York: Doubleday, 1991) 484 pp., $25.00

Suppose that a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew and an agnostic—each a well-trained historian of Christian origins—were locked up together to produce a consensus document about the historical Jesus. What might they come up with?

With that intriguing suggestion, John P. Meier, professor of New Testament at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and former president of the Catholic Biblical Association, begins his account of what such an “unpapal conclave” might produce: a “limited consensus statement” about the historical Jesus, not determined by the beliefs of particular religious groups and open to debate by believer and unbeliever alike.

Meier’s title is nicely provocative. Being on the margin suggests “the strange, the unusual, the ambiguous, the unstable, the dangerous and the impoverished.” Jesus was marginal in several of these senses. He left but a blip in Jewish and pagan literature in the 100 years after his death. An executed criminal, he was jobless during his public life. His teachings and practices were marginal and offensive to many, and he was a poor person from a rural culture confronting an urban establishment. However, this is but volume one of a two-volume work, and readers wishing an account of the mission, message and death of this “marginal Jew” will need to wait for the next volume, to be published two or three years from now.

In the present volume, Meier writes the prologue. In the first half (“Roots of the Problem”), he carefully considers the distinctions historians must make between the real Jesus, the historical Jesus (all that can be known about Jesus using the tools of history) and the Christ of faith; examines canonical and noncanonical sources; and describes the criteria for deciding what may be affirmed about Jesus. In the second half (“Roots of the Person”), Meier speaks of what may be said about “the hidden years” before Jesus appears on the stage of history as an adult: Jesus’ birth, language, education, socioeconomic status, family, marital status and status as a layman. It ends with a chronology of Jesus’ life, paving the way for volume two, which will begin with John the Baptist.

This is an impressive book, and one can learn much from it. Meier’s exposition is clear, carefully argued and shows an impressive acquaintance with scholarship in many languages. Footnotes comprise over 40 percent of the text (182 pages) and are exceptionally valuable.

Only a few of Meier’s conclusions can be reported in a brief review. Our primary sources are the canonical gospels; unlike a number of contemporary scholars, Meier does not consider the Gospel of Thomas to be an independent source. Jesus was most likely born in Nazareth (and not Bethlehem). Jesus’ “brothers and sisters” were likely to have been actual siblings rather than cousins or step-siblings. Jesus probably taught in Aramaic and is also likely to have known Hebrew and Greek.

Meier is cautious on the virgin birth. Though he reports the reasons why many scholars see the birth stories as symbolic narratives, he concludes that, on historical grounds alone, one can neither affirm nor deny the virginal conception of Jesus. Yet he also reports that Jesus’ family (siblings and mother) did not seem to know about it.

Meier’s audience is twofold, and he successfully addresses both. The main body of the text is designed to be accessible to a master’s-level student, a well-read undergraduate and the general educated reader. The footnotes are meant for advanced graduate students and scholars. Readers of BR with a serious interest in how historians work with the complex question of the historical Jesus will find this book rewarding. They are also likely to become 011very interested in seeing how, in volume two, Meier will complete his portrait of Jesus, “a marginal Jew.”

The World of Biblical Literature

Robert Alter
(New York: Basic Books, 1991) 225 pp., $23.00

Robert Alter’s new book is a welcome event in the ongoing retrieval of the Bible as a literary work in its own right. In this process, Alter’s own role has been both central and salutary. Written with his characteristic urbanity and forceful style, and informed by a keen ear for the ring and nuance of biblical Hebrew, The World of Biblical Literature complements the author’s earlier explorations of the subject, most notably The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic, 1981) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (Basic, 1985). As with his earlier works, Alter focuses on the “the formal articulations of the literary texts”—their peculiar minimalism of expression; their nuanced stylistics; their verbal tactics and tactfulness; and, of course, their deft and deceptive allusions. All these elements constitute the craft of composition. Indeed, they are among the forms basic to any informed generalizations about “the Bible as literature.” Alter knows this well. Whether reflecting on assumptions that underlie a literary reading of the Bible or considering the cultural concerns of the modern reader, he stresses the literariness of the biblical writers.

This raises some old and pointed questions. In what way is the Bible literary, given its agglutinizing and traditionalizing forms? And in what respect is it a work of the imagination, in the sense that the blocks of tradition are shaped by authors? We can hardly escape these questions, because whatever one’s view of biblical composition and authorship, and however much one’s sense of style differs from the ancients, there is no denying that the Bible was originally communicated on the literary-narrational level. That is to say, whatever their degrees of inspiration or imagination, the religious, historical and epical communications of Scripture are embedded in literary expressions. In The World of Biblical Literature, Alter provides some guidance on these questions, not in any systematic way, but in the course of various reflections on the text itself.

For Alter (in the footsteps of many others), a number of special features can be summoned to begin an answer to these questions. Among the characterizing features of the Bible, he notes the “cloak of traditional or traditionizing anonymity” that conceals the authors, who combine materials into new wholes or add subtle shifts of style that reframe a narrative or portray characters in a new light. Alter is a wonderful reader here, often picking out the tiniest details to deepen our sense of a text. For example, we may tend to read past the little point in Judges 4:9 where Deborah chastises Barak by telling him that deliverance will come “by means of” (literally, “at the hand of”) a woman, only to be shocked to see how Yael (a chapter later) kills Sisera with a tent-peg in her “hand.” A small link, but so strong. Or again, on a larger plane, Alter shows how the play of allusion binds longer texts in striking ways, as when he deftly weaves links between the attempted rape of Joseph by Potiphar’s wife and the violent incest committed by Amnon upon Tamar. Authorial intent aside, comparisons of these (and several other texts) produce unexpected delights. So fine is Alter’s ear that many passages combed by earlier writers are reexamined here with much profit (though I wish that his notes indicated the great debt he owes to others).

Readers of this book will learn a lot about reading and about how meaning is affected by the details of the text. The process of reading the Bible, for the modern as for the ancient, is an ongoing encounter with its style and language. In this regard, Alter makes it quite clear just how much our assumptions on these matters determine what we find—be it historical or archaeological details, traditional theologies and constructions, or literary and typological nuances.

There is no escaping the Bible as the foundation document of Western civilization; the task is to determine its old-new voice. Alter and other literary critics justify their approach by the view that to be subjected to the literariness of the Bible is to be receptive to its cultural and spiritual force. This requires a good guide (like Alter), however, and also the willingness to learn Hebrew.

011

It may be only for a minority that Scripture remains unambiguously authoritative, yet most of us continue to feel the pressure of authority exerted by this extraordinary collection of ancient writings. From the humanist perspective, and, indeed, from many religious perspectives as well, Scripture no longer speaks in one clearly prescriptive voice, but its resonances still carry into the recesses of our spiritual and political imagination. The Bible has been a central force of coherence and continuity n our culture, and so it may not be, after all, surprising that many are now impelled to discover how they might close the gap that modernity has interposed betwen themselves and the biblical texts.

The World of Biblical Literature

In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth

Tikva Frymer-Kensky
(New York: Free Press, 1992) 303 pp., $24.95

Books about ancient goddesses are popular these days. Many of them promise a return to a more harmonious and peaceful existence if these nurturing goddesses are restored. According to some feminist writers, the rise of biblical monotheism sounded the death knell for goddess-religions, and a rigid patriarchy has been dominant in the Western world ever since. The recovery of pre-biblical goddess religions is sought as a return to paradise—a time when people were nurturing, nonsexist and ecologically balanced. Is the Bible really to blame? Are the pre-biblical goddesses the answer to the problems of the modern world?

Tikva Frymer-Kensky, a Bible scholar and professor at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, has taken up the challenge of these issues in this ambitious and thought-provoking book. As a scholar and a feminist, Frymer-Kensky casts a critical eye at popular trends and attempts to set 012things straight. The result is a learned and passionate book that examines the worship of goddesses in ancient Sumer and traces religious transformations that occurred in biblical Israel. There are virtually two books here—one on goddesses and the other on biblical monotheism. At stake is a compelling issue: Which is better suited for life in the late 20th century? Frymer-Kensky concludes, after much detailed discussion, that biblical monotheism is better, although it “has never been truly tried” (p. 217).

At the heart of Frymer-Kensky’s argument is the problem of the transition from Near Eastern polytheism (including goddess-worship) to biblical monotheism. What happens to the world of the goddesses when the Many are replaced by the One? The answer is striking: “The biblical system had to replace both goddesses and gods, and as it did so, it transformed its thinking about nature, culture, gender, and humanity” (p. 85). One result is that humans become more active participants in the workings of the cosmos, replacing many functions of the gods: “In every aspect of biblical thought, human beings gain in prominence in—and because of—the absence of the goddesses” (p. 116).

Frymer-Kensky argues that the Bible envisions “a radically new concept of gender” in which male and female are equal partners. Whereas the mother-goddess in Mesopotamian literature creates a male, Enkidu, to be Gilgamesh’s true companion, God in the Bible creates a woman, Eve, to be Adam’s true counterpart. In Mesopotamia, “the truest bonding, the truest similarity possible is between two members of the same gender,” whereas the Bible envisions a “gender-free concept of humanity” (pp. 142–143). Hence, not goddess-worship but monotheism presents a nonsexist view of humanity, a vision that “makes sense in our more egalitarian world” (p. 217).

It would be nice if this were true, and that the Bible were a modern model for progressive, nonsexist thinking. There are some individual passages that would indeed support such thought. But there are beings many more biblical stories and passages that suggest the opposite. Phyllis Trible’s powerful book, Texts of Terror (Fortress, 1984), laments some of these misogynist stories in the Bible (for example, the stories of Hagar, Tamar, Jephthah’s daughter and other unnamed women). Other biblical scholars—including Carol Meyers, Jo Ann Hackett, Phyllis Bird and others—have also clarified the anti-woman bias in many biblical texts. Frymer-Kensky seems to ignore the important implications of these recent studies for her argument (though she cites them often in her notes) and fails to make a convincing case. Indeed, many of her key examples can be interpreted quite differently. For instance, in the Bible it may not be the marriage of Adam and Eve that provides the most revealing comparison to Gilgamesh’s bond with Enkidu, but David’s relationship with Jonathan. Just as Gilgamesh laments the death of Enkidu by calling him “my friend, whom I love deeply,” so David grieves for Jonathan with the poignant lament: “to me your love was greater than the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26). The heroic ideal of male-bonding is no different in biblical literature, it seems, than in Mesopotamian.

And yet, while the overall argument of Frymer-Kensky’s book may be more wishful thinking than not, there are many merits to her individual discussions. Particularly illuminating is the section on Sumerian goddesses, an area where Frymer-Kensky’s interests and expertise shine. Other sections are also valuable, such as the sensitive investigation of the symbolism of Zion and Wisdom as a woman and the many striking insights into individual stories and themes. Frymer-Kensky ends the book by urging us to purge the “Greek” misogyny in us and return to the egalitarian monotheism envisaged in the Hebrew Bible. I doubt whether the Greeks were quite so “phallic” or the Bible so nonsexist, but it is a challenge well worth the attempt.

012

“Paganism,” once a term of scorn, is no longer derogatory. In an ironic twist, the traditional Judeo-Christian view of paganism is often unquestioned. Now however, this paganism is appreciated as body-and-life-affirmimg. Frequently, now, it is monotheism that is under attack. But the “monotheism” attacked as world-denying, body-deprecating and woman-hating has little to do with monotheism as it first appeared in biblical Israel. And the traditional Judeo-Christian view of paganism is very unlike the polytheism reflected in ancient documents.

In the Wake of the Goddesses

The Bible in Stained Glass

Sonia Halliday and Laura Lushington, photographers
Edited by Tim Dowley
(Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1990) 160 pp., $ 39.95

The final illustration in this book of photographs is of a 19th-century window showing the 17th-century restoration of Lichfield Cathedral. Workers are cutting stone, inspecting plans and building scaffolding. The viewer is struck by expressions of happiness on their faces. Above their heads is the inscription: “Serve God and be chearefull.”

That last photograph and its inscription capture the spirit of this entire book, an attractive collection of photographs and texts illustrating the work of artisans who interpreted the Bible through their craft.

These windows have always been more than just decorations. As architectural advances such as the flying buttress allowed more space for windows, artisans developed the stained-glass technique to combine images familiar from illustrated manuscripts with the newly-available expanded areas of light; the result was a powerful new way to instruct the illiterate. In his informative essay surveying the history of the art of stained-glass, Dowley explains,

“the stained glass window—to the modern tourist above all an object of beauty and mystery—also represented to the 013medieval Christian a vital visual communication of Christian truth. In this way the church fabric itself was drawn to the service of Christian teaching.”

The Bible in Stained Glass contains photographs of windows illustrating Bible scenes from dozens of European cathedrals and churches. Especially featured are Chartres, Canterbury, Ulm Minster, Florence and Great Malvern Priory Church. After the initial essay, the book consists of 53 pages of photographs illustrating scenes from the Old Testament and 69 pages dealing with the New Testament.

A wide variety of periods, styles, countries and artists are represented. Each photograph is accompanied by the appropriate biblical text from the King James Bible. Picture captions contain a few explanatory comments, sometimes showing the relationships between styles or artists.

On a concluding page, Sonia Halliday tells something of the procedures she and Laura Lushington used: “We never photograph windows with direct sunlight coming through; in fact a dull day is preferable, and thick fog ideal!” Halliday gives technical details as well as the relationship of this work to the photographers’ earlier book, Stained Glass (Crown, 1976).

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it with enthusiasm. It could be read aloud—and looked at—in the circle of the family. Those interested in the theme of the artist as biblical interpreter will find it fascinating. The photographers have expended great energy and imagination in getting these pictures and have, like the stained-glass artisans, crafted a beautiful work.

Upon the Dark Places: Anti-Semitism and Sexism in English Renaissance Biblical Translation

Ilona N. Rashkow
(Sheffield, UK:Almond Press, 1990) 180 pp., $50.00

Upon the Dark Places explains in part the great excitement one can feel when first introduced to the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew or in a close modern translation. It is the darkness that excites: the darkness of great literature, with its intended ambiguities, gaps, its theological profundity and moral complexity. Readers who are familiar only with the English Renaissance Bible (an archetype that includes the Tyndale Pentateuch, the Coverdale Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Rheims-Douay Bible and the King James Version) have read a washed-out text, the result of the translators’ attempt to shed light “upon the dark places.” Those early translators wanted to elucidate passages “so dark that by no description they could be made easy” (as the translators of the Geneva Bible state in their preface).

Rashkow shows how those translators, by their choices of certain words and by their marginalia—including extensive commentary, introductions and drawings—removed ambiguities, forestalled questions and flattened the Hebrew text and its characters in the English Renaissance Bible. They viewed narratives as simple tales with obvious meanings, to be found in the tales’ New Testament “fulfillment.” For example, the Book of Ruth was transformed into an allegory representing the “manifold afflictions” that the church suffers but eventually overcomes, and (by cross-reference to the genealogy of Jesus) into a prelude to the Gospel of Matthew. Misogynism and anti-Semitism were part of the translators’ conscious political agendas. They “dejudaized” the text; for example, on his title-page Coverdale assures the reader that the Bible is “faithfully and truly translated out of Douce [i.e., German] and Latyn into Englishe.” There is no mention of the Jewish source of the Hebrew text, in fact, no mention of the Hebrew text at all. The translators also inserted christological references directly into the Hebrew Bible; for example, the marginal comment on Psalm 23:5 (numbered 22:5 in the Rheims-Douay), “Thou has fatted my head with oyle: and my chalice inebriating how goodlie is It!” is “Chalice: the B. Sacrament and Sacrifice of Christs bodie and bloud.” Characters were most often stereotyped (Eve is “eve-il” and Ruth is “good”). Many sophisticated leitmotifs and word-plays were lost in the translation, often replaced by keywords, such as “church,” to trigger Christian associations. “In translation, the Hebrew Bible became the Old Testament, a text which no longer called for its own decipherment, but was deciphered and interpreted for the reader” (p. 17).

The first two chapters of this book give interesting and informed discussions of the nature, politics and power of translation, of Catholic and Protestant attitudes (those of Erasmus, Luther, Henry VIII, Tyndale, Thomas more and others) toward the right of the laity to have translations, and of the authority and dangers of word choice. We are heirs and victims of the prejudices and theological biases detailed here. Stripping the Bible of any “Jewish” meaning, the translators aggressively appropriated whatever they saw as good as a prophecy of Christianity, and whatever they stereotyped as bad as typical of Jews even to their day. The early English translators portrayed female characters either as totally evil or totally good, or else eliminated them from the reader’s mind.

Rashkow then presents detailed analyses of three passages: Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:26–3:24), the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) and the Book of Ruth. To summarize the second: Dinah (who becomes nameless) is blamed for the rape because she left her father’s house and “wandered in greater freedom than belonged to her” (Calvin); Hamor is an amorous lover rather than a rapist, and Simeon and Levi represent the image of Jews in Renaissance England: they “offended by falsly pretending religion, and by excesse in reuenge” (Rheims-Douay translators).

Upon the Dark Places is the kind of book that intrigues and inspires further thinking on the part of both the popular and academic reader. A framework and some correctives are provided by the work of Renée Bloch and James A. Sanders and others on “midrash criticism.” Rashkow extends their work in an important direction, toward some of the right questions we should be asking of the biblical texts and of ourselves, especially concerning the consciousness and articulation of the sets of biases according to which one writes, translates and reads.

Jesus of History, Not the Christ of Faith

A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus