Bible Books

014

The World of the Text and the World of the Interpreter

A Social Reading of the Old Testament: Prophetic Approaches to Israel’s Communal Life

Walter Brueggemann
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994) 328 pp., $18

The primary thrust of this anthology is that every aspect of the biblical text has a social dimension: in its composition, transmission and interpretation down to the present moment. Walter Brueggemann relentlessly plays upon the interaction between the social world of the text and the social world of the interpreter. He wants us to understand that there is no “naked” or “innocent” text, since all writing—especially Scripture—is freighted with presuppositions both in the texts themselves and in their subsequent interpretation by diverse communities.

Brueggemann does not think there is any way to escape this multivalence of biblical texts and biblical interpreters. He embraces it and, in doing so, tries to understand how a variety of vested social interests were at work in composing and preserving biblical texts in the first place and how vested interests continue to operate in the way these texts are interpreted today. He strives to take seriously the social implications and consequences of particular readings of the Bible.

Having been a scholarly conversation partner with Brueggemann for nearly twenty years, I have the highest respect for the acumen with which he unlocks the theological and cultural resources of the Hebrew Bible and relates them to a gamut of contemporary human insights and interests. I am also an admirer of his intellectual and stylistic gifts as a master of dialectical and analogical argument, figurative speech, hyperbole and irony marshalled to incite the imagination and open vistas of meaning for the reader.

Brueggemann presents even his most debatable theses and insights in a way that compels the reader either to close the book or to go on reasoning and struggling with his argument. Perhaps more than any other living North American Old Testament scholar, his voice has been able to reach broad sectors of the contemporary church.

The present work is that bane of the conscientious reviewer—a collection of articles, in this case spanning 1975–1991. With its social critical orientation to the Old Testament, it is the counterpart of the author’s similar collection of articles on Old Testament theology published two years earlier.^a For both volumes, the happy choice of editor was Patrick D. Miller, who supplies masterly introductions that locate the separate pieces within the larger design of Brueggemann’s scholarly methods and thematic interests.

The lead essays on the contrast between the Mosaic and Davidic streams of traditions (representing liberation and domination, respectively) and on covenant as both “a subversive paradigm” and “a social possibility” set the tone for two groups of essays that follow. Selected texts are viewed through the prism of social conditions in tribal, monarchic, Exilic and restored Israel, and a series of thematic studies treats biblical resources for contemporary ethics, theology and church practice.

This radical embrace of the social shaping of the Bible might appear to leave Brueggemann in a morass of subjectivity. On the contrary, his interest in the social conditioning of the Bible and of biblical interpretation contributes substantively to his primary interest in a theology of the Old Testament that will articulate critical categories for living wisely and justly here and now. In a sense, Brueggemann is 015plumbing the thorny question: What are the criteria for assessing which vested interests in biblical interpretation are most theologically appropriate? He does not see this theology as a system or structure of correct ideas about God so much as a process of ideological and political struggle in communities of believers who draw on the Bible to fashion a humane communal life.

The Apocryphal New Testament

J.K. Elliott
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 747 pp., $49.95

Seventy years after the publication of M.R. James’s Apocryphal New Testament, J.K. Elliott, reader in New Testament textual criticism at the University of Leeds, has edited an expanded revision of James’s magnum opus under the same title.

The Christian apocryphal writings, which imitate, supplement and adapt the New Testament writings, fall into four groups: gospels, acts, epistles and apocalypses. The apocryphal gospels include fragments of early lost gospels, some isolated sayings of Jesus not found in the New Testament Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas, an early collection of teachings of Jesus. Other gospels treat parts of the life of Jesus.

The apocryphal acts are narratives concerning the activities of the apostles. Various works tell stories about Andrew, Paul, Peter and others. A few apocryphal letters have survived, including a letter said to be by Paul to the Laodiceans (see Colossians 4:16) and supposed correspondence between Paul and the Roman philosopher Seneca. Finally, early Christian traditions provide us with apocalypses of Peter, Paul, Thomas and others, in addition to the New Testament Book of Revelation.

More than a mere re-edition of the Apocryphal New Testament of 1924 (or the subsequent 1953 edition with its additional appendix), Elliott’s volume includes a number of new features that make it a welcome supersession of James’s. Elliott provides excellent bibliographies, which include modern editions, translations and general bibliographical notices, all of which afford the student of apocryphal New Testament literature with an up-to-date bibliographical account of scholarship at a glance. Another advance on James’s work is Elliott’s introduction to each of the works or subgenres: they are enormously helpful to the novice and provide even the specialist with valuable details on the more obscure literature. In addition, Elliott provides fresh translations, excerpts and summaries of apocryphal works unencumbered by James’s stilted, archaistic prose.

The summaries are accurate and convenient, but of course no substitute for the entire texts themselves. The more obscure the text in question, the more this is so. Some texts, especially the apocrypha that are both lengthier and lesser known, are represented in translated excerpts. The rationale for the particular sections excerpted is in some cases indiscernible to me. For example, from the infancy gospel known as The History of Joseph the Carpenter, Elliott has provided a translation only of sections 10, 11, 17 and 23. These sections are from the Bohairic Coptic version of that work, with no parallel translation or notes on the Sahidic Coptic fragments, which occasionally provide an interesting alternative witness to the text.

The treatment of the Gospel of Thomas is magisterial by comparison. Elliott supplies both a table of New Testament parallels and the text of the gospel in parallel with those parts of the sayings found in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The bibliography lists more than a half dozen translations of Thomas in English alone. Because of its ready availability in other well-known collections and the scholarly attention luxuriated upon it, one may well wonder if the attention and space lavished on Thomas here would have been better spent on less accessible apocrypha.

Another disappointing feature of the volume is the treatment of the so-called “Oriental Acts,” apocryphal acts of the apostles in Coptic, Arabic and Ethiopic. Elliott has granted this considerable corpus only one short paragraph of general introduction with a brief bibliographical note. He provides neither translations nor summaries of any of these works, not one of which he mentions by name. Elliott has already all but completely dismissed the oriental apocrypha in his preface: “The vast number of Apocryphal texts, especially martyrdoms, in Coptic, Ethiopic and other Oriental languages [read: Arabic (though apparently not Syriac!)] do not merit space in this volume and are generally referred to only when they relate to texts available to us in other languages” (italics added). It is one thing to say that space and time do not permit the inclusion of certain materials; it is another thing to say that their inclusion is unwarranted a priori. Besides, it is precisely when we have only the Oriental version of a work that that version takes on greatest significance. Modern text criticism has taught us not to disparage these secondary and tertiary Oriental versions. The discovery of papyrus 46, our earliest witness to the letters of Paul, showed that the text of the Pauline epistles of that third-century papyrus is most faithfully rendered in the Ethiopic textual tradition, long rejected by text critics as a mere medieval translation of a translation (of a translation). Perhaps similar surprises await us in the ancient African apocrypha. We simply don’t know what we are missing, and unfortunately we are afforded no better purchase on these texts by the present volume.

Though Elliott has done a superb job of organizing a varied corpus of materials and improves on the scheme he inherits from James, a few materials are nevertheless misplaced. Under the rubric “Other Apocryphal Acts,” we find the Epistle of pseudo-Titus; though this epistle contains quotations from several apocryphal acts, it is nonetheless an epistolary apocryphon and thus is better placed in the sections treating apocryphal epistles. Similarly, materials about Mary Magdalene follow those treating the Virgin Mary in the section containing the more obscure infancy gospels. These fragments belong not with infancy gospel materials but with the apocryphal gospels proper, as Mary Magdalene is a figure of gospel tradition and is not featured in the infancy gospels. Other works seem to be beyond the stated compass of the collection altogether. The apocalypses of Zephaniah (Sophonias), Elijah (Elias), and 5 and 6 Ezra are pseudepigraphic works of Old Testament worthies, even though written by Christians, and so belong properly in a collection of Old Testament apocrypha, as even Elliott’s bibliographies readily attest.

Elliott has performed an invaluable service to all scholars of the apocryphal literature, especially English speakers who heretofore have limped along with James’s superannuated collection. But the embarrassment of riches with which scholars of the New Testament apocrypha have to do—the multiplicity, fecundity and heterogeneity of these texts, combined with renewed scholarly interest in them—makes them impossible to gather in one volume. Elliot concedes in his preface that 016“far more documents are available than could conceivably be included in a single volume planned to be roughly the same length and format of its predecessor.” Might this mean that the “length and format” itself is ripe for reconsideration?

New Testament apocrypha scholarship bears the burden of its own success in snatching so many maligned and forgotten Christian texts from obscurity. Gone are the days of “one-stop shopping” for these texts in translation between the covers of one book. Elliott’s masterful edition of James not only makes James obsolete, but perhaps at the same time shows that the project of a truly representative single-volume compendium of New Testament apocrypha has become obsolete as well.

The publisher has announced that a popular abridgement of this book, to be entitled The Apocryphal Jesus: Legends of the Early Church, is due out in February 1996 (cloth $35, paperback $12.95).—Ed.

The Psalms Through Three Thousand Years: Prayerbook of a Cloud of Witnesses

William L. Holladay
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) 408 pp., $36.00.

Readers of the Bible may not be aware of how formative a role the Book of Psalms played in the development of Jewish and Christian liturgy and spirituality. Modern biblical scholars have come to see the Psalms as anonymous compositions from the community of ancient Israel that reflected rituals within the Temple. Yet the Book of Psalms itself presents a very different notion of how it originated. Embedded within many of the psalm titles is the presumption that the Psalms were not anonymous at all; they claim instead to reflect the deep spiritual yearnings of King David himself.

A parade example can be found in the heading that adorns Psalm 51. This psalm, one of the most powerful and penetrating expositions of penitence in the Bible, is not the voice of some anonymous supplicant. Quite the contrary, the psalm title identifies it as a prayer that David said after he had been rebuked by Nathan for his violation of Bathsheba. For many early Jewish and Christian readers, this very fact—that the Psalms are the personal prayer book of David—proved to be a decisive key in the interpretation of this book.

William Holladay seeks to trace the way in which the Book of Psalms was read in the synagogue and church. His wonderful book provides the reader with a clear and compelling account of how the history of biblical interpretation unfolds. Divided into three sections, the book begins by reviewing how modern scholarship has interpreted the Psalms since the Enlightenment. The lengthy second section examines the use of the Psalms in a variety of Jewish and Christian contexts across the millennia, discussing both how the Psalms were interpreted in the commentary tradition and how they were used in the daily prayer-life of church and synagogue. Lastly, Holladay outlines current theological issues concerning the Psalms and provides a structure for incorporating Psalm-reading into the contemporary Bible reader’s prayer-life.

The book is enlivened by a rich use of anecdotes, which bring to life the history of the Psalter’s role in the church and synagogue. Unfortunately, sustained curiosity is required to follow all the turns of the narrative, as Holladay winds his way from Rashi’s commentary on the Psalms to their use in the Roman Catholic Divine office. There is even an extended discussion of the 19th-century translation of the Psalms into modern Syriac!

For many readers, however, such arcana will be an asset, not a liability. Holladay’s book, while informed by tremendous learning, is written in a lively style that makes it accessible to lay readers.

The World of the Text and the World of the Interpreter

A Social Reading of the Old Testament: Prophetic Approaches to Israel’s Communal Life