Bible Books

010

A Book for the ’90s

The Good Book

Peter J. Gomes
(New York: William Morrow & Co., 1996) xv + 383 pp., $25.00 (hardcover)

I must admit to a certain reluctance to review a book that has on its back cover glowing notices from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Marian Wright Edelman, Harvey Cox and John Kenneth Galbraith, the latter of whom calls Peter Gomes the “best loved member of the Harvard community.” Even Will Willimon, the dean of the chapel at Duke University and a person much quoted in the realms of religious talk, announces grandly that “anyone who loves the Bible, or is trying to love the Bible, will love this book.” A formidable choir of praise indeed!

Let me say at the outset that I have no intention of attempting to drown out the mighty chorus and their song of jubilant approbation. In fact, for the most part I would be happy to join them, for there is much that is worthy of praise in this book, certainly much to which I would add a hearty Amen.

Gomes, long-time preacher to Harvard University, takes as his inspiration a book often quoted but not seemingly very influential: James Smart’s 1970 (though Gomes says it was published in 1969, not the only niggling mistake that appears in the book) The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church. Gomes adopts Smart’s motivation for writing: “the gap between the fullness of modern biblical scholarship on the one hand, and the poverty of biblical literacy on the other.” In short, Gomes hopes to demonstrate that critical biblical scholarship, far from being a danger to robust faith, is in fact the best supporter of such a faith. He sets out to demonstrate this claim in every way he can by the most practical and straightforward means. In fact, it would be fair to say that he is far more successful at this than Smart, whose book too often smacks of a scholar’s study rather than a preacher’s wrestling with the people in the pew.

I found Gomes’s general observations, which he simply calls “Opening the Bible,” to be his best material. In these three chapters we are given very basic information about what the Bible is, how it came to be, how it has been and can be interpreted, and perhaps most interesting of all, what role the Bible has played in the recent history of America. All of this can be discovered elsewhere, but Gomes offers it in crystalline prose, spiced with enough wit to keep the lessons engaging and fun. The fact that Gomes is an African American might predict that he would focus a large amount of his attention on the Bible and slavery and the civil rights movement. The role of the Bible in both is always worthy of the closest attention, and Gomes certainly does not disappoint in his discussions of these matters.

Gomes offers case studies of the Bible’s use and misuse in contemporary societal disputes over race, anti-Semitism, women and homosexuality. Gomes labels the latter, which receives the longest treatment, “the last prejudice.” Whether or not it is the “last” one (humans seem infinitely capable of creating new prejudices all the time), it definitely is a most contentious one. Gomes himself is a gay man, but he finds the Bible’s basic message not incompatible with his sexual orientation. I find his discussion quite moving and fair, and would commend it to those who are looking for a judicious summary of the issues.

Gomes concludes with a collection of musings scratched up over more than a few years. At times the subjects are so 012broad—for example, the Bible and joy—that the essay loses its focus. At these points what we hear is preaching, but good and faithful preaching nonetheless.

Gomes displays much wisdom in his writing, and can on occasion turn a phrase. More than a few times I jotted “lovely” in the margins and found myself rereading the prose, savoring its richness. For example, when describing how Americans understand religion, Gomes states that religion is neither opiate (Karl Marx) nor poetry (Harold Bloom), but rather “fuel, a form of cultural adrenaline that gives would-be victims the courage to fight back, to reclaim what they believe to be a lost religious inheritance, and to insist upon much more than mere toleration.” This metaphor of fuel is insightful and memorable at the same time. Elsewhere, in his discussion of anti-Semitism, Gomes communicates his own genuine pain when he realizes, after a long discussion with some Jews about the possibility of sharing space for worship, “the unavoidable fact that what was dearest to me in all the world, the sign and symbol of all that was good and true and holy (i.e. the cross), was not merely a ‘stumbling block,’ to use St. Paul’s freighted phrase in his letter to the Corinthians, but a gallows—a sign of all the perversity of which this fallen world is capable.” For many Jews, Gomes discovered, the cross was a symbol of the most profound evil rather than a sign of ultimate love. The book is rife with these gems, found sparkling among his thoughts.

I spoke above of niggling mistakes. It is difficult to assign proper blame for these, whether to editor or writer, but because the author is final arbiter (at least most of the time), I will blame Gomes for these. No fewer than four times—even in the footnotes—my former student and colleague Sid Hall is called “Hill.” This error is the more astounding because Gomes uses his work at some length in his discussion of anti-Semitism. Further, we are reminded that in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus we find “three women of ambiguous sexual morality”—not so. There are four, including Tamar, daughter-in-law of Judah. Later on we are told that “the wasting of seed through non-procreative sex” was “proscribed.” But was it? How then do you explain a book like the Song of Songs, as robust a celebration of sensuality and sexuality as one finds in the ancient world? At times, also, Gomes gets carried away with his attempts at contemporary relevance, offering the following cheap shot: “Saul (Paul) was an ambitious and successful young zealot; he could have been a Hitler youth, an upwardly mobile officer in Oliver Cromwell’s army, a Sandinista, even a young Republican.” Classing young Republicans with Hitler youth may please the ears in Harvard Yard, but it strikes me as merely crude and insensitive, something Gomes is most insistent that we ought not be, if we are to take the Bible with genuine seriousness.

These exasperating peccadilloes cloud what in the main is a whale of a good read. I certainly do recommend this book, especially to church folk who have long had serious questions about t what to do with the Good Book as we hurtle toward the 21st century. Gomes has given us a genuine gift, and I, for one, am profoundly grateful.

014

The Trial of Jesus

Alan Watson
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), xiii + 219 pages, $24.95 (hardcover)

Even in the days before television cameras entered the American courtroom, public debate and obsessive outrage over trials has flourished. The trial of Jesus is a case in point. Vividly portrayed in the Gospels and reenacted in sermons, commentaries and Passion plays, Jesus’ trial has provoked bitter controversy, anti-Semitic condemnations and persecution of Jews. In the past two centuries of supposed enlightenment and reason, numerous scholarly studies have tried to reconstruct the legal struggle that surrounded Jesus’ last days.¹ Alan Watson’s The Trial of Jesus is the latest attempt to determine what happened at Jesus’ trial.

The literary and theological complexities of the Gospels, and their ambiguous witness to historical events, have resisted a definitive and convincing explanation of why and by whom Jesus was executed. Scholars have been unable to determine exactly what charges were brought against Jesus, the legality of the hearings or trials before the Jewish council in Jerusalem and the Roman governor Pilate, and the real reasons for their verdicts. Since the gospel accounts are highly charged defenses of Jesus’ innocence, they attack, rather than coolly assess, the actions and motives of Jesus’ opponents. Modern attempts to write a historically reliable account of why Jesus was executed depend substantially on how one reconstructs the historical Jesus. Was he a revolutionary or a reformer who threatened the institutional status quo? Was he embroiled in a strictly religious debate or in a personal competition for public recognition? Or was he a good, innocent Galilean who presented no reasonable threat to the Jerusalem authorities?

Alan Watson is an accomplished historian of ancient Roman law and thus is in an excellent position to bring the larger imperial, legal, social and political background to bear on the gospel narratives. His recent book is part of a trilogy that traces Jewish-Christian conflicts over law. Watson, in Jesus and the Jews: The Pharisaic Tradition in John (1995), argues that the Gospel of John has absorbed and refuted a Pharisaic document that is no longer in existence. His recent Jesus and the Law (1997) tries to sort out Jesus’ teachings in relation to other Jewish groups and authorities. In all of his books, Watson seeks the most probable historical position from the sources available. Unfortunately, this seemingly reasonable procedure has led him to some very improbable conclusions because, even when the sources allow no certain or even probable conclusion, Watson feels that he must solve the problem rather than let it be. His unconvincing solutions reflect the problems we all have when we think about that important but very distant time when Christianity began, nearly two thousand years ago.

Watson’s Jesus is a religious revolutionary who attacks the Temple establishment, but he is not a social or political revolutionary. Thus, in the eyes of the religious authorities—including the Pharisees, whom Watson sees as religious, not secular, reformers—Jesus is a heretic. However, in the ancient eastern Mediterranean world, religion was not a sphere of life separate from politics. A teacher who had a view of how the law should be interpreted inevitably supported another way of living Jewish life socially and politically, and thus promoted social and political changes. In this kind of world the most spiritual teachings of the Pharisees and the Jesus movement had concrete and—to the authorities—threatening social and political, as well as religious, consequences. Conflict inevitably followed.

Watson concludes, as have others before him, that the Jewish authorities tried Jesus at night and decided he was guilty of blasphemy. They then turned Jesus over to the Romans, who condemned him to death. Interestingly, Watson writes that the Jewish authorities planned to condemn Jesus to death in the morning but thought better of it when they realized that their proceedings were illegal and so left the sentencing to Pilate. The careful reader will immediately realize that this complex picture has been read into the Gospels. We know little about Jewish legal practice in the Second Temple period and, unfortunately for Watson’s theory, quite a bit less than he thinks. In assessing the “trial” before the Jewish council (the frequently used term “Sanhedrin” is a later, Hebraized Greek term from the Mishnah), Watson quotes liberally from the Mishnah, a collection of laws codified more than a century after the Gospels were written. He expresses prudent misgivings about using later sources to explain the first century, but plows ahead anyway. He reasons that since the Roman emperor Justinian’s early-sixth-century C.E. digest of Roman laws (which Watson has translated) tended to conserve long-lasting legal traditions, the Mishnah must have done the same. However, the Mishnah, unlike the Roman digest of Justinian, is not a living code of law. The rabbis who compiled the Mishnah in the second century C.E. were not officials in charge of the Jewish community. (That role would develop slowly over the next several centuries.) They were scholars reconstructing an intellectually articulated Jewish world in response to the historical loss of the Temple and of autonomy following the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. Thus we do not know how the first-century C.E. Jerusalem council, made up of elders from leading families and heads of the most powerful priestly families, proceeded in judicial cases. One telling example: The Mishnaic law recorded in the tractate Sanhedrin clearly encumbered 047capital cases in procedures so rigorous that execution was all but impossible. But Flavius Josephus, the first-century C.E. Jewish historian, testifies that the real rulers of Judea and Jerusalem had no such ideals or qualms.

The Gospels are a troublesome source for reconstructing what “really happened” to Jesus during the 24 hours before he died. Contemporary scholarship has shown in great detail that the evangelists created independent literary narratives about Jesus in order to interpret their teacher and Lord in a way that would be helpful to their audiences.^a Watson harmonizes the two relatively independent traditions in Mark and John rather than reading these documents in their cultural and literary context. He treats these highly polemicized accounts as depositories of “facts,” which he somewhat arbitrarily pieces together to create his composite picture. Such procedures have been rejected by good historical study of early Christianity and Judaism. Failing in so many particulars, Watson’s reconstruction neither convinces the careful reader nor solves the problem of the Gospels’ polemics. Once again, the trial of Jesus has proved itself resistant to historical analysis.

A Book for the ’90s

The Good Book