Bible Books

010

God’s in His Heaven and Albright’s with the World

The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels

Thomas Cahill
(New York: Doubleday, 1998) 291 pp., $23.50 (hardcover)

There is something special about the Hebrew Bible. Orthodox and fundamentalist believers can easily explain what it is that makes it so special—it is God’s word. For others in the modern period, whether Jewish, Christian or nonaffiliated, the answer is more elusive. Having let go of fundamentalism and its inerrant word, people still respect and revere the Bible, but they’re often not quite sure why. Maybe it’s the pull of habit or tradition. Or maybe there really is something that makes the Bible unique, even when it is seen as a text that originated in the course of human history and not through divine inspiration. Why does the Bible still cast its spell on us?

Some modern scholars have sought a historical answer to the question of the Bible’s uniqueness. The Bible, these scholars say, represents a breakthrough in ancient thought. According to one such school of thought, which was prominent from the 1940s through the 1960s, people in prebiblical times thought in a confused way, believing that everything happens in circles, so that there is no difference between past and future. The people of the Bible—so the theory went—first discovered history, and from this discovered the dignity of human life. Biblical monotheism thus represents a great ascent in human consciousness and morality: The religion of the Bible discovered the historical and ethical realities of the world in which we live.

This view—summarized perhaps too crudely here—was expressed in classical form by William Foxwell Albright, one of the great biblical scholars of our century, and popularized by the “biblical archaeology” movement championed by G. Ernest Wright and others.^a But by the 1970s, this idea was beginning to seem a bit shaky. Some scholars began to demonstrate that the sense of history in the Bible wasn’t terribly different from the sense of history in other ancient Near Eastern cultures and that a simple distinction between pagan myth and biblical history doesn’t hold much water. There are differences, to be sure, but they are subtle and require finer distinctions than myth versus history, or cyclical time versus linear time.

In spite of these changes in modern scholarship, the Albrightian view is championed in Thomas Cahill’s new book, The Gifts of the Jews. Cahill is the author of How the Irish Saved Civilization, one of a series of books he is writing on different groups that profoundly changed Western culture. Cahill’s new book is very engaging, well written and likeable. The “gifts of the Jews” are the concepts of history, progress, individual worth, justice and morality, which are first discerned in the writings of the Hebrew Bible. Cahill writes, very movingly, that “we are the undeserving recipients of this history of the Jews, this long, excessive, miraculous development of ethical monotheism without which our ideas of equality and personalism are unlikely ever to have come 011into being and surely would never have matured in the way that they have.”

Cahill is surely right in saying that our moral and social views descend from the Hebrew Bible. His descriptions of the key parts of the Hebrew Bible are thoughtfully drawn and enjoyable to read. And his attention to these deep issues is serious and thought-provoking.

But as a biblical scholar, I must say that Cahill’s depiction of the nonbiblical people of the ancient world as chronologically disoriented, unethical and sexually loose seems like a cartoon parody.

Surely the least historical part of the book is Cahill’s elaborate description of a Sumerian ritual in which an adolescent boy is tied down on a pagan altar and sexually ravished by a naked Sumerian priestess while hordes of other naked priestesses stroke their bodies and bay at the full moon. There is no evidence that such a ritual, or anything remotely like it, ever happened. With these promiscuous pagans as the straw-men and straw-women of the book, the biblical writings do seem revolutionary. But I think the Bible is good enough not to need such imaginary strangers.

Dramatic Presentations from the New Testament

David Rhoads
(Columbus, OH: Select Office, Trinity Lutheran Seminary, 1998) $40.00 (videocassette)

Despite the publication of thousands of books, Christians still transmit Jesus’ message orally. The Gospels portray Jesus teaching the Galilean crowds and his disciples orally in villages and fields. Most people know that the early followers of Jesus communicated his teachings and stories orally after Jesus’ death. Perhaps fewer realize that the New Testament Gospels and letters were written to be read aloud to Christian communities, as they are today.

After a little more reflection, we also realize, to our surprise, that our very literary culture, with its printed Bibles and shelves of religious books, still passes on the core of Christian teaching orally, through parental instruction, religious education classes and the preaching during worship. But true to our modern, visual culture, when we wish to study the Bible carefully, we read the text and turn to books that explain it; thus this magazine with its book reviews.

David Rhoads, long a professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, has sought to re-create the process of oral teaching by 012videotaping presentations of selections from the four Gospels and Paul’s letter to the Galatians. He has also written a brief companion book explaining each text, hoping to foster further reflection within parish communities that are seeking to renew themselves and to respond to Jesus’ message more adequately. His interpretations of the texts stress the diverse ways of following Jesus and the diverse needs of various groups of Christians.

But how was I, a bookish student of the 1950s and 1960s, a university professor, to review a videotape (a question my adolescent sons would never have to ask)? I did what came naturally. I turned to the book first, flipping through its pages as I punched the buttons on the remote control to see what the videotape had to add. Sitting in my family room like an American TV viewer, I listened fitfully to the familiar words of the Bible as I took notes, consulted the book and parried startled inquiries from my teenage sons—a typical evening at home, in other words, and not a good place for the Sermon on the Mount.

So what did I hear when David Rhoads recited the Sermon on the Mount? Like some of the crowds who heard Jesus, I listened but did not understand. My notes say he had a good voice and emphatic tone. The camera shot him seated, straight on or from the side, dressed in a simple, rustic tunic that probably resembles what Jesus wore. His gestures were sharp, and his tone changed depending on the type of instruction given. From a modern visual perspective, I saw mostly a talking head. OK, but not exciting. Thinking about it afterwards, I realized I had expected the video to do what contemporary TV shows and ads do: try to grab my emotions using every vocal and visual trick in the book. This is a commentary as much about me as about the video. I didn’t connect with Rhoads playing Jesus because he, like Jesus himself, expects his audience to listen carefully and to understand. But the book, the family room, and the influence of American TV all got in the way.

Luckily Rhoads and I got another chance. The organizers of a summer conference on the Gospel of Matthew and pastoral theology at Loyola University in Chicago invited Rhoads to present the Sermon on the Mount under especially challenging circumstances: after supper, to about 50 professors and serious students of the Bible. All were familiar with the Gospel of Matthew, perhaps to a fault. What could a recitation of the 013Sermon on the Mount offer a bunch of hardened academics?

We were asked to sit in the first few rows of a small auditorium without notes or a Bible so that we could just listen. We were told that we might ask questions, engage in a discussion or respond in any way we saw fit after Rhoads delivered the sermon. He spoke, we listened, he sat down, and we sat in complete silence for more than 15 minutes. Finally, someone rose, and we all dispersed in quiet conversation. Let me repeat: A room full of studious, articulate (obsessively?), analytical academics who talk and write about Matthew for a living sat in silence in response to the Sermon on the Mount. This time I listened and understood; I looked and perceived. I have studied every Greek word of the Sermon on the Mount, but this time I heard it as a whole. What, I thought, if Christian communities really lived according to those teachings?

So Rhoads’s video will work if it is really heard within a community of followers of Jesus, like the parishes for which it was produced. His book encourages and guides groups in understanding the Gospels by stressing their particular messages. The diversity of the Gospels and of our responses to the heard word may move individuals and parishes beyond the patterns of thought and behavior that keep many from deeply appropriating the biblical tradition. Hearing the Sermon on the Mount demands complete attention to the spoken word and serious reflection on its meaning.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Faith

ed. by James H. Charlesworth and Walter P. Weaver
(Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998) 96 pp., $12.00 (paperback)

“Do the Dead Sea Scrolls hinder or undermine Christian faith?” James Charlesworth asks in the preface of this volume. The four essays that follow all answer with a resounding “No!”

The annual Faith and Scholarship Colloquy at Florida Southern College serves to bring together leading scholars to address the most challenging topics in contemporary biblical studies in a way that speaks to a Christian lay audience. This volume, the fifth in a series, admirably meets that goal. The contributors include four luminaries in Hebrew Bible and New Testament studies who have been involved in Dead Sea Scroll scholarship for many years: Joseph Fitzmyer, John Collins, David Noel Freedman and James Charlesworth.

Readers looking for fireworks and new, untested theories will be disappointed; the essays provide instead a solid introduction to their topics. At the same time, the essays do not shy away from controversial ideas. Joseph Fitzmyer considers the proper use of the Dead Sea Scrolls for the study of the Palestinian Jewish matrix of Christianity. He sees the Dead Sea Scrolls as occupying a “privileged” position in the study of early Christianity, since they supply “firsthand information about a form of Palestinian Judaism of the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E.” He warns, however, of the danger of pushing the importance of the scrolls too far in the study of early Christianity. For example, 014he expresses grave misgivings about the contention of José O’Callaghan and Carsten P. Thiede that fragments of New Testament books have been found in Cave 7.^b He argues that even if a fragment of the Gospel of Mark was discovered in Cave 7 (which he views as “highly questionable”), it would not prove that the owners of the scrolls were early Christians or that they even accepted the claims of the Gospel of Mark.

John Collins considers the topic of messianic beliefs in Second Temple Judaism. He shows that the “distinctive point” about messianic expectation in the Dead Sea Scrolls is that the authority of the royal Messiah (the heir to the throne of David) is subordinated to that of the priests. Collins also discusses 4Q285, the so-called pierced messiah text.^c He decisively refutes the reading of Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise— “they will put to death the Leader of the Community, the Bran[ch of David]” (line 4)—showing that it misunderstands the passage; the line actually reads “the Prince of the Congregation, the Branch of David, will kill him.” Thus the early Christian understanding of Jesus’ death as part of his messianic role cannot be traced back to the community at Qumram (where the scrolls were found).

Discussing the use of prophecy in the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christianity, Freedman notes that scroll texts such as Pesher Habakkuk and Pesher Nahum assume that their interpretation of the biblical prophets is “inspired and authoritative.” Further, their interpretation “ignores or dismisses the historical setting and context of the prophetic book [that they are commenting on]” and instead applies the prophetic words to contemporary events. Freedman argues that this understanding of prophecy is similar to that of the early Christians, another similarity between the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christianity.

Finally, Charlesworth, whose essay has an almost sermon-like quality, argues that Christians should not be frightened of what the scrolls may say concerning the background of particular Christian doctrines, but should embrace them as enlightening our concepts of the teachings and activities of Jesus of Nazareth and of the foundation of the early church. According to Charlesworth, “I cannot imagine anything in the Qumram library that would hinder Christian faith; of course, I am referring to informed Christian faith, which grows and changes as it is more enlightened.”

Since this volume is aimed at a non-scholarly audience and covers mostly introductory material, experts in the field will not find it particularly useful. It may also seem somewhat elementary to BR readers who have done extensive reading on the Dead Sea Scrolls. But for those at the beginning of scroll study, this book will prove helpful and interesting.

God’s in His Heaven and Albright’s with the World

The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels