My View

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Not long ago, Helmut Koester and I published an article in Bible Review on the Gospel of Thomas.^a As is usual with BR, its attentive readers responded with a number of spirited letters, some of which praised the piece, some of which disagreed with our views. This is to be expected, even welcomed. It is essential to the responsible conduct of intellectual pursuits that one’s work be submitted to public scrutiny—both that of the scholarly world of specialized expertise and that of the wider cultural world in which we must ground our work.

Yet one of the responses left me feeling somewhat injured: Ryan Ahlgrim’s letter^b suggested that what lay behind our conclusions was not really a fair and impartial reading of the evidence, but rather an ulterior and unexpressed theological motive. My initial impulse was to write and assure the reader that this was not the case, that our work had been conducted and indeed offered in a purely historical mode, and that it was not our intention to suggest any wider theological significance for what we had done. The absurdity of such a response struck me only later: a New Testament scholar whose work has no particular theological significance! It certainly had a great deal of significance to this particular reader. In fact, the theological implications of what we had done seemed so catastrophic to him that we were kindly asked to desist from considering ourselves Christians at all!

That such a reaction should be so puzzling to a biblical scholar is not surprising. As scholars, we are not generally encouraged to share our work with a wider public, who might more accurately and honestly assess its cultural impact. Rather, we tend to communicate with each other through our own rather arcane media, bearing such mysterious titles as Vigiliae Christianae, Novum Testamentum or Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages—titles as common to the biblical scholar as the New York Times is to the general public. What has resulted is, on the one hand, a professional guild that rather naively assumes that it may confine itself to historical or literary matters without the slightest expectation that anyone would find our work of any great theological or cultural significance and, on the other hand, a general public with little awareness of what scholars are doing and with meager current knowledge about the texts that many regard as “sacred Scripture.” The fruits of this state of affairs are exhibited bimonthly in the Readers Reply columns of BR, where scholar and public are brought face to face. The result is a cold bath for both.

We have not reached this situation easily; there is plenty of blame to go around. For our part, the various guilds in the biblical fields of study seem to thrive on obscurity and to eschew reflection upon the theological or broader cultural significance of our work. For some, to engage in such matters might call into question our devotion to the purer pursuits of scientific knowledge. For others, the theological implications of what has been accomplished exegetically over the last 20 years may simply be too frightening to face publicly, if not privately.

But we are not alone. Theologians, too, bear much responsibility for the current situation. While many theologians still feel the need to ground their work on biblical foundations, few recent titles reflect much awareness of what is currently afoot in the fields of biblical exegesis. Part of the problem is simply interdisciplinary: It is difficult enough to keep abreast of one’s own field, let alone to stay current with another as well. But more fundamentally, systematic theology has historically been about the task of arranging biblical data into a cogent “system.” Exegesis, on the other hand, has tended in our day to highlight the competing claims present in various scriptural traditions. So long as theologians continue to see the biblical text simply as that authority on which their views might be based—citing the “biblical view” of this or the “biblical view” of that—it seems unlikely that the rift between biblical scholars and theologians will be bridged very soon.

Finally, there is also blame in this for pastors and rabbis, who provide day-to-day 044religious leadership at the local level. Fearful of what members of their congregations might think if confronted with the latest results of critical historical investigation, they often choose instead to protect members from that which might hurt or upset them. All too often, perfectly good seminary educations are shelved, and the local study of the Bible is streamlined into the style of devotional reading. On the heels of 20 years of massive decline of membership among churches, and to an extent among synagogues as well, such fear is perhaps understandable. A flap over how to read the Bible might just deal the fatal blow to a fragile congregation on the verge of collapse. Yet an overwhelming majority of Americans, when asked, say that they are not actively involved in any sort of organized religion because they still have unresolved questions of religious faith. Could it be that the paternal manner in which congregations have been protected from the constant questioning and answering of the academy has communicated to our culture that the church and synagogue are not the places to explore the great questions of religious faith?

All in all, we have worked ourselves into an unacceptable state of affairs. Jews and Christians continue to consider the biblical traditions as a major theological point of departure, and yet those charged with ascertaining the best and most accurate technical information about those texts are for the most part unwilling to communicate that information to a public that seems unwilling to receive it.

If biblical scholars are not to find themselves as merely one of the oddities of academic institutional life, pursuing a field with no particular constituency and no particular relevance to any other aspect of modern life, and if Jewish and Christian theology is not to be grounded on assumptions that are utterly naive and out of date, the current situation must change. For starters, biblical scholars should begin once again to take their work seriously as the stuff of theological and philosophical reflection. This means not only that exegetes themselves must be more willing to engage in such reflection as part of their work, but also that they must be willing to share the results of their exegetical and historical work with the widest possible public, regardless of the unpleasant consequences that such intellectual openness may sometimes seem to produce. In fact, we should be especially open and clear about aspects of our work that most dramatically challenge the most commonly held assumptions, that is, when it really makes a difference. To do anything less would, in effect, make us guilty of intellectual malpractice, every bit as irresponsible as the physician who might fail to treat my heart condition with the most up-to-date methods available.

If most scholars would agree that Jesus did not say “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” but rather “Blessed are the poor” (compare Matthew 5:3 and Luke 6:20), we need to be clear about that. If the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but by successive Jewish theologians over a number of years, each with his or her own theological perspective, and reflective of unique and specific historical circumstances, we need to be clear about that. If I Timothy was not written by Paul, but by a second- or third-generation student of Paul, whose views on such important matters as the status of women were not altogether compatible with those of the master whose name he invokes, we need to be clear about that. It might make a difference to someone.

For its part, the theological world—from the professional systematic theologian across the hall from me to the person whose theological avocation simply takes the form of participation in the life of the local church or synagogue—must be willing to face, head on, the realities that biblical scholarship has uncovered. Troubling or difficult questions do not disappear when ignored. They remain as challenges to the theologian’s commitment to do his or her work within the context of the real world, despite the challenge to our assumptions. The biblical scholar engaged in historical criticism seeks to uncover as much as possible of the real world of our religious past. If theology is unable to cope with past realities, there is little hope that it will be able to cope any more successfully with present and future realities.

That is my view.

Not long ago, Helmut Koester and I published an article in Bible Review on the Gospel of Thomas.a As is usual with BR, its attentive readers responded with a number of spirited letters, some of which praised the piece, some of which disagreed with our views. This is to be expected, even welcomed. It is essential to the responsible conduct of intellectual pursuits that one’s work be submitted to public scrutiny—both that of the scholarly world of specialized expertise and that of the wider cultural world in which we must ground our work. Yet one of the responses left […]