Readers Reply

004

Shocking Some of Our Readers

I would like to express appreciation for the article by David Aune entitled “The Gospels—Biography or Theology?’ BR 06:01.

Professor Aune presents the Gospels in the context of their times, and especially in their literary context, in the clearest and most balanced way I have yet seen. His article is full of insights and understanding for anyone truly seeking to understand the Gospels better, and deserves to be read and read again, and meditated upon.

It may shock some of your readers to learn that the Gospel writers were in many ways products of their time, and that they express the conventions and worldviews of their age. It may also shock some readers to realize that the same is true of us today! But if we can once grasp the fact that true objectivity is an ideal not attained in any age, and that all men see through a glass darkly, it is at once humbling and enlightening. Giovanni Garbini has pointed out in his History and Ideology in Ancient Israel that the ancient Israelites were not immune from bias either.

It is now becoming evident that whether we are considering history, politics, science or theology, the essence consists in the continuing tension between the ideal and the real. This is the human predicament, and Professor Aune has reminded us that the Gospels were written by men in the same circumstances we find ourselves in, and they can speak to us today if we have ears to hear.

Objectionable Ad Causes Cancellation

I am canceling my subscription. In the February 1990 issue, there is an advertisement for a book entitled Gospel Fictions. This ad states “According to this provocative book, the four Gospels of the New Testament are fictional narratives.” Further in the ad, it states that “this book reveals the Gospels as works of literary art—contrived, creative interpretations of doctrine and literary precedent that have become the supreme fictions of our culture.” Any book proposing that the Gospels are fiction is contrary to the Word of God and all sound biblical teaching. Dwelling on such thoughts will only introduce doubt and so weaken the faith of the believer. We need to build one another’s faith not tear it apart.

Romans 14:13 says that we are not to put a stumbling block in the path of a weaker brother (see also 1 Corinthians 8:9) Our faith in God is too precious, too life-giving to trifle with by introducing seeds of doubt and unbelief.

Articles in this issue such as “The Gospels—Biography or Theology?” BR 06:01, by David Aune tend to support this kind of theology.

I do not feel that I can in any way be a part of, or lend support to, any periodical or organization that supports the theory that the Bible is anything less than the true, inspired world of God from Genesis through Revelation.

Randel Helms, the author of Gospel Fictions—admittedly a provocative title—is a professor of English and biblical scholar at Arizona State University. Many of our readers would agree that he purveys false doctrine; others may find he has valuable insights that enrich their understanding of Scripture. Each BR reader may ignore the book or decide for himself/herself whether it has any value. We do not agree that faith is so fragile as to be threatened by this ad. It is far better to allow our readers to decide than to censor our advertising pages.—Ed.

No Middle Ground

I respect the fact that the scholars who write in your magazine spend years of their lives and large sums of money to get the required credit to practice their chosen profession. However, they are leading lay people and intellectuals who do not know better astray. That is a Sin! One must accept the Bible as God’s word to man; there is no middle ground.

Bible and Bible Review

One thing you must keep in mind:

The Bible is the truth and not conjecture. Bible Review is conjecture and not truth.

Should We Review the Bible?

I am extremely disappointed in Bible Review.

The question is should we review the Bible 005or should the Bible be the standard by which we review ourselves?

I shall not renew my subscription.

Some Like Us

This is a note of appreciation from one of your readers with no background in formal Bible study. In general, your articles are interesting and often thought-provoking. Different perspectives offered by Jewish and Christian authors are rewarding; the art enriches; and the letters are fascinating.

Gossai Surprises a Jewish Reader

The article by Hemchand Gossai entitled “The Old Testament Among Christian Theologians,” BR 06:01, was quite an eye-opener. He quotes most of the Christian theologians of the last 100 years who said that the Old Testament is “not seen as the Word of God,” “irrelevant,” a book “full of fraud and immorality,” a book “full of intentional and unintentional deception, a very dangerous book,” “obsolete and using other hideous characterizations. We Jews have evidently been totally misled all these hundreds of years as to the basis of Christianity. Our knowledge and interest in Christianity has admittedly been very scant—mainly conditioned by the fact that Christianity throughout most of our history during the past 2,000 years has meant massacres, murders, forced conversions, ghettos, Inquisitions, and the confiscation and the burning of our Sacred Books. If there was such a thing as “Christian love,” Jews rarely experienced it.

But we did believe that Christians based their religion on the “Old” Testament, that is, the Jewish Bible. In fact, Jesus himself, a fully practicing Jew, knew only the “Old” Testament (see Matthew 5:17–18: “Do not suppose that I came to annul the Law and the Prophets. I did not come to abolish but to observe them, for I assure you, while heavens and earth endure, not one iota or one tittle will be dropped from the Law until it is all accomplished”).

Now, however, we find from your article that all along Christians did everything in their power to free themselves from the “Old” Testament. How impoverished they will end up! The pages of the “Old” Testament are full of the world’s most profound ethical and moral teachings, without which the world today would still be a jungle where animal violence ruled. The very idea that man is created in God’s image and the 006ethical teachings from Moses through Malachi are all embedded in the “Old” Testament. The enormously rich Jewish literature that followed the Bible has throughout thousands of years garnered literally tens of thousands of ethical and moral teachings from the “Old” Testament.

Prefers the Bhagavad Gita

I found Hemchand Gossai’s article (“The Old Testament Among Christian Theologians,” BR 06:01) stimulating, but his position leads to logical absurdities whenever one treats a book like the Old Testament as some kind of divine revelation. One agrees with part of it (e.g., the ideas about justice in Amos that Martin Luther King, Jr., used so effectively), but other parts we simply find despicable (e.g., the call for revenge in Psalm 137:7–9).

Gossai wants to reject the untenable parts of the Old Testament, yet he makes a statement that this book of myths and traditions “clearly shows us God’s involvement in history on behalf of his people.” What nonsense: The idea that Yahweh would choose one particular tribe and then encourage them to go in and take the land and kill the people in the promised land! Gossai’s only argument for the value of the Old Testament is that it is in the background of Christianity, which he assumes is valid because it is his religion.

If a person wants to read a religious text, it would be better to put up the Old Testament and read a book such as the Bhagavad Gita.

A Symbolic Reading of the “Cleft of the Rocks”

Susan Ackerman, in her article, “Sacred Sex, Sacrifice and Death” BR 06:01, makes a persuasive and interesting argument. My attention was drawn to her exegesis of Isaiah 57:9. The first two phrases, she asserts, refer to child sacrifice, while the second two refer to necromancy. Why are not the “envoys to a distant throne” and those who are sent down to Sheol the same children whose sacrifice is spoken of in the first two phrases? Similarly, the last two phrases of verse 5 may very well be the subject of the first two or four phrases of verse 6. In other words, the children are sacrificed and become thereby the messengers and intercessors for the people.

Wandering into somewhat more speculative areas, the reference to slaughtering children “among the clefts of the rocks” may symbolically suggest an analogy between the anatomic locus of the conception of the children, and the topographic locus of their sacrifice.

Susan Ackerman replies:

Dr. Ostow has advanced a good interpretation of Isaiah 57:9, one, in fact, which is frequently found in the commentaries (John L. McKenzie, Second Isaiah [Anchor Bible 20, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968], p. 158, for example). I would certainly agree with him that there is some connection between child sacrifice and the, cult of the dead (as I argued in the second half of my article). But the comparative evidence we have concerning child sacrifice from the Phoenician and Punic world suggests that children were not sacrificed as envoys to Sheol and the god MoÆt, who presides there, but rather were sacrificed as payment for a vow made to the high god Ba‘l Hamon (= El) and his consort, Tannit (?). This data connecting child sacrifice and El makes it hard for me to see the sacrificial victims as envoys to MoÆt.

I am even less inclined to see a connection between verses 5 and 6. Again, the comparative evidence is primary: There are no Phoenician or Punic descriptions of libations or food offerings to the deceased children. But still, we must be sensitive to the subtleties to which Dr. Ostow alludes, for while child sacrifice is not a cult of the dead, neither are the two without connections.

The Line Between Child Sacrifice and Sex

Susan Ackerman’s article, “Sacred Sex, Sacrifice and Death,” BR 06:01, intriguingly analyzes the poetry of Isaiah 57:3–13, and its linkage of fertility cults, child sacrifice and the cult of the dead. There is another portion of the Bible in which these three practices may be linked. That portion is Leviticus 18:21–23.

Leviticus 18:21, as Dr. Ackerman notes, refers to child sacrifice. Leviticus 18:22, though frequently taken as a blanket condemnation of male homosexual acts, more likely appears to be directed at sexual acts between men in the context of the fertility cults. Leviticus 18:23 refers to the practice of making a woman lie down before a beast. Could this be a ritual of the cult of the dead? Or perhaps the author of Isaiah 57:3–13 simply took the linkage of child sacrifice and cultic sexuality with another cultic act (not necessarily a cult of the dead) in Leviticus 18:21–23 as inspiration for the poetic broadside against the cult of the dead.

Why the Book of Judith Was Excluded

The numerous contradictions in the Book of Judith, pointed out by Professor Carey Moore in his article “Judith—The Case of the Pious Killer,” BR 06:01, would be obvious even to a marginally competent bar mitzvah student. For that reason, Judith could not be granted canonical status.

Even today many people—Jews and Christians—regard the Bible as literal truth. In earlier times such fundamentalism was the norm. Inclusion in the Bible of anything that was patently not literal truth would undermine the credibility of the whole. If a part of the Bible were demonstrably in error, then doubt would exist regarding the balance. If the Bible could, as the Book of Judith does, wrongly identify

Nebuchadnezzar as king of Assyria, could it not also be in error when it reported the sun standing still at Joshua’s command?

007

The Book of Esther was included in the Bible because it was not inherently incredible. It is at least possible that a king of Persia was influenced to order a pogrom against the Jews, and was then influenced by one of his numerous wives to issue an order partially countermanding the first.

There is little reason to engage in Freudian, feminist or moralistic convolutions to explain Judith’s exclusion when a simple explanation will suffice.

Error in Caption

Congratulations on another fine issue; a special word of appreciation to art editors Robert Sugar and Ted Smith. A truly impressive job!

The picture selection for the article on Judith (“Judith—The Case of the Pious Killer,” BR 06:01) were, as always, beautiful. However, the caption for the Book of Hours has, I think, a small error. The Latin text is not a plea from Judith, but the Versicle and Response from the old liturgical hour of sext (Midday Prayer): “O God, come to my assistance,” followed by “O Lord, make haste to help me.” These invocations were taken from the Psalms (70:1, 40:13 [RSV]) and begin each segment of the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours.

Thanks for a fine periodical.

Professor Carey A. Moore replies:

My thanks to Reverend Hanna and several others of the Roman Catholic and Episcopalian traditions who caught my error and wrote to the editor. No scholar, including myself, deliberately includes misinformation in an article, but there’s nothing like an error to confirm that people have indeed read it!

In any case, Reverend Hanna is quite correct. The Latin text is not a plea from Judith, although such a prayer would certainly have been appropriate for her as she undertook her grisly task.

What a BAS Seminar Led to

In July 1984, I decided to treat myself to the BAS study seminar in Oxford, England. I was so stimulated by that event that I began a correspondence with one of the lecturers, Dr. John Day of Oxford, who encouraged my interest in the topic of Canaanite cultic prostitution. I also formed a friendship with Carol Smith, the seminar coordinator, who continues to be a source of support. It was Carol who, upon seeing how far my research was progressing, remarked, “Mary, you have enough here to do a dissertation.” When I facetiously replied that a Master’s degree was usually necessary before writing a Ph.D. dissertation, she simply said, “Then get one.”

So here I am, in the Master of Arts in Religious Studies program at United Theological Seminary in New Brighton, Minn. I am concentrating on the Hebrew Scriptures and women’s issues and will soon be trying to combine these. interests in a Master’s thesis. I’m still saving the cultic prostitution material for the Ph.D.

More Evidence Against the Theory That Paul Committed Suicide

If it is not too late, I would like to make a few comments on Arthur J. Droge’s “Did Paul Commit Suicide?” BR 05:06.

Droge adduces five instances of suicide in the Hebrew Bible. Samson bringing down the house (temple) of Dagon on its occupants, including himself, doesn’t count because it was not an act aimed at taking his own life. With one exception, all the others occur in battle, and therefore have no relevance to Paul’s hypothesized suicide.

We are left, therefore, with Ahithophel (2 Samuel 17:23), a unique instance reflecting the contempt in which this traitor was held. Droge might have added that the suicide of Ahithophel has very probably shaped the tradition about the end of Judas, also a traitor. According to one version (Acts 1:18), Judas seems to have suffered a fatal and very messy accident; suicide is neither mentioned nor implied. Only in the other and probably later version (Matthew 27:5) does Judas, following the example of Ahithophel, go off and hang himself.

The main problem with Droge’s hypothesis, apart from the total lack of evidence, is that he has not established that suicide was morally acceptable in the early Christian or contemporary Jewish milieu. Job prays ardently for death but never contemplates suicide. In the Book of Tobit, an apocryphal work from the second or third century B.C.E., Tobit himself and his relative Sarah, both in desperate straits, also pray for death but do not see suicide as an option. And, finally, the rabbinic texts adduced by Droge demonstrate only that one might merit a place in the world to come in spite of suicide.

Shocking Some of Our Readers
I would like to express appreciation for the article by David Aune entitled “The Gospels—Biography or Theology?’ BR 06:01.