God's Violence and How to Avoid Facing It

Which dummy is speaking?

I recently posted on the human cruelty sanctioned by God--and, indeed, indirectly perpetrated by Him--in biblical passages such as Joshua 6:20-21.

Some of God's defenders point out that God can do what He likes with human life, as all life "belongs" to him. This apology is special pleading par excellence. As a student of literature I note that no other single character in all of fiction or history has been praised for violently and indiscriminately taking back what he has freely given.

Other God-defenders insist that those who were killed--including non-military, children, the old, the ill, and even livestock--deserved what they got. They did something, or didn't do something, and so God was morally justified to make Israel his instrument of genocidal brutality.

Biblical scholar Peter Enns suggests, following one of his mentors, that difficult passages such as Jericho can be rendered less problematic if the Bible is understood as God letting His children tell the story. He explains:

The Bible is what happens when God allows his children to tell his story–which means the biblical writers told the story from their point of view, with their limitations, within the cultural context in which they wrote.

When children tell the story of their father or mother, parents are typically delighted by how much they get and the childlike way that they see the world. But they are also well aware that children miss a lot when they tell the story, and invariably refract the complexities of family life through their own youthful vision.

It’s not a perfect analogy, I know, but roll with it: Think of how young boys talk in the schoolyard about how great their father is. They are ways of telling the story to make sure everyone knows they have the best dad around.

No, it's not a perfect analogy. And, uh, it's hard to roll with. I'll summarize some of the difficulties I have with Enns's approach, but here's a bit more of his explanation:

When God lets his children tell the story, the way that story is told is deeply and thoroughly influenced by the “rules of the schoolyard”; in the case of the Old Testament that means ancient tribal societies that valued in their people and in their gods such things as taking land, vanquishing (i.e., killing or enslaving) their foes, and generally bragging about who has the best gods and the best kings.

That is how people thought, and this “rule” is stamped all over the Old Testament. This is a way of understanding why the Bible behaves the way that it does. It bears the marks of the limitations of the cultures.

Bear in mind this is only an analogy, but if we want to extend this to the New Testament, we can think of the teachings of Jesus as a more “mature” telling of God’s story. Jesus tells the story in a way that is more in line with who God is (“you have heard it said, but I say to you…”). Such things as land acquisition and killing and enslaving enemies is no longer part of God’s narrative.

It’s like a boy who grows up to be an adult, gets a job, and has a family of his own. Now ask him to tell his father’s story. The son’s life experiences have brought him to a deeper knowledge and appreciation of his father’s experiences, and the story will reflect that.

What problem does the "schoolyard rules" approach solve? Well, it suggests that God really didn't do as much killing as the Bible says. It also indicates that He wasn't in full support of all the killing perpetrated by the Israelites.

OK, so maybe God ain't so bad. But wait. God's exoneration comes at a heavy price, for now we have to wonder how credible "His children" actually are. What else did they exaggerate? Could they have outright fabricated a story or even several stories?

Other problems: Did God approve of some killings and not others? Which ones? Was he OK with the killing of children but not livestock? How do we know?

More problems: Did God let His children tell the whole story or just parts of it? How do we distinguish God's telling from His children's telling, since they both use human language? Is it merely a matter of using the schoolyard rules approach when God does something that makes us uncomfortable?

Even more problems: Are other holy books from the world’s many cultures also re-tellings by God’s children? When re-tellings contradict, how do we adjudicate between them?

These are serious issues. Now take a look at the second section I quote. We see clearly that Enns has the ultimate concern of dropping the "OT" and getting to gentle Jesus. Jesus offers, Enns implies, a truer (what else could "mature" mean?) account of who God is and what He does.This approach reflects a longstanding Christian paradigm wherein the Hebrew Bible prefigures the New Testament. In other words, nasty genocidal God points the way to fatherly God sacrificing himself/his Son out of...love. Yes, love.

Hold on, for Houston, we have more problems. The teachings of Jesus are themselves re-told by the gospel writers. Are these to be viewed also by schoolyard rules? Should we then apply the same questions of credibility, structure, and speaker identification to these teachings?

Sigh.

Despite his cautions on using the analogy, Enns provides no clear statement of how it unambiguously succeeds. We're given the idea that it helps us to accept God's violence but this idea gets us nothing but momentary, visceral relief. Indeed, if we think about it, God's exoneration is passed off to the Israelites. Those kooky Jews were telling tall tales.

I suspect that momentary, visceral relief is all many believers want. Many will not pursue thinking about schoolyard rules and what their truth would entail for the Bible, biblical criticism, and belief.

Sometimes I wonder why people don't just make it easier on themselves and become deists. That way, they could just believe in a supreme being and dispense with having to maintain the authority of the Bible/New Testament.

If you want to believe in the Bible/New Testament, you simply have to accept that God is a huge douche and Jesus is a surly prick--these aspects are inextricable from the characters. Against the plain readings of the Bibles in their original languages and in their many conjoined historical and linguistic contexts, you cannot maintain uniform conceptions of God the loving father and Jesus the meek savior. The conceptions don't hold.

Historical Jesus Is Here!

R. Joseph Hoffmann has issued the The Jesus Process, a series of essays (one by him) discussing the historicity and non-historicity of Jesus, and the processes of scholarship used to adjudicate between historical arguments on Jesus.

This is a moment of supernova-esque importance because, for the first time that I know, the public (indeed, the world) has quasi-direct access to academic scholars in the process of making scholarly arguments. This is not a journalist's report of an academic conference or paper. This is not a mass-market book made by an academic. This is not a non-academic book challenging academic scholarship.

This is the academy on the "home turf" of the public. This is the opportunity for the academy to show how and why its professionalism serves the world better than amateur scholarship in books and blogs. Now, alert readers may note that one of the three essay writers, Stephanie Louse Fischer, is a graduate student and not yet a professional academic.

Nevertheless, professionalism is what is at stake in this academic volley against prominent mythicist bloggers. This essay series puts professionalism at the center of its concerns. The facts, the knowledge, the inferences and interpretations all serve the application of professional methodologies and techniques. The final outcome of these essays and their aftermath will be both the definition of professionalism and the professional viability of mythicism. This is why the moment is so fascinating.

I am very excited about this moment and these essays. I plan to read and analyze every one. I encourage others to do so, too. From there, we on the sidelines will await what I am sure will be an equally momentous reply from Richard Carrier. There may be other mythicists, academic and non-academic, who chime in on The Jesus Process essays, but now that the essays are out, Carrier is the man. Initially, no reply will matter more than his.

Indeed, the credibility and reputation of non-academic scholarship may rest on what Carrier does with this opportunity. If Carrier can make a strong scholarly case in favor of both his use of Bayesian techniques and his mythicist position, he will have achieved something very significant and unique in modern scholarship.

But Hoffmann's essays are determined, make no mistake about it, to go after Carrier and expose his mythicism as less than professional grade. One of the essays of The Jesus Process is by Hoffmann, a long piece called "Controversy, Mythicism, and the Historical Jesus." In it, he promises that the weight of history is "decisive" in favor of the historicity of Jesus. On this point, Hoffmann offers his thesis as follows:

It is my view, simply stated, that while facts concerning the Jesus of history were jeopardized from the start by a variety of salvation myths, by the credulity of early believers, by the historiographical tendencies of the era, and by the editorial tendencies of early writers, the gospels retain a stubbornly historical view of Jesus, preserve reliable information about his life and teachings, and are not engulfed by any of the conditions under which they were composed. Jesus “the Nazarene” did not originate as a myth or a story without historical coordinates, but as a teacher in first century Roman Palestine. Like dozens of other Hellenistic teachers, but lacking sophisticated “biographers” to preserve his accomplishments, Jesus is distinct only because the cult that formed around him perpetuated his memory in ritual, worship, and text, while the memory of other attested personalities of antiquity, even those who enjoyed brief cultic popularity like Antigonus I, Ptolemy I and Demetrius of Macedon are known to us mainly through literary artifacts.

You'll have to read the rest of the article to see how Hoffmann defends the thesis. Let me note, however, that Hoffmann's use of the gospels in his argument may have similarities with the narrative-based methodology employed by Joel S. Baden for the Pentateuch. Both Hoffmann and Baden are interested in immediate sources of religious texts. Hoffmann argues that a person, the subject of the texts, is probably a source for his texts; Baden argues that earlier, separate versions are the sources for his.

In addition to the positive case for the historical Jesus, Hoffmann holds the mythicist position "as fatally flawed and subject to a variety of objections." Here, Hoffmann's thesis is, well, devastating:

The attempt of “mythicists” to show that Jesus did not exist, on the other hand, has been largely incoherent, insufficiently scrupulous of historical detail, and based on improbable, bead-strung analogies.[1] The failure of the myth theory is not the consequence merely of methodological sloppiness with respect to the sources and their religious contexts; that has been demonstrated again and again from as early as Shirley Jackson Case’s (now dated) study, The Historicity of  Jesus (1912). It is a problem incipient in the task itself, which Morton Smith aptly summarized in 1986: The myth theory, he wrote, is almost entirely based on an argument from silence, especially the “silence” of Paul. “In order to explain just what it was that Paul and other early Christians believed, the mythicists are forced to manufacture unknown proto-Christians who build up an unattested myth . . . about an unspecified supernatural entity that at an indefinite time was sent by God into the world as a man to save mankind and was crucified… [presenting us with] a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the Gospels.”[2]

As I said, Hoffmann's essay is long, yet it's well worth careful reading and re-reading.

So, grab your popcorn and read up. I won't say "This is gonna be good," because it already is good.

The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis

Joel S. Baden

I have talked before about source criticism of the Torah/Pentateuch, usually whenever the Kuzari Principle comes up. My 2011-12 series on biblical scholar James Kugel's How to Read the Bible dealt by necessity with source criticism, that is, with the Documentary Hypothesis (DH).

I once summarized the DH this way:

The modern form of [the DH] emerges from seven types of evidence: (1) the Hebrew language of different periods in the Torah, (2) the use and quantity of terms in the different sources, (3) consistent content (such as the revelation of God's name, (4) the narrative flow of each source, (5) the connection between parts of the Torah and other parts of the Bible, (6) the relationships of the sources to each other and to history, and (7) the convergence of the different lines of evidence. According to the Documentary Hypothesis, the Torah as we have it today develops from early oral and written sources that coagulated into four main sources--J, E, P, and D. Between 922 BCE and 400 BCE, the four sources were compiled and woven together to produce the Torah.

This summary, taken from Richard Elliott Friedman, does not discuss the divide between documentary and non-documentary pentateuchal scholars. Indeed, the summary doesn't indicate how much of the DH had been discarded because of the approach's methodological problems.

Joel Baden, an Assistant Professor at Yale Divinity School, writes about the transformation of the DH in the last four decades. This transformed DH is sufficiently new; he calls it a Neo-Documentary Hypothesis (NDH) and asserts that through it, revitalized source criticism "is regaining its place as a viable, productive, and current approach to the Pentateuch."

Baden's NDH is a narrative-based approach to the Pentateuch, interested in assessing literary phenomena against the source-critical position that the text was formed from the combination of previously independent documents, that is, essentially complete and self-contained sources.

I like Baden's framing of the DH/NDH:

The Documentary Hypothesis, it must always be remembered, is precisely that: a hypothesis. It is an attempt to explain the literary phenomena of the Pentateuch: clear narrative contradiction, repetition, and discontinuity. It posits that the best explanation for these features is the existence of four independent documents that were combined into a single text, basically the canonical Pentateuch as we now have it. It is the literary solution to a literary problem, no more and no less. Scholarly claims regarding stylistic criteria or similarity of narratives are not inherent parts of the theory; they are aspects of the methods used to argue for the theory. If they do not succeed, the theory does not of necessity fail; the methods do. The theory may simply need to be argued on different grounds. Thus the very correct criticisms of anti-documentary scholars from the earliest days of the theory until our own time are not necessarily grounds for dismissing the whole hypothesis; they are, rather, a call to refine and revise the methods employed by scholars when describing and applying the hypothesis. When such refinements and revisions are undertaken, as they have been recently, the Documentary Hypothesis regains its place as the most economical, comprehensive explanation for the literary phenomena of the canonical Pentateuch.

The last bit above boldly asserts the preeminence of the DH via the NDH. Below, Baden explains the literary focus of the NDH:

We place at the forefront of the analysis plot and narrative continuity—the events that occur, the sequence in which they occur, cause, and effect. The mark of an author is his creation of and adherence to a distinctive and definable set of narrative claims: who did what, when, where, and how. Where these claims are contradictory, we must consider that a different author is at work; where they are the same, there is no need to pursue any source division.

One key issue for the DH/NDH is separating it from at least some of the work of Julius Wellhausen (and followers):

For generations now, the Documentary Hypothesis has been considered synonymous with Wellhausen’s reconstruction of the evolutionary growth of ancient Israelite religion. The source division and the placement of the sources in a straight line of development from earliest to latest, from naturalistic to legalistic, has been taken as the fundamental claim of the hypothesis. This is demonstrated by the attempts in scholarship to debunk the Documentary Hypothesis by arguing against Wellhausen’s view of Israelite religion, as if the former is dependent on the latter. On the contrary, however, it was Wellhausen’s source division in his Composition that allowed for his historical reconstruction in the Prolegomena. In the first book, he addressed only the literary evidence; in the second, he addressed only the historical questions. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis returns to the first stage, and leaves the second unconsidered. The literary question is primary, and is in fact the only question that can be answered by the documentary theory. Even if one disagrees with or disproves the arguments of Wellhausen’s Prolegomena, the literary analysis of the Pentateuch stands on its own merits.

Separation and restriction are recurring themes in Baden's explanation of the NDH. Below, he discusses how the NDH becomes a better scholarly approach by being properly restricted in scope:

The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis is concerned only with the penultimate form of the text: what the compiler had at hand when he put the four documents together. This approach allows for far greater clarity in addressing the question of how the Pentateuch came to be this way, for it goes back only a single step. It is crucial to note, however, that the Neo-Documentary Hypothesis does not deny the internal growth of the sources; it is simply unconcerned with them. Like so much else, how each source came to look as it does is a secondary question. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis does not deny that each source has a history; nor does it deny that the Pentateuch itself has a history after the compilation of the documents. It is a restricted answer to a restricted question.

The next bit, below, presents the NDH as a kind of return or re-start of the DH model:

The classical theory began as a fairly simple proposition: four independent documents, combined into a single Pentateuch. Over time, however, it expanded dramatically, so that even within a generation or two of Wellhausen the analysis of the Pentateuch required innumerable sigla, regular divisions of the text into half-verses and even single words, and highly complex theories about redaction. The unwieldiness of this theory inevitably led in part to opposition, as it could no longer be said that the Documentary Hypothesis was a particularly simple or elegant solution to the problems of the pentateuchal text. Ironically, of course, the newer analyses coming out of Europe are, if anything, even more complex than the most tortuous classical source-critical work. The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis restores the simplicity of the earlier scholarship. It requires precisely four sources and one compiler.

This is a tremendously interesting essay, and comments/objections from readers appearing below the article are also enlightening. I would be very interested to understand non-documentary hypotheses better.

A Jesus Fight...And What It Means for the Jews

Religious historian and humanist R. Joseph Hoffmann has declared war on Jesus mythicists:

This little rant (and it is a rant, I acknowledge and I do not apologize for it: somebody’s got to do it) will be followed  next week by three essay-length responses to Richard C. Carrier’s ideas: The first by me, the second by Professor Maurice Casey of the University of Nottingham, and the third by Stephanie Fisher a specialist in Q-studies. We will attempt to show an impetuous amateur not only where he goes wrong, but why he should buy a map before starting his journey. Other replies will follow in course, and we invite Carrier, his fans, and anyone else interested in this discussion to respond to it at any stage along the way.

As you can see, Hoffmann's main target is Richard Carrier, a Ph.D. in ancient history, author/speaker, atheist, and mythicist. Hoffmann aims to show both Carrier and his atheist applauders that the Jesus-as-myth view is probably untenable.

But it's important also realize everything that's at stake in this war on mythicism:

• What are viable ideas in scholarship versus crankery and crack-pottery?
• Who are scholars and what does it mean to practice responsible scholarship?
• What authority do consensus views have?
• What consideration should be given to marginal and fringe views?
• What status is given to non-professionals, hobbyists, and scholars in outside disciplines?
• What roles do tradition, bias, ignorance, innovation, and personal ideology have in scholarship?
• What methods work in historical and humanities scholarship, and how do we know they work?
• Where should scholarly debates be conducted, and in what forms?

I don't know this list is exhaustive, but it is accurate and reflects a timely angst about today's hyper-traffic in ideas and opinions.

I look forward to Hoffmann and cohorts bringing in solid data and arguments. I also eagerly await Carrier's replies. I hope we'll get to see whether mythicism withstands scrutiny or not. Most of all, I hope to see how all sides of the debate directly and indirectly wrangle with the issues I've listed.

This is, folks, an important moment.

Yes, you might say, but is it good for the Jews? (i.e., we begin the humorous part of the post.) Consider this:

• The outcome of the debate will not likely stir up antisemitism, unless people walk away thinking Jesus was a myth perpetrated by the Jews to make them look foolish.
• The debate may turn out to be high impact. American and world evangelicals could get stirred up regardless of mythicism's standing afterwards.
• The Jewishness of Jesus and his first followers should be one recurring item. Some, of course, will repress the idea.

Therefore, this debate may turn out not so good for the Jews. The best case scenario for the Jews is that Jesus is concluded to have probably existed and we all return to our regularly scheduled fantasies.

Speaking of Resurrection

I'm back, baby. This is my time of year!

With Easter coming, there's been the unsurprising uptick of historical Jesus talk. This year's chatter brings popular attention to mythicism, the position that Jesus Christ was not a person in history.

The occasion for this development is a Huffington Post article by Bart Ehrman, a very good biblical scholar and former-evangelical-turned-agnostic. Ehrman writes:

In a society in which people still claim the Holocaust did not happen, and in which there are resounding claims that the American president is, in fact, a Muslim born on foreign soil, is it any surprise to learn that the greatest figure in the history of Western civilization, the man on whom the most powerful and influential social, political, economic, cultural and religious institution in the world -- the Christian church -- was built, the man worshipped, literally, by billions of people today -- is it any surprise to hear that Jesus never even existed?

That is the claim made by a small but growing cadre of (published ) writers, bloggers and Internet junkies who call themselves mythicists. This unusually vociferous group of nay-sayers maintains that Jesus is a myth invented for nefarious (or altruistic) purposes by the early Christians who modeled their savior along the lines of pagan divine men who, it is alleged, were also born of a virgin on Dec. 25, who also did miracles, who also died as an atonement for sin and were then raised from the dead.

Few of these mythicists are actually scholars trained in ancient history, religion, biblical studies or any cognate field, let alone in the ancient languages generally thought to matter for those who want to say something with any degree of authority about a Jewish teacher who (allegedly) lived in first-century Palestine. There are a couple of exceptions: of the hundreds -- thousands? -- of mythicists, two (to my knowledge) actually have Ph.D. credentials in relevant fields of study. But even taking these into account, there is not a single mythicist who teaches New Testament or Early Christianity or even Classics at any accredited institution of higher learning in the Western world. And it is no wonder why. These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.

Why then is the mythicist movement growing, with advocates so confident of their views and vocal -- even articulate -- in their denunciation of the radical idea that Jesus actually existed? It is, in no small part, because these deniers of Jesus are at the same time denouncers of religion -- a breed of human now very much in vogue. And what better way to malign the religious views of the vast majority of religious persons in the western world, which remains, despite everything, overwhelmingly Christian, than to claim that the historical founder of their religion was in fact the figment of his followers' imagination?

The view, however, founders on its own premises. The reality -- sad or salutary -- is that Jesus was real. And that is the subject of my new book, "Did Jesus Exist?"

Readers can decide how solid Ehrman's argument is (hint: it's decent but hardly unproblematic or iron-clad), but at least one scholar finds Ehrman's piece wanting. Richard Carrier is a scholar and mythicist; his book on the subject is due out soon. Carrier argues that the historical position has nothing substantial enough to warrant confidence:

To say that the Gospels contain a lot of myth, therefore they “can’t” be entirely myth, is not valid reasoning. They might contain a historical core, they might not. That has to be determined, and is at least an honestly debatable question. As Dr. Thompson admitted. I think on full analysis they come out as completely mythical (most of the attempts to argue otherwise fail on basic logic, as I demonstrate in Proving History, chapter 5). That should at least be a respectable position, even if Ehrman or anyone disagrees with it.

The second century references, meanwhile, cannot be shown to be independent of the Gospels (e.g. the reference in Tacitus, even the Testimonium Flavianum, even if it were completely genuine–and it’s not–says nothing that could not have simply been read out of a Gospel or gotten from any other Christian source relying on one), or to derive from any real source at all (e.g. the Infancy Gospels). And like any other mythic being, the Gospels would not be the earliest versions of the creed; many mythical demigods “died and were resurrected,” some were even “buried” or hung or burned or cut to pieces; that doesn’t make them historical. Thus, in Paul, that Jesus was created out of the “seed of David” (in fulfillment of prophecy) and “born of a woman” are claims that could just as easily be made of any mythical demigod (all of whom were born of a woman, and some of whom were “magically” born from the seed of their fathers, like Perseus, or even, as in the case of Dionysus, their previous corpses). They also said things–none of which were historical. Paul himself only identifies two sources for his sayings of the Lord: scripture and revelation (e.g. 1 Corinthians 11:23 in light of Galatians 1:18-20). No historical Jesus is needed there.

That leaves nothing.

James McGrath, on the historicist side, engages Carrier's piece. McGrath's thesis is that Carrier's "is a disappointing and ineffective response that will only carry weight with people who desperately want there not to have been a historical Jesus, so much so that they cease to care about historical methods and evidence." McGrath ably defends the argument and closes with this:

Ehrman did not make mistakes in his piece, and if there is infelicitous or ambiguous wording, one should not try to use that against him any more than one should accept the use of ambiguous statements by scientists in an attempt to undermine their credibility. It remains the case, Carrier’s lengthy blog post notwithstanding, that the evidence available leads most naturally to the conclusion that a historical Jesus more likely existed than not. The attempt to manufacture controversy about this is one of the reasons why mythicists are rightly compared to creationists and other denialists.

We could go on with the back-and-forth, but instead let's make some general points about the discussion as a whole:

• Mythicism is gaining more public credence and notoriety.
• Some mythicists adopt the position for personal reasons.
• The mythicist position can be made reasonably (in academic terms), yet this doesn't automatically make it a preferable or even very good position.
• On the other hand, the historicist position may seem more "natural" (due perhaps to centuries of assuming its truth), but this in itself doesn't make it correct.
• The historicist position may be better than the mythicist one, but the margin of superiority seems not to be as wide as historicists have traditionally thought.
• The historicist question, we must remember, is entirely separate from many other questions related to Jesus and Christian belief, such as the resurrection.

Personally, I am a historicist who thinks historicism is legitimately questioned. I also recognize that the historicity question is hardly as interesting as the development of actual Christian beliefs and practices. See, for instance, Larry Hurtado's points on the resurrection,which suggest Jesus was at first believed to have been raised to life in the world to come, not to physical life on earth:

• The conviction was that it was Jesus of Nazareth who had been raised.  That is, there was a direct connection between the crucified figure who had been active in Roman Judea and the figure of earliest Christian faith.
• This was not a claim that Jesus had been resuscitated and brought back to life of this world, but instead that God had catapulted Jesus forward into life of the world to come.
• One immediate implication of this claim was that God had vindicated Jesus against the death-penalty imposed by the earthly authorities.  That is, in the earliest setting, Jesus’ resurrection was very much divine vindication.
• The likelihood that Jesus had been executed as a messianic/royal claimant meant that God’s resurrecting him vindicated this claim.  That’s probably why the messianic claim about Jesus seems to have been so central in earliest Christian preaching.
• Resurrection of the righteous was, for many Jews (but not all), a central hope and expectation.  That is, “resurrection”, the personal vivification of people by God was by Jesus’ time already a familiar concept.  This hope seems to have emerged sometime in the “post-exilic” period, and in the time of Jesus was still under debate, the Sadducees the main Jewish party portrayed as denying this belief.
• The unusual thing about the claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead was that he had been singled out in advance of the resurrection that was to be given to all the righteous.  This immediately meant that Jesus was somehow special, that God had chosen to favor him apart from and in advance of the vindication to be given to the righteous (such as Moses, Abraham, David, etc.).
• The references to Jesus’ resurrection include the claim that this involved also his exaltation to heavenly glory “at God’s right hand” (the phrase lifted from Psalm 110).   So “resurrection” in Jesus’ case must be understood as connoting his vindication and glorification.  That is reflected in the “post-Easter” references to Jesus as Messiah and as “Lord”, and the assertion that he now shares in the name and glory of God.
• In short, the conviction that God had raised Jesus from death was central in earliest Christian faith, and also was powerful in generating attendant convictions as well.

As always, the historical and epistemological questions are more interesting and productive. Who cares whether Jesus would vote for Mitt Romney, or whether he died for someone's "sins"? The whole suffering savior stuff could hardly be more boring, as far as I'm concerned.

Kugel's HTRTB [Part 12]: Only One Bible

We continue to read Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. This twelfth installment covers the last section. 

In this final section, Kugel cautions against misrepresenting Chapter 36 or giving it greater importance than all of How to Read the Bible before it:

My subject has been not the ruin of the Bible but the Bible itself--its highways and byways, heroes, brigands, walk-ons, and also-rans, its mysteries and its ineffables, as well as its sometimes treacherous little details. Beyond these, this book is about two extraordinary sets of interpreters, and I have made no effort to disguise my admiration for both. Their approaches, however, are quite irreconcilable.

Reminding us of his main subject and aims, Kugel also describes a particular use for the book: "I hope that this book may at least offer some help in finding an escape from the box of original meaning." This specific help is very important; it's the key to everything Kugel has done:

• Defined two different sets of biblical interpreters: the first interpreters (ancient period) and modern interpreters (post-DH scholars).
• Showed that the approaches of the two sets are irreconcilable. One cannot read the bible as one set and accept the interpretations of the other set at all.
• Argued, moreover, that modern biblical criticism is not criticism of the (real) Bible.

The third bullet point requires explanation. To do this, let me first refer back to the previous installment of our series, where I quoted Kugel on reading the Bible properly.

The texts that make up the Bible were originally composed under whatever circumstances they were composed. What made them the Bible, however, was their definitive reinterpretation along the lines of the Four Assumptions of the ancient interpreters--a way of reading that was established in Judaism in the form of the Oral Torah. Read the Bible in this way and you are reading it properly, that is, in keeping with the understanding of those who made and canonized the Bible. Read it any other way and you have drastically misconstrued the intentions of the Bible's framers.

My earlier analysis did not appreciate that Kugel’s point was eminently bold. In the quote, Kugel says that the Bible is only the Bible when approached as it was by the ancient interpreters. Implicitly, therefore, the approach of modern scholars makes the Bible not the Bible but rather a set of texts with disparate “original meanings.” These meanings thus have nothing to do with the Bible as Bible!

To illustrate further, you can read modern biblical scholarship. You can follow its arguments and even come to agree with its conclusions. The point is that these conclusions don’t affect you when you read the Bible properly. Reading properly takes you beyond the conclusions, and this is how you “escape the box of original meaning.”

With some personal pride, I say that this approach--separating the belief-based context from the historical--was one that I myself adopted when tried to retain a semblance of Jewishness. In those days, I reasoned that when I prayed at shul, it was as if Judaism was true. Judaism didn’t need to be true outside or in reality, but it could be and would be when I was playing the part of observant Jew. Shul was a theater and I a player.

In those days, I would have happily agreed with Kugel’s description:

Scripture in different religious traditions always seems to have the remarkable ability to become the locus of people’s deepest inner fumblings and mumblings: those words suddenly contain so much--their quality of Scripture gives them that right--and they fill up with all that is most important: they become the theater of the soul.

Similarly, I have argued that the Hebrew Scriptures are a different Bible to a Jew and a Christian:

The Old Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures are different texts because the Old Testament is already rendered throughout as a translation that prefigures Jesus. People don't simply open the Old Testament and on their own start seeing Jesus parallels. Rather, the Old Testament has been translated with Christology in mind and the resulting text is available expressly to support Christian theological interpretations.

Read the Hebrew Scriptures as pre-figuring Jesus and you are not reading them as a Jew. For Kugel, the Bible really is the Hebrew Bible; there really is no other Bible. Neither the box of original meaning nor the box of Christian meaning ultimately affects the Bible, for the Bible only happens through a single set of approaches now associated with rabbinic Judaism.

I see wisdom in most everything Kugel says, and although I rarely disagree with him, I depart from him significantly. I depart when he contains the Bible to the approach of its first interpreters. I depart again when he connects belief and behavior, as when he discusses what it means to be an observant person. Kugel means religiously observant, Jewish particularly, but I don’t. He describes the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Jewish religious prohibition against approaching the area, "lest by accident [pious Jews'] foot defile the place where once the Holy of Holies stood, the place of God’s presence on earth (which could be entered only once a year, and only by one man, the high priest)." Kugel believes the Holy of Holies sat in an entirely different place from the current Temple Mount. Nevertheless, he follows other observant Jews and does not approach the Temple Mount.

Were the opportunity ever to come for me to ascend the Temple Mount, I probably would. How could I not? This, then, is where I depart from Kugel again.The tenets of my observance would encourage me to ascend, to see, to learn, to consider.

The departure continues. Kugel suggests that even if the rabbis are sometimes wrong, what matters is their project to record and represent God’s intent for His people. Their project to help His people live out God’s will. For Kugel, though, there is such a thing as God’s intent. There is a Holy of Holies somewhere in the textual archaeology of the Bible. There is a continuity between God's intent for His people and "the intentions of the Bible's framers."

Kugel says he "could not be involved in a religion that was entirely a human artifact." Neither could I. The difference is that I no longer see any reason to believe there is a Holy of Holies in the Bible. I cannot justify viewing the Bible as anything other than an entirely human artifact. And here's the most amazing thing of all: accepting that God and the Bible are man-made has brought me intellectually and personally closer to them than ever before.

Kugel's HTRTB [Part 11]: Reading the Bible as a Familiar Servant of God

"Please don't stand so close to me." --God

We continue to read Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. This is the eleventh installment of the series.

Last time, Kugel argued that the Bible's ancient interpreters established its real meaning. As I summarized it:

Kugel's position, then, seems to be that modern biblical scholarship may be correct about the history and original meanings of biblical texts, but the scholarly consensus has no effect on what the texts really mean. The texts still mean what the Oral Torah says they do, even if they were originally created to communicate a very different kind of message. At some point in history, ancient interpreters got hold of the texts and were able to integrate them into a philosophy of God and Israel. By doing so, these interpreters brought out divine instructions and moral insights in the texts. The interpreters were building a textual universe predicated on God's relationship with His world, His patriarchs, and His people Israel. Their overriding mission was to help their own world of men and women follow from the textual universe; to make, in other words, the real world live out the model of the Torah.

Kugel allows that the Bible has multiple meanings, and that the texts originally meant something different from what later ancients took them to mean. Yet, he privileges the reading of the ancient interpreters above all others, as when he reasons:

The texts that make up the Bible were originally composed under whatever circumstances they were composed. What made them the Bible, however, was their definitive reinterpretation along the lines of the Four Assumptions of the ancient interpreters--a way of reading that was established in Judaism in the form of the Oral Torah. Read the Bible in this way and you are reading it properly, that is, in keeping with the understanding of those who made and canonized the Bible. Read it any other way and you have drastically misconstrued the intentions of the Bible's framers.

Of course, the argument cuts both ways. That privilege granted to the ancient interpreters sounds pretty good. I'd like to grant the same privilege to Abraham Joshua Heschel, or to the late Christopher Hitchens, or to Augustine of Hippo. My point is that Kugel makes a great case for promoting one interpretative tradition, but other great cases can be made also. When scholarship reveals or develops original meanings of biblical texts, it shatters faith in the interpretive tradition more so than in the Bible. To use one of Kugel's illustrations: one can fervently sing a spiritual yet not hold to a certain religious interpretation of it. One's reasons for singing it, for wanting to sing it, need not have anything to do with its "proper" spiritual message.

I have dwelt on the previous subsection of Chapter 36 because in the new subsection, Kugel leaves behind the argument we just discussed and layers on another one. As Kugel says of the previous argument:

This seems to me a plausible position in light of all we have seen about the emergence of the Bible. And yet, for someone who takes the Bible seriously, this stance alone hardly resolves the difficulties posed by the last century or so of biblical scholarship.

Kugel's new approach--which he says up front "is probably not the sort of answer that will satisfy most traditional readers of the Bible"--has to do with seeing oneself as a servant of God and with seeing orthodox practice in particular as the way of being a servant of God.

In a world where God will not encounter us here in our own reality, we must choose and act to stand close to God. Kugel explains:

The idea of human beings as the gods' servants has an ancient pedigree in the Near East, but in Israel this commonplace came to define a relationship, first between God and specific individuals, then between Him and the whole people: "They are My servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt" (Lev. 25:42,55). To be a servant or slave was to be in a state of humble subjection, ever eager to do the master's bidding; but it was also conceived to be a state of closeness, even familiarity. (This English word, it might be noted, is related to the Latin familiaris, the household of the slave who "belonged to the family.") To be God's servant was to be part of his household.

To serve God, one must carry out His statutes in everyday life. Civil law is also Divine law, and people must learn to live intuitively in the ways that God has instructed.

After the Babylonian exile, Kugel says, Israel renews its dedication to God's will, and "it is in this context that one should locate the seeds of the very idea of the Bible, a great, multifarious corpus of divinely given instruction." At this point in time, the knowledge and practices of being God's familiar servants start to be discussed and argued about and codified.

What's more, the Torah is preeminent but not absolutely immutable:

Yet here is a most interesting point: the words of that Torah were not sacrosanct. On the contrary, as we have seen throughout this study, their apparent meaning was frequently modified or supplemented by ancient interpreters--sometimes expanded or limited in scope, very often concretized through specific applications or homey example, sometimes (as with "an eye for an eye") actually overthrown.

How did humans dare to intervene in holy writ? What possible justification could they have to change or re-direct the meaning of the text? Kugel responds:

From the perspective offered above, what do we make of biblical scholarship's insights? My own opinion is that the discoveries and theories of Biblical scholarship would not undercut the religious belief and practice emerging out of this perspective. I also think my opinion largely agrees with Kugel's view. Traditional Judaism, Kugel says, is such a set of beliefs and practices deriving from the supreme sense that serving God overpowers everything, including Scripture. Kugel writes:

Judaism is not fundamentalism, nor even Protestantism. What Scripture is, and always has been, in Judaism is the beginning of a manual entitled To Serve God, a manual whose trajectory has always led from the prophet to the interpreter and from the divine to the merely human. To put the matter in, I admit, rather shocking terms: since in Judaism it is not the words of Scripture themselves that are ultimately supreme, but the service of God (the "standing up close") that they enjoin, then to suggest that everything hangs on Scripture might well be described as a form of fetishism or idolatry, that is, a mistaking of the message for its Sender and the turning of its words into idols of wood or stone.

The Bible, from Jewish vantage, is an expression of apprehending God as His familiar servants. It is one way of apprehending God, the way that came to prominence after the Babylonian exile. In later periods, Scripture would be viewed by different interpretive traditions that would make it undergo three significant revisions:

1. Christian interpretive tradition.
2. Protestant interpretive tradition.
3. Modern scholarship.

Kugel's point here asserts the importance of understanding the sequence of interpretive events, from pre-exile to modern times, that have influenced the way we see and understand both the Bible's words and its role in religious (and scholarly and skeptical) communities. His argument to us, then, is that we should broaden our perspective.

And what of the Bible's divine inspiration? Kugel suggests that our commonplace ideas of divine inspiration are not applied correctly to the Bible:

Divine inspiration is not, at bottom, a matter of conferring a seal of divine approval on this or that passage of Scripture, or even on Scripture as a whole....Rather, as some rabbinic texts themselves intimate, it all has to do with the great, single revelation that inaugurated (and on which was predicated) Israel's changed apprehension of God.

Kugel seems to be saying here that we really don't know what specific words or instructions might be from God Himself. Rather, the divine inspiration of the Bible holds insofar as it derives from the authority conferred by the liberation from Egypt, the revelation at Sinai, and the establishment of the kingdom of Israel.

Kugel has made a fantastic overall argument in this section, a case that has been developing from the beginning of the chapter. He has built the assertions carefully, balancing fact and opinion as deftly as anyone can do it. We will have time to consider the larger argument and to criticize it as we must, but let's close this installment by appreciating scholarship of the very highest order.

The Moral Deity That Commands "You Shall Not Allow Any Soul to Live"

Most everyone by now knows about the statement by biologist and public atheist Richard Dawkins on why he refuses to debate the Christian apologist William Lane Craig. A key reason, Dawkins explains, involves Deuteronomy 20:13-17 and Craig's endorsement of it. The passage has God commanding Moses to destroy various cities utterly, killing everyone indiscriminately.

Dawkins's refusal and citation of the Bible has, of course, caused fits of moral incoherence in the religious, who must reconcile (a) an authoritative picture of the god as vile and cruel with (b) a theory of the deity as good, just, and merciful. The reconciliation is impossible, and I'll admit to having enjoyed the conniptions of those who have sought to cling to their fantasy of a nice daddy-god.

Dawkins gives some of the biblical text in his article, but I prefer the Chabad version of the text, offered here with surrounding verses. This, then, is Deuteronomy 20:10-20:

10. When you approach a city to wage war against it, you shall propose peace to it.

11. And it will be, if it responds to you with peace, and it opens up to you, then it will be, [that] all the people found therein shall become tributary to you, and they shall serve you.

12. But if it does not make peace with you, and it wages war against you, you shall besiege it,

13. and the Lord, your God, will deliver it into your hands, and you shall strike all its males with the edge of the sword.

14. However, the women, the children, and the livestock, and all that is in the city, all its spoils you shall take for yourself, and you shall eat the spoils of your enemies, which the Lord, your God, has given you.

15. Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not of the cities of these nations.

16. However, of these peoples' cities, which the Lord, your God, gives you as an inheritance, you shall not allow any soul to live.

17. Rather, you shall utterly destroy them: The Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivvites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord, your God, has commanded you.

18. So that they should not teach you to act according to all their abominations that they have done for their gods, whereby you would sin against the Lord, your God.

19. When you besiege a city for many days to wage war against it to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them, for you may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down. Is the tree of the field a man, to go into the siege before you?

20. However, a tree you know is not a food tree, you may destroy and cut down, and you shall build bulwarks against the city that makes war with you, until its submission.

This is brutal, nasty, indefensible stuff.

Craig has now responded to Dawkins's charges. Christian Today reports Craig as offering:

"There was no racial war here, no command to kill them all," he said, alluding to extermination of the Canaanites in the Old Testament, "the command was to drive them out."

He then said: "I would say that God has the right to give and take life as He sees fit. Children die all the time! If you believe in the salvation, as I do, of children, who die, what that meant is that the death of these children meant their salvation. People look at this [genocide] and think life ends at the grave but in fact this was the salvation of these children, who were far better dead … than being raised in this Canaanite culture."

Craig's response stinks. In his "no command to kill them all," Craig might be referring specifically to Numbers 33:50-56, but of course that's a change from the text cited by Dawkins.

Craig's next bit is outright repulsive: "God has the right to give and take life as He sees fit"? No, no, he does not have that right. At least, it is not obvious that God has such a right either to give or to take life. I would like to see the philosophical case for this.

The rest of Craig's response continues the fail. By his reasoning, a fanatical religious group commanded by God may wipe out each of us, including our young and cute little babies. We should feel pretty good about being murdered, though, because our kids will be far better off in the afterlife--no matter their fear, crying, pain, suffering, and brutalization before death finally comes.

Better hope Westboro Baptist doesn't build up a stockpile.

Kuzari: Three Sinai Stories

Pregnant triplets. There's a connection with what we're talking about here. I just can't remember what it is.

I tend to be most productive when I have many tasks on my to-do list.

This post will be short on commentary, but nevertheless interesting and provocative (I hope). My Kuzari posts have all centered on the Sinai revelation; that is, on that story. I want to present the story now. Except...it's actually three stories, at least according to biblical criticism.

In what follows, I will present the theophany at Sinai from the J source, the E source, and the P source. In what we know today as the Book of Exodus, these three sources are woven together. When we take them apart, as it were, the narratives yield distinct impressions--not impressions of the event itself so much but of its significance.

With thanks to Richard Elliott Friedman's The Bible with Sources Revealed, here is the J source:

Ch. 19:10. And the Lord said to Moses, "Go to the people and prepare them today and tomorrow, and they shall wash their garments.

11. And they shall be prepared for the third day, for on the third day, the Lord will descend before the eyes of all the people upon Mount Sinai.

12. And you shall set boundaries for the people around, saying, Beware of ascending the mountain or touching its edge; whoever touches the mountain shall surely be put to death.'

13. No hand shall touch it, for he shall be stoned or cast down; whether man or beast, he shall not live. When the ram's horn sounds a long, drawn out blast, they may ascend the mountain."

14. So Moses descended from the mountain to the people, and he prepared the people, and they washed their garments.

15. He said to the people, "Be ready for three days; do not go near a woman."

16a. It came to pass on the third day when it was morning,

* * *

18. And the entire Mount Sinai smoked because the Lord had descended upon it in fire, and its smoke ascended like the smoke of the kiln, and the entire mountain quaked violently.

* * *

20. The Lord descended upon Mount Sinai, to the peak of the mountain, and the Lord summoned Moses to the peak of the mountain, and Moses ascended.

21. The Lord said to Moses, "Go down, warn the people lest they break [their formation to go nearer] to the Lord, and many of them will fall.

22. And also, the priests who go near to the Lord shall prepare themselves, lest the Lord wreak destruction upon them."

23. And Moses said to the Lord, "The people cannot ascend to Mount Sinai, for You warned us saying, Set boundaries for the mountain and sanctify it.' "

24. But the Lord said to him, "Go, descend, and [then] you shall ascend, and Aaron with you, but the priests and the populace shall not break [their formation] to ascend to the Lord, lest He wreak destruction upon them."

25. So Moses went down to the people and said [this] to them.

Now, here is E:

Ch. 19:2b. and Israel encamped there opposite the mountain.

3. Moses ascended to God, and the Lord called to him from the mountain, saying, "So shall you say to the house of Jacob and tell the sons of Israel,

4. You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and [how] I bore you on eagles' wings, and I brought you to Me.

5. And now, if you obey Me and keep My covenant, you shall be to Me a treasure out of all peoples, for Mine is the entire earth.

6. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of princes and a holy nation.' These are the words that you shall speak to the children of Israel."

7. Moses came and summoned the elders of Israel and placed before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him.

8. And all the people replied in unison and said, "All that the Lord has spoken we shall do!" and Moses took the words of the people back to the Lord.

9. And the Lord said to Moses, "Behold, I am coming to you in the thickness of the cloud, in order that the people hear when I speak to you, and they will also believe in you forever." And Moses relayed the words of the people to the Lord.

* * *

16b. there were thunder claps and lightning flashes, and a thick cloud was upon the mountain, and a very powerful blast of a shofar, and the entire nation that was in the camp shuddered.

17. Moses brought the people out toward God from the camp, and they stood at the bottom of the mountain.

* * *

19. The sound of the shofar grew increasingly stronger; Moses would speak and God would answer him with a voice.

* * *

Ch. 20:18. The people remained far off, but Moses drew near to the opaque darkness, where God was.

19. The Lord said to Moses, "So shall you say to the children of Israel, You have seen that from the heavens I have spoken with you.

20. You shall not make [images of anything that is] with Me. Gods of silver or gods of gold you shall not make for yourselves.

21. An altar of earth you shall make for Me, and you shall slaughter beside it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your cattle. Wherever I allow My name to be mentioned, I will come to you and bless you.

And finally, here is P:

19:1. In the third month of the children of Israel's departure from Egypt, on this day they arrived in the desert of Sinai.

* * *

Ch. 24:15b. and the cloud covered the mountain.

16. And the glory of the Lord rested on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days, and He called to Moses on the seventh day from within the cloud.

17. And the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a consuming fire atop the mountain, before the eyes of the children of Israel.

18a. And Moses came within the cloud.

There is so much more to say about what we have here: the reasoning, the context, the cautions. Please forgive me for not providing all that apparatus now. Nevertheless, I think it's fair to say that the three narratives are striking next to one another.

Kugel's How to Read the Bible: Index of Posts

Here is the current list of posts in the series on Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.

• James L. Kugel's How to Read the Bible
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 2): The Achievement of Modern Biblical Scholarship
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 3): What Were Modern Biblical Scholars Thinking?
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 4): Why You Read the Bible the Way You Do
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 5): How the Bible Became the Bible
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 6): The Cost of Modern Biblical Knowledge
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 7): Enter Fundamentalism
• Kugel's HTRTB (Part 8): Can You Have Your Bible and Criticize It Too?

More to come!

Good Friday, Depending on Perspective

The Judenplatz (Jewish Square) in Vienna was the heart of the Jewish ghetto from the 13th to the 15th centuries.

While I wish to take nothing away from Christian observance of a central holiday, I also hope to remember how a dubious story has been used to sanction very real bloodshed. The lesson here is not about the blood. Neither is it about the sins of the past. Rather, the lesson is about dangerous credulity and literalness. It's about adulation of the absent. It's about the desperate wish to make nature hear, if not obey, our cries. Perhaps we today are relatively safe from religious warriors. Perhaps not.


Today is called "Good Friday" by some. The story goes that a controversial, itinerant Jewish preacher was tortured and executed by the Roman authorities. What's more, this was no mere man but the Jewish god incarnate, born to sacrifice himself for the sins of a humanity he had created long before. Some traditions maintain that through this sacrifice, the god-incarnate-as-man thereafter allowed those who believed in him to gain entry into an eternal afterlife of happiness--provided those people also performed the proper sacraments.

I cannot hide my skepticism toward the story. I have no reason to doubt that anyone was murdered, but I'll need more solid evidence on the man-is-god, died-for-sins, and eternal afterlife parts. Nevertheless, I am not alone in questioning the story's veracity. Plenty of others have found ample reason to think the written accounts and subsequent traditions were somehow different from what might have actually happened. To illustrate, I want to quote two paragraphs from Colin J. Humphreys, a physicist at the University of Cambridge:

Bible scholars have puzzled for centuries over apparent discrepancies in the Gospel accounts of the last week of Jesus, and this often leads people to question the Bible’s veracity entirely. For example, Matthew, Mark and Luke all state the Last Supper was a Passover meal. John, by contrast, says that it took place before the Passover began. Whatever you think about the Bible, the fact is that Jewish people would never mistake the Passover meal for another meal, so for the Gospels to contradict themselves about this is really hard to understand. The eminent biblical scholar, F. F. Bruce, once described this problem as “the thorniest problem in the New Testament.”

The Gospels also do not seem to allow enough time for all the events they record between the Last Supper and the Crucifixion, whilst indicating that Wednesday was a “missing day” on which Jesus did nothing. Scholars have literally rushed around Jerusalem with a stop-watch to see how the large number of events recorded in the Gospels could have occurred between the Last Supper on Thursday night and the Crucifixion on Friday morning. Most conclude that it is impossible. In addition, the Mishnah (a compendium of regulations attributed to about 150 rabbis who lived from about 50 BC to about AD 200) states that the Jewish Court called the Sanhedrin, which tried Jesus, must not meet at night, on a feast day or on the eve of a feast day, and in capital cases a verdict of conviction must be reached the day after the main trial. If these rules applied at the time of Jesus then the trials reported in the Gospels blatantly flout Jewish legal proceedings, yet although the gospels claim there were many false witnesses they implicitly accept the legality of the trials. However, it turns out that there is a very simple solution to these problems: if you move the Last Supper to Wednesday, instead of Thursday, the Gospels are actually in remarkable agreement. In addition, the Bible nowhere states that the Last Supper was on the evening before the Crucifixion, contrary to the claims in many biblical commentaries that it does!

Now, Humphreys believes that the inconsistencies in the Gospels are apparent rather than real--which of course puts him in a long, long line of scholars and theologians who have sought to reconcile believers with a collection of narratives that often violate both one another and common sense.

However, while it's fun to argue over the story's historicity, we know that the story has had real consequences in history. Today, the Christian world sees the death of Jesus as something to be commemorated, if not celebrated. But the Jewish world sees the story in the way it often acted in Europe: as a pretext for pogroms against Jewish communities. From the High Middle Ages through the mid-20th century--roughly 900 years--Holy Week could be a dangerous time for European Jews. Here is but one example, from the Austrian city of Vienna:

The Easter 1420 pogrom, during which Jews from throughout Austria were rounded up and imprisoned, was sanctioned by Duke Albrecht V, a member of the Hapsburg dynasty and then-leader of Austria, who was heavily indebted to Jewish money lenders. Many Jews committed suicide while in captivity and their children were forcibly converted to Catholicism. The remainder were burned alongside the river outside Vienna.

Over 200 people were burned at the stake because unfounded rumors circulated that Jews had desecrated Eucharist wafers.

But these incidents--the violence, accusations, and destruction--were not just local in time and space. Jews could not just settle back into "normalcy" and security following a pogrom:

For years after the medieval pogrom, those Jews who managed to escape and resettle in other areas of Central Europe sang a lamentation recounting the obliteration of a once proud Jewish center. This elegy referred to Vienna as the "city of blood." It wasn't until the early 1600s that Jews were allowed to return there in significant numbers, only to face another expulsion in 1669.

Following the 1420 incident, the Jewish synagogue was destroyed in 1421, with its stones used to help build the University of Vienna.

So, while I wish to take nothing away from Christian observance of a central holiday, I also hope to remember how a dubious story has been used to sanction very real bloodshed. The lesson here is not about the blood. Neither is it about the sins of the past. Rather, the lesson is about dangerous credulity and literalness. It's about adulation of the absent. It's about the desperate wish to make nature hear, if not obey, our cries. Perhaps Jewish and other communities today are relatively safe from religious warriors. Perhaps not.

Kugel's HTRTB (Part 8): Can You Have Your Bible and Criticize It Too?

Which is the more alien, the Bible's "original meaning" or the interpretations of liberal theologians?

After a brief hiatus because of my intense workload, I want to continue reading through the subsections of Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.

We'll look now at a subsection discussing what Kugel calls the liberal approach to Scripture. Unlike the approach taken by Fundamentalist Protestantism, the liberal view has sought to reconcile the Bible and the conclusions of modern biblical scholarship.

Kugel points out the diverse forms that liberal approaches can take, yet he notes that overall these approaches accept the Bible as something less than absolutely true in its historical facts. This Bible, embellished here or taking certain narrative liberties there, has more abstract value in this approach. The Bible is about not history but faith, and theology, and more.

Its truth operating at a more abstract level--some might say a "deeper" level, but this is perhaps a biased view--the Bible cannot be apprehended by only a mere surface understanding of its text. The Bible's liberal champions used such assumptions to distance themselves from biblical details such as Israel's nasty wars against neighbors or God's demands for revenge or so-on-and-on. These scholars focused instead on biblical "themes" and theological "centers."

In short, the liberal approach sought to de-emphasize the plain meaning of at least some biblical passages, placing them in the interpretive background or to render them altogether unimportant. Freeing the Bible from its details also allowed liberal theologians to detach it from potentially troublesome items in modern science, common sense, or our contemporary knowledge of ancient Near Eastern history and civilization. The Bible wasn't really talking about that, that nature, that miracle, that event--so just ignore it and focus on the larger or deeper spiritual "truth." This was the liberal approach.

Kugel notes that liberalism joined with broader scholarly discussion over hermeneutics, "the nature of a text's signification and meaning." Without going into detail on specifics of the discussion, suffice it to say that liberal theologians generally felt justified in developing their own understanding of the Bible as an alternative to the Bible's "original meaning"--insofar as that original meaning could be clarified at all by modern scholarship.

Kugel also highlights the connection between liberal approaches to scripture and gradual movement away from the idea of the Bible's divine inspiration. In fact, liberal theologians developed several understandings of inspiration. Some of them:

• Limited verbal inspiration
• Strict verbal insipration
• Nontextual inspiration
• Content inspiration
• Inspired experiences
• Social inspiration

It should be acknowledged that the liberal stance is not defensive. Its proponents do not consider the approach to be a reaction against modern scientific, philosophical, and historical knowledge. It's not designed to "protect" the Bible for religion. Kugel says that adherents of the liberal approach often see themselves liberating (ahem) the Bible from "the straitjacket of original meaning." The liberal approach, they surmise, reads the Bible as it really is, for what it really means, and is therefore superior to an approach that demands belief in the unbelievable.

Kugel criticizes the liberal view somewhat. He says that the liberal approach doesn't really have a claim to unbiased or artificial interpretation, at least no more a claim than ancient interpreters (we may note that this is a rather postmodern stance from a scholar who seems to disdain "postmodernism."). He also points out the rather thorny problem that the Bible of liberalism is somehow lesser than the Bible of fundamentalism. The liberal Bible is "more of a human document than ever before, which is to say that its power to command and even instruct has been diminished." Liberalism, Kugel suggests, accepts two fundamentally opposed ideas: the Bible is more human and less divine than it has historically been taken to be, yet the Bible can continue to act in society as a spiritual (and, one suspects, a moral) guide containing teachings of relevance in the modern world.

In the end, Kugel is ambivalent toward the liberal stance. It seems not to have reconciled the biblical document and the Good Book, and what's more it seems unable to square that particular circle. Kugel leads us, then, back to the Bible's first readers, back to when the words of the Bible were "all-important." A perceptive reader may detect a hint of sarcasm in my last sentence, as I wonder if Kugel is here lapsing into an idealistic, idyllic picture of a "pre-Fall" Bible, when its words and meanings were united and whole. Now, I am not being altogether fair, as Kugel does not completely make this lapse, yet he certainly seems to approve of the interpretive view that privileges words and meanings. If the liberal view is troubled by the Bible's seeming lack of historical veracity, the ancient interpreters know no such trouble. As Kugel summarizes the ancient view once again: "the events of the past are one thing, but the words of Scripture are quite another, and it is the words that count for us."  

In he next section, Kugel discusses the "change back" from liberalism, a change bypassing fundamentalism too.

Israel's God: A History

Tablets from the Enuma Elish, the ancient Babylonian creation myth.

I have been a long-time fan of Evid3nc3's video series on his de-conversion from evangelical Christianity.

His latest installment, derived from his reading of Karen Armstrong's A History of God, talks about the history of the monotheistic god, Israel's polytheistic past, and the ongoing construction and re-construction of the Bible.

The narrative here touches on several themes that have come up in my series on James Kugel's How to Read the Bible. One theme is that we can look outside the Bible and see how its contents have many historical connections and sources. Another theme that while the Bible on its own is fairly dry, its history and evolution is exceedingly interesting. A third theme goes to the question that Kugel asks, which I'll paraphrase as what do we do with the Bible once we know (and perhaps believe) the hypotheses about its origins and development? Do we use it as the basis of religious worship and daily living? Do we consider it alongside other religious works of other cultures, that is, as interesting and valued but not as communicating a special truth about the nature of the universe?

Like Evid3nc3, I felt the second path was probably correct. Once I realized and accepted that it was unreasonable to take the Bible seriously as an authority on the nature of the universe and my personal obligations in the world...well, it became impossible to look at Judaism or religious figures the same way as before.

Related to the above video is another from earlier in Evid3nc3's series.

Kugel's HTRTB (Part 7): Enter Fundamentalism

The Fundamentals, a twelve-volume publication that defended the Christian faith and was the foundation of the fundamentalist Christian movement.

We continue to read through the subsections of Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now.

In the last subsection, we pondered Kugel's question:

[N]ow that the genie is out of the bottle and modern scholarship has discovered everything it has discovered about the [biblical] text's original meaning, what is to become of the Bible?

In the present subsection we start to answer the question from the standpoint of Protestant fundamentalism--Kugel later will deal with other standpoints.

Fundamentalism, Kugel observes, emerges in the late nineteenth century as a reaction to modern biblical scholarship, the German "higher" criticism that developed a picture of the Bible's human sources and human fallibility. The fundamentalist stance, that the Bible is literally true and the product of divine inspiration, has remained fairly consistent to present day from its origins and from its articulation in the twelve volumes of The Fundamentals, published between 1910 and 1915.

I must say here, however, that as a matter of convenience my summary oversimplifies this stance. I advise the curious reader to learn more about The Fundamentals from appropriate primary and secondary sources.

I also want to pause at the idea that fundamentalism is a reaction to modern scholarship and developments. Sociologist Alan Wolfe, in reviewing a new book by Oliver Roy called Holy Ignorance, hones in on a different model of fundamentalism:

Over the past few years, a number of theories have been offered about the rise of fundamentalism. Roy proposes the most original — and the most persuasive. Fundamentalism, in his view, is a symptom of, rather than a reaction against, the increasing secularization of society. Whether it takes the form of the Christian right in the United States or Salafist purity in the Muslim world, fundamentalism is not about restoring a more authentic and deeply spiritual religious experience. It is instead a manifestation of holy ignorance, Roy’s biting term meant to characterize the worldview of those who, having lost both their theology and their roots, subscribe to ideas as incoherent as they are ultimately futile. The most important thing to know about those urging the restoration of a lost religious authenticity is that they are sustained by the very forces they denounce.

Now, I have not read Holy Ignorance, but if I understand Wolfe's summary correctly, the key difference between reaction and symptom is one of necessity. Fundamentalism, the thesis seems to be, is an expected if not inevitable consequence of cultural shift. It is not so much a critique of the shift as an acknowledgment that certain desired cultural norms and values are being disenfranchised, in part or in whole. Fundamentalism is the attempt to insulate these norms and values, to prevent them from being altered or scrutinized.

I personally am not yet comfortable with subscribing to Roy's thesis, via Wolfe, but it's worth considering and gives an interesting perspective on the question, what is to become of the Bible? From the fundamentalist perspective, I think, the very emergence of the question is part of the problem. Fundamentalism is both a product/symptom of this sort of question and a desire to eliminate that question, to remove it as something that could legitimately be asked.

In this context, it is perhaps less surprising to observe with Kugel that both fundamentalism and modern biblical scholarship emerge as Protestant phenomena. Earlier installments of this series have mentioned, albeit briefly, the Protestant beginnings of modern biblical scholarship. Fundamentalism, however, emerges not just to oppose modern biblical scholarship but also to resist the troubling questions and conclusions of both science and arguments from reason (as distinct from divine revelation).

Yet, conservative as fundamentalism is, it does not completely align with the approach of the Bible's ancient interpreters. The fundamentalist assertion "that almost everything Scripture says is literally true" departs from the traditional approach in an important way, for ancients viewed the Bible as a text that often hides its most important messages and true meaning. The fundamentalist drive for literal meaning would have been considered myopic to the point of debilitation by ancient interpreters.

Fundamentalism, Kugel says, starts from the idea "that Scripture speaks directly and literally to us today, without any need for traditional interpretations or ideologically motivated expositors dragging the text hither and yon." This starting point is not so far from that of modern biblical scholars, who also have sought to view the Bible apart from traditional interpretations and ideologically-motivated exposition. The difference between the fundamentalist path and the modern scholars' has been that modern scholars have read the text with a more historical emphasis. We could express the modern stance by re-writing Kugel's voicing of fundamentalism: "Scripture speaks directly and literally to us today about the world of its original production, reception, and dissemination." Modern scholars have thus seen the text as an instrument for learning about the culture(s) that produced the Bible.

Fundamentalism therefore has interesting connections and departures from both ancient and modern approaches. We have seen several ironies already. Fundamentalism is conservative yet avoids the approach of the ancients; it shares a modern distaste for unaware artifice and for ideology yet rejects modern inquiry into textual function and history. And in another irony, fundamentalism maintains an important link with the past:

Yet, in the broad perspective, the fundamentalist stance--occasional anti-intellectualism and all--has succeeded in preserving much of what is most basic about the Bible, the ancient approach to reading it. By contrast, what now seems naive is precisely the liberal faith that, despite their abandonment of a good bit of that approach, the Bible can somehow still go on being the Bible.

Thus, we are back to Kugel's question on what is to become of the Bible now that we know what modern biblical scholarship says about the Bible's original meaning. It seems at this point that Kugel suggests that the Bible cannot remain the Bible unless it is understood as its ancient interpreters understood it. That we have the intended understanding of Kugel here seems supported by how he closes this subsection, noting that both liberal and conservative strains in Protestantism lose a bit of the Bible:

What liberals and conservatives generally share (although there are, of course, exceptions) is a profound discomfort with the actual interpretations that the ancients came up with--these have little or no place in the way Scripture is to be expounded today. Nidrash, allegory, typology--what for? But the style of interpretation thus being rejected is precisely the one that characterizes the numerous interpretations of Old Testament texts by Jesus, Paul, and others in the New Testament, as well as by succeeding generations of the founders of Christianity.

So, we're left with the sense that the fundamentalist approach to modern biblical scholarship is rather unrealistic and intellectually isolationist (I am trying to be polite), while the liberal approach bowdlerizes the Bible. Not a great choice.

In the next subsection, Kugel examines more liberal approaches to the Bible, beyond only liberal Protestantism, and how they have dealt with modern biblical scholarship.