Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Biblical Criticism

  • Pope Benedict XVI on Creation-Evolution Controversy

    My sister e-mail me a link to this article on to me via e-mail.

    Pope Benedict XVI said the debate raging in some countries — particularly the United States and his native Germany — between creationism and evolution was an “absurdity,” saying that evolution can coexist with faith.

    The pontiff, speaking as he was concluding his holiday in northern Italy, also said that while there is much scientific proof to support evolution, the theory could not exclude a role by God.

    Now while I agree that there is much evidence for evolution (I think “scientific proof” is a poor use of terms), I have to say that I don’t think the debate is an absurdity. For folks like Dr. Kurt Wise (author of Faith, Form, and Time, who believes as an article of his faith that he must take Genesis 1-11 as accurate scientifically and historically, it does make a difference. I might call him bullheaded, but I shouldn’t call him stupid. Given that one assumption, the debate isn’t absurd, because from his point of view, the Bible must be false if evolutionary theory is true.

    I don’t have that same problem, because I don’t understand the Bible as a whole, or Genesis 1-11 in particular in the same way that he does. Yet while I continue to have a very low regard for scientific arguments in favor of young earth creationism, as I’ve indicated in several recent articles, and I object to young earth creationists identifying their one interpretation of Genesis as “the Christian faith,” it is obviously quite possible for people with substantial IQs to disagree.

    From the point of view of Catholic Biblical interpretation, it may, in fact, be absurd to come to a problem. I know that my wife, who was raised Catholic, never even saw this as an issue. I lack the knowledge of Catholic doctrine to comment intelligently on that fit. One assumes that Pope Benedict does not suffer from that deficiency, and that one can take his statement that the argument is absurd from that perspective as fairly definitive.

    The primary debate, however, is not between Catholic theologians. It is rather between Christian fundamentalists and some conservative evangelicals and other protestants for the most part. And there we have a simple divide.

    Tim LaHaye, in his book How to Study the Bible for Yourself states as his first rule of hermeneutics (p. 159), “Take the Bible literally.” In my copy of his book I have circled that statement and simply written “WRONG!” And there’s the key point of the debate. I don’t like the literal-figurative continuum as a single way of discussing how to take Biblical meaning. I prefer to discuss the types of literature involved, and what one might expect to get from those particular forms. As commonly understood, however, “literal” generally means “in the most concrete sense possible,” thus suggesting 7 literal 24 hour days, and accurate recording of all generations in the genealogies, for example. “Taking the Bible literally” in that sense of the word will result in support for young earth creationism.

    The controversy is real, and not absurd, however shocking certain positions in it may seem to any one of us.

  • Valuable Evidence Found in Debate on Hebrew Scriptures

    A tiny tablet has been found most likely confirming the name of one character in the Biblical book of Jeremiah. It is unfortunate that the Telegraph headlines it as Tiny tablet provides proof for Old Testament, though the text of their article is more accurate. Biblical archeologists generally do not go out attempting to prove that the Old Testament as a whole is true, and single connections to historical data do not prove the historicity of the whole.

    What this tablet does appear to do is provide some challenge to the Biblical minimalist position, and suggests that the setting of the book of Jeremiah is precisely what it claims it to be, a document contemporary to the exile.

    In the comments on the Telegraph story, one commenter asks how much third party evidence needs to be found to validate the Old Testament. That’s simply the wrong question. Historians and archeologists will continue to examine each document and each incident according to the evidence available.

    Peter Kirk also provided a good perspective on this discovery.

    HT: In the Word.

  • Reacting to Biblical Criticism

    How does Biblical criticism relate to faith? How does one relate this to the work of the Jesus Seminar, for instance? Scot McKnight has an excellent answer in his post A Letter to a Question-full Christian (HT: Pseudo-Polymath). McKnight doesn’t deny the differences in the gospel texts (the main issue at hand), but he also uses some common sense explanations about how such things occur, and how that might relate to historicity.

    I do disagree with one sentence:

    No one dies for a myth, or at least they shouldn’t.

    I believe it is precisely for the myth that people are willing to die. But I am absolutely certain I am using the word “myth” in a different sense. If Jesus was simply a guy who died and was raised, there would be nothing to believe in. Think about his life. There is nothing there that has not at least been claimed of someone else, and except for the virgin birth, you can find similar experiences in scripture–martyr’s deaths, even resurrections. None of that convinced us that Jesus was God.

    We commonly use the term “myth” to as a sort of synonym for “wild fictional tale without historical foundation.” (OK, I exaggerate slightly, but allow me the fun.) I’m referring to the part that “ostensibly relates historical events usu. of such character as to serve to explain some practice, belief, institution, or natural phenomenon, and that is esp. associated with religious rites and beliefs” (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary). The point is that we give greater meaning to the story of Jesus than the apparent physical happenings would warrant, even were all of them proven true. In my view nothing in the record would make us decide Jesus was God. We would probably decide he was the most impressive of prophets.

    But the myth that grows around him, that builds in the meaning and relates it to me now. Thus history can be flexible–not absent, but malleable–as Christians understand the mythos that results from Jesus.

    McKnight’s conclusion is great:

    Now, here’s where I have come: I believe in the Gospels and what they say about Jesus not simply because I have learned that they can be trusted on the basis of historical methods and inquiry, but more importantly because God has spoken to me through those records, because I have found Jesus to be utterly saving and wonderful, and because the Spirit who speaks to me is the Spirit who has spoken to others — beginning with the apostles who put down these sayings and events into words in such a way that the Church — the Church that is led by the same Spirit — has constantly told just this story about Jesus. It is the only story of Jesus I know; it is the story of Jesus that tells my story. Faith, my friend, is always involved in everything we confess in our faith, including the truthfulness of the story about Jesus. [emphasis mine]

  • Looking at Form and Genre

    Awilum has a short post that makes a couple of good points related to literary genre, which I’ve been discussing in a couple of posts, and will discuss some more.

    You should go read his post, but let me highlight the points that caught my attention:

    1. Form and genre are not the same
    2. Form is not binary

    I would add that the classic and regularly abused literal vs figurative divide is not binary either. My observation has been that young earth creationists, and many old earth creationists see literal as equivalent to “accurate historical narrative,” while many liberals respond that the passage is figurative, and one shouldn’t take it so literally. Another alternative is to refer to Genesis 1-11 as “just a myth.” I find that pretty annoying, since myth is one of the most powerful types of literature, and has its own characteristics, not all of which are fulfilled in Genesis.

    I will get back to discussing these passages in more detail, but for now, I’d just like to remind folks on my side of the line (not taking Genesis as historical narrative) that simply saying “don’t take that so literally” is not adequate. One must at least make an effort to identify what type of literature a document is, and let the appropriate approach to interpretation flow from there.

  • Recognizing Literary Genre – I

    I’m keeping things short today as I’m facing another deadline tomorrow night when some research materials have to be returned, and I need to have all my notes extracted and filed. Nonetheless, I did feel the urge to post a couple of things.

    I’m promoting this comment from Peter Kirk because he makes a couple of good points. Some people never get down to the comments.

    Of course starting a story “Once upon a time” is enough to identify it as not intended to be historical, with no need to mention a wicked witch. And most languages have similar pointers to fairy tale or equivalent genres – which are sometimes also in the verb tenses used. It is important for Bible translators to be aware of these pointers, because if they are not, translations of historical books of the Bible may end up being misunderstood as fairy tales. By contrast, the genealogy at the beginning of Matthew is sometimes understood as a strong indication that what follows is intended to be a factual narrative about real people. This kind of study is known as discourse analysis.

    Peter is quite correct that the “once upon a time” indication is enough to identify such a story as one that is not intended to be historical. Many of us would clue in first on the wicked with, however, as it’s simply an easier clue. Such recognition becomes subconscious. We simply respond according to the genre because we have had practice.

    Relatively few of us learn discourse analysis. For example, I went through my BA and MA in Biblical Languages without any training in that area at all. It was only when I became much more interested in Bible translation that I started to pay more attention to it and to read some about it. Amongst students that I teach, which means largely lay people without a formal education in Biblical studies, the only people I have encountered who have an acquaintance with it were one graduate student/teaching assistant in English literature and one philosophy instructor.

    That is unfortunate, because we have many of the same people saying with confidence that Genesis 1, for example, sounds like history. On what basis do they say that? Well, generally they have the feeling that the “right” thing for it to sound like is something factual, because facts are more important than feelings any day. Other varieties of literature, in their view, don’t convey enough facts. I have often heard people in these settings judge works of fiction based solely on how much information one can learn from them. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia suffer, or are weighed solely on allegorical value (a questionable approach in Tolkien’s case at least).

    A good starting point in recognizing literary genre is to put aside prejudices about what literature ought to accomplish. Literature does so much more than convey facts. It can also convey facts in many different ways. I wonder how many of you who have preached or taught have gone back later to find out what people remember. I have done so. I preached a sermon in which I set up a skit. A friend of mine in the audience was primed to angrily interrupt me in the middle of a sermon, and then we followed by ad libbing and argument. A couple of weeks later I asked a few people what we had talked about. The only thing that anybody remembered was the interruption and the skit, but they also remembered the point of the skit.

    I use this approach in my study guide on Revelation. I ask members of the class to mention types of literature that they read and what they expect to get out of them. Once they’ve looked at how their lives actually interact with literature (and we usually extend it to other media as well), they begin to relax. Then we can ask what type of literature the book of Revelation is.

    Which leads to another point. Information may be packaged and organized differently in different types of literature. Just because Genesis 1 is not narrative history, doesn’t mean it contains no information. Peter mentioned the way in which Matthew starts, and one might also look at the way Luke and Acts begin. In both cases there is an indication that they are trying to present factual information. I think those who try to claim that the gospels are not intended to present historical information do a disservice. The gospel writers were not writing as historians, but they were convinced that they were writing something that contained historical information, that is events that actually took place. Now we can look at what was important to them–chronology not as much as the spiritual meaning–and that will help us get the right information.

    One last note. Genre doesn’t necessarily tell us how accurate a work is. We may determine that something is intended to portray history in some way, and yet also determine that the author was hopelessly careless or intentionally inaccurate. Josephus was intending to portray history, or at least he writes as though he was, yet his work is more a personal apologetic, and one can question many of his portrayals.

    To be continued . . .

  • The Importance of Literary Genre

    Yesterday I wrote about the importance of teaching and preaching on the doctrine of creation and also the “how” of creation in our churches. It’s important for us to understand what we believe about this. My personal view is that theology and Bible study tells us about God’s relationship to us and the natural sciences tell us about what is and how it came to be in terms of natural processes. But whether you agree with me on this or not, I suggest that now is not the time to be silent and hope the argument will go away.

    The key element I mentioned in that post is literary genre, and I did so because it is a critical starting point in Biblical interpretation. One can read the Bible as literature and even treat one type of literature as another when doing so. As an example, one could read Job either as history or as literature. In terms of spiritual application, there would be only a small amount of difference. But if one is looking for propositional truths, it is important to understand first what the intention of the author was in whatever passage you’re studying.

    The gospels make a good illustration for this point. Many debates about historicity simply shoot past one another because each speaker is making different assumptions about what type of literature the gospels represent, and what one can expect from that. At one extreme, the gospels are seen as pretty much pure theology, with any possible historical facts one may glean as incidental. At the other extreme one can view the gospels as pure history, describing the life of Jesus accurately, with theology being derived from the events and not the written presentation. I happen to think gospels are their own literary genre, with a number of variants when one includes non-canonical gospels, and that the historical value is considerable, though not the primary focus. But if one reads the gospels as histories, one might expect information that is not present, such as careful chronology. The various attempts to reconcile the chronology and create a life of Jesus from the four gospels demonstrate the difficulty.

    As modern readers, we are used to having the major literary genres identified for us. When I want a science fiction novel, I go buy a book that is identified as such. I don’t have to read it to identify it. The title page or the jacket blurbs generally tell me what I need to know. In ancient times there are no such blurbs. In many cases, I believe we could easily identify modern types of fiction if they were presented to us. We would probably have some difficulty with historical fiction or with fictionalized biography, for example, but generally we’d get a pretty good idea. Why? Because we have read quite a number of examples of each genre.

    And this brings up the common problem in determining the genre of Biblical documents. If we don’t specifically try to shift our viewpoint, we will likely try to force Biblical documents into modern categories, and do so by looking at their characteristics in comparison to what we read most. This will not result in an accurate picture. I experienced this personally in starting to study Biblical languages. As I moved further and further into ancient literature I found that there were other categories and styles than I was used to in my reading. The Bible felt more at home in that environment than when I tried to read it from a modern point of view.

    So one obvious way to learn to recognize Biblical genres is to read a variety of ancient literature. That will expand your viewpoint and give you more points of comparison to more types of literature. I would suggest this process to anyone who is interested in understanding the Bible better. You are going to need to read a variety of things. For protestants, adding the apocrypha to your reading will help a great deal. There are other collections of ancient literature, however, that are also very helpful in getting perspective.

    Let’s just consider one indicator that we commonly use in recognizing genre. Let’s call it the “wicked witch” indicator. By this I mean that we recognize a story as some literary form other than narrative history or a true/true-to-life story because things just don’t work the way the story says they do. If I start a story, “Once upon the time there was a wicked witch who lived in a broken down shack far out in the woods . . .” you will not be under any illusions that I am telling a modern, true-to-life story. (Apologies to any witches who read this. I’m willing to bet you don’t live in broken down shacks far out in the woods.)

    Now consider the following from the Bible: “The trees went out to anoint a king over themselves . . .” — Judges 9:8

    We know immediately that we are not going to read narrative history. Why? Trees do not behave that way. What follows is known as the parable of the trees.

    Now one more example, this time from the apocrypha: “It was the twelfth year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh. In those days Arphaxad ruled over the Medes in Ecbatana.” — Judith 1:1 (NRSV)

    I suspect this one is nearly as easy to identify as the parable of the trees. Why? Because even based solely on the Biblical text, surely available to the author of Judith, we know that:

    • Nebuchadnezzar did not rule over the Assyrians
    • Nebuchadnezzar (first or second) did not rule in Nineveh
    • Arphaxad comes from Biblical genealogies, not from the Median kings

    So here we have historical data that is clearly created using available names and countries. All of these are real, but they’re combined in impossible ways. It’s very likely, based on this, that the author of Judith had no intention of his book being taken as actual history. His readers with no more than the various historical books of Hebrew scripture, could have seen what he is doing.

    Notice that we have twice identified a piece of literature as not being historical because in some sense things just don’t work in the way described.

    To be continued . . .

  • Linking my own Stuff/Book

    I’ve been a bit delinquent here on Threads for the last week or so. There’s a good reason for that. My next book, When People Speak for God is near the final step and should, in fact, go to the printer on Monday. The way we do things, that should mean availability for people to get actual copies (I’ve got definitions on the brain) about 10 days later.

    I want to link to a couple of posts I’ve done elsewhere, but first just a note on the book. This isn’t new and original material. I have written several essays that I published on the web in my pre-blog days, and a number of additional blog entries since then. I also tend to discuss Biblical inspiration, the gift of prophecy, God speaking to people, and people claiming that God told them certain things when I’m teaching in person. A number of readers on of the internet material have suggested I get it in print, as reading 50-60 pages at a shot on the internet annoys them. Those who attend my classes often ask me for something they can read for more information on what I teach about inspiration. Thus far I’ve referred them to URLs, often an unsatisfactory option.

    Print-on-demand technology allows me to create a book such as this for what appears off-hand to be a relatively small audience. My original plan was to collect the essays, write a couple of connecting or explanatory notes, add topical and scripture indexes, and publish. Ah, the wishful thinking! I may be the boss but I’m an incredibly cruel and evil boss. Thus when I looked at the collected essays I said to myself, “This won’t do at all. Get thee to work!” (Note that the archaic language is not an indication of divine inspiration.)

    A few months of off and on work later, the resulting volume is 276 pages (243 pages + front matter, glossary, topical and scripture indexes), and based on word counts I’m guessing it’s about 1/3 new material. The backbone is my essay Inspiration, Biblical Authority, and Inerrancy, which you can check out on the web. Added to this is material on the modern gift of prophecy, and practical considerations for handling the situation when someone claims divine authority for their words. You’ll find almost all the existing material in this book (bar the 1/3 new stuff) if you add to that the Biblical inspiration category on this blog and on my Participatory Bible Study blog.

    To my non-Christian friends I would simply note that if you’re looking for a book in which I argue for divine inspiration, this isn’t it. This book only discusses that issue peripherally. It is strongly rooted in the Christian tradition. I do argue against the doctrine of inerrancy from within the Christian tradition and discuss a number of related issues. I simply don’t want somebody to think this book is something it’s not.

    I’ll probably blog more about that down the road. In the meantime, I wanted to point out that while I’ve neglected this one, some of my blogs have been active.

    On my wife’s devotional blog I posted this entry yesterday, reminding all those of us who are Christians that we may be the one and only “translation” of the Bible that some folks may read.

    The Running Toward the Goal podcast offered Elgin Hushbeck’s latest, titled Irrational Nobility. It includes some arguments that may annoy non-Christian readers. Elgin would enjoy it if you went and argued with him. You can also check out the transcript of that program here if you prefer reading to listening.

    On my Participatory Bible Study blog, I posted on what the author of Hebrews believed was a difficult message. Elsewhere I’ve been just as quiet as I have here.

  • Book: The Voice of Jesus in the Social Rhetoric of James

    This should not be read as a review, but rather as a response and a few notes for potential readers. Dr. Wesley Wachob became pastor of First United Methodist Church of Pensacola last June. His associate minister, Rev. Geoffrey Lentz is a good friend, and I have been hearing many good things about that church and their ministry there. So I was led to read this book because of knowing something of the author and from having heard him preach.

    The Voice of Jesus in the Social Rhetoric of James was first published as a dissertation at Emory University (1993), which should tell you something of the level of discourse, not in James, but in the book itself. This is not for the faint hearted, nor for those looking for devotional or sermon material. It did, I must admit, lead me to some thinking about the book and one or two devotionals, but those were an indirect result, rather than a direct reference. I don’t intend this as criticism. Some of my best study, in my own view, at least, is triggered through reading material from which I find it hard to cite a specific instance.

    I approached this book with two purposes in mind. First, I was interested in knowing about the author and his thinking. Of course, nearly 15 years have passed since it was originally published, and one’s thinking can develop a good deal in that time. Second, I was interested specifically in looking at rhetorical criticism in action. With regard to the first goal I had more success listening to a few sermons. On the second, I found this an excellent case to study and enjoyed myself.

    It is probably not a good idea for someone with no knowledge of Greek or no prior knowledge of Biblical criticism to jump into this book. Though all foreign language quotations are translated, something one cannot always count on in scholarly works, a certain knowledge of Biblical criticism and how things fit together is assumed. This is not surprising, but since most readers of this blog are used to articles written at a much lower level (the ones I write) and reviews of material targeted at an audience with less prior experience, I think it’s important to give a warning.

    Let me deal first with the basics. This is a solid work of scholarship (to the extent that I’m qualified to judge), well-referenced with adequate discussions of a variety of viewpoints to point the author’s conclusions into context. I found it necessary to read the footnotes. I often fail to understand how one divides the text in the body from the footnotes. It’s easy to get too much into the text and drive readers to distraction, but it’s also possible to force footnote reading. I’m guessing that a more casual reader would find the body text adequate, but I found myself constantly moving from body to footnotes. Such are the hazards of reading scholarly works.

    I wanted to look at a case of rhetorical criticism, because my training was seriously lacking in that area. My one previous significant encounter was Betz’s commentary on Galatians, and I was not overly impressed there. The commentary was useful, but I felt that the material was forced into the critical mold rather than having the methodology enlighten one about the text.

    I still think that the rhetorical categories can be somewhat strained if one thinks of the author consciously composing in that fashion, but reading this book helped me shed that way of approaching the issue. The passage considered in James appears to me to be fashioned much more closely to the rhetorical pattern presented than was the one in Galatians. I admit, of course, that this could be due to my inexperience with the tools involved.

    Dr. Wachob considers James 2:1-13, and particularly James 2:5 and looks for the way in which that particular saying of Jesus is used in James. He sets this passage in the full context of James, then looks in some detail at the text. For a study such as this one does have to be very precise about the text one is using. Following that he looks at the rhetorical pattern and relationships of the passage itself. Finally he focuses on the use of that particular text.

    The most helpful point in this book came in chapter five. The key statement, for me, was this:

    Because rhetorical discourse is intertextual discourse – a social possession that is founded on previous texts–inevitably, there is within it a dialogue among different voices. . . .

    I had written myself a note about a week before with key elements of an essay I would like to write for this blog about the various voices involved in studying scripture in a Christian community. That list of voices go beyond whatever list might be made for the original author of the text and the way in which his audience would have heard him to include interpreters in the Christian tradition, and in my tradition and community generally. That sentence tied the detail elements together for me.

    I’m still traditional enough to be strongly oriented toward the “original intent” that elusive intended communication between the author and his audience. It’s quite problematic to track down, but I consider the chase worth it, even if the fox always escapes in the end. That keeps us looking in the right direction. But then we have to step back from looking at the way different texts and voices interacted for that audience, and recognize the web of relationships that results in our present understanding.

    One of the great benefits of critical study of the Bible, no matter which tools one uses, is to force us to think more seriously and in more detail about the text. One of the great dangers of that critical study is that we begin to think that the results of a particular critical methodology give us the final answer. The form critic has accomplished his task when he discovers the genre, the source critic when he has identified sources, and so forth. Rhetorical, genre, and canonical criticism, along with the various tools of literary criticism tend to push us to take a bit broader look at the text in one way or another.

    If you can work your way through the details, handle the Greek texts and the citations of numerous manuscripts, you will find this little book worth they time to read its 201 pages. Just make sure that you really want the kernel, else you’ll feel somewhat put upon by the effort required.

  • Pious Assertions About the Bible

    There is a whole category of assertions about the Bible that I call “pious,” that reflect people’s desire to respect the Bible and uphold its authority, but that are often inaccurate and poorly considered. I would ask whether a statement can be truly pious and respectful if it is also not true. My suggestion is that we consider carefully whatever statements we make about the Bible to be certain that the reflect what the Bible actually is and its purpose in the Christian community.

    For example, there are exaggerated statements of obedience. “I do everything the Bible says,” someone announces. Do they really? That’s quite unlikely. There actions are probably more nuanced than that, but it just sounds so good to claim that you do everything the Bible says. Every theological position I know of has some element to limit certain commands to particular times or places, as well they should. But further very few of us, at best, could claim to always carry out God’s will for us in everything, can we? Perhaps we should say something more like, “I do my best to obey God’s commands as they apply in my life” or “I do my best to follow God’s will with his help or strength.” That sounds more like respect, combined with honesty.

    A second category is those statements that treat the book almost like a person. At our daughter’s wedding the little Bible boy was a fairly lively individual. He was carrying my very most favorite Bible, a Cambridge NRSV with wide margins, two markers, and decent sized print. I have a number of full sets of sermon notes in the margins of that Bible. My daughter wanted him to carry it. During rehearsal, he grabbed it, folded it over backward, and started beating the altar rail with it. May I say that it got on my nerves? But my distress was due to my love of books, and to my desire to have that particular book in good condition, not out of fear that God might be angry at the mistreatment of the book. I have encountered people who are afraid to mark their Bibles, write in the margins, or even carry them under tough circumstances. There’s the standard admonition to put the Bible on the top of any stack of books. But the bottom line is that your actual Bible is still just ink and paper. It’s the divine inspiration, the message, that is holy, and that will not be damaged even if the original is flushed down the toilet.

    Finally, there are the bad analogies. My favorite is the “boy scout manual.” Whenever someone gets that saintly smile on their face, and tells me that the Bible is just like the scout manual, I am pretty sure they’ve either never read the scout manual or never read their Bible–usually the latter. The Bible is actually almost, but not quite totally unlike a scout manual. I say “almost” because the Bible is a book with paper, ink, covers, and so forth. Après church has a good post related to this here (HT: Wayne Leman of Better Bibles Blog).

    The problem is what I call the “Sunday School” answer. We know we’re supposed to respect the Bible as God’s Word. We know it’s important. But often in the modern Christian community we don’t actually know what’s in it, so we can’t make our own accurate statements of why it’s important to us. Thus we use just any comment that sounds pious and respectful, so we can appear to respect the Bible without the effort of digging into it.

    For me, the Bible is an important companion as I commune with God. Over the years my times of prayer and Bible study have become more and more blurred. That’s because I see prayer as communion with God, and I see Bible study in the same way. God speaks to me through the Bible. My understanding of his will is enlightened by the Bible.

    There’s a good old statement that does well for me: Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light for my path. — Psalm 119:105

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – Summary and Conclusion

    This is the conclusion of my multi-part series responding to Bart Ehrman’s book, Misquoting Jesus. Here are links to the earlier portions of this series:

    In chapter 7, The Social Worlds of the Text, Ehrman discusses how the social situation in the early church shaped changes that were made to the text. In particular he discusses the status of women, and mentions several instances of textual change that relate to it. Amongst these are Junia/Junias in Romans 16:7, and the prohibition for women teaching in 1 Corinthians 14:33-36.

    Next he discusses the relationship of Christians and Jews. Some alterations in the text make the Jews look bad. By the 2nd century, Christians were a separate religion, and often engaged in polemic against Judaism.

    Finally he discusses paganism and apologetic alterations to the text. He provides numerous illustrations in each case.

    One of his major points in this section is to show how the scribes were human beings whose world shaped the way in which they transmitted the text, and thus to some extent the text itself. When you hold a Bible in your hands, you hold the complex product of numerous people, each of whom have had a small part in shaping the text you will read.

    Conclusion

    It is in the conclusion that a differ significantly from Ehrman’s view. In technical terms, he is certainly expert, and he displays that expertise throughout the book. As a popularizer, he is clearly one of the best. I have not seen a clearer explanation of the basics of New Testament textual criticism for the non-scholar.

    The fundamental difference in our conclusions results not from the content, but from our starting points. I begin with the view that inspiration is something that happens to people, and that people express that inspiration in various forms, including text. While a person experiences God, individually or in community, the expression of that experience is distinctly human.

    Ehrman seems to accept the standard evangelical view of Biblical inspiration that assumes that God’s breathing of scripture is essentially the impartation of data to be expressed in words.

    How radical are the changes?

    If you see inspiration as involving the impartation of data to be accurately expressed in words, and expect those words themselves to be divine, then the alteration of such words must come as a shock. This is the experience expressed by Bart Ehrman in his conclusion. He sees the changes as radical and important because they alter the words, and to him the words are the vehicle of inspiration, or in the end of the lack of it.

    For me these changes are not nearly so radical, because I assume that the writers chose their own words, and in most cases their own facts. Thus alterations are interesting, but neither shocking nor dismaying. If one studies a broad enough basis of the text, one can get to who Matthew, Luke, John, or Paul really were, and to me that is the key to inspiration. God spoke to the community through these people in a special way and I want to get to know them.

    One quotation will illustrate this point:

    In particular, as I said at the outset, I began seeing the New Testament as a very human book. The New Testament as we actually have it, I knew, was the product of human hands, the hands of the scribes who transmitted it. Then I began to see that not just the scribal text but the original text itself was a very human book. This stood very much at odds with how I had regarded the text in my late teens as a newly minted “born-again” Christian, convinced that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God and that the biblical words themselves had come to us by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As I realized already in graduate school, even if God had inspired the original words, we don’t have the original words. So the doctrine of inspiration was in a sense irrelevant to the Bible as we have it, since the words God reputedly inspired had been changed and, in some cases, lost. . . . (p. 211)

    I would like to point out one other thing, however, and that is that those who argue Biblical inerrancy, with or without verbal plenary inspiration, as it applies to the autographs do need to respond to the issue of the relevance of such inspiration. What is the importance of the inerrancy of a document we do not possess? If we can deal with 98% accuracy in the Bibles we actually have, why would the discovery that the autographs were also only 98% accurate suddenly be a devastating blow to the authority of the Bible?

    This is why it seems to me that the doctrine of inerrancy of the autographs is more a doctrine about God than about the accuracy or authority of God’s communication. What the doctrine says is that God is perfect. Certainly, I can agree with that. But that still seems irrelevant, because the issue is how well did human authors comprehend what God revealed to them?

    Dependence on Scholars

    On one last issue I think that Ehrman makes a particularly good point. I have heard many people express either the desire to be completely independent of Biblical scholarship or even the feeling that they are independent. Sometimes these are people who do not even read the source languages, much less work with the manuscripts to determine the text. When we consider context, the history and culture that stands behind the text, many more specialized fields come into play, and nobody is able to be proficient in all of those areas. All of us are dependent at some point on the scholarship of others.