Tag Archives: Bible

The Living Word

In my experience, evangelical Christianity seems enamoured with the belief that it is ‘biblical’ in ways that other groups are not. Generally, there is an implicit vitriol for Catholicism (as well as mainline Protestant groups such as the Episcopal Church and Presbyterian Church USA) which are seen as somehow not ‘biblical’. It is as if ‘the Bible’ is a static, unchanging document which can be understood fully without plumbing the depths of its roots, contexts, and history of transmission (to name but a few elements!). However, I have become fairly sceptical of such language because ‘biblical’ is almost always encoded and encapsulated with a pre-existing structure of beliefs. It’s amazing that ‘biblical’ in today’s context almost always means a brand of conservative American evangelicalism which believes women are ‘equal but different’ (meaning they can serve the congregation as, say, ‘children’s pastor’ or ‘worship leader’ but not as ‘pastor’), same-sex marriage is an ‘abomination’, and baptism must be done only to adult-ish converts fully immersed in water (and sometimes even with a specific language without which the baptism is somehow invalid). What many of those who purport a ‘biblical’ Christianity don’t realise is that it meant something completely different two hundred years ago (women couldn’t serve, full stop), four hundred years ago, and so forth. Eight hundred years ago, ‘biblical’ Christianity meant either western Catholicism or eastern Orthodoxy depending on where one lived.

So, let’s assume that ‘biblical’ Christianity means some kind of adherence to some ‘broad stroke’  concepts and/or principles which can be interpreted through some systematic approach to the biblical texts. Which approach? There are many; and throughout history, there are many different methods and interpretations which can be seen as plausible — some even contradictory or mutually exclusive. However, even if we take the bigger assumption that there is only one ‘ultimate’ set of principles (and all the others are classified in terms of acceptable deviations which is often none). Even within the Bible, that which is considered ‘scripture’ is frequently recontextualised for new meanings and interpretations. There is a slew of good scholarship (e.g. Brevard Childs’s The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture) which show how Christianity over two thousands years has recast just one of the biblical texts over time. Other scholarship has shown how, within the collection of biblical texts, intertextual relationships have modified or recontextualised older texts (e.g. Richard Hays’s Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul). I bring these up not to suggest that the biblical texts can be absolutely anything as in some sort of relativism, but rather there is a  degree of give and play in the interpretation of those texts.

However, this wiggle room in the practise of interpretation is rendered mute by the evangelicals who speak about the ‘obviousness of scripture’. For them, not only is there a single interpretation to the text, but the current one must have always been the only interpretation (even when the history above shows otherwise). This also ignores the great amount of work which goes into producing a translation of the texts which render them in contemporary language. By ignoring this process, adherents to this practise construct an artificial ‘Bible’ through which their own beliefs and traditions are masked as being directly handed down by God, through Christ, the original disciples, and early Christianity.

Interestingly, the problem does not end there. Instead, many evangelicals who speak about ‘biblical’ Christianity include Judaism from its beginning through the Second Temple period. For some evangelicals, even the Jewish figures in the HB/OT were closet Christians who believed in Christ, a triune God, and so forth. However this is done only by exploiting the terminology of ‘Judeo-Christian’ and reading early Judaism as a thoroughly Christian venture which just happened to have been called Judaism. In other words, there is no double identity  of Jewish-Christian to mediate in the early Church (e.g. the first disciples), but a single identity of Christianity made double through a virtual colonisation of Judaism. To put it bluntly, then, ‘biblical’ Christianity is nothing more than the same oppressive Christianity of history masquerading itself as some kind of new development which has recovered some imagined ‘golden era’ of the past which is no more ‘biblical’ than the other Christian groups which are cast as failing to be ‘biblical’.

 

A Tale of Two Reactions

This is part 5 of 5 in the Sunday responses series

Now that we’ve gotten past the advent season, I did want to raise a few questions from my reading this time around. It seems to me that one of the ‘common’ readings within the birth narratives adds to them in order to validate a particular interpretation. In particular, the ‘common’ interpretation I want to explore is the one which reads the angelic announcements to Zechariah and Mary quite differently.

For this ‘common’ reading, Zechariah does not believe and is struck mute while Mary graciously and willingly accepts her future. Zechariah is an ‘old man’ by the time the angel appears to him (Luke 1:5-25), and has quite likely gotten past the years of unanswered prayers regarding a child. The angel appears and says that his wife will bear a child soon; and he is — like many people would be in his situation — sceptical. Zechariah’s response is straightforward: ‘How can I be sure of this? For I am an old man, and my wife is old as well’. Yet the angel’s response to this question treats Zechariah’s scepticism as utter disbelief and quite contrary to praise heaped on him in verse 6. Zechariah is quickly cursed to be mute until his child is born and Zechariah names him.

The ‘common’ interpretation reads Mary’s story (Luke 1:26-37) quite differently; however, I am not convinced that such is the case. Again, an angel appears. This time, rather than an old couple who are sceptical because of their many years of not having children, the person in question is reportedly a virgin. Unlike Zechariah, though, her questioning response (‘How will this be, since I have not had sexual relations with a man?’) is treated innocuously, and the angel answers her quite differently.

In each case, the two people respond with scepticism — both justified for their own reasons. However, in Zechariah’s case, the angel quickly responds harshly. What separates the two figures? Is it that Zechariah should ‘know better’ because he is old and the bitterness of being childless for years should be ignored? Or do we, perhaps, add to the story of Mary being told of her pregnancy to make her calmer than Zechariah? Both protest their revelations, but Mary is given a second chance that Zechariah does not have. What separates Mary from Zechariah?

Yes, one can say that Mary is chosen as the mother of God, is younger, etc. However, that seems to contradict the impartiality clause about God. Or perhaps, the angel had the freedom to be cruel to Zechariah but God caught on and banned that attitude in future angelic engagements. Whatever it is, the ‘common’ reading takes its cue from the angel’s responses rather than the actual story — surely the angel must know more than we readers! However, this asks the question as to why not explain that in the text. That is, if the angel’s reaction has some kind of insider knowledge that the text doesn’t make explicit, why didn’t Luke or later redactors make it explicit? Instead, we are left with implications that Zechariah is somehow spitting on the angel’s face while Mary calmly and graciously accepts what the angel says in addition to a text which does not quite bear that out. In any case, we have two quite similar reactions from humans and two quite different reactions from the angel, yet we are often committed to a reading which is based more on the reader’s interpretation of cues and implications rather than a somehow ‘objective’ story. In other words, the ‘common’ reading of these two stories excludes the possibility of an ‘objective’ reading. So much for the claim that the Bible contains objective, absolute propositional statements that ‘single, definite, and fixed’ (as is suggested in the ‘Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics’ which is taken by many as a bedrock for evangelical theology).

Quote of the Day

To begin with the common Christian confession: the common confession is ‘We believe in Jesus Christ with the apostles’…The complexities intrinsic to any Christian theological interpretation of the scriptures becomes clear. For Christianity is not, strictly speaking, a religion of the book like Islam. And yet ‘the book’ does play a central role for Christian self-understanding. Christianity, in more explicitly hermeneutical terms, is a religion of a revelatory event to which certain texts bear an authoritative witness.

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this distinction between event and text for Christian theological self-understanding. To fail to grasp the distinction is to lead into two opposite difficulties…[T]he route to Christian fundamentalist readings of the scripture under the banner cries of ‘inerrancy’ soon take over. Here Christians believe, in effect, not with but in the apostles.

The opposite danger is equally devastating…The difficult is, rather, that since the scriptural texts are not allowed to play any authoritative role, the contemporary Christian community can never know whether its present witness to the Christ-event is in continuity with the original apostolic witness. The historical central Christian theological affirmation–’I believe in Jesus Christ with the apostles’–would then be narrowed into the affirmation ‘I believe in Jesus Christ’.

From David Tracy, ‘Reading the Bible’ in On Naming the Present, 1994 (originally in Concillium 1991/1).

Canonicity

The Texts of the
Which texts should we consider “authoritative” as Christians?

  1. The Jews solidified their Tanak (Torah, Niv’m, Kotvim: Pentatuch, Prophets, and Writings) into a count of 22 books (what we have in the Christian OT is the splitting of some of these books into a total of 39, but the actual texts are the same).
  2. The Jews later (4th Century AD/CE) added the Mishnah which later evolved into the Talmud(s). Jews would cringe at reading the Tanak without these texts. For them, these commentaries are as important as the actual Tanak.
  3. Early Christians thought of the current NT as also authoritative.
  4. Until the Reformation and Luther, the (now called) Apocrypha were included in the Bible as Scripture. These were Jewish texts “for scholar use only.” Luther used Jerome’s description of these 15 books to exclude them from the Protestant canon. The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches still consider these as part of their canon.
  5. Both some of the Hebrew writers and the Christian writers (i.e. OT and NT) quoted/alluded to other books as well. These books are considered . One major example of a canonized psuedipigrapha is the book of Daniel. Scholars agree that it was written well after the Exile period (some argue it to be around the Maccabean period) under the guise of someone living during the Exile in Babylon. All other psuedipigrapha are not considered authoritative by current Jews or Christians (even though some of their writers regarded at least part of them worthy of quoting).

The Translations

  1. Jewish texts were written in Hebrew. In many ways, the Septuagint (LXX: major Greek translation of these texts) is more of a paraphrase than a word-for-word translation. Given that, it is still considered an important piece of contemporary translation.
  2. In both the Hebrew and the Greek, there are words that are used once and only once. These words have been regarded as the most difficult to translate because there are no other references to the usage of these words.
  3. Some claim that the only way Matthew and Luke can have a virgin birth is if they use the LXX (mis)translation. This argument is defended by Christians who claim that the Hebrew word used in Isaiah (almah, literally “young woman of a marriageable age”, and found 9 other times in the Hebrew texts) implies being a virgin (Hebrew word betulah, also used other times in the Hebrew texts to specify a virgin). Therefore, the Greek translation of almah as “virgin” (parthenos) is acceptable. But, is that kind of added interpretation acceptable to translation?