There's generally not a lot of commentary in this blog. I do however post most entries on my Facebook page and often there's a bit of discussion there. People who know me will often email me comments as well. And so late last month I received this comment on my Bible and history posts. I responded then that it was something I should take up on my blog and tonight I'm finally giving it a go.
There are a number of issues here but I think the key one revolves around Jesus and his relationship to the collections of texts known as Old Testament. Even with that statement I had to pause because there are a number of ways that it could be qualified, not least because there was no such thing as an Old Testament let alone Jewish Bible in Jesus' day. Both were constructed by Christians and Jews in the years centuries after Jesus' execution (there still is and never has been a definitive Christian Old Testament while the Jewish Bible was probably standardised by the 3rd or 4th centuries CE). Nevertheless we can say that in the first century there was a world of authoritative text and story that we can call biblical or scriptural. Probably the heart of this world was Torah, the 5 books of Moses, shared by Jew and Samaritan alike. Psalms and David were also important for Jews, as well as Isaiah and, for many, 1 Enoch (from the evidence at Qumran).
Part of the problem is that Jesus seems to accept the validity of most of these stories. He talks about Moses and Abraham and Noah as if they were real people. He talks about David and Solomon in the same way and even claims some kind of descent from David. But if David and Solomon weren't real people and neither were Moses and Abraham and Noah well then what do we say about Jesus? Because if Jesus is divine isn't he supposed to be omniscient? Why isn't he speaking like a modern historian or archeologist or even a modern biblical scholar? It's a bit like the creationists. Despite their claims, they aren't the least bit interested in the verbal inerrancy of Genesis 1 or Genesis 2. Nope it's the Gospel inerrancy that concerns them especially those passages where Jesus seems to talking about Adam and Eve, Noah etc as if all of that is real. In other words we don't have any texts in which Jesus speaks like a modern evolutionary biologist or a palaeontologist or a geologist.
But even more importantly is the fact that Jesus claims to be some kind of fulfilment of the stories and other literary materials that we term Old Testament. His claims are grounded in them so what do we make of that? Surely if these stories didn't actually happen but are instead fiction what does that make of Jesus' claims?
I'll attempt some kind of answer by responding to the allegation that I 'don't like' even 'detest' the book of Joshua. Now I wouldn't be the first person to be troubled by Joshua. It has sat like a fishbone in the throat of Christianity for centuries. And lets face it, if Joshua was a straightforward no holds barred historical account, then there is no alternative from a human, from a Christian perspective but to condemn it as a brutal and genocidal text. And tragically it is a text that has been used to give warrant to genocide, in the Americas, in Australia and now in Palestine.
But I don't detest Joshua, although there was a time when I might have done. However when I realised that reading it as history was the wrong way to read it that I came to appreciate that this text is so much richer than a simple catalogue of events. Reading it as history actually misses the point because one very striking pattern is the play between who is in this Israel and who isn't. What is this Israel is the central issue of the book. Because the other surprise that happens when reading Joshua as story not history is that all of a sudden you see that the text is constantly undermining any notion of a 'pure' Israel. At the beginning we meet a unified homogenous Israel. At the end, Israel is merged, blended with the people of the land while religiously it is indistinguishable from them. The Israelites are worshipping the Baals and Astoreths of their neighbours as Greek Joshua declares at its conclusion. It's almost as if Joshua knows that Israelites once were Canaanites and is determined to make sure that we the readers know that fact. Fro that perspective Joshua is forcing us to face up to the othering processes we humans engage in to create communities, to determine who is inside and who is outside. I still hope to write something on the Girardian processes in the book of Joshua.
The real history lies in the texts themselves not the stories they contain. The texts represent a process of cultural/religious transformation in the Levant/Palestine over the preceding centuries. It was that transformation that set the preconditions for Jesus. Without that transformation there could have been no Christ event, pure and simple. So Jesus does represent a fulfilment. He's not the only one, there's also the Mishnah and the Memar Markah. The processes of transformation these texts represent include a range of trajectories, some of which find in Jesus a major turning point at which they become Christian trajectories.
The other thing I'd briefly say is re that vexed question of truth and the OT, it could almost be summed up in the odd old proverb "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear". If the OT has no real truth historically while Jesus is about the fulfillment of a historical promise-cum-revelation and he sees himself as to some extent incarnate in that past history, one can't then easily maintain his truth is as good as the negation of that same history. Lies, falsehoods and distortions can't produce Truth-in Itself and although there is such a thing as mythic truth it's only because we understand truth to fact that we can even assume such a notion as a more elastic mythic truth exists. I realize you don't like, perhaps even detest, the book of Joshua and I won't deny it has its difficulties for us
There are a number of issues here but I think the key one revolves around Jesus and his relationship to the collections of texts known as Old Testament. Even with that statement I had to pause because there are a number of ways that it could be qualified, not least because there was no such thing as an Old Testament let alone Jewish Bible in Jesus' day. Both were constructed by Christians and Jews in the years centuries after Jesus' execution (there still is and never has been a definitive Christian Old Testament while the Jewish Bible was probably standardised by the 3rd or 4th centuries CE). Nevertheless we can say that in the first century there was a world of authoritative text and story that we can call biblical or scriptural. Probably the heart of this world was Torah, the 5 books of Moses, shared by Jew and Samaritan alike. Psalms and David were also important for Jews, as well as Isaiah and, for many, 1 Enoch (from the evidence at Qumran).
Part of the problem is that Jesus seems to accept the validity of most of these stories. He talks about Moses and Abraham and Noah as if they were real people. He talks about David and Solomon in the same way and even claims some kind of descent from David. But if David and Solomon weren't real people and neither were Moses and Abraham and Noah well then what do we say about Jesus? Because if Jesus is divine isn't he supposed to be omniscient? Why isn't he speaking like a modern historian or archeologist or even a modern biblical scholar? It's a bit like the creationists. Despite their claims, they aren't the least bit interested in the verbal inerrancy of Genesis 1 or Genesis 2. Nope it's the Gospel inerrancy that concerns them especially those passages where Jesus seems to talking about Adam and Eve, Noah etc as if all of that is real. In other words we don't have any texts in which Jesus speaks like a modern evolutionary biologist or a palaeontologist or a geologist.
But even more importantly is the fact that Jesus claims to be some kind of fulfilment of the stories and other literary materials that we term Old Testament. His claims are grounded in them so what do we make of that? Surely if these stories didn't actually happen but are instead fiction what does that make of Jesus' claims?
I'll attempt some kind of answer by responding to the allegation that I 'don't like' even 'detest' the book of Joshua. Now I wouldn't be the first person to be troubled by Joshua. It has sat like a fishbone in the throat of Christianity for centuries. And lets face it, if Joshua was a straightforward no holds barred historical account, then there is no alternative from a human, from a Christian perspective but to condemn it as a brutal and genocidal text. And tragically it is a text that has been used to give warrant to genocide, in the Americas, in Australia and now in Palestine.
But I don't detest Joshua, although there was a time when I might have done. However when I realised that reading it as history was the wrong way to read it that I came to appreciate that this text is so much richer than a simple catalogue of events. Reading it as history actually misses the point because one very striking pattern is the play between who is in this Israel and who isn't. What is this Israel is the central issue of the book. Because the other surprise that happens when reading Joshua as story not history is that all of a sudden you see that the text is constantly undermining any notion of a 'pure' Israel. At the beginning we meet a unified homogenous Israel. At the end, Israel is merged, blended with the people of the land while religiously it is indistinguishable from them. The Israelites are worshipping the Baals and Astoreths of their neighbours as Greek Joshua declares at its conclusion. It's almost as if Joshua knows that Israelites once were Canaanites and is determined to make sure that we the readers know that fact. Fro that perspective Joshua is forcing us to face up to the othering processes we humans engage in to create communities, to determine who is inside and who is outside. I still hope to write something on the Girardian processes in the book of Joshua.
The real history lies in the texts themselves not the stories they contain. The texts represent a process of cultural/religious transformation in the Levant/Palestine over the preceding centuries. It was that transformation that set the preconditions for Jesus. Without that transformation there could have been no Christ event, pure and simple. So Jesus does represent a fulfilment. He's not the only one, there's also the Mishnah and the Memar Markah. The processes of transformation these texts represent include a range of trajectories, some of which find in Jesus a major turning point at which they become Christian trajectories.
