The Biblical Illiteracy of Biblical Scholars

Today is the feast of St John the Apostle and Evangelist who has been identified in very ancient tradition as the Beloved Disciple of the Gospel that bears his name (basically on the strength of him being the Beloved Disciple) and I was tempted to write something on same-sex love and the relationship of Jesus and John/the Beloved Disciple. However I've been distracted by my reading.

I'm currently reading/reviewing a couple of books and today I've just finished reading one of them, Subverting Scriptures: Critical Reflections on the Use of the Bible. I'm still gathering my thoughts about it; suffice to say I enjoyed much of it and was put off by it in almost equal terms, not least because it is in many ways an imperialist, US imperialist, exercise. So many of the essays seem to have as their underpinning concern - there are people out there who don't subscribe to our bourgeois liberal order of reality; they are using religion and 'The Bible' or Scripture as the ideological base for their rejection of our nice liberal order; even worse, a substantial number of them live in these here United States. This last point I think is the main concern; Islamic terrorism and even ultra-Zionist settler terrorism in Israel (on the last point with the exception of the Jewish contributors) are of course foreign, outside, not us, and so not so surprising for its rejection rather than the extraordinary violent impact of that rejection. No what is most unnerving is the spectre of US fundamentalism, the apparent refusal of so many of 'us' to subscribe to the tenets of the liberal order. As both a gay man and a Catholic (not to mention a 'foreigner', outside the US) I find that US fundamentalism quite disturbing and both threatening, as someone both non-USan and gay, and thoroughly twisted and blasphemous, as a Catholic person. But perhaps the apparent 'liberality' of the order was really a mask to hide its ruthlessness and violence. After all, the liberal order is one based on a ruthless class and race based oppression at home and abroad. It is a violent and murderous order for all its pretence at reason and liberality.

But that's not what I want to write about tonight. Rather, I come back to the old question of canon and how astonished I am that scholars these days really are ignorant of the history of the anthologies we call Bible/s. In most of the essays 'the Bible' is accepted as a given without even the recognition that Bibles are multiple and various. Unsurprisingly, it's the Jewish authors who will acknowledge that plurality, but, perhaps unsurprisingly too, they can only see the plurality in terms of two (sometimes three, if the Qur'an is included). That was most strikingly exemplified in the final essay of the anthology, Subversion as Return, by Shaul Magid.

Magid is mostly writing for Jewish concerns and as part of his argument he wants to demontrate the constructedness of Biblical canons. So his essay first sets out to sketch a 'brief genealogy of what we today call the Bible' (218). He gives a relatively adequate account of the making of the Jewish canon (although there are parts of it I would dispute) before turning to the Bible in Christianity. Christian Bible-making reinforces his argument by showing analogous processes in Christianity and Judaism which produced their various Bibles. Magid makes his entry point into Christian scripture by highlighting the difference between the Hebrew Bible of Judaism and the Old Testament of Christians. The Hebrew Bible ends with Second Chronicles, which closes with King Cyrus issuing his decree to allow the return of Jews to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple there. As the final text of the Hebrew Bible, 2 Chronicles is placed after Ezra-Nehemiah which recount the return of exiles to Jerusalem and the work of rebuilding the Temple and the city walls. Magid then contrasts the Hebrew Bible ending with the ending of the Old Testament. He wants to highlight the contrast "the rabbinic and early Christian view of history and, by extension, the rabbinic and early Christian view about divine will" (219). He continues "The Christian canonizers had something quite different in mind when they concluded the Hebrew Bible, their "Old Testament," with the prophetic words of the prophet Malachi..." (220).

The problem here is that the 'early' Christian canonizers didn't end their Old Testament with Malachi. If they ended their Old Testament with one of the prophets it was Daniel (not counted as a prophet in the Jewish Hebrew Bible). That's the final Old Testament book in my Eastern Orthodox Study Bible. That's also how one of the oldest Christian Bibles, Codex Vaticanus, ends it's Old Testament. And presumably that's how the other ancient Christian Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, ends its prophetic component of the Old Testament, including Malachi in the Book of the Twelve as the first prophetic book (Sinaiticus is incomplete - the Twelve, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Lamentations survive intact but Ezekiel and Daniel are missing). However Sinaiticus follows the prophetic corpus with the four Books of Maccabees, ending its Old Testament with 4 Maccabees. The other ancient Christian Bible, Codex Alexandrinus, ends its Old Testament with Sirach, placing the prophets plus the four books of Maccabees in the middle of its Old Testament.

It's also important to note that these ancient bibles did not use the Hebrew Bible for their Old Testament but the Greek Bible referred to as the Septuagint. Over in the West, Jerome tried to revise the Latin Bible by basing it on the Hebrew Bible but he was unsuccessful being resisted by none other than Augustine. The result was that the Latin Vulgate Old Testament of the West was a kind of hybrid of both Hebrew and Greek Bibles. Augustine certainly closed his Old Testament with the prophets but for him it seems that Ezekiel went last (De doctrina christiana 2.13). Augustine understood the order of the prophets as The Twelve, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and Ezekiel.

Nevertheless, the Latin Bible came to order its prophetic corpus as we in the West are familiar with today - Isaiah, Jeremiah & Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea-Malachi (or the Twelve). However, the prophets were followed by 1 and 2 Maccabees. This was the ordering in the 15th century Gutenberg Bible and remains the order in Roman Catholic bibles to this day.

The Old Testament order that Magid refers to only came into existence with the Reformation; it is the standard Protestant Old Testament but I'm wondering if the intent was to end with Malachi or whether it was the accidental result of the removal of the 2 books of Maccabees and other texts (such as Baruch) and their relegation to the so-called Apocrypha (they aren't apocryphal for Roman Catholics and Orthodox). So Magid has actually confused the Protestant Old Testament and its canonizers with the various Old Testaments of early Christianity and the canonical processes of their day. Protestantism is the dominant religious form in the US and indeed one could even say that the US is a grand Protestant, even Calvinist, experiment. Magid's understanding of Christianity and Christian Bible making processes has been heavily refracted through that Protestant lens, despite the fact that Magid is himself a Jew.

Magid's error is all the more striking because he actually set out to relate a biblical genealogy to highlight the constructedness and diversity of biblical canons. And is that one of the key problems of this book, that it doesn't really address the key assumptions and ideological constructs underpinning US society and that frame the entire culture wars scenario that so many of the contributors are attempting to remedy, or even worse, 'manage'.

Another What If... Using "Scripture" to "Teach" "Ethics"... and a whole lot more

I saw an interesting item a week or so ago in the Fairfax press; an opinion piece by David Hill titled "Churches don't have monopoly on the good life" and tagged 'Ethics Courses as Alternative to Scripture Classes in Schools'. It seems there's been an experiment in the NSW education system, a trial providing weekly ethics courses for school students in the government education system who don't attend the weekly religious instruction classes provided by the churches. These RI classes are called scripture classes.

It seems that the trial was a success and the participating students really enjoyed the ethics classes. It went down so well that the churches, especially the Roman Catholic and Anglican denominations want the ethics classes to made available to all and not as an alternative to their scripture classes. In fact there seems to be a fear that the ethics classes might prove so popular that they even draw students away from the scripture classes so the churches have mounted a campaign called, very tellingly, Save Our Scripture.

Now I have no idea how these so-called scripture classes are run or what they're like. It's been a long time since my school days and I'd like to think things have changed a bit since then. What's more I was taught in the Catholic system, in my childhood by the Josephite nuns at the local convent school. Back in those days the entire education system, government and non-government, seemed designed to bore students so much that they would never get interested in anything to do with thinking and reflection. Religion was much the same. We had our penny catechism which we learnt off by heart - I've pretty much forgotten all of it now. We also had something called a Bible history which was an illustrated collection of stories from Old and New Testaments. It wasn't the actual text, however, just a retold version in the long tradition of children's bible story anthologies. As we got older the penny catechism was replaced by a more complex hard cover catechism and the bible history by a copy of Knox's Four Gospels translated from the Latin Vulgate. But we really didn't read that much scripture and what we read was embedded in a tight doctrinal matrix underpinned by the catechisms.

I'd assume that scripture classes wouldn't operate like that any more, at least for Catholics, and presumably Uniting Church and Anglicans. But then the Sydney Archdiocese is very conservative and then there are all those very conservative Protestant denominations (presumably the Orthodox and Jews and Muslims and other religions have their own 'scripture' classes too). So I wondered just how and how much scripture might actually be taught in these so-called 'scripture' classes; were they actually doing a very good job of turning the students off scripture altogether?

Maybe because I was Catholic and we Catholics didn't read Bibles in those days, and coming to biblical studies later in life, I have a much greater appreciation of these anthologies of texts called imperially The Bible and I realise just how important these stories, these collections of narrative and poetry and polemic, actually are, not least in cultural terms. And so I began entertaining another what if...

What if 'scripture' was used in schools as a basis to teach ethics and a range of other stuff too. I'm not talking about religious instruction, mind. Far from it. No, what I imagine is something like a regular reading group where students from the start of their schooldays would read the text in an atmosphere where they would be encouraged, according to what I understand (from a rabbi I used to know) is the best of Jewish tradition, that is to always ask why, what is going on here whenever they see something odd, puzzling, shocking or even boring in the text. Because lets face it, there's some pretty wild and puzzling and quite outrageous stories in these scriptures (and some boring bits too) and I think stories like these are the best for ethical reflection not to mention stretching the imagination.

English is the main language of Australia and so I would make the King James Bible, the text for this enterprise. That way students can be introduced to the rich cadences of the language, but which, being some four centuries old, will contain words and usages that are alien. It would also have to be the King James with the so-called Apocrypha, so as to cross over most of the various biblical canons, not just the standard Protestant one. What I envisage is not a denominational exercise. Furthermore I would want the students to read a good English translation of the Qur'an alongside the Bible. That way they can learn how the biblical stories have been retold and live on in Islamic cultures, too, making the stories and characters central to the imaginative life of a plethora of cultures, Christian and Islamic as well as Jewish, over time and space.

My childhood was in the days before Vatican 2 and so I lived then in the world of the Latin Mass. While I don't necessarily miss it as such, I am grateful for spending my childhood in a religious culture with another language to English. As kids we weren't taught Latin but we were schooled in the Latin Mass; we learnt the Latin responses and we could see what they meant in the English translation in our missals. I think that, albeit limited, bi-lingual environment was enriching. Jews and Muslims read their scriptures in Hebrew or Arabic putting them in a similarly enriching bi-lingual environment (even for Arabs - the classical Arabic of the Qur'an is different to the modern Arabics spoken today). Studying the Bible can also create an enriching multi-lingual environment, not just because the King James uses an older form of English but because the stories were composed and transmitted in several different ancient languages. So when the students read Genesis 1.1 in the King James - In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth - they can also be introduced to the older Hebrew, Greek, Latin forms of the text

Bereshit bara elohim eth hashamayim w'eth ha-arets

En arche epoieisen ho theos ton ouranon kai tein gein
('ei' pronounced as in vein or neigh)

In principio creavit deus caelam et terram

They can also be introduced to the Arabic opening - In the name of God/Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful - of the Qur'an too

Bismillahi r-rahman r-rahim

Both the Hebrew scriptures and the Qur'an are sung or chanted texts and so in the first couple of years the students can both read in English and sing or chant in Hebrew and Arabic or at least listen to these texts sung and chanted (and chanted in Latin and Greek too). And so they become exposed to other languages, their linguistic repertoire is expanded. And there is indeed a whole rich world of music around these texts that they can be introduced to, as well as a world of art, film and literature. The biblical world on the internet is vast as is the Qur'an's internet world. Scripture classes can also become great vehicles to teach young people how to work the world of the internet.

As for ethics, well lets start with the Genesis creation stories. Read together with their versions in the Qur'an opens up the world of plurality already but if the school's students are multi-ethnic and multi-faith then it enables the opportunity to share stories from outside the biblical/quranic matrix, Hindu stories, Buddhist stories, Chinese and Japanese stories, and, most importantly in Australia, indigenous stories. If the school is more 'mono' in its faith and ethnic profile then there remain the stories from Greek and Roman and Egyptian and other related mythology too. I remember learning about the Greek myths in the local convent school; for the life of me I can't remember why we learned those stories but we did. What I'm getting at here is cultivating an ethics of listening and sharing and appreciating difference. The Jewish tradition of the midrashim can further reinforce how the biblical stories have been retold and reworked, added to, enhanced, to thus foster an ethics of creativity and, again, appreciation of plurality.

As the students get older then the ethical questions get more interesting, more challenging. In Genesis 1, the text repeats the refrain 'and God saw that it was good' as the great tone poem of creation unfolds. Can we say that the universe is good? What does it mean to say that? Is the universe bad? or indifferent? What then are the implications? There are other ethical questions in Genesis 1 too. How do humans relate to, engage with the rest of the earth? Is it just there for us to exploit any way we like? Related to that is the fact that the vision of human life in Genesis 1 is a vegetarian one - 'Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat' (1.29). So what are the ethics of our treatment of animals? The Genesis text already provides a means for opening up discussion of some pretty weighty ethical issues. And then there is also 'God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them' and 'Be fruitful, and multiply' - how do we go about the ethics of gender and sexuality. And that's just in the first chapter!

These themes get reprised again in the Eden stories along with another biggie, truth and falsehood. Who's telling the truth and who's lying in these stories? God? the serpent? Eve? Adam? And we're still only three chapters in. The rest of the biblical world is bursting with stories that raise a suite of further ethical issues. Power is a big one, not just with David and Solomon and the kings, there's also Joshua and Ezra and then the whole deployment of power in the Gospel narratives. David Hill gives as reasons why parents don't want their children to attend scripture classes 'Others complain that little children should not be traumatised by stories of the crucifixion or the threat of spending eternity ''burning in hell''.' The crucifixion is ugly, terrible, vile, that's the whole point. The story in its various forms raises a suite of ethical issues about power, its deployment, how to respond to it. As a child I was horrified by Herod's massacre of the infants of Bethlehem. Power continues to be used every day to destroy people in brutal ways - and these stories remind us of that fact. And, as with the case of the Hebrew midwives in Exodus, they remind us that people can resist such power too. As for hell, well that's an interesting ethical conundrum in itself, one which I've discussed elsewhere on this blog. While there's little or no hell in the Old Testament and not that much in the New either, an allied question is the ethics of divinity in the scriptures. God is a character in these stories and therefore should not be exempt from criticism or ethical evaluation. Does God's behavior through the Flood, at Sodom and Gomorrah, does such behavior give warrant for genocide? And what about holy war and the ban, the massacre of Canaanite and Amalekite?

And then there is the whole tangled web of gender and sexuality. The love lives (or more appropriately sex lives) of Abraham and Jacob and Samson and David and Solomon, and the poetics of rape and abuse in the prophets, just to name some. What can be made of Jephthah's daughter or the concubine at Gibeah? This is not a Brady Bunch world of sugar and schmaltz (let alone Father Knows Best) but a bizarre and frightening and ethically problematic world, the perfect space to exercise and cultivate ethical reflection. And this world does not exist in a vacuum either. There is more than two thousand years of Jewish, Christian, Muslim and other ethical debate and reflection around these stories. Was Lot right to offer his daughters to the mob? Jewish tradition offers an unequivocal 'no' but Christians and Muslims, are not so clear cut. Augustine's discussion of whether Lot was right or wrong to do so is a text that should be studied and evaluated in developing an ethical framework. Was Augustine right or wrong in his conclusions? And was Augustine uncomfortable with them? I think Augustine was wrong but I also think he wasn't happy with the conclusion he had reached or, at least, understood it was problematic.

Now I'm not proposing that students in grade 1 read Augustine. He, along with other Christian theologians and mystics and heretics, Gnostics, rabbis and kabbalists, sheikhs and imams and sufis, philosophers and the odd few Marxists, Freudians, feminists and other ratbags would come later as the students got older. They would be progressively introduced to these people throughout their school lives, along with the novelists, poets, dramatists, artists, composers and film-makers via the Bible and the Qur'an (which would be read beside the biblical texts in every class on scripture). Through the study of scripture students would be put in conversation with a wide variety of people, thinkers/artists, not just within the English language tradition but from a broad spectrum of cultures around the world and from across the last two to three thousand years.

To highlight the global and pluralist dimensions of these scriptures I had considered banning the adherents of the religions based on them - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Bahais, Druze, modern-day Gnostics, (and where do the Sikhs fit? [1]) - from having any role in teaching them. I would also include all those vigorous atheists of the Dawkins and Hitchens variety who by so striving to discredit these texts, in their very rejection make themselves as uncritically captive to these texts and hidebound as any fundamentalist Baptist or Salafi. So the teachers would have to be indigenous Australians or members of other primal indigenous traditions, Hindus, Parsis/Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Daoists, Shintoists, Jains, Cao Dai, etc, (and where do the Sikhs fit? [1]). I must admit I rather like that idea (even if it precludes such as myself). But then I felt that perhaps Jews should be excepted in honour of the rabbi who stressed to me that you must never be reluctant to ask why when you read these texts. So I have changed my mind. Instead I think the classes should be taught by a team of at least two, of whom at least one must come from a religio-cultural tradition not shaped by this Middle Eastern scriptural/religious matrix. Thus the cross-cultural dialogic framework can be reinforced. The other guideline then that I would place on these teaching teams is that it is okay for the teachers to disagree, even strongly disagree on any reading or evaluation of the stories and characters. Such disagreement could even be encouraged, so long as it was respectful. Here I'm mindful of the old saw 'put two Jews together and you will have three opinions'. And I guess I can't help but think of the yeshiva practice where young Jews argue and debate scripture as they study it and where in these debates if one party exhausts an argument the other party will help them to resume it by working out a critique of their own opposing position.

Obviously such secular teaching of scripture in every year of school could not then be the preserve only of the government school system. No, such teaching of scripture would have to become an integral part of the entire schooling system, public and private, secular and faith-based, school based and distance and somehow as part of home-schooling operations too. Indeed it would provide an essential corrective in schools run by more fundamentalist faith communities, Christian and otherwise.

Of course I realise this is a utopian vision and given the timorous and blinkered petit bourgeois mindset that dominates the politics of this country, as evidenced by the current election, these utopian imaginings have as much chance of success as a snowflake's in Hell (the old-fashioned traditional variety of Hell anyway). But given the singular importance of these scriptures in world history and imagination, not to mention our own Anglo cultural-linguistic trajectory, I don't think they deserve anything less. What's more I don't think children, young people deserve anything less either. These are the stories of their ancestors, of our ancestors, even much moreso now that we are a multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-lingual society. These stories bring contemporary young people into conversation with those ancestors across two to three thousand years. These stories reveal to them the imaginary framework of their culture/s and language/s. And these stories give them the opportunity to enrich, explore and expand both their imaginative horizon and their ethical framework. Thus, I would suggest, they may become more fully human, surely the prime goal of any meaningful education.

[1] Not to mention Mandaeans and Yezidis.

Samson and Delilah - melodrama and biblical narrative.

I like music, I like listening to it. As I write this, I have the radio on playing classical music from ABC's classical music network. Over the last few years I seem to have moved from listening to more popular music to classical. Apart from the intricacy and variety of classical music, I think another reason is that on the classical music stations there is generally a lot less talking than on other stations. I used to listen a lot to 'talking radio' in the form of ABC's Radio National, which I once described as the jewel in the crown of Australian radio. Sadly, I think it's been considerably run down over the years - Howard's revenge. I persisted with their breakfast program into last year, it had basically replaced the daily newspaper. But last year, following the change of government, I found that it had not moved on. All the commentary remained stuck in Howard era style politics. Quite frankly I'm past it. It's not relevant to the real issues facing this country or the planet. Mainstream media discourse on current affairs, including the ABC's, is basically irrelevant to those important issues. And I'm not really interested in confected dramas about trivialities or the ongoing perusal of arcane poll data, especially when it relates to Opposition figures. I just don't care. And life's too short to be caught up with such irrelevant ephemera. So I ended up listening to Classic Breakfast with Emma Ayres. The music is quite varied and often rather fun too and she doesn't seem to think that we are all tuning in for the sound of her voice. The program includes some fun regular segments and one I rather like is 'Tears on Toast' which each week plays excerpts from one of the great melodramatic operas. I'm not into opera much but, in this format, you can enjoy the campy quality of opera but in short daily doses. This week's opera is Saint-Saens' Samson and Delilah. I think it's the first biblically themed one I've heard and I've been struck by the way this opera demonstrates the way biblical narratives are taken, adapted even completely rewritten in such cultural appropriations. This rewriting relies on a general cultural familiarity with the story and its characters but also a complete cultural ignorance of the details of such stories. The story of Samson is a classic example. Samson is generally regarded as a heroic figure, perhaps because he epitomises the masculinist dream of possessing superhuman strength. He's superpowerful, he's got to be a hero hasn't he? My response is, just go read the story for yourself. When I read Samson's story in Judges, the overall impression I get is that this guy is not only a sociopath but a particularly stupid one too. But back to the opera. I didn't pay a lot of attention to the first aria played in yesterday's Tears on Toast but my attention was caught by Emma Ayres' description of events afterwards. The aria is Samson's and in it he calls on the Hebrews, who are slaves to the Philistines in Gaza, to rise up against their oppressors. Of course, the biblical narrative contains NO such rallying cry by Samson or anyone else and Samson never leads any Hebrew uprising. He never leads anyone and seems only to ever follow his own desires in whatever he does. I thought I'd find out a bit more about the opera's story and went looking for a synopsis. I found one here at the Music with Ease site. It describes the events around the aria from the first act as follows:

Before the curtain rises we hear of the Philistines at Gaza forcing the Israelites to work. When the curtain is raised we see in the background the temple of Dagon, god of the Philistines. With the lamentations of the Jews is mixed the bitter scorn of Abimelech. But Samson has not yet expressed a hope of conquering. His drink-inspired songs agitate his fellow countrymen so much that it now amounts to an insurrection. Samson slays Abimelech with the sword he has snatched from him and Israel’s champion starts out to complete the work. Dagon’s high priest may curse, the Philistines are not able to offer resistance to the onslaught of the enemy. Already he Hebrews are rejoicing and gratefully praise God when there appear Philistines’ most seductive maidens, Dalila at their head, to do homage to the victorious Samson. Oh what use is the warning of an old Hebrew? The memory of the love which she gave him when "the sun laughed, the spring awoke and kissed the ground," the sight of her ensnaring beauty, the tempting dances ensnare the champion anew.

Oh my, pure soap! Totally cheesy and bearing no relationship to the biblical story whatsoever. And so I have to laugh when I read elsewhere on the same site that, "'Samson and Delilah' is in three Acts, and the libretto has so faithfully followed the Bible story that there is no need to outline the text." Clearly the writer has never read Judges. But the story of Samson is one that is abroad in the culture and everyone remembers it as a great man - a hero - undone by a scheming woman. Saint-Saens clearly plays with that element in his opera and so everyone thinks he has been faithful to the narrative. I'm sure the opera is delightfully cheesy and melodramatic. But if you really want melodrama befitting the daytime soaps. The biblical story of Samson can't be beaten. As I said this man is at least a totally self-obsessed individual or a sociopath. He never leads anyone, he never issues clarion calls to the Israelites, he only follows his personal agendas. He has the rather disturbing habit of going berserk every so often but, unlike the judges before him, he never shows a whit of interest in doing anything for the Israelites. He is a wildman and in a Gothic way rather humorous, or should I say comic. Comedy certainly is the only way to read the account of Samson's miraculous conception in Judges 13. Not many people know that Samson marries a Philistine woman. His treatment of this woman is appalling. He is also quite a stupid man. His interactions with Delilah show him to be a complete klutz. One can also read Delilah as the arm of Fate, paying Samson back for the treatment of his wife. Given that the whole narrative is drive by Samson's desires, which all too often bring grief to others and finally himself, it really is the stuff of soap opera. It's a nasty soap opera but I guess soap needs a certain amount of schadenfreude to engage its audience. I think that with Samson any possibility that Judges is a heroic narrative is ripped apart. One can say that Jephthah is a tragic character of sorts but you can't say that about Samson. After Samson, the world of Judges just spins apart. He is the transition point. Poor old Delilah gets treated as a femme fatale but I like to think of her as the avenging arm of hubris. In the end, even she fails - in Judges pretty much everyone fails - Samson can call on the berserker within even without his hair and that rage unleashed will go on to infect the people of Gibeah and destroy the Benjaminites and culminate in the massacre and pack rapes at Jabesh Gilead and the pack rapes at Shiloh, defiling the sacred festival at the national sanctuary in Shiloh itself.

Ideology and translation of biblical texts

(With apologies for some html problems below)
I was amazed, even amused, to discover the Conservative Bible Project recently (thanks to Fred Clark at Slacktivist). I thought all manner of bizarre possibilities when it came to the biblical texts. But this one takes the cake. According to the good folks behind it 'Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in Bible translations'. This Liberal bias is 'the largest source of translation error' And it seems there 's only one way to rectify it - 'conservative principles to reduce and eliminate' this translation error! They list 10 some of which include:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

1. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity

1. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level
2. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle".
3. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots", using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
4. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
5. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
6. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story

As Fred points out these are people who

self-identify not just as Christians, but as "Bible-believing" Christians (that is, Real, True Christians) -- people who proudly differentiate themselves by declaring their "high view of scripture."

The irony here is that they are just as keen on taking the scissors to the scriptures as any historical critic and use the same basis that the problematic texts are apparently additions to an authentic original. In their translation points they cite the pericope of the woman taken in adultery as an example of one which should be excised forever from the New Testament, no doubt because the central principle is mercy rather than retribution. These people don't seem to like the concept of mercy. Perhaps they believe they are without sin (and sadly all too many Real True Christians seem to labour under that delusion) and so eagerly want to pre-empt God by casting the first, second and who knows how many stones.

Reading further through the project blurb it appears they want to excise this verse from Luke 23.34

Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

They say that "most authentic manuscripts omit this verse" and then add that "some of Jesus persecutors did know what they were doing". So presumably some first or second century Liberals set out to corrupt the Gospel account. It appears that this conservative Christianity is not a religion in which forgiveness is central. The whole of Christian tradition says otherwise but of course Real True Christians don't know tradition let alone care about it. They probably wouldn't know that newly Christianised Kiev abolished the death penalty 1000 years ago and had a go at some sort of social support scheme for the poor. This latter point shows, too, that the tradition does not show much sympathy to the free market principles these conservatives claim are the key to the parables of Jesus.

As Fred Clark observes:

The American right wing's ability to make parody redundant has gone from being a bitter joke to being a bitter cliché. It's an observation so frequently made because it's so frequently true...
Consider what that joke means. Satire works by exaggeration, but it can't be arbitrary exaggeration. It's only effective (or funny) when it adheres to the trajectory of the idea it lampoons. The target of satire offers a series of points in succession and the satirist ridicules these ideas by continuing down that line, racing ahead to the next logical points in the established progression and demonstrating the inherent absurdity of those ideas by taking them to their logical -- and necessary -- extreme conclusions.

The satirist and the extremist are thus in a kind of footrace. And, as the Conservative Bible Project demonstrates, the extremists these days are winning. They're getting there first -- beating any would-be satirist to the finish line and the punch line.

Thus we have Poe's Law, which states, "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing." The Internet provides dozens of illustrations of this, Web sites that come to function, simultaneously, as parodies and as earnest expressions of the beliefs of extremists. The intent of those sites' creators may not even matter because, if the satirist is doing her job well, she will wind up at precisely the same point further along the trajectory at which the extremist will, sooner or later, arrive. Or vice versa. To paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, all that descends into absurdity must converge.

The CBP is a fine example of this. It reads like parody, even though it isn't. It presents an exaggerated, extreme view, but that extremism and exaggeration is not the product of a satirist's mockery. This makes it unintentionally funny but also, more importantly, it makes the CBP useful as a herald of what is to come. Soon. The CBP illustrates the inevitable destiny of the religious right. This is where things are headed, where things are going, possibly faster than you expect.

The CBP is a self-parody in part because it's not even a real translation but appears to be a paraphrase. They use as their base text the King James Bible (without the so-called Apocrypha, these are Real True Christians after all) and then paraphrase the bits they don't like or are too old to conform to such recent concepts as free market principles. So in other words this is a rewriting of the biblical texts to get rid of everything that doesn't fit, that is ideologically unsound, that is challenging. scary, disturbing... Other .

Indeed, this is a far more ambitious attempt at taming the text than anything proposed by the Jesus Seminar. These conservatives don't want a text that is alien at all. What they want is a text that functions as a mirror, a text in which they can see themselves all dressed up in the God drag and bow down before themselves. As Clark says this is idolatry through and through.

If you want to sample a translation that respects the otherness of the text then check out these two posts at The WOMBman's Bible. In the first one, Mother Eve, Anthropos, J K Gayle translates from the Greek Genesis:

And he it created: the god made the mortal human

According to God's likeness, he it created: that person

>

boy and girl, he them created: those persons

So Adam knew Eve, that wombman of his

and taking it together she

birthed offspring, that Cain,

and said,

I've gotten out a mortal human

through that God

Then in Ancient (Divine & Gendered) Radical Translating Gayle does some very interesting stuff with the Sarah/Hagar/Abraham narratives, this time translating first from the Hebrew

And Princess, the wombman of Father Exalted, bore no babe.

And she had a slave-girl, an Egyptian, named Fly-Away. . . .

And she called the name of Yes-He-Was-Here (who spoke to her) “God sees.”

because she said “'I see him here following him seeing me.”

And then from the Greek "by Jews translating back in Egypt, where Egyptian women are all around. Imagine"

Sara, however, the bride of Abram did not deliver for him.

There was, however, her girl-servant, with the name Hagar. . . .

And Hagar called called the name of Master (who is speaking to her) “You’re the God who Says things to me”

because she said, “And, in fact, in front of my eyes I have seen.”

This is wonderful stuff. The text remains alien, other, and yet hauntingly so. There is also beauty here and an openness that the people of the Conservative Bible Project would suppress. After all they want an ideological text, a text all wrapped up in the cocoon of their circumscribed perspectives. But Gayle plays with and releases the text from such straitjackets and allows it to be revelation no matter how uncomfortable that might be.

That Gayle works with both Greek and Hebrew texts of Genesis is a reminder, too, that there is no such thing as a pure pristine text - there is no original. A pruned-back reconstructed text does not represent such an original, it is merely a pruned-back rec0nstructed text. To play with Bible/Scripture means recognising and working with the multiple texts, their insertions, additions, 'corruptions' all.

Some Thoughts on Human Brokenness

On Wednesday, I was able to catch up with my friend. It was good to be with him and talk about a whole lot of stuff. But this is not a post about him or our day together but rather I'm flagging two areas which we discussed together because they were areas I had been thinking of writing about for some time. One of them, the state of universities and academic life, is something I've had requests to write about on Facebook threads recently since I began a very short term gig with the NTEU this week (and which really kicks into earnest next week), But I'm not going to write about that tonight.

My friend and I also spent some time talking about what would comprise our ideal church. This was also something I had been wanting to explore here as a follow on from my posts on St Mary's. But there was something my friend said the other day, a quality of his ideal church, which I wanted to explore here but which probably wont stay focussed on the ideal church at all. In fact I know it's going to take me into matters biblical and beyond but that's one of the good things about the blog medium is that when you start a post you never quite know where you're going to end up. That's my experience anyway.

An essential quality of my friend's ideal church had to do with the clergy and it was that they readily acknowledge their own brokenness, that being broken is part of being human. To be human is to screw up - we aren't God and we aren't perfect and we shouldn't pretend that we are. But, of course, for clergy all too often rather than acknowledging brokenness they model authoritativeness, control, expertise, capability, power. And after all, they are in leadership positions, they are the religious 'expert', they've spent several years in training. And clergy in Catholic traditions have the additional awesome charisms of consecration of the bread and wine in the liturgy and absolution of sins/screw-ups. To acknowledge brokenness, to even model brokenness, then, would appear to fly in the face of everything they represent.

However I was struck by the sense that part of the power of biblical religion, part of the power of the biblical texts, whether they are are Old Testament or New, lies in the fact that human brokenness is front and centre in shaping the narratives, is a key component of all the characters we encounter in the stories there. David, the hero everyone loves (and David means beloved) including God, including the Samaritans (as I was surprised to discover when reading their alternative history of Israel), David stuffs up in a big way with Bathsheba and Uriah and also with Absalom, Tamar and Amnon. And it's not just David. Moses stuffs up and is barred from entering the Promised Land. Both Abraham and Sarah stuff up. Jacob stuffs up, Jacob is the consummate trickster. Jacob's sons stuff up too and his daughter in law, Tamar, makes a virtue out of a major stuff up. The Israelites themselves are always stuffing up. (Curiously, one character doesn't seem to stuff up and that is Joshua so much so that later rabbinic tradition had to reinvent Joshua as the klutz who started forgetting the law from the day Moses died, thus leading the Israelites astray. A very poignant midrash has Achan accuse Joshua of breaching the Law in the way he conducts the proceedings that lead to Achan's subsequent execution). Now this focus on human stuffed-upness, human brokenness serves an ideological purpose on the part of the Old Testament authors (who I think were, amongst other things abjecting the past as a way to explain Israel's situation as subject to Gentiles and dispersed amongst the nations and also to bolster the claims of particular Temples for pre-eminence). Nevertheless the stories turned out to be bigger than the ideological imperatives of their creation. Thus they still have power today in a very different world and very different cultural settings.

The New Testament, too, further develops these themes of the stuffed up nature of being human. Peter, Paul, the Prodigal Son, the woman caught in adultery, Judas, Mary Magdalen, all of these and more are anti-heroic characters. They are all broken, they are all human. And thus they speak to us, resonate with us, enable us to see ourselves in all our flawed beauty.

Anti-heroism is also a key component in the Lord of the Rings which my flatmate has been watching again this week. I've been watching some of it with him and hence its appearance in this post. Sure there's lots of battle scenes and deeds of heroism but the main action, the crucial action revolves around the unlikely triad of Frodo, Sam and Smeagol/Gollum. Frodo is an anti-hero who is bound to Gollum in a shared experience of creeping corruption, nay destruction at the hands of the Ring of Power. Ironically, it is Gollum who saves the day in the end because he is so gone, so destroyed by the Ring that he no longer thinks of his own safety and survival. Sam of course is driven mad by his disgust at, even jealousy of Gollum who clearly is a focus of Frodo's pity if not love (perhaps because Frodo sees himself in Gollum). As a reader, I was often exasperated by Sam's inablity to understand Gollum, his inability to feel some sort of empathy for Gollum. And if there is one thing that I found remarkable about the story (apart from the extraordinary celebration of love between/among males) it was the capacity for us to see Gollum as a fellow creature, broken stuffed up, like ourselves, to see ourselves in Gollum. I certainly could anyway and could feel not just pity but empathy for this creature. And not just these three, LotR abounds in characters who are flawed and broken. Many of them are destroyed by it, especially if they are the great and the good, and others muddle on through working some good despite (or because of) their brokenness.

LotR is thus a very biblical text and perhaps that's where its appeal and its power lies. Despite the veneer of sword and sorcery, its real power lies in its graphic portrayal of human (and elven and dwarvish and hobbit and entish and wizard) brokenness. Likewise the biblical texts, because in them we can find a mirror for ourselves as flawed stuffed up beings, quite the antithesis of what capitalism values and to the way patriarchal masculinities are constructed. The greatest insult in a capitalist world is 'loser'. But the reality is most of us are losers because only a handful can win under the law of capitalism. Patriarchal masculinity decrees that we males be tough, in control, invulnerable, impenetrable and capitalism gives the added imperative to compete, to get to the top, by trampling on our neighbours if need be. By doing so of course we deny our own feelings, our mutual dependence; we become the enforcers of a system that enslaves us, a system that doesn't want us to see our own frailties, our own stuffed-upness, our mutual vulnerability lest we turn away from its delusions and even worse develop a real solidarity.

Perhaps then a key way of reading the biblical texts for the purposes of liberation is to explore the way they reveal us, reflect us in our frailties, our vulnerabilities, our brokenness. And not to condemn either but to understand, to empathise, yes, to love.

And hope I have done justice here to my friend's insight.

Teaching Bible in English Lit

The last couple of weeks I've been caught up with stuff that has kept me away form here. Last week I was without broadband access as I was catsitting at a place with rather clunky dial-up. This week I've been meaning to put up something but things have been getting in the way, not least reading a fascinating new book belonging to my flatmate by Robin Lane Fox, Travelling Heroes: Greeks and their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in ancient history and mythology (I think everyone should be actually).

But then today I was sent a story from the BBC by my friend Linda from the Crux (LGBT etc Christian) email list that I've been on for so many years now almost since it started back in the mid/late 90s.

Students 'do not know the Bible'

The Poet Laureate says it is becoming increasingly difficult to teach English Literature because students do not know the Bible or classical mythology.

Andrew Motion told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the lack of knowledge made it "difficult to even get beyond go" when teaching some of his recent students.

John Mullan, professor of English at University College London, said it was up to academics to solve the problem.

Mullan goes on to say:

"I've always been concerned about the levels of not-knowing since I started teaching, but quite recently I had a very bad experience of trying to teach some of my, in other respects, extremely good students about Paradise Lost.

"They knew so little about the context in which the poem was written and about the references that the poem itself makes that it was very difficult even to get beyond go in talking about it."

What's been done at Mullan's university is the introduction of a module in the English Literature course through which students are brought up to speed with the classical texts. I think that's a great idea although I'd like to see something like that in schools too, get kids reading the biblical stories together with classical Greek and Roman mythology. I have a friend teaching sessionally at Bond Uni a course on bible and literature. I'd love to see courses on Bible and Film, Bible and Art, Bible and Sci Fi the possibilities are many. But I also rather like the idea of teaching Bible together with classical mythology, maybe at university level, expand out into Egyptian, Levantine, Mesopotamian and Persian mythology to boot.

Biblical studies should be liberated from the confines of Religious and Theological Studies (although I think there is defintely a place for both disciplines in modern universities, and maybe even moreso in postmodern universities. But the impact of the biblical literature goes much further than a theological dimension, it's social, cultural, artistic even linguistic. I also like the idea of reading biblical litgerature beside the mythology of its matrix in the ancient Mediterranean world. Of course understanding anything of Engish or other European culture without knowing something of classical mythology does as the Poet Laureate says make it "difficult to even get beyond go". I have a great love of Russian poetry and many of the great poets such as Osip Mandelstam pepper their work with references to Homer and Greek mythology, as well as the biblical literature. As the Poet Laureate says: "these stories achieve archetypal status because they tell us recurring truths about human nature that is a pleasure and an important thing in and of itself."

So lets have Bible taught in English Lit, in European Lit, in philosophy, in Gender Studies, in Peace and Conflict Studies, in History, in Queer Studies, in Cultural Studies, throughout the Humanities and beyond.