More Christian Biblical Imperialism

The case of The Inclusive Bible is really a case of the unintended consequences of good intentions, albeit good intentions framed by a certain biblical illiteracy. The biblical illiteracy arises from the discourses of the 'Bible is God's Word' variety which promote the fiction that there is only one Bible now and for all time. The reality is completely different. Not only is there not one Bible now and always and not only are Jewish and Christian Bibles different but there is not even a uniform Christian bible now or over time. Not ever. But, of course, people believing that there is only one ever Bible, who don't understand that the Jewish Bible is a different creature to the Christian Old Testament (in all its varieties) can make a well-meaning, dare I say, 'inclusive' gesture to use the Tanakh as the template for the Old Testament of a Bible that aims to be inclusive.

However not so in this case, which I discovered at the Open Source Bible. Apparently it's from a site BiblicalTraining.org and it's from an online lecture by DR Miles van Pelt who is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi.

The following Biblical books shows the structural unity of the canon. The layout is derived from the Lectures on Old Testament Theology given by Dr. Miles Van Pelt

Covenant Prologue	The Law	The Prophets	The Writings	Covenant Epilogue
	Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy	Joshua Judges Samuel Kings Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel The 12 Minor Prophets	Psalms Job Proverbs Ruth Song of Songs Ecclesiastes Lamentations Esther Daniel Ezra Nehemiah Chronicles
Genesis				Revelation
	Matthew Mark Luke John	Acts of the Apostles	Paul's Epistles Hebrews James 1,2 Peter 1,2,3 John Jude
	Covenant	Covenant History	Covenant Life

As you can see, Van Pelt is setting up a common structural pattern of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament using the order of the Tanakh and the New Testament that is standard across most (but not all) Christian denominations today. But he does some strange things. Genesis which has always been the first book of the Torah (which he terms Law) is separated out and given a category of its own: Prologue to the (presumably) unified Bible. Likewise, Revelation is taken out from the New Testament and given its own status of Epilogue. He then marries up the 4 gospels with the remaining 4 books of the Torah under the category of Covenant. His next category is Covenant History under which he marries the Acts of the Apostles with all of the books included in the Prophets section of the Tanakh, Finally he sets up the category of Covenant Life under which he marries up the Tanakh's final section of the Writings with the Epistles of the New Testament. All very neat, all very logical, and no doubt designed to impress his audience with a sense of the underlying unity, rationality and harmony of 'God's Word' as found, of course, in the standard Protestant Bible.

But this structure is an imperialist, supersessionist fraud for several reasons. The most obvious is that, with the exception of The Inclusive Bible, there is no Christian Old Testament that has ever been structured according to the Tanakh. All Christian Old Testaments follow a rough pattern of Law/Pentateuch, Historical books, Wisdom books and, finally, Prophetic books. As far back as we can go with canon lists and ancient codices this has been the consistent shape of the collections called Old Testament. There are some variations from the pattern but none have ever matched the pattern of the Tanakh. Furthermore this Old Testament pattern of Law, History, Wisdom, Prophets was what was assumed by the shapers of the New Testament canons too (yes, there's more than one of those too) to be the structure of the scriptures of Israel that was to be completed by the New Testament.

Indeed, the Old Testament(s) of Christianity were themselves being shaped at the same time as the New Testament(s) in the first few centuries of the Christian Era (CE) and it was also in that same period that the Tanakh of Judaism was likewise achieving its final form. At the time of Jesus there was neither Tanakh nor Old Testament only scriptures in which an authority and priority was accorded to the books of Moses or Torah. The Torah was a Pentateuch, although at Qumran the Temple Scroll represented a 6th book of Moses, meaning for some Jews in Jesus' day the Torah was a Hexateuch. Not only were the Tanakh and the Old and New Testaments shaped contemporaneously but also to a certain extent in reaction to each other. Christians regard Daniel as a prophet and in many ancient collections/lists Daniel is the last book of both the Prophets and the Old Testament as it is in my contemporary Orthodox Study Bible. In the Tanakh, though, Daniel is not a prophet and the book is included in the third division, the Writings. Given how important Daniel was for Christian messianic theologies, it's hard not to think that its placement in the Tanakh amongst the Writings is designed to downplay it and the apocalyptic theologies it represented. The ordering of the Tanakh, furthermore, gives priority to the Torah - all the other books of Prophets and Writings being understood as commentary on Torah. Christian Old Testaments look forward to the New and hence the Prophets are generally the final Old Testament division, heralding the Christ event.

Finally, the New Testament of today is not and has never been the only canonical New Testament structure. It took a long time for the Eastern churches to accept Revelation. It is still not part of the New Testament of the Church of the East (Assyrian Orthodox) and while it might be part of the Greek Orthodox bible there are no readings from it included in the lectionary of the Greek Orthodox church. Furthermore, the Ethiopian Bible includes a number of additional books in its New Testament, which are placed after Revelation. In the first millennium, there were also several different orderings of the New Testament. A quite common pattern was gospels, epistles, Acts and Revelation. The Cheltenham canon, hailing from North Africa, has the ordering: gospels, Pauline epistles, Acts, Revelation, Johannine and Petrine epistles. The Apostolic canons give this ordering for the New Testament:

Our own books, that is, those of the New Testament, are: the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; fourteen Epistles of Paul; two Epistles of Peter; three of John; one of James, and one of Jude. Two Epistles of Clement, and the Constitutions of me Clement, addressed to you Bishops, in eight books, which are not to be published to all on account of the mystical things in them. And the Acts of us the Apostles.

No sign of Revelation but ending with Acts. According to the Muratorian Fragment, which probably belongs in the fourth century, the New Testament structure is as follows: gospels, Johannine epistles, Acts, Paul's epistles, Jude, 2 epistles of John, Wisdom of Solomon, Revelation and Apocalypse of Peter. Indeed a number of ancient New Testament lists include either Wisdom of Solomon and/or Sirach. A list included in the 6th century Codex Claromontanus renders the New Testament thus - gospels, Pauline epistles, Petrine epistles, James, Johannine epsitles, Jude, Barnabas, Revelation, Acts and then Shepherd of Hermas, Acts of Paul, to conclude with Apocalypse of Peter. Finally the New Testament according to the Codex Sinaiticus is ordered as follows: gospels, Pauline epistles, Acts, James, Petrine epistles, Johannine epsitles, Jude, Revelation, Barnabas to conclude with Shepherd of Hermas.

In other words, there were many variant forms of the New Testament at the time the Tanakh was being shaped. None of these New Testament forms influenced the shaping of the Tanakh and none, including the modern standard variant, were influenced by the Tanakh. To try, as Van Pelt does, to affirm an underlying unity of structure to both collections and that this structuring unity is a sign of the overall harmony of the Christian (Protestant) bible seriously misrepresents, distorts the facts. It is a falsehood. Furthermore it is an act of biblical imperialism and supersessionism. It usurps the Tanakh of Judaism as Christian scripture, something it has never been throughout its history. It then uses this Tanakh authority to thus assert a supersessionist claim for the modern standard Protestant bible, not only over the Tanakh of Judaism but also over the other Christian bibles, past and present. Van Pelt's biblical theology is nothing more than biblical imperialism.

A Case of Christian Biblical Imperialism

The other day I had some time to kill in town before my bus out to Uni and so I went browsing in bookshops, as you do. In my browsings I discovered the The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation. It's put out by Priests for Equality and appears to draw on the use of scriptures in the actual worship of LGBT people who are part of Dignity in the USA:

The project began in 1988, when Priests for Equality received permission to use inclusive language texts developed by Dignity, San Francisco. We distributed them to our constituency; their feedback spurred us to revise the texts significantly--revisions that reflected their actual use in the very settings they were being used: college campuses, parishes, chapels, houses of formation, convents, religious communities and living rooms.

Priests for Equality went on to create a two-volume set of daily lectionary readings, and again revised its three-year Sunday lectionaries, to much acclaim. But the demand for an inclusive language version of the complete New Testament began to grow, and we happily undertook the project. In all, The Inclusive New Testament took seven years and the work of many dedicated individuals to complete, and was published in 1994.

So this Bible seems to be a grassroots queer-shaped Catholic Bible and one I will add to my collection. At the same time, this Bible, no doubt well-intentioned set off alarm bells for me as I examined the Table of Contents. Instead of the usual Old Testament and New Testament demarcation it coined the term Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament. The Hebrew Scriptures were then subdivided into Torah, Prophets and Writings. In other words the Old Testament was set out according to the ordering and divisions of the Jewish Bible or TaNaKh. TaNaKh stands for the three divisions of the Jewish Bible: Torah (the 5 books of Moses), Nebiim or Prophets (which includes Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, plus the prophetic books Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve), and Kethubim or Writings which includes the rest of the Hebrew canon ordered from Psalms to Chronicles and including Ruth, Daniel and Esther (without the Greek material added to these books but included in both the Gereek and Latin bibles). Furthermore, the Inclusive Bible adds to the Writings a subsection titled Apocryphal Writings, which includes the deutero-canonical works: Tobit, Judith, 1 & 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach/Ecclesiasticus. There didn't seem to be any sign of (1) Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah.

So what are my concerns? Most importantly, this bible has engaged in a classic case of supersessionism or Christian biblical imperialism. The Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible of Judaism is not and never has been the Old Testament of Christianity and to represent it as such, especially incorporating the deutero-canonical books as a subsection of the Writings, is no more than a pious and inclusive fraud and treats Judaism with gross disrespect. I repeat, the Tanakh has never been the Old Testament of Christianity, least of all Catholic Christianities. The Old Testament has always been structured as Torah/Pentateuch, Historical books, Wisdom books and Prophetic books (which includes Daniel). Some Roman Catholic bibles put 1 & 2 Maccabees after the Prophets, others include them in the Historical books, which is where my Orthodox Study Bible puts them. Both the King James bible and Luther's German bible restrict the Old Testament to the books of the Hebrew bible but with the Christian ordering above and locate the Roman deuterocanonical books in a separate collection called the Apocrypha ,which also includes texts from the Greek and Slavonic bibles such as 1 & 2 Esdras (4 Ezra), Psalm 151, Prayer of Manasseh (none of which are part of The Inclusive Bible's Apocrypha). So this Inclusive Bible is very much a hybrid, if not a dog's breakfast.

It is also supersessionist because it reinscribes the Bible of Judaism as the Old Testament of Christianity, the natural companion to the New Testament. However the New Testament is more companion to the Greek bible which is the canon that has shaped all Christian Old Testaments, east and west. If there is a companion volume to the Tanakh it is more likely the Mishnah. The Midrashim might also be seen as more a companion to the Tanakh than the New Testament and certainly the Zohar. No doubt the terminology and ordering deployed for the Old Testament in The Inclusive Bible were meant with the best of intentions and as a mark of respect for Judaism but it, in effect, is an act of biblical imperialism.

It is also an act of biblical imperialism vis a vis other forms of Christianity as well as an act of collective memory loss by Roman Catholic communities. The so-called Hebrew scriptures of The Inclusive Bible represent no more or less than the standard Roman Catholic Old Testament. However this terminology and ordering obscure that fact and distort the real history of the Old Testament in the Roman Church and Western Christendom as well as continuing to effectively sever the relationship with the Greek Bible which furthermore remains normative for the Eastern Churches. The Inclusive Bible, by claiming a Hebrew priority for its Old Testament, thus exists in an imperialistic relationship to the other Churches of Christendom. There is an irony, of course, here. The standard Protestant Old Testament makes the same imperialistic and supersessionist claim especially when the Apocrypha are removed leaving it to stand with just the New Testament. This has been the norm for most English (derived) Protestant bibles for over two centuries. The US is the Protestant society par excellence. That The Inclusive Bible is a product of US Roman Catholicism attests to the success of Protestant biblical imperialism, a success that has generated a new and imitative imperialism in reverse.