Being Honest About the Bible, Pt. 3 - One Book, Two Views

In my second post in this series, I mentioned that the late Yale historian, Jaroslav Pelikan’s title question, Whose Bible Is It, could be taken in more than one way. In that post, I tried to begin an initial conversation about the differences between the Christian Old Testament and the Jewish Tanakh, especially focusing on the question of hermeneutics (i.e interpretation for those of you who do not like flowery words). In this post, I want to focus not on two books per se – although one could rhetorically make that point - but two views of the same book.

Julie Galambush, who teaches at William and Mary has written an amazing introductory text for anyone who wants to seriously study the New Testament especially in our interfaith age where religious pluralism and the ensuing dialogues are leading to the mutual transformation of all of our particular faiths. The book is titled The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book.

The book itself emerged out of a series of study groups on the New Testament led by Gallambush at Temple Bet Aviv in Columbia, Maryland. The study sessions jokingly dubbed by one participant as “New Testament for Jewish Dummies” sought to introduce these texts to members of the synagogue who mostly did not own, nor had they ever read the New Testament.

Galambush, a Jewish convert, who previously was an ordained American Baptist clergy stands in a unique position to bridge the interpretive gap between these two communities.

Galambush prefaces her introductory chapter with a quote from Jewish Elder and Professor Leo Baeck:

The New Testament is a Jewish book…A Jewish spirit and none other lives in it…Jewish faith and Jewish hope, Jewish suffering and Jewish distress, Jewish knowledge and Jewish expectations. Judaism may not pass it by, not forsake it, nor wish to give up all the claims here. Here, too Judaism should comprehend and take more of what is its own.

Galumbush affirms Baeck’s proposition that the New Testament, which in truth did not exist except as a series of texts for the early Christian Jewish community, was written by Jewish writers. She, however also suggests that much of it was written to be read by Gentiles.

This is particularly important to recognize. In the early First Century synagogue communities there were at least three parties. The largest group was traditional Jews. The remaining community was Jewish as well but with a Christian point of view, i.e. Jews who preached one way or another identification of Christ with messianic images. Not Jewish Christians, the group is more properly understood as Christian Jews.

Prophetic visions had anticipated in these “end times” the turning of Gentiles to the Jewish idea of God and so among the Christian Jews, the small community split apart over the issue of how these Gentile converts might act out their new found faith. Were they required to keep kosher? Must males be circumcised? For the most part, the writers of the New Testament were representative of the more liberal faction.

I have spoken more than once of the need to distinguish between the early Jesus movement as a Jewish sect and the later Jesus movement as a Hellenistic pagan cult. This transformation happened over many years and involved several factors including the general expulsion of Christian Jews from synagogues, the growth of primarily Gentile ekklesia (which in their beginnings functioned as Jewish not Christian institutions) and the emergence of a second generation of Jesus followers who interpreted the meaning of his mission in Gentile terms.

Particularly important is the fact that in the rhetoric of the various texts, statements that were initially written as descriptions of inter-Jewish conflict became after the “reluctant parting” statements that expressed inter-faith hostilities. Soon the one pluralist religion became two competing faiths. Differences which originally were understood to be talking about the conflict between what might be called (depending on where one stood) “good Jews” and “bad Jews” became conflicts between “good Christians” and “bad Jews.” We have ample examples of passages where the New Testament was later read as condemning the Jewish nation minimally as obsolete, more strongly as perverse.

Consequences of the morphing of a Jewish text into a Christian book are well known. But several scholars have recently turned their attention to the recovery of the Jewish background of Jesus and the texts themselves. I have mentioned in particular Paula Fredricksen who teaches at Boston University who I have found most helpful in this regard.

Galumbush’s text is written to be an introductory resource and following preface materials, the bulk of the chapters take each of the New Testament books and engages in what James Carroll calls a “deeper reading.”

For this post, it is sufficient to examine one example. Galumbush’s chapter on Hebrews created for me a paradigm shift allowing me to see the text in a whole new way - if you will, with Jewish eyes.

Hebrews has traditionally been read by later Christians as drawing serious contrasts between our two faiths. In Jesus, (read “in Christianity”) we have a new high priest. Different than the traditional high priest (read “in Judaism”) we have something far better. Drawing on the Platonic distinction between the spiritual, i.e. the perfect forms and the material i.e. copies of the forms, in Christ (again read “in Christianity”) we have a true form. Traditionally, (read “in Judaism”) we have a poor copy. The analogy continues contrasting imperfect sacrifices which must be made over and over again with the one perfect sacrifice made by Christ (of himself) once and for all.

The argumentation in Hebrews is difficult and obscure. Galumbush notes that “Hebrews combines the Platonic allegorizing of Philo with the sectarian exclusiveness of Qumran.”

Galambush suggests that we read a little deeper and indeed she finds in Hebrews a struggle taking place not between Christians and Jews (it is too early for that) but conflict happening across Jewish lines.

Galambush notes that finally, we don’t have enough data to assign dates to the text or for that matter audience, location or author. However, she builds for me a tentative case that does seem to reflect several key points from the text. Speaking in the very first verse where it says that God spoke to our ancestors, the text seems to point to a Jewish audience. Given that much of the discussion comparing priesthoods would be unnecessary if the book was written after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE., this fact also points to an earlier dating

Again arguing for a Jewish audience, Galumbush notes that the author expects some familiarity with Jewish tradition. She writes:

The metaphors assume the readers Jewish identity. They are told that just as Jesus had to suffer crucifixion “outside the city gate, so they too must “go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured.” The image is drawn from Israel’s wilderness wanderings when the unclean were sent outside the camp. Hebrew’s audience is currently inside the camp but must voluntarily put itself outside. Such imagery makes no sense if the text is addressed to Gentiles who are already outside the camp. Hebrews addresses insiders who the author believes must choose between inclusion in the larger Jewish community and a new identity “outside the camp.” Like the Gospel of Matthew, Hebrews seems poised at a moment of realization that those who follow this way will pay the cost of becoming outsiders to their own tradition.

Evangelical Christians have found in Hebrews the discussion of Jesus as a priest sanction for atonement theology that speaks of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice. Galumbush rightly points out that this connection is problematic. “The similarity between the Roman’s execution of Jesus and the levitical priest’s job of performing temple sacrifices is not obvious, and it is worth considering why the author would connect the two in the first place.”

Later in her chapter, she points out that “Hebrew’s elaborate and lengthy discussion of Jesus’ priesthood is in some ways peripheral to the author’s intentions.” I would likewise point out that while sacrifice is discussed in general, there is no detail about types of sacrifice, its purpose or practically how this image squares at all with the historical realities of the lynching of Jesus by Roman occupying forces.

Hebrews is not quite a letter, rather a sermon out to encourage those who have as she indicates become not so sure in light of delayed expectations that this Christian stuff is all that it is cracked up to be. The technical term for this rhetorical genre would be an “encomium.” Facing growing conflict and perhaps exclusion from traditional practice, Hebrews urges steadfast endurance - waiting for things yet unseen, but promised.

In the text, traditional Jewish images are turned on their head and spiritualized. Gallumbush writes, “Hebrews accomplishes a great displacement of Jewish symbols and traditions. None mean what they have traditionally meant. Abraham becomes a man who desired, not the Holy Land, but “a better country, i.e. a heavenly one.” (11:16) Temple, covenant, Torah and land become mere way stations on the path toward heavenly reality.”

This theological move is not uncommon among the various Judaisms of the day. But again at the point where separation becomes unavoidable, tradition becomes not only spiritualized but its material form becomes demonized.

Galumbush holds out the vision that while the separation can not be reversed, it may in fact (seen through Jewish eyes) be taken in a different light.

In the meantime, I think it behooves us as Christians to take special care to not simply repeat the vilifications that have been the basis of 19 centuries of persecution. Rosemary Ruether in her landmark book, Faith and Fratricide speaks of strategies that can go a long way to avoid this tendency for us to unconsciously ignore these elements in our scriptures, our worships practices and our commentaries. The addition of the simple word, “some” as in “some of the Jews” may go a long way to erasing stereotypes. Rather than speak of the high priests and elders of the nation, or to blythly repeat charactures of Pharisees, scribes and other parties of the day, we might simply read the text to say “some of the leadership”. The Christian-Jewish dichotomy can also be recast in contemporary terms. So in John’s Doubting Thomas story instead of saying the disciples are meeting behind locked doors because the Jews are out to get them, maybe we should read it to say that those who are hunting for Jesus’ followers come from the district committee on ministry!

See Also:

Being Honest About the Bible, Pt 1 - Irony

Being Honest About the Bible, pt 2 - Two Books

Being Honest About The Bible, Pt. 2 - Two Books

Two Books

Now that my family castle lies mostly abandoned except for occasional visits from my sons, I have created what I call a shrine room. Hindu friends know well what I am talking about as their homes all have one even if it is only a closet. This room is a special place for meditation, contemplation and prayer. In mine, there is a Cross surrounded by candles on a table with a chalice and plate, there is a kneeling bench, and there is a relief sculpture rendering of St. Francis hanging on the wall next to a framed copy of his popular prayer. But there is also a Buddha box where Kwan Yin lives in my house. If I was really serious, then I would close the doors and let her sleep during the late evening. I forget, so she sits there staring at the darkness all night long – I need to repent of that breach in my spiritual practices.

Now I can hear my fundamentalist and more conservative colleagues here in 7 villages saying “I told you so.” This self-proclaimed post-modern inclusivist worships pagan Gods. First, I don’t worship Kwan Yin any more than I worship St. Francis. Also, even if we want to quibble with words, Kwan Yin is not a God, but technically a Bodhisattva, a manifestation of the Buddha (sort of like John the Baptiser was a manifestation of Elijah) whose compassion will not let her claim her place in Nirvana where suffering ceases. As she waits until all can enter together, she returns to a life of service. Not a bad idea to chew on for a while.

There is another contemplation station in my shrine room which tries to hold symbolically some of the questions emerging in this essay. On the top of a chest of drawers, I have left two books standing side by side. There is one of my father’s copies of the Oxford Annotated NRSV Christian Bible. It stays in the shrine room. I have my own well worn copy in my study. Standing next to it is one of my copies of the Tanakh. This is the Jewish Publication Society translation and it was my study text somewhat ironically for my seminary basic course in the Old Testament.

Jaraslov Pelikan’s posthumously published study of the development of the canon(s) and the emergence of historical criticism is titled Whose Bible Is It? It raises more than one provocative question about the relationship between these two texts and the two faiths that claim them as holy writ. I will return to Pelikan soon. First let me step back a minute.

We might see in the relationship between Mark Twain’s two popular books, the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn an admittedly weak but still instructive analogy. Is the first book simply preparation for the latter. Can one read the latter seriously without knowing the first? Aren’t they really a two volume set or do they stand each on their own bottom.

In this essay, I am going to bracket the question of canon although I will come back to it in another post. If my display was accurate, then there would be at least two versions of the Jewish Bible and a whole bunch of Christian Bibles all claiming in the context of their particular communities to be the real deal. We might start with the Samaritan scriptures which only contain the first five books of the Pentateuch, nothing more. The Christian canon, which during the Reformation became for us Protestants the Catholic Bible, was grounded in the Septuagint translation of traditional Hebrew and Aramaic texts into Greek. Reformers chose to “fix” their Old Testament canon based on what they found in European synagogues and temples of their day. Those texts generally drew on the Masoretic materials written mostly in Hebrew and so therefore both sides of the struggle we now call the reformation ended up with different lists with different understandings of differing authority. Most of the churches in the East have even longer lists of what is considered scripture. As United Methodists (thank you, Andy), who affirm the Holy Catholic (i.e. universal) church, we rightly stand before questions of what finally constitutes scripture acknowledging some ambiguity.

But, instead of talking about lists, I want to talk about interpretive perspectives and raise the question of what might be a responsible hermeneutic in our day as we move into a more pluralistic age.

Most of my Jewish brothers and sisters would say that the core of their scriptures is the first five books, the Torah. We share a polite fiction in that we talk of these books as the Books of Moses. But, modern historical critical methods clearly demonstrate that Moses could not have been the author of most of what we find there and that these texts represent redactive work by scribes who sought to make a particular point to the Jewish people on the other side of exile in Babylon.

People note that some of the most interesting threads found in these first texts are truncated, cut short if you will and many originally continued past this canonical stopping point on into the next several books. This is to say that the somewhat artificial delineation of Torah at the end of Deuteronomy 34 represents a canonical decision initially highlighting the priesthood and its centralized temple over the monarchy, most particularly the Judean monarchy of the House of David. Following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE, the interpretation of the first five books came to be focused through the work of the rabbinic leadership on the interpretation and application of the 613 commandments found therein.

Of course, the Jewish laws while certainly prescriptive are also descriptive of the working out of the underlying contract(s) between G-d (Yahweh) and the sons and daughters of Israel. Hermeneutically, we should imagine a set of concentric circles with Torah in the middle and the prophetic texts and the later writings clarifications on the requirements of covenant. Finally, over time the Talmud emerges as both an archive of the long history of argumentation about these requirements and as light to the contemporary applications of these ancient covenantal arrangements.

Pelikan’s title question can be taken in a couple of ways, even though he concentrates on the interpretation of the ancient Jewish texts. I have written earlier about the distinction that must be drawn between the Jesus movement as a Palestinian Jewish Sect and the later Jesus movement as a Hellenistic Pagan Cult. Clearly from its inception, the Jesus movement was a Jewish movement. Clearly, by the third century of the Common Era, it was not, although it had appropriated the Jewish scriptures stripped of both a vision of a peculiar people and a loyalty to a holy land.

Scholars talk about 2^nd Temple Judaism as a time of Judaisms, a variety of formal sects, parties and movements. Each in their own way, they resolved the cognitive dissonance experienced by all Jews in that day where tradition tells one that the nation will be restored, that Jerusalem is the navel of the world, and that all the nations will be led to worship God by the sons and daughters of Israel who are a holy priesthood. But in actuality, reality is very different; the capital of the known world was Rome not Jerusalem.

Josephus named several formal parties, each who resolved this cognitive dissonance in different ways. There were the Sadducees who accommodated Roman rule by concentrating on maintaining the priesthood, even though it had become an office that was bought and sold. The Essenes, in protest, withdrew to the desert waiting a time of the restoration of the temple beyond its present corruption. Pharisees stressed the application of the law in the lives of everyday people. The Zealots represented the insurgency against the empire. The Jesus movement, like many others, participated in the anticipation of the popular apocalyptic interventions by Yahweh and the coming of the undisputed sovereignty of God.

After the destruction of the temple, only the rabbis and their followers and the members of the Jesus movement were left. Zealots were wiped out in the fighting. The Essenes fought a last battle at Masada, Sadducees receded quietly into the background. There was no temple, there was no high priest. Both remaining movements were found in the synagogues operating in growing contention with each other. Eventually, there would emerge what Julie Galambush speaks of as The Reluctant Parting. While both groups shared the messianic expectations of the day, more and more traditional Jews were increasingly unwilling to affix the messianic identity to one executed by the empire. Christian Jews were more and more isolated within the community.

The relationship of the Jewish people to the Gentile nations was a central feature of the apocalyptic visions ripe in the synagogues throughout the empire. Pagan “God-fearers” drawn to the Jewish ethical practices regularly attended to the activities of the gathered communities. While traditional Jews became less and less interested in the claims of their Jesus movement colleagues, the converts became more and more part of these new sectarian teachings.

The picture is more even complex for within the Christian Jewish circles, questions of the requirements of the traditional Jewish laws divided the movement. Our New Testament is primarily written by those like Paul who took a more inclusive perspective. We can only see traces remaining of the other side, perhaps in the polemics against the Ebionite community in the emerging Christian history.

We can see the outlines of these factions in The Gospel of Matthew which closes with what has been traditionally called “The Great Commission.” My reading suggests that this call to make disciples of the nations is more Jesus’ practical instructions to begin to tutor this emerging group of Gentile proselytes than a new mission statement for the church. It is the recognition that there is a new rabbinic school in town besides the traditions of Hillel and Shammai. Get these folks into training.

But the real question is “Training for what?” I am struck that in Matthew, the criteria about whether one makes it into heaven is not whether one is formally a disciple of Christ described in chapter 28, but is found earlier in chapter 25. There clearly what makes a difference is how one relates to the poor and the marginalized. If one is going to talk about a Great Commission, then for me one would be better to look at these earlier texts.

The deliberations in the First North African Council held in Carthage is 395 CE represented the initial draft of a New Testament canon and eventually what had been understood as previous scripture was gathered and added to the official list to become the Christian Old Testament. More important than the list was the new hermeneutic where at the center of the concentric circles the affirmation of Jesus as Messiah replaced Torah. These first five books became less central and eventually the prophetic writings were interpreted not as commentary on the Law of Moses, but predictions about the coming of Jesus.

Over time, we now have two books. A cursory look at the order of included texts within the Christian canon dramatically makes this point. The prophesy of Malachi, the last chapter in volume one, if you will, is now simply a turn of the page away from the opening verses of Matthew which pick up the messianic expectations talked about by the prophet. The arrangement of texts in the Tanakh reveals no such sub-text.

So we are left with the dilemma, Whose Bible is it? The coming liturgical season intensifies these questions. When we soon read Isaiah with his discussion of the “suffering servant,” is this about Jesus or is it about Israel? Maybe it is about Job. Moreover, in light of the fact of the holocaust, might we as Christians answer such a question differently in our day than in previous generations?

See Also:

Being Honest About the Bible, Pt 1 - Irony

Being Honest About the Bible, Pt. 3 - One Book, Two Views

Being Honest About Scripture, Pt.1 - Irony

The Irony of Scripture

Several pastors who have gone on to their reward are sitting around the local watering hole in heaven. Yes, this is not a baptismal font. It is a watering hole. It is heaven after all. They are commiserating about some of their tougher assignments as clergy in divisive congregations. The apostle Paul is standing nearby and he has been eavesdropping. He joins the conversation and begins to talk about his experience with one of his charges located in Corinth. One pastor interrupts him saying that the group already knew the story as they had read his correspondence.

Paul sits dumbfounded asking, “How did you get hold of those old letters?” When the group tells him that they are part of Holy Scripture, he shakes his head in amazement.

When Paul instructs his protégé Timothy about scripture, he is pointing him toward the collected texts of the nation. He is referring to long narrative accounts of the people of God struggling to be in covenant with Yahweh. He also is most likely recommending the moving poetry of the prophets who give voice to the Word of God. That is the scripture that “is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”

How could anyone consider Paul’s pastoral letters scripture?

There is a certain irony at play in our Christian scriptures. A comparison of the two parts of the Christian Bible is instructive. Clearly, the writings of the Old Testament are drawn from foundational documents originally written for an enduring community. They relate the history of that community, the eidetic myths and the foundational covenants. The oracles of the “prophets,” many written in the form of briefs for a law suit, rehearse the struggle to be faithful to those covenants. The “writings” complement the cultic dimensions of the symbolic life of the people as they struggle to sustain those covenants.

The New Testament writings are remarkably different. They are primarily tracts, sermons, pastoral letters, or reports of obscure visions - all created in the context of a loose set of apocalyptic expectations. While the Old Testament was meant to be an enduring document for a people on a long journey, the New Testament is more rightly understood as occasional writings meant to nurture a community that expects radical change – an urgent end to the present order of things. Elaine Pagels helpfully speaks of these texts as temporary “war literature” whose intent is to sustain an interim community through a transition time until the certain victory is claimed. In this sense, the New Testament only became community scripture much later and when it did, it required a radical reinterpretation of the intent and the images of the original writers.

So when we honestly look at the Christian Bible, it is particularly ironic that we find in our Old Testament the story of a religious community’s foundational writings appropriated and retrofitted to seemingly predict the events and claims made in the New Testament, a use never intended by its original writers, and we find in the New Testament writings occasional texts which over time became transformed into community foundational literature, a function they were never meant to play either.

Recently several posts have emerged around the question of whether our present canon is inspired by God. Frankly, it is not obvious to me what people are saying when they make such a claim. Paul certainly argued that the ancient Israelite texts were inspired by God. But, I find little evidence to suggest that the latter Bible writers made such a claim for themselves. Now they certainly thought that what they were writing was important, maybe pretty good stuff. In that way one might claim that they were inspired to create the texts, like a moving lyric might be crafted by an inspired musician. One might even say that God had a hand in the creative process. Clearly over time these texts were considered by the church to be inspired, but in general the original writers forwarded no such point.

I deeply suspect that what most people mean when they say that scripture is inspired is to say that God wrote the words. But in truth, only Muslims have historically made the claim that the very words of their sacred writings were dictated.

The Qur’an speaks of the three Abrahamic faiths as “people of the book.” In fact, both Christianity and Judaism are more appropriately understood as people of the books.

In the late sixties, the staff of the community renewal movement that I worked with on the Westside of Chicago developed a concept they called the “briefcase library.” This was a list of some 20 books recommended for reading and study by persons working with that group to further racial justice and congregational revitalization. It was a compendium of foundational writings that formed the basis of the common mind of that movement and documented the essential concepts under girding their methods and strategies. In the same fashion, the book, we Christians speak of as the Bible, is not really a coherent singular piece of writing, but is better thought of as an essential library recommended by the church as the foundational writings necessary for the ongoing formation and edification of the members of the Christian movement.

Moreover, the writings, we Christians call the “Old Testament,” originally were not a book at all, but a series of scrolls sometimes preserved in jars, at other times stored on shelves. The Christian New Testament as it began to become canon, originally circulated in codex form, i.e. folded papyrus sheets. But in the beginning, it was circulated in the forms in which it was written, a series of religious tracts and pastoral letters. These circulated for over 100 years before they were edited together as a collection and only much later were they bound under one cover where we might speak of them as a book.

While there have historically been recurring efforts to harmonize the images and stories in the texts of our scriptures, honesty requires the recognition not only of particular differences and apparent contradictions, but moreover the recognition of an underlying antagonism between various factions in the movement revealed in the various texts. We should not be surprised; the letters of Paul directly speak of the tensions and controversies in the early Christian movement. I believe that one can find in the gospel of Matthew concrete allusions critical of Paul, whose theological view of the requirements of the Jewish Law differs markedly from Matthew’s own view. John’s caricature of Peter as a disciple who always seems to miss the point and is always a little slower than the “beloved Disciple” speaks for itself.

So what are we to make of these differences? I fervently believe that in today’s world, where pluralism in no longer just an idea but a lived reality, an honest recognition of the original pluralism in the New Testament texts can pave the way for greater understanding and dialogue.

I became interested in how we could think honestly about matters of faith and religion in the late 1960s when I first encountered British scholar John A.T. Robinson’s short book, Honest to God. In the book, now in its 40th year edition, Robinson traced the theological movements of the 20^th Century and called for recognizing the need for new and different patterns of thought about the notion of God more relevant to the “one-story” universe, the context in which we regularly thought about every other subject but religion. Robinson’s call for honesty served as a paradigm shift for my own theological and religious development over the years, although with the advent of the diverse theological movements among women and non-Western Christians in the last half of the 20^th century, most of us have traveled far beyond the places that Robinson envisioned. The virtue of intellectual honestly in our studies and reflection however, seems just as relevant today as it did then.

In much the same vein, John B. Cobb Jr. recently published a book called Becoming a Thinking Christian. In it, he sets forth the challenge to local congregations to engage in a spirit of theological reflection that both affirms the Christian tradition, yet also recognizes the perspectives of the post-modern world in which we find ourselves. Cobb calls for theology that does not require that we as 21st century, scientific, globally concerned individuals “check our minds” at the door whenever we reflect on matters of religion and faith.

Photo Used With Permission: I-stock Photo, jbarnettphotography