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 2nd 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
No comments:
Post a Comment