The Bible Beyond Its Gilt-Edged Pages
A friend who is not entirely comfortable with my philosophical take on religion was wondering about lectures I am soon to give, which will make clear that one can take the Bible either literally or seriously. The title of the series is Seeking Truth Beyond Belief.
The friend predicts that what I say may raise more than a few hackles. She is no doubt right. There are few forces as powerful as religious conditioning.
Sunday school and catechism classes have done their work well in sowing uncritical certitude in the soil of innocence. Yet the worst of it is that captains of industry and their puppet politicians do not hesitate in their ignorance to misinterpret a Bible passage to their own advantage, especially on such topics as economic theory and climate change:
"God is good and will take care of us" (translation: global warming is a hoax); "the poor we have always with us" (translation: they should suck it up); "Jesus is God's only son" (translation: those who don't believe this are doomed). Such propositions are reinforced homiletically and liturgically and so become the basic "facts" of Christianity in many of its iterations.
Then along come those of us perhaps raised in similar faith traditions but whose subsequent education led us to see that uninformed proof-texting of the Bible yields no such "facts." Much of my adult life has been devoted to the research and analysis of biblical texts, having first learned to read them in their original languages.
That experience taught me to treat the Bible for what it actually is -- a somewhat arbitrary and indiscriminate collection of ancient texts sometimes canonized according to obvious theological bias. I came to see the Bible as an archaeologist would see a dig, treating each piece of text as if it were a discrete shard amongst other shards.
The task is several fold: to understand as best one can what exactly the text says, and how it may have been heard or read at or around the time it was written; to determine, if possible, what was the tenor of that time and the kind of situation whence the text may have come and maybe even why.
If the archaeologist or analyst has any kind of luck, the shards or texts begin to appear to be related one to the other in a way similar to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which, when correctly reconstructed, make an coherent picture. Sometimes, though -- especially where textual shards are concerned -- it is as if a seriously cubist painting had been sawn into small pieces and, even if put back together, its message remains ambiguous at best.
In addition, the textual analyst must always be aware of the scribal problem. The texts with which we deal were first set down at some distant time by scribes unknown to us and then copied who knows how many times over with likely errors as well as suspected alterations that may have been made to support theological or political agenda.
There is so much that anyone who conducts any kind of research does not and probably cannot know for anywhere near certain. That is very much the fact of the matter where the research of ancient texts is concerned. Questions, not answers, are the currency of this occupation.
It requires an extra dose of functional agnosticism in order to check one's own conditioning. In any event, it becomes a tender thing where research in matters touching upon personal religious beliefs is concerned. None of us sets out purposely to offend a believer's faith. But offend it we may.
People who know nothing more about the Bible than that it is a nice, leather-covered book with gilt-edged pages are wont nonetheless to quote its verses -- invariably out of context -- to support their positions, politics or prejudices. "The Bible says this. The Bible says that." The Bible says nothing. It is a collection of what other people in other ages have said, often being willing to say they heard it first from God. Therein lies a psychiatric problem.
One of my primary motivations in these years of research and publishing has been the conviction that the record where biblical texts are concerned needed to be set straight. To be sure, one doesn't make a lot of money doing that kind of work. And, as my friend warned, it is likely to make the one doing it an object of criticism, even vitriol.
A critic of mine once told me that, if I couldn't get over the "Question First" thing, I should found a movement called "Faith Killers Anonymous." [Sigh.]
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