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Second naivete
A personal scholarly trajectory regarding the historicity of ancient scriptural narrative.
Probably the most important element of C. S. Lewis’s conversion, at least in his telling of it, was that for a definite period of time between atheism and Christian faith he lived as a theist without any expectation of reward or afterlife. He knew from experience that one could believe in God, relate to God, obey the will of God just because; that is, just because God is God and one is not. Afterward, believing in the promises of Christ came with a certain sweetness but also a certain lightness or liberty: he did not feel compelled to believe, the way “God” and “pie in the sky” are conflated for so many people, but free to believe. The freedom lay in the gut-level knowledge that grace was grace, neither earned nor automatic.
I feel similarly about historical events reported in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. For a definite period of time it was not important to me whether this or that discrete happening in Scripture “really” occurred, or occurred in the precise way reported, or occurred at the time and place reported. Perhaps Job or Daniel or Esther were pious fictions; perhaps the Israelites came out of Egypt but in some far less magnificent manner; perhaps David’s many origin stories were folk tales “rightly” remembered and surely worth retelling but not exactly what we would today judge to be “historically accurate.”
My faith was not threatened by these possibilities; it still is not. I am not and never have been any kind of strict inerrantist. If it turns out that, like a nineteenth-century painting of a days-long battle, stories in Scripture are not historical in the way we use that term or measure reportage today, the sum total of my response remains a shrug of the shoulders. If you tell me that Acts and Galatians’ chronologies are finally irreconcilable, I will do well if I suppress my yawn.
As I said, though, for a period of time this was my default setting: “The following ‘historical’ passage I am about to read from the canon may or may not be ‘historical’ at all.” A giant if invisible question mark floated above the text whenever I read, heard, or taught the Bible. Let’s say this ran for about a decade, from 18 to 28 years old, roughly my undergraduate, Master’s, and beginning doctoral years.
Then a funny thing happened. The default setting slowly shifted, mostly without my knowing it. I saw firsthand how the historical-critical sausage is made. I digested a good deal of it for myself. And I came to see that the confidence with which its assured results were delivered was entirely unearned.
Lowered confidence—from dogmatic pronouncements to measured statements of relative probability based on the available evidence (often minimal to begin with)—does not mean biblical criticism should be ignored, much less that it’s all wrong. But what it does mean, or at least has meant for me, is that it need not be treated with submission, docility, deference, or fear. The study of Scripture, whether secular or spiritual, is a humanistic enterprise. It involves interpretation, wisdom, good judgment, good humor, humility, and dispassionate assessment. Very nearly every one of the questions it poses admits of numerous good-faith answers, just as very nearly every one of its considered conclusions admits of good-faith disputation. It is healthy when it tolerates and nurtures dissent, unhealthy when majority positions calcify into dogmas that define the well-policed borders of “serious” scholarship. The one thing to hang your hat on in this field is that something “everybody knows” today will be contested, qualified, replaced, or surpassed in the next generation.
With the following result: The question mark has, for me, dissolved into thin air. I now read the Pastorals as Saint Paul’s without a troubled scholarly conscience; I read Acts as penned in the early 60s by Saint Luke; I read Daniel and Esther and Ruth as historical characters; the same goes for the patriarchs and Moses and Aaron and Miriam and Joshua. It all happened, just as the text says it did. Not because I’m ignorant of research that suggests otherwise; not because I’m a fundamentalist who needs it to be so, lest my faith’s house of cards tumble to the ground. No, it’s because I know what it’s like to be a Christian who supposed otherwise, whose faith was as untroubled then as it is now. I’ve weighed the evidence and found it, for the most part, wanting. Wanting, that is, in terms of compelling my and all others’ uncritical obedience to purported academic consensus. (Reports of consensus being always greatly exaggerated in any case.) I could be wrong. But I’m not worried about it.
Most of all, I couldn’t care less what some expert in the field thinks about my so-called naivete. If he wags his finger at me and cites the latest peer-reviewed journal, I’ll just roll my eyes. This time I won’t be able to stifle the yawn his pronouncements so dearly deserve.
My latest: on Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis in LARB
A link to my review of Marilynne Robinson’s new book, Reading Genesis, in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
This morning The Los Angeles Review of Books published my review of Marilynne Robinson’s new book, Reading Genesis. Here are the opening two paragraphs:
MARILYNNE ROBINSON HAS always been a theologian at heart. It’s merely convention that theology today is one among dozens of specialized academic subdisciplines. If that’s what theology is, Robinson doesn’t write like it—and thank God for that. Theology’s mother tongue is prayer and confession, the language of the liturgy, but these aren’t genres so much as modes that transform disparate genres into vehicles of divine discourse. Like Jacob’s Ladder, the traffic runs both ways.
It just so happens that Robinson’s theology has taken shape in essays, novels, and prose so patient and unpatronizing that it’s embarrassing how long one sometimes takes to catch the point. She has been doing this for almost half a century. She has won all the awards, sold all the books, chatted with presidents, and garnered every laurel and medal. She has nothing to prove. And so, having just turned 80, she has chosen to mark the occasion by publishing a commentary on Genesis, the first book of the Torah.
Click here to rest the rest. (See also Francis Spufford’s review and Ezra Klein’s interview with Robinson.)
The metaphysics of historical criticism
Fifty metaphysical propositions that underwrite the practice of “historical-critical” biblical scholarship.
I, the historical critic, exist.
That is to say, my mind exists.
My mind is not deceived by a demon.
My mind is not self-deceived.
My mind has access to external reality.
External reality exists.
External reality is apt to be known by a mind like mine (and by other rational beings, should they exist).
I am a rational being, in virtue of my mind’s existence and capacity to know external reality.
My mind’s access to external reality via my rational nature is epistemically reliable.
Natural languages are, likewise, a reliable vehicle of rational pursuit of knowledge of external reality.
Natural languages are a reliable vehicle of communication between rational beings.
At least, that is, between rational beings of a shared nature.
There are rational beings of a shared nature; other minds exist besides my own.
(I can know this—I am in a position to know it, with something like certainty or at least confidence—just as I can know the foregoing propositions and many others like them.)
Mental life is linguistic and vice versa; human minds, or rational persons, communicate through natural languages.
I can (come to) know what other persons think, believe, intend, hope, or love.
I can (come to) know such things through many means, one of which is the use of a natural language.
Natural languages can be translated without substantial loss of meaning.
Rational users of natural languages are capable of mastering more than one such language.
Such mastery is possible not only of living languages but of dead languages.
Such mastery is possible not only through speaking but also through reading and writing.
Written language is not different in kind than spoken language.
The living word can be written down and understood through the eyes alone, without use of the ears or of spoken language.
The written word offers reliable access to the life—norms, beliefs, hopes, fears, behaviors, expectations, habits, virtues, vices, and more—of a culture or civilization.
This truth obtains for ancient, or long dead, cultures as for living, or contemporary, ones.
(“Truth” is a meaningful category.)
(Truth is objective, knowable, and not reducible merely to the perspective of a particular person’s mind or thought.)
(There are truths that both antedate my mind’s existence and exist independently of it.)
(The principle of non-contradiction is itself true.)
(The prior four propositions are true irrespective of any one individual’s affirmation or awareness of them, including my own.)
Records of ancient peoples’ and regions’ artifacts offer a limited but nevertheless reliable window onto their respective cultures.
Through accumulation, comparison, and interpretation of evidence, probabilities of likelihood regarding both historical events and certain cultural beliefs and practices can be reliably achieved.
The space-time continuum in which ancient peoples lived (“then and there”) is one and the same as mine (“here and now”).
The sort of events, experiences, and happenings that mark my life or the life of my culture (“here and now”) likewise marked theirs (“then and there”).
These include occurrences commonly labeled “religious” or “spiritual” or “numinous.”
Such occurrences, however labeled, are knowable and thus (re)describable without remainder in wholly natural terms.
They can be so described because religion is, without remainder, a natural phenomenon.
That is to say, as an artifact of human social life, religion is “natural” inasmuch as it is a thing that humans do, just as dancing, gambling, and wrestling are natural, inasmuch as they are things humans do.
In a second sense, too, religion is “natural”: it is a thing wholly constructed by human beings and thus without “reference” beyond the human lives that give rise to it.
There are, in a word, no gods; God does not exist.
Neither are there spirits, angels, demons, ghosts, jinn, souls, astral beings, or any other entities, living or dead, beyond this universe or however many universes there may be.
Accordingly, there are no interactions with or experiences of such beings, divine or celestial or otherwise.
Accordingly, such “beings” do not act in the world at all, for what does not exist cannot act; a nonexistent cause has nonexistent effects.
Accordingly, miracles, signs, and wonders are a figment of human imagination or an error of human memory and experience.
What happens, happens in accordance with the laws of nature recognized and tested by contemporary scientific methods and experiments.
Claims to the contrary are knowable as false in advance, prior to investigation; they are rightly ruled out without discussion.
There are always, therefore, alternative explanations in natural terms.
This principle applies to every other form of mystical or transcendent experience, whether dreams or visions or foreknowledge or prophecy or glossolalia.
The fact that many contemporary people continue both to believe in religious/spiritual realities and to claim to experience them is immaterial.
Any attempt to undertake any form of epistemic inquiry based on any other set of principles besides the foregoing ones is ipso facto unserious, unscientific, irrational, and to be dismissed with prejudice as unnecessarily metaphysical, unduly influenced by philosophical commitments, biased by metaphysics, prejudiced by religious belief, and ultimately built on unprovable assumptions rather than common sense, natural reason, and truths self-evident to all.
A test for exegesis
Is God merely a character within the text? Or also an author of the text? The difference matters for scriptural interpretation.
A simple test for any proposed reading of Scripture, but especially for those put forth by biblical scholars:
Is God understood as (presupposed to be) a living agent…
(a) within the world described by the text, whatever its genre? or
(b) both within the world of the text and behind, in, and through the text itself?
In other words, is God a character in the text? an author of the text? or both?
What I find, in far too much Christian scholarship on the Bible, is option (a). God is taken seriously as a character, an agent, a force, a presence, an actor, a protagonist—within the narrative or poetry or whatever pericope or canonical book. Apparently, for many Christian biblical scholars, that is what it means to read “theologically.” The modifier “theological” denotes a “more than humanist” or “non–methodological atheist” hermeneutic; God is not presumed to be a superstition best elided in interpretation. This principle might extend to the present, so that the God at work in the world of the text is taken to be at work in the world of the reader.
But a crucial premise has been overlooked or denied. To read in the way thus delineated is to read the Bible “like any other book,” as if its form and content, its status, were no different in kind from any other work of literature. But why, then, should you or I or the scholar give it our attention, indeed a unique attention incomparable to any other book? The answer is simple: Because, as the church confesses, what the Bible mediates or bears to us is “the word of the Lord.” The Lord God of Israel stands behind the words of the text that attest him. They are inspired by him; he is, in the phrase of St. Thomas Aquinas, their “principal author.”
If that is true—and its truth is a matter of faith, not demonstration—then it must, and invariably will, affect how one reads the text. Nor is there anything unscholarly about this. Method is apt to subject matter. The subject matter of Christian exegesis of canonical Holy Scripture is the living word of the living God to his living people: the speech of Christ to his body and bride, in the present tense.
Christian scholars should read it as such. Bracketing the text’s inspiration or divine authorship is a dodge. A reading that limits God to intratextual agent while ignoring God’s role as extratextual author is not yet theological in the fullest sense.
Exegetes, take note.
If not inerrancy or tradition … then what?
Earlier this year I wrote a couple of posts about what I call Post-Biblicism Biblicism, or PBB, a phenomenon I’ve observed among professors in theological higher ed. This post extends those reflections, only from the perspective of the pews.
Earlier this year I wrote a couple of posts about what I call Post-Biblicism Biblicism, or PBB, a phenomenon I’ve observed among professors in theological higher ed. Briefly described, PBB is the view that (a) the Bible is the church’s sole source and authority (to the exclusion of creeds, dogmas, sacred tradition, formal confessions, etc.) and (b) the Bible is at once historically, morally, and theologically flawed, such that it is not entirely trustworthy as a book (sometimes so much so that to call it “God’s word” full stop would be a “fundamentalist” mistake). Yet persons who hold this view not only (c) remain Christian in (d) low-church, evangelical, or non-denominational ecclesial traditions, but (e) spend their entire lives studying, teaching, and attempting to “accurately” interpret every jot and tittle of the biblical text.
You can go read the original posts for my confusion about and critique of this phenomenon. It seems obvious to me that one of those five aspects has to give way for the sake of any kind of personal or theological coherence. Mostly I experience PBB as a source of befuddlement.
Recently a friend made an observation about a similar trend, only this time from the perspective of the pews. And I think he’s right. This phenomenon, moreover, is more than befuddling. It’s troubling, saddening, and urgent in its pastoral need.
Suppose you’re a normie biblicist Christian. You partake of what scholars call a “first naïveté” in relation to the Bible. It’s an open book. It’s crystal clear. Any sincere literate person could sit down with the Bible and understand it for himself. And either (a) all Christian communities do thus correctly understand it, at least in terms of the basics, or (b) your community (your denomination, your congregation) has got the goods—i.e., the proper understanding of the Bible’s essential teaching about God, Christ, the gospel, etc. Let’s call this general posture Perspicuous Inerrant Biblicism, or PIB for short.
Now let’s say your PIB-ness gets complicated, by honest means. Either (a) you come to believe that the Bible isn’t so clear as you once thought. Not that it’s unclear per se; but you realize that you, the individual layman, are not in a position to answer some of the most pressing—and contested—moral and theological questions about which Christians turn to the Bible for answers. Or (b) you come to believe that inerrancy, understood as factual-error-free, documentary-style verbatim historical reportage, isn’t plausible as an account of what the Bible is or how it works. In short, having lobbed off the P and the I, the B goes with them: no more biblicism for you.
It seems to me there are only three or four routes to go from here. One is to lose your faith: if it’s PIB or bust, then you’ve just read your way out of Christianity. Another is to DIY it: Christianity becomes whatever you say it is, because the meaning of your unclear-cum-imperfect Bible is up for grabs, and no one else is in a position to say you’re wrong. A third route is to glom onto a charismatic, entrepreneurial, but ultimately arbitrary pastor or personal figure who presents a version of Christian faith that you find appealing. (Now is this person, even if sincere, also DIY-ing it? Yes. So options two and three are variations on the same approach.)
The fourth and final option is to turn to the church. On this view, the church is both mater et magistra: mother and teacher of all the baptized. She, in the person of her ordained leaders, is authorized by Christ to speak on his behalf, vested with his authority. She it is who has passed on the gospel from the apostles to you, down through the centuries. She it is who has kept inviolate the faith once for all delivered to the saints. She it is who stands as mediator between you and the apostolic preaching of the good news. Indeed, she it is who stands as mediator between you and Christ. (She is, after all, his body and bride.) And when, not if, you or anyone else has questions about the faith or about the teaching of Scripture, she is there to answer them.
The term for this role is magisterium, or the teaching office of the church. To turn or submit to this fourth option, beyond biblicism, is to recognize that the church has the authority, by the power and guidance of the Spirit of Christ, to speak decisively and definitively on matters of faith and morals, particularly when these concern disputed interpretations of Scripture and/or pressing questions of the day. This understanding of ecclesial authority was axiomatic for the church before the sixteenth century, and since then then has remained the majority view of the global church.
Leave to the side whether it is true. Here is the point I want to make.
Is there any serious option for someone who no longer affirms Perspicuous Inerrant Biblicism, but who nevertheless wants to remain a morally and intellectually serious Christian, other than this last, fourth route—i.e., submitting to sacred tradition and entrusting oneself to the Spirit-derived and Spirit-led authority of the historic magisterial church?
I don’t see how there is. Because if biblicism isn’t true, and/or strict inerrancy isn’t true, and/or strong perspicuity isn’t true—and remember, we’re merely stipulating these as possibilities—then either Christianity isn’t true, or Christianity can be whatever you want it to be, or Christianity is already something solid, defined, and given, and where you find it is in the authoritative church of magisterial catholic tradition.
I’m trying to be as ecumenical as possible here; at the very least, not only Rome but Constantinople and (I think) Canterbury could affirm the account so far. Perhaps others. In any case, I’m looking in the other direction.
I know countless books, together with countless friends, neighbors, pastors, and family members who’ve read said books, that suppose what I’ve outlined here so far is untrue. That is, they not only recognize but actively engender the loss of ordinary believers’ first naïveté in relation to the Bible. They want to rid lay Christians of their commitments to inerrancy and perspicuity. And yet, for reasons I cannot discern, they appear to continue to be bound by a sort of persistent or lingering biblicism—even though they have explicitly kicked out the legs of the biblicist stool. For biblicism doesn’t work if the Bible is not radically perspicuous and absolutely inerrant. Yet these writers offer their books for the edification of the faithful, only (apparently) to be surprised when their readers understand them perfectly well, and accordingly leave the faith.
Christians, in order to be Christians, have to put their trust in something. And that “something” must include what is intermediate and not only what is immediate. Obviously our ultimate hope and faith are in God alone. But we only have God through the work of mediation, and thus through concrete mediators. PIB-ers insist on that mediator being the Bible alone. Absent that extreme form of sola scriptura, the church is the only other candidate for such trust. That is, on this latter view, the baptized trust that the community to which they belong is the divinely appointed and preserved vehicle of the truth of Jesus Christ, kept and carried through the vicissitudes of history by the Holy Spirit. That is where the gospel is found, together with the scriptures, the sacraments, the saints, and all the rest.
I see no alternative. Further, apart from these two paths I see no way forward for the transmission of the faith across the generations. Either a biblicist church faithfully communicates a biblicist faith to its members and children (and it’s straightforward to see how laypeople might participate in that process); or a magisterial church faithfully communicates the teaching of sacred tradition to its members and children (and it’s likewise plain to see how such a process might work). But how is a typical Christian adult supposed to train up his children in the faith if his church simultaneously rejects sacred tradition and repudiates Perspicuous Inerrant Biblicism? He lacks tradition to hand down, and he lacks the-Bible-alone to hand down. He’s also hip to the fact that the-Bible-alone just isn’t going to get the job done for him, because he’s brim-full of vertiginous confusion regarding how to interpret the Bible in the first place—in other words, he needs someone to answer his questions. But his pastor is just one more dude; he claims no special authority. And normal-adult-Christian-parent here knows that even if he likes Pastor 1’s answer, Pastor 2 at the church next door will give a substantially different answer. So, again, he’s left to his own devices. What’s he supposed to do?
He knows one thing at least. Those pop-evangelical books hawking post-biblicism biblicism aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Whichever way is right, they’re not it.
Pseudo-Scorsese
It’s come to my attention that there are discrepancies in the filmography of American director Martin Scorsese. To be precise, certain films attributed to him evidently qualify as pseudirectoria (pseudokinemagraphia? pseudeikonzon?)—that is, instances of unnamed others claiming his name as director of a cinematic artifact, although the evidence suggests otherwise.
It’s come to my attention that there are discrepancies in the filmography of American director Martin Scorsese. To be precise, certain films attributed to him evidently qualify as pseudirectoria (pseudokinemagraphia? pseudeikonzon?)—that is, instances of unnamed others claiming his name as director of a cinematic artifact, although the evidence suggests otherwise.
Consider three films, released across more than two decades’ time: The Age of Innocence (1993), Kundun (1997), and Silence (2016). Their subject matter, respectively: a historical romantic drama set in the 1870s among the upper class; the life of the Dalai Lama, set in Tibet in the middle of the twentieth century; and the plight of Catholic converts and their missionary priests in seventeenth century Japan.
Are we really supposed to believe that the director responsible for these films is the same man behind the camera—during the same time span!—for Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)? Not to mention Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Raging Bull (1980)? It beggars belief.
The visual grammar; the composition and editing; the characters, time periods, settings, and cultures; the dialogue; the feel—it’s all off. Someone else has been posing as Martin Scorsese in plain sight. Any honest comparison between the two groups of films will render the same result; any protest to the contrary is clearly a matter of special pleading.
The upshot: We have a Pseudo-Scorsese on our hands. The time has come to weigh the evidence and thence to sort the “official” or “received” Scorsese oeuvre into those films that are “authentic” or “undisputed” and those that are “inauthentic” or “disputed.” Historical and artistic integrity demands no less.
I’m in CT on the conquest
I’m in Christianity Today with a review of Charlie Trimm’s new book, The Destruction of the Canaanites: God, Genocide, and Biblical Interpretation.
I’m in Christianity Today with a review of Charlie Trimm’s new book, The Destruction of the Canaanites: God, Genocide, and Biblical Interpretation. Here’s how it opens:
There is a problem with the Old Testament. At a key juncture in salvation history, the God of Abraham commandeers one nation in order to destroy another. The aggressor nation attacks the second nation because God has judged the latter guilty. The aggressor is merciless, sparing neither women nor children, expelling the inhabitants from their land, and destroying sacred sites and symbols of religious practice—in effect, wiping them off the map. And, according to the Hebrew scriptures, all this happened by the terrible will of the sovereign Lord of Hosts.
It is a harrowing moment in the history of God’s people. But I am not referring to the conquest of Canaan by the tribes of Israel. I am referring to the assault on the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians (a little over 700 years before the birth of Jesus) and the campaign against the southern kingdom, especially the city of Jerusalem and its temple, by the Babylonians about 130 years later.
Click here to keep reading. The book is excellent and I hope pastors and professors use it going forward. I also hope readers understand, once they finish the essay, that the opening line of the review is ironic.
“The latest scholarship”
One often hears folks in biblical studies refer to “the latest scholarship” on such-and-such topic. Or they will refer to author X or book Y being “out of date.” Or when writing a scholar will refer to “the latest studies” or “the most recent research.” I’ve poked fun at this tendency before. A few years back I penned “An honest preface to contemporary academic interpretation of the New Testament.”
One often hears folks in biblical studies refer to “the latest scholarship” on such-and-such topic. Or they will refer to author X or book Y being “out of date.” Or when writing a scholar will refer to “the latest studies” or “the most recent research.”
I’ve poked fun at this tendency before. A few years back I penned “An honest preface to contemporary academic interpretation of the New Testament”:
The figures and authors of the New Testament, especially Jesus and Paul, taught and wrote primarily during the middle half of the first century A.D. Their teachings and texts were not, alas, understood in the 2nd century, nor were they understood in the 3rd century, nor were they understood in the 4th century, nor were they understood in the 5th century, nor were they understood in the 6th century, nor were they understood in the 7th century, nor were they understood in the 8th century, nor were they understood in the 9th century, nor were they understood in the 10th century, nor were they understood in the 11th century, nor were they understood in the 12th century, nor were they understood in the 13th century, nor were they understood in the 14th century, nor were they understood in the 15th century, nor were they understood in the 16th century, nor were they understood in the 17th century, nor were they understood in the 18th century, nor were they understood in the 19th century, nor were they understood in the 20th century. Such periods, unfortunately, were not up to date on the latest scholarship.
I am.
That is the spirit of historical-critical hubris in a nutshell. Less sarcastically, I’ve reflected on what I call “subjunctive scholarship,” or biblical scholarship in the subjunctive mode (or mood, if we want to be strict about it). Here’s the object of critique:
If you read enough biblical scholarship, you come to realize that one of the guild’s endemic features—for at least a century, probably two—is an overweening confidence in its claims. Such claims usually partake of a rhetoric of calm certainty; all too often what are contestable judgments based on slim evidence are instead asserted as facts, or at least as bearing a supreme likelihood of being true. These judgments in turn become the basis for still further judgments, or proposals, that are themselves even flimsier in terms of probability or breadth of justifying reasons. So far as I can tell, this style of scholarship is of a piece with the broader approach not only of history but also the social sciences.
I offer a couple counter-proposals for how to frame a work of historical biblical scholarship:
(1) In what follows I will write as if it were the case that X, though I am by no means certain or even confident that this hypothesis is true…
(2) In this essay/book I will follow lines of speculative reflection regarding a set of issues about which we lack anything close to sufficient evidence to support confident claims; accordingly, my ideas and proposals will follow a certain pattern: “If it is the case that X, then Y might reasonably follow,” allowing that I can make no dispositive arguments in favor of X, and that any number of alternatives to X are plausible; for that reason I will also trace some of those plausible alternatives and see what they might lead.”
Such argumentative frameworks are, granted, not exactly sizzling compared to the sort of rhetoric that attends much “cutting edge” scholarship. But the gains are worth it, gains in both epistemic humility and intellectual curiosity. Also in the honest pursuit of truth, given how little we do or can or will ever know about, in this case, the texts and wider contexts of culture and politics, persons and happenings in the first century.
Here’s one other observation I make in that post:
[To write in the subjunctive would] make clear—with no ifs, ands, or buts—that one or more premises of [a scholarly proposal] are arguable, indeed so arguable that it would be laughable to presume them to be self-evidently true to any reasonable person. Such a proviso would also signal the self-awareness on the part of the scholar that seemingly commonsensical consensus scholarly judgments inevitably come under fire in and by subsequent generations of scholars. What is taken for granted today is up for grabs tomorrow. No reason to act as though that isn’t the case.
Here’s the question I want to ask (one I may have asked elsewhere, though I can’t seem to find it in the following form), a question that might sound pedantic or sardonic but is meant in earnest. What good is being “up to date” on “the latest research” on X when the one thing about which we may claim disciplinary or epistemic certainty is that, whatever “the latest research” says about X today, it will be disputed by whatever “the latest research” says about X tomorrow? Put differently, if the force of academic arguments in the present tense depend upon a rough consensus about intrinsically contestable matters, and if the history of the discipline reliably informs us that every rough scholarly consensus is inevitably heavily revised or jettisoned by subsequent generations of scholars, or at least becomes subject to destabilization and thus no longer remains a consensus, then isn’t the whole towering edifice built on sand? Isn’t every argument built, with full awareness, on a foundation that everyone knows, as a matter of fact, will no longer exist within a matter of decades?—just to the extent that the foundation’s stability depended (at the time of the argument’s being made) upon its being more or less unquestioned, which is to say, a matter of present-day (though not future) consensus?
Note well that I am not calling into question either growth in historical knowledge or the ability to make claims to knowledge in this or adjacent realms of inquiry. Rather, I am calling into question the rhetoric, the confidence, and the rhetoric of confidence that attend such claims to knowledge. At a deeper level I am further calling into question the method of the inquiry, built argumentatively and even logically upon claims to present-day achievements of consensus that everyone knows but chooses to forget will be undone eventually—and often sooner rather than later.
Instead of qualifying historical and textual arguments into oblivion, however, acknowledging and accepting this critique should function to liberate biblical scholarship and historiography more generally. For it entails that works in biblical studies do not expire the year after publication. The value of the car, so to speak, doesn’t plummet once it’s driven off the lot. Sometimes colleagues in biblical studies speak as though, on one hand, they can’t propose ideas in public unless and until they’ve read everything published up to and including today (perhaps also forthcoming works!); and, on the other hand, that the sell-by dates for the very ideas they’d like to elaborate are, sad to say, the day after they propose them.
That sounds at once emotionally grueling, humanly impracticable, intellectually stifling, and epistemically indefensible.
The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is construing biblical scholarship on analogy to the hard sciences, rather than classing it among the hermeneutical arts. To be sure, there is sifting of evidence, and some of that evidence qualifies as “hard.” But the work of making sense of the canonical Jewish and Christian texts, including making historical sense of them, is finally interpretive in character. Not only is interpretation not “scientific” in the colloquial or disciplinary sense. To treat it as such is essentially to distort the task of understanding—in this case, understanding texts in their historical and cultural contexts—as well as the nature of disputation regarding proposals for such understanding. It takes on faith what is unproven, considers evidentially dispositive what is anything but, concedes to consensus what is and shall always be arguable. In short, it artificially constricts both the range and the force of what one may (and must) say as a member of the guild. And it does so for no good reason.
That’s not to say one may or should avoid reading “the latest” in one’s discipline. Staying “up to date” is in general a reasonable expectation for academics. But it is not and cannot be a condition for holding or proposing a plausible opinion on a contested topic, much less for rejecting, out of hand and sight unseen, “old” or “outdated” scholarship on said topic. Nine times out of ten, what makes “new” research new is not an archeological discovery or fresh material evidence. It is an innovative theory, speculative reconstruction, or alternative explanation of preexisting materials (usually just the texts themselves) that is “the latest” on the scene. Such proposals are well worth appraising. But they do not ipso facto rule out antecedent ideas. Even where they attempt to do so, they rarely succeed on the merits; when they do so succeed, often as not the rationale is fashion, an itch for novelty, or social pressure (that latter phrase being a serviceable gloss for “scholarly consensus”).
In any case, what I most want, as an outsider to the field of biblical studies but as one who reads it regularly for pleasure and profit alike, is for members of the discipline to be and to write and to teach free of this tiresome burden imposed upon them. That burden is called “being up to date,” which in turn carries with it a methodological mindset that treats the humanistic arts of interpreting ancient texts as a sort of hard science that accords omniscient experts, and them alone, the authority to make even the most modest suggestions about how to understand the Bible in its original historical contexts. Such a mindset also renders all biblical scholarship negligible or moribund within a decade after its publication. That’s just silly. Moreover, it ends up lowering the quality of such scholarship even on the day of its publication, since it is invariably pitched in such a way both that it must be “cutting edge” (ramp up that PR machine) and aware of its immediately diminishing relevance (grasp for those straws while you can), all the while focusing disproportionately on minute debates from recent years instead of the big questions at the heart of the subject matter. Not to mention the typical unspoken pretense that no one tried to exegete the text in question until the last two centuries.
That’s what I’d call being “up to date.” If you can tell me what the Greek and Latin and Syriac fathers and medievals and reformers all thought about this or that text, then you’ve got my attention. If, by contrast, mostly you know the Anglophone academic “consensus” regarding half a chapter in Philippians circa 1986–2011, though you’re aware that’s been overturned in the last decade, so obviously you need to bone up on the latest articles before you proffer an opinion … you’ve lost me.
To that sort of disciplinary formation, I have a simple message.
Be free!
A sheep among wolves
If, after reading [this book], you now turn to study the historical evidence for yourself, begin with the New Testament and not with the books about it. If you do not know Greek get it in a modern translation. Moffat’s is probably the best: Monsignor Knox is also good. I do not advise the Basic English version. And when you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as a sheep among wolves.
If, after reading [this book], you now turn to study the historical evidence for yourself, begin with the New Testament and not with the books about it. If you do not know Greek get it in a modern translation. Moffat’s is probably the best: Monsignor Knox is also good. I do not advise the Basic English version. And when you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as a sheep among wolves. Naturalistic assumptions, beggings of the question such as that which I noted on the first page of this book, will meet you on every side—even from the pens of clergymen. This does not mean (as I was once tempted to suspect) that these clergymen are disguised apostates who deliberately exploit the position and the livelihood given them by the Christian Church to undermine Christianity. It comes partly from what we may call a ‘hangover’. We all have Naturalism in our bones and even conversion does not at once work the infection out of our system. Its assumptions rush back upon the mind the moment vigilance is relaxed. And in part the procedure of these scholars arises from the feeling which is greatly to their credit—which indeed is honourable to the point of being Quixotic. They are anxious to allow to the enemy every advantage he can with any show of fairness claim. They thus make it part of their method to eliminate the supernatural wherever it is even remotely possible to do so, to strain natural explanation even to the breaking point before they admit the least suggestion of miracle. Just in the same spirit some examiners tend to overmark any candidate whose opinions and character, as revealed by his work, are revolting to them. We are so afraid of being led into unfairness by our instant dislike of the man that we are liable to overshoot the mark and treat him too kindly. Many modern Christian scholars overshoot the mark for a similar reason.
In using the books of such people you must therefore be continually on guard. You must develop a nose like a bloodhound for those steps in the argument which depend not on historical and linguistic knowledge but on the concealed assumption that miracles are impossible, improbable, or improper. And this means that you must really re-educate yourself: must work hard and consistently to eradicate from your mind the whole type of thought in which we have all been brought up. It is the type of thought which, under various disguises, has been our adversary throughout this book.
—C. S. Lewis, Miracles (1947), 267–269
Subjunctive scholarship
If you read enough biblical scholarship, you come to realize that one of the guild’s endemic features—for at least a century, probably two—is an overweening confidence in its claims. Such claims usually partake of a rhetoric of calm certainty; all too often what are contestable judgments based on slim evidence are instead asserted as facts, or at least as bearing a supreme likelihood of being true.
If you read enough biblical scholarship, you come to realize that one of the guild’s endemic features—for at least a century, probably two—is an overweening confidence in its claims. Such claims usually partake of a rhetoric of calm certainty; all too often what are contestable judgments based on slim evidence are instead asserted as facts, or at least as bearing a supreme likelihood of being true. These judgments in turn become the basis for still further judgments, or proposals, that are themselves even flimsier in terms of probability or breadth of justifying reasons. So far as I can tell, this style of scholarship is of a piece with the broader approach not only of history but also the social sciences.
I’m not here to bury these disciplines. Rather, I want to suggest what I wish biblical scholars would do in their work. Better put, how I wish they would approach their subject matter and write about it. A certain sensibility and style. Call it the subjunctive mode.
I can think of at least two ways the subjunctive mode of scholarship would work. One would be marked by variations on this phrase:
In what follows I will write as if it were the case that X, though I am by no means certain or even confident that this hypothesis is true…
Note well that this style would neither eliminate strong or interesting rhetoric in the outworking of theories nor require constant and repetitive qualifications of such theories. It would only make clear—with no ifs, ands, or buts—that one or more premises of the work are arguable, indeed so arguable that it would be laughable to presume them to be self-evidently true to any reasonable person. Such a proviso would also signal the self-awareness on the part of the scholar that seemingly commonsensical consensus scholarly judgments inevitably come under fire in and by subsequent generations of scholars. What is taken for granted today is up for grabs tomorrow. No reason to act as though that isn’t the case. Moreover, to remember as well as acknowledge it surely increases humility and fallibilism in one’s own epistemic habits.
Here’s a second way the subjunctive mode could work in scholarly writing:
In this essay/book I will follow lines of speculative reflection regarding a set of issues about which we lack anything close to sufficient evidence to support confident claims; accordingly, my ideas and proposals will follow a certain pattern: “If it is the case that X, then Y might reasonably follow,” allowing that I can make no dispositive arguments in favor of X, and that any number of alternatives to X are plausible; for that reason I will also trace some of those plausible alternatives and see what they might lead.”
Among theologians, Paul Griffiths is a model of this approach. In his book Decreation, for instance, he regularly offers forks in the road to the reader, before following one, then the other, to wherever it leads. He makes no commitment to either being true, or at least obviously true. He simply suggests that both are plausible, and makes arguments for what would be the case if either were true—admitting, too, that it may well be the case that neither is true.
I most often find myself wishing biblical scholars did this (and they do, though in my experience only in the tiniest of historical and textual details) when reading their work on the dating of New Testament texts. I am utterly uninterested in a scholar spinning 10,000 theories on the single basis—sorry, “fact”—that no Gospel was written before AD 70, or that St. James’s epistle wasn’t written before the extant letters of St. Paul, or that the latter’s so-called disputed letters couldn’t possibly have been written by him, or that Luke–Acts unquestionably belongs to the turn of the second century, or that the beloved disciple wasn’t an eyewitness of Jesus’s comings and goings in Jerusalem, or that Mary obviously gave birth to brothers and sisters of Jesus. What I see in this kind of rhetoric is, on one hand, a confounding absence of curiosity; and, on the other, a wholly unwarranted confidence in the to-any-reasonable-person-or-serious-scholar certainty of one’s presuppositions. But those presuppositions, precisely as premises, are conclusions to arguments, and those arguments comprise probabilistic judgments of contestable processes of reasoning built on slim evidence, incommensurate and inadjudicable methodological frameworks, and finally subjective acts of interpretation that depend heavily for their value on intellectual virtues like honesty, modesty, courage, and prudence. In a word, they are defeasible, even when they are defensible.
Better to say: “So far as it seems to me, the evidence suggests that St. Mark’s Gospel was written in the late 60s, and partakes of knowledge of the assault on Jerusalem and its temple. Having said that, there are reasons to suppose otherwise. So in what follows the main thrust of my proposals will presume the former dating, but where appropriate, I will suggest what might be the case if I am wrong—as I no doubt I am, if not in this then in another matter.”
I remember, for example, reading a brilliant Pauline scholar asserting as an incontestable fact that the disputed letters are pseudonymous and that Romans is the last of his “authentic” letters to have been written. I don’t mind that assertion, modestly argued and supported with evidence and reasons. But what I wanted next was this: “And if I am wrong about that—if Philippians is dated AD 62, or if Ephesians is a circular letter delegated by St. Paul to St. Timothy to write in his name, or if Paul was released in 62 and later dictated his second epistle to Timothy from another Roman imprisonment circa 66—then that would alter my account of Pauline thought in the following ways…” I mean, why not admit that one might be wrong in one’s highly speculative hypothetical reconstructions of 2,000-year old texts and events? Why not trace alternative routes?
Why not, in short, write scholarship in the subjunctive mode?
Peter van Inwagen on disciplinary hubris, relevant expertise, expectations of deference, and ordinary prudence
In the early 1990s the philosopher Peter van Inwagen wrote an essay called "Critical Studies of the New Testament and the User of the New Testament." It is a long, detailed philosophical investigation of the epistemic nature, or status, of academic biblical scholarship; specifically, it asks whether…
In the early 1990s the philosopher Peter van Inwagen wrote an essay called "Critical Studies of the New Testament and the User of the New Testament." It is a long, detailed philosophical investigation of the epistemic nature, or status, of academic biblical scholarship; specifically, it asks whether ordinary Christians or readers of the Bible ought to consult such scholarship, or defer to its judgments, prior to or in the course of their readings of the Bible or accompanying theological judgments. After many pages, his answer is a firm No. Here are the final paragraphs of the essay (bolded emphases are mine):
I conclude that there is no reason for me to think that Critical Studies have established that the New Testament narratives are historically unreliable. In fact, there is no reason for me to think that they have established any important thesis about the New Testament. I might, of course, change my mind if I knew more. But how much time shall I devote to coming to know more? My own theological writings, insofar as they draw on contemporary knowledge, draw on formal logic, cosmology, and evolutionary biology. I need to know a great deal more about these subjects than I do. How much time shall I take away from my study of them to devote to New Testament studies (as opposed to the study of the New Testament)? The answer seems to me to be: very little. I would suggest that various seminaries and divinity schools might consider devoting a portion of their curricula to these subjects (not to mention the systematic study of the Fathers!), even if this had to be done at the expense of some of the time currently devoted to Critical Studies.
Let me close by considering a tu quoque. Is not philosophy open to many of the charges I have brought against Critical Studies? Is not philosophy argument without end? Is not what philosophers agree about just precisely nothing? Are not the methods and arguments of many philosophers (especially those who reach extreme conclusions) so bad that an outsider encountering them for the first time might well charitably conclude that he must be missing something? Must one not devote years of systematic study to philosophy before one is competent to think philosophically about whether we have free will or whether there is an objective morality or whether knowledge is possible?—and yet, is one not entitled to believe in free will and knowledge and morality even if one has never read a single page of philosophy?
Ego quoque. If you are not a philosopher, you would be crazy to go to the philosophers to find anything out—other than what it is that the philosophers say. If a philosopher tells you that you must, on methodological grounds, since he is the expert, take his word for something—that there is free will, say, or that morality is only convention—you should tell him that philosophy has not earned the right to make such demands. Philosophy is, I think, valuable. It is a good thing for the study of philosophy to be pursued, both by experts and by amateurs. But from the premise that it is a good thing for a certain field of study to be pursued by experts, the conclusion does not follow that that field of study comprises experts who can tell you things you need to attend to before you can practice a religion or join a political party or become a conscientious objector. And from the premise that it is a good thing for a certain field of study to be pursued by amateurs, the conclusion does not follow that anyone is under an obligation to become an amateur in that field.
This is very close to some of the depreciatory statements I have made about the authority of Critical Studies. Since I regard philosophy as a Good Thing, it should be clear that I do not suppose that my arguments lend any support to the conclusion that the critical study of the New Testament is not a Good Thing. Whether it is, I have no idea. I don't know enough about it to know whether it is. I have argued only that the very little I do know about Critical Studies is sufficient to establish that users of the New Testament need not—but I have said nothing against their doing so—attend very carefully to it. (God, Knowledge, and Mystery [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995], 189–190)
The choice quote here, reduced to a general maxim:
If an [expert in X] tells you that you must, on methodological grounds, since he is the expert, take his word for something, you should tell him that [X] has not earned the right to make such demands.
One cannot substitute just anything for "X," but one can substitute most things, and certainly anything outside the hardest of hard disciplines. Any and all discursive practices and realms of knowledge in which prudence is required or normative questions are involved, or in which ongoing contestation, adjudication, and dissent are prominent or at least typical, are by definition substitutable for "X." Moreover, if a legitimate expert in X attempts to mandate deference to her authority, but in this case regarding not X but Y, the attempt is patently fallacious, mendacious, confused, and absurd. One owes such an attempt and such an expert little more than an eye-roll, though laughter and mockery are warranted.
Let the reader understand.
Talismanic invocations of scholarship
Not only is "scholarship" used in the singular, as if two centuries' worth of study of the Bible in all its variety of contexts across dozens of countries in as many languages can be considered monolithic and unanimous. Even more, it's waved around as a kind of talisman, evidently with the expectation of an effect that can only be called apotropaic—which, we may infer, is the effect it had initially on the person so using it.
It's true that any number of stupid or damaging claims about the Bible and Christianity are a function or result of ignorance, and that education can remedy some of this. But the truth is that scholars disagree about very nearly anything and everything you can formulate a question about regarding the origins and interpretation of Christian figures, events, and teachings. About almost nothing can we say, "Scholars say..." and fill in the blank with a true, uncontested, non-banal claim. And even then, if such a claim did exist, I assure you that we could find someone 50 years ago or 50 years hence who did or will disagree with the would-be consensus.
Moreover, the "scholars say" line is typically used in an unsophisticated way. For example, if what Paul had in mind, or the anonymous final redactor of the fourth Gospel, was X, then that just settles the matter: it meant and means and will mean for all time this singular thing, X—protestations and counter-readings and reception history and reinterpretations and figural exegesis and the rest be damned.
Finally, the use of "scholars say" is often, at bottom, just an exercise in rhetorical trumping. It's a defeater in intra-communal arguments about God, the Bible, and history, wielded as a weapon. And naturally, there are always good reasons to discount the other side's scholars (falsely so called).
Having said that, I do think that many use the phrase in a sincere, almost obsequiously religious and deferential way: the experts have spoken, thus saith the Lord. There's always a magisterium, in other words. Just find yourself the right one. Which is to say, the one that supports your opinion.
An honest preface to contemporary academic interpretation of the New Testament
I am.
On Markan priority
Reading and re-reading and teaching Mark has raised anew for me the question of Markan priority. I teach, following the overwhelming majority of New Testament scholars, that Mark was most likely the first Gospel written, and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark as a primary source. If I had to bet, that's still by far the choice I would go with.
Having said that...
Spend some time with Mark, and you'll notice just how expertly crafted it is; just how richly artistic and intentional its literary, structural, thematic, and theological features are. My sense is that at least part of the case made for Matthew and Luke's dependence on Mark is their "cleaning up" of Mark's roughness. Except that there is no reason in principle to take Mark's roughness as an accidental aspect of the Gospel, that is, to take it as a function of a hurried or rushed composition, unrelated to the purpose and stylistic substance of the work.
Because Mark's no-frills style is part and parcel of the subtle, sophisticated portrait of Jesus the Gospel offers to its readers. (One student compared the opening two dozen verses of the Gospel to a movie trailer: action, CUT, action, CUT, action, CUT—new scenes piling on top of one another with neither commentary nor context.) And the literary intentionality is undeniable: doubled episodes, intercalation, the messianic mystery, the triple repetition of Jesus's prediction of suffering in Jerusalem, the drum-beat refrain of the disciples' (most of all Peter's) absolute failure to understand Jesus, the allusions (centrally in the opening handful of verses) to Isaiah 40–55, the circumspect but exhaustive affirmation of Jesus's divine power and authority, the elusive and unsettling account of the resurrection, the irony of who it is that recognizes Jesus and who does not, the would-be angel's exhortation to the women (and so to the disciples, and so to the reader) to "return to Galilee" and to discover the living Jesus there—i.e., in the pages of the very same Gospel—etc., etc.
So what would have to be the case for Mark not to have been the first Gospel written? Matthew would probably have to be first instead, using his own materials (and perhaps something like "Q"), composed just before or after the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D.; and Mark, receiving Matthew's Gospel—let's say in Rome, only months or 1-2 years after Matthew's composition—gives us not just the cliff notes, but a much less explicit, a much less didactic, a much less prolix and embroidered Gospel, one emphasizing mystery, secrecy, failure, shame, suffering, and irony—perhaps under the influence of Paul or one of his coworkers, perhaps under the heightened pressures of persecution in the imperial capital, perhaps aiming for something both more concretely close to the ground of Palestine yet accessible to gentile Christians in south-central Europe unfamiliar with Jewish groups, conventions, and language in and around Galilee and Jerusalem, perhaps even a hear-it-in-a-single-sitting biography-Gospel for Pauline-like churches that lacked something so rich in narrative detail but for whom Matthew's Gospel would be too invested in intra-Jewish polemic and interpretive dispute over Torah to be existentially and spiritually significant.
Perhaps. It's a long shot. It's unlikely. I know I'm not the first one to suggest it. But it's a thought.
Freud's historical-critical methods
—Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, 1939), 30n.1
Marilynne Robinson on biblical scholarship
"Perhaps I should say here that when I say 'Matthew,' 'Mark,' or 'Luke' I mean the text that goes by that name. I adapt the sola scriptura to my own purposes, assuming nothing beyond the meaningfulness of forms, recurrences, and coherences within and among the Gospels, at the same time acknowledging that different passions and temperaments distinguish one text from another. I have solemnly forbidden myself all the forms of evidence tampering and deck stacking otherwise known as the identification of interpolations, omissions, doublets, scribal errors, et alia, on the grounds that they are speculation at best, and distract the credulous, including their practitioners, with the trappings and flourishes of esotericism. I hope my own inevitable speculations are clearly identified as such."
—Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2015), pp. 241-242
Brevard Childs as John Rawls
Reading the work of Brevard Childs, in tandem with its critical reception, it strikes me that he is the John Rawls of late 20th century biblical scholarship. Enormously talented, undeniably brilliant, hugely influential, an intellectual pillar at an elite Ivy League institution—and yet, the "big idea" that animated his thought throughout his career never stopped evolving, never quite reached clarity in presentation, and by the time retirement came it had, as it were, reached the point of exhaustion, becoming a disciplinary touchstone that basically nobody was persuaded by anymore. Reviews and summaries tend to treat both men's thought similarly: we "must" talk about them; they "changed" the field; and, today, we are "beyond" them. One's feeling in reading the magnum opus of each is at once a solemn respect for their achievement and an overriding sense that, alas, it just doesn't work.
A possible exception to this overall picture is the good will Childs had and continues to have in the theological academy, presumably due, at least in part, to the many significant scholars who studied under him at Yale. (I can't speak for Rawls.) But apart from Christopher Seitz, who has taken up the mantle of Childs's "canonical" proposal and continues undeterred, the field seems empty of (implicitly or explicitly) "Childsian" bibliology and theological hermeneutics. Which makes me wonder how, decades from now, this period in theological proposals about Scripture will be recounted. Will Childs be a transitional figure? Will he be a footnote? Will he stage a comeback? As with Rawls in political theory, it will be interesting to see.