Introduction to Biblical Studies 9781472556769, 9780567608147, 9780567175571

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Abbreviations

GNB JB KJV NAB NAS NIV NJB NRSV REB RSV

Good News Bible (1976) Jerusalem Bible (1966) King James Version (1611) New American Bible (1970) New American Standard (1971) New International Version (1978) New Jerusalem Bible (1985) New Revised Standard Version (1989) Revised English Bible (1989) Revised Standard Version (1952)

1 God and the bible

I was in a church once when the reading for the day happened to be one of the Old Testament genealogies. It wasn’t long before the reader realized that he should have practiced at home! Each of the Hebrew names required several attempts and even then, it was not all that close to the words we had in front of us. As a result, the reader became flustered and so coughed and spluttered his way through the reading. It took over five minutes! When he had finally finished, he solemnly closed the bible, looked at the congregation and uttered the traditional words, ‘This is the word of the Lord.’ At which the congregation immediately burst out laughing. In part this was a reaction to the tension created by the man’s discomfort. But it was also about calling such an odd and seemingly irrelevant passage the ‘word of the Lord’. Most Christians read the bible because they think that it will somehow bring them closer to God or help them grow in their Christian faith. This book called the bible is not simply human opinion; it is the ‘word of God’. Christians claim this on the authority of Jesus himself. For example, in Mark 7:13, Jesus criticizes the Pharisees’ adherence to custom because by it they are ‘making void the word of God’. In the Sermon on the Mount, we read that ‘until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished’ (Matt 5:18). And at the end of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you – that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled’ (Luke 24:44). It is a view that is summarized in  2 Timothy 3:16–17: ‘All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof,

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for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.’ The word translated ‘inspired’ is a compound word (theopneustos) meaning ‘God-breathed’ (so NIV). It is not clear if this refers to the way that scripture came about or to its character. But what it does say is that scripture is somehow connected with God and has an important function. By means of teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness, it prepares people for Christian service. It gives them what they need to be ‘proficient, equipped for every good work’. Both of these quotations are of course referring to what Christians call the Old Testament, that is, those scriptures which were written before the time of Christ (bc). However, the authors would have been puzzled by our reference to the ‘Old Testament’ because the ‘New Testament’ had not yet been written. It would be many years before the Gospels, Acts, Epistles and Revelation were collected together and put alongside the Hebrew scriptures to form one holy bible. In recognition of this, and the fact that the Jewish people did not cease to exist once the church was born, most modern writers now use the abbreviation bce (Before the Common Era) and ce (Common Era) in preference to bc and ad, and this will be our practice. John Goldingay (1994) would also prefer to talk of First and Second Testaments instead of ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament’ but here we will stick with conventional usage. Though it was some time before the New Testament books were collected together to form a canon (the Greek word means ‘rule’ or ‘measure’) of scripture, there is an interesting passage in 2 Peter 3:15–16, which refers to Paul’s letters. It is gratifying to know that they were hard to understand even in the first century but the reason for quoting this passage is the way that it associates Paul’s letters with ‘the other scriptures’. The author of 2 Peter says: ‘So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.’ The use of the word ‘other’ here appears to put Paul’s letters on the same level as those Old Testament books which the author regarded as scripture. More texts could be quoted (see especially 2 Pet  1:19–21 and Psalm 119) but the above is sufficient to show that the Christian

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claim that the bible is the ‘word of God’ is grounded in the bible itself. And this is acknowledged in most churches when a reading from the bible is followed by an acclamation such as, ‘This is the word of the Lord.’ There cannot be many Christians who categorically deny that the bible has anything to do with God. But Christians do differ on what they believe to be the implications of this. For example, what does the bible give us (or do for us) that ‘mere’ human writings do not or cannot? The following have been suggested:

‘The bible gives us knowledge’ As the ‘word of God’, some would suggest that the primary function of the bible is to tell us things that we could not otherwise know. For example, some think it can tell us about the creation of the world, even though there were clearly no witnesses to record it (Gen 1). Some think it is only through the bible that we can find out about angels, the devil and other spiritual forces which cannot be seen (Job 1–2). Some think that the bible gives us a detailed plan of how the world is going to end (some even try to predict the date). And on a more mundane level, when historians point out that Moses could not have written about his own death (Deut 34), proponents of this view simply declare that God revealed it to him. In other words, unlike any human writing, which is necessarily limited to the knowledge and experience of the author, the bible comes directly from God and can therefore tell us things that we could not otherwise know. Now few would wish to deny that the bible might sometimes function like this, but it is a view more usually associated with ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘taking the bible literally.’ Some Christians would prefer to reserve the word ‘fundamentalism’ for those who believe in the ‘fundamentals’ of the faith but I will follow popular usage here. Fundamentalists believe that the ‘literal’ meaning is the only meaning. They see themselves at war with modern culture (modernity), which they believe to be anti-Christian, in both morality and doctrine. Thus when science proposes theories about our origins that differ from the six-day creation of Genesis, fundamentalists simply declare that science is wrong. It has overreached itself, putting its trust in human wisdom rather than the ‘word of God’.

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The clash between such views and the growth of biblical criticism will be described in the following chapters but it will be useful to highlight some of the pitfalls now. A moment’s reflection will show that each of the books of the bible has its own particular style. Leviticus is not like Psalms. Paul’s letters are not like the Gospels. Kings and Chronicles are not like the book of Revelation. Some New Testament writers use a wide vocabulary and a good Greek style (Luke, Hebrews). Others are more limited in their abilities (Mark) and some even contain grammatical irregularities (Revelation, though some think John did this on purpose). Whatever the mechanism which led to the writing of scripture, it clearly did not bypass the personalities of its human authors. Indeed, the rich use of parables and figures of speech by Jesus should have made it clear that not everything in the bible is to be taken literally. If I go down to my local garden shop and purchase some mustard seeds, I have not thereby gained the kingdom of God. In the parable of the mustard seed (Mark 4:30–32), Jesus is comparing some aspect of the kingdom (presumably its growth) to some aspect of a mustard seed. The hearer (and now the reader) is invited to ponder what Jesus was trying to convey by this analogy. This is no more ‘liberal’ than recognizing that expressions like ‘it’s miles away’ or ‘I’m starving’ are not to be taken literally but are figures of speech. The question of whether a particular bible passage is to be taken literally has to be considered on its merits: Its literal veracity cannot be assumed simply because it is in the bible. Language does not work like that. There is an amusing story in Mark 8:14–21, where the disciples have forgotten to bring bread for their journey. Later, Jesus warns them to ‘beware of the yeast of the Pharisees’, which they take to be a rebuke for not bringing any bread. One can almost hear the exasperation in Jesus’ voice as he says to them: ‘Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear?’ (8:17–18). In other words, they were expected to discern that ‘yeast’ is a figure of speech for the way that evil or malice spreads. Jesus was not referring to loaves of bread. One can pass an amusing hour with a concordance locating all the verses that are not meant to be taken literally. For example, we are told that ‘the eyes of the Lord range throughout the entire earth’ (2 Chron 16:9) – a rather gruesome picture if taken literally!

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More seriously, it must be recognized that we cannot simply turn to a passage of scripture and declare, ‘This is the word of God – I must obey it.’ Consider, for example, the end of Psalm 137 (often omitted when read in church): ‘Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!’ Now in what sense can it be said that this verse is true? And in what sense should it be obeyed? The first question is difficult and involves appreciating something of the historical situation and something of the type of language being used. As an expression of extreme grief (this is what the Babylonians had done to Israel), it is understandable (though not commendable). The second question, however, must be answered with an emphatic negative! Jesus taught us to pray for our enemies, not dash their children against the rocks. Taken literally, this verse is not simply mistaken, it is monstrous. But taken as an exaggerated expression (known as hyperbole) of grief, it is understandable. Indeed, one of the reasons that the psalms are so popular is that they manage to put into words the whole range of human feelings (from joy and peace to anger and vengeance) and offer them to God in worship. But they are certainly not commands to be obeyed! Even something as seemingly clear-cut as the command, ‘You shall not kill’ (Exod 20:13, RSV) requires interpretation. Does it apply to animals? Does it forbid capital punishment? What about war? Should all Christians be pacifists? Though there is something appealing (at least for some) about a form of Christianity that always deals in clear-cut answers, one cannot avoid questions of interpretation (the study of interpretation is known as hermeneutics). Indeed, the bible portrays God as commanding the killing of animals (for sacrifices), criminals (for a range of offences) and the Canaanites (to provide Israel with a promised land). Our generation has seen horrific deeds done in the name of God, some of which made appeal to passages like these. The principle of ‘read the bible, obey the bible’ is not only simplistic, it is also very dangerous.

‘The bible shows us how to live’ Many Christians feel that the function of the bible is not primarily to provide information for the curious but to teach us how to live. Most of the bible does not consist of doctrine or teaching but stories, focusing on particular individuals. For example, Abraham and his

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descendants dominate the book of Genesis; Moses is the focus of Exodus; David is the key figure in Samuel and Kings; the Gospels are about Jesus; Peter and Paul are the central figures in Acts. Though separated by thousands of years, such stories give us glimpses of ‘people living before God’. We are not the first generation to try and be faithful to God. There is much to learn from those who have gone before us. Furthermore, what many people find valuable about the biblical stories is that they seldom try to hide the character’s weaknesses. They do not give us a selection of ‘plaster saints’. For example, Abraham puts his wife in jeopardy by telling the king that she is his sister (Gen 20:2). Moses makes excuses for not doing what God wants (Exod 4:1). David commits adultery and then arranges for the husband to die (2 Sam 11:15). Peter and Paul fall out over the issue of whether Jewish Christians can eat with Gentile Christians (Gal 2:11). And even Jesus, though never presented as actually sinning, would prefer some other way of doing God’s will if it is at all possible (Mark 14:36) and, according to Matthew and Mark, ends his life with the cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?‘ (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34). Stories do not function by offering us a set of doctrines. There is something about a good story which has the potential to inspire, warn, encourage or challenge. It offers us a vision of what life or faith could become. As we identify with particular characters, our horizons are expanded. Why shouldn’t we have a faith like Abraham or Ruth or Paul or Mary? They were in touch with the same God as we are. On this view then, the bible is mainly a collection of stories (narratives) about people ‘living before God’, which can inspire us to do likewise. It is of course possible that certain stories may imply certain doctrines (the book of Jonah is certainly saying something about God’s love extending beyond the borders of Israel). But that is not the primary function of stories. Stories operate on a different level, as we shall see in Chapter 6.

‘The bible reveals the way of salvation’ Without denying the above, some would wish to narrow the focus. What holds the diverse literature of the bible together is its story of salvation, from Genesis to Revelation. The lives of

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Abraham, Moses and David are not recorded so that we can emulate their deception, cowardice or adultery but because they are part of a plan to bring salvation to the world. As the author of Hebrews put it: ‘Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son’ (1:1–2). Thus while we might be able to learn something from every part of the bible, not every passage is of equal importance. For example, we read in the New Testament of heated debates about whether the coming of Christ implies that the food laws or the practice of circumcision are still in force (see Acts 15, Gal 2, Rom 14). Paul’s opinion that such laws should not be imposed on Gentiles is extremely significant, for the Old Testament (see Gen 17) is quite adamant that they are both mandatory and binding. But Paul declares in Galations 5:6 that ‘in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything’. On what basis can he decide that certain scriptural commandments are no longer to be obeyed? The answer is complex (as we shall see in later chapters) but clearly has something to do with the revelation of Christ. Paul now reads the (Old Testament) scriptures in a new light (2 Cor 3:15–16). Revelation is not static in the bible but is to be read in the light of what else the bible says. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus repeatedly says, ‘You have heard that it was said . . . But I say to you’ (Matt 5:21, 27, 31, 33, 38, 43). And according to John’s Gospel, Jesus even promises an ongoing revelation: ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come’ (16:13). The bible is a developing story.

‘The bible reveals God’ The goal of reading the bible is not to obtain information about God or even about the story of salvation; the goal of reading the bible is to experience the God that the bible talks about. On this view, the bible is called the ‘word of God’ not because it was dictated by God but because these (very) human words are somehow able to mediate God’s presence. Consider, for example, Isaiah’s vision of God, as recorded in Isaiah 6:1–5:

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In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’ This text could be analysed to see what doctrine it might imply. It clearly speaks of the holiness of God. Or we could try and use it as an example of ‘living before God’. Perhaps we should acknowledge our sins more often. But both of these fall short of experiencing the God that Isaiah experienced. In other words, Isaiah had a revelation or experience of God; we have an account of that experience in the bible. The experience and the account are two different things, as can be seen from the countless number of people who have read this passage and been completely unmoved by it. Something has to happen for the (ordinary) words of scripture to come alive. Many Christians believe that this is the aim of reading the bible. Whether by study or prayer, discussion or meditation, the bible can be the vehicle for an experience of God. As Hebrews 4:12 says: ‘the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.’ My own conversion to Christianity was through reading Luke’s Gospel. I was an undergraduate student in London and had never read the bible or gone to church in my life. One day, two evangelists knocked on my door and tried to convert me. I was not interested but for some reason, they came back (weekly!). Eventually, they offered me a challenge: Read Luke’s Gospel in a modern version of the bible and decide for yourself. It was some months before I took up their challenge (hiding the bible they had lent me under my bed lest any of my friends should spot it) but when I did, something totally unexpected happened. The words on the page became so real that I could almost hear Jesus calling me, as if I were one of the first disciples. And like those in the story, I felt compelled to follow him.

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However, I would be less than honest if I were to imply that this is always my experience of reading the bible. Sometimes it can seem very dull. Some passages seem so obscure that it is hard to find in them anything of value. And some are so puzzling that it is hard to understand how they got there in the first place (e.g. Gen 19:8). I have come to believe that inspiration (‘God-breathed’) is more to do with what God does with the text than what it supposedly guarantees. And this is the crux of the matter for me. Whatever our beliefs about inspiration, they have got to do justice to what we actually find in the bible. For example, there is no point maintaining that because the bible is the ‘word of God’, everything must be taken literally. Such a view not only leads to absurdities but is contrary to the nature of language. Nor (in my opinion) can we hold the view that inspiration guarantees that every writer agrees with every other writer. Paul does not agree with the author of Genesis that: ‘Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant’ (Gen 17:14). Paul thinks that Gentiles can belong to the people of God without being circumcised (Gal 5:6). To argue that these two texts are really saying the same thing is to trivialise the bible.

Inspiration and the bible So how should we understand the human and the divine in the bible? Such a question is not of course unique. Christian theology has found the same sort of dilemma when discussing a range of issues, such as the nature of Christ, the church, the sacraments and creation. In each case, scholars have wanted to assert that there is both a human element and a divine element, but that they function in different ways.

Christ From the Gospel stories, Jesus was clearly a human being who ate, drank, slept, grew tired, prayed, discussed and died. But Christianity also makes the claim that in this human life, God was incarnate. As the author of the Fourth Gospel says, ‘And the Word became flesh

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and lived among us’ (John 1:14). Most of the (so-called) heresies in the church can be put down to a wrong emphasis on one or other of these aspects. For example, the ‘docetists’ argued that if Jesus was God, then he must have been all-powerful and all-knowing, even as a child. He would not need to ask questions of people to obtain information because as God on earth, he already knows everything. If he did ask a question, it must have been to engage the person in conversation, not to learn something new. On the other hand, against the ‘docetists’ (from a Greek word meaning ‘to seem’), others argued that unless Jesus shared the same weaknesses and limitations of childhood (and adulthood) that we do, then he cannot be regarded as fully human. It took centuries of debate to arrive at a formula which did justice to both aspects (Council of Chalcedon, 451 ce) and even that leaves many questions unanswered.

Church The church is often called the ‘body of Christ’ but I am not sure that Christ can be held responsible for everything the church does! On the one hand, it is a ‘spiritual house . . . a holy priesthood’ (1 Peter 2:5). But on the other, it is plagued by divisions (1 Cor 1–3), immorality (1 Cor 5) and disorder (1 Cor 12–14). Indeed, it is often difficult to see how the divine could be related to such an institution at all. The answer is presumably ‘by grace’, that somehow our alltoo-human efforts to be ‘church’ can be transformed into something pleasing to God. Is this how it is with the bible also, that these very human writings (‘dash them against the rock’) can ‘by grace’ become vehicles for revelation? Or is it closer to the analogy of the person of Christ, who while subject to the limitations of human nature is nevertheless regarded by Christians as perfect (Heb 5:9)? In other words, the bible might reflect the limitations of its authors (e.g. science, geography) but is never actually wrong.

Sacraments During a service of Holy Communion (eucharist, Lord’s supper), words such as ‘the body of Christ’ and ‘the blood of Christ’ are associated with ordinary bread and wine. There have been great debates as to what happens (if anything) to the bread and wine

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during the consecration but most Christians accept that ‘taking communion’ is significantly different from taking coffee and biscuits after the service. In some way or another, ordinary things become the vehicle for God’s grace. Whether this is a helpful analogy for how the human words of the bible can become the ‘living word’ will depend on one’s view of the sacraments. But the analogy does at least draw attention to the fact that the biblical writings do not differ from other writings in formal terms (grammar, vocabulary, style, etc.). They are very human writings, as can be seen from Paul’s offhand comment in Gal 5:12 (‘I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves’). And for some readers (perhaps many) they never ‘become’ anything more than this. But other readers testify to the life-changing power of the bible, just as some claim to experience the life-changing power of God in the sacraments.

Creation Some would want to go further than the above. Why should we only draw analogies from specifically Christian themes? The phenomenon of words having a life-changing effect is a characteristic of all good literature. Poetry, plays and stories have moved people to tears, galvanised them to acts of heroism and inspired them to discover their true humanity. Humanists might explain this in mechanistic or evolutionary terms but Christians believe that creation is infused with God’s grace and that language and communication are gifts of God. On this analogy, the bible might have a particular function (to mediate God, to produce Christ-like transformation) but the reason that it can do this is because of the nature of language. Language is not simply a convention for referring to objects and things but is the substance of thought and hence transcendence. Thus the author of the Fourth Gospel begins his story of Jesus with the words: ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (John 1:1). The canon of scripture are those books that the church recognized as having the power to produce Christ-like transformation. It does not mean that no other writing is capable of doing this, and indeed Catholic bibles have more books than Protestant bibles (because they derive from the Latin Vulgate - see Appendix). It is just that these books gained the assent of the whole church.

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Conclusion Many debates about biblical interpretation are conducted from two opposing camps. There are those who regard certain types of questions (e.g., ‘Did Jesus say these actual words?‘ or ‘Did Israel really cross the Red Sea?’) as incompatible with belief in the absolute truth of scripture. If the bible is the ‘word of God’ then God would not have allowed mistakes. Hence if the Gospel writers say Jesus said something, then he did. It is this that separates the bible from all other writings. Indeed, even to ask such questions is to put oneself above the bible, and biblical criticism is precisely that – unbelievers criticizing the bible. On the other hand, some think that this effectively denies that the bible was written by human beings. It assumes that it somehow ‘dropped from the sky’ or was dictated ‘word for word’. Claims that the bible is the unchallengeable word of God puts all the emphasis on the divine side, and so this second camp chooses to emphasize the ‘humanness’ of the writings. The authors were people of their time. They shared in the culture and beliefs of their time and could not have written about things which were only discovered centuries later. Thus it is absurd to try and reconcile Genesis with modern theories of the universe. It is clear (so it is argued) that the biblical writers accepted the science of their day. And any responsible study of the bible must recognize this. However, it will be clear as we proceed that this latter position can be just as dogmatic as the former. What has seemed obvious and irrefutable to one generation of scholars has been challenged by the next. Indeed, many of the approaches to biblical studies that we will be discussing arose because of the inadequacies of those that had gone before. This is important to bear in mind, for when I am discussing a particular approach, I shall endeavour to present it in as positive a light as possible. My aim is to convey something of the rationale of the approach and its contribution to our understanding of the bible. You may initially feel that I have swallowed the approach ‘hook, line and sinker’ but a critique will follow, usually in the subsequent chapters. However, it is worth saying at the outset that I do believe that each approach has something to contribute and is therefore worth trying to understand. Consider the following diagram:

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The first approach we shall look at is called historical criticism. Prior to the eighteenth century, the meaning of the bible was largely in the hands of the church hierarchy. The bible meant what the church authorities told you it meant and there was very little that the ordinary person could do about it. However, the period known as ‘the Enlightenment’ (late seventeenth century until recently) offered a challenge to this. It resented the idea that the church was accountable to no one and suggested that truth should be open to public debate. Setting aside centuries of dogma, it began an historical quest to discover what the original authors meant and how their writings would have been understood by the original readers. In terms of the diagram above, it drew attention away from the vertical dimension by emphasizing the horizontal or historical dimension. Before the books of the bible were collected together to form the canon of scripture, they were real communication between an Author (or editor) and a set of Readers (or in most cases, hearers). Historical criticism set out to learn all it could about the original circumstances of these writings. The results were to completely change the way that modern people look at the bible.

Further reading Raymond Collins offers a useful survey of the doctrine of inspiration in Chapter 65 of The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Geoffrey Chapman, 1989). As well as brief commentaries on all of the books of the bible (including what Protestants call the Apocrypha), there are 19 additional

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chapters covering such issues as Inspiration and Canon, Text and Versions, Archaeology and History and the Dead Sea Scrolls. A more recent reference work is The Oxford Bible Commentary, edited by John Barton and John Muddiman (2001), which also contains useful articles. The classic Protestant view of biblical inerrancy is argued by B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (1970), while W. Abraham, The Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture (1981), J. Goldingay, Models for Scripture (1994), D. R. Law, Inspiration (2001) and P. Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation (2005) offer broader perspectives.

Questions 1 Which of the analogies for inspiration (Christ, Church, Sacraments, Creation) do you find most convincing and why? 2 How does the bible differ from other great works of literature? 3 With reference to the creation stories, to what extent does the bible reflect the culture of its day?

2 Historical approaches: The search for sources

One of the chief features of the modern world is its sense of history. We are aware that we think in ways that are very different from ancient peoples. This is well illustrated by the interpretation offered by Augustine (perhaps the greatest theologian the church has ever known) of the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Gospel text is in italics, followed by Augustine’s interpretations: A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho; Adam himself is meant; Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace, from whose blessedness Adam fell; Jericho means the moon, and signifies our mortality, because it is born, waxes, wanes, and dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels. Who stripped him, namely, of his immortality; and beat him, by persuading him to sin; and left him half-dead, because in so far as man can understand and know God, he lives, but in so far as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead; he is therefore called half-dead. The priest and Levite . . . signify the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament, which could profit nothing for salvation. Samaritan means Guardian, and therefore the Lord Himself is signified by this name . . . being set upon the beast is belief in the incarnation of Christ. The inn is the Church, where travellers returning to their heavenly country are refreshed after pilgrimage . . . The two pence are either the two precepts of love, or the promise of this life and of that which is to come. The innkeeper is the Apostle (Paul) . . . (Quoted in Dodd, 1978:13)

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Whatever value this explanation had in terms of contemporary relevance, what is most apparent to any modem reader is that Jesus could not possibly have meant this. The simple story told by Jesus in order to answer the lawyer’s question, ‘who is my neighbour?’ (Luke 10:29) has been turned into an allegory of Christian doctrine. And this is not an isolated example. This is how most of the parables were interpreted until the modern period. The question of what Jesus originally meant when addressing a firstcentury Palestinian audience was secondary to what the text means now to Christians in subsequent centuries. Thus an alternative to Augustine’s interpretation of the two pence is that they signify the sacraments of baptism and eucharist. Why? Because that is what nourishes the Christian in the church (inn) until Jesus (the Good Samaritan) returns. Historical criticism tries to discover the circumstances behind each of the biblical books. It recognizes that in the first instance, the books were not written to us but to a particular set of readers. For example, Paul’s reason for writing what we now call 1 Corinthians is connected with a report from someone called Chloe: ‘For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you . . . each of you says, “I belong to Paul”, or “I belong to Apollos”, or “I belong to Cephas’” (1 Cor 1:11–12). This letter is not written to you or me. I do not know of anyone in my church or any other church who claims to follow Apollos; yet this is what 1 Corinthians is said to be about. There may well be things that I can learn from it (that is why it was copied and read out to other communities) but it is not addressed to me directly. Historical criticism seeks to discover the background to the writing. Who was Apollos? What was he doing in Corinth? Did he  have a following and what did they stand for? Some of this might be answered by Acts 18:24: ‘Now there came to Ephesus a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria. He was an eloquent man, well-versed in the scriptures.’ If this is the same Apollos, it might explain Paul’s statements about coming to Corinth not with eloquence or clever words (unlike some!) but determined only to preach Christ crucified (1 Cor 2:1–5). Martin Luther suggested that Apollos was the author of the letter to the Hebrews (it is unsigned) and this has been taken up by Hugh Montefiore (1964), who further suggests that it was sent to Corinth. This has not won much support but it is an interesting proposal.

Historical approaches: The search for sources

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The rationale of historical criticism is that meaning always depends on context. It is not enough to know what someone said: we need to know the context in which they said it. For example, writing to the Philippian church, Paul is able to give this promise: ‘I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ’ (Phil 1:6). It is a promise that many Christians have clung to during difficult times. Even if we fail, God remains true to us; what God started, God will finish (for reasons that will be discussed in chapters 7–8, I avoid referring to God as ‘He’). In terms of doctrine, this verse in Philippians 1:6 has been used to support the ‘eternal security’ of the believer. A rather less encouraging statement, however, is found in the letter to the Hebrews: For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, since on their own they are crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him up to contempt. (6:4–6) As absolute statements, these appear to be contradictory but in historical terms, they are understandable. To a church that is suffering and divided, Paul offers promise and encouragement. Philippians is a letter full of joy and praise. But to a church that is on the point of apostasy, the author of Hebrews issues a stinging rebuke. You do not say to a child playing with an electricity socket, ‘Isn’t it fortunate that God will protect you from electrocution?‘ First, you remove the danger and then you have a discussion about the dangers of playing with electricity sockets. Likewise, Hebrews is most concerned with the dangers of falling away from the faith. Thus the context helps us to appreciate why something was said as well as what was said. And this is necessary before any truth claims (such as whether a Christian can fall from grace) can be evaluated.

Sources of the bible Historians depend on sources to reconstruct history. If no one felt an event was worth writing about, it is lost forever (though archaeology

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may uncover non-written remains, such as evidence of a battle). When we listen to the news, almost every item is immediately followed by its source (‘according to a close member of the family’; ‘as the football manager said today’). Unsubstantiated claims are soon dismissed. Only that which comes from reliable sources can be used to reconstruct history. What then are the sources of the bible? Where did the authors get their information from? Were they reliable sources? These questions were sharply aimed at the bible during the eighteenth century. And one of the first observations to come to light was that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the bible) is not the work of a single author. Traditionally, this was thought to be Moses but Deuteronomy 34 contains a record of his death. Are we to believe that God inspired him to write about his own death? Some would answer, ‘Yes’, arguing that if God could cause Moses to predict the coming of a future prophet (Deut 18:15–22), God could certainly cause him to write about his own death. But Deuteronomy 34 does not claim to be prophecy and it does not sound like prophecy. What it sounds like is a later generation paying tribute to Moses: Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab . . . He was buried in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day . . . Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. (34:5, 6, 10) The most obvious explanation of Deuteronomy 34 is that someone thought the stories about Moses would not be complete without an account of his death and a tribute to his accomplishments. Furthermore, there are signs of editing in the books themselves. Thus in Genesis 12:6, we are told that, ‘At that time the Canaanites were in the land.’ This is clearly written by someone who is living after Israel had taken over the promised land and the Canaanites eliminated. Genesis 36:31 says, ‘These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom, before any king reigned over the Israelites.’ Whoever wrote these words not only knows about Israel’s conquest (the theme of Joshua and Judges), he or she also knows about the establishment of the monarchy in Israel (the theme of Samuel and Kings). Who these authors/editors were and when they were working is still a matter of debate but almost all scholars accept that

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Moses could not have written these comments, just as he could not have written about his own death. Even a scholar as conservative as Edward Young says: When we affirm that Moses wrote, or that he was the author of, the Pentateuch, we do not mean that he himself necessarily wrote every word. To insist upon this would be unreasonable. Hammurabi was the author of his famous code, but he certainly did not engrave it himself upon the stele. Our Lord was the author of the Sermon upon the Mount, but He did not write it Himself. Milton was the author of Paradise Lost, but he did not write it all out by hand. (1964:45) However, what remained controversial was the observation that Genesis appeared to contain not one but two accounts of creation. The first is set out in Genesis l:l–2:4a and describes creation in six days, the climax being the creation of ‘male and female’ together (1:26–29). After providing a habitable earth, God creates plant life, creatures of sea and air, animals and finally human beings. However, Genesis 2:4b–25 describes the creation of Adam (2:7), then the animals (2:19), and then, because none of these offer suitable companionship for the man, woman is created from Adam’s rib (2:21–23). The difference between these two accounts is not simply that of chronology but outlook and content. Thus in Genesis 1, God simply utters a word and something comes into being. In Genesis 2, God first makes a shape from the dust of the ground and then breathes life into it. In Genesis 1, the emphasis is on male and female in the image of God (and hence set apart from the rest of creation). In Genesis 2, our proximity to the earth is emphasized by a word play. The Hebrew word for ground is adamah and so God makes adam from the adamah. This connection is lost when we translate adam as ‘man’ (which also introduces gender distinctions). A cumbersome but more accurate rendering would be something like ‘from the earth came the earth-creature’. Lastly, throughout Genesis l:l–2:4a, the Hebrew word for God is elohim but, in the second story (2:4b–25), it is always the compound form yahweh elohim (usually translated ‘Lord God’). This is highly significant because the Genesis 2 account (‘Adam’s rib’) has been used to promote subservient (not to say misogynistic) roles for women as representing God’s will. Though it goes against modern understandings of equality, some Christians argue that

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Genesis 2–3 lays down a hierarchy of being where men are leaders and women are followers. As Eve is told, ‘I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you’ (Gen 3:16). However, if someone wishes to argue that this is how things ought to be today (whether in marriage, society or church leadership), the following ought to be considered: 1 It may be the emphasis in Genesis 2 (though this has been disputed) but it is certainly not the emphasis in Genesis 1. Quite the opposite. The author/editor seems to have gone out of his or her way to stress that male and female were created together in God’s image. On what basis does one choose to give priority to the second account? 2 By adding up the genealogical data, Archbishop Ussher (1658) calculated that, according to the bible, Adam and Eve were created in  4004 bce. Modern science (whether astronomy, geology or biology) declares that to be impossible. Indeed, there are indications in Genesis itself that the story is not meant to be taken literally. Thus, after the murder of Abel, Cain fears that wherever he goes, people will molest him (Gen 4:14). But according to the story, Adam and Eve are the only people alive! Now either the author/editor was incredibly stupid and did not realize this glaring error or he or she was not aiming to give a literal account. The critical view is that the story was written to say something about sin and evil, not to give details about our supposed ancestors. 3 Even on the level of the story, gender roles are not how things ought to be (Gen 1–2) but the result of the Fall (Gen 3). However, as Romans 5:12–21 points out, Christ has reversed the effects of the Fall. Why then should hierarchical gender roles still be part of the new Christian order? Should we not take Paul’s statement in Galatians 3:28 (‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ’) to be the defining characteristic of Christian existence? 4 The most critical question to be faced is whether the stories of Genesis command male dominance (patriarchy) or reflect it. It is well known that much of ancient culture was patriarchal.

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Do the accounts simply reflect the assumptions of the culture from which they come? Or are they God’s blueprint for how things ought to be? The question is clearly of some importance and will be discussed further in Chapters 7–8. Another observation was that the styles of the two creation accounts (including the use of different names for God) were seen to reappear in the flood story (Gen 6–9). However, in this case, they are not complete accounts placed side by side but appear as alternate paragraphs. The change in the divine name is indicated in the NRSV by using ‘God’ for elohim and ‘Lord’ for yahweh. 6:9 6:12

Noah walked with God God saw that the earth was corrupt 7:1 7:5

Then the Lord said to Noah Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him

7:9

male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah. 7:16a And those who entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him 7:16b and the Lord shut him in 7:22 everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. 8:1

But God remembered Noah . . . And God made a wind blow 8:20 8:21

9:1 9:6

God blessed Noah . . . ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ for in his own image God made humankind.

Then Noah built an altar to the Lord the Lord smelt the pleasing odour

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What is particularly interesting about this is that in the ‘God’ (elohim) passages, we see other examples of Genesis 1 language, such as ‘God saw’ (cf. 1:10), ‘male and female’ (cf. 1:27), ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (cf. 1:28) and ‘in his own image God made humankind’ (cf. 1:27). On the other hand, 7:22 reproduces the characteristic way that Genesis 2 refers to life, namely, ‘in whose nostrils was the breath of life’ (cf. 2:7). It appears that the author/ editor of Genesis had access to two different sources, written in very different styles. One referred to God as elohim and pictured God as utterly transcendent, able to create by the mere utterance of a word. The other source used the covenant name yahweh or yahweh elohim (see Exod 6:3) and had a much more immanent (anthropomorphic) view of God (God forms Adam from the dust, walks in the garden, closes the door of the ark, smells the odour of the sacrifice). This theory was then expanded by such scholars as K. H. Graf and given classic exposition by Julius Wellhausen (1878), whereby the whole of the Pentateuch was thought to be composed of four basic sources, these two (known as J and P) and two others (known as E and D). D was primarily the book of Deuteronomy (deuteros   second, nomos  law), which repeats many of the laws of Exodus and Leviticus but with some surprising differences. For example, Deuteronomy 5 contains an alternative version of the ten commandments. These mostly agree with Exodus 20 except for the sabbath command (differences in italics): Exodus 20:8–11 Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work – you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.

Deuteronomy 5:12–15 Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work – you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you.

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For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

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Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

Both traditions know that the sabbath was commanded by God but they differ as to the reason. Exodus 20 looks back to the Genesis account and is the version used in our prayer books. It is based on a creation principle. Deuteronomy 5 looks back to the Exodus (it would be strange for non-Jewish people to recite these words) and is based on a redemption principle (‘God brought you out’). The most plausible explanation for this difference (it was argued) is that they come from different sources (E and D) and have been preserved because the editor(s) did not want to omit anything important. This is why we have two creation accounts, a composite account of the flood and two versions of the ten commandments (actually three, see Exodus 34). The picture that was emerging is that the Pentateuch, as we know it, is a collection of material that has grown over the centuries, rather than the work of a single author (Moses). However, many scholars went further than this general conclusion and tried to assign each and every verse of the Pentateuch to one of these four sources. This was particularly difficult in those passages where the divine name does not occur at all (e.g., Gen 23, 36–37, 47). Instead, such scholars had to look for other signs of editing, such as sudden changes of style or vocabulary, inconsistencies or repetition. For example, consider the story of Joseph’s betrayal by his brothers in Genesis 37: So Joseph went after his brothers, and found them at Dothan. They saw him from a distance, and before he came near to them, they conspired to kill him. They said to one another, ‘Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.’ But when Reuben heard it, he delivered him out of their hands, saying, ‘Let us not take his life.’ Reuben said to them, ‘Shed no blood; throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but lay no hand

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on him’ – that he might rescue him out of their hand and restore him to his father. So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the long robe with sleeves that he wore; and they took him and threw him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it. Then they sat down to eat; and looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels carrying gum, balm, and resin, on their way to carry it down to Egypt. Then Judah said to his brothers, ‘What profit is there if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.’ And his brothers agreed. When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt. When Reuben returned to the pit and saw that Joseph was not in the pit, he tore his clothes. He returned to his brothers, and said, ‘The boy is gone; and I, where can I turn?’ (Gen37:17b–30) Though the double mention of Reuben at the beginning is a little inelegant, the story makes sense up until Judah’s suggestion that they sell Joseph to the Ishmaelites rather than kill him. This is odd because we have just been told that the brothers decided not to kill him; that is why he is in the pit. Furthermore, the mention of the Midianites is puzzling. The brothers see a caravan of Ishmaelites but ‘when some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites’. Are we to understand that the Midianite traders acted as brokers or is ‘Midianite’ an alternative way of referring to an ‘Ishmaelite’? And then there is Reuben himself. At the beginning of the story, he acts to save Joseph by suggesting the pit rather than killing him. Then we are told that ‘they sat down to eat; and looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites’. But this cannot have included Reuben, or the ending (‘When Reuben returned’) makes no sense. Thus we must assume that having persuaded the brothers to do as he suggested, he went off somewhere, though there is no hint of this in the text. This unevenness was explained by S. R. Driver (1904) by reference to sources. The editor had at his disposal two versions of Joseph’s betrayal, one where Judah takes the lead and one where it is Reuben who acts to save Joseph. If we separate the story into these sources, we find that

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In J, Judah takes the lead: he dissuades his other brethren from carrying out their purpose, and induces them to sell Joseph to a caravan of Ishmaelites, who happened to be passing by on their way from Gilead into Egypt; and the Ishmaelites, upon their arrival in Egypt, sell him as a slave to an Egyptian of rank (xxxix.l). In E, Reuben takes the lead, and dissuades the other brethren from carrying out their plan: at his suggestion, they cast Joseph into a pit, and Midianite traders, passing by, draw him up out of the pit, while his brethren are at their meal, and sell him in Egypt to Potiphar (1904:321). There are two main difficulties with this explanation. The first is that in order to separate the story into two sources, Driver has to assume that one of the early references to ‘Reuben’ originally read ‘Judah’. But any theory that requires us to change the primary data is bound to appear suspect. It is not impossible; such changes do occur in textual transmission, as we shall see in Chapter 5. But without specific textual support, we shall require firm evidence from elsewhere before we agree that the text must have read ‘Judah’. Second, even if it is true that the editor is drawing on ancient sources, what is the evidence that the ‘Judah’ story comes from the same source that gave us the second creation account? It does not use yahweh elohim since it does not speak of God at all. And since it does not speak of God at all, it cannot be argued that its outlook is immanent rather than transcendent. Indeed, this is the basic difficulty with the JEDP hypothesis. There is general agreement that the Pentateuch draws on various sources and has been edited over a period of time. But whether these sources can be reconstructed or indeed whether it is right to talk of them as documents (as opposed to traditions) is doubtful. Many scholars still find it useful to speak of a J or a P tradition but very few accept the detailed reconstructions of Wellhausen and Driver. Conservative scholars such as Young take this as a victory for the traditional view: The Pentateuch exhibits an inner plan and structure that betray a great mind. Who, better than Moses, could have produced such a work? More than two hundred years of exhaustive study have been unable to produce a satisfactory substitute for the time-honoured biblical view that Moses himself was the human

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author of the Law. Hence, we cannot do better than to regard the Pentateuch as the product of the great lawgiver of Israel. (1964:153) The majority of scholars, however, do not find this accords with the facts. The signs of editing are clearly present in the text. If the original JEDP theory is unsatisfactory, it is not because the evidence points to a single author but because it points to an even more complicated process than the combining of four fixed documents (see Gooder, 2000:9–45).

Isaiah The kingdom established by David and Solomon (c. 1000–922 bce) was short lived. The northern tribes refused to be ruled by Solomon’s son Rehoboam (1 Kings 12) and made Samaria their capital (1 Kings 16). Henceforth, the name Israel is used for the northern tribes only and is nearly always negative (1 Kings 16:13), while those who continued to worship in Jerusalem are referred to as Judah. For the next two hundred years, Israel and Judah are forced to defend themselves against foreign powers and at times, each other. However, both kingdoms eventually fell: Israel was conquered by the Assyrians in 722/1 bce (2 Kings 17) and Judah by the Babylonians in 587/6 bce (2 Kings 25). Many scholars believe that the final editing of the Pentateuch took place during this period, partly to understand why such a catastrophe had happened and partly to ensure that it would never happen again by rigorously keeping the law. The opening verses of Isaiah identify him as a prophet living before and after the fall of Samaria. His call vision (Isaiah 6) took place in the year in which King Uzziah died (c. 740 bce) and he was still active in the last days of Hezekiah (c. 690 bce). His ministry was to Judah, urging the southern kings not to fear their enemies but to remain faithful to God. However, when we reach chapter 40, it becomes clear that we are in a completely different time period. The exile is over and the Jewish people are about to return to Jerusalem (Isa 40:1–11). This has come about because a certain Cyrus has issued a decree that Jerusalem is to be rebuilt (Isa 45:13) and Babylon is to be destroyed (Isa 47:1–15). This corresponds to

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the final verse of 2 Chronicles where we are told: ‘Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the LORD his God be with him! Let him go up’ (2 Chron 36:23). This can be dated to c. 538 bce, so the exile referred to in Isaiah 40 is not the fall of Samaria in 721/1 bce but the destruction of Jerusalem in 587/6 bce. How is this to be explained? The traditional view is that because Isaiah was a prophet, who not only spoke to his own generation but also predicted the coming of a messianic king (Isa 9:6–7; 11:1–9), he foresaw what was to happen in the sixth century bce. However, scholars have observed that Isaiah 40–55 is written in a very different style to Isaiah 1–39 and its view of God has a different emphasis. Thus a simple search on the word ‘created’ in the NRSV reveals 11 occurrences in Isaiah 40–55 but none in Isaiah 1–39. The argument of Isaiah 40–55 is that because God is their creator, they will be comforted in their sorrow and given new hope (Isa 42:5; 43:1). Indeed, Isa 54:6 is bold enough to say that God feels the people’s suffering ‘like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, like the wife of a man’s youth when she is cast off’. In Isaiah 40–55, we meet the famous servant songs where God’s servant is initially identified as faithful Israel (Isa 44:1) but is described in such personal and individual terms in Isaiah 53 that the church became convinced that it spoke about Jesus (Acts 8:27–39; 1 Pet  2:22–5). But perhaps the most significant point is that these chapters do not read like future prediction; rather, they seem to describe an actual prophet delivering a message of comfort to the people of the sixth century (‘Comfort, O comfort my people . . . Speak tenderly to Jerusalem’ – Isa 40:1). This cannot be the historical Isaiah and so scholars refer to him as ‘Deutero’ or ‘Second’ Isaiah. The latter chapters of Isaiah (56–66) seem to come from an even later period and the name ‘Trito’ or ‘Third’ Isaiah was given to the prophet who inspired them. If this theory is true, then what we have in the book of Isaiah is a collection of traditions that began with the eighth century prophet but was expanded and developed to meet the needs of later generations. In particular, the traumatic experience of exile brought forth a prophet whose theology of suffering is unmatched in the Old Testament and plays a crucial role in the New Testament. And although there is less consensus on the nature of Trito-Isaiah,

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here we find a prophet who can envisage the nations joining Israel in worship and indeed can speak of a new heaven and earth (Isa 66:22–3). For some scholars, the idea that later prophecies were added to Isaiah’s prophecies is incompatible with a doctrine of inspiration. They correctly point out that when Paul quotes Isaiah 53:1 in Romans 10:16, he introduces it with the words, ‘for Isaiah says’, demonstrating that he thought it was from the eighth-century prophet. On the other hand, it is clear that tradition associated Moses with the Pentateuch, David with the Psalms and Solomon with Proverbs, even though Psalm 73 is said to be associated with Asaph and Proverbs 30 with Agur. Many scholars now think that the growth and development of traditions need not be incompatible with a doctrine of inspiration and indeed are necessary if we are to understand the reinterpretation of Old Testament texts that we find in the New Testament. How else can we explain Paul’s conclusion that some of God’s laws, such as circumcision, are no longer in force (Gal 5:6)?

Daniel Daniel is a curious book. The Hebrew bible is divided into three sections (Torah, Prophets, Writings) and Daniel is included in the third section, along with Psalms, Job and Proverbs, rather than with the Prophets. It was only when the Hebrew bible was translated into Greek (known as the Septuagint or LXX) that it took its place after Ezekiel, as well as receiving a number of additions (see 3:24–97; 13:1–14:42 in the Jerusalem Bible). The book is written in two languages, Hebrew (1:1–2:4a; 8:1–12:12) and Aramaic (2:4b–7:28). The first half of the book concerns the exploits of Daniel during the exile in Babylon (fiery furnace, lion’s den, Belshazzar’s feast) but the second half consists of a series of apocalyptic visions which refer to the kings of Media, Persia and Greece (Dan 8:20–21). Unlike the glorious future predicted by Deutero-Isaiah, these chapters speak of further persecutions and are at times extremely detailed. For example, Daniel 8:9–14 speaks of an attack against the ‘beautiful land’ which results in a suspension of the ‘regular burnt-offering’ for ‘two thousand three hundred evenings and mornings’. This sounds like a reference to the desecration of Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanes in the second

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century bce, where according to 1 Maccabees 1:45–8, he ordered those in Jerusalem to ‘follow customs strange to the land, to forbid burnt offerings and sacrifices and drink offerings in the sanctuary, to profane sabbaths and festivals . . . to sacrifice swine and other unclean animals, and to leave their sons uncircumcised’. Under the leadership of Judas Maccabeus, these forces were repelled and the temple rededicated in 164 bce, an event celebrated in the feast of Hanukkah (1 Macc 4:59). In between these two sections of Daniel lies chapter 7, where evil is depicted as four beasts emerging from the sea, which are then identified as four kings or kingdoms (7:17). The fourth kingdom is the worst and will ‘devour the whole earth, and trample it down, and break it to pieces’ (7:23). The good news is that this kingdom will finally be destroyed and dominion will be given to the ‘people of the holy ones of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom’ (7:27). The chapter also contains two visions that are taken up in the New Testament and have been highly influential in Christian theology. The first is Daniel’s throne vision, where God is described as an ‘Ancient One’ (lit. ‘ancient of days’) whose ‘clothing was white as snow’ and hair like ‘pure wool’ (7:9). The scene is one of judgement where ‘the books were opened’ (7:10). We are not told anything further about these books but in Revelation 20:12 we read: ‘And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, the book of life. And the dead were judged according to their works, as recorded in the books’. The second vision is of a figure approaching God, who is ‘coming with the clouds of heaven’ and described as ‘one like a son of man’ (7:13 RSV). There has been much debate as to the relationship between this general description of appearance (like a human rather than like a beast) and the title ‘Son of Man’ found in the Gospels but there is little doubt that the words of Jesus recorded in Mark 13:24–6 are an allusion to this text: ‘But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory’. Two other features are worth mentioning. The first is the role of angels in human events, both to convey messages (Gabriel: 8:16; 9:21) and to direct the affairs of nations (Michael: 10:13, 21; 12:1).

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The former is very close to the announcement of Jesus’ birth to Mary in Luke 1:19, while the latter is echoed in Revelation 12:7 (‘And war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon’). The second feature is that Daniel 12:1–2 is the only clear statement in the Old Testament that explicitly speaks of resurrection: ‘Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever’. All these features suggest that Daniel is closer in time to the New Testament period than to the sixth-century exile in Babylon. It would explain why it is included in the third section of the Hebrew bible, which was not yet complete, and why it includes detailed knowledge of the attack on Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanes. We know from other writings that interest in angels and demons developed in the century or so before Christ, as was belief in resurrection. Although Daniel remains a puzzling book, placing its final composition a century and a half before Christ has helped to explain a number of its features.

Old Testament time-line It will be clear from the above that it is very difficult to construct a time-line of Old Testament books and events. However, in order to begin Old Testament study, it will be useful to have in mind at least a provisional framework of some key events/people. 1 Kings 6:1 puts the date of the Exodus around 1450 bce but there is no archaeological evidence to support a major invasion of Canaan some 40 years later (Gooder: 67–71). A suggestion that was popular in the twentieth century was a date around 1220 bce but most scholars today think more in terms of a gradual settlement rather than a great invasion. Not surprisingly, the date of the patriarchs (400 years earlier according to Gen 15:13) is even more vague, as there is no external evidence to confirm any of the stories. However, once we get to David and Solomon (1020–922 bce), we are on firmer ground and the destruction of Samaria in  722/1 bce and Jerusalem in  587/6 are dates worth committing to memory.

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bce

Key events/people

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Biblical books

2200–1600 Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob)

Genesis 12–50

1450–1220 Exodus, wilderness wanderings

Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, Deuteronomy

1220–1020 Settlement in Canaan, governed by judges (Gideon, Samson) Saul is Israel’s first king

Joshua Judges, Ruth 1 Samuel

1020–922

David and Solomon

2 Samuel; 1 Kings 1–11

922–722/1

Divided kingdom of Israel and 1 Kings 12–2 Kings 17 Judah Samaria falls to Assyrians – 722/1 Amos, Hosea, Isaiah 1–39

722/1–587/6 Kingdom of Judah Jerusalem falls to Babylonians – 587/6

2 Kings 18–25 Jeremiah

587/6–538

Judah in Exile

Isaiah 40–55, Ezekiel Dan 1–6

538–400

Return from exile Rebuilding of Jerusalem

Haggai, Zechariah 1–8 Nehemiah, Malachi, Ezra

167–164

Attack of Antiochus Epiphanes Maccabean revolt. Rededication of Temple

Daniel 8–12 1 Maccabees 2–4

The Gospels In the New Testament, the big question was the relationship between the Gospels. For example, how did Jesus face death? According to Mark, Jesus utters a cry of despair: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (15:34). No other words are recorded by Mark, leaving nothing to offset the sombre nature of the whole event. But John offers a different picture. In John 19, Jesus utters three sayings from the cross. The first is an expression of concern for his soon-tobe bereaved mother (19:26–27). The second is to express his thirst (19:28), which we are immediately told was to fulfil scripture. And third, Jesus’ final words on the cross according to John, he says, ‘It is finished’ (19:30). There are no signs of despair or questioning God or wondering what is happening to him. Jesus is in perfect control. He is returning from whence he came (see 17:4–5).

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An historian is bound to ask which of these accounts is closest to what actually happened? Did Jesus end his life with a despairing question or a confident assertion? Previously, questions of this sort were answered by trying to harmonize the accounts. Everything in the Gospels is true and so must somehow fit together. But the problem is far more complex than trying to imagine a scenario where Jesus experiences both despair (Mark) and assurance (John). Read on their own, each Gospel is clearly trying to give a different impression. Indeed, if Jesus ultimately left this life with the confident assurance that John suggests, then one can only describe Mark as perverse in omitting all mention of it. What of the other Gospels? Reading Mark and John side by side reveals almost no verbal parallels. They appear to come from quite different sources. But Matthew and Luke are often very similar to Mark (they are known as the ‘Synoptic’ Gospels because they can be arranged in a synopsis). Despite a number of important differences, they clearly tell the same story: Matthew 27:45,51

Mark 15:33,38

Luke 23:44,45

From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon . . . 

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon . . . 

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon . . .

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.

As for the crucifixion scene, Matthew agrees with Mark that the last words of Jesus were, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (27:46). But Luke is more like John in recording a number of sayings from the cross, all of which are positive. The first is the forgiveness saying, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing’ (23:34). The second is the promise to the penitent thief that ‘today you will be with me in Paradise’ (23:43). And the third, Jesus’ final words from the cross according to Luke, is, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’ (23:46) As can be seen overleaf, Matthew and Mark are almost identical but Luke and John are significantly different:

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Matthew 27:45–6

Mark 15:33–34 Luke 23:44–46

From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last.

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John 19:28–30 After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfil the scripture), ‘I am thirsty.’ A jar full of sour wine was standing there, So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

Now up to this point, the church had accepted the judgement of Augustine that Matthew was the first Gospel to be written and that Mark was an abbreviation of it (it is about two thirds the length). But during the nineteenth century, scholars became more and more convinced that Mark was the first Gospel and that both Matthew and Luke used Mark as one of their sources. If this is true, then historical reconstruction suggests that the original picture of Jesus dying in despair (or at least questioning God) was changed to a more victorious one. It is true that Matthew follows Mark by repeating the cry of dereliction but he offsets this by telling us that when Jesus died, there was an earthquake, the tombs opened and the saints of old came to life (Matt 27:51–53). Though the cry of despair is recorded, the reader is left in no doubt that Jesus’ death was a victory. It was nothing short of the beginning of the resurrection of the dead (Ezek 37:13: ‘And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people’). Luke’s changes are more far-reaching. He omits the cry altogether and replaces it with ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’

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(a quotation from Ps 31:5). The other two sayings have already indicated that Jesus is thinking of others rather than himself. Now he indicates his complete submission to God. He willingly commends his spirit into God’s hands. There is no sense of despair or questioning God. As Talbert says, ‘Jesus dies quietly, full of trust, a model for Christian martyrs to follow’ (1982:225). Jesus’ promise to the penitent thief (‘today you will be with me in Paradise’) is also a sign of his own confidence. His ordeal will soon be over and he will be in paradise to welcome the penitent thief. John is even further away from Mark. He is similar to Luke in having Jesus thinking of others (his mother) instead of his own suffering. But is this quite accurate? One looks in vain in John’s account to find any suggestion that Jesus is really suffering. He asks for a drink, which he duly takes. But this was to fulfil scripture, not because he was in need. And then he utters his final words, ‘It is finished.’ Jesus has come from the Father, has accomplished his will and now returns (John 17:4–5). Our knowledge of the other Gospels (and the later creeds) tells us that Jesus suffered but it is not the focus of John’s Gospel. The impression left by John is more that Jesus, as divine Son of God, rose above the pain and died victoriously. Everything went as planned. Some try to minimize the differences between these accounts by suggesting that the so-called cry of dereliction is really a cry of victory. As is well known, the cry is a quotation from the beginning of Psalm 22 (‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?’), and the psalm does end on a note of trust (22:29–31). However, it would be a strange way of pointing to the ‘trusting’ part of the psalm by quoting only from the ‘despairing’ part. One could perhaps argue that Jesus was intending to recite the whole of the psalm but got no further than the first line. But that hardly lends itself to harmonizing with John or Luke, where the last words are positive and affirming. The most natural way of reading Mark’s crucifixion account is that Jesus died in turmoil if not despair. And the words of Psalm 22:1 were on his lips because they voiced what he was feeling. He identified with the (innocent) suffering of the psalmist. Furthermore, such differences between the Gospels are not limited to the crucifixion accounts. Consider, for example, how each of the Gospels begins. Mark has Jesus coming to John for baptism (1:9), receiving the Holy Spirit (1:10) and hearing a heavenly voice

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(1:11). If we did not possess the other Gospels, there would be no reason to assume that Jesus was anything special before this experience. He was simply one of the many who came to John for baptism. In Mark’s account, what sets Jesus apart is what happened to him at his baptism. The heavens opened, the Spirit descended, the voice spoke. This is what empowered him to do battle with Satan (1:12–13) and begin a ministry of preaching, healing and exorcism. In terms of later doctrinal disputes, Mark could be open to an ‘adoptionist’ view of Christ, the view that God chose (‘adopted’) Jesus to be the Messiah and hence ‘Son of God’. Matthew and Luke, by providing infancy stories, rule out this interpretation. Jesus was no ordinary man who simply received the Spirit at baptism. The Spirit was involved in his life from the very moment of conception (indeed, conception was of the Holy Spirit). It is probable that this is more important to the authors than the so-called virgin birth, which is never referred to again in the whole of the New Testament (see Brown, 1977). But now that we know that Jesus is set apart at birth and endowed with the Spirit, we are ready for a different sort of baptism account. And that is what Matthew offers: Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then he consented. (3:13–15) Matthew and Luke rule out the possibility that Jesus was simply adopted by God at his baptism. God’s Spirit was involved from the very moment of conception, and the incident of the boy Jesus in the temple (Luke 2:41–51) and the baptism story in Matthew confirm this. However, in neither Gospel is there any hint that Jesus had a ‘life’ with God before his conception. The virgin birth might be miraculous but it is nevertheless narrating the beginning or origin of Jesus’ life. There is no suggestion in Matthew or Luke that Jesus’ birth is the incarnation of a pre-existent being. But that is precisely what John claims in the opening of his Gospel: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing

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came into being . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth (1:1–3, 14).

The quest for the historical Jesus Whatever the processes that led to the sort of differences that we have been highlighting, the church has generally assumed them to be providential. It is admitted that John’s Gospel has a much more explicit Christology (doctrine of Christ) than Mark but this is part of an unfolding revelation which eventually led to the definition of Chalcedon (451 ce) and the creeds: Therefore, following the holy Fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the Fathers has handed down to us. (Text from Bettenson, 1963:51–2) However, if history means anything, it is difficult to maintain that this complex set of propositions was what ‘our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us’. It may represent genuine hindsight as to his significance but it is a long way from our earliest sources. The Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels is more concerned to preach the coming kingdom

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of God than instruct his disciples that he is ‘of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood’. So what sort of picture of Jesus emerges if we allow our earliest sources to be our guide? For Albert Schweitzer (1910), it was of someone who ardently believed that the end of the world was drawing near. Thus from Mark’s Gospel, written within 30-40 years of the crucifixion, we read: Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ (1:14–15) ‘Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.’ (9:1) ‘Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.’ (13:30) Jesus’ mission, says Schweitzer, was to prepare Israel for the coming kingdom of God. Jesus initially thought this would come as a result of his ministry (Matt 10:23) but when this did not happen, he realised that only his own sacrifice would bring it about. So he made his way to Jerusalem, knowing that he would die there but confident that God would then inaugurate his kingdom. The cry of dereliction (‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’) expresses his perplexity that nothing seems to be happening. And after nearly 2000 years, the kingdom has still not come. Schweitzer thus urged Christians to face up to the facts about Jesus. He was not the doctrinal figure of the creeds, fully aware of his own divinity and knowing everything in advance. Indeed, Jesus states this quite clearly in Mark 13:32: ‘But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.’ So who was Jesus? For Schweitzer, he was an eschatological prophet, a preacher of the end of the world (eschatos   end). This is the reason for his radical teaching on discipleship. The end is coming soon and so no sacrifice is too great in order to be ready. Possessions and family must not be allowed to get in the way (Mark 10:28–31). Let the dead bury their own dead (Matt 9:22). If hand or foot causes you to stumble, cut it off (Mark 9:43). Such radical

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commands make sense in a time of crisis or dire emergency but are hardly a blueprint for a healthy society (especially if taken literally!). And if we are honest, we must recognize that we would normally associate such behaviour (breaking up families, harsh treatment of the body, disregard for a decent burial) with fanatical sects, rather than Christianity. Schweitzer’s views did not go unchallenged. C. H. Dodd (1935) pointed out that there are other sayings in the Gospels which suggest that Jesus believed the kingdom to have actually arrived. Thus, in the Beelzebub controversy (Mark 3:22–30), Jesus implies that his healings and exorcisms are a result of God’s kingdom attacking Satan’s kingdom. This is made more explicit in Matthew’s version, which says: ‘But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you’ (Matt 12:28). Dodd believed that the urgency in Jesus’ ministry was not because the kingdom was coming soon but because it was already making its presence felt. Jesus himself is the event that forces people to decide for or against the kingdom, not the end of the world. God was ‘realizing’ or ‘making present’ his kingdom in Jesus and hence the urgency of his message. Dodd’s view was later to be called ‘realized eschatology’ as opposed to Schweitzer’s ‘futurist eschatology’. But what of the three verses in Mark (1:15; 9:1; 13:30) that seem to imply that Jesus thought the end of the world was coming soon? Dodd offered alternative interpretations. For Mark 1:15, the phrase ‘the kingdom of God has come near’ means it has actually arrived. The announcement is not saying that the kingdom is coming soon; anyone could have said that. The point is that, in Jesus, the future hope has actually been realized. And Dodd supported this interpretation by pointing out that the Greek verb (engizein   to draw near) is in the perfect tense and therefore implies a completed state. In other words, the kingdom has drawn near to such an extent that it has actually arrived in the person of Jesus. On Mark 9:1, he says: ‘The bystanders are not promised that they shall see the Kingdom of God coming, but that they shall come to see that the Kingdom of God has already come, at some point before they became aware of it’ (1978:43). Once again, he points out that the verb ‘coming’ (a participle) is in the perfect tense and should be translated, ‘has already come’. And third, the calamities to take place in the disciples’ generation (Mark 13:30) refer to the political

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upheavals mentioned in the first part of the discourse (13:5–23), not the apocalyptic description of the end of the world in 13:24–27 (‘the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light’). And if these calamities refer to the Jewish war (c. 66–70 ce), as Luke makes explicit with his mention of ‘Jerusalem surrounded by armies’ (Luke 21:20), then they did indeed take place within a generation. Dodd’s linguistic arguments are now regarded as dubious but his work was an important corrective to Schweitzer. The consensus for the last 40 years has been that the kingdom of God is both present and future. There are sayings that suggest that Jesus believed the kingdom to be present in his own ministry. But, equally, there are sayings which suggest a future dimension and this is usually referred to as ‘the consummation’. The kingdom was inaugurated by Jesus but awaits a final consummation. Nevertheless, the impression given by Mark is undoubtedly that the consummation was expected soon, a view apparently shared by Paul: For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord for ever. (1 Thess 4:16–17) I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. (1 Cor 7:29–31).

Conclusion For most of church history, the meaning of the bible was whatever the hierarchy of the church decided. And, as Galileo found out, it had means of persuasion for those who disagreed. But the Enlightenment changed that by suggesting that truth should be established by rational enquiry, not ‘law and enforcement’. Central

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to this was the use of the historical method. By evaluating sources and suggesting hypotheses, here was a means of enquiry with which all people could agree. Any rational person must concede that Moses could not have written every word of the Pentateuch and Jesus did not go around talking about his two natures. The historical evidence says so. However, debate continues as to the significance of this evidence. Radical scholars tend to see it as the tip of the iceberg. If editors were still working on the Pentateuch in the fifth century bce, then it is hardly a reliable source for what Moses said and did a thousand years earlier. The Pentateuch, as we now have it, represents what Israelite tradition believed about Moses, not what he actually said and did. On the other hand, conservative scholars point out that the number of verses that definitely could not have been written by Moses is relatively small. The different styles could represent the sources used by Moses or even changes in his own style over a period of 40 years or more. Thus some scholars still maintain that the Pentateuch is substantially the work of Moses, even though later editors have added explanatory remarks (‘before any king reigned over the Israelites’). Furthermore, it was argued that the bible can only be regarded as mistaken if it can be shown (for example) that the author of Genesis intended the ‘six days’ to be taken literally or that Jesus intended to predict the date of his second coming. In the first case, it has long been observed that the sun was not created until the fourth day (Gen 1:14–19) and so ‘day’ does not necessarily imply a 24-hour period, which is governed by the sun. And Mark 13:32 makes it clear that Jesus refused to speculate about when the end would come. In other words, the truth of a passage depends on what the author or speaker was intending. If the Gospel writers were aiming to give us the exact words of Jesus, then the fact that they differ among themselves must mean that one or more of them is in error. But was it the intention of the biblical writers to record the exact words of the characters in the stories?

Further reading For more detailed discussions of the nature of the Pentateuch, Isaiah and the Gospels, see the corresponding volumes in this series (Gooder, 2000;

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Marsh and Moyise, 2006; Stromberg, 2011). There is also a series of ‘Guides’ published by T&T Clark International to the various biblical books (Genesis, Exodus etc.) which cover historical, literary and theological issues. Clines’s book (The Theme of the Pentateuch, 1997) remains useful and for a more recent treatment, see J. L. Ska, Introduction to Reading the Pentateuch (2006). For three very different historical reconstructions of Jesus, see E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993), J. D. Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994) and N. T. Wright, Who was Jesus? (2005).

Questions 1 What is the evidence that Genesis 1–2 come from different sources? 2 Is it possible to harmonize the crucifixion accounts into one coherent narrative? What assumptions have to be made in order to do it? 3 How has historical criticism changed the way we read the bible?

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3 Historical approaches: The search for context

In our last chapter, we saw how historical criticism attempted to understand the Pentateuch, Isaiah, Daniel and the Gospels by identifying their sources. Not surprisingly, this is known as source criticism. But what about the individual stories, oracles, parables, laws and psalms that make up the bible? Is there any way of going behind the texts to discover their original context or life setting (Sitz im Leben) in which they were first used? In this chapter, we will discuss three approaches to biblical studies that seek to illuminate the tradition history of the material, namely, the so-called ‘history of religions’ school, form-criticism, and social-scientific criticism.

‘History of religions’ Archaeological discoveries during the nineteenth century produced a number of texts from the Ancient Near East (ANE) that bore striking similarities to certain biblical texts. The best known of these is perhaps the Gilgamesh epic, which Gooder (2000:41) summarizes in the following words: The god Enlil decided to flood the earth. Warned by the god Ea, Utnapishtim tore down his house and built a cube-shaped ship, into which he took treasure, his family and both domestic and wild beasts. The storm raged for six days. On the seventh day the storm died down and the ark came to rest on Mount Nisir. The ship was

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grounded for six days. On the seventh day, Utnapishtim sent out a dove, which returned to him because she found no resting-place. Then he sent out a swallow, which also came back. Finally, he sent a raven, which did not return. At this point, Utnapishtim released the creatures from the ark and sacrificed to the gods. When they ‘smelled the sweet savour. The gods crowded like flies about the sacrifice’ (lines 160–1). When the god Enlil saw that Utnapishtim had survived the flood, he was angry because he had intended to destroy all humanity. In order to preserve his plan, he made Utnapishtim and his wife divine and hence immortal. What is particularly striking is the series of birds (dove, swallow, raven) that are sent out to determine whether the waters have receded. One might expect a certain amount of similarity in ‘flood’ stories (there has to be rain, a vessel, receding waters, survivors etc.) but this detail is too specific to be mere coincidence. In our Genesis account, the ‘ark’ also comes to rest on a mountain range (Gen 8:4) and then Noah determines when the waters have receded by sending out first a raven, which returns, then a dove, which returns, then the dove again, which returns with an olive leaf in its beak, and then the dove again, which does not return. The details are not exact and most scholars deny any direct literary dependence but it would seem that both stories emerge from a common tradition or milieu. The so-called ‘History of Religions’ school seeks to explain (or at least better understand) the biblical material by setting it in its proper context (ANE). Another example consists of the psalms and poetry that we now know existed in a variety of ancient languages and cultures (Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian). Hebrew poetry has often been characterized by certain formal patterns, such as parallelism (phrases A and B are broadened or intensified by similar phrases A' and B' to form an ABA' B' pattern) or chiasm (an ABCB' A' pattern). But such traits are characteristic of ancient poetry, along with some common themes. Consider this extract from an Egyptian text written by Pharaoh Amenophis IV (c. 1364–1347 bce): The world came into being by thy hand, According as thou has made them. When thou hast risen they live, When thou settest they die.

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Thou art lifetime thy own self, For one lives (only) through thee. Eyes are (fixed) on beauty until thou settest. All work is laid aside when thou settest in the west. [But] when (thou) risest (again), (Everything is) made to flourish for the king, . . .  Since thou didst found the earth And raise them up for thy son . . . (Text in Seybold, 1990:206) The obvious difference to the Old Testament psalms is that this is written in praise of the Egyptian sun-god (‘When thou hast risen . . . When thou settest’). However, not only does Psalm 104 say similar things about Israel’s God, it also appears to show knowledge of this sort of piety (‘The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God. When the sun rises, they withdraw and lie down in their dens’). Although many of the assumptions of the ‘History of Religions’ school have been challenged, it is generally recognized that a thorough knowledge of the ANE is essential for understanding the Old Testament.

Form criticism Herman Gunkel (1862–1932) is usually seen as the founder of what is known in English as Form criticism. Taking his cue from the compari­ sons being offered by the ‘History of Religions’ school, Gunkel drew on the work of the Grimm brothers (Jakob and Wilhelm) to classify the ‘types’ or ‘forms’ of literature that make up the book of Genesis. The idea was that ‘form’ is a clue to social setting and perhaps even origin. However, he is best known for his work on Israel’s psalms.

The psalms Beginning in  1904 and culminating in his Die Psalmen of 1926 (ET: 1933), Gunkel attempted to categorize the individual psalms into a number of ‘types’ as indicators of their use or function. He found five main types: Hymns (e.g. 145–150), Communal laments (e.g. 44, 74, 79), Individual laments (e.g. 42–51), Individual

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thanksgivings (e.g. 18, 30, 32) and Royal psalms (e.g. 2, 45, 110). The latter category has been much debated as it appears to be based more on content than form. It is also of great significance for New Testament interpretation since these psalms are applied directly to Christ. Gunkel also recognized a group of minor categories, such as Pilgrimage songs (84, 122), Communal thanksgivings (67, 124), Wisdom poems (1, 37, 49) and Liturgy (12, 15, 75). Gunkel only thought a small proportion of the psalms can be directly linked to a specific worship (cultic) settings but his student, Sigmund Mowinckel (1933) expanded this to include the majority. He noted the dramatic features that occur in the psalms, such as processions, invocations, oracular responses, dancing, singing, reference to musical instruments, ritual actions and what at times appear to be stage directions. Consider, for example, a pilgrimage on the way to Jerusalem to celebrate one of the great feasts. Who is worthy to go and what will be the result? Who shall ascend the hill of the lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? Those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully. They will receive blessing from the lord, and vindication from the God of their salvation. (Psalm 24:3–5). And when they approach the temple, one of their number cries out, ‘Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors!‘ (Psalm 24:9). On analogy with the Babylonian new year festival, Mowinckel believed that Israel celebrated an annual enthronement festival where the king played the part of God, ritually enacting the kingship of God over the world. This explains why the human king can be addressed in such exalted terms as Psalm 45: I address my verses to the king; my tongue is like the pen of a ready scribe. You are the most handsome of men . . . Gird your sword on your thigh, O mighty one, in your glory and majesty. In your majesty ride on victoriously for the cause of truth . . . Your throne, O God, endures for ever and ever. (Psalm 45:1–6 abbreviated) These last words are quoted in the New Testament (Heb 1:8–9) as referring to Jesus but they were originally directed towards Israel’s king, who was representing God in the enthronement ritual.

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Subsequent scholarship has attempted to refine Gunkel’s categories (many of the individual laments are probably communal) and modify Mowinckel’s reconstructions of Israel’s cultic life but in the words of Crenshaw, ‘Together, teacher and student shaped the nature of all subsequent interpretation of Psalms’ (2001:84). The essence of form criticism is that form is an important clue to the life-setting (Sitz im Leben) of the material.

The Gospels In 1919, Karl Ludwig Schmidt published a book which showed that many of the events in the Gospels are introduced with a minimum of historical detail. For example, the story of the disciples passing through the grainfields is introduced by the words, ‘One sabbath he was going through the grainfields’ (Mark 2:23). It is important for the story that it happened on a sabbath but other than that, there is no indication whether this happened early in the ministry or much later. Mark’s next story begins, ‘Again he entered the synagogue’ (3:1), which only tells us that this was not his first visit. It could come from any time in Jesus’ ministry. We tend to assume that it is early because it comes early in Mark’s Gospel but is that a safe assumption? Our earliest reference to Mark’s Gospel is preserved in Eusebius’s fourth-century work, Historia Ecclesiae. In this work, Eusebius quotes Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis around 130 ce, as saying, ‘Mark, who had been Peter’s interpreter, wrote down carefully, but not in order, all that he remembered of the Lord’s sayings and doings’ (H.E. 3:39). Furthermore, Matthew clearly did not think Mark’s order was sacrosanct. One only has to consult a synopsis such as Throckmorton (1992) to make the point: Story

Mark

Matthew

Jesus calls the first disciples Jesus casts out a demon in the synagogue Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law The sick are healed in the evening Jesus prays in a lonely place Summary of Jesus preaching throughout Galilee Jesus heals a man suffering from leprosy

1:16–20 1:21–28 1:29–31 1:32–34 1:35–38 1:39 1:40–45

4:18–22 8:14–15 8:16–17 4:23–25 8:1–4

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Three conclusions are possible: (1) Matthew knows Mark’s chronology is wrong and is trying to correct it; (2) Neither Matthew or Mark are particularly interested in chronology – it is the meaning of the individual stories that is important; (3) The accounts could be harmonized if we had more information. The majority of scholars opt for the second explanation, arguing that the first is unlikely since Matthew seems to prefer a thematic rather than chronological order (see Chapter 4), and the third involves inventing additional stories for which there is no evidence. For example, to harmonize the above sequence, we would have to suppose that Jesus healed a man suffering from leprosy both before and after he healed Peter’s mother-in-law and this took place with identical dialogue (The man says, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean’, and Jesus says, ‘Go, show yourself to the priest’). Schmidt’s conclusion was that the particular setting (‘the string’) of a story or parable (‘the pearl’) in the Gospels is not a reliable guide to its actual setting. These have been provided by the Evangelists in order to produce a connected narrative. Thus in order to discover the original context of the various stories and parables, it is necessary to peel away these later accretions, and the two scholars that pioneered this were Martin Dibelius (1921) and Rudolf Bultmann (1921). Both tried to classify the types of material in the Gospels (using German words like apophthegm for a short story with a punch line) in order to ascertain its earliest form. They assumed that ‘simple’ or ‘pure’ forms were closer to the original than ‘mixed’ forms like the healing of the paralytic, which contains both a miracle story and a pronouncement of forgiveness. As an illustration of their method, consider the debate about fasting in Mark 2:18–20: Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, ‘Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’ Jesus said to them, ‘The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.’ The first phrase is quite general and is used to provide a setting for what follows. It does not appear to be related to the previous story,

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where Jesus is accused of eating with sinners and tax-collectors at Levi’s house (2:15–17). If it were, Jesus’ reply (‘The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them’) would most naturally be taken as a reference to Levi and his hospitality. But it is clear that we are intended to understand Jesus as the bridegroom. Thus it is most likely that this is a free-standing story, placed here as one of a group of conflict stories that run from Mark 2:1–3:6. The setting and the question have been formulated by Mark or the source that he is using. Then comes the key saying, that it is inappropriate to fast at a wedding. What could Jesus have meant? Presumably, something like, ‘The coming kingdom of God is a cause for joy and rejoicing not sadness and solemnity.’ Elsewhere, Jesus compares the coming kingdom with a wedding feast (Matt 22:1–14) and the theme of ‘partying’ appears in a number of parables (e.g. the prodigal son). It would appear then that the early church transmitted a saying where Jesus compares the kingdom with a wedding feast and, on at least one occasion, used it as a reason for not fasting. Though the Greek words that have come down to us are not the actual words spoken by Jesus (which would have been in Aramaic), the maxim is memorable and is probably close to what Jesus actually said. Except for the last sentence. Bultmann notes that the final sentence makes quite a different point and has a context in the debates of the early church rather than the life of Jesus. The maxim makes the point that God’s kingdom is a time of rejoicing. The final sentence is a reference to the crucifixion (‘when the bridegroom is taken away’) and has the effect of (1) identifying Jesus as the bridegroom – in other words, it turns the maxim into an allegory; and (2) implying that his disciples will fast after the crucifixion. Now we know from other New Testament documents that there was fierce debate in the early church concerning how much of the Jewish law should be obeyed. Bultmann suggested that this is the most likely context for understanding the last sentence. The early church did have times of fasting and yet it knew of a maxim of Jesus that spoke about God’s kingdom as a time of rejoicing not fasting. The church’s answer was that it was inappropriate for the disciples to fast while Jesus was with them but thoroughly appropriate for them to fast in remembrance of Jesus’ death. Thus according to Bultmann, only the actual maxim goes back to Jesus. The introduction and the final sentence come from the early church.

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As another example, consider the parable of the vineyard as recorded in Mark 12:1–11. The theme of the parable is quite plausible as the people of Galilee were well aware of absentee landlords and the ill-feeling this generated. Most people would probably know of someone who has been evicted under such circumstances. Now as Mark records it, Jesus says: A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a pit for the wine press, and built a watch-tower, then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the season came, he sent a slave to the tenants to collect from them his share of the produce of the vineyard. But they seized him, and beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. And again he sent another slave to them; this one they beat over the head and insulted. Then he sent another, and that one they killed. And so it was with many others; some they beat, and others they killed. He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard. What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others. Have you not read this scripture: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’? According to Bultmann, the thrust of the parable has been completely changed by Christian additions. First, the extravagant description of the vineyard is now intended to evoke the allegory of Isaiah 5, where Israel is the vineyard. Second, the introduction of the ‘beloved son’ (an obvious reference to Jesus) is achieved at the expense of credibility, for why would the tenants think that killing the heir would lead to them receiving the vineyard? This would only be true if the owner also died. Third, the transfer of the vineyard, which is now associated with Israel through the allusion to Isaiah 5, to ‘others’ is a reference to the early church replacing Israel as God’s people. And fourth, the scriptural quotation (Ps 118:22–23) that is now attached to the parable completely changes its tenor, for the abuse of the servants and killing of the son are now regarded as the ‘Lord’s doing’. A tragic story has been changed into ‘good news’ for

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the new owners of the vineyard. Only by peeling away these layers can we get at the true meaning of Jesus’ parable.

The Jesus Seminar In 1985, under the leadership of Robert Funk, around 70 to 100 North American scholars agreed to meet twice a year to study all the recorded sayings of Jesus. Their purpose, says Funk, was ‘to examine every fragment of the traditions attached to the name of Jesus in order to determine what he really said—not his literal words, perhaps, but the substance and style of his utterances’ (quoted in Borg, 1994:161). Each seminar took as its theme a particular aspect of the sayings tradition (e.g. parables, aphorisms, Sermon on the Mount) and after papers were discussed and opinions shared, a vote was taken. Each scholar was asked to cast a vote depending on whether they thought a particular saying was definitely from Jesus (red), probably from Jesus (pink), probably not from Jesus (grey) or definitely not from Jesus (black). The results were published in a multi-coloured volume, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (1993). The reference to five Gospels is because the Seminar considered the Gospel of Thomas as a valuable source for Jesus’ sayings. It came as no surprise that almost the whole of John’s Gospel is in black. For the last two centuries, John has been regarded as a sublime theological reflection rather than as recording the actual words of Jesus (though for a contrary view, see Robinson, 1985). But what was a surprise is that the Seminar turned its back on the eschatological consensus of Schweitzer and Dodd (and its modern exponents, such as Sanders and Wright) in favour of a non-eschatological Jesus. Rather than seeing texts like 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17 and 1 Corinthians 7:29–31 as continuing Jesus’ eschatological hope, the Seminar thought such fervour belonged to the early church and was generated by reports of Jesus’ resurrection. Such additions must be stripped away if we are to understand the actual concerns of Jesus. Thus the Jesus Seminar concluded that Jesus was a political subversive who challenged the power structures of his day. He advocated a life of denial and sought to reintegrate into society those who were treated as outcasts (sufferers of leprosy, the possessed, the dispossessed, prostitutes). Borg claims that the traditional view of

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the so-called ‘cleansing of the temple’ (Mark 11:15–19) has focused on the first of Jesus’ sayings (‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’), as if Jesus were only interested in ‘spiritual’ concerns. But the words continue, ‘But you have made it a den or robbers’ (Mark 11:17). Borg argues that this is ‘most plausibly seen as a protest against the temple as the center of an exploitative social-economic system’ (1994:115). Stripped of later Christian piety, Jesus was a political subversive.

Social-scientific criticism If we are to understand the history of Israel or the development of the early church, we need to employ sociological insights about how groups and communities function. Much historical reconstruction has assumed that the explanation for why Israel or the early church did what they did is primarily theological, a response to particular beliefs. But sociological theories tells us that groups of 30–40 (the probable size of Paul’s house churches) behave in very different ways to cities and nations (or, for that matter, churches of 200 or more). In a so-called ‘honour and shame’ culture, people will endure great hardship rather than risk dishonour and it would be a misunderstanding to explain this as ‘discipleship’ or ‘imitation of Christ’ just because the people are Christians. It might simply be that they are seeking to avoid dishonour, as with the rest of their society. For example, in  1 Corinthians 8–10, Paul deals with the vexed question of whether Christians should eat meat which has previously been involved in pagan sacrifices. Some had no scruples, arguing that since idols have no real existence, there is no question of the food becoming dangerous or contaminated. Indeed, it was a sign of their freedom in Christ to eat such food with a clear conscience (1 Cor 8:4–6). Others found it difficult, since for them it was equivalent to participating in the worship of idols, a view that Paul can also understand (1 Cor 10:14–22). Chapter 11 is also about food, the meal known as the Lord’s supper. Paul castigates them for their behaviour, ‘For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?’ (1 Cor

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11:21–22). These have normally been explained as two quite separate issues, but is there a connection? Prior to 1970, most commentaries focused on doctrinal explanations for these issues. The question was: what doctrine and beliefs were held by those that could or could not eat food offered to idols? Theissen, however, suggests that the answers might lie in sociological rather than theological issues. He notes that the church at Corinth contained both rich and poor. Factors such as freedom of travel and owning property (in some cases large enough to house the church) show that some members were well off. Mention of slaves, on the other hand, implies that some were poor or destitute. That being the case, the issue of food takes on a new dimension, for the main opportunity for the poor to eat meat was at the great public festivals, which would certainly have involved pagan rites. Thus to take the stance that Christians should not eat such meat would mean that the poor would never eat meat at all. But for the rich, who could eat meat at home, it might be no more than a minor inconvenience. Likewise with the Lord’s supper. Sunday was not a special day for the Roman world and so those who worked for others would have to negotiate time off in order to come to a church meeting. Slaves could only attend after they had done all that their master required and would probably find themselves arriving late. And what did they find when they arrived at this celebration of Christian unity? That those hosting the meal and those whose working life permitted them to arrive early had consumed all the best food. Theissen says: ‘The core of the problem was that wealthier Christians made it plain to all just how much the rest were dependent on them, dependent on the generosity of those who were better off. Differences in menu are a relatively timeless symbol of status and wealth, and those not so well off came face to face with their own social inferiority at a most basic level’ (1982:160). As an example, he quotes an amusing speech by Martial, who complains to his host: Since I am asked to dinner, no longer, as before, a purchased guest, why is not the same dinner served to me as to you? You take oysters fattened in the Lucrine lake, I suck a mussel through a hole in the shell; you get mushrooms, I take hog funguses; you tackle turbot, but I brill. Golden with fat, a turtledove gorges you with its bloated rump; there is set before me a magpie that has died in its cage. (1982:157).

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If Theissen is correct, then it places the description of the supper (1 Cor 11:23–26) in a new light. Paul did not cite the last supper tradition in order to make some doctrinal point about the nature of the elements or the frequency of celebration but to call to mind that solemn occasion when Jesus shared bread and wine with all who were present. This is contrary to how the well-off were behaving, who are warned: ‘So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. If you are hungry, eat at home, so that when you come together, it will not be for your condemnation’ (11:33–34). Such a statement makes it clear that Paul is aiming his comments mainly at the rich, for it would be an insult to tell slaves that they could eat any time they like ‘at home’. Another example is the different emphases that we find between early and late documents in the New Testament. One way of explaining this is to talk about theological development but this ignores important social factors. Thus, whether we are talking about the church or any group or club, there is always a significant difference between the culture of the pioneers and that of the second and third generations. Max Weber (1947), the great sociologist, spoke of the early phase as ‘charismatic’. Everything is new and exciting. There is an emphasis on spontaneity, with rules and regulations invented ‘on the hoof’, as and when required. But eventually, the pioneers die (or leave) and others have to take their place. There follows a process which Weber called ‘routinization’, where a number of questions have to be clarified: What does the movement stand for? How do people join? What are the conditions of membership? What behaviour is unacceptable? In other words, the movement becomes an institution. Does this help to explain the New Testament documents? Though there is some dispute about dating, the earliest documents in the New Testament are Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians, Galatians and Corinthians. In each of these there is vigour and excitement. Jesus is expected soon (1 Thess 4:17; 1 Cor 7:29). The Spirit is powerfully operative (Gal 3:5; 1 Cor 12–14) and the only mention of church organization is a reference to those ‘who have charge of you’ (1 Thess 5:12). However, in the Pastoral epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus) we appear to be breathing a different atmosphere. There is an emphasis on order, holding firm to the traditions and faithfully transmitting them to the next generation. There are instructions about enrolling widows, who have to be over 60 and to have married only once

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(1 Tim 5:9). Specific leaders are mentioned (elders, deacons, bishops), together with lists of requirements that each must satisfy. There is very little mention of the Spirit, the return of Jesus or an ‘every member’ ministry. In between these early and late documents are the epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians. The exact date is disputed, partly because of the features we are about to mention. Thus, while differing from the Pastoral epistles, they do show signs of routinization. For example, both contain household codes for ordering family life and employment (Col 3:18–4:1; Eph 5:22–6:8). Both speak of the church as a universal phenomenon (‘The Church’) as well as a local congregation. And the image of being the body of Christ is different from that of Romans and 1 Corinthians. In the latter, Christians are likened to parts of the body (‘The eye cannot say to the hand’), but, in Colossians and Ephesians, the metaphor is now that Christ is the head of the body. For many, these differences have resulted in a very negative picture of the later epistles, where all the vigour seems to have gone. Indeed, modern house churches that speak of ‘returning to the New Testament church’ are seldom thinking of the Pastoral epistles. It is the communal sharing in Acts or the charismatic ‘every member’ ministry of Corinthians that is usually in mind. But if we consider them in the light of Max Weber’s analysis of social movements, they become more understandable. Pioneer movements do change in the second and third generations. Indeed, had there not been an emphasis on ‘guarding the deposit’ and ‘appointing elders’, we would probably not have a New Testament at all. Social-scientific criticism is a branch of historical criticism which challenges many previous reconstructions by emphasizing the social nature of texts.

Dating the New Testament There are three factors that are used to date the New Testament documents. The first is the internal evidence: some books appear to depend on other books (Matthew and Luke on Mark; Ephesians on Colossians; 2 Peter on Jude) or naturally follow them (Acts is Luke’s second volume; 2 Corinthians follows 1 Corinthians etc.). The Pastoral epistles claim to come from the very end of Paul’s life (2 Tim 4:6–8), though many scholars think they are later than this,

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either compiled from genuine fragments smuggled out of prison or written in Paul’s name. If this is the case, then we may be looking at a date of around 80–100 ce, rather than shortly before Paul’s death (c. 65 ce). Some use the same reasoning for Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians, though the differences are much more nuanced. For example, in 1 Corinthians 12, the church is likened to a body with many members but in Ephesians 4, the church is the body of Christ. Does this represent a development in Paul’s thought between 55–65 ce or is it evidence of a different author? James is the most Jewish document in the New Testament, which could suggest an early date (40s), though his discussion of faith and works in 2:14–26 appears to be aimed at followers of Paul who misused his teaching on ‘justification by faith’ to downplay the importance of good works (c. 65–100 ce). The second factor is the external evidence, though it is clear that in some cases the second century writers were either guessing or had reasons for championing a particular position. For example, Revelation  was thought to have been written under Emperor Domitian (c. 95 ce) because he is said to have instigated a world-wide persecution against the church. Many scholars now think that this was a deliberate attempt to discredit Domitian in favour of Trajan and that no such persecution occurred. Some have opted for a date during the reign of Nero, under whom we know there was a persecution (c. 65 ce), although many still find the later date convincing. Early church tradition thought the fourth Gospel was written by the apostle John at a great age and although many scholars think the Gospel is more the product of the community that surrounded him, the late date (c. 95 ce) is generally accepted. If 1 and 2 Peter were written by the apostle Peter, then they must be dated before his martyrdom in 65 ce. But 2 Peter is so different in style and content from 1 Peter that very few scholars accept common authorship and it was some time before it was accepted by the church. It is clear that no one knew who wrote Hebrews. Among the suggestions are Paul, Luke, Barnabas and Apollos, with Origen capturing the state of the question: the author is known only by God. The third factor consists of external events, particularly the decree of Claudius to expel Jews from Rome (c. 49 ce; cf. Acts 18:2) and the Jewish war that led to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce. The former allows us to date Paul’s earliest letters (1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Romans) to 49–55 ce, while the

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latter was such a catastrophic event that one would expect some reference to it in any writings that come afterwards. Many think that the difference between Mark 13:14 (‘But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be’ – an allusion to Dan 8:13) and its equivalent in Luke 21:20 (‘When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies’) constitutes such evidence. Mark is writing shortly before the fall of Jerusalem (c. 65–68 ce) and advises his readers to ‘flee to the mountains’ (13:14b), while Luke is writing a decade or so after (c. 80–85 ce) and knows of the city’s destruction. Others suggest that Luke’s words could still have come from 68–69 ce, when it was becoming clear what was about to happen. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine why the author of Hebrews would not have mentioned the fall of Jerusalem had he known it, since it would crown his argument that Christ has put an end to the sacrificial system (Heb 10:1). Thus the date of Hebrews tends to be in the 60s or much later, when the immediate impact of the event had waned. The disappointing conclusion is that apart from the early letters of Paul (49–55 ce) and perhaps the Gospels of Mark (65–68 ce) and John (c. 95 ce), there is very little consensus concerning the rest of the New Testament. In general, scholars tend to be either ‘early daters’ or ‘late daters’, though some are content to outline the main options without coming down on a particular side. To give an idea of the variation that you will find among commentators, the following table outlines the views from two popular introductions of the 1990s, those of Edwin Freed (1991) and Robert Gundry (1994). Bart Ehrman’s extremely helpful introduction, now in its fifth edition (2011), is similar to Freed, though he is less specific about the dates. The more conservative introduction by Dan Carson and Douglas Moo (second edition, 2005) is similar to Gundry. New Testament Writings Mark Luke-Acts Matthew John Ephesians/Colossians Hebrews

Freed (1991) 66–73 70–90 85–110 90–120 Uncertain 60–110

Gundry (1994) 45–60 Slightly later than Mark (50–65?) Slightly later than Mark (50–65?) Close of first century 65 or an earlier imprisonment Probably before 70

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James 1 Peter 2 Peter Pastoral epistles Revelation

Uncertain 70–115 100–125 100–180 68–96

Before 62 63–64 63–64 Before Paul’s death (65?) 64–96

Conclusion The desire to place the biblical material in its ancient context is still the motivation behind a great deal of scholarly work, although it is generally recognized that it is fraught with difficulty. For example, Bultmann’s analysis depends on the assumption that ‘pure’ forms have been embellished during transmission, but it is not difficult to find examples where complex forms have been ‘trimmed’. In reality, there are no ‘rules’ for the transmission of traditions. The ‘History of Religions’ approach is valuable but the comparative material is often difficult to interpret and difficult to date, though these are not reasons for ignoring it. Vast dictionaries and encyclopaedias continue to be produced which collect the most helpful material (see below). Social-scientific approaches are subject to the same criticisms that they face in their own discipline – there is no single theory as to how groups, communities and societies function (and even the validity of such terms). Biblical scholars must therefore choose which sociological model is the most helpful for interpreting the biblical evidence. Nevertheless, since it was an axiom of the Enlightenment that meaning is related to context, such research will continue.

Further reading The standard collection of ANE texts has been J. B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (1969) but this should now be supplemented by the articles in the Anchor Bible Dictionary (eds D. N. Freedman et al., 1992). Also useful is A. Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East, c. 3000–330 b.c. (1995). To explore further the modern study of the psalms, see J. L. Crenshaw, The Psalms. An Introduction (2001) and the volume in this series by A. G. Hunter, Introduction to the Psalms (2008). For a variety

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of approaches to the Gospels, see M. A. Powell, Fortress Introduction to the Gospels (1998) and C. B. Puskas and D. Crump, An Introduction to the Gospels and Acts (2008). For an introduction to Paul, see the volume in this series by D. Horrell, An Introduction to the Study of Paul (2006). And for further exploration of social-scientific criticism, see J. H. Elliott, What is Social-Scientific Criticism? (1993).

Questions 1 How does comparative material like the Gilgamesh epic or Egyptian psalms help our understanding of the bible? 2 What is the value of going behind the Gospels to locate the original setting of Jesus’ words? 3 How does a sociological analysis of first-century culture help our understanding of the disputes in 1 Corinthians?

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Towards the end of the 1950s, Gospel studies turned away from sources and traditions (always somewhat speculative) to the authors themselves. If it is true that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as one of their sources, then we can actually see what changes they made. The result was the birth of redaction criticism. Redaction criticism builds on form criticism by examining how the author has used the available traditions to shape their text or book. By analysing changes of wording, order and emphasis, redaction criticism aims to give a rationale for why the authors wrote as they did. It operates on the belief that such changes are not arbitrary but are clues to the intention of the author. What form criticism regarded as secondary (‘the string’), redaction criticism regards as primary, for it reveals the mind of the author. In the case of Matthew and Luke, redaction criticism builds on the source-critical conclusion that they have both used Mark. For Mark and John, we do not possess their sources and so it builds on form-critical conclusions that distinguish between tradition and redaction.

Luke’s changes to Mark We have already mentioned that Luke adds two chapters of infancy stories to Mark’s opening. One effect of this is to show that Jesus was not simply a penitent coming for baptism but that his birth (and conception) was of the Holy Spirit. Another characteristic is that they centre on Jerusalem. Zechariah and Elizabeth were ‘righteous before God’ (Luke 1:6) and it was while Zechariah was performing

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his priestly duties that the birth of John the Baptist was announced. Incidentally, one would never have guessed from Mark that John and Jesus were cousins. Indeed, it might have been part of Luke’s purpose to clarify the relationship between John and Jesus, since Acts 19:1–7 makes it clear that not all of John’s disciples became followers of Jesus. At the end of the Gospel, Luke makes changes to the crucifixion scene, as we have already noted. The effect is to present a much more assured picture of Jesus, a martyr who dies asking for the forgiveness of his enemies. Luke also adds a number of resurrection appearances, the most memorable being the walk to Emmaus. It is surely a significant aspect of this story that the disciples recognize Jesus when he breaks bread (Luke 24:30–31), just as in Acts, the early Christians will meet to break bread (Acts 2:46). The majority of scholars believe that the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles were written by the same person (they are both addressed to a certain Theophilus: Luke 1:3, Acts 1:1). However, Luke’s biggest change in terms of quantity of material is his so-called ‘travel narrative’. According to Mark, after the transfiguration (Mark 9:2–13) and healing of the epileptic boy (Mark 9:14–32), Jesus returns to Capernaum and utters sayings about ‘first and last’, ‘causing people to stumble’ and acting as salt (Mark 9:33–50). Then, in Mark 10:1, he sets off for Judaea, has a discussion with the Pharisees about divorce (Mark 10:2–12) and blesses the children (10:13–16). The corresponding sequence in Luke is as follows: Mark Transfiguration Epileptic boy Various sayings Begins journey

Luke Transfiguration Epileptic boy Various sayings Begins journey Mission and return of the 70 Parable of the Good Samaritan Mary and Martha Lord’s Prayer Beelzebub controversy Woes against Pharisees and scribes Parable of the rich fool

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(cont.) The faithful steward

Question of divorce Blessing of the children Rich young ruler

Parable of the fig tree The woman with the eighteen-year infirmity Parables of the mustard seed and leaven bread Lament over Jerusalem Healing of the man with dropsy Parable of the wedding banquet Parables of the lost coin, sheep, son Parable of the unrighteous steward Parable of the rich man and Lazarus Healing of ten lepers The coming of the Son of man Parable of the unrighteous judge Parable of the Pharisee and the publican Blessing of the children Rich young ruler

This extra material is rich in parables and wisdom sayings, and Hans Conzelmann (1953) believed that Luke was consciously altering Mark’s picture of Jesus. Whether Jesus looked for the actual arrival of the kingdom or its consummation, the picture of Jesus in Mark remains an eschatological one. However, Christians at the end of the first century had to face up to the fact that Jesus had not returned. Far from seeing the kingdom coming in their lifetime, they had seen most of the disciples die. That this was a problem for the early church can be seen from the following: Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; he was the one who had reclined next to Jesus at the supper and had said, ‘Lord, who is it that is going to betray you?’ When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, ‘Lord, what about him?’ Jesus said to him, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!’ So the rumour spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?’ (John 21:20–23)

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First of all you must understand this, that in the last days scoffers will come . . . saying, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!’ . . . But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire . . . (2 Peter 3:3–10 abbreviated). Conzelmann argued that Luke dealt with the issue by dividing history into three periods. The first period is that of the Old Testament, a period of anticipation and prediction. He made the point that whereas Mark portrays John the Baptist as the forerunner of the new age, Luke makes him the last of the old age (Luke 16:16). Second, there is the period of Christ’s earthly ministry, where the devil is bound and his kingdom plundered. This is the subject of Luke’s first volume and why the original German title of Conzelmann’s work was Die Mitte der Zeit (‘The Middle of Time’). Third, there is an indefinite period until the Lord returns. This is the church age and the subject of Luke’s second volume. It is traditionally called ‘The Acts of the Apostles’ but a better title might be ‘The continuing acts of Jesus through his church’. This schematizing of history allowed Christians of the late first century to understand their role positively rather than lamenting Jesus’ failure to return. If this is correct, then Luke’s most difficult task was to do something with those three sayings in Mark which seem to stress the nearness of the end. The first one appears to have been reworded so as to avoid any sense of an imminent end: Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ (Mark 1:14–15)

Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. (Luke 4:14–15)

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The second (Mark 9:1    Luke 9:27) is modified by omitting three words. The promise is no longer that the disciples will see the kingdom ‘coming in power’ (seemingly pointing to the end of the world) but only that they will see the kingdom. Thus the disciples will live to see the kingdom but not necessarily its consummation (‘coming in power’). This could therefore refer to the transfiguration, Jesus’ resurrection, Pentecost or even the fall of Jerusalem. There is no reason to take the saying as a reference to the end of the world. The third saying (Mark 13:30    Luke 21:32) is the most difficult as it comes at the climax of what is often called the ‘apocalyptic discourse’ (Mark 13), where sun and moon collapse and the ‘Son of man’ comes on the clouds. Luke reproduces most of this but introduces a clause in between the fall of Jerusalem and the coming of the ‘Son of man’ (‘Then those in Judea must flee to the mountains . . . and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles, until the time of the Gentiles are fulfilled’). The effect of this is to suggest that an indefinite period (‘the church age’) separates the destruction of Jerusalem (which Luke makes more explicit by mentioning ‘armies’) from the signs in sun and moon. Some of Conzelmann’s points are disputed but most scholars would agree that Luke has made significant changes to Mark. The extra material, along with specific changes of wording, do give the Gospel a different emphasis. As Norman Perrin observes, it is thanks to Conzelmann that scholars now see Luke as a major theologian rather than simply a collector of traditions. Even those who challenge Conzelmann’s position write books with titles like Luke: Historian and Theologian (Marshall, 1989).

Matthew’s changes to Mark Like Luke, Matthew adds infancy stories (focusing on Joseph rather than Mary), resurrection accounts (in Galilee) and a great deal of teaching and parables. However, Matthew does not include this teaching material in one long travel narrative but constructs five great discourses, perhaps on the pattern of the five books of the Law or the five books of the Psalms. There is a discourse on righteousness

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(chs 5–7, usually called the Sermon on the Mount), on missionary work (ch. 10), on the kingdom (ch. 13), on the church (ch. 18) and on things to come (chs 24–25). Two of these (the kingdom and things to come) are expansions of Mark 4 and 13 respectively but the other three appear have been constructed by Matthew, who seems to have had an eye for symmetry:  1

Genealogy and birth stories

 2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Magi and escape to Egypt Baptism Temptation, calling of disciples Discourse on righteousness (Sermon on the Mount) Healing of leper and centurion Healing of paralytic Discourse on missionary work Jesus and John the Baptist Jesus and Beelzebub Discourse on the kingdom Feeding of 5,000 Feeding of 4,000 Peter’s confession Transfiguration Discourse on the church Journey to Jerusalem Parable of workers in vineyard Triumphal entry Parable of wedding banquet Woes against Pharisees Discourse on things to come Last supper, Gethsemane Crucifixion Resurrection appearances

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Explanations for these changes vary but most agree that it is something to do with Matthew providing the church with a pattern of teaching. Mark tells us that Jesus taught with great authority (1:27) but does not actually reproduce much of his teaching. Matthew offers guidance to the church in the areas of moral decisions, missionary strategy and church discipline. Further, the discourses on the kingdom and eschatology go some way to answering the question of what Christians should be doing while they wait for Jesus’ return. This emphasis on the church can be seen by the fact that Matthew is the only Gospel to use the Greek word ekklesia: And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church (ekklesia), and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. (16:18) If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church (ekklesia); and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church (ekklesia), let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector. (18:17) If these sayings go back to Jesus, he probably used a general Aramaic word meaning ‘gathering’ or ‘congregation’. By using the Greek word ekklesia, Matthew has Jesus speak directly to his church. Thus the Gospel is not simply a transparent record of what Jesus said and did but is shaped by the needs of the church. Matthew emphasizes those things that he thinks his church needs to hear. Thus Robert Gundry entitles his commentary: Matthew. A Commentary on His Handbook for a Mixed Church under Persecution (1994).

The Q hypothesis So far, I may have given the impression that in order to change the emphasis of Mark, Matthew and Luke simply invented material. However, if this extra material in Matthew and Luke is analysed, it is found that some 200 or so sayings are almost identical. For example, Mark has a very brief account of Jesus’ temptation. This

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is expanded by both Matthew and Luke to include the three specific temptations of turning stones into bread, throwing himself off the temple and accepting the devil’s offer of the kingdoms. Further, both omit Mark’s mention of the wild animals and the angels ministering to Jesus. This would be quite a coincidence if Matthew and Luke had acted independently: Mark 1:12–13 And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Matthew 4:1–4 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.

The tempter came and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’ But he answered, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone . . . ”’

Luke 4:1–4 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’ Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone.”’

Even more revealing are the changes made to the preaching of John the Baptist. Here both Matthew and Luke complete Mark’s sentence by adding the words ‘and fire’ and then go on to speak about the wheat and chaff:

Historical approaches: The search for intentions

Mark 1:7–8 ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’

Matthew 3:11–12 ‘I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshingfloor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’

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Luke 3:16–17 ‘I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’

Some scholars, such as Michael Goulder (1989) and more recently Mark Goodacre (2002), believe these similarities are best explained on the hypothesis that Luke had access to both Matthew and Mark. On this theory, Luke can see what Matthew has done with Mark and decide whether to follow him or not. Thus, in the example above, Luke begins with Matthew’s ‘I baptize you with water’ but abbreviates by omitting ‘for repentance’ and ‘after me’. He then changes to Mark, preferring ‘untie the thong of his sandals’ to Matthew’s ‘carry his sandals’. In English, the next phrase (‘he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit’) is the same in all three versions but in the Greek, Luke agrees with Matthew (Mark omits the Greek preposition en). He then continues by following Matthew’s major addition to Mark, namely, the ‘wheat and chaff’ material, where there is close verbal agreement. Thus, providing we accept that Luke had access to Matthew (and many scholars do), this offers a plausible explanation for the similarities and differences between the various versions. However, others scholars find it difficult to believe that Matthew expanded Mark to form his five great teaching blocks, only to

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have Luke come along and obliterate them. If Luke is oscillating between Matthew and Mark, why does he take material away from its Markan setting in order to construct his long travel narrative? Streeter’s view (1924) was that Matthew and Luke both had access to a collection of sayings (conventionally called Q), which they drew on independently. Matthew used them to construct his five teaching blocks, while Luke used them to construct a long travel narrative. This would explain why there is often close verbal agreement in the individual sayings though they appear in very different settings. Since Streeter’s work, a great amount of effort has been expended in trying to reconstruct Q (Kloppenborg, 1987). For example, in the temptation narrative, Matthew speaks of turning ‘stones to loaves’ but Luke uses the singular. Which of these is closest to what was in Q? Further, the order of the temptations in Matthew is bread, temple, kingdoms whereas in Luke it is bread, kingdoms, temple. What was the order in Q and why did either Matthew or Luke (or both) change it? The importance of this work is two-fold. First, if we can reconstruct Q, we can see how Matthew and Luke have used it and so further the goals of redaction criticism. Second, if we can reconstruct Q we have an early source (perhaps earlier than Mark) for the life of Jesus. This is why Q has been important to members of the Jesus Seminar and figures highly in their reconstructions of Jesus (e.g. Mack, 1988; Crossan, 1994).

Mark and his purposes Though scholars analyse the data differently, the differences between Matthew and Mark or Luke and Mark do provide something objective with which to work. But what of the purposes of Mark? Is it possible to see what Mark has done to his sources? Consider the story that we discussed in the last chapter: Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, ‘Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’ Jesus said to them, ‘The wedding-guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.’ (2:18–19)

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According to form critics, at some point in Jesus’ ministry, he compared the coming kingdom of God with the joy of a wedding feast. Mark has taken that saying and placed it among a set of controversy stories. Thus for Mark, the saying now makes a number of points: (1) Jesus refutes the Pharisees with his clever reply; (2) Jesus speaks of himself as the bridegroom; (3) Jesus predicts his crucifixion, thus demonstrating his special knowledge; (4) Jesus says it will be appropriate to fast after the crucifixion. None of these were intended by Jesus himself. According to redaction critics, they represent Mark’s understanding. Redaction criticism like this clearly suffers from the same weaknesses as form criticism, namely, the speculative nature of the reconstructions. Most scholars, therefore, combine it with other indicators of Mark’s purposes. For example, Mark does occasionally intrude into the story with his own comments. Consider the following: [Jesus] said to them . . . ‘Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?’ (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, ‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.’ (7:18–22) The words in parenthesis (an editorial decision of the NRSV – the original manuscripts contain  almost no punctuation, not even spaces) are from Mark. They interrupt the flow of Jesus’ saying by drawing out an implication for the benefit of his readers. We know from other New Testament documents that the question of whether the Jewish food laws remain in force was hotly debated (Acts 15). Here, Mark makes a deduction from Jesus’ saying that they are not. However, this is not Matthew’s understanding of the saying. As in Mark, the controversy begins with the complaint that Jesus’ disciples do not (ritually) wash their hands before eating (Matt 15:2; Mark 7:2). Jesus’ answer takes in a number of topics, including the illustration of food passing through the system, and then ends with a reference back to the original complaint: ‘These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile’ (Matt

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15:20). Matthew (probably a Jewish Christian) does not draw the conclusion that Jesus was intending to ‘declare all foods clean’ and omits Mark’s saying. Thus the parenthesis reveals something of Mark’s intentions for including this incident and ultimately, for writing his Gospel. More generally, redaction critics have tried to discern Mark’s purposes by analysing the particular emphases in the Gospel (some call this composition criticism). For example, Mark appears to focus on the failure of the disciples. Incident after incident shows them in a bad light. Even after the feeding of the 5,000, they have no idea how Jesus might feed a similar crowd of 4,000 (Luke omits the second feeding). They want the best places in heaven, want to forbid children coming to him, criticize a woman who wants to anoint him and, in his hour of greatest need, desert him. How is this to be explained? One suggestion is that this is what actually happened and Matthew and Luke have progressively softened it (compare the conclusions of the ‘walking on the water’ story in Mark 6:50–52 and Matt 14:27–33). Alternatively, Mark might be emphasizing their failure for particular reasons. For example, perhaps he wants to give a warning against complacency; if even those closest to Jesus failed, no one can afford to be complacent: all must remain watchful (13:35). We have already noted the sombre nature of the crucifixion scene and how Mark seems to spurn any attempt to make it victorious. This continues with his description of the empty tomb, for, according to our earliest manuscripts (see Chapter 5), Mark does not include any resurrection appearances. Instead, the Gospel ends on a note of awe: ‘So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’ (16:8). Why this dark portrait? According to Dennis Nineham (1963:33), Mark is writing to a persecuted church and highlights three things:

a That Jesus himself had suffered exactly as his followers were now being called upon to do. b That Jesus had clearly warned his disciples that following him would involve sharing in his sufferings. c That he had promised great and sure rewards to those who endured such sufferings without loss of faith.

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It is clear that Mark contains both ‘suffering’ passages (the cry of dereliction) and ‘glory’ passages (people were astounded by his miraculous power). Robert Gundry (1993) thinks that Mark wishes to show that the crucified Jesus is none other than the allpowerful Lord. But most scholars think it is the other way around. Mark intends the ‘glory’ passages to be interpreted in the light of the ‘suffering’ passages. There can be no Christianity without the cross. Indeed, as Paul discovered, God’s power is made perfect in weakness not outward success (2 Cor 12:9). It is not that Mark does not believe in the resurrection. The empty tomb scene contains the promise: ‘He has been raised; he is not here.’ But he is not going to allow it to take away from the crucifixion. Nearly a third of Mark’s Gospel (chs 11–16) focuses on the last week of his life (some have called Mark a ‘passion narrative with a long introduction’). As Morna Hooker says: If we don’t like Mark’s ending, and think he cannot really have intended to end there, then perhaps it is because we are looking for the wrong thing. What we expect to find at the end of the Gospel is the knock-down proof, the evidence that proves that Jesus has indeed been raised from the dead, that he is the Messiah, the Son of God. But as with every other story in the Gospel, the evidence is there for those who have eyes to see it . . . For this is the real beginning of discipleship; and it is the beginning for Mark’s own readers, who do not ‘see’ Jesus in any physical way. (1983:121)

John’s purposes John’s Gospel could not be more different. Not only does the author tell us that Jesus is the incarnation of the Word; Jesus is fully aware of it throughout the narrative. For example, in John 17:5, he is recorded as saying, ‘So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.’ How is this emphasis to be explained? One suggestion is that the Gospel emerged in a context of fierce disputes with the Jews. As Christians became more explicit about the divinity of Christ, so Jewish criticism became more vociferous. By the end of the century, the synagogue liturgy incorporated a curse on heretics,

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perhaps with the Christians in mind. The result was a Gospel that emphasized the following points:



a Jesus is fully divine. He is the incarnation of the Word and was recognized as such by any who had eyes to see (2:11). His death was his return to the Father (17:1–5). b The scriptures, when correctly interpreted, point to Jesus. The Jews do not see this because they are blind (5:39–40). c Jesus specifically warned that Christians would be put out of the synagogue (9:22; 12:42). The author of the Gospel even invents a Greek word for it: Christians will be made asynagogos (de-synagogued).

Raymond Brown (1979) takes this further by referring to the Johannine epistles. They are written in much the same style as the Gospel (‘We declare to you what was from the beginning . . . the word of life . . . and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father’) but clearly have a different focus: By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. (1 John 4:2) Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist! (2 John 7) Brown points out that the target in the epistles is those who deny the humanity of Christ (‘come in the flesh’). Now since John’s Gospel placed a great deal of emphasis on the divinity of Christ, perhaps some took this too far and effectively denied his humanity. It is clear from 1 John 2:19 that there has been a split in the community (‘They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us’). Brown believes this split concerns the proper interpretation of the Gospel. Some took its emphasis on divinity to mean that Jesus only ‘seemed’ to be human (‘docetists’). After all, how can the divine Word need food or drink? When he appeared thirsty at the well John 4:6–7), this is not to be taken literally. It was simply a device in order to engage the woman in conversation. And this is why there is no fear

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or pain at the crucifixion. Jesus is the divine Word, who has taken the form of a man in order to communicate with us. But the reality is that Jesus is actually a divine being. The epistles, however, insist that belief in the divinity of Christ must not be allowed to deny the fact that Jesus was a real human being. And the Gospel does portray Jesus as growing tired (4:6), feeling troubled (12:27), made of flesh and blood (19:34) and ultimately dying. If it is a paradox that a divine being can die, then the Gospel does not try to avoid it. Nevertheless, John’s emphasis on the divinity of Christ (compare the arrest of Jesus in Mark 14:43-50 and John 18:1–11) is very different from the other three Gospels and requires some sort of explanation.

Conclusion Redaction criticism suggests that what we have in the Gospels are four portraits of Jesus which were written to influence a particular group of readers/hearers. It is not denied that these accounts can be used to reconstruct his life but the results will always be open to debate. By focusing on the Evangelists, we appear to be on firmer ground. Thus we can say with a high degree of probability that Matthew sees Jesus as ‘Teacher of the church’. Whether this was actually a priority for Jesus (i.e. to prepare for an ongoing institution) will remain a matter for debate. But to have four attempts from the first century at applying the Jesus tradition to the needs of the church is not to be despised. It speaks of a living faith, in continuity with the spirit of the first believers but not bound by the letter. Indeed, the fact that the Gospels are written in Greek shows that communication and relevance were more important to the Evangelists than preserving the actual words of Jesus (probably spoken in Aramaic). Conservative scholars have naturally been concerned that redaction criticism has sometimes been used to challenge the historicity of the Gospels. They correctly point out that having a theological aim or intention does not mean that the Evangelists had no interest in history. Thus Craig Blomberg describes redaction criticism in two paragraphs and then points out its weaknesses in ten. Nevertheless, he is able to conclude that ‘when stripped of the excess baggage it tends to attract, it offers insights into the

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emphases of the evangelists which make the differences among the gospels understandable’ (1987:41). And here is the key. Whatever one believes about inspiration, one cannot ignore the fact that the Gospels are very different from one another.

Further reading An interesting attempt to present the theology of the four Gospels in the light of the ancient symbols (Lion, Ox, Eagle, Human) is found in R. A. Burridge, Four Gospels, One Jesus (2005). See also the volume in this series by C. Marsh and S. Moyise, Jesus and the Gospels (2006) and M. L. Strauss, Four Portraits, One Jesus (2011). Redaction criticism is not much practised in Old Testament studies because of the difficulties of identifying an author but see J. Barton, Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study (1984). Actually, we do not know for sure who wrote the four Gospels. They are anonymous and it is only traditions from the second century ce that identify them with key apostles, either directly (Matthew and John) or indirectly (Mark is the interpreter of Peter, Luke is the travelling companion of Paul). As we will see in Chapter 6, talk of authorial intention was challenged by the emerging discipline of literary studies. Though scholars speak of Mark’s intention or Matthew’s purpose, we have no access to their thoughts. What we have is a text and so literary critics examine the relationship between text and reader (which we possess) rather than author and reader (which we do not).

Questions 1 How does redaction criticism differ from form and source criticism? 2 How does knowing Luke’s purpose affect our reading of his Gospel? 3 What does Jesus say about himself, according to Mark’s Gospel?

5 Historical approaches: The text of the bible

I have often been in a bible study when someone says that a particular word or phrase means a lot to them – only to have someone else say, ‘My version doesn’t say that’. In a modern version of the bible, Mark’s Gospel ends with the story of the empty tomb and the women running away in fear (Mark 16:8). In the King James Version (KJV), the story continues for another dozen verses, telling of resurrection appearances and a great commission involving protection from snake-bites. Similarly, the much-loved story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) is printed as a separate paragraph in modern bibles because it is no longer thought to be part of the original text. The main reason for these changes is textual criticism and notably the discovery of earlier and earlier manuscripts.

The text of the New Testament Byzantine and Alexandrian manuscripts When Erasmus worked on his edition of the Greek New Testament in the early sixteenth century, he only had access to medieval (Byzantine) manuscripts. The Greek text that he produced was extremely influential for subsequent translations, including the King James Version. However, when the time came to revise that translation in the nineteenth century, scholars now had access to the great uncial (written in capitals) manuscripts of the fourth and

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fifth centuries (Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus). Each of these manuscripts has its own characteristics but on numerous occasions, they agree in presenting a different, generally shorter, text than the  medieval (Byzantine) manuscripts. To illustrate, Thomas (2000:64–78) lists 165 passages in the New Testament where the differences can be clearly seen in English translation. These are the four he lists for Ephesians: KJV (1611) God, who created all things by Jesus Christ 3:14 For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ 5:30 For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones 6:10 Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might Ref 3:9

NRSV (1989) God who created all things For this reason I bow my knees before the Father because we are members of his body Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power

If the nineteenth century could be said to be the age of the uncial manuscripts, the twentieth century was the age of the papyri, some going back to the second century. They range from small fragments which only contain a few verses (p1 contains Matt 1:1–9, 12, 14–20 and dates from the third century) to codices (pages sown together like a book) containing most of the Gospels and Acts (p45) or Paul’s letters (p46). In the latest edition of the Greek New Testament (NestleAland 27, 1993:684–9), there are 98 papyri listed, along with their probable date, contents and where they are held. To the satisfaction of most scholars, these discoveries have confirmed the view that the text represented by the King James Version (Byzantine) is sometimes unreliable. It arose through the desire to standardize the text, often by smoothing over difficulties. Modern translations, therefore (except the New King James Version) remove many of these ‘additions’ and print a text that is closer to the Alexandrian tradition represented by Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus (Alexandrinus has a Byzantinetype text for the Gospels). Thus modern bibles have removed phrases (Eph 3:14), whole verses (Matt 23:14; Mark 9:44) and on a few occasions, whole paragraphs (Mark 16:9–20; John 7:53–8:11).

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Does this now mean that we possess the text that left the author’s hand (the autograph)? Not quite, for textual criticism is a lot more complicated than choosing between Alexandrian and Byzantine readings. For a start, most scholars think that at least some of the Byzantine readings might go back to a text that is earlier than the Alexandrian tradition. The argument is that the particular reading might represent local variation (e.g. Egyptian) rather than a genuinely early text. Of the 165 readings discussed by Thomas (2000:85), six are accepted by the REB and JB, five by the NRSV and NIV, but only one by the older RSV. Second, it is not true that everything that differs from the Byzantine text should be labelled Alexandrian. There are other groups or families of texts that show considerable affinity with one another but differ from the principal Alexandrian manuscripts. For example, scholars speak of a Western text, witnessed by early Latin manuscripts and the fifth-century Codex Bezae. The issue this raises is that just because a manuscript is old, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is closer to the original. It might be a reading peculiar to a particular geographical location, such as Italy or Egypt. In order to try and decide between such readings, it is necessary to understand something about the transmission of manuscripts.

Transmission of manuscripts Generally speaking, texts were copied with great care in the ancient world, for the materials were expensive. Nevertheless, it was inevitable (human) that errors would creep in. For example, if the first word of a line is the same as the first word of the previous line, the copyist’s eye could easily omit the second line. This is relatively easy to spot because the number of words missing will equal the line length of the manuscript. Rather more difficult is when the  same word is used twice in the same line. The copyist copies the word, looks back to the manuscript and begins copying after the second occurrence of the word. Sometimes this is easy to spot but if the resulting sentence makes perfectly good sense, it is difficult to tell whether words have been omitted from a longer text or added to a shorter text. Thus the principle of favouring the shorter text (lectio brevior) must be used with care.

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However, worse is to come. On some occasions, a scribe clearly thought the reading before him was incorrect (or just unreadable) and so wrote what he believed the original must have been. No doubt the scribe sometimes got this right but on other occasions, an erroneous word or phrase was introduced into the text and was henceforth copied as part of the tradition. This appears to be the best explanation for many of the Byzantine readings. For example, consider the Old Testament quotations in Mark 1:2–3: See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’ The opening two phrases come from either Malachi 3:1 (‘See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me’) or Exodus 23:20 (‘I am going to send an angel in front of you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared’). The rest of the quotation comes from Isaiah 40:3, which reads, ‘A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’”). In Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, this compound quotation is introduced by the words, ‘As it is written in Isaiah the prophet’ (in Greek, of course). But in Alexandrinus and the Byzantine manuscripts, the reading is, ‘As it is written in the prophets’. Which is correct? Almost all scholars and versions of the bible believe that the reference to Isaiah is original because it is easier to see why it was changed. If the original said ‘prophets’, why would a copyist change it to ‘Isaiah’, when the words that immediately follow are not from Isaiah? But if the original said ‘Isaiah’, it is easy to see how a copyist might assume that this is an error (since the words which follow are not from Isaiah) and attempt to correct it. At first sight, it seems strange to think of textual critics examining the variety of readings found among the manuscripts and favouring the most difficult one (lectio difficilior). But it is based on the principle that copyists are more likely to have changed a hard reading to an easier reading than vice versa. Of course, it cannot be applied as an absolute rule, for some difficult readings were no doubt produced by careless scribes who ended up writing nonsense. The difficult reading must also be a plausible reading. John 1:18

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affords a good illustration. At the end of John’s prologue about the Word becoming flesh, he makes the statement that no one has ever seen God except the one who is in the bosom of the father. The Byzantine manuscripts, including Alexandrinus, call the one who is in the bosom of the father, ‘the only son’, something the author of the Gospel undoubtedly believed (e.g. John 3:16). Based on this, the KJV rendered the verse: No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. However, the two second-century papyri (p66,75), along with Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, speak of (the) ‘only God’ instead of ‘the only son’, producing a rather difficult sentence: ‘No one has ever seen God. Only God, who is in the bosom of the Father, has made him known.’ By the principles of textual criticism (early attestation, most difficult reading; shortest does not apply here), this is the most likely reading. But is it so difficult as to be impossible? Can we believe that the author of John’s Gospel, who has carefully maintained a balance between identifying God and the Word (‘the Word was God’) and distinguishing them (‘The Word was with God’) now simply equates them? The NIV does but the REB and the NRSV hedge their bets and include a reference to God and the Son: No-one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known (NIV) No one has ever seen God; but God’s only Son, he who is nearest to the Father’s heart, has made him known (REB) No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known (NRSV)

The agony of Gethsemane Our understanding of Luke’s account of Gethsemane is quite different if we read it from the RSV (1952) or its revision, the NRSV (1989):

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Luke 22:40–46 (RSV 1952) And when he came to the place he said to them, ‘Pray that you may not enter into temptation.’ And he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed, ‘Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.’ And when he rose from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping for sorrow, and he said to them, ‘Why do you sleep? Rise and pray that you may not enter into temptation.’

Luke 22:40–46 (NRSV 1989) When he reached the place, he said to them, ‘Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.‘ Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.’ Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. When he got up from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping because of grief, and he said to them, ‘Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’

From the RSV (1952), there is little to suggest that this was a great ordeal for Jesus. In fact the point of the story seems to be more about providing the disciples with an illustration of ‘lead us not into temptation’. Jesus asks that the cup might be taken from him but is only concerned to do God’s will. Having prayed, he gets up, reminds the disciples of the need for prayer, and accepts his arrest. The next verse reads: ‘While he was still speaking, there came a crowd, and the man called Judas, one of the twelve, was leading them. He drew near to Jesus to kiss him’ (22:47). However, the NRSV prints two extra verses in between Jesus’ request and his return to the disciples. The effect is dramatic. Far from simply accepting his fate, Jesus now wrestles in prayer to such an extent that he needs an angel to strengthen his resolve. His sweat is ‘like great drops of blood falling down on the ground’. He is in anguish (the Greek word is agonia). Thus our understanding of this episode clearly depends on which version of the bible we are reading. Do the extra verses come from Luke or were they added by a later copyist?

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The extra verses are found in the first hand of Sinaiticus (the manuscript contains a correction and a counter-correction), the Western tradition (Codex Bezae and Latin manuscripts) and the Byzantine tradition. It is not found in the earliest papyrus that contains the passage (p75) or Alexandrinus or Vaticanus. However, it cannot simply be explained as a late addition, for second-century theologians (Justin Martyr, Irenaeus) know of it. Thus the age and quality of the support is not conclusive. The RSV (1952) decided to omit it but the NRSV (1989) has decided to reinstate it. Redaction criticism would tend to support its omission for it is not the sort of addition that Luke would make to Mark. As we have seen with the crucifixion stories, Luke omits the cry of dereliction and has the more reverent sounding, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ And Luke appears to have done the same with Mark’s introduction to the Gethsemane story. Mark’s comment that Jesus ‘began to be distressed and agitated’ has disappeared. Jesus’ own words that he was ‘deeply grieved, even to death’ have also gone and instead of ‘threw himself on the ground’, we have the more reverent ‘knelt down and prayed’. In fact, he does not even mention the name Gethsemane: Mark 14:32–34 (NRSV) They went to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here while I pray.’ He took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be distressed and agitated. And he said to them, ‘I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake.’ And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed . . .

Luke 22:40–41 (NRSV) When he reached the place, he said to them, ‘Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’ Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed . . .

Modern commentators agree that the evidence is finely balanced, with Christopher Evans (1990) and John Nolland (1993) rejecting the reading, while Charles Talbert (1982) and Darrell Bock (1994) accept it.

The text of the Old Testament The task of determining the original text of the Old Testament text is somewhat different from the New Testament and it will help

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to know a little about the Hebrew language. The main idea of a Hebrew word is expressed in the root, which usually consists of three consonants (e.g. rgl    foot). The different parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs) are formed by varying the vowels that are read between them, and adding prefixes and suffixes. Thus regel is the noun ‘foot’, regli is a foot-soldier but ragal is the verb ‘to go on foot’. These vowels were not reproduced in the original text (which was written from right to left) but transmitted orally. During the early medieval period a text was produced by a group known as the Masoretes who added these vowel signs (along with what they considered to be corrections in the margins). The text, known as the Masoretic text, is preserved in a number of important manuscripts and forms the basis of the text printed in English bibles: Name Aleppo Codex Lenigrad Codex Cairo Codex Petersburg Codex

Sigla A L C P

Date 925 1008 896 916

Contents All of OT but most of Torah missing All of OT Former and Latter prophets Latter Prophets

Up until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1947–), these manuscripts were our main access to the Hebrew text. We did also have manuscripts of the various translations of the Hebrew text, some dating back to the second century ce. The most important of these is the Greek translation known as the Septuagint (LXX), followed by the Syriac and Latin. However, since the translation techniques vary from book to book (and it is not clear if the Syriac was made directly from the Hebrew), it is always a matter of debate as to whether one of these versions contains a superior reading to the Masoretic text. Some scholars only emend the Masoretic text if its reading is patently incorrect; others are more ready to see the LXX as an important witness to an earlier form of the Hebrew text. Thus it can be seen that the discovery at Qumran of Hebrew manuscripts (including a whole scroll of Isaiah) going back to the first century bce was very significant. Suddenly, we had access to texts that are 1000  years older than what was being used as the basis for our bibles. But the result was not the same as the discovery of early papyri for the New Testament. It was not the case that the existing texts were set aside in favour of earlier ones, for some of the

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texts found at Qumran were virtually identical to the medieval ones. There were, however, other texts that had a considerable number of variations. Two conclusions emerged from this. On the one hand, the Masoretic text was not simply a medieval construction but an extremely accurate copy of a type of text that was known in the first century bce. Jesus could have heard it expounded in the synagogue. On the other hand, the discoveries at Qumran show that there were other texts in circulation (Hebrew and Greek) and it was only later that the Masoretic form became the standard version.

Genesis 4:8 When Cain lures his brother out into the field, the Masoretic text does not contain any speech. It simply says, ‘And Cain said to his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him’. This is the text reproduced in the KJV, though it is made a little smoother by using ‘talked’ rather than ‘said’: And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. However, the Greek and Syriac (and the Samaritan Pentateuch) contain some direct speech (‘Let us go out into the field’) which makes what happens next more understandable. Were these words added to improve the flow of the passage? Or were they present in the Hebrew text that the Greek and Syriac translators had before them? Most scholars think the words are original and they appear in nearly all modern bibles, the exception being the New American Standard (NAS), which has stayed loyal to the Masoretic text.

Isaiah 53:9–11 As can be seen from the NRSV footnotes, there are a number of difficulties with these verses and on several occasions, the Qumran manuscripts have been followed rather than the Masoretic text. One relatively straightforward example is in verse 11, where the Masoretic text has an incomplete sentence (‘from the pain of his life he will see’). The Qumran manuscripts (lQIsaa, lQIsab, 4QIsad) all

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add the word ‘light’, and this is supported by the Septuagint. Thus almost all modern versions print, ‘he will see light’. More difficult is the first half of verse 9. A literal rendering of the Masoretic text would be something like, ‘And he made with the wicked a grave, and with a rich man in his deaths (bmtyw).’ However, instead of bmtyw, the Qumran scroll 1QIsaa (the 1Q means it was found in cave 1) has the consonants bwmtw (‘burialplace’), which offers a better parallel to ‘grave’. The NRSV follows this and also conjectures that ‘a rich man’ should be a plural to match ‘the wicked’ in the first clause: ‘They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich.’ The REB goes one stage further and ensures that the reader understands ‘rich’ in a negative sense by rendering it ‘felons’ (to match the ‘wicked’ of the first clause). The NIV, however, stays closer to the Masoretic text (‘He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death’), though it reverses the singular (‘rich man’) and plural (‘in his deaths’).

Psalm 2:8–9 In this messianic Psalm, a promise is made to the king that the nations will be his inheritance and that he will rule/destroy them with a rod of iron. In the Masoretic text, the vowel signs are such that the verb means ‘destroy’, and this is consistent with the analogy that follows, that it will be like the smashing of a pot. However, the Greek translator has rendered the Hebrew text with a word which means either ‘rule’ or ‘shepherd’. This is interesting because the Hebrew consonants could mean this if they were combined with a different set of vowels. But the original Hebrew text had no vowels and so the issue is that the Greek translator followed a different oral tradition to the one that the later Masoretes followed. Which is correct? Is the king promised ‘sovereignty’ over the nations or their ‘destruction’? The most frequent rendering in English is ‘break’ them (KJV, RSV, NRSV, NJB, REB), which is not quite as strong as ‘destroy’ but stronger than ‘rule’ (NIV) and quite different from ‘shepherd’ (NAB). A further point of interest is that this same verse is quoted in the New Testament with respect to the messianic rule of Jesus (Rev 12:5; 19:15) and faithful Christians (Rev 2:27). These texts are written in Greek and agree with the form found in the Septuagint.

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Thus almost every English version translates them as ‘rule’, rather than ‘destroy’ or even ‘break’. Nevertheless, some commentators on Revelation have argued that the author of Revelation was thinking of the psalm in Hebrew but quoted the Greek version for the sake of his audience. He thus meant ‘destroy’ even though he wrote ‘rule’. The chief argument for this is that the phrase that follows is about smashing clay pots and hence the meaning of the whole is about ‘destruction’ rather than ‘rule’. Others have argued that the author is more than capable of speaking about destruction when he wants to (e.g. Rev 8:9) but this is not the case here.

The art of translation Modern versions of the bible differ in several ways. The first, as we have seen, is that they make different choices about what constitutes the original text. The second factor is that translations make different choices about what the original meant. This is particularly difficult if it is a rare word, perhaps only occurring once in the whole bible (a so-called hapax legomenon). But it can also be difficult if the particular construction is ambiguous. For example, there is a difficult passage in 1 Thessalonians 4:4, where the moral exhortation is to ‘ktasthai one’s own vessel in holiness and honour’. The ordinary meaning of ktasthai is ‘take’ (Matt 10:9 – ‘Take no gold’) or ‘obtain’ (Acts 8:20 – ‘obtain God’s gift with money’). Thus the KJV renders the verse: ‘every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour’, which is literal but incomprehensible. The RSV takes ‘vessel’ to mean ‘wife’ (the next verse is about lust!) and renders ‘each one of you know how to take a wife for himself.’ In some Greek writings, ‘vessel’ is used in a crude phallic sense, which would fit well with the passage if ktasthai could be rendered ‘control’. The REB does not wish to be crude but follows this line of thought with its ‘each one of you must learn to gain mastery over his body’ (similarly NRSV and NIV, which use the word ‘control’). Perhaps surprisingly, the GNB has the rather tame, ‘Each of you men should know how to live with his wife’, while the JB has ‘each one of you to know how to use the body that belongs to him’, which is ambiguous. Does it mean his own body or that of his wife? The NJB clarifies: ‘each one of you to know how to control his body in a way that is holy and honourable.’

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Third, different versions of the bible have different translation policies. For example, the GNB seeks to avoid technical language like ‘righteousness’, which is rare in ordinary usage (the exception being the phrase ‘self-righteous’). It therefore uses expressions like ‘to do what God requires’ (Matt 5:6). Unfortunately, this means losing the rich background of the word ‘righteousness’. Rather different is the question of inclusive language. When Paul addresses a congregation with the word ‘brothers’ (adelphoi), was he referring to everyone or just the men? Almost all scholars would say that he was addressing the whole congregation, in the way that ‘mankind’ has been used to mean everyone. Thus a number of translations now speak of ‘brothers and sisters’, not as an attempt to be ‘politically correct’ but as an attempt to get closer to what Paul actually meant. As it says on the inside cover of the NIV (Inclusive Language Edition, 1995): ‘Where the original languages are considered to refer to humanity in general or to a person of either gender but do so using masculine terminology, revisions have been made to restore the intention of the original texts.’ Not all agree with this, however. Thomas says: The pitfall of this policy lies in its failure to convey accurately the historical situation of the original. It attempts to bridge a contemporary cultural gap by misrepresenting what the writers wrote. If a translator obscures that cultural feature, what keeps him from obscuring other cultural features of the original text that contemporary cultural perspectives find distasteful? (2000:109)

Conclusion It is sometimes a fundamentalist argument that though people differ in their interpretations of the bible, the Word itself is from God and therefore infallible (God would not lie or make mistakes). We have already noted that this places all the emphasis on the ‘divine’ side and does not take seriously the ‘human’ aspect of the writings. Thus Jesus can contrast what Moses wrote about divorce with God’s intention for marriage (Mark 10:2–9) and Paul can decide that certain aspects of God’s Law are no longer in force. However, whether such a claim is true or not, the simple fact is that we do not have the original texts anyway. We have a multitude of manuscripts, all of which differ in some way or another. Textual critics seek to

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determine what the original is most likely to have been, given the variations found in the manuscript tradition. But it is not an exact science. Opinions of what a scribe is likely to have done or what Luke is likely to have written are all part of the equation. Interpretation is therefore unavoidable. There is no such thing as an objective translation of the bible. They are produced by editorial committees who no doubt do their best and do it sincerely but are influenced by numerous factors, some of them unconscious. For some readers of this book, this will come as a disappointment. If we cannot be sure we are reading exactly what the original author said, why bother with the bible at all? But this applies in  all walks of life. If we were to cease doing things because we could not do them perfectly, we would do nothing at all. Limitation and incompleteness are integral to the human condition. But that does not mean that real insight or even revelation is impossible. We just have to learn to appreciate it for what it is and not fool ourselves into thinking that we have the whole picture.

Further reading For a good summary of textual criticism, see Chapter 68 (‘Texts and Versions’) of the New Jerome Biblical Commentary and more recently, P. D. Wegner, A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible (2006). B. Metzger’s The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration (1968) remains a classic. For a more introductory work, see K. Elliott and I. Moir, Manuscripts and the Text of the New Testament (1995) and for the Old Testament, E. R. Brotzman, Old Testament Textual Criticism (1994).

Questions 1 How do modern bibles differ from the King James Version? 2 What principles are used by textual critics to determine the original text? 3 In Luke’s account of the last supper (Luke 22:17–20), the RSV and REB have Jesus distributing the wine before the bread. Why is this?

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Though the benefits of historical criticism have been immense, a grave weakness was that it focused on discovering what the text meant then – to the detriment of what it might mean to readers today. Ordinary Christians, praying over the scriptures and declaring what God had shown them, were regarded by ‘critical’ scholars as naive. Furthermore, those who appealed to the scriptures in doctrinal or moral debate were regarded as guilty of misusing the bible because they failed to consider the original intention of the author. For those who were schooled in the historical method, even the claim to be a follower of Christ was complicated by questions such as: Did Jesus really say those words? Did he really institute a eucharist? Did he really think of himself as the Messiah? In short, the Enlightenment spirit, which attempted to free the text from the dogmatic control of the church, had ended up by placing it within the dogmatic control of the professional historian. In reaction to this, scholarship swung in the 1980s to the question of how texts affect readers and how readers affect or make sense of texts. Historical study was quite clear that the individual authors of scripture had their own point of view and this must be taken into account when analysing their texts. However, the same is also true of modern readers (and modern scholars!). No one comes to a text from a neutral or objective stance: all come with certain presuppositions and interests and this inevitably colours what is found. Yet for Christians, one of the reasons for reading the bible is the belief that it is able to challenge and transform, as we saw in our first chapter. The study of how texts affect readers and how readers

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affect texts is sometimes called reader-response criticism. Sanders and Davies explain: Reader-response criticism explores the dialectic of text and reader. On the one hand, the text controls the reader’s response through its own strategies and conventions, selecting and arranging from contingencies those matters and patterns which it requires the reader to notice. On the other hand, the reader must actualize the world of the text in such a way as to be moved and enlightened by it. Some reader-response critics pay more attention to the strategies of the text and some to the psychology of the reader. (1989:240) In this chapter, we shall focus on the first of these, the question of how texts affect readers. In our next chapter we shall consider the other side of the interaction, how our different backgrounds, interests and commitments affect how we read and interpret texts.

The process of reading Before we can even begin to read the bible or any other book, we must have a basic vocabulary and set of meanings. Otherwise, it will simply be squiggles on a page (or electronic data).This becomes clear as soon as you remember that the original texts were not written in English. You could have a page of the Hebrew Old Testament in front of you and could reverently declare it to be the ‘word of God’, but unless you have some experience of this ‘right to left’ language, it will remain ‘non-sense’ to you. Interpretation is only possible if you come to a text with a basic set of meanings and experiences. For example, suppose you are reading Paul’s letter to the Romans (in English) and you come across the word ‘sin’. Now depending on your previous reading and experiences, this may suggest to you one or more of the following: 1 gross immorality or wickedness (hence nothing to do with you); 2 letting God down or failure (we do it all the time); 3 letting ourselves down (we do it some of the time);

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4 injustice, such as being part of an economic system that keeps third world countries in poverty (some are aware of this, others are not); 5 an old-fashioned expression (‘living in sin’) which society now finds quaint. Whatever ‘sin’ means to you, your first attempt to understand what Paul is saying has to start with that. These are your first thoughts or impressions on the passage. However, if you are a careful reader, you might find that you are forced to revise these initial meanings. For example, Paul declares in Romans 3:23 that ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’. Now it is clear that not everyone has committed gross immorality, so that, if that was your starting-point, you might be challenged to revise it (or you might declare Paul to be wrong; not everyone has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God). In this way, the text can speak back to you. Some interpretations fit the passage better than others. Of course it cannot force you to change your mind and the verb ‘speak’ here is clearly figurative. But if you continue to ignore such prompts, your reading of the text will become problematic and eventually create dissonance. On the other hand, if you are prepared to modify what you thought ‘sin’ meant, your next reading of Romans will take place with a revised set of meanings. Thus reading is a dialectical process which begins with an initial set of meanings, is modified in the course of reading, and leads to a revised reading next time around.

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Rhetorical criticism In the ancient world, the art of persuasion was called rhetoric and a number of prominent Christians (Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine) were rhetoricians before they were Christians. Rhetorical criticism (some would prefer the term rhetorical analysis) is the study of how texts influence readers. What literary devices are used in order to persuade readers to accept the author’s point of view? It is particularly relevant to those parts of the bible which record speeches or oracles. For example, consider the summons in Isaiah 1:18: Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. The oracle invites the hearers to consider their present state and hope for something better. At the moment, their sins are like scarlet, red or crimson (perhaps a reference to blood). But this could be different; they could be like snow or wool. The meaning of the metaphor becomes clearer from its use in other passages. For example, in Daniel’s vision of God, he describes the glorious figure as having clothes as ‘white as snow’ and the ‘hair of his head like pure wool’ (Dan 7:9). This is picked up in the book of Revelation where John says Christ’s ‘head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow’ (Rev 1:14). The hearers are invited to imagine an enormous change in their situation, from blood-red sins to pure snowy-white. But there is more: If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. (Isa 1:19–20) Having whetted their appetite for such a transformation, the conditions are now laid out. One way involves obedience and a further promise is given: ‘you shall eat the good of the land.’ The other way is the way of rebellion and a threat is added: ‘you shall be

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devoured by the sword.’ Thus the oracle uses at least three rhetorical devices to persuade. First, there is an appeal to the imagination: think how it would be to have your blood-red sins transformed into something as pure as snow. Second, there is promise: ‘you shall eat the good of the land.’ Third, there is threat: ‘you shall be devoured by the sword.’ And, if that is not enough, the oracle continues by highlighting their predicament: ‘How the faithful city has become a whore! She that was full of justice, righteousness lodged in her –but now murderers! Your silver has become dross, your wine is mixed with water’ (1:21–22). Another rhetorical device is to carry on a dialogue with an imaginary inquisitor who supplies you with questions. These not only anticipate possible objections to the speaker’s position; they also allow him or her to answer them when they are ready. Thus, in Paul’s letter to the Romans, the argument is punctuated by such questions as: Then what advantage has the Jew? (3:1) What then? Are we any better off? (3:9) Then what becomes of boasting? (3:27) What then are we to say was gained by Abraham . . .? (4:1) Is this blessedness, then, pronounced only on the circumcised . . .? (4:9) Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? (6:1) Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? (6:15) Paul knows that unless he can offer satisfactory answers to these questions, his message will not be convincing. But he only wants to answer them when he is ready, that is, when he has got to the relevant part of the argument. Thus, in 6:15, the questioner asks: ‘Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace?’ It is a dilemma many Christians have found themselves in. At the moment of temptation, does the message of forgiveness offer sufficient incentive to resist? But forgiveness is not the sum total of the gospel message. Becoming a Christian involves a transfer of loyalties: ‘For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification’ (6:19). And Paul is quite

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happy to mention the incentives of reward and punishment: ‘For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (6:23). But the latter phrase shows that it is not an abstract promise of reward that acts as incentive. It is rooted in the object of the Christian’s new loyalty, ‘Christ Jesus our Lord’. Rhetorical criticism then is the study of the means whereby an author seeks to convince or persuade readers to accept a particular point of view. It is therefore close to the aims and goals of redaction criticism. If we agree with the point of view we congratulate the author on his or her rhetorical skill. We admire his or her ability to ‘make a case’, to present arguments clearly, to give good illustrations, indeed, to communicate. But it is sobering to remember that, if we do not agree with the position being offered, we usually refer to it as manipulation. The author tries to control the reader’s responses by various clever devices. How we view it (including the bible) depends on whether we are disposed to accept the point of view being offered or whether we feel it is something that must be resisted (see Chapter 8).

Narrative Rhetorical criticism of speeches and oracles is close to redaction criticism’s concern with authors. But when we turn to stories, we are less concerned with authors and more concerned with the dynamics of the text itself. How is it that stories can have such a dramatic impact on readers? Even when they are not literally true, like Jesus’ parables? Anthony Thiselton (1992) suggests the following reasons:

1. Biblical stories catch us off-guard When we read stories, we sometimes get so involved with the characters that the ending can have a huge emotional impact on us. Had the author stated the point right at the beginning, we might have been impervious to it, but we were taken along by the story. The author got behind our natural defences by luring us into their story world. Just for a while, we suspended life in the present world to live in the world of the story. In short, we were caught off-guard.

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An excellent example of this occurs in  2 Samuel 12. David has committed adultery with Bathsheba and then plotted to have her husband killed. Nathan approaches him and tells him a story: There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. He brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his meagre fare, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveller to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb, and prepared that for the guest who had come to him. (2 Sam 12:1–4) The story is vivid and has an immediate impact on David. He declares, ‘As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.‘ But then comes the punch line. Nathan declares: You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; I gave you your master’s house, and your master’s wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would have added as much more. Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife. (2 Sam 12:7–9) David was caught off-guard, as are countless readers of other parts of the bible. Thiselton explains: Because the narrative entices them into its world and enthrals them, they become unconsciously exposed to viewpoints, judgments, and reversals of assumptions which in other modes of discourse would have called explicitly for conscious willingness to be ‘open’ and to ‘listen to the text’. Narrative can reverse expectations which initially would be hostile to its viewpoint. (1992:567)

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Thiselton’s insight offers an alternative way of looking at the parables of Jesus. Consider again the parable of the Good Samaritan. The lawyer has successfully answered Jesus’ question by declaring that eternal life comes from loving God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind and your neighbour as yourself (Luke 10:27). But he wishes clarification: ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Now Jesus could have answered him, ‘Anyone in need’, but he elects to tell a story: A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Historians tell us that the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was notorious for this sort of thing. The man may well have thought that Jesus was recounting a true story. He continues Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. The mention of priest and Levite is surprising. This is beginning to sound like an anti-clerical story. No doubt the next person will be a lay person, who will show the sort of compassion that the clergy should have shown. But the lawyer is in for an even bigger surprise: But a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Despite being able to recite the commandments, the lawyer probably had little love for Samaritans (Jews did not associate with Samaritans, as we are told in John 4:9). Jesus asks him, ‘Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into

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the hands of the robbers?’ There is only one answer and the lawyer must bow to the logic of the story. The one who acted as neighbour is the one ‘who showed him mercy’. Jesus ends with ‘Go and do likewise’. Thus the man is not only given a poignant example of love, he is also confronted with his own prejudice. Loving one’s neighbour is of little use if it is not willing to cross racial barriers. We are not told what his response was; the reader is invited to draw his or her own conclusion.

2. Biblical stories embody truth in people/characters It is a common experience that knowing about someone is not the same as actually knowing them. Indeed, it is possible to know someone intimately (partner, relative, flat-mate) without being able to list very many ‘facts’ about them (height, weight, colour of eyes, etc.) Though the church thought it necessary to use doctrinal statements to distinguish truth from error (i.e. the creeds), most Christians ‘know’ Jesus from the stories about him (and their own personal experience). For example, the author of John’s Gospel could have simply told us that we should serve one another. Narrating the story of the foot-washing (John 13) is much more powerful because it embeds a powerful image in the mind.

3. Biblical stories stimulate imagination Doctrinal statements often function as a test of orthodoxy and can be either accepted or rejected. Historical reconstructions are a matter of probabilities. Stories, on the other hand, invite imagination and exploration. Though we are not always conscious of it, when we read a story we are always filling in gaps. We build up a picture of the characters and the settings. We imagine what it must have been like for Peter to deny Christ or the woman with the issue of blood to touch Jesus’ garment. We are not told these things in the text but they are necessary in order to bring the story to life. We find ourselves liking some characters and disliking others. We speculate on why certain characters act as they do and how things might have been different. This leads on to Thiselton’s fourth point.

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4. Biblical stories invite participation Getting involved in a story involves our own story. We identify with certain characters. Why? Perhaps because we see echoes of our own upbringing or conversion in one of them. We see traits described that are typical of ourselves and hence see ‘our story’ in the narrative story. A good example of this can be found in the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, where one is invited to imagine oneself into the story. For example, on the last supper, he says: The first Point is to see the persons of the Supper, and, reflecting on myself, to see to drawing some profit from them. The second, to hear what they are talking about, and likewise to draw some profit from it. The third, to look at what they are doing, and draw some profit. The fourth, to consider that which Christ our Lord is suffering in His Humanity, or wants to suffer, according to the passage which is being contemplated, and here to commence with much vehemence and to force myself to grieve, be sad and weep, and so to labor through the other points which follow. The fifth, to consider how the Divinity hides Itself, that is, how It could destroy Its enemies and does not do it, and how It leaves the most sacred Humanity to suffer so very cruelly. The sixth, to consider how He suffers all this for my sins, etc.; and what I ought to do and suffer for Him (Text in Fleming, 1980:116–18). Literary studies have identified a number of features that affect the way we read a story. For example, we are taken through a story by a narrator. Consider the following verses from John’s Gospel: But he was speaking of the temple of his body (2:21) He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do (6:6) He was speaking of Judas son of Simon Iscariot, for he, though one of the twelve, was going to betray him (6:71) Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive (7:39)

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They did not understand that he was speaking to them about the Father (8:27) He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die (12:33) For he knew who was to betray him (13:11) This was to fulfil what Jesus had said when he indicated the kind of death he was to die (18:32) He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God (21:19) So the rumour spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die (21:23) These are not part of the story as such but asides to the reader. They guide us through the story and since the narrator (normally) seems so good at making sense of the events described, we are well disposed to accept the points of view being offered. These might be explicit, as in the doctrinal assertions of Chapter 1 (‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’) or implicit, as in the following: Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. So Jesus asked the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God’ (John 6:66–69) We are not forced to take the stance that Peter takes. We could disagree with the point of view being offered but that is to place ourselves with those that found the teaching too difficult. In actual fact, it may be nothing of the kind but the flow of the narrative has encouraged us to accept the story and the values it is propagating. Why doubt now? The effect of being taken through a story by a narrator is that we are often oblivious of the fact that the narrator appears to be both omniscient (knows everything) and omnipresent (can be everywhere). For example, the narrator is able to tell us what is going on in Jesus’ mind. Consider these comments from John’s Gospel: When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force (6:15) For Jesus knew from the first who were the ones that did not believe (6:64)

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Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him (16:19) Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him (18:4) After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished (19:28) The narrator is always present where the action is. If Jesus is at the well (John 4), the narrator is there to record the conversation. When the woman returns to the town, the narrator is there to hear her report, while simultaneously being back at the well to tell us what the disciples had to say. It is a measure of the skill of the author that we do not question how this can be so. Think how different the Gospels would be if we read, ‘And the disciples returned to Jesus but I have been unable to discover what was said.’ Our confidence in the narrator is shown in passages like John 3:11–36. Verse 11 begins with Jesus’ reply to Nicodemus (‘Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know’). But it is unclear whether the paragraph that begins at verse 16 (‘For God so loved the world’) or verse 17 (‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn’) continues Jesus’ words or whether they are commentary provided by the narrator (the original manuscripts contain no punctuation). Likewise with the end of John 3. John the Baptist is speaking in 3:27: ‘No one can receive anything except what has been given from heaven. You yourselves are my witnesses that I said, “I am not the Messiah, but I have been sent ahead of him.’” But is it John or the narrator who is speaking at the end of the paragraph: ‘Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but must endure God’s wrath’. The literary point is that, whether John said it or not, it hardly matters to most readers, for the narrator has convinced us that he is utterly reliable. Whether Jesus, John or the author of the Gospel is speaking, they all speak as one (and use the same language and style). While the lack of punctuation in the original means that it is sometimes impossible to tell when one voice stops and another starts, for most readers it makes no difference. It should be noted that from an historical point of view, all of this is highly suspicious. The author of John’s Gospel has made Jesus and John adopt his own idiom.

Plot Plot may simply be the chronological sequence of events (as far as the author knows it) but the differences between the Gospels

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suggest that this is not their leading feature. Alan Culpepper says that though the Evangelists received traditions about Jesus, they still had to fashion them into a coherent whole. The resulting sequence (plot) has a significant effect on the reader. For example, in the Synoptic Gospels, the cleansing of the temple forms a fitting climax to the clashes between Jesus and the Jewish leaders. According to Mark, there are mutterings of blasphemy as early as the second chapter (2:7), leading to a plot to kill him in the third (3:6) Yet Jesus continues his ministry, travelling up and down the country, preaching and teaching, healing and exorcizing demons. There are further disputes in Chapters 7 and 8 (see 7:5; 8:11) which come to a climax in Chapter 11, with his entry into Jerusalem and the cleansing of the temple (11:15–19). From here on, the narrative is swift, with disputes in Chapter 12, apocalyptic discourse in Chapter 13 and his arrest in Chapter 14. In the flow of Mark’s story, it is the cleansing of the temple which finally precipitates Jesus’ arrest and death. However, this is clearly not the case in John’s Gospel, since the cleansing comes right at the beginning (John 2:13–22). Its different setting gives it a different function. One suggestion is that the author is trying to illustrate the verse in the prologue which says, ‘He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him’ (1:11). He does this by narrating a number of ‘transfer’ stories. First is the water into wine, illustrating the superiority of Christianity (2:1–11). Second is the cleansing of the temple, indicating God’s judgement on Israel (2:13–22). Third is the story of Nicodemus (a leading Jew), who will only see the kingdom if he is born from above (3:1–10). Thus John’s story (plot) presents a break between Jesus and Judaism right from the beginning. Experience shows that certain types of plot tend to produce certain types of reaction. For example, most stories have some sort of hero and this character can either succeed or fail. If he or she succeeds (the happy ending), readers are usually pleased. Providing it is not contrived or unbelievable, most of us like a happy ending and this goes far deeper than wishful thinking. There is something deep down that expects good things to happen to good people. It is reassuring. On the other hand, if the hero fails, this is deeply unsettling. Books that lead you to identify with heroes only to kill them off are often subversive. They are intending to challenge your apathy or traditional values. Further, most plots usually have a villain or bad person. Generally speaking, we do not expect them to prosper for that would go

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against our sense of fairness or justice. That is why the psalmist cries out to God when the wicked prosper. This is not how it should be! Conversely, we are pleased when the wicked get what they deserve. We may have radically different views about punishment but few people want to see the wicked ‘getting away with it’. Think how different the Gospels would be if they ended with Judas living happily on his 30 pieces of silver. All this can be utilized by an author. Stories generally move in either an upward direction (‘rags to riches’) or downward (tragedy) and this has a predictable effect on the reader. Within this framework, interest is often focused on the reasons for success or failure. For example, why did Judas betray Jesus? Was it a moment of weakness or a flaw in his character? In Mark, the betrayal of Jesus comes completely out of the blue. It is inexplicable and hence a little worrying. After all, if one of the twelve can be with Jesus for so long and still fall, where does that leave the rest of us? But John takes care of this. Not only are we told that Jesus knew this would happen (6:71; 13:11), we are also told that Judas was a thief and used to help himself from the common purse (12:6).Whether there is any historical basis for such a claim is open to debate. But what is clear is that John has made an awkward incident (for the reader) into an understandable and hence less disturbing one.

Irony Amongst the various literary devices open to an author, irony has been thought to play a significant role in biblical stories. A dictionary definition is a ‘device whereby a character in a play or book says something which has one meaning for him and a deeper one only visible to audience or reader’ (Penguin English Dictionary, 1969). A good example is the speech of Caiaphas in John’s Gospel: So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council, and said, ‘What are we to do? This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.’ But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high

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priest that year, said to them, ‘You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’ (John 11: 47–50) Caiaphas is talking about getting rid of Christ as a political expedient but the reader knows that Jesus did in fact ‘die for the people’. It is as if the author is giving the reader a knowing look or nudge. He shares a secret unknown to the characters in the story and this gives us confidence that the author knows what he is talking about. The prologues of the Gospels function in a similar way. Each in its own way serves to put the reader in the picture. For example, we are prepared for the Nicodemus dialogue about being ‘born again’ (John 3:1–10) by the statement in the prologue: ‘But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God’ (John 1:12–13).With this knowledge, we can only smile at Nicodemus’ stupidity as he enquires: ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ (3:4) But this is more than a piece of amusement for it is part of the plot. Who is Nicodemus? The chapter opens with the words, ‘Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.’ The reader is urged to take a negative view of the Pharisees and a superior view of Jesus.

Conclusion It should now be clear that there is a fundamental difference between historical and literary approaches to the bible. An historical approach seeks meaning in the original context, whether this is the actual events being narrated or the intentions of the author. In effect, the text is treated as a window to something behind it. And it is that something which is the real focus of attention. Literary approaches, however, focus on the actual text and its interaction with readers. Whether what is written corresponds exactly to what happened or to an author’s intention is always a matter of debate. The text is what we have in front of us and its influence depends on a variety of

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rhetorical and literary devices such as plot, an imaginary questioner or a narrator. The 1980s saw a proliferation of studies with titles like Matthew As Story (Kingsbury) or Mark As Story (Rhoads and Michie), each trying to illuminate the dynamic between text and reader. But are such studies grounded in anything objective? Do all people, across time and culture, respond to irony in the same way? Does everyone find a happy ending fulfilling? Do texts really have this power to influence? In our next chapter, we consider how the background, interests and commitments of readers influence their interpretations of texts. For a growing number of scholars, the most influential factor in determining meaning is what readers themselves bring to the text. That is why historical reconstructions vary so much and why scholars disagree about literary structure. The background of the reader, what they know and why they are reading the text, has been left out of most interpretations of the bible since the Enlightenment. Yet where you stand greatly affects what you see and hence how you interpret. Or so it is claimed.

Further reading Discussion of all the biblical books from a literary point of view can be found in the very reasonably priced The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by R. Alter and F. Kermode (1987). Also useful are their separate works: R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (2011) and F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy. On the Interpretation of Narrative (1979). For an introduction, see M. A. Powell, What is Narrative Criticism? (1990) and K. Keefer, The New Testament as Literature (2008). On individual books, A. Culpepper, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel (1983) and D. Rhoads and D. Michie, Mark As Story (1982) remain classics. For the Old Testament, see the two books by D. Gunn, The Story of King David (1978) and The Fate of King Saul (1980). Also an excellent buy is one of the standard introductions for students of English, the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Leitch et al. (2009). This contains 2758 pages and, at the time of writing, was available for under £35.

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Questions 1 How does a literary approach to the bible differ from an historical approach? 2 How does the prologue of John’s Gospel (1:1–18) inform the way the rest of the narrative is read? 3 How does the narrative of the book of Jonah reinforce the view that God’s concern is wider than Israel?

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7 The role of readers: Gender, ethnicity and social location

Though the aims and methods of the approaches discussed so far are very different, they have one important thing in common: they make claims to objectivity. They borrow from the Enlightenment spirit the desire to eliminate subjectivity and rely solely on evidence, logic and rationality. If the JEDP hypothesis for the Pentateuch or that of Markan priority for the Gospels is convincing, then it should be convincing for all people. That is not to say that such theories cannot be challenged; that is how biblical scholarship proceeds. But the challenge will not take the form of ‘that’s just your opinion’ or ‘I don’t like that conclusion’. It will be a new hypothesis, which claims to do greater justice to the evidence. However, the task of biblical interpretation is rather different from determining the chemical properties of paracetamol. People do see things differently and there has been a growing concern that the majority of biblical studies has come from a rather narrow selection of the world’s population, namely, men (gender), white (ethnicity) and from the affluent West (social location). Can such an unrepresentative group tell the rest of the world the meaning of the bible? In this chapter we will consider how gender, ethnicity and social location all influence our interpretation of the bible. In the next chapter, we will consider whether the bible itself is guilty of promoting sexism, racism and imperialism, and look at a number of approaches designed to resist this.

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Gender From the first edition of The Women’s Bible (1895/8) to its new edition (Newsom and Ringe, 1992), books and articles have challenged the view that men have the authority to speak for women. The bible contains numerous stories that include (or exclude) women characters or use imagery associated with women (e.g. childbirth) which men have interpreted from their own perspective. It is now possible to read what women commentators have made of these stories.

Retrieving women’s voices in the bible Interpretation requires a judgement about what is important in a text. For men, this is usually the male heroes like Abraham and David or Peter and Paul, with scant attention to Sarah and Bathsheba or Lydia and Priscilla. We have already noted that (male) tradition has placed far more emphasis on the second creation account, where Eve is created as Adam’s helper (Gen 2:18–25) than the first creation account, where male and female are created together (Gen 1:27). It does not take a rocket scientist to work out that it has been in men’s interests to do so. One aspect of feminist interpretation is the retrieval of women’s voices. This can be a matter of choosing more inclusive language, as in this blessing from the World Council of Churches: The blessing of the God of Sarah and Abraham, the blessing of the Son who was born of Mary, the blessing of the Holy Spirit, who watches over us like a mother over her children, be with us all. Amen. (quoted in Bührig, 1993:62) In 1 Cor 15:3–8, Paul declares that Jesus died, was buried and was raised on the third day. His proof of the latter is that he was seen by a series of witnesses, the first of which was Peter. He then mentions the other disciples, a large crowd and finally himself. However, according to the resurrection stories in the Gospels of John and Matthew, it is Mary Magdalene (John 20:1, 11) and ‘Mary Magdalene and the other Mary’ (Matt 28:1, 9) who were the first to see Jesus. While the male disciples have all fled, the women stay with Jesus at the cross

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and thus see where he is buried. They are then favoured with the first resurrection appearance. Male commentators have either ignored this discrepancy or have offered an explanation that assures the reader that what Paul has done is perfectly acceptable. This usually takes the form of explaining Paul’s words in the light of the culture of the time. It is asserted that the testimony of women did not enjoy legal status in the first century and so Paul does not mention them because it would not have been convincing (see Luke 24:8–12). He thus passes over the female witnesses and cites the first male to see the risen Christ, namely, Peter. Two things can be said of this. First, it has had an enormous impact on the history of the church. Think how different things would have been if Christianity had proclaimed from the beginning that the church was founded on the testimony of Mary Magdalene. Second, even if we were to accept Paul’s expediency in the light of first-century culture, there is no reason why we should perpetuate it. The testimony of Matthew and John is that Jesus first appeared to the women and did so because the men had all deserted him (Mark 14:50).

Retrieving feminine images of God The bible uses both feminine and masculine images to express God’s character but only the masculine ones have found their way into the church’s doctrine and liturgy. God is referred to as ‘He’. ‘He’ has revealed himself in his ‘Son’. Even the Spirit, which is a feminine word in Hebrew (ruach), is referred to as ‘He’. But there are other images. Isaiah 66:13 says: ‘As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.’ The image of childbirth is used of God bringing His (?) people into being. Jesus says: ‘How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’ (Matt 23:37). Wisdom is personified in the Old Testament as God’s co-worker from the very beginning: The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth . . . (Prov 8:22–25)

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Wisdom was feminine. The first verse of Proverbs 8 begins: ‘Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?’ The idea of Wisdom being God’s co-worker in creation was taken up in the New Testament as a way of expressing Jesus’ role (‘He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created’ – Col 1:15–16). Yet the feminine imagery has been lost. We have already mentioned that the Hebrew word for Spirit is feminine. The Greek translation, pneuma, is neuter but it is usually translated by masculine pronouns when the Holy Spirit is meant. It is only the Latin spiritus that is masculine from a grammatical point of view and this has been hugely important in the development of liturgy. Some feminist interpreters have attempted to retrieve the feminine imagery used of God and Schüssler Fiorenza (1994a) has argued that the earliest Christology was based on seeing Jesus as the wisdom (sophia) of God.

Reinterpreting biblical stories As well as retrieving women’s voices and feminine imagery (that male interpreters have neglected), feminist scholars have brought new perspectives to familiar stories. For example, prohibition about women’s dress in the New Testament (1 Cor 11:6; 1 Pet 3:3–4) has usually been explained as a ‘woman’s problem’. But considering that it is men who wrote these letters, is it not more likely that it was the men who were having the problems? Christianity gave (some) new freedoms to women. They could participate in worship, could prophesy and evangelize. This inevitably led to issues about spirituality and sexuality in the congregation and the way that the male authors appear to have dealt with it (and have done ever since) was to make it a ‘woman’s problem’. If men are finding ‘attraction’ a problem then it is the woman who must ‘cover up’ or ‘withdraw’ or ‘be quiet’. The story of the woman at the well (John 4:4–42) is instructive. The ‘traditional’ reading sees Jesus (the male) in conversation with the Samaritan (the female) but operating on a different (higher) plane. Her mind is set on earthly matters. She has come to the well for ordinary water (v.7). When Jesus speaks of ‘living water’, all she can think of is ‘Sir, you have no bucket’. When he explains that ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but

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those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty’, her interest is aroused but only to save herself the daily journey (v.15). When Jesus exposes the fact that she has had five husbands (v.16), she tries to embroil him in a theological discussion about places of worship. But, once again, Jesus is on a higher plane. Worship is not about place but spirit and truth (v.24). Lastly, she voices a basic tenet of her Samaritan beliefs: ‘I know that Messiah is coming . . . When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us’ (v.25). Jesus replies: ‘I am he, the one who is speaking to you’ (v.26). Sandra Schneiders calls this the typical male reading of the story which ‘presents the woman as a disreputable (if interesting) miscreant who, failing in her attempt to distract Jesus from her sexually disgraceful past, surrenders to his overpowering preternatural knowledge of her, alerts her fellow townspeople to his presence, and then fades from the scene as they discover for themselves and come to believe in him’ (1999:194). But a different reading is possible, for it is Jesus who asks for a drink. It is not that the woman can only think in earthly terms; this is what Jesus asks for. He is sitting by Jacob’s great well and asks her for a (material) drink. But the woman looks beyond the material to ask why social taboos are being ignored, for ‘Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans’. Jesus replies that he can offer ‘living water’, which the woman (rightly) takes as a religious claim to be superior to Jacob and the patriarchs. Jesus then elaborates that the water he offers is such that those who drink of it will never again be thirsty for it ‘will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’. The woman is interested and replies using the same metaphor as Jesus used: ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’ Furthermore, male commentators have assumed that the reference to ‘you have had five husbands’ implies that she was immoral. But the text does not say this. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that she would have been able to divorce five men and remarry. It is more likely that five men have abandoned her and the present man refuses to marry her because of it. In other words, she is the victim in the story, not the villain. Jesus points to her desperate need not her wanton lifestyle. Thus it is possible to read the text as a serious theological exchange and not a (foolish immoral) woman continually misunderstanding the (pure superior) male. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1994b) offers a different interpre­ tation of the debates between Jesus and the Scribes as recorded

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in Mark 10 and 12. Traditionally, these have been described as debates about the law in order to trap Jesus but Schüssler Fiorenza points out that both of the questions enshrine a ‘male-orientated’ perspective: Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? (10:2) In the resurrection whose wife will she be? (12:23) In the first question, Jesus is being asked to enter the rabbinic debate about the grounds for divorce. Should it only be for infidelity or for a variety of lesser reasons (like burning the dinner)? However, Jesus overturns this patriarchal concept of marriage by declaring that divorce was only permitted ‘because of your hardness of heart’ (Mark 10:5). God created male and female people and marriage is about male and female people becoming ‘one flesh’ (quoting the Genesis story). The idea of one partner (male or female) being able to ‘dispose’ of the other is contrary to God’s will. In the second question, a rather bizarre story is concocted about a woman marrying a succession of brothers in order to ridicule belief in the resurrection (since it was assumed that she would be married to all of them in the afterlife). But once again, Jesus denies their patriarchal concept of marriage, whereby a woman’s function is simply to continue the (male) line. In the afterlife, people ‘neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven’ (Mark 12:25). Thus according to Schüssler Fiorenza, these are not just debates about the law, they are debates about gender. Both questions enshrine patriarchal assumptions and Jesus challenges them.

Ethnicity One of the most important changes in New Testament scholarship during the last few decades is the recognition that descriptions of first-century Judaism as ‘harsh’, ‘legalistic’ and ‘lacking in love’ is nothing short of caricature (some would say racist caricature). All down the ages, commentators have described first-century Judaism in these terms without ever bothering to consult Jewish sources or discuss with Jewish scholars. Judaism ‘must’ be these things, it is claimed, because that was the view of Jesus and Paul. However, in

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the latter part of the twentieth century, scholars began to examine Jewish documents (including the newly-discovered Dead Sea Scrolls) to see how the people themselves understood their religion. The results began a new era of biblical interpretation.

E. P. Sanders Ed Sanders set out to read (in Hebrew) all of the Jewish documents that can reasonably be dated to the first century or before. He concluded that there is not a single document that expresses the popular idea that Judaism was a legalistic religion. Indeed, far from believing that one had to perform good works in order to earn salvation (legalism), they believed that they were God’s chosen people. God has made a covenant with Israel and God is faithful (as Paul asserts throughout Romans 9–11). It is quite correct that Jewish writings do stress the importance of obeying God’s laws but not in order to earn salvation: rather as a response to God’s gracious calling. The central paradigm is the exodus, where God first rescued the people from slavery (grace) and then told them to live up to their calling (law). The idea that the law was a crippling burden is a fictitious caricature that is denied by the Old Testament itself: Blessed are you, O lord; teach me your statutes. With my lips I declare all the ordinances of your mouth. I delight in the way of your decrees as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts, and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word. Deal bountifully with your servant, so that I may live and observe your word. Open my eyes, so that I may behold wondrous things out of your law (Psalm 119:12–18) Sanders left biblical scholars with a challenge. Either Jesus and Paul totally misunderstood their Jewish heritage or biblical scholars have totally misunderstood Jesus and Paul. Sanders opted for the latter and tried to persuade scholars to re-read the New Testament without such racist spectacles. For example, because the Gospels contain a few stories where Jesus is criticized for healing on the

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sabbath, scholars have deduced that Jesus rejected the law in favour of ‘heart’ religion. But what are we to make of the Sermon on the Mount, which has Jesus saying: Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these command­ ments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 5:19–20) Certainly he was against hypocrisy, but so were the Old Testament prophets and so was Paul when he found it in the church. Protestants are familiar with such verses as Galatians 2:16 (‘we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ’) and Romans 4:5 (‘But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness’) but they ignore what Paul says in Romans 2: For he will repay according to each one’s deeds: to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honour and immortality, he will give eternal life; while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury . . . For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified. (Rom 2:6,7,13) Generally speaking, Protestants have taken Galatians 2:16/Romans 4:5 as expressing what Paul ‘really’ means and have attempted to explain (away) passages like Romans 2. But taking the lead from Sanders, scholars from the so-called ‘new perspective’ have tried to integrate them. The most important point is that Paul’s ‘faith and works’ contrast is only prominent in Galatians and Romans, where the issue under discussion is whether Gentile Christians are obliged to take up the Jewish law. Paul is not accusing his ancestral faith of legalism. He is attacking Christians who are trying to force Gentile converts to take up the law. Even Peter appears to be implicated in this: But when Cephas [Peter] came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people

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came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. (Gal 2:11–12) Not all agree with Sanders’s particular reconstructions but the principle that religious and/or racial prejudice can distort what we see is becoming well established (Kelly, 2002). The key question for Jesus scholarship is what form of Judaism (there were many) is the most appropriate background for understanding him. Albert Schweitzer, as we have seen, thought Jesus was best viewed as an apocalyptic visionary. Others have suggested a charismatic healer (Vermes, 1993), a restoration prophet (Sanders, 1985), a subversive philosopher (Crossan, 1994) or a local rabbi (Chilton, 1996). Whichever it is (research will continue), one thing has been established: Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian. Indeed, according to Matthew, Jesus instructed his disciples to ‘Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matt 10:6), for he himself ‘was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matt 15:24). Though this probably reflects Matthew’s schematization that the gospel was offered first to the Jews, then to the Gentiles, it is a position that many Christians will find surprising.

Social location Though I have linked some of the views above to religious or racial prejudice, another challenge has come from non-Western interpreters. Their challenge is that it has suited those of us who live in plenty to emphasize the ‘spiritual’ message of the bible because it is in our interests to do so. If we were to take seriously the message that God hears the cries of the down-trodden and will act against those who maintain an unjust system, we would have to change our ways. So we go on propagating interpretations that emphasize faith, inwardness, individual salvation and submissive obedience, all the time believing that we are objectively analysing the texts. Liberation theologians tells us that the bible has far more to say about ‘establishing justice on earth’ than ‘getting to heaven’. The key text for liberation theology has been the exodus narrative:

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The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them (Exod 2:23–25). What is important to God is liberation. He hears the cries of those who are down-trodden and acts against their oppressors. This is also the message of the prophets. Traditionally, they have often been thought of as fortune-tellers, predicting the coming of Christ, but such texts (and their meaning is disputed) make up a very small proportion of the prophetic books. In the main, the prophets denounce those who wield power for allowing (or perpetrating) injustice and exploitation. This is good news for those who are being oppressed but bad news for those who are doing the oppressing. Not surprisingly, Western interpreters have ‘discovered’ the message of the prophets to be a concern for ‘heart religion’ rather than ‘external obligation’. There is some basis in the texts for this. Ezekiel contains the promise that, ‘A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh’ (36:26). But this does not produce an ‘inward religion’ that is unconcerned with the external realities of life. The promise continues, ‘On the day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities, I will cause the towns to be inhabited, and the waste places shall be rebuilt’ (36:33). Indeed, the topics of ‘Jesus and Empire’ and ‘Paul and Empire’ have been much explored in recent writings. Richard Horsley highlights the resentment and unrest experienced by Rome’s conquered peoples, so that ‘kingdom’ language would inevitably be understood as political language. In the developed nations, where personal aspiration is often ‘peace and security’, Jesus’ words in Mark 12:17 (‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s’ – NIV) are often taken as a measure of good citizenship. But in the context of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God (Mark 1:15), the emphasis would have fallen on the second clause: ‘Jesus is clearly and simply reasserting the Israelite principle that Caesar, or any other imperial ruler, has no claim on the Israelite people, since God is their actual king and master’ (Horsley, 2003:99). Similarly, the sayings about what to do if someone demands your coat or forces you to go with them one mile (probably a reference to carrying a

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soldier’s kit) are often taken in a submissive sense: let him have your cloak also and go with him a second mile (Matt 5:40–41). But to do the first would leave you naked and thus publically embarrass the one making the demand and the second shifts the balance of power: the soldier is now in your debt. Horsley also suggests that the exorcisms and healings should be taken in the same way. It is no coincidence, he says, that the demons who are commanded to leave the possessed man in Mark 5:9 and rush headlong into the sea are called ‘Legion’. This would immediately evoke the Roman legions that had recently ‘burned the villages around such towns as Magdala and Sepphoris and slaughtered or enslaved thousands of their parents or grandparents’ (Horsley, 2003:100). The manner of their demise would also evoke Israelite traditions of Pharaoh’s troops drowning in the Red (Reed) Sea, further suggesting the liberation of God’s people. Horsley explains the two healing stories of Mark 5 in a similar manner. Because the woman who is healed of her flow of blood has been ill for twelve years (Mark 5:25) and the little girl who is raised from the dead is twelve years old (Mark 5:42), both act as symbols of a restored Israel (twelve tribes). The message is that ‘God’s restorative powers’ are working through Jesus, leading to ‘recovery from the death-dealing domination by Roman imperial rule’ (Horsley, 2003:109). Many will find this a little far-fetched but it is interesting that Mark goes out of his way to add the detail of ‘twelve years’ in both stories.

Postcolonial perspectives In a valuable collection of essays entitled The Postcolonial Bible (Sugirtharajah, 1998), Bailey offers a different perspective on a number of biblical stories. For example, he notes that when Moses receives a warning of God’s power, his hand turns ‘leprous, as white as snow’ (Exod 4:6). Once the shock has registered, God acts and ‘it was restored like the rest of his body’. To a non-white person like Moses, it was traumatic to see part of his body turn white, and a relief when it returned to ‘normal’. In the Song of Songs, the NRSV has the female lover declare, ‘I am black and beautiful’ (1:5). But when Jerome translated the Hebrew into Latin, he used the conjunction sed (‘but’), which the KJV followed (‘I am dark but comely’). Bailey says that ‘they could not even admit the possibility

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of one being “black”’ (1998:76). The NIV puts the contrast even more starkly with its use of ‘yet’ (‘Dark am I, yet lovely’). In Genesis 16, Sarai (later changed to Sarah) tells Abraham that because she has been unable to bear children, he should have sex with Hagar, the slave-girl (v.2). He does and she becomes pregnant. We are then told that Hagar despised Sarai and as this made Sarai angry, she complained to Abraham, who told her, ‘Your slave-girl is in your power; do to her as you please.’ She did. She treated her so cruelly that Hagar was forced to flee. Bailey tells the story of a bible study that he was leading on this passage. When they got to the part where Hagar despised Sarai, the women in the group commented that Hagar was being arrogant and flaunting her pregnancy. Bailey then asked the women whether they knew of any ‘domestics’ who had been raped by the man of the house, with the full knowledge of his wife. Some did. So he asked them if any of them knew any instances where the ‘domestic’ had become pregnant. Some did. He then asked them how they thought the ‘domestic’ felt about the wife who had allowed her husband to rape her. Their answer was that she would despise her. Bailey then poses the question of why it is that we have been conditioned to see Hagar as in the wrong when her feelings towards Sarai are perfectly understandable after what she had suffered. The title of Bailey’s essay is a good summary of this chapter: ‘The Danger of Ignoring One’s Own Cultural Bias in Interpreting the Text’ (1998:66–90).

Conclusion Not all will agree with the conclusions of this chapter but it should be apparent that none of us can escape from personal bias. We probably do not think of ourselves as racist, sexist or an exploiter of others but those on the other end of our teaching or preaching might have a different view. We should ask them. Part of the difficulty is that while we spot such faults in others, we do not see them in ourselves. Many of the examples that I have cited in this chapter are meaningful to me because they have challenged some of my teaching and writing – and rightly so. I have preached on the woman at the well in a way that I now see was demeaning to women. I have caricatured Judaism in an effort to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity. I have assumed that my white, male,

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Western perspective is the norm for biblical interpretation. In this chapter, I have tried to give an account of how gender, ethnicity and social location can effect what we see in the bible. In the next chapter, I address an altogether more difficult problem: What do we do when the bible itself seems to propagate such things?

Further reading An excellent collection of articles on feminist interpretation can be found in L. M. Russell (ed.), Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (1985) and for individual books of the bible, see the Feminist Companion series, edited by A. Brenner. For an introduction to liberation theology, see C. Rowland (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology (2007). Key figures in postcolonial interpretations are R. S. Sugirtharajah (Voices from the Margin – 1995; Postcolonial Reconfigurations – 2003; Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism – 2012) and M. W. Dube (Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible – 2000; Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible – 2001). At the time of writing, ‘Bible and Empire’ produces 683 results on Amazon. See especially W. Carter, Matthew and the Margins (2001) and John and Empire (2008); S. Kim, Christ and Caesar: The Gospel and the Roman Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke (2008); W. Howard-Brook and A. Gwyther, Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now (1999). See also further works by Richard Horsley (The Liberation of Christmas – 1993; Paul and the Roman Imperial Order – 2004; In the Shadow of Empire – 2008).

Questions 1 Have any of the examples cited in the chapter revealed a bias in your interpretations of the bible? 2 If gender, ethnicity and social location inevitably influence our interpretation of the bible, how is biblical studies best conducted? 3 Should the God of the bible be referred to as ‘He’?

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8 The role of readers: Reading against the grain

In our last chapter, we saw how such things as gender, ethnicity and social location can affect our interpretation of the bible. In this chapter, we look at an altogether more difficult issue: what about those passages in the bible that themselves appear to promote sexism, racism and imperialism? Historical criticism can sometimes help us to understand the situation they come from and thus make them more understandable. Literary criticism can sometimes help us to appreciate that certain expressions are figures of speech and are not meant to be taken literally. But problems remain. Here are a few examples: Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him, and said, ‘I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.’ (Gen 19:6–8) But as for the towns of these peoples that the lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them . . . (Deut 20:16–17a) O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! (Ps 137:8–9) Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent (1 Tim 2:11–12)

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It was one of them, their very own prophet, who said, ‘Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.’ That testimony is true. (Titus 1:12) I will make those of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not, but are lying – I will make them come and bow down before your feet, and they will learn that I have loved you. (Rev 3:9) With passages like these, the problem is not that their message has been distorted by Western male interpreters. The problem is that their message is all too clear: women are inferior to men, vengeance is good and genocide is legitimate when commanded by God. The bible was written by people who sometimes allowed their prejudices to intrude upon their writing. The modern interpreter needs to compensate for this bias by ‘reading against the grain’ or reversing the distorting lens. Otherwise, such perspectives are directly identified as the ‘Word of God’ and given divine sanction. And we know from history that this is not just a theoretical possibility. Commenting on the Old Testament tradition of herem (‘ban’), Michael Prior says: There exists within the Bible a degree of violence and praise of violence that is surpassed by no other ancient book . . . The ban requires that the enemy be utterly destroyed as a sacrifice to the deity who had made the victory possible . . . the killer is not only acquitted of moral responsibility for his destruction, but acts under a religious obligation . . . It is little consolation to the victims of unsolicited slaughter that their killing is an act of piety which redounds to the glory of God. (1997:261–2)

Feminist resistance Challenging stereotypical roles At the age of 83, after a lifetime of campaigning for women’s rights, Elizabeth Cady Stanton completed The Woman’s Bible (1895/8). It consisted of those passages of the bible that speak about women (estimated at 10 per cent), followed by commentary, first by her

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and then by other members of the Revising Committee. She says in the introduction that ‘when, in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, women began to protest against their civil and political degradation, they were referred to the Bible for an answer’ (Abridged Edition, 1985:8). The Woman’s Bible set about changing this by offering alternative interpretations or explanations of these passages. Armed with historical criticism, which had already shown that the bible was compiled from various sources, she sought to undo the harm caused by the fact that the editors of the bible were  most likely men. For example, she praises the first creation account for giving equal dignity to women, but says of the second account: It is evident that some wily writer, seeing the perfect equality of man and woman in the first chapter, felt it important for the dignity and dominion of man to effect woman’s subordination in some way. (1985:21) There follows a comment by LDB, which turns out to be Lillie Devereux Blake. She notes that Genesis 2:24 speaks of a man leaving his father and mother to cleave to his wife, the implication being that the wife is the head of the household. This is confirmed, she says, in the story of the fall (Gen 3), where the serpent aims its attack at Eve. Had Adam been the divinely appointed head, ‘he assuredly would have taken upon himself the burden of the discussion with the serpent, but no, he is silent in this crisis of their fate’ (1985:26). Furthermore, the story makes it plain that Eve attempts to resist the serpent but ‘the fall of man is contemptuously dismissed in a line and a half’ (1985:27). And as for the curse pronounced in Genesis 3:16 (‘in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you’), she suggests that this should not be taken as a divine command but a prediction. Eve, and all women after her, are given the solemn warning of what they can expect from men in the future. And to the shame of men down the ages, they were more than ready to fulfil it. Not surprisingly, the commentary met with widespread criticism from the establishment and it was not until the 1980s that feminist readings began to make an impact on male/mainstream scholarship. Rosemary Radford Ruether defines the task of feminist interpretation as follows:

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Feminism appropriates the prophetic principles in ways the Biblical writers for the most part do not appropriate them, namely to criticize this unexamined patriarchal framework. Feminist theology that draws on Biblical principles is possible only if the prophetic principles, more fully understood, imply a rejection of every elevation of one social group against others as image and agent of God, every use of God to justify social domination and subjugation. Patriarchy itself must fall under the Biblical denunciation of idolatry and blasphemy, the idolizing of the male as representative of divinity. It is idolatrous to make males more ‘like God’ than females. (1983:23) Whatever the function of such biblical stories or statements in the past, if they promote or otherwise authorize the subjugation of woman, they must be resisted. Too often texts like Genesis 3:16 or 1 Corinthians 14:34 have been used as weapons against women, all the more powerful because they come with divine sanction. The author of Ephesians shows some awareness of the problem, for he seeks to offset the harshness of patriarchal society by adding a proviso to the patriarch: Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (5:25) And, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger (6:4) And, masters . . . Stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality. (6:9) Some have called this ‘love-patriarchalism’. It basically accepts the prevailing culture but thinks that love will transform the relationship into something more ‘Christian’. Today, we live in a society that increasingly recognizes the rights of women, children and employees. Is it being faithful to the New Testament text to repeat its answers to first-century questions or should we try and do for our generation what they were trying to do for theirs? Put another way, if the biblical writer included three statements to warn husbands, fathers and masters not to abuse their patriarchal positions, would he have insisted that movements of liberation, such as the abolition of slavery, equal opportunities for women and

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the rights of children were wrong and that first-century patriarchal culture was right? ‘Reading against the grain’ involves identifying the underlying ideology of texts and where it is contrary to the God who shows no partiality (Acts 10:34; Rom 2:11; Eph 6:9), developing strategies of resistance.

Challenging inflammatory language As well as laws and commands that reflect patriarchy, the bible uses language and imagery that was drawn from the prevailing culture, which many people today find offensive. One of the most prominent is using feminine imagery to characterize evil. Thus the book of Ezekiel condemns Israel’s apostasy in terms of female prostitution, imagery that is reproduced in the book of Revelation: Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians fondled your bosom and caressed your young breasts. Therefore, O Oholibah, thus says the Lord god: I will arouse against you your lovers from whom you turned in disgust, and I will bring them against you from every side . . . and they shall deal with you in hatred, and take away all the fruit of your labour, and leave you naked and bare, and the nakedness of your whorings shall be exposed. (Ezek 23:21–23, 29) So he carried me away in the spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication . . . And the ten horns that you saw, they and the beast will hate the whore; they will make her desolate and naked; they will devour her flesh and burn her up with fire. (Rev 17:3, 4, 16) Some commentators point out that this language is simply metaphorical and is not intended to degrade women. But can anyone seriously doubt that having such passages read in public will affect people’s attitudes? One of the most common justifications offered by men in rape cases is, ‘she was asking for it’. And one of the reasons for this is that societies have often portrayed women as the temptress, the one who leads the good man astray. Passages

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like the above reinforce such stereotypes and need to be challenged. It is not just a matter of being ‘politically correct’, as some have suggested, but a matter of whether Christianity wishes to help or hinder the safety and dignity of women.

Political resistance Liberation theology emerged in the 1960s as oppressed peoples realized that the bible that was used to subjugate them also spoke of liberation. Whereas the rich and powerful identified with the great commission to bring Christianity and the bible to heathen lands, the oppressed peoples identified with the Israelite slaves in bondage to Egypt. And just as the bible says that God heard their cries and brought them deliverance, so God will do the same for them. In the New Testament, the key text was the so-called Nazareth sermon in Luke’s Gospel: When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ (Luke 4:16–19) The establishment saw in this a mandate to take the gospel (‘Christianity’) to the nations. But the oppressed saw in it a message of hope. They were the poor whom Jesus had come to liberate. The ‘good news’ is not the imposition of Western Christianity on indigenous peoples but liberation from Western oppression. The year of the Lord’s favour is a reference to the jubilee year in Leviticus 25, when debts are cancelled and land returns to its former owners. As far as we can tell, this law had not been practised for centuries but Jesus’ choice of this reading (or perhaps it was the reading set for that sabbath) was designed to emphasize it. Today is the day of liberation, when the oppressed are set free and the poor are given hope.

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Not surprisingly, the institutional church did not take kindly to being identified with Egyptian or Roman oppression and acted to suppress such movements (ironically fulfilling the characterization). But liberation theology was born and names like Leonardo Boff (1987), Gustavo Gutiérrez (1988) and Jose Miguez Bonino (1975) became household names. It generated a way of reading the bible which has been called ‘contextual’. It begins with the present context, studies the bible in the light of it, and leads to practical action (praxis). The truth of the bible is not something abstract that one can discern in isolation and then ‘apply’ to a variety of situations. The truth of the bible emerges in its interaction with the lived experience of oppressed peoples. Far from accepting the academic superiority of scholars in the West, liberation theologians believe that Western academics are blinded by their alignment with the sources of oppression. Liberation theology is a ‘grass roots’ theology, a ‘theology from below’.

Post-colonial biblical studies While the term ‘liberation theology’ is still used as a generic term for a range of political theologies, the 1990s spawned an approach that called itself post-colonial. Though over-simplifying, one might say that these studies do not so much identify with the oppressed Israelites, but with the indigenous peoples whose land was taken away from them. According to the ‘grain’ of the biblical story, these people were wicked and so had no right to exist (Deut 9:4). God is said to have commanded their utter annihilation so that the ‘chosen people’ may have their promised land. Today, we call this genocide, a breach of international law and a total disregard for human rights. Do biblical scholars really want to defend this as God’s will? One way of dealing with it is through genre studies. Michael Prior argues that much of the force of such stories derives from the fact that many people think they are reading actual history. They might find the implications regrettable but believe that God really did command this slaughter and Israel really did occupy the land. But Old Testament scholars routinely describe these stories as ‘myth’ or ‘legend’. They are not contemporary accounts of what happened but idealized accounts written centuries later in order to

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legitimate Israel’s claim to the land. The archaeological evidence does not support the view that ‘Israel’ left Egypt and conquered Canaan at a particular point in time (Finkelstein, 1988) and even Judges (e.g. 1:27-36) recognizes that the book of Joshua is an idealized account. Using a Marxist sociological model, Gottwald (1984) proposes that the reality was more like a ‘peasants’ revolt’ than a ‘conquest’. What was later to be called ‘Israel’ had its origins in the class conflicts of Canaan, not a heroic liberation from Egypt. More recently, there has been a tendency to view it in terms of a pattern of peaceful new settlements in the hill country (of which there is good archaeological evidence), resulting from the collapse of urban economies across the region (Finkelstein and Silberman, 2002). Prior concludes: The archaeological evidence points in an altogether different direction from that suggested by Joshua 1–12. It suggests a sequence of periods marked by a gradual and peaceful coalescence of disparate peoples into a group of highland dwellers whose achievement of a new sense of unity culminated only with the entry of the Assyrian administration . . . The legendary account of Joshua 1–12 offers no legitimizing paradigm for land plunder in the name of God . . . Indeed, the extra-biblical evidence promotes a respect for the evolution of human culture, rather than for a process that can deal with change only by way of violent destruction (1997:251–2). A less dramatic example also illustrates the point. In Luke 14, Jesus is presented as offering a challenge to the rich and wealthy: When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbours, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. (14:12–14) At first glance, such a passage does not look like it requires a ‘reading against the grain’. But show it to the woman who is cooking the meal or the slave who is waiting on the guests and you will see

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a different reaction. For them, it does not matter who is invited to the dinner; their role is unchanged. What appears to be a call for a radical re-ordering of priorities is nevertheless the purveyor of an ideology. There are those who ‘decide the date and place of the party, the menu, the size and shape of the table, and who is or is not invited’ (Ringe, 1998:148) and those who serve them. Luke includes these words because he is writing to those like Theophilus (Luke 1:3), who have the wherewithal to put on dinner parties. But as Ringe notes, a post-colonial reading will wish to take its apparent altruism a step further: The text challenges those of us with power to mitigate the practices of colonial authority, but it does not dismantle that authority or fundamentally challenge the exclusive and hierarchical allocation of its power and benefits (1998:149).

Postmodernism resistance Many people today are claiming that we now live in a postmodern world. The movement known as the Enlightenment is said to have come to an end. Modernism, with its quest for objectivity and proper method, is now seen to be an illusion. It merely veiled the particular interests of those who propagated it. In response to this, Walter Brueggemann suggests that biblical studies today should be contextual, local and pluralistic. He explains (1993:8–9): 1 Our knowing is inherently contextual . . . Descartes wanted to insist that context was not relevant to knowing. It is, however, now clear that what one knows and sees depends upon where one stands or sits . . . Contextualism argues that the knower helps constitute what is known, that the socioeconomic-political reality of the knower is decisive for knowledge. 2 It follows that contexts are quite local, and the more one generalizes, the more one loses or fails to notice context. Localism means that it is impossible to voice large truth. All one can do is to voice local truth and propose that it pertains elsewhere.

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3 It follows from contextualism and localism that knowledge is inherently pluralistic, a cacophony of claims, each of which rings true to its own advocates. Indeed, pluralism is the only alternative to objectivism once the dominant center is no longer able to impose its view and to silence by force all alternative or dissenting opinion. Brueggemann is quick to point out that this does not mean that every interpretation is equally valid. Some will simply fail to convince (anyone) because they fail to do justice to the text (for anyone). Some will be so audience-specific that they are judged irrelevant by everybody else. Language is not private property. It exists in the public domain and so acts as a control on the more ‘way-out’ interpretations. But this does not take away from the key insight of postmodernism that every interpretation is an act of power, over people and over the text itself. Those who previously claimed to have discovered the true interpretation did so at someone else’s expense. Biblical studies in a postmodern world must learn to be more humble, to serve humanity rather than seeking to dominate it. Daniel Patte says: existing critical exegeses by male European-American exegetes were originally done with the presupposition that there were two tasks to do: (1) to establish the (single and universally true) meaning of the text, and consequently (2) to disprove all other interpretations. (1995:123) In contrast, Patte believes that responsible exegesis needs to be ‘multidimensional in the sense that it needs to acknowledge as equally legitimate several (rather than one) critical readings of each given text’ (1995:116). Again, this does not mean that a text can mean whatever one likes. A theory that asserts the total relativity of everything is self-defeating, for the assertion itself would be meaningless. All enquiry takes place on the assumption that some meaningful communication takes place between human beings. But if it has any humility, it will recognize that other plausible ways of seeing things are not only possible but very probable.

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Challenging textual stability One of the major debating points in literary circles has been the question of textual stability. Does a text possesses a single ‘meaning’ or does it depend on who is doing the interpreting? The way that Old Testament texts are used in the New Testament provides an interesting insight into this question. Consider the famous Immanuel text from Isaiah 7:14: ‘Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.’ For Matthew, this is a prophecy of the virgin birth of Jesus: ‘She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us.’ (1:21–23) However, if we consider the context of the verse in Isaiah 7, a different meaning emerges. Israel is facing an invading army but God gives them this promise: Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. (Isa 7:14–16) It is indeed a promise that the birth of a child will be a sign of deliverance but the particular deliverance in mind is the political threat to Israel in the eighth century bce. Before this child is weaned (i.e. within a few years), the threat will have disappeared. It makes utter nonsense of Isaiah 7 to say that it predicts the birth of Jesus in 700 years time. Indeed, if it were such a prediction, then Isaiah’s contemporaries were being cruelly misled for the message would then be: ‘For in 700 years time, the land before whose two kings

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you are in dread will be deserted.’ By applying the text directly to Jesus, Matthew has changed its meaning (or at least seen in it a further meaning, as we will discuss in the next chapter).

Deconstruction Deconstructive criticism seeks to expose the bias of particular interpreters by pointing out those parts of the text that have been prematurely silenced. As Jacque Derrida said back in 1972, a text: always reserves a surprise for . . . a critique which might think it had mastered its game, surveying all its threads at once, thus deceiving itself into wishing to look at the text without touching it, without putting its hand to the ‘object’, without venturing to add to it. (1972:71) Interpretations that claim to ‘explain’ the meaning of a text do so by emphasizing certain aspects at the expense of others. This is not in itself a criticism for no one can gather together ‘all its threads’ in a single explanation. The problem is that this is seldom disclosed. Most interpreters arrive at what they consider to be the best interpretation and then defend this against all contrary opinions. But the decision to present ‘harmony’ rather than ‘conflict’ is an ideological one which deconstruction seeks to expose. For example, many commentators would agree with Tina Pippin that the violent language in the book of Revelation is aimed at exposing the corruption and violence of the Empire. But Pippin goes on to point out that ‘also exposed is the desire for the violent destruction of the enemy at the hands of God’ (1992:100). And whereas Kraybill says that while ‘the world follows a beast with all its power and violence, Christians follow a gentle and (seemingly) powerless Lamb’ (1996:201), Moore suggests that what Revelation actually offers is the assertion that God’s imperial splendor far exceeds that of the Roman emperor, just as the emperor’s splendor far exceeds that of any of his 600 senators, and just as the senator’s splendor far exceeds that of any provincial plebeian, and so on down the patriarchal line to the most subdued splendor of the feeblest father of the humblest household (1995:40).

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We have already looked at Schneiders’ feminist interpretation of the woman at the well. She has made a strong case that this should be viewed as a serious theological discussion and not a foolish woman concerned only with earthly matters. However, for many scholars, it remains problematic for her position that Jesus says, ‘You are right in saying, “I have no husband”; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband’ (John 4:17–18). Schneiders’ answer is that adultery is a frequent metaphor in the Old Testament for following false gods and that this is extremely pertinent to the status of Samaritan religion. In 721 bce, Samaria was captured by the Assyrians and re-populated with people from five foreign towns (2 Kings 17:24). Thus, according to Schneiders, Jesus is not playing games with the woman but making a serious point about her religion, which she clearly understands (‘Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain . . . ’). This allegorical interpretation was once quite popular though the Enlightenment has generally been against allegorical interpretation in favour of historical approaches. However, given the symbolic nature of much of John’s Gospel (‘water into wine’, ‘bread of life’, ‘living water’), one has to admit that it is a possibility. Moore turns this into a ‘deconstructive’ point by noting that those who condemn the Samaritan women for foolishly taking ‘living water’ literally are themselves insisting that ‘five husbands’ must be taken literally. They are thus caught in a trap, rather like the one Jesus springs on the men accusing the woman of adultery in John 8:1–11: They can condemn her only if they participate in her error, can ascribe a history of immorality to her only by reading as ‘carnally’ as she does – at which point the literal reading of 4:18 threatens to become a displaced reenactment of yet another Johannine episode, one in which an unnamed woman is similarly charged with sexual immorality by accusers who themselves stand accused (8:1–11). (1994:49)

Intertextuality Another postmodern development in the theory of literature is known as intertextuality. The idea is quite simple. No text is an island but belongs to a web or matrix of texts that is expanding with

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every new utterance. Words do not come to an author in a vacuum but charged with associations and connotations from previous texts (or traditions). For example, if I describe my home town as the ‘Babylon’ of south England, it evokes all sorts of images from the bible where that term is used. Babylon was the place of exile. It was where the psalmist cried out, ‘How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?‘ (Ps 137:4). It was also the place where Daniel’s friends were thrown into the fiery furnace for refusing to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s statue (Dan 3).Thus calling my home town ‘Babylon’ is profoundly ambiguous. Its meaning depends on which of these backgrounds the reader decides to privilege. Thus our previous diagram of Author – Text – Reader is a gross simplification. The reality of reading is much more like this:

Signals come to the reader not just from the text being read but also from those texts to which it points. Thus, reading a passage from the New Testament, the (knowledgeable) reader often recalls a number of Old Testament texts where such words have been used before. These in turn may point to other texts, both within the canon of scripture and outside it. In order to make sense of the New Testament passage (determine its meaning), the reader has to configure these ‘signals’ or ‘voices’ into some sort of coherent meaning. And there is never just one way of doing this. The postmodern concept of intertextuality has made it difficult (some would say impossible) to establish textual stability. There are always choices to be made.

Conclusion ‘Reading against the grain’ is considered essential by some readers and blasphemy by others. For the former, there are two main strategies. Some think that the bible itself provides the tools for

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critiquing its own content, so that what we are doing is similar to what the prophets, Jesus and Paul were doing. Others believe that one must resist certain aspects of the bible because modern insights such as human rights, equal opportunities and the Geneva Convention require it. On the other hand, more conservative critics see ‘reading against the grain’ as simply elevating personal or cultural prejudice above the bible. Contrary to the Reformation principle of sola Scripura (scripture alone), ‘reading against the grain’ is simply choosing which parts of the bible are acceptable, effectively making human reason the final authority. In our final chapter, we will look at a number of theological approaches which are relevant to this debate.

Further reading A useful introduction to post-colonialism is R. J. C. Young, Post-colonialism. A Very Short Introduction (2003) and for its application to biblical studies, R. S. Sugirtharajah (ed.), The Postcolonial Bible (1998) and M. Prior, The Bible and Colonialism. A Moral Critique (1997). For postmodernism, see M. Drolet (ed.), The Postmodernism Reader (2003) and for its application to biblical studies, A. K. M. Adam, What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism? (1995), W. Brueggemann, The Bible and Postmodern Imagination (1993) and S. D. Moore and Y. Sherwood, The Invention of the Biblical Scholar. A Critical Manifesto (2011). For liberation and feminist interpretation, see the titles cited in the previous chapter. For an introduction to intertextuality, see G. Allen, Intertextuality (2000) and for its application to biblical studies, see R. B. Hays, S. Alkier and L. A. Huizenga (eds), Reading the Bible Intertextually (2009).

Questions 1 Is it necessary to ‘resist’ certain parts of the bible? If yes, what is the best way of going about it? 2 Can a text have more than one legitimate meaning? 3 Can the bible retain any authority if any of the approaches discussed in this chapter are true?

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In this final chapter, we will discuss a range of approaches which can broadly be described as Theological. Such approaches emphasize the fact that the bible is not simply a collection of ancient writings which can be interpreted with the tools of historical and literary criticism. It is primarily scripture, the sacred text of the Christian church. Biblical interpretation is thus an activity of the church rather than the academy. This can be stated in weak or strong terms. In its weak form, since postmodern interpretation insists that all interpretation is ideological and that ‘what one knows and sees depends upon where one stands or sits’ (Brueggemann), theological approaches choose to interpret the bible from the vantage point of the Christian church. In its strong form, advocates insist that this is not simply one choice among many but the one implied by the bible itself. Contrary to the Enlightenment principle that the bible should be interpreted like any other book, theological approaches seek to interpret the bible as sacred scripture.

Evangelical interpretation Evangelical interpretation stresses the importance of the Reforma­ tion principle of sola Scriptura (‘scripture alone’) for biblical interpretation. It is inevitable that experience, reason and tradition are involved in determining the meaning of a biblical text but none of these should be elevated above the Bible. Reading against the grain is nothing more than individuals or particular reading communities deciding which parts of the Bible are acceptable and which are not. Many of the so-called ‘assured results of historical criticism’ come from scholars who hold presuppositions contrary

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to a biblical world-view. For example, Old Testament prophecy is explained as political forecasting because it is assumed from the outset that genuine prediction is impossible. Jesus’ miracles are given naturalistic explanations (e.g. autosuggestion) because the modern world supposedly knows that such things cannot happen. Evangelical interpretation insists on the priority of the bible over experience, reason and tradition. Alister McGrath suggests that we can distinguish two phases of evangelical interpretation. During the period when Enlightenment interpretation reigned supreme, its primary function was to defend evangelical doctrine against rationalist assaults. As we saw in Chapter 2, it pointed out the weaknesses in the JEDP theory of Pentateuchal origins in order to maintain Mosaic authorship. It insisted that Isaiah really did predict the virgin birth of Jesus and that male headship is a divine principle that runs through both Testaments. It is not the unfortunate product of patriarchal bias but God’s design for creation. As Guthrie says: The equality of the sexes, so much in the forefront of modern thought, received little recognition in ancient times . . . The idea, however, of woman’s subjection is not only engrained in the conviction of the mass of mankind (which would not in itself, of course, be a justification for it), but also appears to be inherent in the divine constitution of the human race. (1957:76) However, as McGrath notes, evangelical opposition to Enlightenment principles ironically led to the adoption of those same principles in order to try and ‘prove’ the bible. Thus some sought to use archaeology to prove that the exodus and conquest happened just as the bible says it happened. Some defended a literal six-day creation against the time-scales proposed by geology and astronomy and some even sought to show that a whale could have an air pocket in its stomach to hold a man (as in the book of Jonah). McGrath says: For understandable reasons, evangelicalism has in the past chosen to focus on the propositional or cognitive element of the complex network of divine revelation – an element which allowed evangelicalism to maintain its credibility and integrity during a period of rationalist assault. But the ensuing understanding of ‘revelation’ was itself dangerously deficient, verging on the aridity

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and sterility which were the hallmarks of the same rationalism which evangelicalism was seeking to oppose. (1996:107) However, now that evangelical Christianity forms a considerable percentage of the world-wide church, much of that defensiveness has been left behind. Recent works utilize the positive benefits of historical and literary (and in some cases liberation and feminist) interpretation to explicate the meaning of scripture. For example, whereas redaction criticism was formerly viewed with suspicion (for suggesting that the four Gospels offer different portraits of Jesus), Grant Osborne says in the evangelical Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels: A careful use of proper methodology can reduce the problems inherent in redaction criticism, and the values far outweigh the dangers. In fact, any study of the Gospels will be enhanced by redaction-critical techniques. A true understanding of the doctrine of inspiration demands it, for each Evangelist was led by God to utilize sources in the production of a Gospel. Moreover, they were given the freedom by God to omit, expand and highlight these traditions in order to bring out individual nuances peculiar to their own Gospel. Nothing else can explain the differing messages of the same stories as told in the various Gospels. (1992:668) Furthermore, McGrath recognises that the sola Scriptura principle is not quite as straightforward as is often claimed. In practice, evangelical interpretation takes place within a framework of evangelical doctrine. For example, the statement in Romans 2:10 that there will be ‘glory and honour and peace for everyone who does good’ is not taken at face value but interpreted in the light of the doctrine of ‘justification by faith alone’ (similarly with James 2:24). It cannot mean that those who ‘do good’ will be saved, for Paul says in Romans 3:20 that ‘no human being will be justified in his sight by deeds’. Thus ‘doing good’ must either mean ‘doing what God requires’, namely, putting one’s faith in Christ, or it is simply a hypothetical statement, which no one can fulfil ‘since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom 3:23). The evangelical doctrine of ‘justification by faith’ (or ‘justification by grace through faith’) is being used as a principle of interpretation.

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However, McGrath argues that while doctrinal frameworks inevitably play a role in interpretation, they are not to be imposed on the bible: ‘The sola Scriptura principle is ultimately an assertion of the primacy of the foundational scriptural narrative over any framework of conceptualities which it may generate’ (1996:114). When taken seriously, this principle does not lead to the mere repetition of biblical phrases but to a critical principle that refuses to allow the bible to be subsumed or domesticated by whatever happens to be in vogue. It always has the potential to challenge interpreters, even evangelical interpreters, who believe they have mastered it. McGrath is correct in discerning different phases of evangelical interpretation but it should be noted that the more conservative form has by no means disappeared. Thus in his book, How to Choose a Bible Version, Thomas has an incredible chapter (2000:103–124) where he accuses a range of bible translations of ‘theological bias’ because some of their readings do not support evangelical doctrine. Thus the RSV’s choice of ‘young woman’ to render the Hebrew almah in Isaiah 7:14 is ‘probably indicative of the translators’ hesitancy to see it as prophetic of Jesus’ virgin birth’ (2000:113). The tendency of modern bibles to translate hilasterion in Romans 3:25 with words like ‘expiation’ (RSV, REB, NAB) or ‘atonement’ (NIV, NRSV), rather than the KJV’s ‘propitiation’, earns this criticism: various translations have handled the doctrine of propitiation in different ways. That teaching involves the satisfaction of God’s wrath against sinful man through the sacrifice of Christ. But some liberal theologians have taken issue with this rather clear teaching of the Bible, objecting to the idea that a God of love could also be a God of wrath. To nullify that biblical teaching about God, some translators have substituted the word ‘expiation’ for ‘propitiation’. (2000:115) Two things can be said of this. First, many would disagree that ‘propitiation’ is a ‘rather clear teaching of the Bible’. The English word gives the impression that God is a rather sulky figure who needs to be ‘propitiated’ or ‘bribed’ into acting kindly (hardly the father in the parable of the prodigal son). And as the word only occurs twice in the New Testament (Rom 3:25 and Heb 9:5), it is

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hardly a prominent theme. Second, even if it were a ‘rather clear teaching of the Bible’, the majority of bible translators do not see their task as producing a text to support a particular segment of the church. The NIV, though produced by an evangelical committee, chose ‘expiation’ because it thought that this word better conveyed Paul’s meaning in English than the word ‘propitiate’ (see further Thuesen, 1999). Thus there exists considerable diversity in modern evangelical interpretation.

Christological interpretation How did Jesus and the New Testament authors interpret scripture? Clearly in a very different way from the methods discussed in this book, which derive mainly from the Enlightenment. In particular, they were not so much concerned with what the text meant then but what the text means now, in the light of what God is doing. Some have called this an ‘actualizing’ or ‘modernizing’ interpretation and according to Luke, the disciples learnt it from Jesus himself: Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.’ (24:45–7) Donald Juel calls it ‘messianic’ or ‘christological’ interpretation for the ‘greatest difference between early Christian exegesis and other forms of Jewish scriptural interpretation is the impact made by Jesus’ (1988:57). According to the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus repeatedly says, ‘You have heard that it was said . . . but I say to you’ (Matt 5:21, 27, 31, 33, 43). The early church not only claimed that Jesus fulfilled the scriptures. It also claimed that they must now be interpreted in the light of Christ (2 Cor 3:14). Christ is the interpretative ‘key’ or ‘lens’ to understanding scripture. One aspect of this is that it provides a way of reinterpreting some of the more problematic passages of the Old Testament. For example, it accepts the ‘narrative’ principle that God’s kingdom will be victorious and his enemies defeated but insists that God’s way of achieving these ends has now been revealed in Christ. Any

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interpretation that promotes violence or discrimination cannot be a christological interpretation, for according to Matthew, Christ said, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ (Matt 5:44). For some, like the second-century Marcion, this can only lead to the total rejection of the Old Testament but the same Jesus (according to Matthew) also said, ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil’ (Matt 5:17). Christological interpretation can reinterpret the violent imagery of the Old Testament in the light of the revelation of Christ, just as Paul reinterpreted certain aspects of the Jewish law in the light of Christ. In practice, this amounted to setting aside certain aspects of the law (at least for Gentiles) but he considered this to be an interpretation of scripture (Gal 2/Rom 4) rather than its rejection. However, violent texts are not confined to the Old Testament. In the book of Revelation, we read of a series of disasters coming upon the people of the world. In three waves of destruction, symbolized by the opening of seven seals (Rev 6–8), the blowing of seven trumpets (Rev 8–9) and the pouring out of seven bowls (Rev 16), the people of the world are given a stark choice: repent or be destroyed. The text even seems to delight in the level of pain inflicted: Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given authority like the authority of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to damage the grass of the earth or any green growth or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were allowed to torture them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torture was like the torture of a scorpion when it stings someone. And in those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will flee from them (Rev 9:3–6). A christological interpretation of this passage takes as its starting point the vision of the slain lamb in Revelation 5. In that vision, John is first told that ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals’ (Rev 5:5). However, in the next verse, he sees a ‘Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered’. Thus we have juxtaposed two quite different images of victory. One suggests military triumph (lion), the other suggests voluntary self-sacrifice (lamb). Taking this as the

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interpretative key to the book, scholars such as Sweet (1990:125) and Bauckham (1993:183) have argued that although the book uses the language of violence, the only victory it knows is the victory of Christ. In other words, while it uses the literary form of ‘holy war’, the reality (what it refers to) is the victory won by Christ in his death and resurrection. Bauckham even argues that the book holds out hope for the ultimate salvation of all, for the ‘kings of the earth’, who are the object of judgement throughout Revelation 6–19, re-appear in the final vision of the new Jerusalem: ‘The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it’ (Rev 21:24). Thus christological interpretation is capable of ‘reading against the grain’, by appealing not to some principle, such as feminism or post-colonialism, but to the concrete figure of Jesus Christ.

Allegory restored? Paul’s allegory of the Sarah and Hagar story (Gal 4:21–31) and some of Jesus’ parables, such as the four soils (Mark 4:1–20) and the vineyard (Mark 12:1-12), led to the widespread use of allegorical interpretation (resisted by the so-called Antiochene school) in the early church (cf. Augustine’s interpretation of the Good Samaritan cited in Chapter 2). This was later formalized so that medieval exegesis aimed to give the four-fold meaning of a text, namely the literal, spiritual, analogical and allegorical. Such interpretations were dismissed by the Enlightenment, since they were not what the original authors had in mind (Jesus clearly did not intend the two coins to be the sacraments of baptism and eucharist). However, this has now been challenged. Who is to say that the only meaning of a text is its original historical meaning? Frances Young suggests that ‘all reading of texts which involves entering the text-world, appropriating the perspective of the text, or reading ourselves into the text, is in some sense allegorical’ (1997:191–2). One might wish to distinguish between arbitrary or fanciful allegory and that which has some basis in the text but that is no reason to dismiss allegory altogether (or we would be dismissing the interpretations of Jesus and Paul). In a significant article entitled, ‘The Superiority of Precritical Exegesis’, David Steinmetz argues that the bible can only function as scripture if it is acknowledged that texts can have more

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than one meaning. In a trenchant criticism of historical approaches, he says: The defenders of the single meaning theory usually concede that the medieval approach to the Bible met the religious needs of the Christian community, but that it did so at the unacceptable price of doing violence to the biblical text. The fact that the historicalcritical method after two hundred years is still struggling for more than a precarious foothold in that same religious community is generally blamed on the ignorance and conservatism of the Christian laity and the sloth or moral cowardice of its pastors. I should like to suggest an alternative hypothesis. The medieval theory of levels of meaning in the biblical text, with all its undoubted defects, flourished because it is true, while the modern theory of a single meaning, with all its demonstrable virtues, is false. (1997:37) Historical criticism has rightly made us aware of the fact that we should not equate later allegorical interpretations with what the original authors or speakers had in mind. But that is not to say that they are necessarily wrong. Perhaps Isaiah 7:14 refers to a young woman in the eighth century bce and a virgin in the first century ce. After all, the reason these texts were preserved is that they continue to speak to each new generation. That is why they are regarded as scripture.

Ecclesiocentric interpretation Richard Hays prefers the term ‘ecclesiocentric’ as a description of Paul’s interpretation of scripture. Unlike Matthew, very few of Paul’s quotations are directly applied to Christ. The majority are applied to the church and ‘God’s purpose to raise up a worldwide community of people who confess his sovereignty and manifest his justice’ (1989:177). In Hays’s account of Paul’s mode of interpretation in 2 Corinthians 3, he suggests that Paul’s prime criterion for biblical interpretation is what it produces in the readers or hearers. Thus Paul begins a difficult and somewhat convoluted exegesis of Exodus 34 by saying:

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You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts (2 Cor 3:2–3). As far as Paul is concerned, the validity of his exegesis is not that he followed the commonly accepted practices of the day. Neither is it the fact that he viewed the story through a particular ‘christological’ lens. Both of these are to some extent true but the criterion that matters to Paul is the fact that such exegesis produced a Christian community. The Corinthians, of all people, should not doubt Paul’s interpretations because they evidently had the power to bring about Christ-like transformation. This only comes about when the veil is removed and all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Cor 3:18) The point is that Hays does not regard exegetical rules or ‘christological’ presuppositions as determining Paul’s exegesis. Yes, Paul does look at the scriptures through a christological lens and yes, his methods can be paralleled in contemporary Jewish exegesis. But if Paul were asked to justify his interpretations, his answer would not be to quote exegetical rules, nor even to cite his christological presuppositions, but to point to living communities who are a ‘letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts’ (2 Cor 3:3). Thus according to Hays, Paul ‘seems to have leaped – in moments of metaphorical insight – to intuitive apprehensions of the meanings of texts without the aid or encumbrance of systematic reflection about his own hermeneutics’ (1989:161). He elaborates this proposal with five propositions (1989:184–7): 1 We should read scripture as a narrative of election and promise. 2 We should read it ecclesiocentrically. The meaning of scripture is only disclosed to ‘communities that embody the obedience of faith’.

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3 We should read it in the service of proclamation. Meaning is produced at the interface of worldly engagement, not in some objective academic disengagement. 4 We should read it as participants in the eschatological drama of redemption. 5 We should read it in the light of the metaphorical nature of all interpretation. This will ‘prevent us from literalizing or absolutizing Paul’s reading’ and give us humility in offering our own.

Canonical interpretation Brevard Childs argues that the proper context for understanding a biblical text is the canon of scripture. Christological or perhaps ecclesiocentric interpretation led to the writing of Gospels, letters, homilies and apocalypses but the church (over several centuries) collected together the 27 books that we now have in our New Testament and joined them with what was henceforth to be called the Old Testament. From then until now, the context of biblical interpretation has been the canon of scripture (though the Roman Catholic canon includes what Protestants call the Apocrypha – see Appendix). Though Childs himself does not use the term, many scholars now speak of ‘canonical criticism’ as a mode of interpretation that prioritizes the canon as the proper context for interpretation. This not only means that the Old Testament is read in the light of the New but that all the books of the bible are read in the light of the ‘shape’ of the canon. As an example, we will consider his treatment of the creation stories in his Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (1985: 188–95). He acknowledges that the two creation stories come from different sources. The first (Gen 1) is from the priestly writer where no ‘differentiation is made between male and female in terms of temporal priority or function. Their creation occurs simultaneously and only together is their creative role described’ (1985:189). The second account (Gen 2) is from a different source (J) and Childs recognizes that it has been used to justify all sorts of male domination: ‘To speak of the creation of the woman as an afterthought is certainly to do an injustice to the sense of the

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chapter . . . The creation of woman, which is sequential in time, forms a climax to the creation which resounds with joy at the close of the chapter’ (1985:191). However, interpretation must do more than point out that we have two different creation accounts. It must offer an interpretation of the fact that they now lie side by side in the canon of scripture. The canon is not an arbitrary collection of books but a providential ordering of the material so that each text now finds its meaning in the light of the whole. Childs is not denying a role for either historical or literary criticism but is prioritizing the final canonical form of the material. What then is a canonical interpretation of ‘male and female’ in the creation stories? Primarily, he says, in the way that it refutes two types of error: On the one hand, the danger from the theological right is to read into the Old Testament the traditional ideology of a male dominated society which would transfer the mores of a fallen society to the kingdom of God. To them the answer is No. ‘Male and female created he them.’ Together in their unity they constitute true humanity. On the other hand, the danger from the theological left is to equate the biblical witness with a modern egalitarian ideology which would simply identify the sexes in every respect with the same roles, goals, and capacities. To them the answer is likewise No. ‘It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make for him a helper . . . therefore, a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife . . .” God chose to create two different forms of humanity for different functions within his creation. (1985:192) Thus Childs tries to do justice to both stories, allowing the ‘voice’ of gender equality (Gen 1) to interact with the ‘voice’ of gender difference (Gen 2). Though he does not refer specifically to divine inspiration, he sees both stories as reliable testimony to God’s intentions (‘God chose to create two different forms of humanity for different functions within his creation’). If this is kept at a level of generality, it might be concluded that a canonical interpretation celebrates the creative potential of difference, knowing that both genders are equally valuable in God’s sight. But in practice, the effect of such a conclusion is more likely to reinforce the ‘traditional ideology of a male dominated society’. Women can be equal if they

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accept that ‘submission’ to the male of the species is their God-given role. Here lies the difference between a canonical and a feminist reading of the creation stories. Childs is trying to give a balanced interpretation of the two stories but feminist interpreters insist that only a weighted interpretation can offset the patriarchal bias of the second account.

Trinitarian interpretation Lastly, we might speak of Trinitarian interpretation, an attempt to do justice to spiritual, christological and ecclesiocentric modes of interpretation. like Hays, Kevin Vanhoozer thinks that biblical interpretation must take into account the transforming effect of the Spirit. It is impossible to stand aloof from scripture and hope to correctly interpret it. The ‘truth’ of scripture will only be discerned by those who are willing to be transformed in the process. Thus the Spirit not only convinces us that this is divine as well as human communication, it also opens our eyes (and hearts) to its message. Some have called this ‘charismatic’ or ‘spiritual’ interpretation but Vanhoozer does not wish to suggest that it is primarily subjective. John 16:13–14 says, ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears . . . He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.’ The Spirit is an illuminator not an innovator. Thus Vanhoozer also wishes to assert the fundamental stability of scriptural meaning (a creation principle pointing to God the Father) and its christological focus (pointing to God the Son). He thus suggests (1998:431) that the task of biblical interpretation should involve: ●●

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●●

●●

faithfulness, that is, interpretations that extend the meaning of the text into new situations; fruitfulness, that is, interpretations that enliven the reader and show forth the Spirit’s fruits; forcefulness, that is, interpretations that edify the community, resolve problems, foster unity; fittingness, that is, interpretations that embody the righteous­ ness of God and contextualize Christ.

Theological approaches

151

Conclusion It is perhaps fitting to bring this book to a close by returning to modes of interpretation that were deliberately set aside in our first chapter. The movement known as the Enlightenment attacked the idea that the meaning of the bible should be determined by the church. It has given rise to a variety of forms of historical and literary interpretation which to my mind, has significantly enriched our understanding of the bible. However, as we saw in Chapter 7, there has been a growing suspicion that the so-called objectivity of Enlightenment interpretation was really a mask for furthering particular interests. Thus was born a variety of resistance interpretations, such as feminist, liberation and post-colonial. We are now much more aware that our own gender, ethnicity and social location significantly effect what we see and how we interpret. We are also aware, though this is more controversial, that the bible itself is not exempt from this. Some of the things said about God would not be tolerated in any civilized country (‘You shall annihilate them’ – Deut 20:17). For some, this can only be answered by resisting such passages in the name of feminist or post-colonial values. But others believe that these are also the concern of a theological interpretation of scripture, maintaining that the bible itself contains a prophetic or self-critiquing principle (after all, both Jesus and Paul upheld the authority of scripture – see Chapter 1). What I hope is clear from this book is that biblical studies today is a multi-faceted discipline. Though the various approaches are not always compatible, they often illuminate aspects of the text which otherwise remain hidden. I invite you to test your understanding of these different approaches by answering the questions at the end of each chapter and build on that by delving into the Further Reading. As Frances Young says in the Foreword, ‘good journeying’.

Further reading For an introduction to evangelical interpretation, see A. McGrath, A Passion for Truth: The Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism (1996) and G. Goldsworthy, Gospel-Centred Hermeneutics: Foundations and Principles of Evangelical Biblical Interpretation (2007). For canonical approaches, see B. Childs, The New Testament As Canon: An Introduction (1984),

152

Introduction to Biblical Studies

Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (1985) and a useful collection honouring his work, C. Seitz and K. Green-McCreight (eds), Theological Exegesis. Essays in Honor of Brevard S. Childs (1999). The collection by S. E. Fowl (ed.), The Theological Interpretation of Scripture (1997) is valuable and contains a reprint of the Steinmetz article. See also Fowl’s own book, Engaging Scripture (1998). For an overview of the use of the Old Testament in the New, see S. Moyise, The Old Testament in the New (2001).

Questions 1 How does a theological interpretation of scripture differ from a historical approach? 2 Does the bible contain principles in which to critique its own content? 3 Should the methods of biblical interpretation used by Jesus (Mark 7:6–7) and Paul (Gal 4:21–31) be normative for the church?

Appendix

The Hebrew bible divides the various books into three sections: the Law (Torah), the Prophets (Nebuiim) and the Writings (Kethuvim) and hence collectively is known by modern Jews as the Tanak. The Greek translation (Septuagint or LXX) attempts to categorize the books into History, Wisdom and Prophets, while adding additional books (italics). Hebrew Bible Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy

Greek (LXX) Bible Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy

Joshua Judges 1&2 Samuel 1&2 Kings Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel Hosea –Malachi Psalms Proverbs Job Song of Songs Ruth Lamentations Ecclesiastes Esther

Joshua Judges Ruth 1-4 Kingdoms ( Samuel & Kings) 1&2 Chronicles Esdra 1 Esdra 2 ( Ezra & Nehemiah) Judith Tobit 1-4 Maccabees Psalms ( Odes) Proverbs Ecclesiastes Song of Songs Job Wisdom

154

Daniel Ezra Nehemiah 1&2 Chronicles



Sirach Psalms of Solomon Hosea-Malachi Isaiah Jeremiah Baruch Lamentations Epistle of Jeremiah Ezekiel Susanna Daniel Bel and the Dragon

Protestant bibles only include the books in the Hebrew bible but follow the categories of the Septuagint. Roman Catholic bibles were based on the Vulgate, a Latin translation that was influenced by the Septuagint, and thus includes those books that Protestants call ‘Apocrypha’ or ‘Deutero-canonical’. New Revised Standard Version Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy Joshua Judges Ruth 1&2 Samuel 1&2 Kings 1&2 Chronicles Ezra Nehemiah Esther Job Psalms

Jerusalem Bible Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy Joshua Judges Ruth 1&2 Samuel 1&2 Kings 1&2 Chronicles Ezra Nehemiah Tobit Judith Esther 1&2 Maccabees Job Psalms



155

Proverbs Ecclesiastes Song of Songs

Proverbs Ecclesiastes Song of Songs Wisdom Ecclesiasticus ( Sirach)

Isaiah Jeremiah Lamentations Ezekiel Daniel Hosea - Malachi

Isaiah Jeremiah Lamentations Baruch ( Letter of Jer) Ezekiel Daniel ( Susanna & Bel) Hosea - Malachi

156

Bibliography

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164



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Index of Biblical References

Genesis 1–2 1:1–2:4a 1 1:10 1:14–19 1:26–9 1:27 1:28 2 2:7 2:18–25 2:19 2:21–3 2:24 3 3:16 4:8 4:14 6:9 6:12 7:1,5,9,16,22 8:1 8:20,21 9:1,6 12:6 15:13 16 17:14 19:6–8 19:8

20 19 3, 20, 148–9 22 40 19 22, 110 22 20, 148–9 19, 22 110 19 19 125 125 125–6 85 20 21 21 21 21 21 21 18 30 120 9 123 9

20:2 23 36–7 36:31 37:17b–30 47

6 23 23 18 23–4 23

Exodus 2:23–5 4:1 6:3 20 20:13 20:8–11 23:20

118 6 22 23 5 22 80

Leviticus 25

128

Deuteronomy 5 5:12–15 9:4 18:15–22 20:16–17a 20:17 34 34:5,6,10

23 22 129 18 123 151 3 18

Judges 1:27–36

130

166



2 Samuel 11:15 12 12:1–4 12:7–9

6 97 97 97

1 Kings 12 16

26 26

2 Kings 17:24

135

2 Chronicles 16:9 36:23 Job 1–2 Psalms 1 2 2:8–9 12 15 18 22 22:1 22:29–31 24:3–5 30 31:5 37 42–51 44 45 45:1–6 49 67 73 74 75 79

4 27 3 46 46 86 46 46 46 34 34 34 46 46 34 46 45 45 45 46 46 46 28 45 46 45

84 110 118:22–3 119 119:12–18 122 124 137 137:4 137:8–9 145–50

46 46 50 2 115 46 46 5 136 123 45

Proverbs 8:22–5 30

111 28

Song of Songs 1:5

119

Isaiah 1:18 1:19–20 1:21–2 5 6 6:1–5 7:14–16 7:14 9:6–7 11:1–9 40:1–11 40:1 40:3 42:5 43:1 44:1 45:13 47:1–15 53:1 53:9–11 54:6 66:13 66:22–3

94 94 95 50 26 8 133 133, 142, 146 27 27 26 27 80 27 27 27 26 26 28 35–6 27 111 28



Ezekiel 23:21–3 23:29 36:26 36:33 37:13

127 127 118 118 33

Daniel 3:24–97 JB 7:10 7:13 7:17 7:23 7:27 8:9–14 8:13 8:16 8:20–1 9:21 10:13,21 12:1–2 12:1 13:1–14:42 JB

28 29 29 29 29 29 28 57 29 28 29 29 30 29 28

Malachi 3:1

80

Matthew 1:1–9 1:12 1:14–20 1:21–3 3:11–12 3:13–15 4:1–4 4:18–22 4:23–5 5:17 5:18 5:19–20 5:21,27,31,33,43 5:40–1 5:44

78 78 78 133 69 35 68 47 47 144 1 116 7, 143 119 144

167

8:1–4 8:14–15 8:16–17 9:22 10:6 10:9 10:23 12:28 14:27–33 15:2 15:20 15:24 16:18 18:17 22:1–14 23:14 23:37 27:45–6 27:45 27:46 27:51–3 27:51 28:1,9 Mark 1:2–3 1:7–8 1:9 1:10 1:11 1:12–13 1:14–15 1:15 1:16–20 1:21–8 1:27 1:29–31 1:32–4 1:35–8 1:39 1:40–5 2:1–3:6 2:7

47 47 47 37 117 87 37 38 72 71 71 117 57 67 49 78 111 33 32 6, 32 33 32 110 80 69 34 34 35 35, 68 37, 64 38, 118 47 47 67 47 47 47 47 47 49 103

168

2:15–17 2:18–20 2:18–19 2:23 3:6 3:22–30 4:1–20 5:9 5:25 5:42 6:50–2 7:2 7:5 7:13 7:18–22 8:11 8:14–21 8:17–18 9:1 9:2–13 9:14–32 9:33–50 9:43 9:44 10:1 10:2–12 10:2–9 10:2 10:5 10:13–16 10:28–31 11:15–19 11:17 12:1–12 12:1–11 12:17 12:23,25 13 13:5–23 13:14 13:24–7 13:24–6 13:30



49 48 70 47 103 38 145 119 119 119 72 71 103 1 71 103 4 4 37–8 62 62 62 37 78 62 62 88 114 114 62 37 52, 103 52 145 50 118 114 65 39 57 39 29 27, 38, 65

14:32–4 13:32 14:36 14:43–50 14:50 15:33–4 15:33 15:34 15:38 16:8 16:9–20

83 37, 40 6 75 111 33 32 6, 31 32 72 78

Luke 1:3 1:6 1:19 2:41–51 3:16–17 4:1–4 4:14–15 4:16–19 9:27 10:27 14:12–14 21:20 21:32 22:40–1 22:40–6 22:47 23:34,43,44 23:44–6 23:44–5 24:8–12 24:30–1 24:44 24:45–7

62 61 30 35 69 68 64 128 65 98 130 39, 57 65 83 82 82 32 33 32 111 62 1 143

John 1:1–3 1:11 1:12–13 1:14 1:18

35–6 103 105 10, 36 81



2:1–11 2:11 2:13–22 2:21 3 3:1–10 3:4 3:27 4:4–42 4:6 4:6–7 4:9 4:17–18 5:39–40 6:6 6:15 6:64 6:66–9 6:71 7:39 7:53–8:11 8:1–11 8:27 9:22 11:47–50 12:6 12:27 12:33 12:42 13 13:11 16:13–14 16:13 16:16 16:19 17:1–5 17:4–5 17:5 18:1–11 18:4 18:32 19 19:26–7

103 74 103 100 102 105 105 102 112 75 74 98 135 74 100 101 101 101 100, 104 100 77–8 135 101 74 104–5 104 75 101 74 99 101 150 7 64 101 74 31, 34 73 75 101 101 31 31

169

19:28 19:30 19:34 20:1,11 21:19 21:20–3 21:23

102 31 75 110 101 63 101

Acts 1:1 2:46 8:20 8:27–39 10:34 15 18:2 19:1–7

62 62 87 27 127 7, 71 56 62

Romans 2:6,7 2:10 2:11 2:13 3:1 3:9 3:23 3:25 3:27 4:1 4:5 4:9 5:12–21 6:1 6:15 6:19 6:23 9–11 14

116 141 127 116 95 95 93, 141 142 95 95 116 95 20 95 95 95 95 119 7

1 Corinthians 1–3 1:11–12 2:1–5

10 16 16

170

5 7:29–31 7:29 8–10 8:4–6 10:14–22 11:6 11:21–2 11:23–6 11:33–4 12–14 14:34 15:3–8 2 Corinthians 3 3:2–3 3:3 3:14 3:15–16 3:18 12:9



10 39, 51 54 52 52 52 112 53 54 54 10, 54 126 110 146 147 147 147 7 147 73

Galatians 2 2:11–12 2:11 2:16 3:5 3:28 4:21–31 5:6 5:12

7 117 6 116 54 20 145 7, 9, 28 11

Ephesians 3:9 3:14 5:22–6:8 5:25 5:30 6:4,9 6:9 6:10

78 78 55 126 78 126 127 78

Philippians 1:6

17

Colossians 1:15–16 3:18–4:1

112 55

1 Thessalonians 4:4 4:16–17 4:17 5:12

87 39, 81 54 54

1 Timothy 2:11–12 5:9

123 55

2 Timothy 3:16–17 4:6–8

1 55

Titus 1:12

124

Hebrews 1:1–2 1:8–9 4:12 5:9 6:4–6 9:5 10:1

7 46 8 10 17 142 57

James 2:14–26 2:24

56 141

1 Peter 2:5 2:22–5 3:3–4

10 27 112



2 Peter 1:19–21 3:3–10 3:15–16

2 64 2

1 John 2:19 4:2

74 74

2 John 7

74

171

Revelation 1:14 2:27 3:9 5:5 9:3–6 12:5 12:7 17:3,4,16 19:15 20:12 21:24

94 86 124 144 144 86 30 127 86 29 145

172

General Index

Abraham, W.  14 Adam, A. K. M.  137 allegory  16, 49–50, 145–6 Allen, G.  137 Alter, R.  106 Bailey, R. C.  119–20 baptism, of Jesus  16, 34–5 Barton, J.  14, 76 Bauckham, R.  145 Bettenson, H.  36 biblical manuscripts  77–87 Blomberg, C.  75 Bock, D.  83 Boff, L.  129 Bonino, J. M.  129 Borg, M.  51–2 Brenner, A.  121 Brotzman, E. R.  89 Brown, R. E.  35, 74–5 Brueggeman, W.  131–2, 137, 139 Bultmann, R.  48–50 Burridge, R. A.  76 canon  2, 11, 13–14, canonical interpretation  136, 148–9, 151 Carter, W.  121 Chalcedon, council of  10, 36–7 Childs, B.  148–52 Chilton, B.  117 christological interpretation  143–5 Clines, D.  41

Collins, R.  13 Conzelmann, H.  63–4 Crenshaw, J. L.  47, 58 Crossan, J. D.  41, 70, 117 crucifixion, of Jesus  32–5 Crump. D.  59 Culpepper, A.  103, 106 Davies, M.  92 Dead Sea Scrolls  14, 84–6, 115 deconstruction  134–5 Derrida, J.  134 Dibelius, M.  48 Dodd, C. H.  15, 38, 51 Driver, S. R.  24–5 Drolet, M.  137 Dube, M. W.  121 ecclesiocentric interpretation  146–8 Elliott, J. H.  59 Elliott, K.  89 Enlightenment, the  13, 58, 91, 106, 109, 131, 135, 139–40, 143, 145, 151 eschatology  38–9, 67 ethnicity  114–17 Evans, C.  83 evangelical interpretation  139–43 feminist interpretation  110–14, 124–7 Finkelstein, I.  130 Fleming, D. L.  100

174

G eneral Index

form criticism  45–7 Fowl, S. E.  152 Freedman, D. N.  58 fundamentalism  3–5 Funk, R.  51 gender  20, 88, 110–14 Goldingay, J.  2, 14 Goodacre, M.  69 Gooder, P.  26, 30, 40, 43 Gottwald, N.  130 Goulder, M.  69 Graf, K. H.  22 Gundry, R.  57, 67, 73 Gunkel, H.  45–6 Gunn, D.  106 Guthrie, D.  140 Gutiérrez, G.  129 Gwyther, A.  121 Hays, R. B.  146–7 history of religion school  43–5 Hooker, M.  73 Horrell, D.  59 Horsley, R. A.  118–19, 121 Howard-Brook, W.  121 Hunter, G.  58 Ignatian exercises  100–1 inclusive language  88, 110 inspiration, of scripture  9–14, 28, 76, 141, 149 intertextuality  135–7 irony  104–6 JEDP hypothesis  25–6 Jesus Seminar  51 Juel, D.  143 Keefer, K.  106 Kelly, S.  117 Kermode, F.  106 Kim, S.  121

kingdom of God  37–9, 49, 64, 71, 118, 149 Kingsbury, J.  106 Kloppenborg, J. S.  70 Kraybill, J. N.  134 Kuhrt, A.  58 Law, D. R.  14 liberation theology  117–19, 128–30 literary criticism  91–106 Mack, B. L.  70 McGrath, A.  140–2, 151 Marsh, C.  40, 76 Marshall, I. H.  65 masoretic text  84–6 messianic interpretation  143–5 Metzger, B.  89 Michie, D.  106 Moir, I.  89 Montefiore, H.  16 Moore, S.  134–5, 137 Mowinckel, S.  46 Moyise, S.  40, 76, 152 Muddiman, J.  14 narrative  96–104 Newsom, C. A.  110 Nineham, D.  72 Nolland, J.  83 Osborne, G.  141 parables, interpretation of  4, 16, 49, 98, 145 patriarchy  20, 126–7 Patte, D.  132 Pentateuch, the  18–26 Perrin, N.  65 plot  102–4 pluralism  132 postcolonialism  119–21, 129–31

G eneral Index

175

postmodernism  131–7 Powell, M. A.  59 Prior, M.  124, 129–30, 137 Pritchard, J. B.  58 Puskas, M. A.  59

Strauss, M. L.  76 Stromberg, J.  40 Sugirtharajah, R. S.  119, 121, 137 Sweet, J. P. M.  145 synoptic problem  32–6, 61–70

Q hypothesis  67–70 quest of the historical Jesus  36–9

Talbert, C.  34, 83 ten commandments  22–3 textual criticism  77–89 Theissen, G.  53–4 Thiselton, A.  96–102 Thomas, R. L.  78–9, 88, 142 Thomas, Gospel of  51 Throckmorton Jr, B. H.  47 Thuesen, P. J.  143 trinitarian interpretation  150

reader response criticism  92–3 realized eschatology  38–9 redaction criticism  61–76, 83, 141 rhetorical criticism  94–6 Rhoads, D.  106 Ringe, S. H.  83, 131 Robinson, J. A. T.  51 Rowland, C.  121

Ussher, Archbishop  20 sacraments  9–11 Sanders, E. P.  41, 51, 92, 115–17 Schmidt, K. L.  47–8 Schneiders, S. M.  113, 135 Schüssler Fiorenza, E.  112–14 Schweitzer, A.  37–9, 117 Seybold, K.  45 Silberman, N. A.  130 Ska, J. L.  41 social location  109, 117–19 social-scientific criticism  43, 55, 58 source criticism  15–41 Stanton, E. C.  124–5 Steinmetz, D.  145, 152 story, use of  96–104

Vanhoozer, K.  150 Vermes, G.  117 versions, of the bible  77–89 Warfield, B. B.  14 Weber, M.  54–5 Wegner, P. D.  89 Wellhausen, J.  22, 25 word of God, Bible as  1–9 Wright, N. T.  41, 51 Young, E.  19, 25 Young, F. W.  vi–vii, 145, 151 Young, R. J. C.  137