GOSPEL OF MARK (bookin’ through the bible 5)
[back to FIRST CORINTHIANS]
[ahead to MATTHEW AND LUKE]
The multiple versions of nearly every major episode in both the Old and New Testaments—the creation of woman, the flood, the wife-sister subterfuge, the Ten Commandments, the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, the names of the twelve disciples, the Sermon on the Mount, the Shema, the Lord’s Prayer, the words inscribed on the cross, and the last words of Jesus before giving up the ghost, among scores of examples, attest to the folkloricity of the Bible.
From Holy Writ as Oral Lit by folklorist Alan Dundes (1935-2005)
quick preface, to cheat my word count limit
I’ve been insanely lucky at times. One of my luckiest accidents was my choice of university, UC Berkeley, which could hardly have been a more perfect fit for me. In addition to a dozen other lifechanging things, I met the other half of my ridiculously lucky marriage there. Most of the best things in my life can be traced to that place in one way or another.
I also studied with a number of professors who left indelible stamps on my life and mind, especially in anthropology: Tim White, F. Clark Howell, Desmond Clark, James Deetz. But one stands alone as the luckiest path-crossing of my academic career: folklorist Alan Dundes.
I’d gladly spend my thousand words talking about this unique, funny, brilliant and beloved guy, but you’ll just have to follow the link. He changed forever the way I look at the human project. Among other things, he made me find wonder and fascination in things that had formerly irritated me about the human animal. Long story.
Anyway, when I tucked into the Book of Mark, it was Alan Dundes who immediately sprang to mind. Mark is a bag of memes, after all, and it was Professor Dundes who first made me love memes.
One of Dundes’ great joys was studying the mutation of folklore during oral transmission – the changes, tiny and great, that inevitably find their way into a story, joke, playground game, nursery rhyme, or legend as it is passed orally from one person or generation to the next. Nothing pleased him more than having four or five different versions of a story in hand, then recreating the original, and he always seemed to value the variants more than the original. The original was mere creation, after all. The variants had picked up the fingerprints of folklore and so were more complexly, richly human.
The Gospel of Mark
THE BUDDY CHRIST from the movie DOGMA
The Bible provides folklorists like Dundes with one of their greatest playthings for reasons made clear in the immensely readable and fascinating book Holy Writ as Oral Lit (1999). I mentioned in the first installment that Genesis begins with two different versions of the same creation story, but as Dundes noted in the quote above, it hardly ends there. The technique in play is another form of midrash, the Jewish syncretic teaching technique I mentioned in an earlier post.
By “folkloristic,” Dundes means the stories of the Bible show clear evidence of passage through many, many layers of oral tradition prior to being recorded at all. This shouldn’t be too surprising: Mark was written no earlier than the year 70, since the destruction of the Temple is referred to (Mt 24), and more likely around the year 85 (see Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle for a brilliant discursion on dating the gospels).
One of the most wonderful aspects of Dundes’ thesis is that he doesn’t remotely denigrate the gospels on these terms. Their inconsistencies are precisely what intrigues and delights him. Loving variety as he does, he is quite impatient with those who insist, despite continuous evidence to the contrary, that the Bible is inerrant and/or consistent. He contrasts what he calls the literalists’ “governing syllogism”
-
God Cannot Err.
The Bible is the Word of God.
Therefore the Bible Cannot Err.
(Geisler and Howe, When Critics Ask, 1992)
with his own syllogism:
-
Folklore is characterized by multiple existence and variation.
The Bible is permeated by multiple existence and variation.
The Bible is folklore!
(Dundes 111)
Only by remembering that folklore was the love of his life can we see this as the compliment it was meant to be. The Bible is warts-and-all human, not divine, he says. Isn’t that wonderful?
There are two main kinds of memetic repetition in the gospels: (1) Luke and Matthew (written a decade later than Mark) repeat the stories of Mark, and (2) each of the four gospels, including Mark, also repeats different variants of the same story within its own text – often on the same page. The feeding of the multitudes is one example of a single event told in two variants (6:35 and 8:1), followed by a rather awkward attempt to make them appear as two different events – by putting words in the Big Guy’s mouth, no less (8:18-20). Textual analysis this simple and clear doesn’t lie: it’s one story that has drifted into two versions.
5th c. tilework from the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, Tabgha, Galilee, Israel
I could go on with this, but there’s much more to say about Mark.
There were dozens of existing first century gospels. Of the four eventual winners of the memetic lottery, Mark was written first, and Luke and Matthew were so closely based on Mark that the three are called synoptic (“same view”) gospels. So among other things, Mark gets credit for beginning to establish the New Testament’s relationship with the old.
So, with the coming of Jesus, have we decisively thrown that festering stew of the Old Testament Law nastiness onto the dung-heap of bad memes, as so many modern Christians claim? No such luck. Matthew (5:18) makes this clearest (“I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished”), but Mark already hints at the continuing enthusiasm for wretched immoral doctrine. Here’s Jesus himself (Mk 7:9-10) berating the Pharisees for not killing their disobedient children:
You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honour your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’
Oh well done, thou Font of Goodness! Let us hasten to build all human morality on His example.
So why didn’t the early Christians take this golden opportunity to bid the OT farewell? Because the gospels were carefully crafted in fulfillment of OT prophecies, making it necessary to keep the OT around as evidence. But to specifically underline the more reprehensible messages, like child-killing? Perhaps my understanding of Christ’s message of love is insufficiently subtle to grasp His divine strategy.
So long as literalism is alive and dominant, this was, in a very real way, the Last Chance in history to renounce those ideas from the Old Testament that are most reprehensible — to say, “Here is a new covenant AND the old law is renounced.” Instead, God gave those ideas his explicit and enduring Seal of Approval. Once Jesus Christ weighed in both jot and tittle, there was no further way for subsequent Christianity to decisively disclaim any given notion in the Mosaic law. And there, I suggest, is the central problem with religions of the book: they lack a meaningful mechanism for self-correction.
More on this in later posts.
By far the most interesting aspect of the Gospel of Mark is what is missing. The miracles are mild and few, and the story lacks both the beginning and the end we all know. There’s no Zeus-like insemination of the mortal woman, no manger, no wise men or shepherds — none of the things that made Luke and Matthew bestsellers. In Mark, we start with a Jesus who is old enough for his tenth high school reunion. The dying girl he revives (Mark 5) has not yet been exaggerated into a dead girl (Matthew 9:18). Even the moral messages are blander and less compelling than Matthew and Luke.
And there’s another point, perhaps most fascinating of all: Mark 16:9-20 is not present in any of the earliest manuscripts. The original Mark ended with the empty tomb but included no appearances of the risen Christ, no snake-handling or poison-drinking, no appearance to the Apostles, no Great Commission, and no ascension into heaven.
We are left with two choices: If the oldest canonical gospel lacks both the beginning and end that appear in later gospels, either Mark found Jesus’ miraculous birth and explicit conquering of death too uninteresting to include (and the cursing of figs and pigs too interesting to exclude), or those elements — the most theologically important — were later folkloric additions.
Which of those (he asked rhetorically) is 1000 times more likely?
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For December 24: THE GOSPELS OF MATTHEW AND LUKE
Read Matthew and Luke online
Believers on Matthew
Skeptics on Matthew
Believers on Luke
Skeptics on Luke
Followed by:
Dec 29 — John
Jan 8 — Exodus (special guest blogger)
Jan 15 — Leviticus
Jan 22 — Deuteronomy
Jan 29 — Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs (special guest blogger)
Feb 5 — Acts
Feb 12 — Revelation
FIRST CORINTHIANS (bookin’ through the bible 4)
[back to GENESIS]
[onward to MARK]
FIRST CORINTHIANS
You may recall that the design of this mini-course is based on the GSBTS principle (Grade School Basketball Team Selection). Last week was skeptic’s choice (Genesis), so this week we fly over the intertestamental abyss, alight at the dawn of Christianity, and let the Christian captain choose a book.
Well, the Christian captain (in the form of several moderate Christian bible study sites) wanted to start with Matthew, but the ref blew the whistle. You have to begin with a Pauline epistle since they were written over a generation before the Gospels. Otherwise you get the idea that the Gospel stories were written, then Paul spread them. The Christians’ second choice is First Corinthians, after which we’ll visit the Gospels.
THE APOSTLE PAUL MAILS HIS FIRST LETTER
TO THE CORINTHIANS—El Greco (1606)
Paul is a sure candidate for Most Influential Human of All Time. Inventing Christianity from near-scratch is a résumé-brightener if ever there was. But if we want some understanding of First Corinthians and the other Pauline epistles, there are two things we need to know:
1. That Paul wrote them a full generation before the gospels or any other surviving accounts of the life of Christ were written, and
2. That he believed the world was going to end and Jesus return within the lifetime of those then living.
We tend to read Paul through the lens of the gospels. When he says “the Christ,” we picture mangers, shepherds, loaves and fishes, last suppers, Mel Gibson’s oceans of stage blood—and we think Paul’s picturing those things, too. He isn’t, any more than P.L. Travers, in writing Mary Poppins, imagined her singing “A Spoonful of Sugar.”
“We need to embrace the fact that none of Paul’s first readers read him [as we do],” wrote Bishop John Shelby Spong in Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, “for in their lives there were as yet no Gospels. To interpret Paul accurately, we need to put ourselves into that first-century pre-gospel frame of reference and to hear Paul in fresh and authentic ways.”
We do this lensing all the time. When Jefferson invokes a Creator endowing us with inalienable rights, we read through the lenses of subsequent history and think Why, he’s talking about the God of Pat Robertson. It would have been clear to his contemporaries that he was talking about a non-biblical god who made things, endowed rights, then turned to other projects unknown, leaving no forwarding address.
After his conversion, Paul traveled throughout the Mediterranean world, helping the fledgling church to establish itself. At one point he spent some time with the church in Corinth, not far from Athens.
Corinth was a decent-sized city of around 130,000 at the time of his visit, a place of proverbial wickedness, energy, riches, noise, home to the primary temple of the love goddess Aphrodite, which boasted 1,000 ritual prostitutes. It was the Sin City of its time. The verb “to Corinth” (Korinthiazesthai) in popular Greek meant to fornicate, as in Voulez-vous Korinthiazesthai avec moi?
Paul was in Ephesus when he heard the Corinthian church he’d just left was embroiled in a sex scandal. One of the members had had an affair with his stepmother, and the church was ready to fracture. Hence the letter’s emphasis on sexual morality. His overall purpose in writing was to set them back on the rails so they could be saved upon Christ’s imminent return.
The frantic belief that the jig was nearly up explains much of Paul’s advice to the church in Corinth. Brothers, the time is short. Those who have wives should live as if they had none. Those who don’t should not get married. This world is about to pass away (7:29 etc).
But then, weirdly, there’s a lot of long-term planning interwoven, including an exhaustive list of restrictions on women and rules for establishing a church hierarchy. Here’s A.N. Wilson’s take on that contradiction:
There are many reasons to suppose that the letters in which these [long-range plans] occur belong to a later period than Paul’s… The world which these letters reflect is not the one seen through Paul’s frantic eyes, a world about to dissolve, as Christ appears in glory above the clouds. On the contrary, the later New Testament writings seem to have settled down to the discovery that Christ will not be returning quite as soon as the Apostle predicted. They set up a ‘Church,’ with fixed officers (elders, deacons, bishops) and lay down the rules for a dull and virtuous life in which women know their place. To such a world, surely, belongs the sentence in 1 Corinthians in which we read that ‘women should be silent in the churches.’ In short, the sentence is an interpolation. (from Paul: The Mind of the Apostle)
Interpolation was the official pastime of the early Christian church. Paul’s letters passed under the editorial quills of the antisexual, body-hating, self-flagellating Church Fathers—men rooted in the dismal Greek Stoic conception that matter itself is evil and only spirit is good—in an early medieval game of Telephone.
But in addition to the misogyny and apocalyptic yearnings, First Corinthians has some really wonderful passages, mostly in Chapter 13. “When I was a child I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish things behind me” is one such. Another is this exquisite passage, which served as a reading in my wedding and millions of others:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.
That the biblical passage most often heard just before husband and wife say “I do” is from a letter in which marriage is discouraged and women are told to stay silent in church—well, what’s more delicious than the ridiculous and sublime, locked in a scriptural embrace?
Paul’s true genius, according to Wilson, was mythologizing the death of one Jewish teacher to fulfill the prophetic claims of that religion, giving it new energy and relevance. He took the potential energy of the Old Testament and unleashed it by “making” it come true. In so doing, he used an insular, inwardly-turned religion to birth a universally available, all-forgiving creed and conquered death in the bargain.
No wonder the damn thing caught on.
(GAME: “Find the Bad Apostrophe in the Tattoo”)
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POSTSCRIPT
Further reading
AN Wilson, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle
John Shelby Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious
Thirsty for more mail from the first century’s favorite epileptic?
If First Corinthians has somehow whet your appetite for Paul, read Romans next. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, like most sequels, can’t hold a candle to the first one; he mostly asks the Corinthians why they never answered his first letter and whether it means they’ve been seeing other apostles behind his back.
See you on December 17 for THE GOSPEL OF MARK:
Mark online
Believers on Mark
Skeptics on Mark
GENESIS (bookin’ through the bible 3)
The Book of Genesis is true from the first word to the last.
KEN HAM, CEO and president of Answers in Genesis
Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth,
more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand
years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.
SAM HARRIS, Letter to a Christian Nation
GENESIS
We’re pattern-seeking, cause-finding animals. It’s a very adaptive habit. The Book of Genesis represents early attempts, in the absence of reliable methods, to find patterns and seek causes — specifically why the world is the way it is, and why we are the way we are. They’re good questions, and they deserve the best answers we can muster. For a long time, this was it.
Though the NIV Study Bible continues to credit Moses with authorship of this book and the rest of the Pentateuch, most biblical scholars have concluded it is a composite of several sources originating between the 10th and 5th centuries BCE, including the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s fascinating as mythology. Only when it is taken as literal history, as science, or even worse, as a moral guide — long after better methods have been developed for all three — do I get incredibly cranky. Here’s my stream of consciousness on Genesis.
Gen 1
I’ve always found it intriguing that Genesis begins with two quite different creation stories — the so-called Priestly (1:1) and the Yahwist (2:4) versions. I’m unaware of any other culture’s creation story that allows you to choose between plotlines.
The highest overall value of the bible — obedience — shows up for the first time in the Tree of Knowledge story. That central value is still present in conservative Christian parenting research and advice, which regularly places obedience (to God, to parents) above all other virtues. And such a telling transgression was Eve’s! Humanity earned God’s wrath not through lust, or greed, or murder, but through curiosity—the desire to know. If desiring knowledge separated us from God, willful ignorance seems the path back to the garden. Is this a belief worth embracing, or even respecting?
Literal belief in the biblical creation story in the U.S.: 60 – 61%
Gen 6
It seems downright unsporting to go after Noah and the Flood – not even every species of beetle would have fit, etc etc. I am told, again and again, that I am fighting against a belief system long-ago vanished. No one believes in the literal Ark any more.
Literal belief in the Flood and Ark in the U.S.: 60%
Gen 12
Abram/Abraham lies repeatedly, claiming his wife is really his sister. Pharaoh, who could not have known he had been lied to, marries her and is punished by God for adultery. Abram/Abraham is richly rewarded by God. If Genesis is an allegory — a teaching story — what on Earth are we meant to learn?
Gen 16:10-15
I find this passage so charmingly human. ‘You were so laughing at me!” says Jehovah, a little hurt. The changing nature of God’s interactions with humanity is the thing that most energizes the bible as literature for me. I’m not aware of another myth system with the same morphing relationship. Correct me since I’m wrong.
Gen 18
I ADORE the negotiation here — Abraham haggling God down to ten. It’s a Promethean moment, really, an incredible act of courage, of testing God’s own moral definitions. What’s interesting is that negotiations stop at ten — and Sodom is destroyed after all, sparing only Lot, his wife, and his two daughters. So somewhere between four and ten righteous exceptions is the tipping point for destroying a wicked city. Mental note.
Gen 19
The incident of Lot offering his virgin daughters to the crowd for rape is one of the most jaw-dropping moral outrages in the entire book—despicable both for the act and for the clear message. Lot, remember, was chosen by God to survive the destruction of Sodom. Because he was good? No—because in offering his daughters for rape in lieu of the angels, he proved himself obedient. I hereby welcome other interpretations of the message of this scene, which also manages to include the first hints of biblical homophobia that continues to this day.
Then there’s Lot’s wife, turned to a condiment for the Eve-like crime of curiosity — or possibly even empathy for her dying friends and neighbors. No no, those were symptoms of the real disease. Once again, the crime was disobedience.
I won’t even touch the cave scene. But think of what it says about Genesis that I can skip a scene in which two daughters get their father drunk and have sex with him and still make a plenty sound case against the moral value of the book.
Gen 22
Lot holds the heavyweight title in the category of moral menace for a very short time. Within pages, Abraham steals the crown, proving there’s no crime he would not commit, no act too vile or unjustified, so long as God ordered him to commit it. That the founder of Judaism is the first on record to make use of the Nuremberg Defense is an irony too painful to contemplate.
Gen 32
Jacob wrestling with God is another passage I find incredibly intriguing. Does anyone know of parallels in other myth systems? Paging Joseph Campbell.
Obviously there’s more, but I’d better wrap—my word count limit approacheth.
My dismay over Genesis has nothing to do with the fact that it gets the science of life wrong. Nobody in the first millennium BCE got much of the science of life right. My horror is based on three things:
(1) That 46 percent of my fellow Americans think Genesis got the science of life right, and use that profound ignorance to block the acceptance of the single most humbling, inspiring, and transformative scientific discovery in human history — that we are related by descent to all other life on Earth;
(2) That Genesis praises absolute, unthinking obedience while condemning curiosity and intelligence; and
(3) That Genesis continues to fuel ignorant literalism, the corrosive notion of “original sin,” homophobia, misogyny, and any number of other human failings against which we just might make quicker progress without the unhelpful influence of a book that condones, even loudly encourages them.
Luke is lovely. Ecclesiastes is searingly powerful. Song of Songs is sexy. But Genesis, taken literally OR figuratively, is obscene garbage. Any book that includes it is a menace to basic human decency and to the enlightenment of the human mind.
That 49 percent of Americans believe the entire Bible is the inspired word of God is, to quote Harris, “a moral and intellectual emergency,” and Genesis itself provides all the evidence needed. I respect the people who hold these beliefs — all people are inherently worthy of respect as human beings — but saying I respect the beliefs themselves would render the word respect, a very important and useful word indeed, completely meaningless.
Okay, there’s my two cents. As I said, I do not pretend to be neutral, nor should I be. To be neutral on such a thing is to have given it no real thought whatsoever. So what’s your appropriately biased view?
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REMINDER: We’re pursuing an unusual study plan to shake things up and to interweave the favorite texts of skeptics and Christians. Next week:
Dec 10 — 1 Corinthians
Dec 17 — Mark
Dec 24 — Matthew and Luke
Dec 29 — John
Jan 8 — Exodus
Jan 15 — Leviticus
Jan 22 — Deuteronomy
Jan 29 — Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs
Feb 5 — Acts
Feb 12 — Revelation
a note on bias
Final thoughts before we start our romp through the Bible.
I’ve received an email from a Christian from Iowa assuring me that, as an atheist, I cannot possibly see the Bible objectively and therefore should give up the pretense of trying.
I assured her she was right on one count—I am not objective. Neither are Christians, of course, but that does not disqualify their opinions on the book. What I do is recognize their subjective bias and compensate for it. The old grain of salt.
In the course of eleven years teaching critical thinking, I ran into the bias question over and over. Students research capital punishment or gun control would throw up their hands. “I don’t know who to believe! Everyone on both sides is biased!” What they meant is “Everyone has an opinion!”
They had the common collegiate misconception that only neutral, dispassionate voices are worth listening to.
I asked whether the views expressed by Martin Luther King, Jr. in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” were invalidated by the fact that he was not neutral on the question of racism, whether Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was useless because she came down firmly on one side of the feminist question, and whether Christ’s bias toward mercy and forgiveness made him hopelessly irrelevant as a source of ethical guidance.
That always snapped things into focus.
The trick is to recognize that “bias”—an inclination to one side of a question or the other—is nearly universal, and is not in and of itself a bad thing. Most thinking and engaged persons will be “biased” in all questions that have any significance to them. Disregard those voices and we’ve limited ourselves to the apathetic and the stupid—probably not the best plan. The key is not to pretend we are unbiased, but to chose our leanings on the basis of evidence and ethics, to recognize the direction and extent of the bias, to reveal that bias as fully as possible, and to do our level best to ensure that it doesn’t blind us to good information from other perspectives.
When assessing others, we need to determine not whether they are biased, but whether their bias is so controlling that their ability to contribute to the conversation is disabled.
The most pernicious form of bias is confirmation bias – the tendency to see evidence that confirms the conclusions we’ve already reached. Scientific research has to build in all kinds of safeguards to control this one.
Engaging the Bible, interestingly, brings out confirmation bias in two different directions at once for me. My ever-increasing horror at its contents leads me to ever-less-charitable interpretations, something I must be aware of and guard against. But the far older bias that the Bible is the “Good Book” also leads me, and many others, to gloss over some genuine outrages because they are so very familiar. I’d heard the serpent-and-apple story hundreds of times before it occurred to me that Eve’s “sin”—the one that caused the Fall, the one that damned humanity to a separation from God—was one of my two highest values. No, not a hankering for apples; her sin was the desire to know.
And so, by way of full disclosure before we dive into bible study together, let me reveal my position on the Bible so you can take my input with a grain of Lot’s wife.
I am not neutral. As a result of many years of careful thought, attendance of churches in nine denominations, and conversations with theologians, ministers, priests, lay believers, nonbelievers, Thomas Paine, C.S. Lewis, Karen Armstrong, Don Bierle, Bertrand Russell, A.N. Wilson, and dozens more, I’ve concluded that the Bible is a mixture of good, neutral, and bad; that the good elements are easily found elsewhere in far less compromised forms; and that on balance, the overall influence of the book on humanity has been and continues to be so appallingly negative, in subtle and unsubtle ways, as to make me wish it reduced to a museum piece, a sobering object lesson in misplaced affections.
So go into this bible blog series with full knowledge that I’m a biased, wild-eyed extremist. I get bothered by little things, like the Good Book ordering believers to kill me (Lev 24:16, 2 Chron 15:12-13) and my wife (Deut 22:20-21) and my children (Deut 21:18-21, Mt 15:4). I am inexplicably bothered by its exaltation of obedience over autonomy and ignorance over knowledge. It’s too typical of me to fret about such trivia and characterize such a Good Book as somehow…well, bad.
But it will always be with us. So instead of wishing it weren’t, I opt for the widest possible readership in hopes that others will see my point and help me to work against its negative influence. Hence this odd little bible study.
We’ll start tomorrow with Genesis. I’ll give my thoughts in a sketchy stream of consciousness, focusing whenever possible on the implications for parenting and staying within 1000 words, then turn it over to you for discussion. Along the way, I’ll surely show bursts of impatience not only with the text, but with my central frustration regarding religious literacy – that it’s essential to be religiously literate, and I resent the fact that it is essential. I’d much rather spend my time and limited mental capacity elsewhere.
I will also take this opportunity to demonstrate that biblical literalism is not only alive and well, but predominant among believers in the U.S.
Until tomorrow, then.
SECOND THOUGHTS ON VERSION…
After good input from several fronts, I’m abandoning the idea of working with King James. I do love the poetry of it, and it is the version the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible uses, but let’s use the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), which is searchably available here.
I’d also hoped to use Bible Gateway, which is unbeatable when it comes to comparison of versions, but they don’t include the NRSV, for copyright reasons.
If you can’t get the NRSV, just grab something and come on in!
bookin’ through the bible 2
[Back to bookin’ through the bible 1]
Before we begin, let’s select our study materials. You will need:
1. A Bible OR a link to the text online. We’ll be referring to the NRSV.
2. A concise online commentary from the believers’ perspective. I recommend this one.
3. A concise online commentary from the critical perspective. I recommend this one.
4. The brilliant and fun OT commentary David Plotz did for Slate: Blogging through the Bible.
1. Pick a Bible
Naive skeptics and believers alike might think this doesn’t much matter, but it does. Rather than waste word count explaining why, I’ll demonstrate it. When Pilate asked Jesus if he was the Son of God, in Matthew 26:64:
Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said. (King James version, 1611)
Jesus saith to him, Thou hast said. (Young’s literal translation 1898)
“That is what you say!” Jesus answered. (Contemporary English version, 1995)
Jesus said to him, “You have said so.” (English Standard Version, 2001)
This lawyerly, even Clintonesque non-answer has long been a source of discomfort in Christian circles. Why didn’t he just say YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT I AM! instead of the 1st-century equivalent of I’m rubber, you’re glue? Solution for some denominations? Stick your hand up his robe and MAKE him say what you need him to say. Here’s Matthew 26:64 in three other editions:
Jesus said to him, “What you said is true.” (New Life Version, 1969)
Jesus said to him, “It is as you said.” (New King James, 1982)
Jesus answered him, “Yes, I am.” (Worldwide English version, 1996)
My suggestion, and the suggestion of many others, is to go with King James. It predates the modern revisionist trend and is the most beautiful English translation by a mile. the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).
2. The Approach
Keep your approach as unmediated as possible. That said, the insights of others who’ve spent serious time with this book can be very helpful indeed. That said, you want to balance your input between believers and skeptics.
So for our little study time together, I’ll recommend the following:
Read the assigned book for the week (e.g. Genesis) without commentary.
THEN read the Introduction for that chapter from the New International Version (NIV) Study Bible, available online (or the believerly source of your choice).
THEN read the relevant section in the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, a tremendous online resource that provides the text of the Bible with running marginalia calling attention to the good, the bad, and the ugly.
THEN, for the Old Testament, read the relevant section of David Plotz’ Blogging through the Bible.
I’ll provide these links in each post.
3. The Selections
Yes yes, the best thing to do is to read the entire Bible. There, I said it, and I suppose it’s true, and others are doing that as we speak. Having done it myself, I can assure you that by reading a balanced selection of complete books from the Bible, you can get an excellent idea of what all the fuss, positive and negative, is about.
I’ve selected books in much the way you’d select a grade school basketball team, allowing the Christian and Skeptic captains to choose books alternately. I started by scanning Christian Bible study websites to see which books they are excited about. Unsurprisingly, the four Gospels at the center of things, followed by the Epistles of Paul, followed by Acts and Hebrews.
Skeptics, on the other hand, want you to read the Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy), followed by Judges, followed by a New Testament mix-and-match.
Here are four ways to slice it:
PLAN A (The Toe-Dip)
Busy as hell? Just read Genesis and Luke. Total commitment: 5 hours.
PLAN B (The Scriptural Sponge-Bath)
For a good scriptural flyover, read Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus from the OT, and Luke, Acts, and Revelation from the NT. Total commitment: 12 hours.
PLAN C (To the Waist, with Water Wings)
This is our baby. Genesis; 1 Corinthians; Mark, Matthew, Luke, John (the approximate order written); Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy; Ecclesiastes and (just for fun) Song of Songs; Acts; Revelation. Total commitment: 25 hours.
PLAN D (Full Immersion)
The whole megillah. Total commitment: 80-90 hours.
We’ll be following Plan C. I’ll be giving very minimal commentary, mainly pointing you to others who’ve already done that work. Remember that the goal is literacy and clear-eyed knowledge of this influential book, both for ourselves and for our kids. Here’s an approximate blog schedule in 11 installments. These will be interwoven with posts on unrelated topics. Drift in and out as you like:
Dec 3 — Genesis
Dec 10 — 1 Corinthians
Dec 17 — Mark
Dec 24 — Matthew and Luke
Dec 29 — John
Jan 8 — Exodus
Jan 15 — Leviticus
Jan 22 — Deuteronomy
Jan 29 — Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs
Feb 5 — Acts
Feb 12 — Revelation
So start by reading the intro to David Plotz’ Blogging through the Bible — but don’t read his Genesis post yet! — then go y’all forth now and read Genesis! Here are your links:
Book of Genesis online
Believers on Genesis
Skeptics on Genesis
Plotz on Genesis
bookin’ through the bible 1
You’ve got to love the Bible — not for what it reveals about an alleged supreme being, but for what it reveals about us, the monkeys who wrote it and who’ve kept it a bestseller for two millennia and counting.
The fact that this mishmash of exceeding good and outrageous evil, of genuine wisdom and utter nonsense, of sublimity and unintended farce, of perfect love and bottomless hate, continues to resonate for so many people in the 21st century is a function of what it really is: a mirror. We are good, evil, wise, nonsensical, sublime, farcical, loving and hateful. How can you not love a book that shows us so unashamedly for the self-contradictory mess we are?
Here’s a thoughtful take from the good folks at Skeptics Annotated Bible:
For nearly two billion people, the Bible is a holy book containing the revealed word of God. It is the source of their religious beliefs. Yet few of those who believe in the Bible have actually read it.
This must seem strange to those who have never read the Bible. But anyone who has struggled through its repetitious and tiresome trivia, seemingly endless genealogies, pointless stories and laws, knows that the Bible is not an easy book to read. So it is not surprising that those who begin reading at Genesis seldom make it through Leviticus. And the few Bible-believers who survive to the bitter end of Revelation must continually face a disturbing dilemma: their faith tells them they should read the Bible, but by reading the Bible they endanger their faith.
When I was a Christian, I never read the Bible. Not all the way through, anyway. The problem was that I believed the Bible to be the inspired and inerrant word of God, yet the more I read it, the less credible that belief became. I finally decided that to protect my faith in the Bible, I’d better quit trying to read it.
The most popular solution to this problem is to leave the Bible reading to the clergy. The clergy then quote from the Bible in their writings and sermons, and explain its meaning to the others. Extreme care is taken, of course, to quote from the parts of the Bible that display the best side of God and to ignore those that don’t. That this approach means that only a fraction of the Bible is ever referenced is not a great problem. Because although the Bible is not a very good book, it is a very long one.
But if so little of the Bible is actually used, then why isn’t the rest deleted? Why aren’t the repetitious passages — which are often contradictory as well — combined into single, consistent ones? Why aren’t the hundreds of cruelties and absurdities eliminated? Why aren’t the bad parts of the “Good Book” removed?
Such an approach would result in a much better, but much smaller book. To make it a truly good book, though, would require massive surgery, and little would remain. For nearly all passages in the Bible are objectionable in one way or another.
Perhaps. But to the Bible-believer…each passage contains a message from God that must not be altered or deleted. So the believer is simply stuck with the Bible.
Jefferson made one such attempt at corrective surgery with the New Testament.
Whether you’re a believer or a nonbeliever, to get a real grasp of this strange and influential book, at some point you’ll have to go straight to it. Spoonfeeding and cherry-picking add up to religious illiteracy. And with religion dominating and influencing everything from individual actions to world events, religious illiteracy is something we can no longer afford. That includes secular parents. UU Rev. Bobbie Nelson hit the nail on the head in Parenting Beyond Belief:
Choosing not to affiliate or join a religious community does not shield a parent from [religious] questions–you will still need to be able to answer some or all of them. If you do not provide the answers, someone else will–and you may be distressed by the answers they provide.
If that sent a chill down your parental spine, and your exposure to the Bible has so far been secondhand, it’s time to get up close and personal with this long-resonating collection of goat-herd lore.
But like SAB said above, there’s nothing like picking up a Bible to make you want to put it down again. The Bible is protected from close examination by the very idea of plowing through 770,000 words in six-point font (including no fewer than 10,941 shalls). While the daunting size and tedium of the bible serves the needs of the church, which giddily stands in the explanatory breach, it also prevents understanding on all sides. It prevents secularists from engaging the exquisite poetry of Ecclesiastes and Luke (etc) and the faithful from recognizing the genuine poison of Deuteronomy and Revelation (etc etc).
But 770,000 words of Bible prose is roughly 80 hours. I wouldn’t ask you to do that — there are too many books both good and influential to spend that much time on one that’s merely influential. Fortunately you don’t need to read the whole thing to greatly enhance your Biblical Quotient. Crack the cover and you’ve already passed up as much as 72 percent of Christendom.
We here at Meming of Life International have designed a multi-tiered bible reading plan for the secularist. Whatever your level of commitment, from toe-dipping dilettante to full immersion dilettante, we’ve got a plan to match your lifestyle.
Unfortunately, I’ve set a new goal: an absolute 1000-word limit per post, about six minutes of reading, and we’re just about there for today. In the coming weeks I’ll include a few more posts outlining our patented Bible Study Plan for Non-Goatherds™. So get yourself a Good Book…so you have something to read when you’re done with the Bible.
