After presenting a webinar on “Reclaiming the Bible for Progressive Christians” for the Progressive Christian Network of Victoria recently, I was asked a few additional questions by email. Those questions and my responses to them may be of wider interest.
As you questioned why anyone should want a Bible for a child it can be assumed you are not recommending biblical content for children.
My question concerned why anyone would want to give a Bible to a child, which is not quite the same thing as ensuring that children have some familiarity with the key biblical stories and characters. We want them to have some basic biblical literacy, but the Bible is an adult book and represents rather complex hermeneutical challenges when used in a very different culture far removed by time and geography from its origins.
As a parallel, we can assume that people such as Jesus were familiar with the stories from the Hebrew Bible (not least because the names of his siblings are all drawn from the Torah, suggesting a family with some knowledge of and commitment to the story). Yet people such as Jesus and his family were most likely illiterate and—since they were not in the social elite—would not have had the resources to acquire and study a copy of the Torah.
This is a tough nut to crack, as Christian educators know very well. Simplified versions of key biblical texts are surely part of the spiritual repertoire of children within a family that practises its faith. But encouraging children to read the Bible itself, seems (to me) to be rather inappropriate. Of course we can also use art, drama and music to convey the essential <?> biblical content without expecting kids to read a Bible.
And who reads a book these days, in any case?
Surely the move to digital texts will impact how everyone engages with the Bible? (But that is a different topic.)
You were commendatory about the Lectionary because it removed selection of preaching focus from a worship leader in favour of the presented content of the lectionary. The question is: Why privilege 20 to 30 year old writings (with many assumptions peculiar in light of science and modern thought generally) above a well informed and qualified contemporary worship leader?
I am simply not as negative towards the lectionary, in any of its forms, as you seem to be.
We are not reading the lectionary, we are using the lectionary as a map to read selected portions of the Bible week by week in the gathered assembly of the faithful. I would not describe the RCL as “20 to 30 years old writings” (in fact it is more like 50 years old now), as everyone uses some filtering system. Not even the most fundamentalist preacher reads the whole of the Bible from Genesis through to Revelation week after week. Everyone makes selections. The RCL is reliable ecumenical example. For me, ecuemncial is always better than denominational, and denominational is always better than individual minister.
I am not so sure that we have that many “well-informed and qualified contemporary worship leaders” around these days. Your comments possibly reflect a UCA context, but Anglicans and Catholics tend to follow the order for the Eucharist with the CL/RCL readings. The art of leading people in worship, for me, is not creating new content but using traditional content creatively in the quest for spiritual wisdom. In the liturgical tradition of the Great Church, a lectionary is simply part of the liturgical landscape. I realise that is a different universe from what used to be called the Free Churches, let alone the wannabe megachurch startups.
Maybe your disinclination for any lectionary other than the pastor’s personal choice of texts, ultimately stems from a Methodist culture where neither Prayer Book nor Lectionary were highly valued? For me as an Anglican, I listen to the Church and I am happy to be guided in my menu of Bible readings by a lectionary. I prefer the RCL to the one-year cycle of BCP, but there has always been a system for reading the Bible. Even in the 1C, the synagogues seem to have had a lectionary of sorts as they read the Torah in 50+ portions and related those readings with a set of passages from the Prophets. Our oldest existing Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, is already marked up into portions for readings. That is a lectionary, in effect.
For me the spiritual hierarchy is: Church > Prayer Book > Lectionary.
I receive the lectionary as a gift from the church and as an invitation to listen to more of Scripture each week than I may otherwise have chosen to do.
Continuing that question: What parts of the ancient biblical writings are sufficiently relevant to living today to feature as basic to being Christian? As church leaders have to make decisions about what to offer for the education of adolescents and adults, what are the priority parts of the Bible you recommend for church study/exploration programs?
I think is an impossible question to answer.
All of Scripture is basic for Christianity, but various parts of Scripture are more relevant to different people and communities across time and in various contexts. What matters more to me is how we read the ancient texts, not which ancient text we should read. I suggest that we need to read them all, and engage with critical minds in every case. We are not looking for information, but for wisdom. That can be derived from a ghastly biblical passage just as much as from a beautiful passage.
If there is to be a canon within the canon, which is more or else what your question implies, then for me it is the Gospel, and the Synoptic Gospels in particular. Most weeks my preaching is centred on the Gospel passage, with the OT and Epistles being viewed through the lens of Jesus. Occasionally I will focus on a non-Gospel reading, but I usually bringing it into some relationship with the wisdom of Jesus that we know from the Gospels.
There are some biblical passages I would never read in worship and others that I can use only with an explicit disclaimer. Again, what is suitable for use in worship may be different from what is suitable for a Bible study group where we have more time to engage with the hermeneutical process, and that is different again from what we may do in a Biblical Studies class within the University.
I hope these comments are helpful. They are not so much “answers” to questions, as—with hindsight—they seem more like reflections on the difference between the culture of the historic liturgical tradition and the Free Church tradition.
It is literally an article of faith for some Christians that the Bible is infallible. By that descriptor they are claiming at least two things: (1) The Bible is without any errors, and (2) the Bible is a guide for faith which will never mislead or fail to provide a reliable guide to the spiritual wisdom that a person needs at any time in their life.
Christians have actually killed each other over these claims, and even in recent times people have lost their jobs as seminary professors and congregational pastors under suspicion of somehow not defending such a view of the Bible.
All the same, and without wishing to offend colleagues and co-religionists who insist on believing the incredible and the ridiculous, this is a nonsensical claim for anyone to make about any historical text.
Let’s start at the very beginning, as it is a very good place to begin according to another canonical text of western civilization, The Sound of Music.[1]
Which Bible are we talking about and which set of books do we consider to constitute this collection of supposedly infallible texts? Already the heads of our fundamentalist friends will be hurting.
There is no such thing as “the Bible.”
To the contrary, there are many collections of books which various sets of Christians recognise as the Bible for them.[2] The Bible which is most likely in the mind of people who claim biblical infallibility is an expurgated edition the Bible which is much beloved among Evangelical and Pentecostal Christian communities.
Category error?
Yes, indeed.
This whole debate is an ecclesiastical mad hatters party. The rare individual who enters the rabbit hole with some basic religious literacy feels a remarkable affinity to Alice in Wonderland, where the powers that be insist that words can mean whatever they choose to make them mean. But that is not so.
Leaving aside for now the rather important fact that Christians do not even agree on which books comprise the Bible, or in which order they should be arranged, the claim to possess an infallible sacred text fails on numerous other grounds.
It is simply impossible to have an infallible book:
• All texts are generated by people in particular contexts and under the influence of various personal assumptions, many of them entirely beyond their conscious knowledge.
• The texts will be inscribed using technologies and linguistic conventions at the time, and some of those features will be incomprehensible to readers from later times.
• The documents will need to be preserved, and copies will need to be made. Indeed, we have thousands of handwritten copies of the biblical texts and no two of them agree in every single details. Oops!
• In many cases they will need to be translated, even if just to update the font or the syntax for current readers.
• The readers will change over time. There will be different individuals at various points in time. The kind of readers will change from the original audience to the clerics of the religious institutions to the mass readership of an industrial society with general education for all its citizens. The social location and existential context of the readers will vary enormously. They will each be influenced by some obscure mix of their personal experiences and their prior religious beliefs, not to mention their psychological needs.
• Some of them will need persuade us that their reading of their Bible is the reading of an infallible Bible given to us by God, with absolute truths which remain constant for all time and across all cultures.
I would not buy a car from such a person and I will not embrace their concept of biblical infallibility either.
Fortunately for me as an Anglican, the community of spiritual practice of which I am both a member and a cultic official has a more nuanced understanding of the Bible, as well as a wider definition of the Scriptures—a definition which reflects ancient Christian wisdom.
I am encouraged to believe that all the spiritual wisdom which I need can be found in these sacred texts, but I am not required to subscribe to fairy tales about the divine origins of my Scriptures nor to ascribe ultimate truth status to everything my Bible says.
[2] For a current example of a reasonably ecumenical edition of the Christian Scriptures see the New Oxford Annotated Bible, which carefully explains which of the apocryphal texts that are part of the Bible for the vast majority if Christians over most of the 2,000 years are recognized in one or another faith community. It may not be sold in your local “Christian” (sic) bookstore, but that is another essay for another day.
Given continuing debates around the Anglican Church of Australia and elsewhere about the status of the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 and the Articles of Religion (commonly called “The Thirty-Nine Articles”) of 1571, it may be timely to publish the brief speech I gave to the 2019 Synod of the Diocese of Grafton in response to the following motion:
MOTION 27: STANDARD OF WORSHIP AND DOCTRINE That this Synod affirms the authorised standard of worship and doctrine of the Anglican Church of Australia as set out in the Fundamental Declarations and Ruling Principles of the Constitution.
The constitution referenced in the motion is the Constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia, and the particular clauses of the constitution seeking to be affirmed by those supporting the proposed motion appear to have been the following:
(2) This Church receives all the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as being the ultimate rule and standard of faith given by inspiration of God and containing all things necessary for salvation.
(4) This Church, being derived from the Church of England, retains and approves the doctrine and principles of the Church of England embodied in the Book of Common Prayer together with the Form and Manner of Making Ordaining and Consecrating of Bishops, Priests and Deacons and in the Articles of Religion sometimes called the Thirty-nine Articles but has plenary authority at its own discretion to make statements as to the faith ritual ceremonial or discipline of this Church and to order its forms of worship and rules of discipline and to alter or revise such statements, forms and rules, provided that all such statements, forms, rules or alteration or revision thereof are consistent with the Fundamental Declarations contained herein and are made as prescribed by this Constitution. Provided, and it is hereby further declared, that the above-named Book of Common Prayer, together with the Thirty-nine Articles, be regarded as the authorised standard of worship and doctrine in this Church, and no alteration in or permitted variations from the services or Articles therein contained shall contravene any principle of doctrine or worship laid down in such standard.
Not only were clauses 1 and 3 of no particular interest to those supporting this motion, but they explicitly claimed that clause 2 took precedence over both clause 1 and clause 3.
While the motion referred to the Fundamental Declarations and Ruling Principles of the Constitution, it was actually adherence to the Ruling Principles which they wished to promote.
Affirming the first three clauses—which the Constitution itself identified as the Fundamental Declarations of the Anglican Church of Australia—would not have served their intention, which is simply to limit the worship practices and the doctrines of the Anglican Church of Australia to those which were developed in the Church of England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This is an especially odd position for the Australian Anglican Church to adopt, since neither the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 nor the Articles of Religion have that same status within the Church of England today. Nor do they have any status at all in some other provinces of the Anglican Communion, such as the Episcopal Church of Scotland and the Episcopal Church (USA).
Adherence to the doctrine and liturgies of the late-1600s and mid-1700s—at which times we were literally killing each other over differences in faith and practice—is not an essential attribute of Anglicanism, but it is a requirement for ministers and other office-bearers of the Anglican Church of Australia.
In other words, the Constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia is a flawed document that reflects the theological factions who dominated the process when the Constitution was drafted and adopted.
All of that was too much information for a brief two-minute speech under the Standing Orders of the Synod of the Diocese of Grafton, so my speech was crafted to tease out the essential issues and urge Synod to reject this motion.
As a footnote, the motion was overwhelmingly rejected by the Synod, and even many of those who supported the motion say they did so only because they could not bring themselves to vote aganst a motion which purported to uphold the Constitution.
Of course, the motion was not about upholding the Constitution but rather was a tactical move seeking to align the Diocese of Grafton with the extremely conservative views promoted by the Diocese of Sydney and its allies. A similar motion had been brought to the previous session of Grafton Synod and also rejected.
This is part of an on-going culture war in contemporary western society, and within the religious campaign of that ‘war’ the focus is on sexuality; particularly marriage equality and non-binary understandings of gender. The battle continues in the wider domain with demands from the same groups for special legislation to ‘protect’ them from religious persecution and to allow them to discriminate against other people on the basis of their gender, sexual orientation or marital status.
My brief speech to the Synod was as follows:
Mr President, I rise to oppose this motion.
After more than 40 years of ordained ministry in the Anglican Church of Australia, I have repeatedly affirmed the Constitution of our Church including the Fundamental Declarations and Ruling Principles.
These are not paragraphs which we have any option to amend at this point in time.
This motion, therefore, makes as much sense as our Synod being asked to declare that sun will rise tomorrow morning.
Whether we say so or not, the sun will rise tomorrow.
Whether we pass this motion or not the Ruling Principles will remain in place.
Until our General Synod agrees to re-establish itself with a new constitution, there is nothing we can do about the Fundamental Declarations. They remain in place. They define the boundaries within which we seek to live faithfully and generously as one church.
However, there is a deep problem with the existing Ruling Principles, as set out in paragraph four of the Constitution.
As this motion reminds us, those Ruling Principles elevate the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 and The Articles of Religion as the standard for worship and doctrine.
Not the Bible!
In other words, those who promote this motion ask us to affirm that Scripture has less influence in our church than the BCP and the so-called Thirty-Nine Articles.
As a Reformation Christian, I find that to be a faulty view of authority.
It is a mistake.
One day—hopefully soon—our Church will replace the Fundamental Declarations and the Ruling Principles with provisions that better reflect the authority of Scripture in our Church and the diversity of worship and doctrine across the Anglican Communion.
As someone who takes the Bible seriously, I look forward to the day when the Ruling Principles are replaced. Until then, as duty bound, I submit to these inadequate words and reserve the right to advocate for their replacement.
And I look forward to the sun rising in the morning.
For years now educators have reminded us of the need to address the “three R’s”: Reading, ‘Riting and ‘Rithmetic.
At the same time, Religion scholars and especially those of us engaged critical biblical studies have been warning people not to neglect the ‘fourth R’—religious literacy.
Religious literacy might be defined as that set of knowledge, attitudes and skills which enable people to navigate successfully the contested religious landscape.
Doubtless, there are several components of religious literacy:
an appreciation of the role religion plays in the lives of individuals and communities
appreciation of diversity among religious communities
recognition of commonalities that cross religious and cultural boundaries
knowledge about and skills in engaging with key religious practices relevant to particular faith communities
role of sacred texts within religious communities
impact of religion on public health
the interface of religion and violence
the capacity for religion to be toxic and ‘best practice’ to avoid that outcome
fundamentalism as a dynamic that crosses religious boundaries
For many people of Christian faith, including people whose most significant cultural context has been some form of Christianity even they do not practice any faith, biblical literacy seems to be a pivotal element of wider religious literacy.
Biblical Literacy
The following comments on biblical literacy are extracted from my lecture Reading the Bible as a Charter for the Human Spirit at the Festival of Wild Ideas sponsored by the Mosman Neutral Bay Inter-Church Council on 5 May 2019.
Biblical literacy has numerous elements, including at least the following:
It requires attention to how written texts function as acts of communication between and among authors and readers. This is an unremarkable literacy skill in other areas of modern life, including media studies and genre analysis at school. Yet it seems oddly and sadly lacking in many Christian churches. Meaning is always negotiated between the author and reader, with all the power being in the hands of the reader who is the one constructing meaning out of the process. The author can seek to shape the form of those negotiations, but the reader is the one ultimately creating meaning from the communication process. As text the Bible is subject to those same dynamics. We determine what it means. It does not determine our meaning.
Typical literacy also requires us to pay attention to the nature and function of language as we create, share, adopt, implement and adapt human knowledge between individuals and across generations. This is essential as we seek to use the Bible authentically.
Biblical literacy further requires that we pay some attention to what may reasonably be known about the composition of those texts that we now value as sacred Scripture. They did not drop out of heaven and they were not dictated by the Holy Spirit. Despite years of teaching biblical studies in seminaries around Australia and elsewhere, I was still shocked the other day to see a Christian leader quote from Psalm 51 as part of his argument against abortion, with the claim that the Psalm represents the direct words of God. This is, of course, nonsense.
In addition to paying attention to how the text may have originally been composed, we also need to pay attention to the process of reception for certain texts which were accepted as sacred while other texts from the same period were excluded from those documents authorised to be read in church or consulted to settle theological disputes. In other words, both the formation of the canon and the history of the interpretation of the canonical texts have a part to play in genuine biblical literacy.
What we have learned about using these texts from the accumulated experience more than 2,500 years of continuous interpretation within communities of spiritual practice must also be brought into the discussion. We are not the first people to read these texts and people of goodwill have been wrestling with them for centuries, constructing life-giving ways of reading the text as a charter for human flourishing in different cultural and social contexts. We ignore that wisdom at our peril.
An essential element of biblical literacy — or perhaps simply religious literacy — is that we consider what impact our new insights into the physical and social realities of being human in our kind of universe have on our contemporary reception and interpretation of these ancient texts. Since we no longer think we live on a flat earth or in an earth-centric universe, we will necessarily construct a different vision of life as we read these texts.
Finally, there is our own lived experience. This informs us as we reflect on past and contemporary interpretations of these venerated ancient texts. When we speak of the inspiration of Scripture, the work of the Holy Spirit is surely as much in the life of the reader and the listening community as it is in the texts themselves. Such a view of inspiration would certainly be consistent with our understanding of how meaning is constructed when a text is being read.
In his daily meditation for this past Sunday, Richard Rohr correctly invites us to embrace the concept of original blessing and eschew meta-narratives of violence, since these are stories that shape us.
I have immense respect for Rohr and his theological reflections, but I quickly found myself dissenting from the process by which he constructed his otherwise worthy appeal.
First of all, the Enuma elish is from several hundred years before the Babylonian exile and most likely was not the form of the ANE creation myth that was known to the Jewish exiles, let along the theologians who composed Genesis 1.
As I shall point out below, the Jews had their own versions of God slaying the dragon / sea-monster in order to create the world, so they really did not need to borrow this stuff from their goyyim neighbours.
And then I found myself wondering why even progressive theologies—with higher than usual openness to the spiritual insights of other religions—still tend assume that our tradition is pure and non-violent, while other (pagan) traditions are crude and violent?
Secondly, to conjure up an early form of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity from the opening verses of Genesis—as Rohr does in this reflection—is very bad exegesis and even worse interfaith theology.
“Creator” is a function of God (Elohim) in Genesis 1, and not a title — just as it is not the ID of the first person of the Trinity in Christian tradition, despite contemporary attempts to make it so in a gender-free formula such as “Creator, Redeemer and Giver of Life”.
The Hebrew term ruach (wind, spirit), does not refer to the Holy Spirit when used in an ancient Jewish text. While ruach-elohim is literally “wind of God”, it is probably best understood as as Hebrew superlative form, and translated as “a powerful wind” or “a strong storm”, just as a phrase like gibeah-elohim means “very big hill” rather than “hill of God”.
Finally, there is no logos/Word—or even feminine Sophia figure—in this ancient creation poem, simply a God who says, “Let there be light,” etc.
Thirdly, the violence that Rohr finds so abhorrent is still implicit in the story with echoes of ancient conflict traditions in the Hebrew terms that occur within the first few sentences. In any case, the violent defeat of the primordial sea-monster or dragon is explicit in other Hebrew creation poems found in the Psalms and in the Prophets. The ancient Jews, it seems, were not averse to depicting creation as a violent defeat of the primordial serpentine opponent of YHWH.
Perhaps more significantly for both Jewish and Christian readers, this violence is matched and even excelled by the ghastly stories of Abraham (almost) sacrificing his son, Isaac, and Jephthah actually sacrificing his own daughter, not to mention those defective Christian understandings of the atonement which see the death of Jesus as a substitutionary sacrifice in which an innocent person is killed in place of the many sinners.
The violence does not end there within the Christian Scriptures, but is deeply embedded in apocalyptic visions of the destruction to be wreaked upon humankind and all of creation at the end of time.
To be people of peace we need both a creation myth and a redemption myth that eschews violence, and what we have in the Bible are origin myths and end-time myths that are dripping with violence and destruction.
No wonder the modern world is in such a mess.
All of this is related to the myth of St George slaying the dragon, which is an ancient oriental archetype for the victory of civilisation (imperial violence, or the violence of civilisation, as John Dominic Crossan would remind us) over the forces of chaos. The rider on the white horse has a long mythic history long before it was attached to the name of St George, and it is extended further in the Book of Revelation—a.k.a. the Apocalypse [!!!] of John—where the victorious Christ figure sits upon a white horse as he rides out to destroy Satan, a.k.a that great dragon or serpent.
Rohr should know all this, and probably does.
So I wonder why he penned a reflection that leaves all these issues aside and does not see the violence embedded in our own tradition and celebrated in our central liturgies?
Mundine is an experienced public figure, a former president of the Australian Labor Party, and an Australian indigenous leader. He was writing at least partly in response to recent statements by former ALP Prime Ministers, Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd, calling for immediate recognition of the State of Palestine by Australia. As such his comments should be read in the context of an internal ALP debate as well as a growing national debate about the desirability of Australia recognising the State of Palestine. This is all healthy debate in an open society.
Like Bishop Browning, I am appalled at the way Mundine trashes his own legacy as an indigenous human rights activist to support the policies and actions of the government led by Benjamin Natanyahu. There are many ways to support Israel without descending to that political gutter.
In this essay, I want to offer a different perspective on the question of the ‘first peoples’ of Palestine.
Before doing that, I note that even Mundine finds it necessary to speak about the Palestinians as real people living in the land of Palestine and of the desirability of them having their own state. Whether such a Palestine ‘state’ would be anything more than an ethnic homeland designed to exclude Palestinians from full democratic participation in the Israeli political system is another matter, and not one that I plan to address here. However, it does get me wondering whether that is the kind of model Mundine now proposes for the indigenous people of Australia?
At the outset, let me make it very clear that I support the right of the Jewish population within Palestine to create a separate and independent national state rather than live in a bi-national state alongside non-Jewish citizens. I may think such a choice was a mistake, as many Jews around the world did in 1948, but in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the Nazi death camps that was the choice of most Jews inside Palestine and many more who came to join the Zionist project after 1948.
The existence of Israel as a successful and vibrant national society is beyond question, and the achievements of the citizens of Israel—both Jewish and Palestinian—since 1948 are remarkable.
Much remains to be achieved, but that is no criticism of Israel.
Our own record of treating the indigenous peoples of this land—as we benefit from the settler society created by British colonists—should caution us against cheap criticism of the settler society created in Palestine by Jewish colonists. Indeed, our national stories have eerie parallels during these past 200 years, and we may have much to learn from each other: not in tactics for controlling the indigenous people, but in strategies for reconciliation and doing justice.
Here Mundine could be a serious contributor to the task of community building and intra-national reconciliation. Sadly, he has chosen to be a protagonist for colonial oppression of the indigenous majority of Palestine by settlers of mostly European origins.
Let me now turn to the question of the first peoples of Palestine, and specifically Mundine’s claims (1) that the Jewish people are the only surviving descendants of those first peoples, and (2) that this gives them an exclusive right to enjoy the land of Palestine today.
This is bad history, bad theology, and bad politics.
Let me address each of these in turn.
Bad History
Like many pro-Israeli activists, Mundine mistakenly accepts the claim that the Jewish people controlled ancient Palestine, whether by conquest or some other social transformation, for a considerable period of time in the ancient world. This historical Jewish national presence was ‘interrupted’ between 70CE and 1948CE, but has now been restored.
So goes the Zionist propaganda. But it is bad history and, as we shall see, bad theology which—when combined—create even worse politics.
The historical account is much more complex than either the contemporary spin doctors or the ancient authors of the biblical texts would have us believe.
Contemporary historians of the ancient Levant as well as critical biblical scholars have established beyond reasonable debate that the biblical narratives do not reflect historical reality, but rather express the political and national aspirations of a small Jewish community whose elite promoted the Jerusalem temple as the unique place for encounter with YHWH, the national god of ancient Israel.
Even the terms “Israel” and “Jewish” are problematic in the biblical context.
‘Israel’ tends to refer to the larger and more powerful political entity whose capital was located—ironically—in the West Bank. This Israel opposed the religio-political aspirations of the more backward society centered around Jerusalem, and indeed for much of the time the southern kingdom (Judah) was a client state of the northern kingdom. The term ‘Jew” is derived from Judah, and does not include the bulk of the ancient Israelites from the biblical period.
Those ‘Israelites’—a term which can include the people of Judah—emerged in ancient Canaanite society around 1200BCE, at the beginning of the Iron Age in the southern Levant. They shared Palestine with many other ethnic groups, as one would expect given the geopolitical location of Palestine between the great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Out of this ancient melting pot emerged a distinctive people, who described themselves as ‘Israel’. At first these people are indistinguishable from the non-Israelite population of ancient Palestine on the basis of their archaeological legacy. Over time they develop some distinctive features, including the worship of YHWH to the exclusion of all other gods. Even that, however, is not clearly established until well into the Hellenistic period which is probably also the time period during which the biblical texts common to Jews and Christians took their current form.
By the time of Rome’s crushing defeat of the Jewish rebellion in 70CE, the peoples of Palestine tended to describe themselves as either Greeks, Jews, or Samaritans. These are not racial categories, but ethnic identities largely shaped by culture, including language and legion. Hold that idea in mind since it applies equally after the Islamic invasions in the mid-600s CE.
What happened to these ancient ethnic communities of first-century Palestine during the 600 years between the capture of Jerusalem by Roman forces and the capture of Jerusalem by the Arab forces?
The simple answer is that most of the people became Christians. A few remained Jewish. A larger minority continued to identity as Samaritans.
Today, Palestine has Jewish communities with ancient roots stretching back hundreds of years (if not longer), as well as a very small Samaritan community (mostly centred in Nablus), a substantial Christian community who also traces its roots back to the first century, and a large Muslim community. All of these people trace their roots in the land back centuries, if not millennia.
DNA analysis confirms this, with the closest match between any groups being the match between Israelis, Palestinians, and Syrians. That, of course, is equally unwelcome news in Jerusalem as it is in Damascus or Ramallah.
What happened in the 7th century was not a colonisation of Palestine by Arabs, but a conquest of Palestine—along with Egypt, North Africa, the Levant, Syria, etc—by Arab forces united by their new Islamic religion. The indigenous people of Palestine were no more eradicated by this conquest, than the indigenous peoples of Egypt or Syria. We might compare this with the British conquest of India, where the indigenous people remained a vast majority that would eventually reassert its independence.
The Arab conquerors formed a ruling elite, but the great mass of the peasants were the local people. In the beginning they were almost entirely Christians, and they were not required to convert to Islam. Some did in the first few decades, and over time almost everyone converted. A significant minority of Christians, representing around 10% of the population, did not convert. Similarly, a very small community of Samaritans continued to maintain their identity and their culture.
What did happen was that the Christian majority in the early decades of the Islamic conquest decided to switch from Aramaic to Arabic, and to adopt the identity of the rulers. Everyone in the Islamic empire found it convenient to claim Arab identity: Palestinian Christians became ‘Arab’ Christians, Palestinian Jews became ‘Arab’ Jews, and so on.
The direct descendants of the ancient people of Palestine are still with us. A small percentage of them are to be found among the Diaspora Jews who retained their Jewish identity, but the vast majority of them are to be found among the Palestinians of various religious communities still living in their ancestral lands. They never left. They are still present in the land of their ancestors. They have adapted to other conquests in the past. and will adapt to this latest conquest by Zionist Jews. They are all one people, but have developed different identities during the last 2,000 years of history.
Bad Theology
Many Jewish Zionists (but not all Jews) and many Christian Evangelicals (but not all Christians) combine the bad history seen in Mundine’s essay with equally bad theology. Indeed, the theology may be worse than the bad history since it shapes how people act and excuses crimes against humanity as religious observance. We have seen too much of that in the Middle East these past few decades.
Many Zionists, whether Jewish or Christian, promote a theology which affirms that God gave the land of Palestine to the descendants of Abraham as an eternal gift for their exclusive enjoyment.
Already the problems with this tribal religion masquerading as biblical theology are very apparent.
History does not support such a self-serving claim by the Hellenistic Jews who created the biblical texts that promote this toxic idea.
The ‘descendants of Abraham’ are not limited to the Diaspora Jews arriving in Palestine between the late 1800s and the present time. All the Palestinians can claim the land under such narrative theology.
Even the Bible preserves a ‘minority report’ that understood the relationship between land, people and covenant very differently.
The Bible suggests that the ancestors of the Israelites were from ‘Ur of the Chaldees’, the area we now call Iraq. In this narrative they mostly settled peacefully among the indigenous people, despite the occasional disagreement over pastoral rights, etc.
There is no tradition of conquest here. That will come with the exodus traditions and in the great—and very late—nationalistic epic stretching from Joshua to 2 Kings. Here there is no driving out of the indigenous people. No ethnic cleansing. No separate national states with exclusive economic benefits for its people at the expense of those excluded.
Indeed, in Genesis 12:1–3 Abraham and his extended family are led to Palestine by YHWH, who directs them to settle in the land, to live among the indigenous peoples, and to conduct themselves in such a way that the local people will consider themselves blessed to have Abraham and his descendants living with them.
Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country (eretz) and your kindred and your father’s house to the country (eretz) that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the land (‘adamah) shall be blessed.” (Gen 12:1–3 NRSV modified)
In verse 3, ‘adamah is most often translated as ‘earth’. Imperial theology such as we find dominant in Western Christianity prefers to read this as global evangelisation, but that can hardly have been the intent of the author. In context it can equally be understood as the peoples (families) of the land of Palestine. Abraham and his family now share this land (‘adamah) with the indigenous peoples, to the acknowledged benefit of the first peoples.
Tribal religion based on self-serving fictional narratives of the past encourages imperial theology. This is toxic religion. This is bad theology.
Such theology encourages the powerful to oppress and exploit the poor, among whom we most often find the indigenous peoples in a world of empire.
Bad Politics
When a flawed historical narrative is combined with a tribal theology that justifies military force to achieve the ambitions of one ethnic group over other ethnic groups, we have a ‘perfect storm’ of bad history, bad theology, and bad politics.
The prophetic legacy of the Jewish Scriptures, which Christians find embodied in the person of Jesus (himself a Palestinian Jew in a world of empire) and enacted in his mission, calls empire to account and affirms the universal sovereignty of the God revealed in the biblical narratives, as well as in other sacred traditions.
We need a theology that promotes justice, gives hope, and constrains the predilections of the powerful. We need good news. We need Gospel.
We desperately need a political program that engages critically with the best of our historical and biblical scholarship, rather than one that pampers to popular prejudice in order to secure a tainted victory in a dysfunctional electoral system. Sadly, what we see in many Western societies at the moment is a flight from good history and gospel theology into political programs that enrich the few and enslave the many.
Jesus of Nazareth joins with the prophets of ancient Israel in warning us that such systems of oppression and exploitation will fall under the judgment of God. Bad politics will not stand the test of time. In the end, God’s vision for a just society in which all creation finds blessing is not only better theology, but also good politics and that will create a better history.
Given continuing debates around the Anglican Church of Australia and elsewhere about the status of the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 and the Articles of Religion (commonly called “The Thirty-Nine Articles”) of 1571, it may be timely to publish the brief speech I gave to the 2019 Synod of the Diocese of Grafton in response to the following motion:
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