gregoryjenks

Category: Bible

News and information about biblical studies.

  • A birth certificate for Jesus

    A Birth Certificate for Jesus

    This is a pre-publication extract from Gregory C. Jenks,  Jesus Then and Jesus Now: Looking for Jesus, Finding Ourselves. (Melbourne: Mosaic Press, 2014) Pages 118–22.

    For people researching their family history, the birth certificate of an ancestor is a key document. It preserves valuable information with a presumed degree of accuracy about the person whose birth is being documented, and various relatives of that person at the time of their birth.

    How might we imagine a birth certificate for Jesus? Before we attempt that exercise in holy imagination, a comment about the sources for our information is needed.

    There are a number of items in the Jesus Database that relate to the traditions around the birth of Jesus: 007 Of Davids Lineage; 026 Jesus Virginally Conceived; 367 Birth of Jesus; 368 Genealogy of Jesus; 369 Star of Revelation; 431 Conception of John; and 432 Birth of John.[1] I include the last two items relating to John the Baptist since they are integral parts of Luke’s story about the birth of Jesus.

    As we have already seen, the NT offers confusing and contradictory information about the family of Jesus. This is not surprising, as such information is not the reason for the Gospels being composed. The data is simply transmitted by the tradition without any desire to coordinate with other documents.[2] In brief, the information in the NT can be summarized as follows.

    In the letters of Paul there is just a single reference to the birth of Jesus (Gal 4:4). Jesus is simply described as having been “born of a woman, born under the Law.” Paul’s letters are the earliest Christian documents that have survived, and they offer no hint of any special circumstances attending the conception and childhood of Jesus.

    In the Gospel of Mark not much has changed. As we have already seen, Jesus is described as the son of Mary, and a brother to several siblings. This suggests a typical Jewish family, except that there is no mention of his father in Mark. On the basis of this early Christian Gospel we would never imagine anything unusual about the birth of Jesus.

    In the Gospel of Matthew things begin to change. Now a stepfather appears on the scene in the infancy narratives, along with an explicit denial of any natural paternity. Despite this, Jesus is called “son of the carpenter” in Matthew’s revised version of Mark’s episode from the village of Nazareth. In my view, Matthew is the source for the virginal conception idea, and his Joseph character is surely shaped to evoke the legacy of Joseph the dreamer from Genesis.

    As we have seen already, in the Gospel of John the identity of Jesus’ parents is not a mystery. The crowds claim to know both his parents (John 6:42) and Jesus is explicitly called the “son of Joseph” (John 1:45; 7:40–44). His mother is mentioned several times, but never named. This natural biological conception sits alongside the most sophisticated Christology to be found in the NT, as John celebrates Jesus as the “only begotten Son” of the Father, and the incarnation of the divine Logos (John 1:1–18). This should reassure people who worry that taking Jesus as the natural child of Joseph and Mary will necessarily result in a ‘low’ Christology.

    Finally, in the Gospel of Luke we find our early second-century author reviewing the earlier accounts about Jesus. In Luke 1:1–4 he claims to be familiar with their work and sets himself the task of providing a more accurate account. It is possible that Luke understood his version as correcting and replacing these earlier versions that he considered inadequate to the task. He begins that revisionist task with his version of the birth of Jesus. In the Gospel of Luke Jesus has a more complete family context, including two relatives of his mother, Elizabeth and her priestly husband, Zechariah. Indeed, Luke’s story of Jesus’ conception and birth is closely entwined with the story of the conception and birth of his cousin, John the Baptist (Luke 1:5–2:52).

    As a matter of critical method I give no historical weight to any of the traditions in the infancy narratives, including the motif of an irregular conception of Jesus. Rather, I see these traditions—and especially those in Matthew and Luke—as late additions, and expressing the developing devotion to Jesus around the end of the first century. They provide no additional historical information about the childhood of Jesus or the circumstances of his conception.

    In any case, why would we give any credibility to the idea that Jesus was conceived in anything other than a perfectly normal way for his time and culture? The idea seems only to be derived from the infancy legends in Matthew and Luke, and specifically Matthew.[3] Indeed, we find no hint of anything irregular about the circumstances of Jesus’ birth in Paul, Mark, John or any part of the NT except for Luke and Matthew.

    One possible exception is the comment in John 8:41.

    [Jesus said to them,] “You are indeed doing what your father does.” They said to him, “We are not illegitimate children; we have one father, God himself.”

    This turn in the dispute between Jesus and the Jewish crowd is sometimes understood as an allusion to there being something irregular about Jesus’ conception.[4] Such an irregularity—whether arising from his parents not being married when he was conceived, or his father being someone other than his mother’s husband—would result in him having the status of a ‘mamzer’ (a social outcast).’ I think it is a stretch to connect this verse from the Gospel of John with traditions of Jesus’ alleged status as a mamzer. I also note that the gospels nowhere reflect any sense that Jesus was excluded from full participation in the religious life of his community.[5]

    Most critical scholars reject the miraculous elements of the story, but some would suggest that there was some historical core to the tradition. The idea that the gospels preserve a memory of something irregular or shameful about the circumstances of Jesus’ birth seems to me to be a survival of traditional beliefs rather than a natural interpretation of the biblical texts. While we know very little about Jesus as an adult, and even less about him as a child, it seems clear that the biblical texts themselves do not require a supernatural conception for Jesus.

    In light of the most natural reading of the biblical material, a naturalistic explanation along the following lines seems most probable. Stories about a miraculous conception are best understood as Christological statements rather than reports on Mary’s reproductive history. Indeed, I wonder if we would ever have wondered about the paternity of Jesus were it not for the Gospel of Matthew? It seems that we only contemplate the circumstances around Jesus’ conception, including the mamzer theory, because of the influence of the virginal conception motif introduced by Matthew.

    Matthew represents Isaiah as predicting that a virgin (Greek, parthenos) will conceive and bear a son.[6] This is the term found in the Greek versions of the Jewish Scriptures, but the Hebrew text has ‘almah (maiden, young woman). Most likely, Matthew was working with a testimonium, a list of biblical verses extracted for convenience, as scrolls were not easy documents to consult. The genre is known from examples discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, but Matthew’s list of proof texts seems to have drawn from the Greek version of the Jewish Scriptures.

    Matthew may have been quite unaware that the Hebrew tradition did not use the word for “virgin” but rather a more generic term that describes a young woman eligible for sexual relations.[7] The term does not occur often in the Tanakh, but this example is typical, and hardly suggests a sexual virgin.

    Three things are too wonderful for me;
    four I do not understand:
    the way of an eagle in the sky,
    the way of a snake on a rock,
    the way of a ship on the high seas,
    and the way of a man with a girl (‘almah). (Prov 30:18–19)

    People shaped by our contemporary secular and scientific worldview are generally not disposed to accept stories about a virginal conception as historical, and we therefore consider various alternatives. There are just three options. In the first place, there is the default option of normal conception within a first-century Jewish family system with its traditional patterns of betrothal, marriage, etc. Secondly, there is the option of a normal conception through consensual sexual activity outside of such cultural norms. In addition, there is the possibility of a normal conception as a result of non-consensual sexual violence.[8]

    Either option two or three could have resulted in the child suffering some form of discrimination and loss of social status. This seems to be the core of the mamzer hypothesis. However, there is also the broader question of what evidence we have for the mamzer status in the first few decades of the first century CE—and especially in a remote and extremely small village such as Nazareth must have been. For example, would Mary have been the first or only young woman in that social system to become pregnant before she was in a recognized relationship with her male partner?

    In any case, Luke is certainly unaware of such a tradition. Rather than portray Jesus as a social outcast, Luke has Jesus circumcised according to Jewish tradition (Luke 2:21), presented in the Jerusalem temple (Luke 2:22–24), and even engaging deeply in the religious life of the temple as a twelve year old boy (Luke 2:41–49). In Luke’s imagination, Jesus also has a regular custom of attending prayers at his local synagogue where he even reads from the Scriptures before offering a sermon (Luke 4:16–21). We do not have to take any of these episodes as historical in order to see that Luke entertained no concept of Jesus as a mamzer. For Luke, Jesus is an insider rather than an outsider, and he participates actively in the religious life of his community, as do his followers in the Acts of the Apostles.

    For the record, I think Jesus was probably born in Nazareth as a result of normal sexual relations between his parents. Joseph and Mary subsequently had other children. Joseph does not feature in the tradition outside of the infancy legends even though his name and his paternity are preserved in the Gospel of John. Given the mortality rates at the time, an early demise for Joseph is unremarkable, although Mary seems to have done surprisingly well to survive several pregnancies despite the risks of childbirth in such a society.

    Perhaps we can now attempt to complete the birth certificate for Jesus?

    Parents: Joseph of Nazareth, also known as Joseph son of Jacob (Matt 1:16) and Joseph son of Heli (Luke 3:23); Mary of Nazareth.

    Place of birth: Nazareth.

    Date of birth: unknown, but most likely late in the reign of Herod the Great (37–4 BCE) and certainly not 25 December.

    Siblings: James, Joses, Judas, and Simon, plus at least two sisters.

     

     

    [1]For details see Appendix 3, The Birth of Jesus in the Jesus Database.

    [2] For representative scholarship around these Gospel narratives, see Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah. A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke  (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1977); John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. 1. The Roots of the Problem and the Person, ABRL (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1991); Robert J. Miller, Born Divine: The Births of Jesus and Other Sons of God (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2003); Jane Schaberg, Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Traditions. Expanded Twentieth Anniversary Edition, 2nd ed., Biblical Seminar (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006).

    [3] A close reading of Luke suggests no lack of human paternity, just a providential blessing of the child that Mary will bear once she is married to the man with whom she is already betrothed.

    [4]For one example of this interpretation, see Brown, Raymond E. The Gospel According to John. Introduction, Translation, and Notes. Anchor Bible 29. (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1966), I, 357. For an opposing view, see Miller, Born Divine, 213–15.

    [5] For a different view, with which I disagree, see Bruce D. Chilton, Rabbi Jesus. An Intimate Biography  (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2000).

    [6] See http://www.jesusdatabase.org/index.php?title=026_Jesus_Virginally_Conceived

    [7] For a more detailed discussion of Isaiah 7:14 in Christian interpretation, see Gregory C. Jenks, The Once and Future Bible: An Introduction to the Bible for Religious Progressives (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011). 100-03.

    [8] It is also possible that the mother of Jesus may have conceived him as a result of an involuntary sex act, such as rape by a Roman soldier. However, we have absolutely no evidence for that and we can therefore set it aside as baseless speculation, as Robert Miller also does in Born Divine, 215–16. Roman soldiers would not normally have been present in the territory ruled by Herod and his sons, although Miller (ibid., 220–21) notes that Roman forces were in the vicinity of Nazareth to suppress the rebellion at Sepphoris following the death of Herod in 4 BCE.

  • Jewish Biblical Scholarship

    Contemporary biblical scholarship is mostly non-confessional. In other words, critical scholars are open to insights from all qualified contributors, irrespective of their personal religious affiliation (or lack thereof). The major critical tools will include material written by Anglicans, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Protestants—as well as atheists and agnostics.

    Finding scholarship that is distinctively Jewish (or with any other religious character) is not as easy as one might expect. In most cases the personal religious identity of the author is not identified, but it may sometimes be inferred from their name and/or their academic affiliation. These are not entirely reliable indicators, as a Jewish scholar (for example) may be employed to teach at a Protestant seminary, while many biblical scholars work in secular universities.

    As an aside—and as something we will discuss at another time—let’s note the unresolved issue of how people with a particular religious identity (say, Anglican) might engage with scholarship that is from another religious perspective. This ecumenical and interfaith diversity is actually one of the great gifts of biblical scholarship since WW2, but it becomes more problematic when we are looking for a confessional or theological reading of the Old Testament. For example, is there a distinctive Anglican way of reading the Bible, and should our final interpretation of the Bible be controlled by our confessional location?

    Another factor that complicates this matter is that Jewish scholars writing as and for Jews, tend to work directly with the Hebrew text and to publish their work in Modern Hebrew. That makes it inaccessible for most of us.

    With all that in mind, here are some suggestions for finding contemporary Jewish scholarship that offers critical engagement with the biblical texts and addresses a wider audience than their own Jewish religious community.

    For a Jewish perspective on the Old Testament (excluding the OT Apocrypha or Deuterocanonicals), as well as helpful essays on Jewish approaches to biblical studies see:

    • Berlin, A., Brettler, M.Z., & Fishbane, M. (Eds). (2005). The Jewish Study Bible. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

    Note those three names – Adele Berlin, Marc Zvi Brettler, and Michael Fishbane – and look for other works by them.

    Another significant one-volume Jewish commentary to keep in mind is the revised edition of W. Gunther Plaut, The Torah: A Modern Commentary (1981):

    This  volume by women scholars from the Reformed Judaism tradition is also a valuable resource:

    A Google search for “Jewish biblical scholars” includes the following wikipedia page among its results (more names to look for when seeking Jewish scholarship):

    The major explicitly Jewish Bible commentary series is the JPS Commentary:

     

    The Feminst Companion to the Bible, co-edited by Athalya Brenner, has a number of contributions by Jewish scholars. There is now a second series for this project, but both the first and second series are with consulting.

    A glance down the list of volumes in the Anchor Bible and the Hermeneia commentary series reveals numerous Jewish scholars:

    • Adele Berlin
    • Mordechai Cogan
    • Michael V. Fox
    • Jonathan A. Goldstein
    • Moshe Greenberg
    • Baruch A. Levine
    • Carol L. Meyers
    • Eric M. Meyers
    • Jacob Milgrom
    • George W. E. Nickelsburg
    • Shalom M. Paul
    • William H. C. Propp
    • Jack M. Sasson
    • E. A. Speiser
    • Michael E. Stone
    • Marvin A. Sweeney
    • Hayim Tadmor
    • Moshe Weinfeld

    This article has tended to focus on Jewish scholarship that examines the biblical and post-biblical Jewish texts, but there are also Jewish scholars who focus on NT studies, including:

    • Rami Arav
    • David Flusser
    • Paula Fredriksen
    • Richard Freund
    • Samuel T. Lachs
    • Amy-Jill Levine
    • S. Safrai
    • Alan F. Segal
    • M. Stern
    • Emmanuel Tov
    • Geza Vermes

    The following resource is a good place to begin when seeking to access Jewish scholarship on the New Testament:

    Finally, it is worth mentioning that there are online biblical studies resources that offer a Jewish perspective, although these tend to offer traditional rabbinic materials, including the work of Medieval scholars such as Rashi (1040 – 1105 CE):

    [This information was initially created for students in my class, “Introduction to OT Studies”, at St Francis Theological College, but may be of wider interest. It will be updated from time to time as I become aware of further works by Jewish biblical scholars. Your suggestions of additional names to add to this page are very welcome!]

  • Why bother with the Old Testament

    A sermon for the ‘Debate the Preacher’ series at St John’s Anglican Cathedral, Brisbane on Sunday, 2 February 2014.

    It has fallen to me to begin this new series of ‘Debate the Preacher’ as we explore the significance of the ‘Old Testament’ for us today. Over the four Sundays of February we shall have an opportunity to hear different scholars from St Francis Theological College offer perspectives on the contributions that this part of the Bible makes to our lives today.

    Speaking of perspectives, what are we to make of the title for this series? How do we imagine the title to be punctuated? To put it another way, is our topic a question or an argument?

    Have you come here this evening expecting to be told why you should actually bother with the OT? Or have you come to hear someone tell you it is OK not to bother with that part of the Bible? Those are very different perspectives and we can signal the difference by the way we punctuate the sentence. 

    So whether you have come to seek release from the challenge of reading the OT, or seeking to be persuaded that this is actually something you should do, we have each come with some assumptions. We also come from particular contexts and life experiences. All of this will shape our perspectives, and meaning is largely constructed through the perspective of the interpreter. You may find what I say confronting or challenging, traditional or revisionist, helpful or a waste of time. What I will have said will be the same, but your perspective will largely determine what you make of my words.

    And then to the debate after the service ends …

    Defining our terms

    One of the first challenges we may face when thinking about the OT is which set of books is  intended, and what is the best way to name them these days. We can start with the latter issue since that opens the way for the deeper issue of which texts comprise the OT.

    It is common these days to find Christian people seeking to avoid the term, ‘Old Testament’. In its place we typically find terms such as ‘Hebrew Bible’, or ‘Jewish Scriptures’. There are good reasons for doing that, as well as even stronger reasons—in my mind—not to do so.

    The positive reasons for dropping the label ‘Old Testament’ begin with the unfortunate perception that ‘Old’ implies ‘no longer of value’. In a consumer culture obsessed by the quest for the latest new thing, clearly a ‘New’ Testament is better than an ‘Old’ Testament. Quite apart from the age profile of the average Anglican congregation, one might expect such an argument to have little appeal in Anglican circles. We value tradition and do not chase after the latest new thing.

    More insidiously, ‘Old Testament’ can suggest a supersessionist attitude towards Jews and their religion, and reinforce latent Christian anti-Semitism. The traditional name for these books within the Bible that we share with Jews does tend to imply that the religion centred around those books is an earlier and less-developed version of the latest ‘religious operating system’ that we enjoy as Christians.

    On this side of the Holocaust, Christians are rightly sensitive to anything that smacks of supersessionism or excludes Jews as the despised other. For many people, calling these books the ‘Hebrew Bible’ or the ‘Jewish Scriptures’ is an overdue recognition of our debt to Judaism and of the historical reality that two-thirds of the Christian Bible belongs first of all to the Jews.

    However, despite my sympathy with all these arguments, I do not accept the fashion of re-badging two-thirds of our Bible in this way. In my view the Christian scriptures known as the ‘Old Testament’ are related to the Jewish scriptures, perhaps better described as the Tanakh, but are not to be confused with them.

    The reason for this is very simple, and it is connected with the fact that there is no such thing as ‘the Christian Bible’, but rather a great many different variants of the Christian Bible. The collection of biblical writings that passes as ‘the Bible’ for most Westeners these days is not the ancient Bible of Christianity, but a novel form of the Bible created at the time of the European Reformation for the use of Protestant faith communities in NW Europe.

    Up until the Reformation—and therefore for more than one thousand years—the normative form of the Christian Bible was an enlarged version of the Old Testament together with the commonly-accepted books of the New Testament. The Christian OT derived from the ancient Greek version of the Jewish Scriptures, and included a dozen or so additional writings not included in the normative Hebrew version of the Jewish Bible. These were parallel and competing versions of the Jewish Bible, until the Protestants decided to adopt the Jewish set of books for their Old Testament as part of their protest against Rome. In the East, of course, there were none of these internal debates over the contents and form of the Bible, and the ancient Greek Bible with its larger OT continues to be the canonical text of the Orthodox religious communities.

    When the Protestant Reformers took upon themselves to reshape the OT within the Christian Bible they only half completed the job. They deleted the books found only in the Greek version, but kept the remaining books in the same sequence as found in the Septuagint Greek and the Latin Vulgate versions. The end result was a Protestant OT that contained only the books found in the Tanakh, but arranged them in the traditional Christian order that differs significantly from the Jewish arrangement.

    That was not simply a sloppy job. It actually created a third form of the OT, even if it is one that most Western people mistake for the original Bible. We now have a Jewish set of Scriptures with 22 books arranged in three sections, a Catholic/Orthodox Old Testament with around 52 books arranged in five sections, and a Protestant Old Testament with 39 books also arranged in the same five sections. These are not the only variations, but they are the major ones and suffice for our purposes this evening.

    Except when I am intending to refer to the Jewish Scriptures (in which case I use the term, Tanakh), I therefore insist on using ‘Old Testament’ for the first two-thirds of my Christian Bible. There is an ancient and obvious link between the Christian Old Testament and the Jewish Tanakh, but they are not the same document. What I am speaking about this evening is not the role of the Tanakh in the life of the Christian community, but the role of Old Testament.

    In doing that I am conscious that my OT may not be the same as yours. That is most likely because I am using the ancient Christian Old Testament while you may be using a Protestant edition of the OT that deliberately choose to exclude a dozen or writings that had been part of the biblical inheritance of Christians since the first century. Those so-called ‘apocryphal’ books continue to form part of the Bible for Anglicans, Orthodox and Roman Catholics.

    As an aside, let me just add that this diversity in the forms of the Bible does not faze me. In fact, I appreciate that diversity and I claim it as part of my biblical authority to hold opinions that someone else may not approve. If the Great Church cannot even agree on what books constitute the Bible, then I think I can cut myself a bit of slack on a number of other disputed beliefs and practices as well.

    Why is the place of the OT in Christianity up for debate?

    Given the historical aspects of the Old Testament as ancient part of the biblical legacy of Christianity, why are we beginning this conversation over a month of Sundays? The reason is, of course, that all of us feel some degree of discomfort when engaging with these ancient Jewish texts that now form two-thirds of our Bible.

    Let me absolutely plain here: these are Jewish texts. They constitute the largest part of the Christian Bible, but they are not Christian texts. They are canonical texts for Christians, but in accepting them in that way we are adopting into our context documents that come from another very different context.

    Out of our desire to acknowledge and respect the Jewishness of these texts we may feel that there is something awkward about even using them these days as Christians. Just as we would no longer consider it appropriate (I hope) for a group of Christians to celebrate a Passover Seder during Holy Week, should we stop using their Scriptures and just make do with our own? For reasons that will be covered later, this is not my view; but it is one with which I have some sympathy.

    We sometimes hear it said that we are a ‘NT church’ and therefore should not pay as much attention to the Old Testament. Indeed a colleague said exactly that at Clergy Summer School last month. It is almost as if a biblical passage from the OT only has relevance for us if we can find a NT text to affirm it or modify it in some way. This is a view with which I have almost no sympathy, and it drives me to affirm that we are a ‘biblical church’, rather than a NT church. Not a ‘Bible Church’, mind you; but a biblical church! There is a difference even if we cannot parse it out this evening.

    Part of the reason for this series that we are beginning tonight is that we do sense some profound differences between OT and NT. This is right to do, and far better than reading the OT so thoroughly through our Christian perspectives that these ancient Jewish texts only speak with a Christian accent. But a growing awareness of those differences, and the need to redress almost 2,000 years of Christian anti-Semitism, can cause us to lose our nerve when it comes to reading these texts.

    The ‘problem’ of the Old Testament

    There are a great many complexities and challenges about reading the OT as Christians, just as there are when Jewish people seek to read the same texts as Jews. I have rehearsed some of these in other places, so I will not recite them again here.

    Suffice to say that the length and complexity of the OT, and its cultural distance from our time and place—as well as its uncritical acceptance of violence, patriarchy, gender discrimination—all combine to make these texts problematic for Christians in the twenty-first century. This is compounded by issues around literal readings of these ancient pre-modern texts, and perceived conflicts with history and science.

    The power of the Old Testament

    Rather than focus on the things that make it tricky for us to use the OT, I want to sketch some of the positive reasons why we should make the best use we can of these ancient Jewish texts that constitute such a large proportion of our Christian Bibles.

    First of all, the OT provides historical depth to our tradition. Even when the events themselves are not historical, these are ancient stories and ancient songs that derive from the historical experience of our ancestors in the faith. Their contexts were different from ours, and their beliefs about God are not the same as ours, but they represent the mountain spring from which the river of faith flows. The faith that matters to us did not begin with Jesus and was certainly not created in the last few hundred years. It has ancient roots deep behind historical memory. Some of us are privileged to visit the biblical lands and dig up the past with our own hands, but for most of us the OT is our birth certificate as people of faith.

    Secondly, the OT simply covers a larger sample of life and holiness than NT offers. Most likely we can account for the creation of all of the NT writings within about 100 years of Easter. Some would argue that much less time is needed, but I prefer this is more modest claim. During that one hundred years and across the limited range of texts gathered into the NT, there is a much smaller sample of life and faith than we find in the OT. Many issues are just not addressed directly in the NT, but we find texts within the OT that do so—and they invite us into an engagement with Scripture (and with the Spirit of Christ).

    A third reason for bothering with these ancient Jewish texts in the Christian Bible is that these are the formative texts of the Western religious tradition. In saying that I am conscious that these are actually ‘Eastern’  texts, even though they have shaped the Western tradition so deeply. If we want to understand our own cultural tradition we simply have to engage with the writings of the Old Testament.

    Far more than a cultural legacy is involved at this point. These are challenging spiritual texts: the Law, the Prophets, the Poems. The Law invites us to imagine ourselves in a covenant with God, and it is a communal covenant rather than simply a private quest for salvation. The Prophets challenge us to be authentic about living out the implications of that covenant, and to focus on the things that really matter: mercy, justice, humility. And the Poems of Israel provide us with a songsheet for the human soul as we pass through times of success and times of tragedy.

    The danger of a Christianity without the Old Testament

    The idea of ceasing to bother with the Old Testament is not a new one. It was a very real option for Christians in the middle of the second century. By that time a majority of Christians were not of Jewish descent, and some Christians considered too close an association with Judaism to be a negative element following successive Jewish revolts against Roman rule. Indeed, some Jews were also eager to dissociate themselves from Christianity and sharpen the divide between the two religions.

    Marcion (ca. 85–160 CE) was a Christian leader from what today we could call northern Turkey. He was something of a lightning rod for those Christians seeking to discard the Jewish aspects of Christianity, and get rid of the Old Testament. While often represented as a heretic and trouble-maker, Marcion may actually have been a traditionalist who argued for a view that was contested in his own time. However that may have been, the debate that Marcion brought to focus with his publication of the very first edition of the New Testament, led ultimately to the NT as we know it today—and to the affirmation that the OT is an essential part of the Christian Bible.

    We owe Marcion a deep debt, and especially for his unintended consequence of making us claim our Jewish heritage as an essential element of Christianity.

    To discard the OT from our Bibles—or even just from our lectionaries—would be to suffer a loss of access to these profoundly spiritual texts. Can we really contemplate a Bible without the Law? A Bible without the Prophets of Israel? A Bible without Job or the Psalms?

    Such a truncated Bible would mean we could never understand either Jesus or Paul. They were both Jews, of course. Their Bible was the Tanakh, or—in Paul’s case—the Septuagint.

    Worse still, if we are not willing to ‘bother’ with the OT we shall end up with an excessively spiritualised and individualised Christianity. ‘Me and Jesus’ too often substitutes for the biblical faith that calls us to participate in intentional covenantal communities of faithfulness. The OT is absolutely essential for a Christianity that offers more than fire insurance or get-out-of-jail cards for isolated individuals.

    Finally, and most importantly, a Christianity without the OT will lead us back to Auschwitz. Christian anti-Semitism is fed by self-serving Christian rejection of the Jews and their Bible. A Christianity without the OT is not Christianity at all, but a Jesus cult that promotes a toxic religious message that is bad for everyone, and fatal for the Jews.

    So, yes, I think we should bother with the Old Testament!

  • The Occupation of the Bible

    Wednesday, 20 November, 1100–1230

    Text for an introductory presentation to a panel at the Ninth International Sabeel Conference, Jerusalem on Wednesday, 20  November 2013. [video]

    The conference organisers indicated as follows:

    What are some of the common ways to misinterpret the Bible and how can Christians avoid them? Since we are all ‘prisoners’ of our own epoch, culture, national identity, gender, experiences, etc., how is it possible “to hear the word of the Lord” without bias? Give examples of mistaken hermeneutics and also helpful hermeneutics. Why do biblical hermeneutics matter? Is the Palestinian experience of biblical interpretation unique, and if so, in what sense? And does this mean Palestine must have unique hermeneutics, too? What can non-Palestinians learn from the Palestinian experience for their own interpretation of Scripture? Does the Palestinian Christian experience of scriptural interpretation in its particular socio-political context have something of value to offer to the oppressed Buddhists of Tibet; the Kurds of Iran, Iraq and Turkey; and the Uighurs of China?

    In terms of the place that I come from, one of the things that I have learned to do when speaking in Australia is always to bring greetings from the church—and from the Christian communities—in Palestine. But when I am somewhere else, like other Australians—and especially indigenous Australians—I find myself discovering a deeper sense of our own country, or unique place in the world. I am learning—as someone who has been out of my own ‘country’ for most of my adult life—really to appreciate how the Christian Scriptures, are used (and also misused in may ways) in terms of Palestine, Israel, and the conflict.

    I begin from the assumption, of course, that the Bible has immense authority for this conversation. We have already begun to explore that with the earlier panel this morning.

    Because of the authority that the Scriptures have—however we understand that authority—the Bible will inform and will shape the ways that we address issues of justice, peace, and reconciliation for all the communities that live in this land.

    So far as process is concerned, my working assumption is that this will require an active and open-ended engagement with the sacred texts. It will also require us to be involved with the historical processes that have led to the present situation in this land and, of course, as we have already heard—I think from each of the speakers in the previous panel—we need to be paying attention to our own perspectives, our own locations, and our own point of view.

    I actually think we had a fine example of that in the sermon that Azziz Naim gave yesterday in the Melkite church. However, I want to go out on a limb a little bit and indicate one of the places where I would probably differ significantly from some of the other members of the panel, and particularly the previous panel. I am one of those liberal or progressive scholars who look at the way Scripture functions in terms of the Palestinian/Israel conflict. This is one way of working around the issue of how the Scripture impacts on the claims made for land by both Jewish and Palestinian communities.

    So as the sermon began I made a note to myself: This could be hard. While I love Azziz very much, I could see that he was going to take the story very literally. And that is not what I would do. As the sermon unfolded I was delighted, then more delighted, and more pleased. I found myself drawn along. I loved it and entirely agreed with the way that the text was unfolded. I mention that because saying that I do not begin with the assumption that the Bible is simply a record of something that happened can frighten the camels; it can scare the horses. Choose whichever metaphor works for your culture!  I could be putting myself out on the end of a plank with the pirates about to saw through at the end closer to the ship.

    But even if we start from different positions as we engage with Scripture, my experience has been—and this perhaps goes to the question of the role of the Spirit in this whole process—no matter what position we are starting from, if we are engaging the Scriptures with hearts and minds that are open, then God is able to speak to us.

    So what I saw yesterday was someone taking the Gospel story at face value in a way that I would have difficulty doing, and yet someone who was deftly avoiding some of the traps that I might imagine to be there when people say they are taking the Bible literally, at face value.

    What I saw yesterday, and what I am committed to myself, is a way of engaging with Scripture that offer the Bible the best of our critical engagement. We are called to love God not only with heart and might and strength, but also with our minds. I believe we are called to engage with Scripture in that same diverse way: with the best of our mind, the best of our soul, the best of our heart, and the best of our strength.

    The Bible, I suggest, deserves and requires the best of our critical engagement, rather than naive readings which perhaps are predicated on the assumption that we should defer to Scripture. I think Scripture—like God in the book of Job—is strong enough, powerful enough, and robust enough, to take our questions, to take our confrontation, and then to take us further into the journey that God has for us to make.

    So with all that in mind, I am taking this panel to be an invitation to explore some of the ways that the Bible has been exploited to justify the occupation of Palestine to the benefit of some people and the simultaneous detriment of other people, rather than serving—as I think it could and should—as a prophetic text that might challenge both the occupiers and the dispossessed.

    This gets me thinking about the significance of the location and agenda of the reader when using Scripture in the context of occupation. Clearly a Jewish settler would read the Bible differently than a displaced Palestinian, and neither would read the Bible from the same perspective as me. I am a white, male, Anglican, academic, priest—and a colonialist, or at least a descendant of colonialists and someone one who benefits from the dislocation and displacement of the indigenous peoples of my own country.

    There other variables as well, including those between someone like myself who reads the Bible from a consciously critical and humanistic perspective, and others who may read the same Bible from different perspectives—some of which we have heard this morning. Again, my experience has been that beginning with different perspectives does not prevent us from discovering common ground and hearing common wisdom.

    I would lead into our discussion this morning, by thinking about how the Bible’s three different ‘worlds’ are captured in this occupation of the Bible. The worlds I am thinking of are: the world behind the text (the historical realities that presume to be behind the text, how we imagine the ancient past), the world within the text (the stories, the context of the Bible as it is), and the world in front of the text (those places where we are as we engage with Scripture).

    The World Behind the Text

    I think of the historical dynamics of ancient Palestine that witnessed the emergence of ancient Israel and Judah, and—at some point in that process—the suppression of non-Yahwistic Canaanite communities with their rich human cultural fabric. As an academic, and as a person of Christian faith and a follower of Jesus, I find myself wondering how much of those ghastly stories of ethnic cleansing and religious violence reflect events that actually happened. To what extent, on the other hand, do they represent the imagination of later religious scribes—the Taliban of ancient Jerusalem—who were expressing how they felt about their experience of marginalization and their threatened fragile existence, and found comfort in fantasies about total conquest, excluding the other, ethnic cleansing, and the belief that God gave this land to me and my own kind (and no-one else).

    So there is a whole set of issues about claims that are made and assumptions that are embraced in terms of the historical veracity of the biblical narrative. You might have already picked up, in case I have not made it clear enough, that I am actually a minimalist and I think there is very little historical value to the biblical narratives. (So get the tar and feathers ready!)

    The World Within the Text

    The second world is, of course, the world within the text. This is the story world that Naim and I both find in Luke chapter 4. Whether or not there was a synagogue in Nazareth for Jesus to attend during the first three decades of the first century, and whether Jesus was literate or not, is beside the point. These are narratives by first and second-century Christians, and the sermon created for Jesus by Luke now serves as a sacred text that calls us to faithfulness.

    Real or imagined, the ethnic violence of the Bible—whether we think of the Old Testament or the apocalyptic fantasies of the NT—inscribes and reinforces patterns of fear, suspicion, and violence that are presumed to have divine legitimisation. The Bible drips with blood, whether that be the blood of Jesus (whose death is often understood in Christian tradition as expiating an angry—and potentially violent and dangerous—God), the blood of the little ones who are crushed by empire, or the blood of those whose religion is different from ours and are thus doomed to destruction by our God. The book of Revelation is certainly a classic text in that respect.

    The World Before (in front of) the Text

    Then, of course, there is the world in front of the text. This is the world in which we live, the world in which we attempt to shape lives that are holy and true.

    Looking at the text from where I stand and from among the communities to which I belong, I discover that I am in a very ambiguous space. I belong to a religion that has incarcerated, tortured and killed its opponents, whether they be internal dissidents or external infidels. My religious community has drunk deeply from the well of violence. I am a citizen of a nation that has dispossessed and literally hunted down the indigenous people of my own land. I benefit from an economic system that continues to use violence to sustain itself.

    So neither the text nor this reader of the text is innocent. Yet both are open, all the same, to be used by God, and to serve God’s purposes of justice and peace. The occupation of Bible can come to an end, just as the Bible can encourage us to resist the occupation of Palestine until it also comes to an end.

  • Why visit Israel and Palestine?

    Yesterday I was asked by a journalist for a couple of lines about why I visit Israel so often, and what it means to me as a person of faith?

    For me, the most important thing about taking students to work on the dig at Bethsaida is the transformation that happens in their own lives, and in their appreciation of Scripture.

    I teach Biblical Studies, but to take a busload of students with me to Israel is to teach in the best possible classroom. The Bible comes alive for people who have been to Israel, walked by the Sea of Galilee, and stayed overnight in Nazareth. The outer realities of the experience are the study tour requirements, but the heart of the experience is pilgrimage: a risky journey to a new place from which we return but are never quite the same!

    On an even more personal level, I love the Galilee, and simply feel very much at home in Nazareth. Jerusalem is the great holy city for Jews, Christians, and Muslims; but Nazareth is the town of Jesus and very much my alternative home.

    As a Palestinian Jew from the Galilee, Jesus lived in the border lands at the edges of the Land of Israel. My Jewish and Palestinian friends live on the contested borders of their ancient homeland and their contemporary identities. As a boy from Lismore (on the northern rivers of New South Wales) who has now lived most of my life (across the state border) in Brisbane, I resonate with those ancient and contemporary borderland dynamics.

    I wrote about this in an essay for a collection of studies—about the intersection of Bible, borders, and belonging—being published early in 2014. “The sign of Jonah: Reading Jonah on the boundaries and from the boundaries.” in Bible, Borders, Belongings: Engaged Readings from Oceania, edited Jione Havea, David Neville, and Elaine Wainwright, 223–38. Semeia Studies. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014. (The front matter, with table of contents and details of the contributors, is already available online.)

    As an Anglican Christian, I live in the religious no man’s land between Catholics and Protestants, and as an Australian Anglican I belong to a church seeking to find a fresh identity far from the ancient privileges of England. I live in some pretty edgy places. So do my Jewish and Palestinian friends, and so did Jesus.

  • Does the Bible have a future?

    Thursday, 21 November, 0900–1030

    Text for an introductory presentation to a panel at the Ninth International Sabeel Conference, Jerusalem on Thursday,21  November 2013. [video]

    The conference organisers indicated as follows:

    This panel discussion arises out of the following critical awareness:

    Since the Bible has been used to support highly destructive moments of human history such as theft, slavery, murder, assassination, war, genocide, population transfers, forced conversions, and environmental degradation, perhaps the Bible is too dangerous for the masses. Maybe we should take it away from the laity and only allow it to be read and interpreted by professionals? Yet neither political leaders nor the church’s anointed have been free of biblically justified atrocities. Perhaps the Bible should be counter-balanced by other authorities such as scientific findings and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Can the Bible be redeemed and used as a source for human advancement, and if so, how?


    This panel has its theme, “Does the Bible have a future?” This is a very different kind of topic, and it plays into my own research and writing about the “once and future Bible.” It could be a theological diversion from the challenges of justice and peace, but perhaps it is also about asking what kind of ways we might imagine the Bible contributing to justice and peace, rather than promoting and endorsing violence and oppression.

    Let begin by noting a simple but significant error in the title of our panel and of our conference.

    The title refers to “the Bible,” but there is not ONE BIBLE. Rather there are many Bibles, as Yohanna reminded us yesterday morning.

    There is more than one form of the Bible and one expects there always will be, just as there is more than one expression of church. That diversity of Bible extends beyond the formal differences of content between Anglican, Armenian, Catholic, Coptic, Ethiopian, Jewish, Orthodox, Protestant and Syriac Bibles, since — even when we have the same set of books in our Bible — we may choose to read some parts while ignoring other parts.

    So much of the power talk around the Christian Scriptures speaks as if the Bible was a single thing, that exists in one agreed form and through which God speaks with one voice. I suggest that is simply not so. The Bible is diverse and God speaks through the Bible in many different voices.

    Yet so often our language about the Bible reflects an assumption that we all mean the Protestant Bible, as it emerged in NW Europe at the time of the Reformation. That particular form of the Bible is the Bible most of us know, but it is not the Bible of the Catholic Church nor of the Eastern rite churches. It is the Bible of the North Atlantic Theological Organisation, but it is not the only Bible. It is not the ancient Bible. And it is not the best Bible.

    I suggest, with as much humility and grace as I can muster, that the first thing about the future of the Bible that we need to embrace is that the Bible has always existed in multiple forms and that it will continue to do so. Our desire for certainty seduces us into thinking of the Bible as a single thing that speaks with one voice, and that plays into theological power games that — as we see in this land, but also in other lands — can have unjust outcomes for the people of the land, the am-haaretz, the little ones of God.

    So I have no doubt that Bible has a future, even if I find it hard to predict just what those futures of the Bible may be like.

    A further preliminary response to this topic would to ask why are we discussing this theological topic rather than a real topic? My own response to that comment is that, in my view, an authentic Christian response to occupation, dispossession and violence must be derived from our understanding of Jesus, and for that I need the Bible. Not because I will ever take the Bible literally, but because I must always take it seriously.

    So let me clear at the outset that I have no doubt that the Bible has a future. Indeed, I am sure that the Bible does have a future, but I do wonder whether it will be a future that serves the powers that be or a future in which the Bible functions as a prophetic text, calling us all to repentance, renewal and action?

    Let me also say that how this is future takes shape rests with the communities of faith for which the Bible serves as sacred text. Academics will not determine the future of the Bible. That will be determined by the people of God, in all their diversity.

    While I am sure that that the Bible has a future, I am not sure whether the future of the Bible will be toxic for humanity or a good thing for us all.

    For sure, I suggest, the toxicity of the Bible rises in direct correlation to its integration with the powers that be — whether those powers be inside the church or outside the church.

    Not every reading of the Bible is healthy and good for us. I wish I could promise that the future of the Bible is one characterised by life-affirming readings, but I fear that will not be the case. People of power will always find it expedient to co-opt and exploit the Bible for their own ends, while evading its prophetic claim upon our lives. In this respect, I have found the contributions by Nancy Cordoso Pereira to be challenging and transformative for me.

    As we reflect on this further, I would affirm that the Bible — in its diverse forms and with its diverse voices — is a key text for both victims and perpetrators, and will continue to be so unless we can change the ways in which people read the Bible. This suggests at least two different futures for the Bible: one that assists victims to use it more effectively, and another that disarms the Bible so that it cannot be used as a weapon of fear and hate.

    The trick is not to change or domesticate the Bible, but to change and empower the readers.

    So I invite you to think about the two sides of the coin for the future of the Bible: How to make it work better for the little people, and how to make it work not so well for (and even against) the powerful people.

    Some of the strategies will have both outcomes, so they are high value options.

    These would include:

    • Improving biblical literacy within the churches and in the wider community
    • Accessing contemporary critical biblical scholarship
    • Recognizing diversity within the Bible and attending to the minority voices
    • Acknowledging the dark side of the Bible
    • Celebrating the positive side of the Bible

    One key element will be reading the Bible contextually:

    • In its ancient historical contexts
    • Through its history of interpretation across the centuries
    • In our own contexts now
    • In the context of scientific insights and human rights values
    • In our multi faith context (as one religion among many, not as THE only true religion)

    If we can make progress across these issues, then for sure the Bible will not only have a future but it will be a future that brings healing and hope to all people