More on "You Didn't Build It..."

I reprinted some of the "Voice out of the Whirlwind" passage from the Book of Job the other day (in response to Mitt Romney's claim that he sprang forth ex nihilo).  Here's an interesting gloss on the passage, in the context of the Bible as a whole:

The chief problem raised by God's answer to Job (chap. 38-41) is to relate the panorama it paints of God's amazing creativity to the issues the interlocutors have been wrestling with.

In opening his speech (chaps. 38-39), God exchanges roles with Job; till now, Job has demanded answers from God; now God sets unanswerable questions to Job about the foundations of the universe.  Does Job know anything about the fashioning and operation of the cosmic elements--earth, sea, the underworld, and darkness  Has he knowledge of, can he control, the celestial phenomena of snow, hail, thunder, and lightening, or the constellations?  From these spectacles of nature God turns to wilderness animals and their provisioning: the lions,  who lie in ambush for their prey; the raven, whose young cry to 'God for food; the mountain goats, whose birth only God attends; the wild ass, who roam far form civilization; the wild ox, who mocks man's attempt to subjugate him; the silly ostrich; the war horse, with his uncanny lust for battle; the soaring falcon and eagle, who sight their prey from afar.  None owes man anything; the ways of none are comprehended by him.

How different this survey of creation is from that of Genesis 1 or the hymn to nature of Psalm 104.  Here man is incidental--mainly an impotent foil to God.  In Genesis 1 (and its echo, Ps. 8) teleology pervades a process of creation whose goal and crown is man. All is directed to his benefit; the earth and its creatures are his to rue.  In Psalm 104 nature exhibits a providential harmony of which man is an integral part.  But the God of Job celebrates each and and product of his creation for itself, an independent value attesting his power and grace.  Job, representing mankind, stands outside the picture, displacing from its center a remote periphery.  He who would form a proper judgment of God cannot confine himself to his relations with man, who is, after all, only one of an astonishing panoply of creatures created and sustained in ways unfathomable to the human mind.

Instead of confessing his ignorance and, by implicaiton, his presumptuousness, in judging God, Job replies (40:3-5) that he is too insignificant to reply; that he can say no more.  This response, as Saadya Gaon observed in the tenth century, is ambiguous: "When one interlocutor says to his partner, 'I can't answer you,' it may mean that he acquiesces in the other's position, equivalent of 'I can't gainsay the truth'; or it may mean he feels overborne by his partner, equivalent to 'How can I answer you when you have the upper hand?'"

--Moishe Greenberg, "Job," in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode eds.,  

The Literary Guide to the Bible 282-304, 297-8 (1987)

 I first ran across the passage from Job not in the Bible (it wasn't part of the Sunday School curriculum) but in Edith Sitwell's Planet and Glow-worm (1944), sandwiched in between passages from those other classics of wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon. It occurs to me now that the venue I've most frequently heard (of) it, is the funeral, perhaps most often of a non-practicing Jew.

Folk Science and Science (Documentary Hypothesis Dept.)

Here's one that probably has no larger meaning, but it catches my fancy (and if any reader does extract a larger meaning, they'll get a special Underbelly medallion with oak leaf cluster).  Anyway, the subject is "science," versus bogus

"folk" science, as in "whatever passes for science in Texas or Louisiana. We all know the drills: scholarly/academic/scientific opinion crystallizes around some core complex of knowledge, only to get swept up in a prairie fire of opposition from those who say it is contrary to sharia law unBiblical, an affront to religion and an insult common sense. So climate change, so evolution and I'm sure we're not done yet. Beleaguered scientists draw their wagons into a circle, only to find that they have fanned the flames of rage and rancor among the insulted.
No news here folks, move along--except that it hits me that there is a curious precedent for the underlying discontinuity that drives these conflicts, much closer to the religious homeland. I'm thinking of the so-called "Documentary Hypothesis." Anyone who troubles to read this blog will recognize (at least in rough outline) the content, if not the tagline. I'm talking about a body of insights concerning the nature and provenance of the Bible.

Specifically by hallowed first principles, the Bible is the Word of God and in particular, the first five books. the Pentateuch, were (dictated, written down) by His servant Moses, he who led the chosen people to the Promised Land.

I gather that serious scholars found reason to doubt the single-author principle as long ago at the 11th Century.  I'm told that the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the 17th Century was perhaps the first noteworthy person to say flat out that Moses did not write the majority of the Pentateuch.

Flash forward to the end of the 19th Century; we have a German "theologian" (heh!), Julius Wellhausen, who assembles the core of the "hypothesis" of which I speak.  Integrating the work of distinguished predecessors, Wellhausen allocates the authorship of the Pentateuch among four different authors, identified by convention as J, E, D and P.   From this, much follows: not only that the Pentateuch is the work of multiple hands (working at multiple times) but that the whole of the Bible is the accretion of work by countless contributors extending,  not incidentally, over a vast reach of time.

I lay these facts out in a tendentious manner to make an important point. Specifically, this is old news. The "documentary hypothesis" has been around for a century or more. It may have been radical in its time: Wellhausen was startled enough at his own insight that he resigned his academic chair of theology (he found employment elsewhere). But over time, the "documentary hypothesis" (allowing for differences in particulars) has become the very bedrock of received opinion among students of religion. Richard Elliott Friedman, perhaps its most visible modern expositor, says:

At present [sc. 1987], ... there is hardly a biblical scholar in the world actively working on the problem who would claim that the Five Books of Moses were written by Moses--or by any one person. ...[T]he hypothesis ... continues to be the starting point of research, no serious student of the Bible can fail to study it, and no other explanation of the evidence has come close to challenging it.

--Richard Elliott Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible 28 (1987) 

So why am I spending energy on what is, by now, the religious equivalent of an ivy-covered monument?  Perhaps you anticipate me here: my point is that I suspect there are millions--literally--of self-professed Christians (and, I suspect also Jews, though I know less about them) who simply haven't got the word: who continue to believe, insofar as they consider the issue at all, that the Bible is a single self-contained immutable whole.  In other words, we have precisely the same discontinuity over the Bible that we see in politics over evolution and global warming: "respectable" scholarship on one side, the mass of believers on the other.

There is of course at least one notable difference between the discontinuity over Biblical authorship and that over evolution or global warming.  That is: over Biblical authorship, the flames have never glowed so brightly as they do over evolution and global warming.  Well: in the early days, proponents of the new view met resistance: there were heresy trials, people were stripped of employment and suchlike. But no one was  burned at the stake (okay, I grant that nobody has been burned at the stake over Darwinism either, though over global warming, I suppose you could say we are all at risk).  

Not exactly sure why we've had so little uproar over the authorship issue.  My impression is that the job of a professor of theology is to try to let the students down easy, to try to introduce them to the adult world without too abrupt a shock.  Aside from that, I take it neither side has any strong incentive to tell the masses; theology is not, at the end of the day, all that important.

Obama's Foreign Doctrine

Politico, 7/17/12

Romney singled out a line from Obama’s stump speech on Friday in Virginia, attacking the president for saying no one is successful on their own, calling it “insulting” to all entrepreneurs.

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help,” Obama said in Roanoke, Va. “There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own.”

The crowd of about 1,000 booed when Romney quoted a line, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” (Update: But there's this).

 Book of Job, 6c-4c BCE

38 Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said:

“Who is this who darkens counsel
By words without knowledge?
Now prepare yourself like a man;
I will question you, and you shall answer Me.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements?
Surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
To what were its foundations fastened?

Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy? ...


“Have you commanded the morning since your days began,
And caused the dawn to know its place,
That it might take hold of the ends of the earth,
And the wicked be shaken out of it? ...

“Have you entered the springs of the sea?
Or have you walked in search of the depths?
Have the gates of death been revealed to you?
Or have you seen the doors of the shadow of death?
Have you comprehended the breadth of the earth?


Tell Me, if you know all this.

[Odd to hear someone from perhaps the most communal of all American religions--and one with an exemplary record of concern for the poor-embrace a posture of nihilistic individualism.]

The Things that you're Liable to Read in the Bible...

Note to self: I think I may have to go back and (re?)  read some of the Biblical political narrative, particularly the stuff about David and Solomon.  I've been curious for some time about the "true history" of the Bible--how and where it came into being, that sort of thing.  For the moment, I'm pretty much sold on the view that it crystallizes shortly after 722 BC when the Assyrian Sargon II smashes his mailed fist down on on Israel driving (one may surmise) a horde of refugees down into poor, forlorn, infertile, left-behind Judah.  The refugees brought with them who knows what sorts of texts; they fell into the mercies of King Hezekiah who, remarkably, chose to accept them and to weave them into a new--or at least a reconceptualized--culture.

Which reconceptualized culture necessarily includes a "founding narrative"--or two, or three, but at the moment (as I say)  I'm curious about the David/Solomon story, which I a few years ago heard dismissed with irony as an artifact of "the missing 10th Century."  Meaning, I take it, that we must doubt the David/Solomon story because there is such a yawning emptiness in the archaeological record. 

I take it that this is a view widely shared among contemporary archaeologists, but no means universal.  And while in broad outlines it makes sense to me, I don't suppose I've actually read those resifted and resifted early narratives since my Sunday school days.  If then: would the authorities have turned us loose on the story of Bathsheba?  Anyway, might be fun to redo it now with  the eye of a detached maturity and after having actually set foot, however briefly, on the turf that gave the stories their start.  I still have that big old sturdy-on-the-shelf volume that my parents gave me for (perhaps) my 17th birthday--the one someone portentously entitled "The Bible Designed to be Read as Living Literature."  I don't recall that I ever gave it much actual attention, though I was always happy to keep it around for show.  And I find somewhat to my surprise that I actually defaced it with some bits of underling here and there.

Morning After

...or two:

5 Build ye houses and dwell in them, and plant gardens, and eate the fruit of them.


6 Take ye wiues, and beget sonnes and daughters, and take wiues for your sonnes, and giue your daughters to husbands, that they may beare sonnes and daughters, that ye may bee increased there, and not diminished.


7 And seeke the peace of the citie, whither I haue caused you to be caried away captiues, pray vnto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall yee haue peace.


8 For thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, Let not your prophets and your diuiners, that bee in the midst of you, deceiue you, neither hearken to your dreames which yee cause to be dreamed.

Link.  H/T Slacktivist.  

Harold Camping and the Long, Lonely Road

No reason why we he should know, but Harold Camping already almost played a prominent role in my career, long before he set this coming Sunday Saturday as the date for the end of the world.

That is: for nearly 30 years I've done a 90-mile backroad commute across Californie Profonde.  Which is to say, for a long time, for an hour and a half on many a Thursday evening, Camping was my only companion as I hurtled through the dark towards home. I'm an inquisitive guy and I can listen to almost anybody's story once,  but I have to admit I got tired enough of the preacher's, ahem, ministrations--so tired that I had begun flailing around for some way to escape this weekly routine: a different job, maybe, or maybe even early retirement. But I didn't want to retire and in particular, I didn't want to be driven out of my place by some guy with a microphone.

What finally bailed me out was the discovery of good audio books. Suffice it to say that I plugged an old (ten pound?) tape deck into my cigarette lighter (sic!) and  I pretty well worked my way through the classical canon thanks to Blackstone Audio of Ashland Oregon, together with the settled conviction that I didn't want to go back to the preacher.
 
What do we learn here, children? We learn that I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to preacher for having made my world a richer, more varied, altogether more interesting place. 

Ah well.  I should try to avoid snark here, but as to the preacher's main message--I am already on record as one of those who believes that the rapture has already happened and it is we who are left behind. So I haven't cancelled my dental appointments for Monday. Meanwhile, if you're looking for an absorbing diversion as you beguile away the idle hours of Sunday Saturday afternoon, may I recommend an old favorite of mine--When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger et al. Festinger is the man who invented "Cognitive Dissonance." The book is a careful, insightful and remarkably kind study of those who believe in end-of-days stories and in particular, what happens when they turn out not to be true.    Meanwhile, enjoy your weekend, Harold, but remember:

  Περὶ δὲ τῆς ἡμέρας ἐκείνης καὶ ὥρας οὐδεὶς οἶδεν, οὐδὲ οἱ ἄγγελοι τῶν οὐρανῶν οὐδὲ ὁ υἱός, εἰ μὴ ὁ ^]πατὴρ μόνος.

 For those of you keeping score at home, that is Matthew 24:36.  For a more emphatic rendering of the point, go here.  I've always said that if I'd grown up next door to a good cathedral music program, they'd probably still have me.

People who Bought

The King James Version for Kindle also bought Sex in the Sanctuary by Lutishia Lovely.

You'd think they'd find enough sex in the King James version itself to satisfy most tastes.

James L. Kugel Shows How the Bible Works

Idling after some distraction the other night, I picked up Mrs. B's copy of James L. Kugel's How to Read the Bible, in which Kugel with awesome learning yet seemingly without effort, guides is through that great historical anthology that Christians call "the Old Testament."  Kugel wears his formidable knowledge with an ease almost unnoticeable except that it is so different from anything else I've ever encountered in the way of Biblical exegesis.

I fell serendipitously into a summing-up chapter in which Kugel explores the question of when and how "the bible," small-b, a random, disjointed, overlapping compendium of cultural curiosities, becomes "The Bible," the fountainhead of oracular wisdom--in Kugel's apt characterization, subject instead of object.  How did it all happen?  "It did not happen all at once," Kugel explains.  And continues: "In the area of biblical law, for example, apparent contradictions or conflict between laws must have demanded the attention of interpreters from an early period."  He gives the example of  Passover sacrifice; in Exod. 12:8 we are told that it must be "roasted;" Duet. 16:7 says "boiled."  What is the conscientious believer to do?

We know that this contradiction must have bothered people from very early times, since a solution (o sorts) appears even within the Bible itself, in one of the later books.  "They boiled the Passover lamb in fire," reports 2 Chron. 35:13, thereby implying that "boil" in Deuteronomy really meant "roast" (= boiling in fire) as stated in Exodus.

It's a telling catch and it is only the beginning.  Kugel moves on to another early example: the "bailee" who (in one sentence) is absolutely liable to pay for stolen goods is, (in another) allowed to get off with a solemn oath.  "To ancient interpreters," Kugel observes, "it was simly axiomatic that the Bible couldn't contradict itself."   How to deal with the seeming contradiction? "Well obviously," as we might say today, the matter turns on the issue of payment. The paid bailee may be absolutely liable; the unpaid, not.  This is a satisfactory commonsensical solution, until you reflect that it is nowhere specified in the text.  Who wrote it then?  "Well obviously," again (my phrase, not Kugel's), there is only one suspect: God, who may speak in mysterious ways, but who comes to inhabit the text if we have ingenuity enough to tease him out.

Kugel carries this sort of analysis through several telling examples from the "transitional" period --the years around the time of the birth of Jesus, when Judiasm seems to have suffered from a kind of perplexity as some of the old certainties fade away.  Just as strikingly, he shows how the process goes into reverse with the coming of modern Biblical scholarship in the 19th Century--mostly from men motivated to strengthen and  purify the text, but who wound up in spite of themselves taming and desacralizing it, returning it from subject to object once again.

It's a bravura display and it struck me--this is old stuff, but still it struck me--how much this process resembles what we do every day in law, particularly in "prestige law," where people take seriously the task of teasing a coherent meaning out of a raw and ungainly text.   When Elena Kagan (for example) takes a dog's breakfast of a statute and exposes its inner order, she seems to do it with the kind reverence that you might expect from people trying to touch the hidden God.  It's an amazing process to watch and Kugel does a delightful job of suggesting a bit about how it works.
 

Appreciation: Hammond on Translation

An undocumented extra accompanying my foray into the Greek New Testament is the discovery of Gerald Hammond's essay on "English Translations of the Bible," in The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Hammond is fhe ideal choice for such a topic, there being few who know it better. A lifetime of scholarship permits him to say with authority that "translation is one of the most influential forms of literary criticism, for it both interprets and recreates the text it addresses." In the briefest compass, Hammond pretty well demonstrates how any translation is doomed to failure--doomed to make compromises that will sacrifice something out of the original. He's particularly good, I think, on the way in which modern translations tend to smooth over and defang some of the gnarly otherness of the original. Of Jesus' Lazarus' (!) body (John 11:39). the Bible in Basic English says "by this time the body will be smelling;" the New International says "there is a bad odor;" the New American Standard, "there will be a stench;" the King James "he stinketh." The Greek is "otsei," from "otsō." To be fair, the the big Liddell & Scott dictionary (the Great Scott) includes some 30-40 lines of definitional material from the Classical age, most of which has little to do with foulness.

Another Hammond example that I can't evaluate at all comes from the Hebrew Old Testament: the New English Bible gives "every mother's son;" the New International, "every last male;" the King James, "him that pisseth against the wall" (cf. link).

Evidently one among Biblical scholars was the neighbor of Colette, as set forth here.

Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark VII: It's All Over

Okay, I finished the Greek-reading of the Gospel of Mark last night, with some sense of accomplishment. It's a short and simple text and it is (merely) Biblical and not (gasp) classical--but it was still a stretch and it was nice to get all the way to the end. I guess two summary thoughts crowd out others. One, it is a rather different Jesus than I remember from the movies in Vacation Bible School--crankier, more contentious and challenging. Or to turn it round, a whole lot more interesting than the picture of gossamer serenity that dominates so many readings. And two, it's a pretty strong piece of story telling. You could certainly read it in an evening (if reading in a language you understood, heh heh). I have heard it said it could be read aloud in just two hours, and I suppose it is plausible to speculate that here (as with Homer?) we have a text that had an oral (here, perhaps a collaborative) life before it was ever written down.

It does seem a bit improvisational in structure. Things get repeated--perhaps most notably that feeding of the multitude, leading the reader to speculate on whether it's just accidental or whether there is a larger purpose. The "little apocalypse" does seem to have been just lowered in through the ceiling. Even so, though, he whole moves with a directness and energy that settle it firmly into the catalog of good stories.

I think I'll go on with this reading/translating stuff, although I need a breather, and I think for the next round I may move away from the Gospel--Revelations sounds like fun, and the Greek looks doable. I'm not sure how much I'll blog it: I am glad to have the commitment device (and I have just lately learned about StickK. But reading back, I'd say I find some of my own comments a bit cheesy--not wrong precisely, but stuff that is likely to be irritating to perfectly nice people who never did me any harm. There ought to be better uses for my time.

Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark VI: Approaching the Main Event

Well, you don't have to wait for this one: here in Chapter 14 of the Gospel of Mark, we begin the narrative of the main event--preparation for crucifixion, to be followed by the deed itself, and resurrection. The story is familiar enough that the Greek is even easier to guess than before, but there are still parts that seem unfamiliar. I don't remember, for example, the woman who poured a bottle of ointment over his head. The text presents a challenge to the translator: for the ointment, the text says " nardou;" footnotes translate "oil of nard;" many translations say "spikenard," which leaves me none the wiser. Wiki identifies "Spikenard" as a flowering plant, "used as a perfume, an incense, a sedative, and an herbal medicine said to fight insomnia, birth difficulties, and other minor ailments."

In any event, the unnamed pourer finds herself in trouble with her mates who complain that the ointment was worth "epano denarion triakosion,"--more than 300 something, but what? The Greek "denairon" suggests Roman "denarii;" a number of translations do indeed say "denarii." King James and others say "pence." The American (sic) standard says "shillings." Weymouth sys "fifteen pounds." One is tempted to say that the effective sum is anybody's guess, but the New Living Translation says "a year's wages" which is functional but not literal (the New International Version says more than a year's wages"), so even functionality does not settle matters.

What we do know is that it is enough for the observers to complain about, leading to an oddly dismissive response from the man (sic?) at the center of the portentous drama:

And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me.

For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always.

By the end of Chapter 14, it is pretty clear who the instigators are in this plot: scribes, Pharisees and elders -- "grammateis, "Pharisaioi" and "presbyteroi." Why they should want to make such a big deal out of what appears to be no more than routine sectarian rancor is not (at least so far) explained; and if they did, it is equally unclear why they didn't just have a couple of toughs take him out in the alley.

It is a matter of interest, surely, where the whole story, particularly the edifying detail, all comes from. If you are a believer, the answer is that it is in Holy Scripture and that is it. Even if you are a skeptic, you may believe: Bart Ehrman, a leading critic of Biblical inerrancy, argues that the very fact that the story runs so contrary to a standard mythology--that fact alone, he contends, argues for its authenticity. Others--Burton Mack?--note that 40-odd years have passed since the apparent moment, long enough to leave the truth so shrouded in legend that one may despair of ever reaching through to it. But this brings us full circle: if it really is a fiction--if Mark did make it up--than you have to want to know more about just how he did it.

Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark V: The Little Apocalpyse

I continue reading (or "decoding") the Greek original of the Gospel of Mark--

Chapter 12 is, in a sense, sameold sameold: more quarreling with the establishment (scribes and Pharisees). But Jesus gets more programmatic: here we find "Render under Caesar..." (Mark 12:17); also "love thy neighbor as thyself" (Mark 12:31). There's also a parable about a "husbandman" who kills the son of the man who owns the vineyard, and come to a bad end; also another, stranger story about a woman who married (in succession) seven brothers, all of whom "left no seed." The question is: whose wife will she be in heaven (the answer seems to be "none")?

None of this really anticipates the extraordinary Chapter 13, the so-called "Little Apocalypse," in which Jesus offers his forecast, and it's not a pretty one: "nation shall rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles..." (Mark 13:8). "Little," I take it, means in contrast to the last book of the New Testament, the "Revelation" or (big) "Apocalypse." I've heard it said that Revelation is the most-cited book in the Bible, and I can believe the "Little Apocalypse" shares its place as a generator of any number of end-time cults (there's even a PBS Frontline Special on the topic, timed to coordinate with the coming of the new millennium in 2000).

But I gather this minatory "prediction" is also taken as evidence that Mark wrote after the Destruction of the Second (Jerusalem) Temple in 70AD and thus enjoys the most powerful ally of any predictor, thee benefit of hindsight. Indeed I gather that the whole point of the Gospel of Maark is to stitch together a new self-understanding for the nascent Christian community as it undertakes to rebuild itself out of the ruins.

Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark III

Wups, here it comes! I had remarked on how unremarkable was the career of Jesus in the early portions of the Gospel of Mark. But then out of nowhere (as it seems) in the middle of Chapter 8 (verse 29), we get:

And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ.

Then in verse 31:

And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

Cat's pretty much out of the bag now, wouldn't you say? I think this is the first time the word "Christ" (i.e., "Messiah" or "anointed one") has been used in Mark. But just to remove any doubt, next in Chapter 9 we find Jesus climbing "a high mountain," there to disport himself with Elias and Moses. And as if to drive the point home, here's the voice again, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, saying (Maerk 9:7) "this is my beloved Son: hear him."

Generally, Chapters 9 and 10 include more routine garden-variety healing, but also an increasing amount of programmatic preaching, the sort you would expect from an agent of the Almighty. The interesting wrinkle is that at least as presented so far, all this is supposed to be a secret among the special friends. Mark 8:30, omitted between the two verses quoted above, says:

And he charged them that they should tell no man of him.

So also in Mark 10:32:

He took again the twelve, and began to tell them what things should happen unto him.

Fine, but the question remains: why the big secret? If there is this grisly life (!) plan, and if he knows it and the disciples are to know it, why should they "tell no man" what is up?

I'm sure that barrels of ink have been spilled over this one and I am only guessing, but two thoughts. One, the writer does seem to be talking out of both sides of his mouth here. We have this "tell no man" stuff. But on the same page, almost in the same paragraph, we see Jesus speaking--and the crowd responding--in a manner as if to suggest that they know perfectly well what is afoot.

And two--this is only speculation, but I wonder if the writer didn't feel the need to defend against a certain kind of critic. That is: apparently quite a few scholars agree that a good deal of the "Christ" apparatus was made up after the fact--in the 30s, 40s and 50s. I wonder if the author felt he had to defend himself against those who would say: well, if all this was foreordained, how come nobody knew about it at the time? You're covered if nobody knows except those who are in the club.

Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark II: The God Story

The late Herb Gardner used to have a riff about "The God Story"--the story of a small boy, born in a Pennsylvania mining town, who grew up to be God ("mama, I think I'm God!") I thought of "the God story," as I was reading the first few chapters of the Gospel of Mark. I was thinking: had I been doing the scouting report, I would not have identified this kid as the one who would grow up to be King of Everything. Granted, he seems to have a knack for driving out demons and healing the sick (one, by spitting), but hey, who among us does not?

Aside from that, Jesus seems to spend most of his time engaged in what Burton Mack would recognize as "pronouncement stories--anecdotes common in the tradition of the Cynics, pithy exchanges with a hostile or skeptical interlocutor in which the favored subject always gets the last word (but then, we aren't told what the other guy said after the last word). So, when someone asked Antisthenes why he kept low company, he replied "Well, physicians attend their patients without catching the fever" (Mack, 95). So, when his antagonists asked Jesus why his people ate with unclean hands, Jesus said "it is not what goes into a person, but what comes out that makes him unclean." Passable material in its own right, I suppose, but it mainly presents a man who has some cleanliness issues with the Pharisees. As to the bigger stuff, we'll have to wait and see.

I mentioned yesterday that I did find the Salome story. I might have added that until a couple of years ago, I just assumed something so saucy could not possibly be part of Holy Writ. I had a fairly decent bout of religious instruction in Presbyterian Sunday School in the 1940s, but I guess they skipped that part. But here it is: Mark 6:17-29; cf Matthew 14:3-11. [Update: But whups--it turns out she isn't named in either version. It was so obvious to me what story I was reading that I missed that point. Evidently for her name, you have to go to Josephus and his Jewish Antiquities.]

I said we wouldn't guess that he was bound for greater things. Let me revise that. In Mark 1:7, John the Baptist says "There cometh one mightier thn I after me, the latchet of whose shoe I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose." And in verse 11, "a voice form heaven"says "Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." You can't buy publicity like that.

Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark I

When I set out to learn Greek, my goal was to read Thucydides. Hah, fat chance. No one told me that Thucydides was hard even by Greek standards, and that given my resources and abilities I had best (as my high school guidance counselor might have said) select some more suitable employment.

By contrast I did my best to stay away from the Bible, which I thought "just not classical enough." But a while ago, cooling my heels in the jury-pool waiting room, I wrapped my mind around a copy of New Testament Greek: A Reader from the Joint Association of Classical Teachers in Britain. I should have foreseen: like all JACT's stuff, this one is a masterpiece of pedagogy: impeccably edited with just the right amount of help to keep you going. Given a lot of hours in a windowless room, it was a perfect companion and I may even have learned a bit.

I didn't follow up on JACT at the time, but just lately, reorganizing a bookshelf, I stumbled on something I didn't know I owned. It's called A Reader's Greek New Testament.* It's not as elegant as JACT, and there are none of those little prodding footnotes that you get in so many student editions. What it does have is a ton of vocabulary: it footnotes virtually every word except the most common. In an introduction, the editors explain that to master this much vocabulary on your own, you'd have to knock off about ten words a day for two years. As the editors do not add, not bloody likely. The (pious) hope is that by reading along with the vocabulary crutches, you will pick up at least a good deal of the vocab on your own.

Oh, goody, I thought. I can read the New Testament. Wait, the whole thing? Again, not bloody likely. For one thing, do I really need to read, say, all those minor letters that are in there only because the editors made mistakes about their authorship? Do I really need to read all of the (admit it, now) sometimes mad ravings of St. Paul?

Well, so maybe some Paul. And Revelations ought to be fun. And the Gospels, oh yes the Gospels. Well, one Gospel.

I actually started with the Gospel of Matthew; I read a few chapters and it was going okay but then it occurred to me: by almost universal assent, the Gospel of Mark is said to be the earliest composed. Might as well approach this task in an intellectually disciplined manner. So I abandoned Matthew (for the moment?) and tackled Mark.

So far, to my pleasant surprise, it is going okay. I'm most of the way through Chapter 6 (of 15) which means, inter alia, that I already got the story of Salome (although I can't seem to find the line that goes "the hell we won't Salome said, and kicked the chandelier!"). I do indeed need the vocabulary notes, though the grammar is pretty straightforward--and though it may be simple, I'd say it is also pretty good review-practice of some basic forms.

As a pony, I also keep around the copy of The New Oxford Annotated Bible, which Mrs. Buce picked up in graduate school. I've also taken a flyer at Burton L. Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of Christian Myth (1995). Mack is a big fan of the Gospel of Mark--he calls it "a literary achievement of incomparable historical significance," (181). The book as a whole is absorbing and instructive, but I mustn't let myself get distracted.

Of course I still don't know if I have the stones to keep going at this. I'm posting this now as a kind of hostage, to commit myself through a form of public shaming. I'll keep you posted. Or maybe I won't. But who knows, if this works, then someday I might even get back to Thucydides.
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*Richard J. Goodrich and Albert L. Lukaszewski (Zondervan 2003).

God and Mr. James

Yesterday I showcased Cynthia Ozick’s perplexity over her relationship to the Bible. Here’s another appreciator, more secular but no less enthusiastic and less conflicted:

The King James Bible is a prose masterpiece compiled at a time when even a committee could write English. The modern versions, done in the name of comprehension, add up to an assault on readability…. Those responsible for the [New English Bible] probably did realize that they were atheists: otherwise they could scarcely have been so determined to leave not one stone standing upon another. For those of us unable to accept that the Bible is God’s living word, but who believe that the living word is God, the successful reduction of once-vital language to a compendium of banalities was bound to look like blasphemy, and the perpetrators like vandals. When I joined in a public protest against the rejigging of the Book of Common Prayer, a practising Christian among the London editors—it was Richard Ingrams of Private Eye—accused me of being in bad faith. He hated the new prayer book even more than I did, but thought I could have no reason for sharing his contempt. But it was my book too. I had been brought up on the scriptures, the prayers and the hymns. I had better reasons than inertia for deploring their destruction.

--Clive James, Cultural Amnesia 488 (2007)

God and Mr. Darcy

Cynthia Ozick has a din in her head, but it doesn’t mean she is crazy. She’s just feeling “that relentless inward hum of fragility and hope and transcendence and dread.” She finds its source chiefly in “the art of the novel; in the novel’s infinity of plasticity and elasticity.” (162)

Is God a character in a novel? In God: A Biography, by Jack Miles, God (per Ozick)

has an indelible, even a familiar, human personality, not unlike the mercurial protagonist of an epic, or an opera, or a labyrinth of motives by Henry James. (234)

Ozick isn’t happy with this view:

[I]f the God of the Bible is not “real,” then—in creative-writing-course argot—the Bible’s stories won’t and don’t work. For the faithless skeptic or rationalist confronting Scripture (a category of modernity that includes, I suppose, most of us), there is nothing more robust to lean on than suspension of disbelief, the selfsame device one brings to Jane Austin. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightly, salvational creations both, are not real; we believe in them anyway. Causality deserves better. Causality escapes the mere “comes to life” of character. (Id.)

And in the Bible, she says,

[T]he antique words, on their own power, and even in a latter-day language, draw us elsewhere, to that indeterminate place where God is not a literary premise but a persuasive certainty—whether or not we are willing to go there.

It is (I mean this without disrespect) a decidedly odd conclusion, or non-conclusion. God in the Bible is a success because he "doesn't work?" The point invites, to put it mildly, more development. Ozick says that “most of us” read Scripture as faithless skeptics or rationalists. Does she, I wonder, include herself?

All quotations from Cynthia Ozick, The Din in the Head: Essays (2006).eadHead

The Biblical Approach

A Kentucky outfit reports great success at curing sex addiction with a "Biblical approach."

Me, I'm just waiting for the video version of this.

Update: turns out I don't need to wait (link) (link) (link) (link)

He Beat Me To It

Faithful readers will know I spent a month last fall trekking over archaeological sites in Israel and Jordan. Apparently I was not the first. Here is the estimable Sir John Mandeville, Kt., the granddaddy of all travel writers. “And I, John Mandeville, Knight, left my country and crossed the sea in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ 1332,” he reports (in the Penguin translation of C.W.R.D. Moseley). It seems I was following in his footsteps:

In the marches of Galilee, among the mountains, was the Ark of God taken. On the other side is the hill of Endor in Hermon. … Five miles from Naym is the city of Iesrael [Jezreel], also called Zaraym. Iesabel [Jezebel] the wicked queen was of that city; she had Naboth slain unrighteously for his vineyard. A little way from this city is the field of Mageddo [the plain of Megiddo], where the King of Samaria slew Josias the King of Judah, who was afterwards carried to Mount Sion and buried there. A mile from Jezreel are the hills of Gilboa, where King Saul, his son Jonathan and a great number of the Children of Israel were killed. For this reason King David cursed those hills. A mile to the east is a city called Citople [Scythopolis], or Bethsaym [Bethshan]. The Philistines hung the head of King Saul on the walls of that city.

--The Travels of Sir John Mandeville 94

Penguin Paperback ed. (C.W.R.D. Moseley, trans. 1983)

Unlike some parts of the Travels, which are pretty clearly pure fantasy, the incidental detail here suggests that “Sir John” may actually have seen the sites he describes here.

More on the Book I Wish I'd Read

More on The Bible Unearthed: you can get a hint of what this book is about without ever opening the cover without ever cracking the cover by taking a look at the Amazon reviews. At the moment, there are 97, with an average rank of four stars. But 45 of them give five stars and another 11 give only one—and probably would give zero if they had the chance. For some portion of the reading public, suggesting that the Bible not inerrant, is not a cool thing to do.

It will be obvious that I am not of the inerrancy party, but I don’t want to appear dismissive here: this kind of thing has great meaning to people and it’s not at all surprising if they seem to feel dissed or affronted when somebody challenges a deeply held belief.

In response, I’m sure I can’t save any souls here, but for whatever it is worth: if FS are right, then the Bible is not what we (once thought it was?). But if they are right, then the creation of the Bible has got to qualify as one of the great cultural achievements of human history: they’ve created a culture, a history, a reason for being—and they put it all down in a book. As FS insist, nobody else has anything like it:

The Greek epics and myths spoke only by metaphor and example: Mesopotamian and Persian religious epics offered cosmic secrets but neither earthly history nor a pracxtical guide to life. The Hebrew Bible offered both, providing a narrative framework in which every Jew could identify both family and national history. In short, the saga of Israel that had first crystallized in the time of Josiah became the world’s first fully articulated national and social compact, encompassing the men, women and children, then rich, the poor, and the destitute of an entire community.

There’s a scene in a Stanley Elkins novel (I quote from memory) where God says—alright, you want to know why I did it? I’ll tell you why I did it! Because it is a good story, that’s why!

“Is that all?” says Jesus, rubbing his stigmata. “All?”

Indeed it is all, and perhaps no cultural product has ever done better.

Thanks again, Joe.