These pages are apparently not for everyone. Every now and again I get a flame from a defender of the faith, or get missionaries at my door. These sermons have never yet progressed beyond fanatical exhortations from Scripture. Marginally better are those who come up with a stance based on face-value Scriptural claims, which fall away when examined closer.
This is something of a sequel to Hacking the Bible. I wrote that site to list the tools I personally use to do my work, that others may have a place to start. In it are definitions of terms, the contexts of the writings, and the languages they survive in. Elsewhere I've brought up my starting assumptions as well. This site fully lays out those assumptions, and whence I got them. Unlike the Bible hacking pages, some of these assumptions are optional. Others are (if you pardon the expression) fundamental to how I look at the Bible, and for that matter all literary sources. Either way, if you disagree, please show your work.
This is not the page to deal with philosophical arguments against God's existence, attempts to terrify nonbelievers (like Pascal's Wager), &c. This page is intended for biblical studies, not on general beliefs. I will however need to start with certain dismissals of fundamentalist objections. More serious potential objections - valid ones - I deal with further down. Click here for those.
To start with, I do not accept that every word of "the Bible" is literally true. For the sake of argument I won't even get into what "the Bible" means in this chapter, but will deal with the "five books of Moses".
You'd think one look at Numbers 31 ought to convince them otherwise. Here's my advice to all of you: read it. And when the missionaries come, bring it up. Watch the firm believers in "moral absolutes" start arguing that, at the time, this was acceptable; and that it had (has?) to be done in order for salvation to arrive; that God only did it after waiting 400 years, when the Midianites &c. finally became irredeemable; that murdering infants was (is?) preferable to allowing them to grow to adulthood in a sinful culture. Some may bring up abortion to deflect the issue. If so, say that you're against abortion too. It is exceedingly entertaining. I do it whenever I can.
There are lots of other reasons, too. I'll let you surf on over to www.infidels.org for more. But it was studying herem for my Moabite Stone project that did it for me. Sacrificing entire nations was, indeed, acceptable for that society. It is perfectly acceptable for any society that has entirely lost its moral bearings. Most tragic is how frequently the tables are turned. Jews became the nation of Amalek within Christian Europe, and Christians serve that role in many Muslim countries today. Don't think it won't happen to your pet cult. Genocide is not to be sanctified; therefore, neither is the Torah.
So scripture quotes won't faze me. It hasn't seemed to register to some that if I don't accept 1-2 Timothy (say) as authentic, then I don't need to consider the rest of the bible as "god-breathed" either. (I might also add that parts of the Bible bear more than a hint of sulphur.)
Every kook says this when he realises he can't defend himself. Similar arguments can be seen in far-out Afrocentricism, dismissing logic as a racist tool of the Enlightenment. You can justify anything when you discard reason - and so can your opponent. So if I'm wrong, tell me why I'm wrong; but don't use the Bible's face claims to buttress the Bible.
I have dualist tendencies. For me, there is not much that is a shade of grey. This is shared by the much of the Bible, particularly the Johannine literature. Debates about the neutral ones seem to have centred over whether one ought to count them as allies. Mark had Jesus claim the middle ground: "he who is not against me is with me". Matthew had him reject it. If both are true - which of course they aren't given the contexts but enough for now - then there is no neutrality at all. Unfortunately for me, I can't be very strict in my dualism. This is true for biblical studies as well.
Dualism in the Bible explains why so many fundamentalists are dualists, and that dualism explains why so many are cowards. If they are not 100% right, someone else might be righter. Depending on God's cutoff point - for blind obedience ("faith") over good deeds ("works"), natch - that someone else may get to hawk phlegm at them from heaven while they're screaming in fire.
If one chapter is wrong, as many fundamentalists have noted, it follows that no chapter of the Bible can be assumed as "true". Here the dualists run into a problem. If no chapter is off-the-bat "true", it doesn't follow that all chapters are false. Really it means it's all up for grabs. The Bible becomes a big document - a collection of documents in fact - that one may interpret, or even add to or subtract from, at will.
It might damn us to hell, but would it destroy human society? Taking this to an extreme, Ivan, in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, claimed that without God "everything is lawful". The already-godless ones who believed this suffered for it. Contrary to that idiot Alin Voicu, "Dostoyevsky" did not follow Ivan's chain of reasoning (Wall Street Journal letters page, 10 July 2000 - but then, if he represents the population, it may be hard to find The Brothers Karamazov in SMU/Dallas). Dostoevsky was warning against it! If non-theists do take this as a licence for licence, they are guilty of the same sin that the fundamentalists commit: binding morality to a flimsy empirical claim. In fact morality is not the sole preserve of Christians, nor even theists. But this is not a Philosophy 101 class.
Even when mucking with the Scriptures, in practice one will have to do so according to reason and integrity - at least, if one wants one's ideas to be accepted by intelligent people. That is what I have endeavoured. When I suggest cutting chapter 21 away from the Gospel of John, I explain that this is because it is not quoted or preserved before Tertullian; and before him, after him, and for that matter including him (in a later work) there were those who did more than just not say it was there, but said it was not there. (As an added treat, this illustrates that "A is not true" is not enough to show that "B, which does not intersect with A, is true", the principle involved two paragraphs up.)
So the choice is not "creed or chaos"; that's nothing more than a terror tactic. And I already promised not to pay attention to bullies. Errgh. Sorry.
I try to start with as few assumptions as possible, particularly those of divine origin. God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are the ends of Scripture, not the starting point. All three are discussed outside the Protestant Bible to boot. So it's no use starting with those assumptions, blundering about a bit, and then concluding with "God did it this way". Or saying "you have to read it with the Holy Spirit". What Holy Spirit?
Nor is it useful to follow CS Lewis, that fecund father of falsehoods, and accuse your debaters of a priori discounting miracles. In the ancient world, thousands of miracles are reported. We tend not to believe most of the pagan miracles because they're unprovable. We don't even believe most of the Christian miracles - Infancy Gospel of Thomas, anyone? Miracle claims are miracle claims, and must be viewed with skepticism: Who recorded it? How long after it allegedly happened? What might have been his/her/their motive?
Yeah, and monkeys could fly out my butt. Or, more to the point, UFO's, Thetans, Nephites, and Allah Himself could have done it. There is no claim so ridiculous that it cannot be reconciled with scientific evidence. It only takes a bunch of mischievous daemons from Hell to muck about with the fossil record, and voilą. "It could happen" is no excuse.
John Dominic Crossan put it best (against Brown's attempt to read the passion narratives as history): "The debate is not over could but over did, not over what could have happened but what, in one's best historical reconstruction, did." (Who Killed Jesus? p. 9)
My "discoveries" are not built from ground up. I have seen no need to redo the work of centuries of study. I pluck away at the edges. In some cases, though, picking at the strands has led me to unravel at least part of the cloth (as when studying the priority and development of Mark).
But I don't trust the term, "majority of scholars". Who's a scholar? I would rule out all research that fails to meet historical standards, that is, Crossan's could/did criterion. Unfortunately most (I hope not all) evangelical work I've seen betrays history in the name of the Faith. That leaves us with the left wing and the moderates. But even the moderates (I would include Raymond Brown, Luke Timothy Johnson, and Paul Meier) too often do not take their research far enough, and waste everyone's time criticising those who do. That is why, when someone tells me, "the majority of scholars thinks such and such", I ask for specific references so I can look into it myself. This is also why I find myself on the left wing, writing largely for the left and centre. Those who haven't even renounced Numbers 31 certainly won't be convinced by my research.
Not to say I agree with the entire left, either. I follow those scholars who share my values, not necessarily my opinions. Burton Mack may have a lot in common with my opinions, but I am not impressed with how he reached his conclusions. Accordingly he is not often quoted here. On the other hand, I am thus far skeptical of Bart Ehrman's conclusion that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. (Admittedly I haven't read his latest book.) His scholarship is first-rate, though, at least in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. That book was very influential for me.
Other books I recommend: Who Killed Jesus? already mentioned, Ancient Christian Gospels by Helmut Koester, The Cambridge Companion to the Bible, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis by Gabriele Boccaccini, The Psalms through Three Thousand Years by Holladay, Books and Readers in the Early Church, Biblical Figures outside the Bible, The Encyclopaedia of Early Christianity (now at a second edition), The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research edited by Ehrman (again) and Michael Holmes. Most recently I've added Israel Knohl's The Sanctuary of Silence to this wall of fame.
Websites, too, are influential, but not as. Far and away my favourite there was actually a text transcription of Baruch Halpern's 1992 article "The Baal (and Asherah?) in Seventh Century Judah", which I converted into HTML 4.0 right here. (Illegally. But I wasn't the guy who initially posted it.) Mostly websites come up with ideas and I roll with them. I even make use of fundamentalists when they do the research, such as Glenn Miller.
There are some books which are "curate's eggs"; as the joke goes, they are bad overall but "very good in parts". Evan Powell's The Unfinished Gospel is the poster child in my collection, but the Jesus Seminar's work may also qualify.
Overall quality doesn't always determine whether a book is going to be more influential. Powell's opinion weighed heavily on my Mark project, out of all proportion to its scholarship. Locally, though, it was a huge help. On the other hand, I haven't worked on the Psalms much here; they only cropped up in my Judges 4 and Jeremiah 10:1-16 projects. Mostly that's because Holladay's work was so good that I couldn't add anything to it.
This is the background you should assume when I counter individual conclusions of Koester, Crossan, and even my fellow webmeister Andrew Bernhard; and when I agree with same from Powell. If I disagree with a scholar, or even take him or her to task over an error, it is not to be taken as an attack on that scholar's overall work. Nor is an agreement an endorsement. Trust me. I'll let you know if something's "otherwise valuable" or "although his overall thesis sucks". And all scholarship is a work in progress. I've had to correct mistakes of my own hundreds of times. That's why we publish.
In this field, there are a few particularly nasty "holy wars" one must watch out for - even between otherwise-respected scholars. Keep this in mind when you compare papers.
Perhaps the best known is Thomas Thompson (minimalist) versus William Dever (moderate), concerning the history of Israel-Judah. Ultimately they don't even disagree that much. Where they do - over the hazy history of the pre-Omride period - they lack the evidence to do so intelligently. It has therefore descended into name-calling. Thompson claims Dever has called him an anti-Semite, and indeed many on Dever's side have. I have personally read a paper by Thompson which sneeringly compared Dever to Bishop Ussher (the infamous 4004 BCE creationist).
Another, which I do not know so much about, is Morton Smith versus Jacob Neusner. Smith discovered the Epistle to Theodore, one of the most incriminating documents in world history. Based on the "Secret Gospel of Mark" quoted therein, he concluded that Christianity started out as a magical/mystery/visionary cult and has been seeking parallels for this in Tannaitic and Qumran Judaism. In one particularly witty - but questionable - article, he claimed that 4Q491 was about "some egomaniac" from Qumran and not about Michael; and concluded that 4Q491 and Jesus were "mushrooms from the same ring". Neusner, perhaps the most learned Jewish scholar since Rashi, has been unimpressed. My own research tells me Secret Mark is not the original Mark by a long shot. One could turn Smith's metaphors around and accuse him of wigging out over Theodore.
I think I could add William Petersen versus George Howard. Howard, A Response to William L. Petersen's Review of Hebrew Gospel of Matthew shows Howard's side of the story, and if he is quoting Petersen ethically, Petersen does not come off well at all. This is a shame, because Petersen has performed a Heraklean labour restoring Tatian's Diatesseron from many centuries of corruption.
I take the above as a warning. No-one is too good to fall into petty bickering. The horror of it is that all the above are, within this field, celebrities and heroes (except perhaps the relative unknown Howard). If an argument begins - and it will - it ought to finish, even (or especially) if there is no winner. The effect of the sheer mass of recent manuscript discoveries ought to humble us all. Many an unsinkable theory has sunk in recent days.
So what does this elite group of scholars say, once sprinkled with a pillar of salt?
For Hebrew Scripture, I assume some form of the "four-source hypothesis", that is, that the "five books of Moses" are a composite of four sources: Judean / Jahwist, Ephraimite / Elohist, Priestly, and Deuteronomistic. Beyond that basis there are wildly differing ideas of when and where each was written, and what should belong to each. The reason for this total lack of agreement: 1. there are no commonly-recognised witnesses to this collection's development, 2. it's very likely other editors stuck their paws in - witness the Samaritan additions, and 3. some of the sources may rely on the others.
I didn't want to get involved when I started out. However, my research forced a decision in a number of places. In particular I decided that the Epistle of Jeremiah is a witness to the development of the law (if not the law books). I found that the Epistle's halakhah best fit the P source Israel Knohl predicted in his 1995 book (the one I own), without the so-called Holiness Code (Lev 17-26 and related additions). Knohl's view is canonised, so to speak, in the HarperCollins Study Bible of the NRSV. Its preface to Leviticus was the work of Jacob Milgrom, incorporating a sizeable excursis on P and H in his preface to Leviticus. Knohl had converted Milgrom to this theory back in 1983.
Outside the Torah, I agree that the history in Joshua - 2 Kings is a Deuteronomistic History, whose ideal king was Josiah. The law "found" in the Temple was the nucleus of Deuteronomy. While the history is late, its core components could date from any time; Judges in particular isn't too different from the Stele of Mesha. I align myself in the party of Baruch Halpern and Nadav Na'aman for Israelite history: the Deuteronomist Historian was a true historian, if flawed.
As for the books of the prophets: I agree that Isaiah should be split between chapters 1-39 and 40-65. I call them 1 Isaiah and 2 Isaiah. While the book has been a unified whole since the Great Isaiah Scroll in B.C., that leaves several centuries in which some editor could have joined the two. There may be a memory of a time when some Jews continued to treat the books separately; in Jewish legend, a heretic king sawed in two Isaiah (the prophet :^). And I classify Daniel in late apocalyptic, not classical prophecy.
Assumptions on the form of the text: I go with the Hebrew. Usually. 1-2 Samuel is different in Greek and in the quotes in Chronicles. This is particularly noticeable in 1 Sam 17-18 and in the beginning of 1 Sam 11. Jeremiah is also better preserved in Greek.
For the development of apocalyptic, I follow Boccaccini. The lead-ins for Qumran and Christianity are the three early books of Enoch, Jubilees, the Temple Scroll, 4QMMT, and the other books of Enoch in roughly that order. The War Scroll is second-century BCE, not first.
For the Christian NT, I assume a modified Marcan Priority solution to the Synoptic Problem - that is, the priority of a now-lost original to Mark, Luke, and Matthew which Mark preserves best. I also agree that Luke and Matthew did not know each others' work. Therefore there are other written sources shared by Luke and Matthew. I also think Egerton preceded John, and that Luke's copy of Mark lacked Mark 6:45-8:21 (but not 8:21-27a!).
Quick vent here. It is a common practice in antiquity for a copyist to insert into a document phrases from other, similar documents which happen to coincide. This is called "scribal harmonisation", or less politely "intentional corruption" or just plain forgery.
So far I have noted at least three occasions where some yahoo did this in a modern translation. I don't like it even in ancient documents, let alone now. This site is not my day job. I can do my own translations, to a limited extent, but I'd much rather not re-invent the wheel. I go into a translation assuming it offers a rendition that is as faithful to the original and as understandable as possible.
Most recently I've taken to task the New Revised Standard Version's Jeremiah 10:5, which spliced in "like a scarecrow in a cucumber patch" from the Epistle of Jeremiah v. 72. As a result I assumed the Epistle of Jeremiah relied on Jeremiah 10:5. I then noticed a lot of data that didn't add up (viz. the completely different form of the Septuagint, and the verse's general incoherence). As it happens, the verse was closer to: "erected like a palm-tree". I don't appreciate it when I find the King James Version does a better job than a modern translation.
Frustration aside: when I see a translation that seems too good to be true - that is, too dependent on an "earlier" source - I'm going to look up the original language of both. If the translator's rendition is nowhere supported in the extant text nor in the context, I'm going to throw it out, and if I'm especially grumpy that day I'm going to write a project about it (c.f. Scholarly Corruption of Egerton).
I started this 9 June 2000. 11 and 18-19 June, made more coherent.
2 Jan 2001: Created new summary chapter. 10-11 Jan: added rant on bad harmonisations. 17 April 2004: corrected obsolete link to "Scholarly Corruption", which had broken when I moved the page 5 May 2002. Thanks Patrina!
Click here to return to the House of David.
Any thoughts? e-mail me :^)
zimriel@sbcglobal.net