New Testament Study: "Great logic there, huh?"

For the past few months I have been watching on YouTube a lecture series which constitutes the Yale University Religious Studies course “Introduction to New Testament History and Literature.” The instructor is Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies. Martin’s course examines the New Testament as text—written in the first century C.E. and providing evidence of the diversity of early Christianity and a reflection of the religious, social, and political environment of that time.

Around Christmastime friends who know of my interest in Christianity and who are devout Christians themselves loaned me a set of DVDs entitled Christianity: The First Three Centuries, From Christ to Constantine (How could a tiny sect ever conquer the world?). This lecture series is billed as “An Eight Session DVD Series by Dr. Paul L. Maier, Professor and Best-Selling Author.” Maier is Russell H. Seibert Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University. The DVD series is produced by Tobias Communications, an organization which appears to be mainly concerned with promoting Maier’s books and DVDs; there is no affiliation with WMU.

I am struck by the difference in the approach to the question of the historicity of the New Testament taken by these two historians. Martin is lecturing to undergraduate students at a prestigious university, so while he is a self-confessed Episcopalian, he is constrained by his environment to assume a critical-historical approach to the subject matter. Maier appears to be lecturing to adults in a non-academic setting, so he does not find himself under the same constraints as Martin. Yet both are distinguished historians, and one can thus reasonably assume that it is at least partly their prestige as scholars that has attracted a willing audience for their lectures.

While Martin’s course focuses on the New Testament and Maier’s series is a history of early Christianity as interpreted and told primarily by the early ecclesiastical historian Eusebius, each is clearly early church history.

In his opening lecture, Martin carefully explains to students the nature and purpose of the course. First he tells them what the course is not: an examination of the New Testament as Scripture, providing deeper insights into the theological message of the Bible and thus strengthening the faith of the participants. In contrast, some of the first words of Maier’s introductory lecture are, “And it all began from God’s ultimate revelation in one person, Jesus Christ.”

Lecture 13 of the Yale series is “The Historical Jesus.” In this lecture Professor Martin explains the difficulty of using the New Testament texts as historically reliable documents. He has introduced this problem in an earlier lecture, in which he demonstrates that the accounts of the life and ministry of Paul in Acts and in Galatians are completely different. In this lecture he gives another example: the birth narrative, which only appears in Matthew and Luke, the two versions being so different as to be utterly irreconcilable, leading scholars to conclude that nothing is known about the birth of Jesus.

In Lecture 13, Martin also talks about the New Testament accounts of the trial of Jesus. Modern biblical scholars have concluded that there is no evidence that any such trial ever occurred. He cites the following reasons for this conclusion:

• The Romans did not need trials to crucify Jews; a Jew could be summarily executed if he was suspected of acting against the Empire
• The New Testament versions of the trials are very different. In Mark’s account, for example, Jesus says almost nothing in his trial; in John’s version, he speaks a great deal
• Records were not kept for trials at that time
• In all four gospel accounts, the apostles had fled before the trial took place. In any case, had they not fled they still would not have been allowed to be present for any trial or hearing as they were lowly fishermen and peasants

Session 2 of Maier’s series, “Jesus of Nazareth: What else do we know?” also deals with the question of the historicity of the trial of Jesus. Maier offers as one item of evidence for the trial a riot in which Jews angry over the use of the temple treasury to finance a Roman water project for Jerusalem were attacked by Roman troops: “So Pilate has had a record of run-ins with the Jews that were pretty serious.” He then tells us about a coin minted by Pilate upon which appears a shepherd’s crook—not the crosier of the Good Shepherd but rather “the utensil used by the Roman augur” who predicted the future by examining the condition of the liver of a sheep that had been sacrificed (“Great logic there, huh?”).

Maier goes on:

And so this helps set the stage for Good Friday and the trial of Jesus. Pilate is under pressure; he’s had two or three run-ins with the Jews already. And so this is fresh detail that tremendously informs our knowledge of the politics behind the crucifixion and what’s going on on that day that changed the world, namely Good Friday. And yet you can’t believe how many critics doubt the historicity of the trial of Jesus, and I don’t know why they doubt it. You know we have the judge’s [i.e. Pilate’s] name on stone; we have his coinage; we have the evidence of his projects in Jerusalem according to [Flavius] Josephus. And then what about the prosecutor himself? He was the high priest of the Sanhedrin, you’ll recall: Joseph Caiaphas. And we get additional detail of Caiaphas from Josephus, from the rabbinical traditions, from Eusebius, and even from archaeology”—the discovery of Joseph Caiaphas’s ossuary. “The hard evidence [for the truth of biblical stories] is all over the place.

So here we have two approaches to historicity by two distinguished historians. The first is, at least in part, an attempt to determine the historical reliability of the biblical texts through careful exegesis and modern historical methodology. There appear to be no assumptions made and no attempt to “defend the faith.” The second is simply an exercise in Christian apologetics.

I have no problem with either approach. In both cases, the audience for the lectures is made up of adults who are capable of thinking critically and who are free to believe or disbelieve the information offered by the lecturer and to accept or dismiss the “evidence” provided.

I am curious, however, as to whether the people who attend Professor Maier’s lectures and buy his books and DVDs are aware beforehand of the obvious weakness of the evidential foundation of his claims for the historicity of the New Testament. If we are people of faith, is our faith so weak that we need to construct bogus “proof” for the factuality of our story in order to defend it from real or imagined enemies?

And what of Professor Maier? How can a historian who is trained in Western critical scholarship and who is a faculty member of a publicly accredited American university make such a mockery of his profession in what he would have us believe is a sacred cause?

Perhaps he has been listening to the wise words of another good Christian, Joel Osteen, who said “God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us.”

Photo Credit

"Easter Pageant 2009, Pontius Pilate what is truth" by divemasterking2000

Creative Commons:some rights reserved

 

The Bible tells me so. Oh, really?

In his most recent book, A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren states that “for a new kind of Christianity to emerge, we need a new approach to the Bible.” He claims that most Christians treat the Bible as a kind of constitution; in other words, it is a set of immutable laws that Christians are expected to live by. At the core of this constitutional metaphor is the idea of authority—not so much the authority of the Bible itself but “the authority of the people interpreting the Bible.” McLaren cites a pre-Civil War novel as an extreme example of where this exploitation of the Bible-as-constitution metaphor can border on the extreme.

Nellie Norton was a novel to celebrate the greatness of slavery, and the subtitle was basically something like this: “How the Bible is a pro-slavery Bible and God is a pro-slavery God." Now, that turns your stomach to hear that now but we haven’t had any scrutiny about the way we read the Bible. We’re still using it the same way.

We are indeed still using the Bible the same way. In fact, many claim today that the Bible is an anti-gay Bible and God is an anti-gay God.

For the Bible Tells Me So is a wonderful documentary that came out a few years ago and made the rounds of the film festivals; I’m not sure whether it ever found its way into general release. The film is about Christian parents with gay children.

The documentary looks at five families, including Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop elected in the Episcopal Church, and his parents, and former U.S. presidential candidate Richard Gephardt and his wife and their lesbian daughter Chrissy. In the film we learn of the struggle of the parents to come to terms, in the context of their own religious upbringing and beliefs, with the sexual orientation of their children and with their own prejudices and their fears for their children’s safety and well-being. The film also examines the fears and misgivings faced by gay and lesbian children in religious families as they hear the condemnations of homosexuality in their churches and as they consider coming out to their parents.

The Bible is a major character in this documentary as it is quoted by pastors and laypeople alike in order to condemn homosexuality and homosexuals. There are numerous clips of preachers railing against homosexuality; the most common word that is used against it is “abomination.” One preacher, Jimmy Swaggart, says to his congregation: “I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. If one ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died.” He goes on to say—with no awareness of the irony of his statement—that “God calls homosexuality an abomination. It’s an abomination! It’s an abomination!”

A parent of a lesbian daughter and husband of a Christian minister says, “I’ve learned enough about the Bible now to understand God. I understand how God works, how Jesus works.” A little later, when talking about his two children, he has this to say: “When my kids were growing up, I said, ‘God, please don’t let my son grow up to be a faggot and my daughter a slut’. And he did not…he did not do that. He reversed it (laughs).”

Gene Robinson, who was a model Christian boy in his childhood church, says, “From ten to eleven on Sunday morning everyone was in Sunday school class, [which] was always and only focused on the Bible. So we were absolutely steeped in scripture.” From the seventh grade, Robinson knew that he was different from the other boys his age and he immediately realized that he must keep this difference to himself. “I was always familiar with what the Bible said: Anyone who is thought to be ‘that way’ was an abomination before God.”

All of the stories in For the Bible Tells Me So are compelling. The senior Robinsons, southerners and members their whole lives (they are in their late seventies when the film is shot) of the Church of the Disciples of Christ, deeply and unconditionally love their son. The Gephardts are willing to forego Richard’s quest for the presidency if their daughter feels the campaign—and Gephardt believes her being a lesbian will be an issue—is in any way going to be painful for her.

For me, the most powerful story in the film is that of Mary Lou Wallner and her daughter Anna. Mary Lou was raised in a family of fundamentalist believers and attended “a conservative, Bible-believing church” every Sunday of her childhood and her adult life. In her Christian community, “everything in the Bible was taken literally and there were rules about everything.”

The church that Mary Lou was attending taught that homosexuality was a sin—and not just a sin but the sin of all sins. “I didn’t really study the Bible at all about [homosexuality], but I did pull out those passages and read them and certainly used them against Anna, later.”

When she was away at college, Anna wrote to her mother and told her that she was gay. Mary Lou reacted to this news by first going to the bathroom and throwing up and “then just going completely underground, not telling anybody and being ashamed and embarrassed.” She wrote her daughter back and told her “some things…that were not very loving.”

Undoubtedly the most difficult part of your letter is the gay thing. I will never accept that in you. I feel it’s a terrible waste, besides being spiritually and morally wrong. For a reason I don’t quite fathom I have a harder time dealing with that issue than almost anything in the world. I do and will continue to love you, but I will always hate that.

She thought her daughter’s sexuality was a choice and that “she needed to just get her act together and stop this.”

The letter caused an irreparable break between daughter and mother. Ten months later, before there could be any reconciliation, Mary Lou’s daughter took her own life by hanging herself from the bar in her bedroom closet.

The death of her daughter led Mary Lou to question what she had been taught by her church—that being gay was a choice, for example—and to begin to research the subject of homosexuality for herself. What she learned was this: “…instead of taking the Bible literally, I have to take it in the context and culture of the day in which it was written.” She has since become an activist for the advancement of gay rights and for the understanding of gay and lesbian people by the church.

Jorge Valencia of the Trevor Project Suicide Hotline says:

It’s estimated that every five hours an LGBT teen takes his life, and for every teen that takes his or her own life, there are twenty more who try. One of the top five reasons why teenagers call us is for religious reasons. They’re feeling there isn’t a place for them and God.

Reverend Jimmy Creech of Faith in America says:

The church, because of its teachings that homosexuality is sinful, is wrong, is a perversion, has created the climate in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered children growing up feel very much in conflict with the world in which they live. It really shapes their thinking so that they hate themselves, so that they internalize this judgment and condemnation.

In The Bible Tells Me So, a number of clergy members, including biblical scholars like Reverend Peter J. Gomes of Harvard Divinity School, stress the wisdom and importance of reading the Bible in the context of the period and culture in which it was written. They point out, for example, that the famous prohibition against homosexuality in Leviticus—“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall be put to death. Their blood is upon them”—does not exist in isolation from other abominations: eating shrimp, planting two different seeds in the same hole, comingling crops, eating a rabbit, and so on.

Moreover, biblical scholarship has determined that in the Hebrew Bible the word abomination “is always used to address a ritual wrong. It never is used to refer to something innately immoral. Eating pork was not innately immoral for a Jew, but it was an abomination because it was a violation of a ritual requirement.”

It is not a stretch to say that selective reading of the Bible, as a constitution, led to the tragic death of Mary Lou Wallner’s daughter and has led to the deaths of many other young people. It has also resulted in closeted lives of fear, self-loathing, and confusion for countless numbers of LGBT teenagers who do not take their own lives. In this age of information, where the truth of both scripture and homosexuality are readily available, the choice of pastors and laypersons to not only remain ignorant but to preach in ignorance is, in the sense of the word as they so like to use it, an abomination.

In A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren suggests an alternative metaphor for the Bible; his suggestion is that we think of the Bible as a library, which is “a collection of documents.” His rationale for the use of this metaphor is that “in a good library you want to present all sides of an issue. A good library preserves key arguments; a good constitution eliminates all arguments.”

A library is a sacred place of ideas. For every argument you find there, you will find a counter-argument, made with the same intelligence, with the same love for truth as the first. This interplay of ideas promotes growth—spiritual, intellectual, and emotional. If we can see the Bible as a library rather than as a constitution, Christian churches and Christian families might begin to have respectful and loving conversations that include the LGBT members of those churches and those families and that allow them to be who they are.


If you have not seen The Bible Tells Me So, I highly recommend it. You can watch it on YouTube in nine parts. Here is the first:

Making Room for God

I have been engaged, more or less full-time, for the past several years in a personal study of the Catholic faith. This study has not been systematic in any way; I have simply trusted my intuition to take me wherever it wanted me to go. My journey, and my feelings about the journey, have been fairly well documented in this blog in the short time it has been in existence; blog postings have also been random, the result of inspiration rather than of a particular agenda. The main characteristic of the study and the writing has been unrelenting passion.

I have stated previously that I understand, as a mature Christian, that God is not the bearded old man who appeared on the glossy pages in the family Bible of my childhood. I recognize that God is within me as he is within every particle of creation. Yet in these years that I have been so engrossed in studying and reflecting on faith, I do not feel that I have truly connected with God, experienced God, participated fully in the mystery that is God. I have not felt the God who is within.

A great deal of emotion has been involved in the journey, but it has also been a deeply intellectual exercise. I have reached the point where the intellect and the emotions have become reasonably well integrated, but I have so far failed to integrate the spiritual and create a truly whole person (or a true holy person?). I have so far been unable to banish the ego in order to make room for God, and as long as I allow the I/me illusion to dominate my daily life, God will remain hidden.

There is a large hole in the mosaic I have been creating since my return to the Church; what is missing is prayer. I have heard many people say that prayer is the key to truly experiencing God, but I have yet to succeed in finding a method of prayer that works for me. For some reason, I am not motivated to pray. At the end of my first meeting with the pastor of our church, shortly after I joined the parish, he gave me a rosary that he had bought in Rome and that had been blessed by the Holy Father. I have prayed that rosary many times, both in church and privately, but the repeated Our Fathers and Hail Marys prayed silently or aloud do not speak to me. I have participated in the Liturgy of the Hours, which on our church is chanted before the weekday morning Mass; it is very beautiful and often quite moving but God is just not there for me in those prayers. For some reason, I always end up thinking about what I am going to cook for dinner that night. I wonder if I should just pray the rosary as a kind of mantra and create a space for God to enter, or if I should follow Eckhart Tolle and create stillness so that God may enter the spaces between thoughts? At this point I just don’t know about prayer.

Another significant piece that is for the most part missing is the Bible. I have read about the Bible. I have heard others speak knowledgeably about the Bible; I have even studied two of the Gospels (John and Matthew—according to Scott Hahn). But I have not taken this document and made it my own. I have not “wrestled with Scripture,” as the Jews do with the Hebrew Bible. I haven’t listened to the words of Jesus and contemplated their meaning for my life and for the contemporary world. I have not tried to locate, through my own effort, the connecting points and the points of disconnect between Jesus and the hierarchical church. I have not truly reflected on how I might imitate Christ in my everyday life.

I have also become aware in the short period since my return to the Church of a profound disconnect between the militarily hierarchical and politically and socially influential character of the Church, which often seems to predominate, and the truly pastoral, which tends to be overshadowed by the desperate effort of bishops to keep the Church out of the modern age. While I am sure that many bishops demonstrate considerable pastoral concern for their flock, what we ordinary Catholics hear are the incessant polemics of the pro-life, anti-gay, investigate-the-nuns, reform-the-reforms positions of the Curia and the national bishops’ conferences. Naturally, these polemics are exactly what the media thrive on, but we are not so naïve as to think that the bishops do not use the media for their own purposes. I cannot find God in any of this.

The institutional Church, then, with its overriding concern for policing adherence to doctrine, does not help me to experience God’s love. Because the priests in the local churches (at least in my archdiocese), as well as the local diocesan media, which is of course controlled by the chancery, are in lock-step with the bishop and thus with Rome, for laypersons seeking a glimpse of the true God, a huge iron fence of orthodoxy has been erected before them. Am I wrong in thinking that the main purpose of the Church and its leaders is to help the ordinary Christian, the ordinary Catholic, to experience the goodness, the love of God through the sacraments, through effective preaching?

Again, I think of Hans Küng, who has clearly shown that the spiritual relationship between Jesus Christ and the institutional Catholic Church is tenuous at best.

Through his actions this man from Nazareth became involved in a dangerous conflict with the ruling forces of his time. Not with the people, but with the official religious authorities, with the hierarchy, which handed him over to the Roman governor and thus to his death....Even in today's Catholic Church might he have become involved in dangerous conflicts if he so radically put in question the dominant religious circles and cliques and the traditional religious practices of so many pious and fundamentalist Catholics? What if he even initiated a public protest action against the way in which piety was practiced in the sanctuary of the priests and the high priest and identified himself with the concerns of a popular church movement "from below"? Jesus was anything but the representative of a patriarchal hierarchy.

It seems that Catholics who find themselves in conflict with the religious authorities of our time need to reclaim the Jesus of the Gospels and to seek God through Jesus’ unconditional love, his acceptance of everyone, his forgiveness of those who persecuted him, and his simple but profound wisdom. We love our Church, but we must see it for what it has become: a powerful and influential organization in which only a few are actually in touch with the ideals of its supposed Founder.

I am not disappointed or bitter that I have failed to find God in my Church. As I have said before, I know that God has led me onto the path that I am now traveling on. I only seek to feel him traveling with me.