Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change, Part 8 - Christopher M. Hays

Christopher M. Hays

“aha” moments: biblical scholars tell their stories (7): Christopher M. Hays

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/07/aha-moments-biblical-scholars-tell-their-stories-7-christopher-m-hays/

by Peter Enns

July 11, 2014

Comment

Today’s “aha” moments is by Christopher M. Hays (DPhil, New Testament Studies, University of Oxford). After completing his degree, Hays was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow for 3 years, and is now teaching at Fundación Universitaria Seminario Bíblico de Colombia.

Hays thinks a lot about how early Christians believed that money ought to be used, a subject he calls “Christian wealth ethics.” He is the author of Luke’s Wealth Ethics: A Study in Their Coherence and Character (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), and his current research moves beyond the New Testament to investigate the teachings and practices of early Christians in the era before the rise of Constantine. He is also the co-editor (with Christopher B. Ansberry) of Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism  (SPCK/Baker Academic, 2013).

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Graduate students are willing and eager to do miserably boring jobs for woeful wages. Professors, who also do a lot of boring work for only slightly less woeful wages, are willing and eager to give their grad students the worst of that drudge-work. (It’s called “mentoring.”)

That’s how, in 2003, I found myself naively happy to be cataloguing “textual variants” for 2 Peter, helping my boss and mentor, Gene Green, on his then-forthcoming commentary for Baker. (Not all ancient copies of biblical manuscripts are identical, so scholars have to decide which “variants” are likely to be older, and therefore more likely original.)

Now most textual variants are tremendously insignificant, which is why, when I found a slightly-less-insignificant one in 2 Peter 2:15, I felt a rush of nerd adrenaline.

2 Peter 2:15 mentions false teachers who have gone astray like Balaam, the prophet from Numbers 22:5 who was hired by King Balak to curse the Israelites. Some manuscripts of 2 Peter 2:15 called him “Balaam son of Beor” (which is what Numbers 22:5 calls him); other manuscripts of 2 Peter 2:15 call him “Balaam of Bosor,” which, as we’ll see in a moment, makes no sense at all.

“Beor” is a person’s name; it was the name of Balaam’s dad (his patronymic). Bosor is the name of a city (a.k.a. Bosorra). The problem is: the older, better manuscripts called him “Balaam of Bosor,” but Balaam wasn’t from anywhere near Bosor, which is in the land of Gilead. According to Numbers 22:5, Balaam was from “Pethor, which is on the Euphrates, in the land of Amaw.”

Later copyists, therefore, changed “Bosor” to “Beor” so that the text makes more sense.

So I asked myself, why did the author of 2 Peter call him “Balaam of Bosor”? I poked around, and then an answer suggested itself.

If you are a normal person, reading text criticism is about as much fun as un-sedated dental surgery, but I’m asking you nicely to hang with the next couple of paragraphs to see how I came to understand that the author of 2 Peter was himself confused about a historical detail.

The basic problem is that there was another guy in the Old Testament whose name sounded a lot like Balaam’s. Instead of being “Balaam son of Beor,” his name was “Bela son of Beor.”

The name Beor actually occurs in a genealogy (a king-list) that is copied three times in the Old Testament (Gen 36.33; 1 Cor 1.44; Job 42:17c [LXX only]). That genealogy mentions a king whose name was “Bela son of Beor,” who in turn was succeeded by aguy from the city of Bosorra (Bosor). And in one version of the genealogy (the LXX of Job 42), the king “Bela son of Beor” is actually called “Balak son of Beor”.

Now the King Balak son of Beor in this genealogy is a different King Balak (of Moab) than the one that hired Balaam son of Beor in Numbers. But you can see how people might get confused: same patronymic, similar sounding first names. You’re probably confused already! And so were some ancient Jews.

In fact, when you read the genealogy in ancient Aramaic translations of the Old Testament (the “targums”), which were already popular at the time of Jesus, you can see that they sometimes actually changed the name of King Bela/Balak son of Beor toBalaam son of Beor.

Since there was already a history of confusion over the Balaams and Balaks and Beors in the Numbers story and the genealogy, it seemed really understandable that the author of 2 Peter would be caught up in the flow and reproduce the same mistake.

What more natural way is there to explain the fact that he used “Bosor” instead of “Beor” than to say that he mixed up the patronymic of one person in the genealogy with the similar sounding hometown of the next person in the genealogy?

Yeah, yeah; I know it’s dull stuff. But I was fascinated, and so Prof. Green (who really was and is a brilliant mentor to me) fanned the flame, and helped me produce my first scholarly publication (an insignificant note in Filologia Neotestamentaria; if you are an insomniac, you can look it up here).

It was at that point that my friends started to rain on my parade.

One of my buddies asked, “So, don’t you believe in inerrancy anymore?” I was taken aback. I was pretty sure I still believed in inerrancy. But he explained, no, no I didn’t; after all, I had just said that Peter (no scare-quotes at this point in my life) made a mistake.

(BTW, this totally messes up the silly idea that Scripture is “inerrant in the original autographs”; we of course will never have the original autographs, but in 2 Peter 2:15, for example, the most-original reading we have is the more problematic one; the later manuscripts in 2 Peter 2:15 are the ones that are without error!)

Then came my “Aha” moment: I realized that I thought Peter had made an historical mistake, and I realized that it didn’t make me trust themessage of Scripture less. The agenda of 2 Peter (to say that false prophets in his day were doing bad things, like Balaam did) is not remotely altered by the author’s snafu about Balaam’s surname.

In this case (though not in every case) the veracity of the theological message is in no way dependent upon the historical detail of the Old Testament illustration used to underscore the point. So I saw no reason to doubt 2 Peter’s criticism of the false teachers because of this tiny lacuna in his historical knowledge.

But for a lot of my friends, that wouldn’t be the case. In popular evangelical discourse (such as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy), the historical and scientific inerrancy of Scripture is adduced as the reason one can trust Scripture’s message about God’s redemption in Christ.

So, if there are historical or scientific errors in the Bible, then the theological veracity of the Bible’s message is also jeopardized.

The conservatives have a point here; we can’t just pretend that historicity is entirely irrelevant to the Bible. The live debate among conservative and liberal Christian scholars has to do with how much historicity the Bible itself claims to possess and how much Christians are obliged to affirm.

We all agree (at least in principle) that inductive research should help us determine which of the portions of the Bible aim to be historical. We all agree (at least in principle) that a biblical text that doesn’t aim to be historical can still be true. For example, none of us will argue that the Parable of the Lost Son (Luke 15:11-32) is “false” even though we all agree—since it is a parable—it never happened in history.

But how much history is there? How much history needs to be there?

I’m inclined to say that lots of texts that evangelicals consider historical probably shouldn’t be read that way (e.g. Gen. 1-11). Nonetheless, lots of biblical texts are still very concerned with substantial historicity the key events. Moreover, the historicity of the events in the Bible does matter for lots of our Christian doctrines. So I don’t think we can make a binary distinction, claiming that the Bible is a purely theological but non-historical book.

We’ve got to be more refined than that, examining the texts of the Bible and the doctrines of the Church on a case-by-case basis to figure out where the points of friction are. (I recently edited a book exploring just this subject, Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism. Pete was kind enough to post an interview about it here, if you’re curious.)

From a pragmatic point of view, there’s a downside to this nuanced construal of Scripture’s historicity. A definition of Scriptural truth that safeguards all its historical and scientific contents does build a nice fence around our other doctrines. (Muslims have a similar construal of the Qur’an, and it certainly can be useful.)

But the point of my “aha” moment is that the phenomena of Scripture itself don’t seem to support that depiction of Scripture. Scripture cannot bear the weight of the historical demands that many evangelicals place on it.

That sort of realization sometimes causes people to conclude (or fear) that all our other doctrines must be rubbish. But that’s sloppy logic; just because you can’t guarantee the historicity of every genealogical detail doesn’t mean that Jesus’ body is moldering in a tomb somewhere. There’s a ton of middle ground between those extremes, and evangelical biblical scholars (as well as non-evangelical Christian biblical scholars) can and should be (and are!) involved in mapping out that middle ground.

Are there doctrines “at stake” depending on the conclusions that people draw? Sure. But I don’t think our faith is actually well served by distorting the Bible, especially insofar as I think that the Bible is revelatory and true just as it is. As a good friend of mine, David Lincicum, puts it, the job of the Christian biblical scholar is to seek the perfection Scripture has, rather than the perfection we would demand of it.

Index to Series -

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change

Part 1 - Introduction

Part 2 - Peter Enns

Part 3 - John Byron

Part 4 - Daniel Kirk

Part 5 - Michael Pahl

Part 6 - Charles Halton

Part 7 - Christopher W. Skinner

Part 8 - Christopher M. Hays

Part 9 - Michael L. Ruffin

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change, Part 7 - Christopher W. Skinner

Christopher W. Skinner

“aha” moments: biblical scholars tell their stories (6): Christopher W. Skinner

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/07/aha-moments-biblical-scholars-tell-their-stories-6-christopher-w-skinner/

by Peter Enns

July 9, 2014

Comments

Today’s “aha” moment–the 6th in the series–is by Christopher W. Skinner (PhD, Catholic University of America), Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Mount Olive in North Carolina. Skinner is the author or editor of 6 books, including John and Thomas: Gospels in Conflict?: Johannine Characterization and the Thomas Question (Wipf and Stock), What Are They Saying About the Gospel of Thomas? (Paulist), and Characters and Characterization in the Gospel of John (T & T Clark). His current book project is Reading John and will be published in the Cascade Companions series. He blogs, along with Nijay Gupta, at Crux Sola.

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I was raised in a tiny town in southeastern Virginia where I spent much of my childhood inside the small Southern Baptist church nestled at the corner of Chesapeake Avenue and Guerriere Street. From the earliest age I was taught to love and revere the Bible—that it was the repository of everything God wanted us to know and do in this world.

In addition to affirming its truthfulness and authoritative status, we used terms like “inerrant” and “infallible” to describe the Bible. We were fond of saying things like, “The Bible is a perfect description of our realities and the perfect prescription for our ailments.”

The Bible was always correct in whatever it affirmed, and if a situation arose in which the Bible appeared to be incorrect, this discrepancy could easily be answered by those who knew more than I did. Any apparent inconsistency could be explained, resolved, or harmonized if given the right amount of time and attention.

This perspective carried me through my time in undergraduate school, where I involved myself heavily in a campus para-church group, and even my early days in vocational ministry where I served as an overseas missionary with the same organization.

In those early days, there were few challenges—either internally or externally—to my received convictions about the Bible. But as I entered seminary and began to immerse myself in the study of ancient languages, the history of interpretation, and other complex areas of inquiry, a nascent sense of cognitive dissonance began to emerge.

I had been led to believe that there was something like a one-to-one correspondence between what I read in the Bible and what I saw in the world, but my own experience seemed to contradict this.

In fact, when first learning about how to “do” theology, we were introduced to the Wesleyan Quadrilateral—the idea that we must keep Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience in dialogue while constructing our theologies.

We were cautioned that, above all, the Bible MUST play the most important role of the four.

My problem was that my personal experiences and my own (admittedly feeble) attempts at reason very often disagreed with what the Bible seemed to be saying.

During my second year in seminary, I began a love affair with the Gospels from which I have yet to recover. I began to read them all the time in English, and as my skills improved, in Greek. I read every commentary I could get my hands on and trolled the campus and local bookstores for other books that could help me better understand these four texts.

At this time, I began to experience an even greater sense of cognitive dissonance. In these Gospels I was seeing four very different, yet very compelling portraits of Jesus.

At times the differences were so great that I felt they might never be harmonized. However, I remained resolute in my conviction that any discrepancy I might find was either the result of my ignorance, my inattention to the text, or my own personal sinfulness.

In short, I found myself constantly doubting the veracity of the Bible I had been taught to trust implicitly, and there was no little guilt associated with these doubts.

If only I could have had more faith….a faith that would have allowed me to believe through my doubts.

One of the most poignant epiphanies came during my third year of seminary in an upper-level class called, “Exegesis of Gospel Narrative.” The course was team-taught by two members of our New Testament faculty—one a Synoptic specialist (i.e., Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and the other a scholar of John’s Gospel.

The class was illuminating in so many ways. We were introduced to Jewish backgrounds to the Gospels, philological concerns, and important insights from 19th century German scholarship.

However, there was still a baseline assumption that for all of their “perceived” differences, these four Gospels could (and should) be harmonized. On the side, I had also begun reading the work of Alan Culpepper and the early NT narrative critics, an exercise that was contrasting sharply with my experience in class.

It was in this class that I ran into my first truly insurmountable problem. Since I had always been taught about the Bible’s coherence and internal consistency, I thought, “Surely the New Testament gives us reliable information about Jesus’ origins?”

This meant that despite my misgivings, there had to be a way to reconcile the conflicting genealogies in Matthew 1 and Luke 3.

From Abraham to Jesus, Matthew lists only 41 names while Luke lists 57. At the time I thought Matthew’s omission of names must be some kind of rhetorical device. However, more problematic for me was the realization that of the 41 names Matthew and Luke should have had in common, they agree on only 17.

How could this be? Surely this level of disagreement was something more than a rhetorical device?

Whenever I raised this question, one solution that evangelical friends and commentators alike continued to affirm was that one genealogy recounts the line of Mary while the other recounts the line of Joseph. However, this solution was immediately unacceptable to me since both texts clearly indicate that the lineage is being traced through Joseph (if you doubt this, please see Matt 1:16 and Luke 3:23).

I also spent considerable time researching the history of scholarship on this issue only to realize that it was not just a problem for my 21st century historiographical sensibilities. As early as Julius Africanus in 225 CE, this contradiction had been a serious problem for commentators on the Gospels.

I wasn’t the only one who saw this problem for what it was—a REAL problem—and I cannot tell you the relief that realization was. I had been wracked with guilt and confusion this whole time.

Finally, I decided to approach the Synoptic specialist in the class—an individual I greatly respect, who is both a brilliant scholar and a man of tremendous Christian conviction. When I told him my concern, he replied that the best solution was to regard one genealogy as Mary’s and the other as Joseph’s.

I objected to this facile solution by pointing to the details of actual text. His response was simple: “We need to trust the Bible even when we don’t understand, even when it seems to be contradicting itself.” Not only did this seem to me like an easy answer, it smacked of the same sort of intellectual dishonesty I had been taught to avoid at all costs.

This was a travesty. I had been taught to ferret out every exegetical nugget, to mine every nook and cranny for insights into the text. I had spent hours and hours learning Greek, textual criticism, and numerous other exegetical skills, only to be told to abandon them when I ran into a problem that contradicted my overarching approach to the Bible.

This was the beginning of the end of my rigid reading of the Bible.

The “aha” moments began to come with increasing frequency and intensity over the next few years. I am genuinely thankful for that moment because it allowed me to begin the process of reading the Bible without my hands tied behind my back.

The assumption (and protection) of a unified, harmonious, problem-free reading of the Bible is endemic to the life of most evangelical Bible readers. However, the Bible we have—as opposed to one we want or are often led to believe we have—does not fall into line with that assumption.

When we ignore or explain away these problems, we do ourselves, our churches, and future generations of Bible readers a serious injustice.

I have come to think that defending the Bible as inerrant is more about maintaining an identity than it is about searching for truth. I like to tell my students that one of my goals is to help them “eschew the culture of easy-answerism.” One of the best ways to do this is to study Scripture together without flinching and let them know that they have nothing to fear.

Index to Series -

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change

Part 1 - Introduction

Part 2 - Peter Enns

Part 3 - John Byron

Part 4 - Daniel Kirk

Part 5 - Michael Pahl

Part 6 - Charles Halton

Part 7 - Christopher W. Skinner

Part 8 - Christopher M. Hays

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change, Part 6 - Charles Halton

Charles Halton

“aha” moments: biblical scholars tell their stories (5): Charles Halton

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/07/aha-moments-biblical-scholars-tell-their-stories-5-charles-halton/

by Peter Enns

July 7, 2014

Comments

Today’s “aha” moment is the 5th in our series and brought to you by Charles Halton (PhD Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion), assistant professor of theology at Houston Baptist University.

Halton is the managing editor of Marginalia and just completed editing Genesis: History, Fiction, or Neither?: Three Views on the Bible’s Earliest Chapters (Zondervan, February, 2015). He is working on several other projects, one of which is with co-author Saana Svärd The First Female Authors: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from Mesopotamia (Cambridge, forthcoming). His essays have appeared in the Journal of Biblical Literature, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, Cuneiform Digital Library Notes, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Bulletin for Biblical Research, and Books & Culture. He lives with his wife and daughter in Louisville, Kentucky. Charles tweets from the incredibly creative handle @charleshalton and virtually resides at www.charleshalton.com.

Halton’s “aha” moment will be familiar to many who have studied Genesis–and for that very reason is worth raising…again and again.

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When I was in seminary I was told that if I wanted to learn of the origins of the universe and how humans came to be, then I needed to consult the Bible, and most specifically, the book of Genesis. On questions of science and history, they said, the Bible is entirely accurate. Furthermore, they continued, at no point should scientific discoveries change the way we understand the Bible’s clear, unified story concerning the origins of the world.

In this last point, my professors were merely recapitulating the view expressed in theChicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, a document that professors at many conservative Evangelical schools must agree with. Article twelve of the statement includes this assertion: “We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.”

As a young and eager seminary student this made sense to me, particularly when I considered the syllogistic reasoning that often went with it: God spoke the Bible, God always is true, therefore, the Bible is true in all it says including its teaching on the origin of the world. Fair enough, that made sense.

Until I read the Bible.

What I found out, when I paid attention to the details, is that there is no one, singular teaching on creation in Scripture. There are several creation narratives and they conflict with one another. And they conflict on the most superficial level—the order of creation.

For me—like so many others have done—all I needed to do was read the first two chapters of the Bible, the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2.

Genesis 1 presents the world as created in six days. If we take the sequence literally, things are created in this order: light, sky, earth, plants, stars and sun and moon, aquatic animals, birds, land animals, and, finally humans in large number. In other words, humans—and many of them—are created last.

But when we come to Genesis 2, the one human (Adam) is created first, even before plants had grown (Gen 2:5). After the human is made, God sows a garden and plants begin to sprout. After this, God begins the process of identifying a suitable companion for the human.

At this point, it gets a bit tricky if you are reading the Bible in translation. One of the difficulties in studying the Bible is that modern translations sometimes obscure what the Bible really says.

In most cases, the translators have good motives for this and they believe they are doing their readers a favor—making the text more clear and steering them away from error. In many cases this is entirely appropriate and is beneficial.

But then there’s Genesis 2:19. This is where God is trying to find a companion for the human, and so he forms the animals (maybe that will provide a suitable companion for the human?).

Genesis 2:19 reads, “So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the sky….” This conflicts with Genesis 1 where the animals were already created (days 5 and 6) before the humans were.

Two of the most popular translations within the Evangelical world—the ESV and NIV—obscure the natural flow of the passage. The Hebrew verb is a “narrative preterite,” which indicates sequential action (e.g., “and then this happened”). But these translations say “had formed”—i.e., “had previously formed” back in Genesis 1.

In other words, “had formed” is a translation aimed at harmonizing the creation accounts of Genesis 1 and 2, thus reconciling the contradiction between them. In doing so, these translations opt for a rather forced reading of the Hebrew. (For what it’s worth, ancient Greek versions render this verb with the construction kai + an aorist verb, which shows that they interpreted the verb as a narrative preterite and not as a pluperfect. The KJV also translates it as “formed.”)

Once I saw these conflicting accounts of creation I was fearful. The entire artifice I had learned, which asserted that the Bible alone has the true story of the scientific origins of the world collapsed. If the biblical authors couldn’t agree on the sequence of creation, how could I trust the rest of what they said?

But then, through the help of some very patient friends, I began to understand that God communicates to us in the forms that make up our contextual environment, such as language and culture. It could be no other way.

And this applies to the biblical authors as well. They were people who lived in a pre-scientific age for which discussion of big bangs, the speed of light, and genetic codes would have made no sense. They explored the nature of the universe with the tools that were available to them—the literary forms and tropes of their day, their observations of nature, and their religious understandings.

The authors of Scripture were not concerned, as many are today, about conflicting orders of creation—they put them side by side for goodness sake! This reveals, at least to me, that Scripture begins not with a scientific treatise but with two theological stories. And as we turn to Scripture’s pages we should separate the theological messages of its authors from the accouterments of their cultural context. The fact that the author of Genesis 1 had no knowledge of the human genome nor astrophysics does not diminish the worth of their theological vision. At the same time, we are not required to believe that the earth was created in six days when every single facet of the scientific study of nature tells us otherwise.

I think it is exciting that, in Christian confession, God speaks to us through the writings of people long dead. Instead of trying to change the word of God to accommodate our expectations, the voices of Scripture call us to think beyond our own cultural contexts and contemplate what it has meant and what it now means to follow after God in the myriad of contexts in which the people of God live. This challenges us even on the level of the expectations we bring to our study of the Bible. Should we really prize philosophical consistency and weed out contradiction if the biblical authors saw no need to?

It is also exciting that we as humans have the freedom and capability to study the Scriptures and in them learn of our life with God and also to explore the world that God has made and try to figure out how it came to be. But with this freedom comes great responsibility. Interpreting the Bible well is difficult and we will constantly disagree with one another as we do it.

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a brief word on my current series “aha moments from biblical scholars”

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/07/a-brief-word-on-my-current-series-aha-moments-from-biblical-scholars/

by Peter Enns

July 6, 2014

Comments

We’re now 4 posts into my series, “‘aha’ moments: biblical scholars tell their stories.”

I’ve gotten a lot of very positive feedback from many of you, which is always encouraging to hear. I’ve also gotten some messages from pastors and doctoral students who have had their own “aha” moments in their study of Scripture.

It was an oversight on my part to restrict this series to biblical scholars, and so I am broadening the field to include others who have had some formal training in biblical studies (i.e., involving the study of original languages and ancient contexts) and whose view of the Bible has been significantly affected as a result of their study.

Pastors (some of whom also have earned doctorates) have a great existential crisis because their “aha” moments are never too distant from their pastoral responsibilities. Their stories can be quite compelling for this reason.

So just letting you know that as this intermittent series continues (I will post contributions as they come in), you will be seeing pastors and students contributing.

Have a blessed Sunday.

Index to Series -

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change

Part 1 - Introduction

Part 2 - Peter Enns

Part 3 - John Byron

Part 4 - Daniel Kirk

Part 5 - Michael Pahl

Part 6 - Charles Halton

Part 7 - Christopher W. Skinner

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change, Part 5 - Michael Pahl

Michael Pahl

“aha” moments: biblical scholars tell their stories (4): Michael Pahl

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/07/aha-moments-biblical-scholars-tell-their-stories-4-michael-pahl/

by Peter Enns

July 2, 2014

Comments

Today’s “aha” moment is by Michael Pahl (PhD, University of Birmingham). Pahl, as you may recall, was one of the casualties of Cedarville University’s theological purge of 2012. He is now pastor of Morden Mennonite Church (Canada). You can find more about Pahl at his blog. Pahl has written 3 books including The Beginning and the End: Rereading Genesis’s Stories and Revelation’s Visions and co-edited 2 others including Issues in Luke-Acts: Selected Essays.

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I still remember winning the VBS Sword Drill one summer. I was maybe seven, and I could already pick out Obadiah with the best of them. I could also quote John 3:16, Romans 3:23 and 6:23, and all the other must-have-in-your-back-pocket verses crucial for salvation. Our church had prophecy conferences, where smart men in suits quoted the Bible left-and-right in building their towers of end-times prophecy right to the new heavens.

I knew the Bible. I loved the Bible. And with that particular knowledge and love of the Bible came a whole set of expectations about what the Bible is and what it’s all about:

"It is God’s word straight from God’s mouth, internally consistent from cover to cover. It is God’s literal, inerrant truth about anything that matters, but what matters most is personal salvation: people being saved from eternal hell, God’s just judgment for their sin, in order to spend eternity with God in heaven."

A lot changed for me over the years following my VBS triumph. We attended a different church through my teen years, not quite so hard-and-fast conservative. I then went through some crises of life and faith that pushed me to explore other denominations, even other religions.

I was hungry for meaning, and this hunger became so intense I did the only thing I could think to do: I read the Bible.

I skipped my university English classes to binge-read the Bible, devouring it not in single sword-drill verses but in large chunks: all of Isaiah in one sitting, all of Paul’s letters in another, then all of Genesis, then all of Luke, and so on.

This Bible binging was just what I needed—I found the meaning for life I was craving—but it was also the beginning of the end for the view of the Bible I had grown up with.

For the first time I saw the Obadiahs and John 3:16's of the Bible as pieces of a much larger narrative, a narrative centered on Jesus and encompassing the entire creation.

I realized God wasn’t concerned so much with personal salvation but with cosmic restoration.

I discovered that this world really mattered, that our bodies really mattered, that this life with all its joys and sorrows really mattered, that God created all things good and longed to return all things to that original goodness—or even better.

For the first time I also read the pieces of the Bible alongside each other: two creation stories in Genesis, two renditions of the Ten Commandments, two accounts of Israel’s kingdoms, four Gospel stories of Jesus.

This raised all sorts of questions for me that I wasn’t yet prepared to answer, but there was no doubt in my mind that these parallel pieces were different from each other.

It wasn’t until later, when I began to explore historical setting and source criticism and literary genre that these questions began to be answered—but in a way that made it impossible for me to hold on to the view of Bible I had inherited.

“I was always taught the Bible says X but now I just don’t see it.”

I could fill in that X with quite a few things.

I was taught that Genesis 1 was all about when, and how, God created the world—in six literal days a few thousand years ago, directly by a series of divine commands. I was taught that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, that Deuteronomy’s account of his death and mysterious burial was an instance of prophetic foresight.

I was taught that Jesus’ words in the Gospels were word-for-word what Jesus said. I was taught that there are no real contradictions among the Gospel accounts, that if you just look hard enough there is always a harmonizing explanation.

I was taught that Paul’s gospel was all about how individual sinners get saved, so that after death we can escape hell and enter heaven. I was taught that Revelation was all about when, and how, God would wrap it all up—pretty much like the Left Behind series, only for real.

I was taught a bunch of things “the Bible says” that I no longer believe the Bible says.

But yet I still believe.

I remain a committed Christian, in many ways a deeply conservative Christian (hey, I can recite the Apostles’ Creed without crossing my fingers—just one little asterisk by “he descended into hell”). How can that be, when so many have abandoned their faith after leaving behind their conservative bibliology?

I think the answer to that comes down to two things.

First, early on in my journey I came to the realization that Jesus, not the Bible, is the foundation and center and standard and goal of genuine Christian faith and life.

During those early days of reading the Bible in large swaths, I found Jesus, and that makes all the difference: paradoxically, the Bible matters less even as it matters all the more.

And second, along the way, even in the strictest of conservative environments, I always found people who gave me space to ask hard questions and avoid simplistic answers—because they themselves were in that space. It’s a dangerous place, that risky grace of a humble search for truth.

I’m grateful to those who have created those “dangerous places” for me in my life, even at great risk to themselves—and I’m committed to providing that same space of grace for others.

Index to Series -

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change

Part 1 - Introduction

Part 2 - Peter Enns

Part 3 - John Byron

Part 4 - Daniel Kirk

Part 5 - Michael Pahl

Part 6 - Charles Halton

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change, Part 4 - Daniel Kirk

Daniel Kirk

“AHA” moments: biblical scholars tell their stories (3): Daniel Kirk

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/06/aha-moments-biblical-scholars-tell-their-stories-3-daniel-kirk/

by Peter Enns

June 30, 2014

Comments

Today’s “aha” moment is brought you by Daniel Kirk, associate professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he has taught since 2008. When he’s not watching a Coen Brothers movie, Kirk blogs at Storied Theology (“telling the story of a story-bound God”). His has written Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?: A Narrative Approach to the Problem of Pauline Christianity and Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God. His current project is a volume on early Christology in a Jewish matrix to be published by Eerdmans.

Kirk’s aha moment concerns the resurrection accounts of Christ.

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Each summer during college, I worked at Christian summer camp. No, it wasn’t pretty. The other counselors called me “the enforcer” because I was so hung up on everyone keeping the camp rules.

But I digress.

One year they let me teach sailing. Since I was not the true sailing instructor, this mostly meant that I sat on the shore and shouted encouraging words at anyone who hadn’t managed to get their Sunfish out of the cove.

In other words, I sat there on the shore for about three hours a day with nothing to do.

So one day I decided that the logical way to spend my time would be to create a chart of what each Gospel says about the last week of Jesus’ life.

Have you ever tried it? Go ahead. I’ll wait.

I told one of my fellow counselors about my project. He knew just what I’d find: “Wasn’t it beautiful how it all lined up?”

Um… No, actually. They don’t line up at all.

O.k., so “not at all” is an overstatement. But there are interesting differences.

One example: does Jesus go into the temple to cast out the money changers as the climactic moment of his “triumphal entry” (Matthew)? Or does he wait until the next day (Mark)?

Another: Does the fig tree whither immediately upon being cursed (Matthew)? Or does the withering happen overnight (Mark)? For that matter, does Jesus curse it before going to the temple for the clearing incident (Mark)? Or after (Matthew)?

Details, details, right?

But then there are potentially more troubling questions: did Jesus have his last meal with the disciples on Passover (Matthew, Mark, and Luke)? Or was Jesus killed on the day when the Passover Lamb was slaughtered, such that the religious leaders were scrupulous to keep themselves pure for the feast that would take place that night (John)?

Though I had not been raised in a fundamentalist church, I was attending one during my first two years of college. Somehow the idea of “inerrancy” had lodged itself in my mind. And here I was, reading the Bible, and discovering that the Bible we actually have doesn’t seem to line up with the Bible I was told to believe in.

As I prepared to go to Westminster Theological Seminary a couple years later, I got introduced to the idea of “hermeneutics.” Guided by the biblical studies department, a way forward began to open up, in which I might be able to affirm inerrancy with respect to the Bible we actually have: maybe we need to think about reading and interpreting differently, bringing a different set of expectations to the text with us.

This, frankly, carried me very far through my studies.

At Westminster (at the time) I was given ways of affirming inerrancy by attributing historical inconcinnities to authorial purposes that lay beyond the bounds of historical accuracy. Historical problems were due to differing expectations of the ancients, or they were due to the fact that the Bible’s history is “preached” history rather than “objective” fact.

Moises Silva, formerly a New Testament professor at Westminster, even wrote an article in which he stated the possibility that pseudepigraphy might be part of an inerrant New Testament.

Learning all of this at Westminster, and spending my first 4.5 years at Duke while I was at the same time pursuing ordination in an inerrantist denomination, I actually found that the view of the Bible I had been given had a lot of staying power.

See, what I had learned by the side of the lake at Camp Willow Run was that (1) the idea I had of an inerrant Bible couldn’t contain the Bible we actually had. What I learned in the classroom at Westminster was that (2) we can put the horse before the cart and allow the phenomena of scripture to define what we mean by “inerrant.”

When I left my conservative denomination for a mainline church shortly after graduating from my doctoral program, I did not change my doctrine of scripture. I simply realized that what I had been given as “inerrancy” in seminary is not how most people understood and used the term.

“Inerrancy” offers itself as a term to both predict and determine beforehand the results of historical and scientific and theological investigation. What I discovered early on is that it fails as a theory precisely because its predictions are wrong.

My co-counselor was right, in this sense: if the doctrine of scripture he was learning at his Bible college were correct, the last week of Jesus’ life would line up in a glorious harmony (the likes of which is nowhere to be found in any of our canonical gospels).

That’s not how they function, because that’s not what the authors wanted (Matthew, after all, was intentionally changing Mark, for instance), and because inerrancy aims to describe a Bible that, in the end, we don’t have.

One of the most compelling things about landing at Fuller Seminary six years ago was finding myself in a Bible Division practically devoid of inerrantists, and yet brimming with Evangelical colleagues who affirm that the Bible is the Word of God, who seek it for divine guidance, and who seek God as a direct and active participant in the lives of God’s people.

In the manner somewhat analogous to my time in a conservative denomination, I discover afresh that communities have tremendous power.

Formerly, my communities helped me hang onto something (inerrancy) that I had been willing to let go of for years. Now, my community of godly colleagues affirms for me what folks from my past would claim to be impossible: those who reject inerrancy handle the scriptures with reverent humility, and live fruit-bearing Christian lives, demonstrating that here is a place where not only the word of God but the very Word of God is living and active.

Index to Series - 

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change

Part 1 - Introduction

Part 2 - Peter Enns

Part 3 - John Byron

Part 4 - Daniel Kirk

Part 5 - Michael Pahl

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change, Part 3 - John Byron

John Byron

“aha” moments: biblical scholars tell their stories (2): John Byron

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/06/aha-moments-biblical-scholars-tell-their-stories-2-john-byron/

by Peter Enns

June 27, 2014

Comments

Today’s “aha” moment, the second installment in the series, is by John Byron (PhD University of Durham), professor of New Testament at Ashland Theological Seminary. Among his books are Cain and Abel in Text and Tradition: Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the First Sibling Rivalry and a recently released commentary on 1 and 2 Thessalonians.

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When Pete asked me to write on my faith journey as a biblical scholar I was glad to oblige. This is a topic that I have blogged on in the past and something I talk about with my students regularly.

It seems that Greg Carey’s Huffington Post article “Where do Liberal Biblical Scholars come from?” struck a chord with many. I found myself agreeing with many of Greg’s points, but especially with his statement: “The best way for conservative churches to produce ‘liberal’ biblical scholars is to keep encouraging young people to read the Bible.”

I suppose we all come to this juncture in our faith journey at various times and in various ways. Like Greg, the questions that began confronting me were a result of reading the Bible. And it was the result of having a solid knowledge of the Bible’s contents that caused questions to surface and sometimes got me in trouble.

The earliest example occurred in Bible College. The instructor was discussing Mark 2:23-27, which narrates the challenge of the Pharisees to Jesus over his disciples picking grain on the Sabbath. Jesus responds to their question by referring to the story in 1 Samuel 21:1-9 of David and his men eating the consecrated bread from the tabernacle.

The problem, however, as I pointed out to my teacher, is that Jesus got it wrong. The story in 1 Samuel 21 relates how David fled from Saul alone. When he stops at the tabernacle and asks Ahimelek for help the priest enquires why David is alone. David seems to lie when saying that his men well meet him later (v. 2).

Moreover, Mark has the wrong priest. In 2:26 Jesus states that the priest was Abiather, but 1 Samuel 21 clearly states that it was Ahimelek.

When I raised these points with the teacher in the middle of class (I wasn’t as tactful then) he looked at me with confusion. He had never noticed these discrepancies before. I was asked politely to be quiet. Years later I was pleasantly surprised to read that it was this very same passage in Mark that signaled the beginning of Bart Ehrman’s faith journey, although he and I are, in many ways, in very different places.

In the end, of course, it wasn’t just one problem like Mark 2:26 that caused me to reexamine how I understood the Bible—but it was a hook and it began a process. Over time numerous passages forced me to conclude eventually that the Bible wasn’t a history book, meaning the authors were not trying to give me a blow-by-blow account from creation to the end of the first century.

Instead I came to realize that the Bible was first and foremost a theological book that contains history and uses history to direct me towards God. I would come to realize more and more that true faith—the faith God calls us to—was not focused on the Bible, but on the God to whom the Bible bears witness.

Now some will say to me: “God’s plan is clearly laid out for us in the Bible. Had you not gone and destroyed your belief in the word of God through theological education you would not be in the fix you find yourself!”

Well perhaps they are correct. But it is too late now for me to change what has happened and I am unconvinced that I will ever be able to revert back to the way I was. My approach to the Bible is as complicated as everything else in my pursuit of faith.

Here’s where I’ve come out

I consider the Bible to be a book written by fallible human beings who were attempting to describe their own faith and religious experiences and did so in an imperfect way. Yet at the same time, what I find within the Bible are words of life.

I am all too aware of the difficulties that arise when reading the Bible and the way that its influence on society has at times caused undue suffering even in the most sincere pursuit of faith. But I also cannot escape the wisdom found on its pages, nor can I ignore the way it has helped to shape the modern world in a positive way. But in the end I am not called to have faith in the Bible but in God.

There are some who would read what I have just written and conclude that I have become one of the many casualties of a (liberal?) theological education. A particular encounter in my “pre-educated” life seemed to predict such an outcome.

My wife and I had served in a church for three years. As we were preparing to leave and begin my seminary training I received the usual jokes about attending “cemetery” and becoming too smart for my own good.

One individual in particular warned me in an almost conspiratorial tone, “Be careful brother, too much of that stuff can be dangerous and cause you to take your eyes off of God.” I assume that he meant I would lose my faith.

In some ways I think he is right. My education has been extremely dangerous to my faith, at least a faith that was taught to me, a faith that is shaken by things like Mark 2:26. On the other hand, through my serious study of the Bible and the questions that arise from it, I continue to find that faith—a true resting and trusting in God—is more present to me now than ever before.

I am like the man who said to Jesus, “Lord, I do believe. Help me in my unbelief!” As a biblical scholar, I think that’s is a good place to be.

Index to Series - 

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change

Part 1 - Introduction

Part 2 - Peter Enns

Part 3 - John Byron

Part 4 - Daniel Kirk

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change, Part 2 - Peter Enns

Peter Enns

“aha” moments: biblical scholars tell their stories (1): me

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/06/aha-moments-biblical-scholars-tell-their-stories-1-me/

by Peter Enns

June 25, 2014

Comments

Following on my last post, here is the first installment of a series–biblical scholars from evangelical backgrounds telling their stories about their “aha” moments that convinced them they needed to find different ways of handling the Bible than how they had been taught.

In the last day I’ve already gotten 10 scholars who want to participate and I expect more to come. My plan is to post their thoughts as they come in rather than all right after the other.

The purpose of this series, more than anything, is to encourage followers of Jesus who are on similar journeys–those who are finding that how they were taught to think about the Bible does not have adequate explanatory power for engaging the Bible as they now read it. You’re not alone. And it’s all good.

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OK, I’ll go first.

Like most of those who will contribute to this series, there wasn’t just “one” moment that moved me from one place to another. It was more a culmination of many moments over many years–some feeling like a 2×4 over the head and others more a whisper.

Overall, as I continued to pay more and more attention to the details of the Bible, it became harder and harder to shake the feeling that the Bible wasn’t behaving as I had always been told it most certainly needs to behave.

What drove this home to me–one of these culminating “aha” moments– happened during my doctoral work and centered on just one verse: 1 Corinthians 10:4: “for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.”

I try to be brief here, since I touched on this quickly in The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously, and will lay it all out in chapter 1 of my upcoming book The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It. But here’s the gist.

In this verse Paul refers to Christ as the “rock that accompanied” the Israelites through the desert. Paul is alluding to the episode–actually 2 episodes–in the Pentateuch, where the Israelites get water from a rock while wandering in the desert for 40 years.

For Paul to equate Christ with the rock is a typical example of his Christ-centered reading of his scripture (our Old Testament): the savior was present with God’s people then as he is now.

What threw me, though, was that word “accompanied.”

One day in class, my professor James Kugel was lecturing on the creative ways that Second Temple Jewish interpreters handled these episodes. He explained that water coming from the rock twice–once at the beginning of the wilderness period (Exodus 17) and again toward the end of the 40-year period (Numbers 20)–led some Jewish interpreters to conclude that the “two” rocks were actually one and the same, hence, one rock accompanied the Israelites on their 40-year journey.

There is a certain “ancient logic” at work here. After all, if the Israelites had manna given to them miraculously every morning, are we to think that the corresponding miraculous supply of water was only given twice, 40 years apart!? Of course not.

So, to solve this problem, the water supply became mobile. For some interpreters it was a stream through the desert, but for others the rock of Exodus 17 followed the Israelites for 40 years and was mentioned again in Numbers 20.

Evangelicals could write off this bit of biblical “interpretation” as entertaining or just play silly, but 1 Corinthians 10:4 complicates things. When Paul refers to Jesus not just as the rock but the accompanying rock, he, as a Jewish interpreter, is showing his familiarity with, and acceptance of, this creative Jewish reading of the Old Testament.

Let me put a finer point on that: no rock moved in the Old Testament, but Paul said one did. Paul says something about the Old Testament that Old Testament doesn’t say. He wasn’t following the evangelical rule of grammatical-historical contextual interpretation. He was doing something else–something weird, ancient, and Jewish.

My Bible was no longer protected under glass. It was out there, part of its very odd, ancient world that I really didn’t understand.

For Paul–an inspired apostle–to accept such a strange legend and treat it as fact is not something that can be easily brought into an evangelical framework. “But Paul is inspired by God! He would never say something like this!!”

But he did.

And it struck me that Paul probably couldn’t get a job teaching at the seminary that taught me about Paul.

Understand, as I said above, that this "aha moment" didn’t happen in isolation. It came in the context of years of pretty intense and in-depth doctoral work where my main area of focus was Second Temple biblical interpretation.

But here, at this moment, some tumblers clunked heavily into place. I was seeing a bigger picture, not just about this one verse but about the Bible as a whole. I was seeing right before my eyes that Paul and the other New Testament writers were part of this ancient world and they too handled their Bible in highly creative ways that were not anchored in the “original meaning” of the text but were transposed and altered in keeping with Jewish interpretive conventions of the day.

Evangelical attempts to make Paul sound more evangelical and less Jewish–to make him into a “sound” interpreter rather than a creative one–immediately rang hollow, and continue to. And I knew back then, as I do now, that the older model of biblical interpretation I had been taught was not going to cut it. I couldn’t deny what I was seeing. I knew I had some thinking to do.

That happened over 20 years ago, and the memory is still vivid. And it’s fair to say this aha moment, along with others before, and since, have shaped my life’s work of trying to understand the Bible rather than defend it. And that is to me much more interesting, meaningful, and spiritually enriching.

Index to Series - 

Transparent Moments of Scholarship when a Theologian Must Either Stay or Change

Part 1 - Introduction

Part 2 - Peter Enns

Part 3 - John Byron