The Historical Context of the Gospel of Mark's Ending

Turning to the earliest theological traditions of the first century church let us see how its earliest liturgical and doctrinal confessions were interwoven into the very text of the gospel of Mark itself - specifically its ending in chapter 16:9-20. By this handiwork of the church's textual editorialists we may then determine the importance this liturgical confession held for the early church of Jesus Christ. To do this I have chosen James Tabor's article to lead out in this discussion. And though he may use hard language in his analysis we need only to recontextualize his helpful insights of the early church's redactions to see all too plainly for ourselves the importance these ecclesiastical texts held for the earliest Christians regarding Christ's Resurrection and Great Commission.

Nor was this emendation unknown by the church's collegial ranks in its study of the bible's original manuscripts. Nor in today's newer publications which helpfully provide a footnote like to the one we have here from the ESV bible below (which I use as my present bible of choice over my much amended and very dog-earred NASB version I had used in college and seminary. Which itself had replaced the red-lettered KJV bible I grew up with as a boy to read at home, in Sunday School, and VBS).

Moreover, within the proceeding discussion is the idea that theologising God's Word is nothing new. Both the ancient Jews and ancient Christians did the same but with the difference that each group was rehearsing God's former revelation which had come to them by various means and forms, lessons and events. Either personally or as clans, tribes, or people groups. So that within the corpus of the Old and New Testaments we may behold its hymns, psalms, prayers, petitions, and confessions.

However, the difference here is that these teachings were not considered "external" to God's Word as the gospel of Mark's later addition was held by its latter emendation. How this is different is another subject for another time but suffice it to say both the Jewish and Christian faiths were actively engaged in theologising their understanding of God's Word even as we are today as externalising influencers upon its internalized texts that was itself at one time externalised in its initial traditions and revelations. Which should give us pause as to why we shouldn't read the bible literally but literarily. Enough said. Onwards!

R.E. Slater

March 13, 2015

Mark 16

English Standard Version (ESV)

The Resurrection

16 When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” 4 And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. 5 And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. 6 And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” 8 And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

[Some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16:9–20.][a]

Jesus Appears to Mary Magdalene

9 [[Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first toMary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. 10 She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. 11 But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.

Jesus Appears to Two Disciples

12 After these things he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. 13 And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.

The Great Commission

14 Afterward he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, becausethey had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. 15 And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.16 Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. 17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18 they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

19 So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. 20 And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs.]]

ESV Footnotes:

Mark 16:9 Some manuscripts end the book with 16:8; others include verses 9–20 immediately after verse 8. At least one manuscript inserts additional material after verse 14; some manuscripts include after verse 8 the following: But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told. And after this, Jesus himself sent out by means of them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. These manuscripts then continue with verses 9–20

The “Strange” Ending of the Gospel of Mark and Why It Makes All the Difference

http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/new-testament/the-strange-ending-of-the-gospel-of-mark-and-why-it-makes-all-the-difference/

James Tabor presents a new look at the original text of the earliest Gospel

James Tabor • 02/02/2015

This article was originally published on Dr. James Tabor’s popular Taborblog, a site that discusses and reports on “‘All things biblical’ from the Hebrew Bible to Early Christianity in the Roman World and Beyond.” Bible History Daily first republished the article with consent of the author in April 2013. Visit Taborblog today, or scroll down to read a brief bio of James Tabor below.

"And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and

astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing."

Most general Bible readers have the mistaken impression that Matthew, the opening book of the New Testament, must be our first and earliest Gospel, with Mark, Luke and John following. The assumption is that this order of the Gospels is a chronological one, when in fact it is a theological one.

Scholars and historians are almost universally agreed that Mark is our earliest Gospel–by several decades, and this insight turns out to have profound implications for our understanding of the “Jesus story” and how it was passed down to us in our New Testament Gospel traditions.

The problem with the Gospel of Mark for the final editors of the New Testament was that it was grossly deficient. First it is significantly shorter than the other Gospels–with only 16 chapters compared to Matthew (28), Luke (24) and John (21). But more importantly is how Mark begins his Gospel and how he ends it.

• He has no account of the virgin birth of Jesus–or for that matter, any birth of Jesus at all. In fact, Joseph, husband of Mary, is never named in Mark’s Gospel at all–and Jesus is called a “son of Mary,” see my previous post on this here.

• But even more significant is Mark’s strange ending. He has no appearances of Jesus following the visit of the women on Easter morning to the empty tomb!

Like the other three Gospels Mark recounts the visit of Mary Magdalene and her companions to the tomb of Jesus early Sunday morning. Upon arriving they find the blocking stone at the entrance of the tomb removed and a young man–notice–not an angel–tells them:

“Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing (Mark 16:6-8)

And there the Gospel simply ends!

Mark gives no accounts of anyone seeing Jesus as Matthew, Luke, and John later report. In fact, according to Mark, any future epiphanies or “sightings” of Jesus will be in the north, in Galilee, not in Jerusalem.

This original ending of Mark was viewed by later Christians as so deficient that not only was Mark placed second in order in the New Testament, but various endings were added by editors and copyists in some manuscripts to try to remedy things.

The longest concocted ending, which became Mark 16:9-19, became so treasured that it was included in the King James Version of the Bible, favored for the past 500 years by Protestants, as well as translations of the Latin Vulgate, used by Catholics. This meant that for countless millions of Christians it became sacred scripture–but it is patently bogus. You might check whatever Bible you use and see if the following verses are included–the chances are good they they will be, since the Church, by and large, found Mark’s original ending so lacking.

Here is that forged ending of Mark:

Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it. After these things he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them. Afterward he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover. So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs.

Even though this ending is patently false, people loved it, and to this day conservative Christians regularly denounce “liberal” scholars who point out this forgery, claiming that they are trying to destroy “God’s word.”

The evidence is clear. This ending is not found in our earliest and most reliable Greek copies of Mark. In A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Bruce Metzger writes: “Clement of Alexandria and Origen [early third century] show no knowledge of the existence of these verses; furthermore Eusebius and Jerome attest that the passage was absent from almost all Greek copies of Mark known to them.”1 The language and style of the Greek is clearly not Markan, and it is pretty evident that what the forger did was take sections of the endings of Matthew, Luke and John (marked respectively in red, blue, and purple above) and simply create a “proper” ending.

Even though this longer ending became the preferred one, there are two other endings, one short and the second an expansion of the longer ending, that also show up in various manuscripts:

[I] But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told. And after these things Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.

[II] This age of lawlessness and unbelief is under Satan, who does not allow the truth and power of God to prevail over the unclean things of the spirits [or, does not allow what lies under the unclean spirits to understand the truth and power of God]. Therefore reveal your righteousness now’ – thus they spoke to Christ. And Christ replied to them, ‘The term of years of Satan’s power has been fulfilled, but other terrible things draw near. And for those who have sinned I was handed over to death, that they may return to the truth and sin no more, in order that they may inherit the spiritual and incorruptible glory of righteousness that is in heaven.

I trust that the self-evident spuriousness of these additions is obvious to even the most pious readers. One might in fact hope that Christians who are zealous for the “inspired Word of God” would insist that all three of these bogus endings be recognized for what they are–forgeries.

That said, what about the original ending of Mark? Its implications are rather astounding for Christian origins. I have dealt with this issue more generally in my post, “What Really Happened on Easter Morning,” that sets the stage for the following implications.

1. Since Mark is our earliest Gospel, written according to most scholars around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE, or perhaps in the decade before, we have strong textual evidence that the first generation of Jesus followers were perfectly fine with a Gospel account that recounted no appearances of Jesus. We have to assume that the author of Mark’s Gospel did not consider his account deficient in the least and he was either passing on, or faithfully promoting, what he considered to be the authentic Gospel. What most Christians do when they think about Easter is ignore Mark. Since Mark knows nothing of any appearances of Jesus as a resuscitated corpse in Jerusalem, walking about, eating and showing his wounds, as recounted by Matthew, Luke and John, those stories are simply allowed to “fill in” for his assumed deficiency. In other words, no one allows Mark to have a voice. What he lacks, ironically, serves to marginalize and mute him!

2. Alternatively, if we decide to listen to Mark, who is our first gospel witness, what we learn is rather amazing. In Mark, on the last night of Jesus’ life, he told his intimate followers following their meal, “But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee” (Mark 14:28). What Mark believes is that Jesus has been “lifted up” or “raised up” to the right hand of God and that the disciples would “see” him in Galilee. Mark knows of no accounts of people encountering the revived corpse of Jesus, wounds and all, walking around Jerusalem. His tradition is that the disciples experienced their epiphanies of Jesus once they returned to Galilee after the eight-day Passover festival and had returned to their fishing in despair. This is precisely what we find in the Gospel of Peter, where Peter says:

Now it was the final day of the Unleavened Bread; and many went out returning to their home since the feast was over. But we twelve disciples of the Lord were weeping and sorrowful; and each one, sorrowful because of what had come to pass, departed to his home. But I, Simon Peter, and my brother Andrew, having taken our nets, went off to the sea. And there was with us Levi of Alphaeus whom the Lord …

You can read more about this fascinating “lost” Gospel of Peter here, but this ending, where the text happens to break off, is most revealing. What we see here is precisely parallel to Mark. The disciples returned to their homes in Galilee in despair, resuming their occupations, and only then did they experience “sightings” of Jesus. Strangely, this tradition shows up in an appended ending to the Gospel of John–chapter 21, where a group of disciples are back to their fishing, and Matthew knows the tradition of a strange encounter on a designated mountain in Galilee, where some of the eleven apostles even doubt what they are seeing (Matthew 28:16-17).

Galilee is one of the most evocative locales in the New Testament—the area where Jesus was raised, where many of the Apostles came from, and where Jesus first began to preach. In the FREE eBook The Galilee that Jesus Knew, Bible and archaeology experts will expand your knowledge of this important region, focusing on how Jewish the area was in Jesus’ time, on the ports and the fishing industry that were so central to the region, and on several sites where Jesus likely stayed and preached.

The faith that Mark reflects, namely that Jesus has been “raised up” or lifted up to heaven, is precisely parallel to that of Paul–who is the earliest witness to this understanding of Jesus’ resurrection. You can read my full exposition of Paul’s understanding “the heavenly glorified Christ,” whom he claims to encounter, here. And notably, he parallels his own visionary experience to that of Peter, James and the rest of the apostles. What this means is that when Paul wrote, in the 50s CE, this was the resurrection faith of the early followers of Jesus! Since Matthew, Luke and John come so much later and clearly reflect the period after 70 CE when all of the first witnesses were dead–including Peter, Paul and James the brother of Jesus, they are clearly 2nd generation traditions and should not be given priority.

Mark begins his account with the line “The Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). Clearly for him, what he subsequently writes is that “Gospel,” not a deficient version that needs to be supplemented or “fixed” with later alternative traditions about Jesus appearing in a resuscitated body Easter weekend in Jerusalem.

Finally, what we recently discovered in the Talpiot tomb under the condominium building, not 200 feet from the “Jesus family” tomb, offers a powerful testimony to this same kind of early Christian faith in Jesus’ resurrection. On one of the ossuaries, or bone boxes in this tomb, is a four-line Greek inscription which I have translated as: I Wondrous Yehovah lift up–lift up! And this is next to a second ossuary representing the “sign of Jonah” with a large fish expelling the head of a human stick figure, recalling the story of Jonah. In that text Jonah sees himself as having passed into the gates of Sheol or death, from which he utters a prayer of salvation from the belly of the fish: “O Yehovah my God, you lifted up my life from the Pit!” (Jonah 2:6). It is a rare thing when our textual evidence seems to either reflect or correspond to the material evidence and I believe in the case of the two Talpiot tombs, and the early resurrection faith reflected in Paul and Mark, that is precisely what we have.2 That this latest archaeological evidence corresponds so closely to Mark and Paul, our first witnesses to the earliest Christian understanding of Jesus’ resurrection, I find to be most striking.

---

Dr. James Tabor is a professor of Christian origins and ancient Judaism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Since earning his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1981, Tabor has combined his work on ancient texts with extensive field work in archaeology in Israel and Jordan, including work at Qumran, Sepphoris, Masada and Wadi el-Yabis in Jordan. Over the past decade he has teamed up with with Shimon Gibson to excavate the “John the Baptist” cave at Suba, the “Tomb of the Shroud” discovered in 2000, Mt Zion and, along with Rami Arav, he has been involved in the re-exploration of two tombs in East Talpiot including the controversial “Jesus tomb.” Tabor is the author of the popular Taborblog, and several of his recent posts have been featured in Bible History Daily as well as the Huffington Post. His latest book, Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity has become a immediately popular with specialists and non-specialists alike. You can find links to all of Dr. Tabor’s web pages, books, and projects at jamestabor.com.

Notes

1. Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd edition, (Hendrickson Publishers, 2005), 123. Metzger also states: “The last twelve verses of the commonly received text of Mark are absent from the two oldest Greek manuscripts (? and B), 20 from the Old Latin codex Bobiensis, the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript, about one hundred Armenian manuscripts, 21 and the two oldest Georgian manuscripts (written a.d. 897 and a.d. 913).”

Correction: In the original publication of this article, Bruce Metzger’s statement “Clement of Alexandria and Origen show no knowledge of the existence of these verses; furthermore Eusebius and Jerome attest that the passage was absent from almost all Greek copies of Mark known to them” (Metzger, 2005, p.123) was not appropriately referenced as a quotation from Metzger. We thank our careful reader James Snapp, Jr., of Curtisville Christian Church in Indiana, for bringing this to our attention. —Ed.

2. We offer a full exposition of these important discoveries in our recent book, The Jesus Discovery. The book is a complete discussion of both Talpiot tombs with full documentation, with full chapters on Mary Magdalene, Paul, the James ossuary, DNA tests, and much more. You can read my preliminary report on these latest “Jonah” related findings at the web site Bible & Interpretation, here, and a good account of the controversy here. During March and April, 2012 I also wrote a dozen or more posts on this blog responding to the academic discussions, see below under “Archives” and you can browse the posts by month.

How Orthodox Beliefs and Modern Biblical Scholarship Might Reconcile

Today's article concentrates on comparing the orthodox view of Scripture with the modern view of biblical scholarship. It is a problem not only for the Christian faith but for the Jewish faith too as each debates the Bible's many meanings and interpretations for today in language couched within psychological or sociological paradigm, or a philosophic mode of discovery albeit personal or societal, organic or institutional, natural or spiritual. It ranges from a worshipful embodiment of that great collected tome of gathered biblical stories and accounts, to a soulless tome of objectivity in portended analytic research upon its mortal pages. For the biblical scholar, as for any scientist who is peerless in his or her's study of inquiry, each attempt to uncover the holy grail of Scriptures can be met by one of a hundred approaches to beholding the hand of God, or the hand of man, or some combination of the two in joint collaboration and communion with one another.

Succinctly, the orthodox view of Scripture is that of a God-breathed product while the non-orthodox view may portend anything but this awareness claiming human authorship alone if not human commentary on the ancient wisdoms of ages past. Here at Relevancy22 we subscribe to the former while working with the latter to discover Scripture's background and setting, narrative and interpretation, and liveliness (or relevancy) to each age of its witness to humanity. More plainly, that the Bible is very much God-breathed and inspired but that it is also very much a human product written and maintained by mortal mankind through its ancient history of oral legacies and imperfect recounts (if not wholly lost) human recordings and derivative midrash accounts or commentaries. To say otherwise is to subtend its meaning from both directions at once. Or to imbalance one account of its charter to that of the other in preference of personal view and understanding. Thus making of it more religious than it is (sic, bibliotry, or even palpable humanism), or less godly than it was conceived (sic, mere historical myth and legend alone).

It is a divide that must be approached from both directions at once, and more particularly for the believer, can at once be the easiest and most difficult challenge to spiritual discovery. But to do less is unwise. And to do more can be exhausting... many simply give up and consider Scripture as a wholly man-made product. And who could argue with this approach? For certainly it is! And yet, for the child of faith, this beloved collection of narratives and stories carries within it a strong sense of God's handiwork and faithful revelation through the history of both Israel and its antecedent priests and rabbis. And later, the early church and its early church fathers, as it reflects its divine Author in a hundred more ways when examining mankind's sufferings and toils, joys and delights, melancholies and ecstasies, temperament and behavior.

But the task of biblical discovery requires a wisdom both childlike and spiritually mature and cannot be a task simply given over to one's religious preferences or academic prejudices. To do so is to create an injustice to the sacred text of Scripture as well as those whom it will affect by our prejudices and bigotries. One that is more commonly done when its readers come to a subject matter wholly distasteful to their spiritual sense of morality and ethic. And can become a great danger when blundered through by inexact - and let me suggest - naive, simplistic, or literalistic, readings of the biblical text by the religious reader. Or  a soulless, empty, austere approach by the academician. Nay, the biblical text is far wiser and more complicated than either approach. Far more hoary and fraught with sublime reflections of mirror-like self-imaging should we allow it to be itself. Which reflections may better tell us perhaps more about ourselves than about the mind of God as He chips away at our self-reliance, prideful wisdom, follies, and sin through its joint sacred-mortal pages. And yet, it is the Christian belief that somewhere upon its holy pages it tells us of our God as much as it tells us of ourselves.

Nay, as a two-way mirror, the Scriptures can tell us as much about ourselves as it can hide us from ourselves should we choose to be its mere interpreters and not its supplicants come to a holy fountain requiring a washing from sin and stain, self-discovery and illumination. Who, beholding the divine sword of a Damocles, allows it to fall this way or that to our preferential readings rather than where it must fall upon our sin-hardened hearts and religious spirits that holds the dead man of our being stoutly within. For it is there upon this altar where God's words must fall in cleaving our beings in two as He did with Abraham (sic, Gen 15 below), sorting out to which side of the ledger he wished to meet his Maker. Either in the austerity of his own hands and handiwork. Or by that of His Creator-God come to save his soul in a remake of heaven of earth for this humble servant seeking to cling to the worship of this new god he had given all for known by the divine name of YHWH.

And to know that this holy covenant of cleaved halves were measured out not by his own making but by the bloody testament of His God YHWH who swore an oath to Abraham upon Himself to bring forth the divine promise of restitution, redemption, and rebirth from the mortal lands of Ur unto the harder lands of repentance and faith. The worship of God begins-and-ends upon God alone and not upon ourselves. It can be a hard faith. A faith that must claim even our sin (but not necessarily our doubt) until all is laid upon God's holy altar as loss and incense. That is given up to a God of grace and mercy whom we do not understand but can only marvel at the great works by His hand when led to the Christ of the Cross become our covenant by His own blood. A slain sacrifice cut in two by the hand of God as continuing testament to God's promise to Abraham that would lead us from the lands of our own making to one made by God alone who is our self-sufficiency. A God who is great in forgiveness and long suffering. Who claims His children as His own and never remits of His promise that we are His. This is the God of Scriptures who whispers grace and love to the lost lands of humanity that all will be peace and still in the destitutions and loss of the day. Even so Lord may we bow in covenantal rest and assurance in Thee. Amen.

R.E. Slater

April 1, 2014

Genesis 15

English Standard Version (ESV)

God's Covenant with Abram

15 After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” 2 But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue[a] childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3 And Abram said, “Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.” 4 And behold, the word of the Lord came to him: “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son[b] shall be your heir.” 5 And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” 6 And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.

7 And he said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess.”8 But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” 9 He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” 10 And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. 11 And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

12 As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him.13 Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. 14 But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15 As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. 16 And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

17 When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. 18 On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give[c] this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, 19 the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, 20 the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, 21 the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.”

Footnotes:

Genesis 15:2 Or I shall die

Genesis 15:4 Hebrew what will come out of your own loins

Genesis 15:18 Or have given

* * * * * * * * * * *

James Kugel, Professor Emeritus of Classical
and Hebrew Literature, Harvard University

James Kugel: Professor of Disbelief

http://www.momentmag.com/james-kugel-professor-disbelief/

By Michael Orbach

March/April 2014

When I was a teenager, there was a legend repeated in the Jewish schools of my hometown. If you somehow manage to get into godless Harvard, don’t go. But if, against your rosh yeshiva and rebbe’s advice, you actually go, whatever you do, don’t take biblical scholar James Kugel’s class. If you do, you’ll walk into Introduction to the Bible, see that the professor is wearing a yarmulke and assume the course is kosher. And, the story goes, you’ll walk out a heretic.

These days, James Kugel, a professor emeritus of classical and modern Hebrew literature at Harvard University, lives on a quiet street off one of the main thoroughfares in the religious Baka neighborhood in Jerusalem. The front door of his apartment building displays his English last name and his family’s original Sephardic name, Kaduri. When we met late one Friday morning, the 68-year-old wore a rumpled blue shirt and light-colored khakis. In person, Kugel—who has called the Jewish food of his namesake “stomach-churning”—looks every bit the absent-minded professor, gray hair flopping down over a craggy forehead. On his left arm, I could make out the indentations of the leather tefillin straps that he had put on earlier for shacharit, the morning prayers. He welcomed me with a wan smile.

I had come with a specific purpose. After an unremarkable career at a private Modern Orthodox high school on Long Island, I spent a gap year at a very Orthodox yeshiva on an Israeli mountaintop and then attended another yeshiva not far from my parents’ house. Things didn’t turn out the way I thought they would. My yeshiva closed down and became a vacuum repair shop; I moved to a far more religious yeshiva that I left over philosophical differences. Eventually, my faith eroded. For me, the term “losing one’s faith” is a misnomer. My faith slipped away—as if I were holding on to a precipice and lost my grip, finger by finger. I couldn’t hold on, no matter how much I tried.

Kugel had an ancillary role in this drama. His mammoth 2007 book, How to Read the Bible, an encyclopedic study of the Bible from both a traditional and academic perspective, seemed a confirmation of what I had come to think but was afraid to say aloud: that the Torah was written by man and that all the laws and regulations that we, as Orthodox Jews, followed were simply constructions based around that. For someone who was raised to believe that the Written Torah and the Oral Torah that accompanied it were divine, the realization was devastating.

I was intrigued that Kugel could be both an Orthodox Jew and one of the most impressive biblical scholars of our time. Seemingly this means reconciling the irreconcilable: Orthodox Jews believe, as Maimonides articulated in his “Thirteen Principles of Faith,” that the “Torah came from God.” Modern biblical scholars, on the other hand, have spent the past century deconstructing it, putting forth various theories of the historical origins of the sacred text. According to one of the most widely accepted views, the Five Books of Moses were not written by the prophet himself, but are a compilation of four independent, parallel narratives assembled over several centuries. While non-Orthodox denominations have absorbed this scholarship into their theology, there remain Orthodox circles where this kind of analysis is considered heresy.

Kugel, however, seems underwhelmed when I ask him how he remains an Orthodox Jew. “The only way to square this circle is the traditional way,” he explains while furrowing bushy eyebrows. Kugel speaks in a congenial, self-effacing manner and has a habit of cocking his head while you speak, as if you were saying something particularly important. “Our rabbis didn’t say that understanding the Torah - and interpreting the Torah - was something that was up in the air. They established how to read the Bible in an Orthodox—I should say, Jewish—way, through the lens of rabbinic interpretation, and that in a sense is a whole new text.”

Or, as he wrote in the closing pages of How to Read the Bible: “My own view… is that modern biblical scholarship and traditional Judaism are, and must always remain, completely irreconcilable. The whole attitude underlying such speculation is altogether alien to the spirit of Judaism and the role of scripture.”

A Biography of Shoe Leather and Parchment

Kugel was born in New York in 1945, the son of a religious businessman on Wall Street, and grew up in the suburban enclave of Stamford, Connecticut. He attended public school—but studied Jewish subjects under a private tutor—and in 1963, went on to Yale as an undergraduate when the university’s Jewish quota was about 10 percent of the student body. Becoming a Hebrew Bible scholar wasn’t something Kugel had initially planned. His first love was literature, and his debut book, The Technique of Strangeness, which was published when he was an undergraduate, delved into the symbolist poetry movement. “I don’t really put it on my bibliography,” Kugel says. “It was a good book.”

After graduating, he struggled to figure out what to do with his life while receiving support from what he jokingly calls his “fathership.” In 1972, he was working as poetry editor for Harper’s magazine when he was selected to the prestigious Harvard Society of Fellows. For four years, the university funded his research into medieval Jewish poetry, without the constraints of a formal degree program.

From there, he went on to City University of New York, where he earned his doctorate in 1977 and, shortly after, published another book, The Idea of Biblical Poetry, which argued against the prevailing notion that biblical poetry was formulaic. Instead, Kugel put forth, its purposeful repetitiveness was meant to elicit an emotional response from readers. “A lot of people hated it,” he recalls. “People are always distressed when you tell them what they think—the way they’ve been thinking about it—was wrong.”

Kugel always began his courses by saying, “If you come from a religious tradition upholding the literal truth of the Bible, you could find this course disturbing.”

After completing his graduate studies, Kugel taught at CUNY and Yale before returning to Harvard in 1982 to teach Hebrew literature. It was at Harvard that he began to make his mark on the world of biblical scholarship. Prior to Kugel’s work, the discipline generally focused on the nuts and bolts of the Bible: how it was written, when it was conceived, and what early historical periods it reflected. Kugel offered a different approach in two of his early books, In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts in Early Judaism and Christianity (1990) and The Bible As It Was (1997), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. (Kugel published two versions of this book, one for a popular audience and another, re-titled Traditions of the Bible, for an academic one.) In them he argues that much of what is considered the Bible today is based on interpretations developed between 200 BCE and 100 CE. These interpretations came primarily from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha—or as Kugel calls them in Hebrew, sefarim achi kitzonim, the Outside Books—texts preserved by the Christian tradition and not considered part of the Jewish canon, such as the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Judith and the Book of Enoch.

“Even more importantly, Kugel demonstrates that those early interpreters are the real authors of the Bible as it came to function in Judaism and Christianity,” says Benjamin Sommer, a Hebrew Bible professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary. By dint of his encyclopedic knowledge, Kugel was able to put pieces together from sources as diverse as obscure midrashim and the writings of early Church fathers. “There’s a gap between the last pages of the Tanakh [the Jewish Bible] and the first texts of our rabbis,” Kugel explains. “So much of what we think about the Bible is really dependent not on the Bible but what these ancient interpreters said. I tried to highlight that they were as important to Jews as they were to Christians.”

His emphasis on the importance of scripture to early Christians and Jews was well received by Jewish and Christian scholars alike. “It’s hard to overstate what Kugel’s work has brought about,” says Gary Anderson, the Hesburgh professor of Catholic theology at Notre Dame. “His deeper point is not always appreciated but bears repeating: The very notion of sacred scripture arises in this environment of early interpretation.” Anderson continues, “This is an argument that will wear well over time; it constitutes a lasting legacy to Kugel’s oeuvre.”

Kugel’s ideas cast a long shadow over academia and the public—even reaching into my relatively sheltered Orthodox world. This was due, in part, to the fact that Kugel is one of the rare academics who is accessible to a popular audience. At Harvard, he was wildly popular among students and even ran a friendly competition with an economics professor to see who could bring the most students into the classroom. One semester, when Kugel’s class had 975 students, compared to the economics class with 950, the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, ran the headline, “God Beats Mammon”—a reference to the New Testament’s false god of material wealth. (A 2004 profile in Harvard Magazine described his teaching style as “Woody Allen in a state of grace.”) Kugel always began his courses by saying, “If you come from a religious tradition upholding the literal truth of the Bible, you could find this course disturbing.” This is why the heavily trafficked religious Jewish news site, www.VosIzNeias.com,  dubbed him “perhaps the most famous living controversial Apikores [heretic] in the world.”

Of Books and Universities

Kugel and his wife Rachel, a French social worker (they met at Hebrew University in 1972), long wanted to make aliyah. In 1991, he received a phone call from Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv offering him a full professorship. When Kugel told his dean at Harvard about the news, the dean, unfamiliar with how little Israeli academics are paid, offered to match the salary. “I said, ‘Please don’t do that,’” Kugel recalls, laughing. So for the next 12 years, he taught a semester at Bar-Ilan and a semester at Harvard before leaving Cambridge for good in 2003.

At Bar-Ilan, Kugel authored several books in rapid succession, including The God of Old (2003), The Ladder of Jacob (2006) and How to Read the Bible, which won the National Jewish Book Award. The last received public acclaim, with The New York Times calling it an “awesome, thrilling and deeply strange book.” Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker used it as a key source for his 2011 bestseller The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. “I found Kugel’s book invaluable,” says Pinker. “It reported both traditional interpretations and the latest scholarship on provenance and historical fidelity of biblical narratives, and it was written with an appealing voice—respectful of the scholarship, but with frequent touches of irreverence and wit.”

Scholarly consensus on How to Read the Bible has been less forgiving, especially on the chapters that focus on Kugel’s approach to reconciling Orthodox Judaism and biblical scholarship. “James Kugel has written a stunning number of spectacular books and How to Read the Bible is not one of them,” Sommer, the JTS professor, wrote in The Jewish Quarterly Review. Sommer equates Kugel’s view on the irreconcilability of traditional Judaism and biblical scholarship to sticking one’s head in the sand: “A Jew whose intellect believes that biblical criticism makes valid claims, but whose religious self pretends otherwise… is rendering God service that is fragmented and defective,” [said Sommer].

Despite his harsh review, Sommer stipulated that I could only quote him if I also included the aftermath of his article: Three days after the review was published, Kugel sent him a complimentary email. When Kugel responded in a post on his own website, he sent it to Sommer in advance to make sure he thought it was fair. Later, when Sommer spent the year in Israel, the two scholars met with their families several times and even went out for drinks. “He is truly a gentleman and scholar in spite of very serious critiques,” says Sommer. “He’s quite friendly to his critics, and especially to a younger scholar who has criticized him. He’s the real thing. He’s really a mensch.”

If the Torah truly is the work of some anonymous collection of authors whose names we don’t even know—shouldn’t that have some effect on Judaism, on what Jews think and do?

Can Orthodox Jewish Faith Bridge Academic Schlorship?

Kugel is not the first religious Jew to grapple with the concept of [the] “Torah from Sinai.” Eleventh-century scholar Ibn Ezra, who posited that Joshua, not Moses, wrote the last 12 verses of Deuteronomy, is sometimes considered the first biblical critic. In the 13th century, Rabbi Yehuda ha-Hasid went further, claiming that entire passages of the Pentateuch were inserted later on by different writers. Nor is Kugel the only religious Jew in the field today, although most others are attempting to find ways of bridging Orthodox belief and academic scholarship.

One such recent effort is www.thetorah.com, led by an Orthodox Bible professor at Brandeis, Marc Brettler, and Zev Farber, a graduate of the rabbinic seminary Chovevei Torah in New York. Every week, the site publishes essays on the weekly Torah portion in an attempt to create “an observant and knowledgeable Jewish community empowered by an understanding of Torah integrated with scientific approaches and scholarly knowledge.” Even Yeshiva University (YU), the flagship institute of Modern Orthodoxy, teaches biblical criticism —although not without contention. Several months ago, in an article in Kol Hamevaser, a student journal at YU, entitled “Shut Down the Bible Department,” a student wrote: “I can think of no other class in YU that is as potentially damaging to one’s faith as Intro to Bible.” The professor, the student continued, “destroyed my core beliefs without replacing it with anything. He tore down my foundation and left me staring at the rubble.”

Jon Levenson, a Jewish studies professor at Harvard and a former colleague of Kugel, sees a way to cross the theological chasm: Just because the Bible has a human history, it does not logically follow that it has only a human history or that it lacks a transcendent source, namely God, says Levenson, who describes himself as a “somewhat unorthodox Orthodox Jew.” “What is needed is a more sophisticated model of divine revelation, one that can take account of the modern discoveries, for example, the complex pattern of composition in antiquity, without losing sight of the theological dimension.”

Kugel calls this “Biblical Criticism Lite.” Writing on his website, he explains: “Apologetics are a sign of an underlying anxiety…. The anxiety in this case derives from the inescapable fact that, in the light of all that modern scholarship has discovered, the Bible necessarily looks very different from the way it looked only a century or so ago. Yet these commentators still want it to be the Bible in the old sense—divinely inspired (at least in some attenuated way), a guide to proper conduct and proper beliefs, a book of truth and not falsehood, as free of error and internal contradiction as possible, in short, despite everything they know, a book still worthy of being called the Word of God…Most of them are simply doing the best they can to have it both ways, to have their Bible and criticize it too.”

Kugel’s views on faith are evident in his 1990 book Being a Jew, a modern-day adaptation of the Kuzari, the fictional dialogue between a Khazar prince and a Jew, written in 1140 by Yehuda Halevi. In Kugel’s version, the Jewish scholar is a religious Syrian banker named Albert Abbadi and the Khazar prince is Judd Lewis, an assimilated American Jew about to marry a Presbyterian.

In the book, Kugel argues that Orthodox Judaism is a holistic experience and can only be understood from within the culture. “You want to understand everything before learning anything,” Abbadi lectures Lewis in one memorable passage. “It is somewhat analogous to passing suddenly from a very dark place, a sealed-off closet to which one’s eyes have become accustomed, into a brightly illuminated room. One is, of course, aware of the change in lighting, but to the room itself and what it contains one is temporarily blinded.”

This parallels Kugel’s thoughts about learning Torah: “It really is a way of entering a different understanding of the world, in which different things are important,” he says, “and even upon leaving it and returning to the humdrum world, we for a while take some of it with us, and everyday life is changed for it.”

In January, Kugel published a sequel to Being a Jew, entitled The Kingly Sanctuary: An Exploration of Some Underlying Principles of Judaism, for a Jewish Student who has Become Disillusioned, where he revisits the two characters of Being a Jew. In the second book, Lewis is disillusioned after spending several years in a yeshiva in Israel. In a surprising endnote to the book, Kugel states that while people have mistaken him for Abbadi, he based Abbadi on an old Egyptian Jew that he once knew. The character of Judd Lewis, Kugel explains, is himself at a younger age.

How Does One Reconcile the Orthodox Faith?

Kugel is a patient teacher, and as we talk he takes the time to offer two different responses to the dilemma I raise: how to reconcile being Orthodox and knowing too much about the history of the Bible. First is the one he points out in How to Read the Bible—that Orthodoxy, almost despite itself, isn’t really about the Bible. “Judaism has at its heart a great secret,” he writes. “It endlessly lavishes praise on the written Torah, exalting its role as a divinely given guidebook and probing lovingly the tiniest details of its wording and even spelling…Yet upon inspection Judaism turns out to be quite the opposite of fundamentalism. The written text alone is not all-powerful; in fact, it rarely stands on its own. Its true significance usually lies not in the plain sense of its words but in what the Oral Torah has made of those words.”

In other words, the Bible is not, and has never been, the last word in Judaism. Kugel can study the Bible and propose as many authors as he wants, because ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The rabbis have given their explanation of the text, and he abides by it; it’s a bifurcation between the historical reality of the Bible and the rabbis’ interpretation of it. “I consider the Torah as the first volume of a multivolume work about serving God,” he says—in his case the Jewish God.

I don’t find these answers particularly satisfactory—if the Torah isn’t the Word of God, then why bother? Or as Lewis asks in one early passage of The Kingly Sanctuary “Doesn’t the truth count for something?” Adding, “I mean, if the Torah truly is the work of some anonymous collection of authors whose names we don’t even know—shouldn’t that have some effect on Judaism, on what Jews think and do?”

To that, Kugel has another answer, something far deeper and more basic. He alludes to it in his 2008 book, In the Valley of the Shadow, his haunting meditation on his battle with aggressive cancer: His faith stems from something else, a way of seeing the world as being a small part of a larger world that includes God. “I wouldn’t call it belief,” he tells me more than once. “I would call it a way of fitting into the world.”

I wished that there was something he could tell me that would restore my faith. Kugel picked up on that, and he appeared to be sorry for what he had unleashed. I’m not the only former yeshiva student who has sought him out. Kugel explains that he gets emails from yeshiva guys around the world asking him about faith. When I ask him what they are like, he says, “like you.”

As brilliant as he is, Kugel has no answer for me. It takes a particular mindset to be able to believe in the words of the sages and, at the same time, know that they might be fiction. At first, Kugel’s position reminded me of pragmatism, the school of philosophical thought created by William James, which holds that a person can believe in something even if it’s not true, so long as that belief has real-world applications. But I found that Kugel’s belief isn’t like that; he’s a genuine believer, with a faith no different from that of a shtetl Hasid—though since he’s Sephardic, more like a shopkeeper in Aleppo, rushing home before the Sabbath begins.

As we shook hands and he escorted me down the path of his tree-lined garden, a quote from James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience came to mind. It’s from a section of the book in which he describes people who’ve had visions and sentiments of great religious commitments. James was mystified by the phenomenon. “The only sound plan,” James wrote, “if we ourselves are outside the pale of such emotions, is to observe as well as we are able those who feel them, and to record faithfully what we observe.”

Archaeology and the Bible: Sorting through Fact from Fiction

Camels as beasts of burden in the Bible

"In its early stages, religion means certainty about many things.

But... he is most religious who is certain of but one thing,

the world-embracing love of God." 

- Charles Hartshorne

Bible bashing is not an activity that can be found here at Relevancy22. The Bible is considered God's Holy Word to mankind that is authoritative and inspired but not inerrant. As such, this site does work at conveying to readers how the Bible may be read without adding the forced doctrine of inerrancy (a doctrinal creed that comes courtesy of the Evangelical Theological Society's Chicago Statement of 1980), without losing its spiritual authority in our lives when reading of God's wondrous story of redemption for creation and mankind. That this spiritual recount is inspired by His Spirit and guided by His hand placed upon the passions and burdens of His people over  a very long period of time. That it began as oral history in the form of story telling, religious poems, hymns, songs, incantations, or recitals; to people who were weary, joyful, hopeful, religious, not religious, fearful,  or superstitious; and conveyed by priests, prophets, community leaders, country folk, bedouins, villagers, city folk, foreigners; who may have been oppressed, humbled, persecuted, enslaved, and exiled, to name a few circumstances and instances.

So today's topic will review two kinds of reading of the Bible - one that is not-inerrant as versus one that is inerrant - by using an archaeological discovery which is acting like a fast spreading wildfire of public opinion and news. At the outset it is important to notice that we didn't say an "errant" reading of the Bible because that type of reading can be true of both groups - both for the one not holding to inerrancy as well as for the one holding to it. So what does this mean? Well, for the scientist - or archaeologist in this case - rather than to describe something in "error" the preferred term might be "anachronism," meaning something that is unique, different, or a-typical, of what you are studying. That is, one's findings, or discoveries, or calculations, have turned up a salient, singular, result that requires further investigation. And in the case of archaeology, more than in the case of physics or chemistry, those findings may still be hiding in the dirt. And so you wait. You hypothesize. You reflect on patterns and meaning to what is known and what is not known.

a·nach·ro·nism
  [uh-nak-ruh-niz-uh m] Show IPA

noun

1.

something or someone that is not in its correct historical or chronological time, especially a thing orperson that belongs to an earlier time: The sword is an anachronism in modern warfare.

2.

an error in chronology in which a person, object, event, etc., is assigned a date or period other thanthe correct one: To assign Michelangelo to the 14th century is an anachronism.

Which in this case is whether camels (both the one-hump variety and the two-hump kind) were domesticated in Abraham's day (that is, from Genesis 11 onwards). And if they weren't then why are they described in Genesis (and the Pentateuch) as being present and being used as beasts of burden? Now this isn't new news for those studying ancient biblical ruins, times, or events... but it is to us non-archaeological types that read the news and react to its discourses when it runs afoul of our thinking, prejudices, biblical systems, conventions, and philosophies. It can dissettle us. And when it does we may have one of three reactions: (i) stay calm by reading onwards while reflecting upon the meaning of the discovery; (ii) say "yeah, I suspected this all along!" and excitedly push on into the story as it reflects our pet beliefs, idiosyncrasies, or skepticisms; (iii) or, react in disgust and anger saying, "Confound it, those liberals are at it again, telling me my Bible is wrong, and I am wrong! Anathema on all science and archaeology!" Which is my poor attempt at being humorous over a very serious subject for many, which may hold very serious implications if preferred readings and traditional interpretations of the Bible are being forthrightly challenged to the degree that it requires personal, if not system-wide change and rethinking.

Which begs the question, how are we to read the Bible? Especially if what we're reading may not be true but filled with authorial largesse more concerned with great story telling than historical accuracy. Which hits at the nub of the problem as any new discovery may conflict with our own private interpretations of a very complex book we know as the Bible. A book spoken, sung, and much later written, by burdened story tellers wishing to convey how God came to them and spoke to their hearts redemptive truths. Truths that required telling - whether it was wanted or not. Perhaps at story teller's own peril or community standing. And, unlike modern day storytelling, the ancients weren't particularly worried about facts, more probably because of their mindset, and just as likely because there were no resources to verify them as there is today in our digital age of "ready online information." As such, biblical story tellers were not buttoned down by the convention of historical accuracy. Rather, they were more concerned in telling of God's great passion, burden, and heart, by using whatever conventions they could to drive home the point which the Lord had so placed upon their heart.

So when we, as modern day readers, come to this very ancient process of oral tradition that was much, much later written down and then imperfectly preserved through the long centuries of personal and national disruption created by ethos wars, cultural exiles, and civil disobedience, we should not expect a "Star Trek type of Bible" dropped out of the sky into our lap to read unmarred by the many disjointed personalities, events, past traditions, and interpretations of the ancient story tellers. To read the Bible is to try to read, and interpret, its narrative while holding in abeyance its many anachronisms, which are no threat to God or His Word. Thought they may be to us and our biblical systems and doctrines which we have built upon select readings of the Bible's "airs and atmospheres." For the scholar, as for the biblical reader in general, the trick is to read its center, and there find God's message of redemption. Of personal sacrifice and love for a creation and for mankind gone off track because of sin and desire. Its spiritual message is deep, and wide, and pregnant with meaning for the empty lives we would live without the presence of our kind Lord and almighty Saviour.

With that said, here are four articles, or reference links, which you may further explore as related to this topic. The first is the finding itself. The second by Huff Post is written as sensationalism journalism... else, "who would ever want to read about the dry dusty topic of archaeology anyway!?" The third article is from Peter Enns who we regular follow for his level-headedness. And the fourth, and final article, is from an inerrant reading of the Bible as it tries to piece together its meaning for inerrancy (which, in my opinion, typically rearranges the facts to better line up with a more evangelical reading of the Bible, of which the magazine Christianity Today is a mouthpiece for).

As alway, Peace in the name of our Incarnate Lord Jesus,

R.E. Slater

February 21, 2014

* * * * * * * * * * *

Introduction of Domestic Camels to the

Southern Levant: Evidence from the Aravah Valley

http://archaeology.tau.ac.il/ben-yosef/pub/Pub_PDFs/Sapir-Hen&Ben-Yosef13_CamelAravah_TelAviv.pdf

Tel Aviv University, Vol. 40, 2013, 277–285

"It was recently suggested that the introduction of the camel to the southern Levant occurred in the early Iron Age (late 2nd–early 1st millennia BCE). Our study of faunal remains from Iron Age sites at Timna, together with previous studies of Late Bronze and Iron Age sites at Timna and Wadi Faynan, enable us to pinpoint this event more precisely. The new evidence indicates that the first significant appearance of camels in the Aravah Valley was not earlier than the last third of the 10th century BCE. This date accords with data from the Negev and the settled lands further to the north when the low chronology is applied to the early Iron IIA...." 

(the article continues at the link provided)

* * * * * * * * * * *

Archaeologists Carbon-Date Camel Bones,

Discover Major Discrepancy In Bible Story

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/carbon-dated-camel-bones-bible_n_4737437.html#slide=1024672

February 6, 2014

Researchers Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef from Tel Aviv University have discovered what may be a discrepancy in the history laid out in the Bible.

Using carbon-dating to determine the age of the oldest-known camel bones, the researchers determined that camels were first introduced to Israel around the 9th century BCE.

The Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament refers to camels as pack animals as early as the story of Abraham. Though there is no archaeological evidence of Abraham's life, many in the religious and scientific communities, including Chabad and the Associates For Biblical Research, cite the 20th century BCE as his time of birth. If the new evidence is correct, however, this suggests discrepancies between the Bible and human history as explained by science.

The researchers scoured ancient copper production sites in the Aravah Valley, where camel bones were only present in sites active in the last third of the 10 century and the 9th century BCE. Sapir-Hen and Ben-Yosef write in their report:

"[The camel bones] demonstrate a sudden appearance of camels at the site, following a major change in the organization of production in the entire region."

This suggests that camels were introduced to the region abruptly, perhaps by Egyptians along Mediterranean trade routes.

Dr. Robert Harris, an Associate Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, says this shouldn't come as a shock to the theological community.

“While these findings may have been published recently, those of us on the inside have known the essential facts for a generation now," Harris conveyed to HuffPost Religion through associates at JTS. "This is just one of many anachronisms in the Bible, but these do not detract from its sanctity, because it is a spiritual source, not a historical one.”

Biblical archaeology is understandably an imperfect science. Archaeologist William Dever explained in an interview with PBS several years ago:

"We want to make the Bible history. Many people think it has to be history or nothing. But there is no word for history in the Hebrew Bible. In other words, what did the biblical writers think they were doing? Writing objective history? No. That's a modern discipline. They were telling stories. They wanted you to know what these purported events mean."

* * * * * * * * * * *

everybody…put the camel bones down

and step away before someone gets hurt

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/02/everybody-put-the-camel-bones-down-and-step-away-before-someone-gets-hurt/

by Peter Enns

February 19, 2014

Comments

Camel bones and the Bible have made the news lately, as in this online article, which is pretty sober and worth reading.

The scholarly article that started all this recent hubbub can be found here, which sports the perfectly boring scholarly title “The Introduction of Domestic Camels into the Southern Levant: Evidence from the Aravah Valley.”

Some media outlets, however, have (surprise) gone for the jolt factor, claiming that this is a “new” discovery that reveals that the Bible is a pack of lies, God no longer exists, and portends various apocalyptic scenarios, like the Cubs winning the World Series this year.

Sometimes archaeological finds are unfortunately reported in an exaggerated manner because (1) news outlets are sometimes ridiculous, and (2) archaeological digs need serious funding and without showing some sort of results funding may dry up.

The jolt factor is unfortunate, not only because it can bury truly interesting finds under a blanket or hype, but also because it encourages conservative responses that likewise are geared more to responding to hype than the scholarly issues behind it.

For example, the quick response to the camel bone “discovery” at Christianity Today claims to lay all this camel nonsense to rest, counseling that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions and that evangelical scholars have our back on this one.

I think we just need to take a step back here and calm down.

The article itself (linked above, written by Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef), is a scholarly article that doesn’t claim to expose the heretofore unknown issue of camel domestication in the Patriarchal period, which is an almost universally understood anachronism in Genesis. The authors claim, rather, to have found further evidence for supporting this claim.

Of course, the authors’ argument can be contested, and archaeologists do that–a lot. But responses to the article should not treat this one scholarly study in isolation from what archaeologists have studied and concluded for quite some time: the presence of camels in Israel in the 2nd millennium BC is a problem, and this joins other anachronisms (like the presence of Philistines in Genesis) to suggest strongly that whatever history there is in the Patriarchal stories must also account for the clear 1st millennium BC coloring of those stories [a thousand years later].

This point is not in the least controversial and to suggest that it is–either by those reporting the findings or those wishing to contest the findings–is bad form, and misleading.

In this respect, the CT response is a bit disappointing to me, for a couple of reasons.

First, its readers will not gather from it just how well ensconced in the academic study of the Bible (including by evangelicals) the notion of anachronisms in Genesis is. It suggests that all this camel business is just the latest attempt on the part of a sensationalistic media to discredit the Bible. That is false.

Second, the article also suggests, not too subtly, that the archaeologists who did this field work aren’t very good at their job. One problem, we are told, is that they limited themselves to one small geographic area and didn’t consider the full range of evidence of camel domestication elsewhere.

But their study was intended to focus on the Levant–where the Patriarchs were–not “elsewhere.” I’m willing to bet that the authors of the article know very well what is out there beyond the patch of real-estate they were working on and how to interpret their findings in light of that larger scope.

We are also told that, “Archaeologists usually remember that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’” “Usually” subtly implies that these archaeologists have forgotten this dictum of archaeology, but I seriously doubt that is the case. I’m sure this isn’t their first rodeo, and we should assume they are weighing a lot of evidence in drawing their conclusions.

Also this slogan can become–and in fact has become, in my opinion–a clever way of evading difficult conclusions by holding things perpetually at bay. After all, sometimes absence of evidence IS evidence of absence. But the CT article subtly suggest that evangelical scholarship takes the more rigorous academic high ground of not jumping to conclusions like Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef are.

Anyway, bottom line as I see it:

1. Camel domestication in the Patriarchal period (early 2nd millennium BC) in general is a problem with or without this recent article.
2. It is perfectly OK to hope that perhaps more evidence will be forthcoming to support the Bible’s depiction of 2nd millennium life, but as it stands the presence of anachronisms in general in Genesis is not seriously disputed and cannot be tabled simply by “refuting” this one article.
3. The presence of anachronisms does not in and of itself render Genesis historically valueless, but it does likely tell us something about the time when these stories were written and the perspective of the writers [that is, the Genesis story was written much later - res]. A helpful analogy I first heard from Daniel Fleming at NYU is that Genesis is like a Renaissance painting of Madonna and Child: Mary and Jesus look like Italian nobility.
4. Any credible defense of the historical accuracy of Genesis needs to take seriously anachronisms and other indications of later authorship rather than feel the pressing need to hang historical accuracy on 2nd millennium authorship. To try to make that case in essence undoes several centuries of biblical scholarship, which I feel is highly ill-advised.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The Latest Challenge to the Bible's Accuracy:
Abraham's Anachronistic Camels?
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/february-web-only/latest-challenge-bible-accuracy-abraham-anachronistic-camel.html?paging=off

by Gordon Grovier

Christianity Today

February 14, 2014

Despite the latest study of bones, evidence indicates the

iconic desert animals do belong in Genesis.

Like the nose of a camel under the tent, archaeological research has raised new questions about the Bible's version of ancient history.

Two researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) studied the bones of camels found in an area of ancient copper mines in the Aravah Valley, south of the Dead Sea. Using radiocarbon dating and other techniques, they determined that camels were first used in the mining operations near the end of the 10th century BC.

They state that this is the first evidence of domesticated camels in ancient Israel.

This would be almost 1,000 years later than the time of the patriarchs, when camels first appear in the Bible. The most memorable account is the story of Abraham's servant, Eliezer, in Genesis 24, who is sent by Abraham to find a wife for his son Isaac. He finds Rebecca, who not only draws water from a well to quench Eliezer's thirst, but also waters his 10 camels.

Their study was quickly used to claim that the Bible was written or edited long after the events it describes. Headlines included:

The Mystery of the Bible's Phantom Camels

Camels Had No Business in Genesis

Will camel discovery break the Bible's back?

Study of camel bones suggests Bible may be wrong

Camel archaeology contradicts the Bible

But evangelical scholars say the claims are overblown.

The use of camels for copper mining is an important discovery. "But to extrapolate from that and say they never had domesticated camels anywhere else in Israel in the 1,000 years before that is an overreach," said Todd Bolen, professor of Biblical Studies at The Master's College in Santa Clarita, California. "The conclusions are overstated."

While it has been difficult for archaeologists and historians to pin down the exact time and location when camels were domesticated, there is evidence to suggest that the Genesis accounts are not a biblical anachronism.

Two recent academic papers written by evangelical scholars—Konrad Martin Heide, a lecturer at Philipps University of Marburg, Germany; and Titus Kennedy, an adjunct professor at Biola University—both refer to earlier depictions of men riding or leading camels, some that date to the early second millenium BC.

Among other evidence, Kennedy notes that a camel is mentioned in a list of domesticated animals from Ugarit, dating to the Old Babylonian period (1950-1600 BC).

He concludes, "For those who adhere to a 12th century BC or later theory of domestic camel use in the ancient Near East, a great deal of archaeological and textual evidence must be either ignored or explained away."

In an interview with Christianity Today, Kennedy said that he noticed archaeologists who work in Israel and Jordan seem to date camel domestication later than those who work in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

"[Israel] doesn't have much writing from before the Iron Age, 1000 BC," he said. "So there aren't as many sources to look at. Whereas in Egypt, you have writing all the way back to 3000 BC and in Mesopotamia the same thing." Based on Egyptian and Mesopotamian accounts, Kennedy believes domestication probably occurred as early as the third millennium BC.

He also believes the TAU researchers not only ignored evidence from outside Israel, they also assumed too much about their own research. "All they really tell us is that at that particular place where they were working they found some camel bones that they interpreted as in a domesticated context between the ninth and 11th centuries BC," Kennedy said. "It doesn't tell us that camels couldn't have been used in other nearby areas earlier than that."

Archaeologists usually remember that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." The absence of evidence for Hittites once fueled some 19th-century debates over the Bible—until the vast Hittite empire was discovered in Anatolia. Questions about the Book of Daniel once focused on the absence of the prominently featured Belshazzar from Babylonian king lists—until it was discovered that Belshazzar was actually the son of Nabonidus, and co-regent.

The many media reports which unquestionably accepted the TAU findings is also testimony to the fact that mainstream archaeologists and Bible scholars believe the Bible was written or assembled in the first millennium BC. They are highly skeptical of any historical information that predates that period.

Bolen also observed that archaeologists at TAU support a low chronology for the United Monarchy of Israel, which minimizes the importance of David and Solomon, and typically weights archaeological evidence more strongly than the biblical account.

"They're thinking of this in terms of strengthening their position on the low chronology," he said.

Ironically, one of the most-recent critiques of the low chronology came from another archaeologist working in the same Aravah copper mine area. He determined that the bulk of the industrial-scale mining probably occurred during the 10th century BC, the time of David and Solomon, and not later, as had been thought.

Gordon Govier is the editor of ARTIFAX magazine, and executive producer of The Book & The Spade radio program.