The N. T. Wrong Blog

from an article in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, back in 1999 …

“A literal biblical chronology would mean a world created in seven days, about 4000 B.C., give or take one or two hundred years. But many creationists do not want to be biblical literalists. Of course the Bible in a general way is a big source of inspiration for their movement, but the exact figures of the Bible are not a matter of principle for them, as I understand them. In my opinion, it was a big mistake for many of the mainline religious organizations when they opposed the creationists by saying that the Bible should not be taken literally. This is not what the creationists do. It is, on the contrary, what the churches and other organisations should do: that is, to argue that, in this respect, the Bible’s figures should be taken literally, because it is when they are taken literally it becomes clear that they are not historically or scientifically true.”
- James Barr

Hoorah for Barr!! Damn it, but I so often relish his words, like those of few other biblical scholars.

James Barr set himself against those who would construct an artificial separation of theology and science/history, realising that both stand and fall together. The attempt to defend the bible as ‘theologically true’ but not a ‘textbook’ on history or science is, first, a false dichotomy, and, second, a division that its authors simply could not have conceived of. The bible is ‘theologically’ false because it is ‘historically’/’scientifically’ false - if these categories are understood emically (and so, non-exclusively). Disproof of the bible’s own conception of history or science (not our categories, mind you) is disproof of its own theology. Any denial of this stems from an imposition of modern categories which attempt a separation where none was thought possible.

So, heed James Barr’s call from beyond the grave: Take the Bible literally (don’t impose your own ill-fitting concepts on it).

In other News …

Tattooed Pork-eating Shellfish-eating Gay Cross-dressing Bastard Palestinian Wiccan Man with crushed testicles has sued the publishers of the New International Version for Zillions.

“We think he has a very good case,” said his lawyer, Denny Crane.

Philip Culbertson received the prize for the best title to a paper at the International Congress:

“Bobbitizing God: On the Importance of the Divine Genitals Remaining Un-Manageable”

Philip Culbertson examined the third gender fa’afafine from Samoa (a male who takes on feminine gender roles and dress). After some discussion of fa’afafines, and the cultural construction of gender in general, he suggested that God’s gender be thought of as something that he performs on certain occasions rather than as something essential to God. That is, sometimes God acts in a masculine way, sometimes in a feminine way.

George Aichele discussed the different Jesuses in the four Gospels and the manner by which the canon serves to control diversity by subsuming them under a single voice. He provided a great set of examples of how each of the Gospels portrays a different Jesus. Apparently the paper will be published in the The Bible and Critical Theory. It’s an absolute blast – look out for it.

And then we went to the pub. We spotted this blackboard on the wall, advertising a beer called “Petrus”:

The first sessions of the day I went to were a bit ordinary, so I ducked unto the Book Review Session for Roland Boer’s Rescuing the Bible. This was a good move. George Aichele provided some excellent comments. He first questioned whether it is correct to say that the religious right had “stolen” the Bible (as Roland Boer had asserted), due to the fact that the very idea of a canon is intrinsically conservative. There can only be a “Bible” as long as we consider it authoritative. That is, the Bible would disappear if not considered authoritative. So, he reasoned, it is even impossible to say that the Bible can be taken “out of context”, to the contrary, the “Bible” is the context. What the Left should advocate, according to Aichele, is nothing less than the complete removal of the codex itself. And then he came out with this comment:

“The only good Bible is a dead Bible.”

George Aichele gave the example of The Brick Testament as a retelling of ‘biblical’ stories which manages to free the stories from their canonical context. The aim of the Left should be to reduce the Bible to a husk – reduce the Bible to the mere illusion of a book.

Aichele contrasted his view with those in the Left who want the Bible to act as canon, a venerated classic, to recover, as some have put it, “the dangerous memory of Jesus”. Such a view would try to rescue the radical bits, while failing to recognize the oppressive parts in which it is embedded.

George Aichele also questioned Boer’s advocation of a utopian socialist “myth” which should be aimed for, objecting that all myths are universalizing and totalitarian. Instead, with reference to Lyotard and Zipes, he advocated multiple fairy tales and fantasies rather than a single overbearing myth.

Aichele finished by pointing out that the motivation to be suspicious of the Bible’s contents is not something that derives from the Bible itself, but from outside, from a secular hermeneutical standpoint. If the motivation for suspicion were from the Bible, after all, we would have to be suspicious of that, too. Yet sometimes the Left has accepted the Right’s claim that we are not choosing our beliefs and actions, but we are “just following the Bible” (which, for the right means “just following the Bible” to oppress women, minorities, and homosexuals, encourage capitalism, etc, etc; for the Left means some illusory authentic radical core). Rather than rescuing the Bible, we therefore need to rescue people from the Bible.

Phew, eh?

Here’s Roland Boer in action:

From The Skillful-and-Wise One, Mark S. Smith:

“Perhaps beause of its historical roots in theology, the field of Israelite religion (not to mention biblical studies generally) remains one that does not generate its own general theoretical contribution to the humanities or social sciences.”

- Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities in Ancient Israel. 2nd edn.; Grand Rapids & Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2002: xxx.

Is Mark S. Smith right?

Karl Giberson, author of Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (June 2008), is interviewed in Salon.

I tend to think that Christianity and Evoution are mutually exclusive. But Karl Giberson is one of those folk who think they can get along just fine.

And he does make some nice comments. Like this one:

Salon: What is it about our culture that has led to creationism’s popularity?

Karl Giberson: In short, intellectual laziness. We’re not prepared to do the hard work to make our culture more sophisticated. We don’t drill into our children in Sunday school or church the fact that ancient people thought differently about the world than we do. Even a modest amount of sophistication in biblical interpretation will show that the biblical authors, in both the Old Testament and New Testament, are not writing history.

And why is American evangelicalism much more popular than, say, European evangelicalism? Giberson says that American evangelicals have been quite successful in marketing Christianity to the lowest common denominator.

Karl Giberson: Biblical literalism is very simple. You read the Bible in English and you say to yourself that these are the things God wrote down through a secretary a long time ago, and all I need to do is read this in English and that’s all the work I have to do to understand it. Who wouldn’t want that to be the case? If you try to tell these people that they need some egghead scholar from Harvard, who can read Hebrew, to come in and help them with it, that seems offensive and alienating, and people aren’t attracted to that. So I think the ability of American religion to invent itself and to appeal to common denominators, sometimes the lowest denominator, has allowed these evangelical movements to flourish with their own agendas.

Good comments - I wonder what he thinks about Wiki-Bible?

There’s some interesting reviews in the latest Review of Biblical Literature:

Gregory W. Dawes, Introduction to the Bible, New Collegeville Bible Commentary (2007)

Do you ever get asked, by a general non-specialist reader of the Bible, for an introduction to the Bible that you would recommend to them? Faced with a choice of thrusting a lengthy JJ Collins Intro on them, or the like (which would be too long, and will drown their enthusiasm), or some shorter work (which they will read, but which you cringe about), the question can be a problem. But now Gregory Dawes’ 80-page introduction to the Bible provides a robust and thoroughly readable book that will stimulate beginners while not shirking the deeper issues involved. This book is perfect for its target audience! From the book’s own blurb: “To rescue Bible readers and students from turning their initial enthusiasm into boredom, Gregory Dawes gives us this Introduction to the Bible, the indispensable prologue to the entire series of the New Collegeville Bible Commentary. Dividing the contents into two parts, the author first describes how the Old and New Testaments came to be put together, and then explores how their stories have been interpreted over the centuries.”

Maria Gorea, Job: ses précurseurs et ses épigones ou comment faire du nouveau avec de l’ancien
(2007)

Gorea explores the complex relationship between other ancient Near Eastern traditions about the just sufferer and the book of Job. Crenshaw likes it very much, considering it does a fine job of setting out the issues, engaging mainly with the primary texts rather than the secondary literature: “For me, this book was a pleasure to read. Every student of the biblical Job should keep it close at hand, for it beautifully traces a compelling philosophical theme through three millennia.”

Cheng, Jack and Marian Feldman, editors, Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context: Studies in Honor of Irene J. Winter by Her Students. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, 26 (2007)

Contains 21 essays from 20 authors, in honour of Irene Winter.
- Cheng and Feldman provide 3 introductory chapters
- I Ziffer on crowns from Nahal Mishmar
- Ö Harmansah on orthostats in MB, LB, IA
- S Reed on the depiction of enemies in Assyrian art, esp Ashurbanipal’s relief
- A Shaffer on the ideology of Assyrian royal monuments at the periphery
- T Ornan on the increasingly godlike imagery for Sennacherib
- E Denel on how IA Charchemesh reliefs reinforced the status of rulers
- T Tanyeri-Erdemir on the relation between Uraritian temple architecture and royal ideology
- J Aker on hierarchical portrayal of workers in Ashurbanipal’s lion hunt relief
- M Feldman on the Mesopotamian roots of Darius I’s ‘heroizing’ style
- M Atac on Akkadian ‘divine radiance’ (mellamu), with parallels from Greece
- C Suter on how to detect high priestesses in Mesopotamia
- T Sharlach on how to identify an archive of texts as belonging to a woman
- J Assante on Middle Assyrian pornographic depictions of foreigners
- A Cohen on barley in Mesopotamia
- A Winitzer on melilot (Deut 23.26) as “eating one’s fill”, not the usual “grain of wheat”
- J Cheng on objects (vases, etc) which depict themselves
- A Gansell on bridal adornments in ancient Mesopotamia and modern Syria
- B Studevent-Hickman on the 90-degree rotation of the cuneiform script

Maeir considers, all up, their quality is such that they provide a fitting tribute to Winter.

Alan Lenzi, Professor of Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern Studies at University of the Pacific, has invented a new ‘trilemma’.

The original ‘trilemma’ was coined by C. S. Lewis, who famously argued that Jesus must either be Lord, a Liar, or a Lunatic. This caught on immediately, due to the catchy alliteration.

Now, Prof Lenzi has discovered a trilemma which applies to biblical scholars who claim Christian faith. These are the good professor’s own words:

“Ultimately, I think one must exercise a kind of intellectual schizophrenia, engage in [at least] implicit mysticism, or turn a blind eye to some major critical issues if one is going to maintain Christian faith as a Biblicist.”
- Alan Lenzi [, with systematic emendation]

Let’s break that down.

A self-professed Christian doing biblical studies today, after all that has been discovered over the last 200 years or so, must either:

1. Be an schizo, intellectually holding to two opposite things at once;
2. Be a mystic, appealing to some lame ‘God works in mysterious ways’ theology, Barthianism, some other obscurantism, or all of the above;
3. Be intellectually dishonest, choosing to ignore the ramifications of what she or he has learnt.

‘The New Trilemma’, as it has been coined, manages to avoid the charge of ‘false trichotomy’ which undermined C. S. Lewis’ formulation - because it leaves open the possibility that faith-professing biblical scholars can do all three (sometimes, even, within a single sentence).

A New Trilemma has been born.

Robert Alter delivered the 2008 Spencer Trask Lectures on April 8, 9 and 10, 2008. The videos have been made available at the Princeton website.

The Bible, though its centrality may now be fading, has been a pervasive presence in American culture—for the most part, in the King James version. It was the Old Testament rather than the New Testament that exerted the greater magnetism because its focus on family and nation, politics and history spoke to the American condition, and because, beginning with the Pilgrims, generations of Americans saw themselves as the New Israel. Allusions to biblical texts and biblical motifs consequently abound in American writing, but what deserves equal attention is that the memorable language of the King James version made a certain difference in the kind of prose some major American novelists fashioned to represent their world in fiction. The lectures will explore how the canonical English version of the Bible was drawn on in the diction, the syntax, the rhythms, and the thematic key-terms of three American novelists, making possible what is arguably a distinctive American style.

Part 1: Moby-Dick: Polyphony
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Melville, aspiring to create an American prose-epic about man and the cosmos, combined Yankee vernacular elements with three principal poetic sources from the early 17th century in England: Shakespeare’s tragedies (in particular, King Lear), Paradise Lost, and the King James version of the Bible. It was especially the poetic stratum of the Hebrew Bible that he made use of, echoing its cadences, its syntax, and even its convention of parallelism. It is to a large degree the biblical constituent of Melville’s language that makes the prose of Moby-Dick an achievement without precedent in English.

Part 2: Absalom, Absalom!: Lexicon
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Faulkner’s syntactically convoluted prose, with its relish for recondite polysyllabic terms of Greek and Latin derivation, would seem to be the antithesis of the spare language of the Bible as it is represented in the King James version. But in Absalom, Absalom!, which may well be his finest novel and is surely one of the great American novels of the 20th century, there is an elaborate network of thematic key-words that are taken directly from the Hebrew Bible. It is this special vocabulary that enables Faulkner to articulate his moral vision of the South, its primal sin of slavery, its traumatic defeat, and the collapse of family and of overweening ambition that were concomitant with the historical catastrophe.

Part 3: Seize the Day: American Amalgam
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Saul Bellow, beginning with The Adventures of Augie March, became the most original stylist in the generation of American writers after Faulkner. He himself claimed that Augie March had freed him from the constraints of formal literary diction and enabled him to combine what he called “street language” with a more refined literary style. What has not been sufficiently noticed is that the King James version—coupled in his case with some recourse to the Hebrew original—also was a significant source of strength in his style, encouraging an eloquent plainness of language and a fondness for sturdy paratactic sequences in the sentences. The prose of this urban novelist, vividly engaged as he was in the cityscapes of New York and Chicago, is at times surprisingly in touch with the values and themes of biblical literature.

This appeared in a stage one exegesis of Genesis 3:

“The fact that the serpent is referred to as a wild animal, allows one to presume that God is referring to a snake. This proposes the question; could animals and humans once communicate with one another? In Genesis 11: 1 it says that ‘the whole world had one language and a common speech’. Perhaps this included animals too.” (sic)