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The Bible in the modern world
The Bible is central to Christianity and Judaism, but it is also a classic of Western (though originally Middle Eastern) literature. It has been read and pondered for generations, translated, paraphrased, interpreted, preached on, and dramatized. It has been praised as sublime and attacked as barbaric. Throughout the world it sells more copies than any other book. I begin this introduction to it by reflecting on how it is typically read by believers, who might be called its primary readership, before going on to explain how it is understood by academic biblical scholars.
Reading the Bible as Scripture
Most people who read the Bible do so for religious reasons. The Bible is the sacred book of Christians, and the part of it that Christians call the âOld Testamentâ is the sacred book of Jews. When believers read the Bible, they do not treat it as they would any other book, but approach it with expectations linked to its special sacred status. They read it âas Scriptureâ, and this involves a number of assumptions and attitudes that produce distinctive results. Similar effects can be seen in other religions that have sacred writings.
Most believing readers begin from the conviction that the Bible is the word of God to the Christian or Jewish community, and that the meanings to be found in it flow from this. The Scriptures, it is believed, are not simply a collection of ancient books that happen to have come together to form a corpus, but a carefully selected range of works in which there is a communication from God. For Christians this is very obviously true of the New Testament, which is the primary witness to the events of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and the beginnings of the Christian Church which he founded, including the very early testimony of the apostles, above all perhaps the Apostle Paul. But it is also true of the Old Testament, in which God is encountered throughout the history of ancient Israel, witnessed to by prophets, priests, and sages, and described by historians and psalmists. In these works, believers think, the word of life is to be found, and reading them is thus not at all the same kind of experience as reading any other books, not even other religious texts. It calls for a particular mind-set, and for a number of presuppositions about what will be found in the text. Here are five of them.
Truth
First, there is generally an expectation that what we find in the Bible will be true. For some Christians, especially on the more conservative and evangelical wings of the churches, the truth that is looked for is literal and historical truth, so that whatever the biblical text affirms is taken to be factually accurate. This is most obviously true for âcreationistsâ. All Jews and Christians believe that God is the creator of the world, but a creationist, in the technical sense, is one who subscribes to the literal accuracy of the first chapters of Genesis. Creationism has seen a huge upswing in recent years, especially in the United States, where there is often a demand that it be taught alongside scientific theories about the origins of the universe.
But for many who would not subscribe to this it remains the case that the Bible is to be read as true rather than as false. The truth it contains may sometimes be poetic or symbolic truth rather than factual truth. But it is not an option to suggest that anything in the Bible is an expression of error. Even if, for example, Genesis 1â2 does not accurately express the length of time it took God to create the universe, it is unacceptable to say that it is therefore simply mistaken about the events described: there is bound to be some level at which what the author wrote is true. Many Christians will say, for example, that although the idea of creation in six days is not factually accurate, the intention of showing that God is the creator remains, and this is indeed a profound truth. It would be wrong for a Christian to read Genesis 1â2 looking for fundamental error in what it is trying to tell us. Christians who are not in the least fundamentalist will usually shy away from saying that Genesis 1 is âwrongâ; generally they will say that it is profoundly true in a theological or perhaps in a poetic sense, and many are (perhaps surprisingly) quite attracted by the argument that even some of the details are much less far from scientific truth than other people thinkâyou can often hear, for example, the argument that Genesis is really talking about six ages in the creation of the world and that there is some scientific evidence for this. The contention that when Genesis says âdayâ it means âdayâ, that is, 24 hours, and that this is simply a mistake, does not commend itself to many Christian readers.
The same would be said about the historical books of the Bible, and for Christians perhaps especially about the Gospels. We know, from the fact that the Gospels tell significantly different versions of the story of Jesus, that they cannot all be literally true in everything they say, but this is a far cry from saying that they are false. Very often the exact detail, it is felt, doesnât matter that much, and the evangelists have captured the essence of Jesus in the way they portray him even if there are inaccuracies at the purely factual level. To take a famous example, Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell us that the âcleansing of the TempleââJesusâ violent ejection of traders from the temple in Jerusalemâhappened towards the end of his life, and imply that it was a factor in precipitating his arrest (see Matthew 21:12â13; Mark 11:15â18; Luke 19:45â46); whereas the Gospel of John places it at the beginning of his work (see John 2:13â22). Both cannot be right at the merely historical level. But for most Christians the underlying message of the cleansing of the Temple is far more important than the âmereâ question of when exactly it happened, and that is not affected by this historical discrepancy. It is the meaning that counts, not the mere historical detail, and at that level, people feel, the story is profoundly true, whenever exactly it took place.
Relevance
Second, Scripture is to be read as relevant. Even where, for example, Paul is discussing an issue that arose in the early Church but does not arise in the same form today (e.g. whether Christians should eat meat that has been sacrificed to false gods, as in Romans 14 or 1 Corinthians 8 and 10), this does not mean that the text in question has nothing to say to us. It is our task as readers of Scripture to discern what God is saying to us through the inclusion of such passages in the Bible. Because the Bible is authoritative, it does not have passages that were once relevant but are so no longer: all that is written is there for our instruction (cf. 1 Corinthians 10:11). So it is not an option, when faced with a puzzling or difficult text, to say that it simply has nothing to say to us today. The fact that it was included in the Scriptures means that it is eternally relevant to the Christian believer.
The principle of relevance seems to be built into the idea of Scripture in most, perhaps all, religions that have a sacred book. If you attend a Christian Bible-study group, it isnât an option when someone asks what the passage being studied is saying to us to reply that it isnât saying anything to us at all. The early Christians believed that everything was relevant in the very direct sense that their own life and times were actually predicted in the Scriptures of the Old Testament. Most Christians today donât see matters in this way, but they do believe that what the Bible contains is applicable in every age. To some extent of course this is true of other literature, too: many people would say that Shakespeare, for example, is perpetually relevant, and each age needs to discover him anew. But with the Bible the principle works on a more exalted plane, and means that for most Christians there is not a single sentence in Scripture that is devoid of meaning for us. In Judaism, similarly, there is a complex and sophisticated set of interpretative procedures that will guarantee the relevance of even tiny fragments of the biblical text for modern Jewish life and practice.
The contemporary relevance of the Bible can be seen very clearly in the phenomenon of Christian Zionism, a major force in the United States. Christian Zionists extract from the Bible (especially the book of Revelation and certain teachings of Jesus and Paul) a theory that the present age of the world is coming to an end quite soon. The end, in which believers will be rewarded and unbelievers punished or destroyed, must be preceded by the return of all Jews to the land of Israel, and hence Christians ought to be strongly in favour of the state of Israel and should do everything to encourage it. Only when Israel has been âgathered inâ will the end come. This explains the enthusiasm of some people in the United States for Israelâof course there are also many other reasons for supporting Israel, but this is an influential one at the moment.
Profundity
Third, everything in the Bible is important and profound. There is no triviality in Scripture, nothing that should be read as superficial or insignificantâin a way this is close to the previous point about its relevance. The Bible is a book of divine wisdom, and it does not contain any unimportant texts. This can be difficult for the average reader, who is likely to feel that some parts of Scripture are more important than others. For example, most Protestants, at least, make much more of Romans than they do of 2 John or Judeâespecially since it was Romans, with its doctrine of âjustification by faithâ, that lay at the root of much of the Reformation. But for many believers there is strictly speaking no hierarchy within Scripture: everything is inspired by God and therefore everything is important, even if in practice we may at times concentrate more on some books than on others. We are not at liberty, for example, to regard the historical narrations in the Old Testament as mere historical records that are devoid of spiritual significance: they are all deep texts with profound meanings. That is one reason why Christians read so much of the Bible in church. Just as it isnât an option to say that something in the Bible is irrelevant to us, so it isnât an option to say that bits of it are superficial or trivial.
It is the assumed profundity of Scripture in all its parts that can lead to the practice sometimes called âproof-textingâ, in which conclusions are drawn from a single verse. In secular literature we would generally think that interpretation needs to work with whole chapters, or at least with a substantial chunk of text, but in the case of the Bible it is often felt that its sanctity is found even in verses taken out of context. This may be encouraged by the practice of beginning sermons with âa textâ, that is, a single verse, and deriving a great deal of teaching from it. Proof-texting may go with a belief in verbal inspiration, that is, the conviction that God has inspired every word of the Bibleânot necessarily by literally dictating it, but certainly by ensuring that it expresses what he wants to communicate. Conservative forms of evangelicalism, especially in North and South America, and certain types of conservative Catholicism, are sometimes committed to a theory of verbal inspiration.
Consistency
Fourth, Scripture is self-consistent. The Christian reader must not play one part of the Bible off against another. If there appear to be contradictions between two texts, more careful reading is required so as to show that they really cohere. A classic case of this would be the apparent discord between Paul and the Letter of James over the question of âworksâ. On the face of it Paul denies that human beings are made ârighteousâ by good works: faith alone is needed to ensure salvation (see Galatians 3:6â14). James on the contrary affirms that good works are essentialâindeed, that âfaithâ apart from good works is empty and false (see James 2:18â26). There have been Christians who argued that this difference is irreconcilable, and Martin Luther famously proposed to exclude James from the Bible as worthless because it contradicts Paul. But for most Christians this is not an option. They are obliged to find ways of showing that Paul and James are not really at odds, but teach messages, which, though different in emphasis, are ultimately compatible. In a way, the self-consistency of Scripture is already implied by saying that it is true, since two messages that are incompatible with each other cannot both be true. Because Scripture thus speaks with a single voice, we can always elucidate obscure passages from more transparent ones.
The self-consistency of Scripture seems again to be a feature of many religions that have a holy text. Certainly Judaism often works with an assumption that the Bible will cohere, and there are a number of discussions in rabbinic literature designed to show that apparent discrepancies are really reconcilable; though Judaism also recognizes that texts of the Bible may sometimes be in dialogue with each other and that something positive may emerge from a kind of creative tension. In Christianity a feeling that all the holy texts must ultimately speak with the same voice lies behind âharmoniesâ of the Gospels, where a coherent account is believed to underlie the apparently rather different accounts in the different Gospels. There is a long tradition of this kind of work, going back into the earliest Christian centuries. Again, Christians may sometimes think (as St Augustine of Hippo did, for example, in the fifth century) that minor discrepancies among the Gospels do not really matter since there is unanimity on the major issues of the truth of the gospel message; but most religious readers would be wary of taking this idea too far.
Conformity with Christian belief
The first four preconditions of believing Bible-reading are shared by all Christians and in slightly different ways by Jews. The fifth is more obvious in a Catholic context, though it has parallels in the Protestant world. This is that the Bible is to be read so as to conform to the teachings of the Church. Catholics, for example, will normally say that where the New Testament appears to speak of Jesusâ brothers and sisters, the words âbrotherâ and âsisterâ must refer to more distant relatives, because Jesus cannot have had literal brothers and sisters if, as the Church teaches, his mother remained forever a virgin. At most they could be half-siblings from a previous marriage of Josephâs. Protestants usually do not follow this line of reasoning since they typically do not believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, but on other matters they may well stress that the Bible is in general to be read and received within the teaching of the Church. A clear case of this would be how to read the story of the âFallâ of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. Christian teaching holds that Adam and Eve were created immortal but lost their immortality through the sin which brought punishment not only on them but on the whole human race. The Bible is read, especially by Protestants, as witnessing to this total depravity into which the human race has fallen, and it is not acceptable to expound it in any other way.
Like early Christian writers, religious readers typically say that the meaning passages in the Bible can have depends on consonance with the Churchâs teaching. If our reading implies a meaning in the biblical text that conflicts with basic Christian belief, we can be sure we have misread the text. When we read some of the Old Testament prophets, we may feel that we are hearing about a God of vindictiveness rather than of love, but that must be a mistake, since the God we worship is indeed a loving God, and we must read the prophets in the light of that belief, even if they help to highlight Godâs love as sometimes âtough loveâ. Francis Watson puts the point Iâm making here by saying that Scripture must always be interpreted with regard to âthe centreâ, by which he means something like what the early Christians called the ârule of faithâ, a creed-like statement of what basic Christian belief is. A recent American writer expresses this by saying that Christian reading of Scripture must be âruledâ. This belief has far-reaching consequences, since it affects what meaning one perceives any text as having: the text must always, as it were, be given the benefit of the doubt, and religious readers must never say that any text contradicts what they take to be basic Christian belief. This therefore has (as indeed do the other four principles) implications for âexegesisââthe exposition of the meaning of the text: not just for what we âmakeâ of texts once weâve understood them, but actually for what basic meaning we find in them in the first place.
Critical reading
Alongside this kind of committed, religious reading of the Bible, there has existed from ancient timesâbut gathering momentum in Europe and America since the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesâan alternative approach, which is traditionally referred to as âbiblical criticismâ. This is not in itself hostile to the religious authority of the Bible, but it works by âbracketing outâ religious commitment in order to read the Bible âlike any other bookâ, in the words of the nineteenth-century scholar Benjamin Jowett. It may be that, as Jowett himself remarked, when the Bible is studied in this rather neutral way it will emerge that it is actually unlike any other book. Shakespeare, after all, is normally read âlike any other playwrightâ, but most people who read him in this way quickly see that he is rather special. But critical reading does not start with an assumption of specialness, but with an open and enquiring stance. It has the following features.
A literary approach
First, it approaches the biblical text from a literary rather than a religious perspective. Another way of putting this is to say that it treats the Bible as a text first, and only secondarily as in some kind of unique category (holy or inspired). It seeks to enquire into the meaning of this text in the same way that one might enquire into the meaning of any other text. (A technical way of putting this is that it does not believe in a âspecial hermeneuticâ for reading the Bible.) This has two important further aspects.
On the one hand, it is concerned to discover what kind of text each biblical book is. Reading prophecy is not the same kind of activity as reading poetry, reading historical narrative not the same kind of thing as reading law. The Gospels and the letters of Paul belong to different literary types. One cannot legitimately treat all these different works as though they were cut from the same cloth. If we want to know how we ought to live, we shall not learn this in the same way from a Psalm or from a pi...
