TEXT AND EVENT
TEXT AND EVENT
Ancient and Classical studies have shown us that when the stories about past events have true events behind them it is not as simple as a record of the past. Instead, stories have been 1) selected from a cache of stories about past events and 2) put to work by an author for an ideology. For modern readers, this means the stories have moral and ethical wisdom that ought to be reclaimed over and against asking what actually happened.
HISTORICAL KERNAL
Scholars of antiquity often assume that behind myths and stories about the distant past some historical occurrence is being recounted. However, it is getting back to these events which is elusive and for the most part, impossible. The Iliad is fantastic ancient literature about the true event of the siege of Troy. Archaeologists have actually uncovered the destruction layer of the ancient city. Long before I stumbled through Homeric Greek in the Hall named after him at the University of Cincinnati, Carl Blegen excavated Troy. Carl Blegen was a total cowboy. He served as a double agent World War II spy and had a wooden hand. I just thought you should know—he was the real deal.
Blegen uncovered Troy VI, a level of excavation known as Homer’s Troy in the 1930s. Homer’s Troy had a magnificent city wall and terraces protected by 16 foot city wide and 13 feet high. The walls were topped with brick ramparts. Later archaeologists have found arrows, weapons, and markers of damage which suggest the core event of the Greeks sieging Troy actually happened.
But that is as far as we can go. The ancient Greeks actually sacked Troy… but the literary evidence is far more complex. First of all, the Iliad was written in the Greek Dark Ages around 750 B.C.E., about 500 years after the actual siege of ancient Troy. Second, it is a composite text. This is to say, many poets contributed to the final form of Homeric literature over time. And they did this by selecting from the best of the traditions and myths about the famous siege of Troy. Third, the literature recounts a siege from around 1250 B.C.E., but it seems to reflect the virtues, weapons, and customs of the Dark Ages in Greek culture. If that is not enough, the Iliad is in poetic verse. It is written for sound and aesthetic as much as it is to recount the past. It is a work of art, and captures the truth through army metaphors and literary prowess. All these facts lead scholars to place next to no faith in the historicity of the Illiad. We can affirm a historical kernel, but we can not read the Iliad as a historical document in the modern sense.
So why am I telling you all of this? Because it’s the same with the Bible. Biblical writers are producing literature in general, long after the events they are describing. The narrative sections of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament Gospels and Acts of the Apostles are also composites. They are comprised of stories selected from a larger repertoire of oral and written traditions. The selected stories were then ordered by an ancient editor who added what was necessary to make them flow together.
Stories about the oldest patriarchs of Israel like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob purport to tell of Bronze Age migrations beginning in the 13th or 12th century B.C.E. but are clearly literary productions in the Iron Age 500 years or more later. The Hebrew Bible is compiled sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries B.C.E., and the Greek New Testament between the 1st and 2nd centuries C.E… or later. All this is to say, we can assume a historical kernel of truth behind biblical events and characters, but we cannot and should not assume more. It is far better to let the literature do what all good story does: Take us to a place far away and once we are there, show us ourselves. Let’s talk about story selection a little more…
STORY SELECTION
The author of the Gospel According to John writes that his book is only a few of the stories of Jesus. He writes, “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” This is one statement from John you can take as gospel truth! There were many, many stories of this miracle working, purportedly resurrected Jewish teacher circulating in 1st and 2nd century Palestine and Asia Minor, and the author of John’s gospel has selected some of them and ordered according to an ideology. For every story we do have in the gospels, or entire Bible for that matter, there are likely similar stories we do not have. Most of the legends, myths, fables, and oral traditions of antiquity are lost to the sands of time, save for the stories about Biblical characters which were intentionally selected for use by the ancient writers of the Bible.
Just as specific stories were selected, specific versions of stories were chosen as well, and often adapted by authors to fit the theological goal of the text. A great example of this is the mention of fallen angels mating with humans in Genesis 6.4. Books from outside the Protestant Canon of the Bible, like Jubilees, the Book of Enoch, or the Wisdom of Solomon, make numerous references to variant legends of the same type. In almost every case, angels having sex with humans and producing offspring who happen to be giants is the core reason God decides to flood the earth, leading into the Noah story. In the Bible, the editor has downplayed the fantastical story of human-angel-sex-demigods and instead wants to highlight how sinful the human heart has become. The biblical author mentions the legend in passing because everyone knew the great traditions of human-divine offspring (it is a common motif) as the cause for the flood, but then writes how humans had become so evil that God regretted creating the world. The flood in the Bible was because of human sin, not angelic sin. The point, is that the editor of Genesis shortened and rewrote the legend of divine-human offspring to serve his purpose of explaining the problem of evil as being the result of human sin and human rebellion against God. This is called authorial ideology.
AUTHORIAL IDEOLOGY
Authorial ideology is simply the goal of the ancient author. It is the reason he has taken the time and energy to stitch together stories about the past. In the case of the Bible, authors are writing with a theological goal. In the case of the Hebrew Bible, they want their readers to understand Israel’s unique relationship to God and specifically, they are recounting the past to speak to the present. The Hebrew Bible was either compiled in the Exile of Israel’s leadership to Babylon around 586 B.C.E. or it was the product of the Persian period when Israel was allowed to reestablish itself as a nation under Cyrus the Great around 540 B.C.E. In either case, the central questions that loom behind the Bible are: Why did God allow his special people to be conquered and go into exile? and What can we do to reclaim our unique relationship to the One, True God?
Genesis through 2 Kings is literally an epic meant to explain precisely how God’s faithfulness and love was undermined by Israel’s inability to live up to her side of the covenant. The prophetic writings like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel capture the poetry of numerous seers who tried to convince Israel to get back on track. The later writings like Ezra, Nehemiah, or Ruth are trying to work out exactly who belongs to God and who does not- specifically, how ethnocentric is the divine? The author of Ezra and Nehemiah disagree with Ruth, by the way. Finally, Israel’s wisdom tradition fits squarely within the ancient Near East, save for the firm belief that all wisdom is united and held by Israel’s God. Books like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, many of the Psalms, and Job explore the relationship between blessings found by aligning oneself with God’s character versus unexplainable theodicy, or the problem of evil things happening to good people. Job is sort of a hybrid of wisdom and Israel’s story—it is best read as a parable for how such bad things (think Exile) can happen to a good man (think faithful Israel).
In terms of the New Testament, authors are trying to point out that God has done something new in his relationship with humanity through Jesus. They use quotes, allegory, and allusions to show how Jesus was the Messiah, or promised anointed leader, promised in the Hebrew Bible. The letters of New Testament assigned to Paul and others carry this assumption as their starting point—God has formed a new community, or a new Israel, through Christ’s sacrifice on behalf of human sinners. All of the letters, and under the surface the gospels and Acts, are about what it means to be part of that community.
THEOLOGICAL TELOS
This view from space of the Bible is to suggest that we can best understand the biblical authors as having a theological telos—their telos, or goal, is theological in nature. They are not just writing a history of the King’s court like the Assyrian Annals. They are not simply telling myths and fables and legends for the sake of literary entertainment like the Iliad or the Odyssey. Rather, they are recounting Israel’s past in terms of loyalty and disloyalty to their God. This means they want to tell you about God. They want to tell you about his world. They want to tell you about what it means to image God correctly.
FOR MODERN READERS
QUESTIONS ABOUT WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED WON’T GET YOU VERY FAR. The stories have moral and ethical wisdom that ought to be reclaimed over and against asking what actually happened. We can become better human beings by imitating the virtues of biblical characters or by learning from their mistakes and vices. This is simply the Greco-Roman idea of exemplar, drawing from positive and negative exemplary people from the past. The Bible can make you virtuous. It can save you from peril. It can take you to a place far away and once you are there, show you yourself. It can help you do the work which Plotinus held as most essential, when he said, “you should always be carving your own statue.” Here are some things to remember going forward.
FAITH STANDS ON THE HISTORICAL KERNAL NOT THE ARTISTIC LITERATURE. For me personally, my faith is placed on the large story of the Bible naming the living God in a novel and helpful way. Events like the exodus, Israel’s unique relationship with God, a true promise of a Messiah from the Davidic line, and Jesus as that Messiah— these things matter to me as a person of the Judeo-Christian faith. And it matters that the big events actually happened. However, I think of the Bible as the explosion of literature that humans wrote as a result of encountering God. If revelation was the big bang that let us know what God was like, the literature is the footprint in physics that we can observe today. The literature is divine whiplash. However, it is literature and it is a human artistic medium. Specific details and discrete theological ideologies belong the authors who wrote them, they do not always agree, and they often embellish the historical core…and that is okay. One of my teachers once told me, “Get used to the indeterminacy.”
WHENEVER WE HAVE A STORY, THERE MAY BE OTHERS WHICH WERE NOT SELECTED. When we read the Bible, we should proceed humbly in drawing literal meanings. Often there were other versions of the story which didn’t make the editorial cut. This means we must move past any sort of argument about what really happened, and instead we dive deep into the metaphor and ethical inquiry of the story. It is counter-intuitive at first, but WHAT HAPPENED is simply the wrong question. Many times, the first question we instinctively ask of the Bible is what exactly happened. Our intuition, is that trustworthiness or even faith is only possible if the Bible records history accurately. But this is a modern concern not shared by ancient authors. They actually appreciate the art of taking stock motifs and stories and putting them to work. They do this with stories from the Israelite repertoire and also from the common cache of Ancient Near Eastern Stories.
THE FOX IS WISE AMONG CREATURES. Once Dr. Nili Fox, one of my mentors, a scholar, an Egyptologist, and an archaeologist told me a story. She said she was in a Bedouin village conducting anthropology research. Bedouins are nomadic peoples in the Middle East who live at the outskirts of cities, on the edges of the wild. She asked the patriarch of the village to tell her the story of the creation of the world. He then told her something akin to the kind of myth we read in the Bible. But what he said next is what is intriguing. He looked at Dr. Fox and told her, “If you want to hear a different creation story, there is another village seven miles that way!” His point, was that many stories exist and the value of story is not in accuracy, but in efficacy. For him, and for ancient Near Eastern peoples, it was better to have more myths of the past then less to help navigate the present. Isn’t that unexpected and profound?
Going forward, I challenge you to never ask again “what really happened” about a Biblical story. Instead, ask how the author is trying to use the story to say about God, about what it is to be human, and about how we ought to relate to God’s world. Learn to ask the same questions as the author and you will go far.
SOMETIMES FICTION SAYS THE TRUTH BETTER. The best stories have changed you more than facts—I can guarantee it. Your favorite movies, books, and podcasts matter to you so much because of the great gift of story. And the reason you love them is not because they give you objective facts, it is actually because they are true in a different, more sublime way. You see sometimes fiction tells the truth better. So it is with the Biblical tradition and all great faith traditions. Let us end today by asking a common question of the Jewish rabbis: To what may this be compared?
There was a king of flesh and blood. He entered a foreign land and he said to the people there, “Let me be your King.” The people looked at the King on his war horse and asked him, “Why? Why should we make you our king.” So the king went away for a month, and he came back with an army and a great mass of men. But with the army he drove out the enemies of the land and with the men, he fixed the broken bridges in the land, and he built a strong wall around the cities for protection, and he fed the hungry, and he provided for the poor, and he clothed the naked, and he strengthened the weak.” And then he asked the people of the land again, “Let me be your King?” “Yes!” the people said, “You will be our king and we will be your servants. We will do as you say.”
So it is with the Bible. It is the story of a God who generously gives to the people of his world. The Bible, like many faith traditions, seeks to name the divine accurately and eloquently. If you are daring enough to enter this literature you will simply not come out the same and you will encounter language to God that can move you from skepticism and anxiety to trust and shalom. From “why on earth should I make you my king,” to “You will be my king and I will be your servant. I will do as you say.”