(As I prepare once more to teach my introduction-to-the-Bible course, here is the opening of an introduction-to-the-Bible book I have had in mind to write for some years.)
Introduction: Same Difference (Old Testament ~ New Testament)
The first thing we need to get clear is that the Bible isn’t a book. It’s a books.
Fifty-six distinct texts, from Genesis to Revelation, go to make up this volume. The books are discontinuous—standing on their own, even though later ones refer to earlier ones. And they are extremely various.
Some are narrative, others philosophical. Others, mystical. A few, erotic. By turns, the Bible is severe, comforting, sexy, funny—and much else. And this because it has many different authors, who worked at many different times, in many different places around the ancient Middle East.
Which, originally, was obvious. Biblia is a Greek plural noun. In the earliest Christian communities, moreover, there was reasonable disagreement about where the sacred collection of “the books” started and stopped. Not until the Council of Nicea, in 325 AD, would the Church make a final decision about what was, and was not, Biblical. And not until then would the loose collections of sacred scrolls be gathered together into a single, final, Bible.
The contrast to the origin of the Islamic holy book (in the 7th century AD) is instructive. The Koran appears through the witnessing of one man: Mohammed. He works at the dictation of one mind: God’s. In a single lifetime, the holy book is started, and finished. This could not be more different from the slow and eclectic growth of the Bible.
Now, a traditional Christian theory held that at least part of the Old Testament—its first five books, or “Pentateuch”—were written down by Moses, at God’s dictation. Divine author, prophetic secretary. This brings us quite a bit closer to the Koranic model.
The model could easily be extended, moreover, to effective divine authorship of the whole Bible. For the God of the Bible is supposed to be omnipotent (all-powerful), as well as omniscient (all-knowing). Such a being’s book—it was argued—could not have anything in it that He didn’t explicitly mean to be there.
We can accept this traditional claim, if we choose, without diminishing our insight into the eclectic nature of the Bible.
For what if it is all God’s word? If so, then it would appear that the God of the Bible has chosen to utter an enormously diverse range of words.
From the stern law-giving of Leviticus to the erotic poetry of the Song of Solomon. From the pragmatic wisdom of Ecclesiastes to the hallucinogenic freak-out of Revelation. From the severity of Job to the subversiveness of John.
Literary scholars have a fancy word for this kind of effect: they call it “polyglossia” (“many-voiced-ness”). The Bible, however you slice it, is a polyglossic text. It is a weave of many differences, joined together into a same.
In this chapter, I want to introduce the major patterns of Biblical diversity. The main point I want to make is that they are, indeed, patterned. We are not dealing with a hot mess here, but with an organized sequence of disparate elements. A basic task for us, if we are interested, is to try to grasp the unity of this ancient collection.
Old school / new school
Let’s start with the most basic Biblical difference of all: that between the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament, taking up approximately the first three-quarters of the Bible, is more-or-less equivalent to the Jewish scriptures. The last quarter of the Bible—the New Testament—is, then, its specifically Christian part. Old Testament plus New Testament equals Bible.
Why do we have to make our way through the Old Testament to get to the New? Why, in getting the Christian holy book, do you also get the Jewish one? To answer these introductory questions, we need to take a step back.
Christianity began, in the first century AD, as a Jewish heresy. By “heresy” we mean a serious religious error—which is what the new faith was, from the Jewish perspective.
As we will see much later on, all the first Christians were Jews, and only Jews could become Christians, at first. (Obviously, only some did.) Christianity was a heresy that only worked as such on a Jewish basis.
Now, the ancient Jews, to put it mildly, took their religion very seriously. They also had a very special conception of what constituted a religion.
The larger, stronger peoples around them—Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans—worshipped lots of gods (“polytheism”). Each god expressed a power of the natural world: war, death, fertility, or what have you. This is what we call paganism.
But the Jewish people worshipped a singular and unique God—they were “monotheists”—whose power was supposed to be totally beyond the world. Their God was so incredible, so transcendent, that He was almost unimaginable. He had chosen the Jewish people, or Hebrews, as his own. And so it had been (their scriptures told them) for perhaps 2000 years.
Jesus of Nazareth, assuming he existed, was a charismatic Jewish preacher. That does not mean he was a priest, qualified to carry out worship in the Jewish Temple. Rather, Jesus was what in Christian communities today would be called a “lay” preacher. An ordinary person—a carpenter, as it happened—responding to a divine calling.
The ancient Jews had a name for preachers like that. They called them prophets. These play a crucial role in the stories of the Old Testament. But Jesus of Nazareth, to the people who began worshipping him in the decades after his death, was far more than a prophet. He was supposed to have been the actual and literal son of God.
This is an absolutely appalling notion for ancient Judaism. It strikes at the very core of the difference between the Jewish religion and all others. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Indians, you name em—they all have (male) gods who create children, in one way or another, with human women. But Jews? The very thought is blasphemy. The incarnation of God as man is the very essence of an unJewish idea. Arguably, it amounts to the destruction of Judaism.
Christianity sees it differently. True, the coming of Jesus amounts to the end of the old religion. But not as its destruction. Rather, as its fulfillment.
Partly at issue here is the Jewish concept of a Messiah, or saviour. The concept is obscure, and contested. It almost certainly doesn’t include the idea of God procreating. Nonetheless, it’s on this template that Jesus presents himself in the New Testament. He is supposed to be the final and decisive prophet that his people, the Jewish people, have been waiting for. The Messiah, or—in a Greek form—the Christ.
So the New Testament, from a Christian perspective, fulfills the promise of the Old.
By that token, the Old Testament needs to be there for its fulfillment, in the New Testament, to be.
Christianity isn’tJudaism. It is post-Judaism. That is the complex idea that is produced by the difference and transition between the Bible’s two major parts. And that is why we get the Jewish holy book as the basis, and introduction, for the Christian one.
Reflection and recursion
To make matters worse–or better, depending on your intellectual taste–the Old Testament, in its own right, is a very eclectic bunch of texts.
In the beginning (so to speak), we are told an origin-story for the world (Genesis). This leads us into the ancient and semi-legendary history of the Jewish people, which takes us from Genesis all the way to the book of Esther—almost half the entire Bible.
In this first, major sub-section of the text, we read the famous stories of Paradise and Fall, Noah’s flood, Abraham and Isaac, Moses, Samson—and many, many more.
Scholars call these the “History” books. They are driven by the deal that God makes with Abraham, ur-patriarch of the Jews. He will be their God, if they will be His people. This is called the Covenant. It sounds straightforward enough.
But it isn’t. The History books are mostly a tale of woe. The Jewish people are always falling away from God—following other deities, seeking other satisfactions. For this they get punished, repeatedly and severely. Like addicts, they get back on the God-wagon—for a while. But they always relapse, get punished again, get back on the wagon again, and so on.
In the end, there’s a bang, and then a whimper. The bang is the conquest and enslavement of the Jews by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. The whimper is their return, after several generations in Babylon, to rebuild Jerusalem and give their kingdom one more try.
Historically, they were never more than partly successful at this. For centuries, the returned Jews lived under a series of foreign overlords. This state of affairs came to an end only with their final, disastrous revolt against the Romans, in 70 AD.
Jersualem was destroyed, the Temple flattened. The Jewish people dispersed around the world (in the mass emigration known as the “Diaspora”). It’s a measure of how unhappy this ending is that the Bible doesn’t tell it at all.
Instead, the Old Testament changes course. The History books give way to books of Wisdom, then Prophecy. (In the Christian Bible, that is. The Jewish sequence is Prophecy, then Wisdom.) The Prophetic books, 17 of them, defy brief summary (as we will see later on).
For the moment, let’s just say a little bit about the Wisdom books.
They are five: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. Dispensing with historical narrative, these texts turn to philosophy, meditation, and poetry.
It’s as though the Old Testament, in the wake of the History books, says: what the heck just happened there? And it turns around to see.
The result is a re-examination—even an inversion—of some of the ideas over which the History books have labored.
Consider the book of Job. On the surface, this is a simple folk-tale about a man who loses everything.
It is such a folk-tale. But it is anything but simple.
Job is about the moral problem of human suffering. In the preceding, History books of the Old Testament, this actually isn’t a problem: people who suffer deserve it. They have failed to worship or obey God. Simple as that. The very fact of their suffering proves it.
But then we meet Job. He is not only rich and prosperous. He’s also very good, and very pious. But it all gets taken away from him: goods, house, land, family. Even health. In the end, and for most of the book, Job is reduced to a fragment of himself: a diseased, pain-wracked, and slowly-dying body.
Why?
Well, a figure called Satan—making one of his very rare apperances in the Bible—claimed that Job would turn against God if he suffered.
And God was like: yeah, maybe. Let’s try it and see.
The moral underpinning of the Old Testament falls away here, like a nightmarish collapse. You see: As part of the work that the Old Testament itself does, to itself. Job doesn’t suffer for lack of piety. He suffers even though he has plenty of it.
A couple of technical terms can help us here.
The first term is literary. The book of Job examines and critiques the morality of the Old Testament. That is to say: the morality of the text to which the book of Job, itself, belongs.
The text comes to be about itself, as a text. A text like that is called reflexive.
Reflexivity is a hallmark of the Bible. At the end of Deuteronomy, for example, Moses puts the book of the law—the very book we are reading—away in the Ark of the Covenant. In Jeremiah, scripture gets written down, burned, and written down again. In the Gospels, everybody—Jesus, scribes, Pharisees, disciples—constantly and almost obsessively quotes and critiques and debates previous episodes of the Bible.
When a text becomes reflexive—when it turns upon itself as a text—it is calling upon us to pay attention. What we are supposed to notice depends on the nature of the case. But in the case of Job, it’s pretty clear. The moral theory that is operative at the beginning of this book (pay attention!)is no longer operative at the end. The book has turned a facile answer—people who suffer deserve it—into an urgent question: why do people suffer?
That brings us to the second technical term. Which comes from computer science (of all places).
The book of Job does work on the old-school morality of the preceding History books. Let’s call that the input to Job. Like a program, the book performs operations on its input. Resulting in a certain output. And that becomes input for the subsequent Wisdom books. And so on, in the overarching program of the Bible.
Recursive is the word for this kind of program. Each part of the Bible provides a starting-place for the next. In the end, the text we started with has changed quite radically.
We remain connected to the beginning, of course. But that is precisely what allows us to see how far we’ve come.
Change your mind?
In short: the Bible is a sequence. The sequence matters. That ordinary yet deep idea is almost the whole point.
For some final examples, let’s turn to the New Testament: the specifically Christian part of the Christian Bible.
The New Testament begins with the Gospels: accounts of the life of Christ, written by four of his disciples. They are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, appearing in that order. However, the first of these gospels (Matthew), appears to be responding to the second (Mark). Scholars are pretty sure that Mark came first. So why does the New Testament put Matthew in that position?
Because Matthew, of all the four Gospels, most carefully connects Jesus to his Old Testament antecedents.
Matthew opens with a genealogy linking Jesus’s family back to Abraham. The Temple scribes and priests explain why the Christ must be born in Bethlehem: “thus it is written” by the Old Testament prophets. Fleeing wicked King Herod, the Holy Family head for Egypt—as did the original family of Israel, at the end of Genesis. From Egypt they re-emerge—as did the Israelites in Exodus. They settle in Nazareth because of an Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah “shall be called a Nazarene” (Matt. 2:23).
Matthew insists on the Jewish basis for Christianity. Putting his Gospel first connects the New Testament back to the Old.
At the other extreme, last of the four Gospels, is John.
In a famous episode of John chapter 2, Jesus attends a wedding party. Informed that his hosts have no wine, he orders some large vessels to be filled to the brim with water. What comes out is wine—such good wine, in fact, that the bridegroom gets complimented on it.
Jesus performs this miracle in “six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews” (John 2:6). He takes holy Jewish vessels—meant for the removal of sins—and turns them into Christian party-pots. And this is only the first of many instances in which the Jesus of John ignores, or violates, Jewish tradition.
Matthew says: “Still Jewish, sort of.”
John says: “Seriously, no longer Jewish.”
The sequence of these Gospels enacts the transition from Judaism to Christianity.
Conclusion: Not like a box of chocolates
Many people, I know, look at Biblical diversity and conclude it’s a kind of grab-bag. You have to take whatever you get. Call these people Forrest Grumps.
Grump puts his hand in the bag. He comes out with Leviticus 20: a very stern Old Testament scripture. Leviticus 20:10 tells us that adulterers must be put to death. The method of execution is not specified, but stoning is the default option.
“See?” Grump says, triumphantly. “That’s the Bible for you. Horrible, inhuman violence. Just like all religions.” (PSA: Grump has not necessarily studied all religions.)
Somebody else—me, maybe—will counter with the much later New Testament Gospel of John, chapter 8.
Here, Jesus brilliantly defends an adulterous woman against her accusers—who are citing Leviticus 20. Jesus says: “Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone at her.”
The mob, stunned, files silently out.
The woman goes placidly free.
See? I’ll say. That Old Testament scripture gets deconstructed by this New Testament one.
“Pfttht,” Grump will reply. “You can cherry-pick it all you want.”
People like this, it seems to me, should not be allowed to watch romantic comedies.
What happens, we might ask them, in When Harry Met Sally?
“Oh, he hates her. Says a bunch of obnoxious stuff. She hates him, too.”
Ok, but, they get married in the end, right?
“Pfttht. You can cherry-pick it all you want.”
In a story, the beginning and the middle lead to the end. The end depends on the middle, and on the beginning; but the beginning and the middle are really just there for the sake of the end.
It’s paradoxical, I guess, but in a totally ordinary way. We all understand, just as beings who live in time, that later moments of a sequence trump earlier ones—even while containing them. And the last moment of all is what it’s all about.
By that token, starting at the end is cheating. We’ve spent a lot of time in this chapter working at a fairly high theoretical level, in an attempt to provide a quick sketch of some complex Biblical patterns. In the first place, though, the Bible is down-to-earth. Its History comes down to a story; the Hebrews come down to a family. All of which we will see if we work through the Old Testament from—you know where.
Libber leeber 