Part 2— Church Resources, and Why Scholarship Can’t Be Separated from Doctrine or Discipleship

(See Part 1 here. )
We cannot separate our understanding of scripture, history, or doctrine from human scholarship. The image here is the gateway into the BYU Jerusalem center, where I really had my eyes opened to this idea; I first read a Study Bible through from beginning to end while learning about history and religion, touring archaeological sites. Scripture was much more than words on paper.

Again, we cannot separate our understanding of scripture, history, or doctrine from human scholarship. This is demonstrated in Church history as well as anything else; note the recent changes, including “factual corrections,” to our chapter headings in D&C based on better data and  understandings from the Joseph Smith Papers.

To stave off the critics, this does NOT mean Church classes ought to be focused on trivial or tertiary matters, Greek grammar, or Assyrian pottery typology; discipleship certainly does not require a MA in Semitics or even basic literacy, for that matter. While doctrine and history matter, discipleship “that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

But those who are—as I suspect my audience to be— literate and college-educated ought to be studying scripture along with “the best books,” to use the phrase from D&C. In my mind, those “best books” help us see scripture’s implicit contexts,  their meanings which were evident to their original audiences of two-hundred or two-thousand years ago, but are opaque to us. They get us beyond the words alone, because the words alone, however good a translation, are insufficient to communicate scripture’s meaning.

Let me relate three personal stories of how and why scholarship matters.

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Anecdote 1: Bible Translations

I’m slowly working my way through the entire Bible in the original languages, 15 minutes daily in Greek and 15 in Hebrew/Aramaic. Today I perked up at something I read in 1 Samuel 13:19-21.  Compare the KJV with the NRSV, especially the last verse.

The first few words are unusual in Hebrew, though clearly related to others we DO know. One is PYM, which appears nowhere else, and which makes it particularly hard to understand.  The KJV translators didn’t know what to do with the unusual Hebrew of  that last verse, so the translation comes out a bit illogical; the Israelites DID have a file to sharpen things, yet they still went down to the Philistines to sharpen their tools? (Note how there’s no indication in the KJV translation that it’s uncertain.)

Now, the Book of Samuel has particularly messy and poorly preserved Hebrew. One specialized commentary on the messiness of Samuel said bluntly, “These words are hopelessly corrupt” and went on to explain why.  This commentary was from 1890, and the Hebrew truly didn’t make much sense… because we lacked important context.

Since then,  archaeologists have discovered small weights in Israel inscribed with PYM, like this one here. With some consistency, these weigh 2/3 of a shekel. IF the average wage at the time was one shekel per month (as some scholars believe), then the Hebrew intended to communicate the fact that the Philistines kept Israelites from having sharp tools that might be used as weapons by charging exorbitantly high prices for sharpening them.   Are you ready to pay 2/3 of a month’s salary to sharpen your knives? As the UBS commentary points out, “the original readers and hearers [of the Hebrew]… would have known that the prices were unreasonably high.”

We know more now thanks to scholarship, and the NRSV reflects this new knowledge.  Modern translations are simply better, because new discoveries and improved scholarship help us make better sense of the text and its meaning.  We’ve known this for a good while. 

Anecdote 2: Genesis and Institute

I’ve taught courses covering less and less material in greater and greater depth at Institute: Old Testament> Book of Genesis> Genesis 1-11. In one of those smaller courses, Genesis and the Doctrine of Creation, I addressed the puzzling issue of God “separating” light from darkness in Genesis 1, as if they were just Legos that needed sorting into their own bucket.

That Hebrew verb hivdīl — translated as “divided”— does indeed have a physical and spatial meaning, “to divide, separate” as in Exo 26:33 where “the veil separates  the holy place from the holy of holies.” But it also has a more abstract meaning, to “designate, distinguish between.” Note how in Ezekiel 22:26, the priests are condemned for their failure to make and teach important distinctions, using the same verb.

[Israel’s]  priests have done violence to my teaching and have profaned my holy things; they have made no distinction between the holy and the common, neither have they taught the difference between the unclean and the clean, and they have disregarded my sabbaths, so that I am profaned among them. 

I told my class that Genesis 1:4-5 could be translated as “So God made a distinction between the light and the darkness by naming the light ‘Day’ and the darkness ‘Night.'” I explained further that this translation makes much more sense in light of what “creation” meant for Israelites; creation is a transition from non-existence to existence.

But for Israelites, “existence” was not defined in physical or material terms; to exist meant having a name and a function. Per John Walton and others, in Genesis 1 God creates by separating and distinguishing through naming and assigning functions. (This, I think, is what Lehi is talking about when he says “opposition in all things” and “compound in one.” He’s not talking about “opposition” in the sense of “resistance” but in the sense of separating out and defining opposites.)

Well. The next session of my Institute class, a student spoke right up with a story, which I’ve anonymized.

I’m on the University sportsball team, and one of my good friends on the team is mostly an atheist. We talk about scripture a lot. The day after your class, he was talking about how weird and illogical the Bible is, and so it can’t really be true. He brought up separating light and darkness as if they were physical things. So I told him what we’d talked about, and he was impressed! ‘I guess I didn’t know any context for that one, that’s really interesting.’

My student positively beamed; that positive experience is the direct result of scholarship.

When we try to recover the past and read scripture in context— which require scholarship to discover, process, and popularize that context— we can more easily make sense of difficult and foreign passages. Scholarship contributes directly to our understanding of scripture, and perhaps more important makes our witness more credible and powerful to others. It can remove obstacles to belief.  And so along with deeper understanding comes deeper testimony.

Anecdote 3: Doctrinal Understanding and Grace

Although I don’t read Study bibles or commentaries for Church doctrine, my understanding of the doctrine of grace has been completely changed directly due to the scholarship I’ve read. There is, of course, the LDS “rediscovery” of grace in our own Restoration scriptures, as found in various articles and books starting with Stephen Robinson in the late 80s and early 90s.

But then there is the non-LDS scholarship I read about grace in the New Testament, which taught me that Paul didn’t invent the closely related terms “grace” and “faith” and “works,” he borrowed them from his cultural surroundings and from scripture. Paul presents these concepts within the patron-client relationship known in his Greco-roman cultural context as well as Israelite cultural inheritance.   But in short, grace did not mean what Protestants have often claimed.

I wrote up a lengthy essay on this, which many people have found very useful. I’ve mentioned it in some videos, one of which has been used as a missionary training tool. Missionaries have found it far more useful than merely bashing back with scriptures from James or the Book of Mormon.

Reading scripture alone— even in Greek— or General Authorities alone would not have given me this understanding of what Paul meant. Reading LDS scholarship alone (at least until Brent Schmidt’s Relational Grace) would not have given me this understanding.  It was reading non-LDS scholars like Matthew Bates Salvation by Allegiance Alone  and Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes: Patronage, Honor, and Shame in the Biblical World  and Honor, Patronage, Kinship, and Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture that really opened my eyes. In fact, it changed my thinking entirely. I’ve memorized Ephesians 2:8 because of how it embodies this new understanding, even though it’s  a passage many Evangelicals think “totally destroys Mormonism.”

Do you need to do this? No. Does someone need to do this? Yes. This scholarship pays dividends. It moves us away from perfectionism, de-weaponizes New Testament passages about grace and works, recharacterizes our relationship with God, and builds testimony and spiritual resilience. And it’s thanks to non-LDS scholarship.

We cannot separate human scholarship from our understanding of scripture, history, or doctrine. Shunting off scholarship as irrelevant is choosing casual acceptance of potentially-false traditions over truth, borders on fundamentalism, and rejects the Church’s study directives. Does it potentially create some problems? Perhaps. Or rather, we’re choosing a different set of problems than what comes from reading the KJV alone and not paying attention to context. I’d argue it’s a better set of problems 🙂

Regardless, we always bring our human assumptions and knowledge to scripture; now we’re simply being encouraged to refine those things by examining our assumptions and bringing better contextual knowledge to a much better scriptural text. In short, we’re maturing, and we’re going to start doing a much better job at reading scripture literally.