Occasionally, one hears Mormons (usually laypeople) critiquing Protestants for slavish and uncritical interpretation of the Bible, for “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” kind of bibliolatry. Certainly, some Protestants merit this critique. The intellectual crisis and problems among Protestants, and their effects on American culture and politics have been written about extensively by Mark Noll (e.g. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind), Randall Balmer, George Marsden, Grant Wacker, Kenton Sparks, and others. These scholars are themselves largely Evangelical, so it’s an internal critique.
No, my problem when this critique is made by Mormons is that oft-times Mormons are making it hypocritically. Continue reading
Update: Between now and Dec 5, get 5$ off any physical Amazon book order of 15$ or more. Details here.
One of the things I love about the massive American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature conference is the football’s field worth of booksellers with discounts, new books, preorders, and giveaways. A few recent and forthcoming popular books might be of interest to my readers. To be clear, I haven’t read any of these yet, but I hope to. Continue reading
People are multi-faceted and complex. It’s very easy to develop an attitude of putting either a halo or a black hat on someone from one incident, one aspect of them, particularly when it’s a historical figure. It can be hard to get a full picture of someone. Elder Maxwell once said that the tragedy of Elder McConkie was that he had the most fantastic sense of humor, and no one in the Church knew it. (See my old post here.)
It’s well known that Joseph Fielding Smith was strongly opposed to evolution, embraced a young earth creationist view, and consequently had arguments with other General Authorities for much of his life. Continue reading
Public domain, http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=8577&picture=old-books
The Improvement Era in September 1925 ran a short article in the Editor’s Table called “Teaching Bible Stories.” To set the stage a little, this was 14 years after the 1911 Crisis at BYU over evolution and how to read scripture (see here as well), and immediately after the 1925 Scopes Trial over teaching evolution. I included an excerpt and little analysis here in the larger context of Elder Stephen Richards May 1925 address to BYU. I’d like to revisit it.
Recently a number of communications have come to the Era setting forth in splendid language and in very clear thought the literary advantage of teaching Bible stories; also, that Bible stories are mainly literary tales “written for the simple Israelites to glorify God, and that they should therefore not be taken too seriously. In other words the idea is expressed that they are not historical, not actual, but that they are fiction.
In our opinion, if God is left out in teaching Bible stories, and literary excellence, rather than historical truth, made the only reason for their study in school or otherwise, we may as well study Shakespeare. We think the teaching of Bible stories in this way would be unfortunate. We dislike to call the Bible stories “tales,” which means legends or fiction, in other words. The whole trend of such teaching is to impress the reader that the stories of the Bible are literary fictions, “made up” to boost the God of Israel and the Israelitish religion— they are not real. Taught this way they become a joke, and God a myth. We mean by Bible stories such stories as the creation, the flood, the wooing of Rebecca, Joseph and his brethren, Moses, the Ten Plagues, the passage of the Red Sea, the Ten Commandments received on Mount Sinai, the golden calf, Samson, David and Goliath, Jonathan and Bathsheba, Daniel, and many others.
The Bible must be studied for more than its literature, however excellent that is. That more is the vital and essential purpose, the underlying fact of all facts — to gain a knowledge of the Fatherhood of God and a testimony of his existence, and interest in mankind as his children and offspring. This lesson must be impressed above all others, for it is the paramount truth which rises above the Bible’s wonderful poetry, its concise, direct, clear and beautiful orations, essays and songs, and reaches to the spiritual heights to which the Latter-day Saint youth and all American citizenship must rise if we shall continue a Christian
nation. — A.
What is the value of fiction? Can fiction teach truth? What truths are necessarily of a historical nature? If the Bible makes use of such a loaded category as “myth,” does that render it “a joke and God a myth”? C.S. Lewis didn’t think so. Neither do a lot of other conservative Christians.
But lets steer away from “myth” and talk about “history” with the same scarequotes. Robert Alter’s Art of Biblical Narrative, which talks about how the Hebrew Bible tells its stories, has given me the signature for my email—“history is far more intimately related to fiction than we have been accustomed to assume.”
Alter makes a distinction we should make as well, between “history” as “what actually happened in the past” and “history” as “a record or account of the past” the latter being much closer to fiction than most people realize. As Elder Homer Durham wrote in The Ensign,
The “events themselves,” which took place in the past, whether yesterday or 5,000 years ago, are beyond exact recall with our present facilities. We cannot re-experience an event. Thus, we are left with recordsof events, all of which are interpretations of events. (Even television involves a human judgment on where to point the camera.) Furthermore, despite the contributions of archaeology, linguistics, and the natural and social sciences, most history is a form of literature. Naturally, the most reliable records come from qualified participants in the events or from analysts with access to all the records, but their re-creation of the event for us will always be shaped by their own perspective. [My italics]
So Elder Durham says that written history constitutes, in essence, an interpretive form of literature. History is highly interpretive because it involves choosing a subset from among the very small number of sources that survive (whether written, archeological, or artifacts), and then telling a story from a certain perspective. “Fiction” comes from latin fictio, meaning “something made or fashioned.” In that limited sense, all history-writing is “fiction” because all history is the conscious attempt by someone to select certain points and make or fashion a story with them. A different person at a different time with a different focus or access to different data might select different points, and tell a radically different story. I know a couple who cannot tell their engagement story because they disagree so much on the details and their meaning. No one disputes that they got engaged and married. But the stories of the past they tell are different stories.
This is not to undermine “history” as a profession. Indeed not, it is professional historians who are most trustworthy to handle historical materials and narratives, because they are the ones most aware of its pitfalls and concomitantly the most careful about making sweeping authoritative historical claims.
To bring this back to the Old Testament, Samuel/Kings and Chronicles tell the same stories in very different ways, because the lens of the authors has changed. For no one in the Bible are the stories merely recounting the “facts” of the past.
All historiography [or history-writing] is a literary product, which means it is about people writing down (or transmitting orally) their version of that history. In other words, historiography is by definition an interpretive exercise. There might not be much that is interpretive about saying “David lived,” but when you give an account of David’s life—what he did, when, with whom, why, what the implications were—you are most certainly engaged in interpreting these events. How so? Anyone who communicates historical events must be very selective about what is communicated. You simply can’t say everything, nor would you want to. You say only those things that are important to the point you want to get across. Also, you will say those things in such a way that will drive your point home. In other words, this presentation, this literary product, looks the way it does because the author has a purpose in mind for why those events should be reported. The presentation is not divorced from the events, but it is a purposeful representation of those events.These three elements are always interconnected. All written accounts of history are literary products that are based on historical events that are shaped to conform to the purpose the historian wants to get across.” – I&I 61-2.
Recalling the past is actually never simply a process of remembering but of creating a narrative out of discrete, imperfect memories (our own or those of others), woven together into a narrative thread that is deeply influenced by how we see ourselves and our world here and now. All attempts to put the past into words are interpretations of the past, not “straight history.” There is no such thing. Anywhere. Including the Bible.
So we can’t just nakedly assert in any and all cases that “scripture says x, therefore x happened,” especially if we haven’t even asked if that particular part of scripture was intended as “history” in the first place. Even for those parts of scripture that are intended to be historical, the bright line between “history” and “fiction” doesn’t really exist, and has to be teased apart carefully. Alter expounds.
What the Bible offers us is an uneven continuum and a constant interweaving of factual historical detail (especially, but by no means exclusively, for the later periods) with purely legendary ‘history’; occasional enigmatic vestiges of mythological lore; etiological stories; archetypal fictions of the founding fathers of the nation; folktales of heroes and wonder-working men of God; verisimilar inventions of wholly fictional personages attached to the progress of national history; and fictionalized versions of known historical figures. All of these narratives are presented as history, that is, as things that really happened and that have some significant consequence for human or Israelite destiny. The only evident exceptions to this rule are Job, which in its very stylization seems manifestly a philosophic fable (hence the rabbinic dictum ‘There was no such creature as Job; he is a parable’) and Jonah, which, with its satiric and fantastic exaggerations, looks like a parabolic illustration of the prophetic calling and God’s universality. – Art of Biblical Narrative, 33.
Ultimately, the question we should be asking in scripture is not “why did it happen this way?” (which assumes way too much) but “whether history or not, what is the author trying to teach by telling the story this way?” That question produces much better thought questions and discipleship.
As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.
Jacob wrestles with critical scholarship. Gustav Doré, public domain.
Several weeks ago, the Maxwell Institute’s Studies in the Bible and Antiquityjournal sponsored a small non-public conference at BYU on the topic of “Critical Scholarship and Faith.” If you’re unsure why this is an issue for LDS, read Julie Smith’s post “the next generation’s faith crisis.” I largely agree with her, and was thus quite excited to see this conference happen.
“Critical scholarship,” of course, does not mean scholarship that finds fault or is nit-picky. Its use of “critical” is more along the lines of “critical thinking.” (See my post on critical thinking and BYU here.) The term is shorthand for a vague collection of modern issues, ideas, methods, and conclusions that can seem to (or actually do) undermine faith in scripture and/or God. They are largely things most LDS have never heard about, and that’s a problem. While scholars talk about “critical scholarship” as shorthand for a variety of issues and methods, it might be better to say, “modern biblical scholarship” which is a) often strongly persuasive, b)based on close readings of the texts themselves, and c) doesn’t always cohere well with some elements of either the broader Judeo-christian tradition or narrower LDS tradition. And we haven’t dealt with it very well yet, if at all, as Mormons.
The afternoon session consisted of three LDS scholars David Seely (BYU), J. Kirby (Phd Catholic University of America), and Phillip Barlow (PhD Harvard, now at Utah State).
The morning session, which I’m focusing on, consisted of three non-LDS scholars talking personally about their own religious traditions conflict and interaction with critical scholarship and faith. Peter Enns (PhD from Harvard, now at Eastern University) represented a Protestant view, Candida Moss (Notre Dame) Catholic, and James Kugel (Harvard) Jewish.
This collection of people and speakers was fantastic. Readers may know that I’ve greatly appreciated the work of Enns and Kugel, so it was fantastic to interact with them in person. I knew Moss’s name, but as she has not written as directly on topics pertaining to Biblical interpretation or related issues of interest to me, I hadn’t read any of her books. Since my wife and I are about to celebrate 17 surprisingly childless years, I have now added Moss’ Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness to my reading list.
Each talk (morning and afternoon sessions) will be published in the MI’s journal in the coming months, so I won’t rehash too much.
Kugel recounted some of the history found in his books, especially the excellent intro material in How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now. He’s a little bit of a Jewish Richard Bushman, as I describe here. Someone asked him a question about his faith community (he’s an Orthodox Jew), and he replied that “I often feel that,with my views, my faith community consists solely of James Kugel.” 🙂
Moss talked about her experiences teaching at Notre Dame. This was eye-opening; many of my academic LDS friends have “Vatican II” holy envy, wherein the Vatican essentially gave a blessing to critical scholarship and approved translating the Bible into modern vernacular. Moss showed us that Catholicism has still not fully dealt with the ramifications of critical scholarship, Vatican II notwithstanding.
Enns recounted some of the American Protestant history of critical scholarship from the turn of the century, and referred to his own experiences as an Evangelical scholar who was “let go” from a prominent Seminary for publishing a book that was deemed not orthodox enough.
All of these, in some ways, evoked the BYU student and professor experience. In other ways, they differ sharply. One thing was clear. A full confrontation of critical scholarship yet awaits Mormonism. While we may have our own variations to confront, other faith traditions have walked this path before, and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We can learn from the experiences of others in other faith traditions. Indeed, one of the reasons I’ve pushed Enns and Kugel is because they offer a model of faithful interaction with critical scholarship. Their answers are not necessarily ours, but they can certainly help. This conference felt like a great first step, and I look forward to further discussions.
If the names above aren’t familiar to you from reading me, let me rehash. These are good scholars to read on the Bible.
Phillip Barlow,Mormons and the Bible. Fantastic book about how Mormons have read the Bible, from Joseph Smith on down. Barlow has edited or contributed to a lot of other important work.
Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. This has been on my Top 5 Old Testament Books for Mormons list, since LDS share the 3 problems with the Old Testament that Evangelicals do. I reviewed it here.
How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Nowalso appears on my shortlist. It gives an overview of why ancient readers understood scripture the way they did, and why modern scholars understand it the way they do. It begins with a historical overview and identifying ancient Jewish assumptions about scripture that drove their interpretation, and what changed in the ensuing centuries. Then he goes from Genesis to the end, as a quasi commentary.
As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.
In a previous post, I detailed President McKay’s explicit, published, written approval of a very pro-evolution LDS magazine article. This served as evidence that President McKay did not understand Genesis 1 to prohibit an old earth, evolution, etc.
I’m spending a lot of my time writing about the idea of “context” right now, both for my book and also for a BYU paper, tentatively accepted for the 2017 Sperry Symposium. Below are a few fun things I’ve turned up recently. Continue reading
A friend recently asked for a list of books to read as an intro to the issues in Genesis 1-3 as well as the Moses and Abraham parallels. I focused on the former, because there’s not a whole lot dealing with the latter. I have a few chapters on it in my book, so I could write a separate post, if desired. When I taught my Institute class on Genesis a few years ago, I wrote a summary of each week. I treat Moses and Abraham briefly, here. Continue reading
The Cyrus Cylinder. By Prioryman – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19669420
Back in fall, I got interviewed about teaching early-morning Seminary. I even attended one morning, to get the lay of the land. I got very excited about shaping young minds, but I was also up front that they would probably hear from some parents. As long as they were fine with that, I was on board. I’d heard that they’d called someone else, but then a few weeks ago, received the formal call. A friend (jokingly?) said, “I’m frankly kind of shocked they allow you to do this.”
I only teach Wednesdays, which means Wednesdays Are Different™. Yesterday was my third lesson, covering 1-2 Chronicles. Here’s what we did.
Importance of keeping up with the story
“You’ve finished your homework, and open up Netflix. You’re into Season 4, episode 14, and halfway through the episode, your mom comes in.
…Who’s that? Why’s she doing that? Where is she? Who is that guy? I don’t understand what’s going on.
Here I ran through an outline of the chronology of the Old Testament using this handout of mine, the “Historical Framework.” Since they’d just covered Samuel-Kings in the previous weeks, with Saul, David, Solomon, and the northern and southern kingdom, I focused on the United Kingdom, Divided Kingdom, and the AB down to the Exile. On the left side on the board, I had written down Samuel/Kings events. On the right side, I’d written in some of the prophetic books that happen at the same time as the events of Samuel/Kings, like Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah, as well as Assyria, and Babylon below that, giving us a nice large A, B.
“What happens after the Exile?” Crickets. As planned.
“Ok, in order to answer that question, break up into two groups, around two tables.” I turned on the Indiana Jones theme.
“Ok, you’re all archaeologists now. You’ve just discovered two tablets, broken up and hard to read, like most tablets. Take five minutes, and try to reassemble these tablets. Once they’re together, try to sketch out the signs written on them.”
I handed each table a cookie sheet with a broken-up citrus shortbread tablet. (Pics edited for privacy reasons.)
“Be careful! Tablets are fragile, and if you break it, we’ll never know what was written!”
One group successfully assembled their tablet, and even got some signs copied. Here, the scribe dutifully examines the tablet before careful copying…
Success!
“What is this you’ve just put together? It’s Akkadian, the language of Assyria and Babylon. What you’ve just assembled is part of a royal decree by Cyrus the Persian, called the Cyrus Cylinder. You can go see the original in the British Museum in London.”
Under Assyria and Babylon, I write Cyrus, so we have an aide-mémoire for the history, ABC.
Assyria
Babylon
Cyrus the Persian
“The tablet says, anaku kuraš*, šarru kiššat…or I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, powerful king…”
After the Jews are in Babylon 50-odd years, Cyrus the Persian shows up around the year 530, conquers Babylon, and declares that all the peoples the Babylonians captured can go home. Moreover, here’s money from the royal treasury to rebuild your temple, he says. That last part is from the Hebrew Bible, not the Cyrus Cylinder. Some drama around that is recorded in Ezra and Nehemiah.
“So how do you think the Jews like Cyrus?” They really like Cyrus. Isaiah names Cyrus as God’s messiah/anointed one in Isaiah 45:1. (See also Ezra 1:1, 2Chr 36:22-23, Daniel 1:21, etc.)
“So now that the Jews are back from the Exile, the next books are all about that right? Well, actually not. Chronicles is the next book**, and what do we find there? It starts over, with Adam. And it retells all the same stories about Saul, David, Solomon, and the divided kingdom we’ve just read. Why tell them again, if we’ve just read them all? To answer that question, I want to put this word on the board (“historiography”) aaand… let’s watch these.”
I then ran these three “trailers” on a nice big TV.
(No longer available.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eD2UpdhbwA
“Ok, based on those trailers, which one of those would you take your 8-yr old sister to? (The Shining, obviously.) Are Frozen or Mary Poppins horror movies? (No.) Is The Shining a family-friendly flick? (Not really) How did they make them into horror movies, and The Shining happy?”
Answers included: “what they left out, what they put in. how they put it together, the order of scenes, the jump cuts. The “framing” with music and VoiceOver.”
“Ok, so an editor can take material, and recut it in a different way to communicate something different… and this is exactly what Chronicles does. The stories are not the same as in Samuel/Kings, because the editor of Chronicles has chosen to leave some things out, include others, and frame it differently. This, roughly, is historiography, studying how the history is written and told. ” (We didn’t have time to look at any of my examples comparing Chronicles with Samuel.)
“Now note, the message being communicated here is not being explicitly stated in a verse or a chapter. It’s not a line or a phrase you can memorize. The message being communicated is several levels above that. You have to compare the two, Frozen Recut to the original Frozen, to see what’s being changed, in order to figure out what the director is trying to do and say.
This kind of thing happens in the New Testament too, with the four Gospels.” (I used the example of John changing the chronology of Matt/Mark/Luke, e.g. in the Synoptics, the last supper is the Passover, which is transformed into the Christian sacrament/eucharist. But in John, the last supper is the night before Passover, so that Jesus is crucified at the same time the passover lamb is slaughtered. What message is John communicating by changing the chronology this way? Jesus is the passover lamb.) It also happens in the Book of Mormon once, when Mormon tells the same story twice, differently.
So even something as “repetitive” as Chronicles has something to teach us, as long as we understand how to “read” that repetition.
Closed with excitement and testimony of the Old Testament.
This seemed to go over well.
A few notes:
* Kuraš is koreš in Hebrew… like David Koresh of Waco infamy, whose real name was Vernon Wayne Howell. He christened himself after the uniter of Israel (David) and the messiah of the Exile (Cyrus/Kuraš/Koreš).
** Chronicles only follows Samuel/Kings in the Septuagint and Christian canon. In the Hebrew canon, it’s the last book. This different book order actually makes a difference in how Jews and Christians understand it differently.
For making your own tablets, see here and here. It takes a while. I prefer the shortbread over the gingerbread, because it looks more like a clay tablet.
Tablet 1, in process.
Tablet 1, finished but raw
Tablet 1, baked.
Now, a lesson in scribal errors. If you look closely at the top line of what I’m copying and the top line of tablet 2 below, you’ll notice that the same sign repeats twice, close together. This is the ku sign, in a-na-kuIku-ra-aš (the I tells you “the following thing is the proper name of a human.”) As the scribe’s eye goes back and forth from original to copy, it’s possible to get confused when there are repetitions, like –ku. In copying tablet 2, after copying the first -ku, I went back to the second ku. This means that instead of a-na-kuIku-ra-aš, my top line actually reads a na ku ra aš, or anaku raš, which is either grammatically nonsensical or could be a misspelled version of “I am (the) head.” This is called homeoteleuton (see here, under “scribal error.”)
To learn more about common scribal errors, I recommend this intro volume. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic scholar, wrote a very popular book about New Testament text criticism, called Misquoting Jesus.
As always, you can help me pay my tuition here via GoFundMe. *I am an Amazon Affiliate, and may receive a small percentage of purchases made through Amazon links on this page. You can get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box below) and can also follow Benjamin the Scribe on Facebook.
I’ve presented a version of this as a fireside in Paris (in French!) and Jacksonville, Fl, and promised to make it available online. It’s the first screencast I’ve ever done, and I made it between finals and leaving the country for several weeks, so it’s a little rough.
How can we contextualize the Old Testament, and understand it? Most people are unaware of the major discoveries of the last 150 years which have revolutionized our knowledge of Israel’s neighbors and Israel itself, Israelite scripture. In the screencast, I answer three questions.
1) Why “Rediscovery”? In short, the full “World of the Old Testament” was lost. We had nothing but the Bible. It was akin to having a deep textual tradition about Cuba (like Israel, a relatively small, powerless, and insignificant country) but knowing nothing about Spain, Russia, or the USA, the major influences on it, then discovering their own massive records. Israel was surrounded by much larger and influential nation-states and empires, like Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon.
2) What Have We Discovered? Here I picked 7 major rediscoveries of a textual or linguistic nature, e.g. The Behistun inscription, which cracked open Akkadian; the Lachish Letters; The Elephantine Papyri; The Rosetta Stone, and so on. We have hundreds of thousands of non-Biblical texts that we can read today. Most are only of interest to specialists, but all tell us something.
3) How Have these Discoveries Changed our Understanding? Here I gave several specific examples of things we now understand in the Bible thanks to these discoveries, divided into general areas: Linguistic, Literary, Historical, and Cultural/Religious/Weltanschauung. (BTW, I can’t writeWeltanschauung without linking to Calvin and Hobbes. The first time I wrote it on the board in an Institute class, I also misspelled it, and a German-speaking RM corrected me. )
The whole thing is about 55 minutes, so consider it a Gospel Doctrine lesson that runs over a little. Enjoy.
As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through the Amazon links I post. *I am an Amazon Affiliate, and receive a small percentage of purchases made through these links. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box below). You can also follow Benjamin the Scribe on Facebook. If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.
People are multi-faceted and complex. It’s very easy to develop an attitude of putting either a halo or a black hat on someone from one incident, one aspect of them, particularly when it’s a historical figure. It can be hard to get a full picture of someone. Elder Maxwell once said that the tragedy of Elder McConkie was that he had the most fantastic sense of humor, and no one in the Church knew it. (See my 
I’m spending a lot of my time writing about the idea of “context” right now, both for 
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