Monday Enns: OT and Near Eastern Literature

For the next three weeks, a few of us are reading through Peter Enns' book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. One day we were talking about how old the Hebrew language was and one thing led to another and so we chose this book for a few weeks.

We were divided over the tone of the book. As many of you will know, Enns was forced to resign from Westminster Theological Seminary to a significant degree over this book. As we read, some of us felt like Enns was rubbing it in the noses of Westminster and weren't surprised he lost his job. Others of us might not have put things quite as baldly as he does at times, but didn't think the tone was quite as confrontational as others did. All of us felt like if there was a problem with the book, it was the way he said what he said more than what he said.

So I want to mention some of the ideas both helpful and controversial in the first two chapters:

1. The Bible gives us incarnated truth. That is to say, when God speaks, He speaks to be heard. Thus the original audiences of the Bible could not have understood God if He had not spoken their language.

This would seem to be the main point of the book. It's too bad that we can't go back to 1848 and reframe the issues that so damaged Christianity these last 150 years. Enns is trying to steer clear of the fundamentalist-modernist polarization that took place. We shouldn't fear the fact that the Enuma Elish has a creation story with similarities to Genesis 1. We shouldn't fear the fact that the Gilgamesh Epic bears a lot of similarity to the Flood story. Why would we ever have thought that God would reveal truth in a bubble that was only vaguely related to all times rather than very related to the people to whom it was first being revealed?

Of course we should not be surprised that the legislation of Deuteronomy and the wisdom of Proverbs looks a lot like other ancient legislation and wisdom. Wasn't God revealing himself to them in their times before He used these words to reveal himself to us? The liberals said, "This teaching is obviously just like any other ancient teaching--it's not inspired." The fundamentalists said, "This teaching isn't like the other ancient teaching--it's inspired."

The right answer from the beginning should have been, "This teaching starts where the ancients were and leads them to God--it's inspired."

By the way, like I protest Mark Noll, I strongly protest Enns' use of the word evangelical in relation to his detractors at Westminster and elsewhere. Let's call them fundamentalists and strongly affirm that Westminster was founded from the very beginning as a fundamentalist institution. I resent Noll restricting the term "fundamentalist" to "ignoramuses" like we revivalists and Pentecostals, strangely exepting his own tradition from the label of "ignorant" in the way he goes about his historiography (Foucault is on line 1).

Those who deserve the label "fundamentalist" are those who fought the modernists intellectually and militantly (and their heirs) far more than those of our traditions that retreated from the battle into our own little conclaves. Enns is not battling against Wesleyan evangelicals. He is battling Calvinist fundamentalists. And that is the foundation of Westminster.

2. Revelation is thus not always unique in the sense that it has to be completely distinct from the world to which it is revealed. God meets people where they are. Given Enns' goals, he probably underplays the possible uniqueness of revelation as well. For example, to me the egalitarian aspects of Paul's teaching stand out to me precisely because those are the points where the New Testament is more unique in its cultural world. Enns points to the worship of Yahweh as the more unique aspects of the Old Testament more than its laws or customs per se.

3. I thought Enns discussion of the difference between historical event and historiography was helpful. All history writing is done from a certain perspective. Again, some of us thought he could have presented this content in a softer manner.

In another section he discusses the word myth in relation to the early chapters of Genesis. Despite Enns' pains to say that it doesn't mean "untrue," it remains for the time being a word almost impossible for some people in the church to use in relation to the Bible, no matter how carefully you define it. I'm not sure that he "redeems" the category in his treatment here, despite his attempt to use a more proper definition than the one in common use.

As I read these chapters, I also printed out the official Affirmations and Denials Regarding Recent Issues that was adopted by the Board of Trustees at Westminster Theological Seminary. Some of the statements sure sound like the Westminster Confession is the 67th book of Scripture, more authoritative than Nicea, the magisterium of the Calvinist tradition, the ex cathedra pronouncement of a Calvinist Pope. Take these lines, for example, "We affirm that the truths affirmed in the [Westminster Confession] are true for all times, all places, all languages, and all cultures." "We deny that the truths affirmed in the [Westminster Confession] are true only for their seventeenth century situation or only for some cultures or circumstances."

WOW! I'm glad I'm a Wesleyan. We have Articles of Religion that we wholeheartedly affirm. But I don't think any of our leaders are so arrogant as to think we are the tradition that finally has everything right, the wisest among the people of God.

More important, "if your heart is as my heart, put your hand in mine."

IWU Accredited to Offer Master of Divinity Degree!

Originally posted January 8, 2009

We received notification over Christmas break that we are now officially accredited as an institution to offer the MDIV degree at Indiana Wesleyan University. This is exciting to say the least, as we have been designing and preparing for several years now!

Pray for the President and Board of IWU this April as they make decisions on how to configure the degree within the university. There is an excellent chance that it will be housed within a seminary (under the overall umbrella of the university of course) with a dedicated building on the south side of campus. It is hard to imagine how it wouldn't turn out this way.

Regardless of the final decisions on those matters, the MDIV degree will be available for its first cohorts this Fall, starting in August. We have planned for 30 students--one online cohort and one onsite cohort. But I anticipate we will have so much interest we will allow for at least 15 more onsite if necessary. Final admission materials should be available later this month so be contacting the Graduate Ministry department as soon as possible if you are interested.

If you have a PhD or DMin in a field of practical theology, especially fields like evangelism, church multiplication, community development, service, discipleship, etc... we will be making two hires for next year, then at least two the following year, and so forth. We're wanting to hire major players in the practice of ministry, not just nerds like me.

I anticipate that Russ Gunsalus and I will probably be involved with the seminary/MDIV next year in some way (although nothing is certain at this point). Bob Whitesel will also almost certainly be one of our professors. Of course you should expect to see current undergraduate faculty teaching the odd course now and then as well, people like Chris Bounds.

Distinctives
Because we are not starting with existing academic turf, because we all recognize that ministerial education is about training ministers--not about training bible scholars or theologians proper or church historian experts--we have designed a truly revolutionary program that is what ministers want and need, rather than what you usually get at a seminary. In other words, it isn't a program for professors to do their thing whether it is useful in ministry or not.

If you want to go on to get a doctorate in Bible, theology, or church history, go somewhere else for now. We train ministers.

Here are our distictives:

Missional: ... focused on serving the kingdom and transforming the world both near and far, ministering to whole persons and addressing world concerns.

Accessible: You don't need to leave your ministry to retool or deepen your skills and knowledge. The MDIV will be conveniently available online and onsite, will be highly affordable (Lord willing), and will welcome ministers of any culture, gender, race, or class.

The onsite version will probably require one full day a week--from 9 to 5, probably Tuesday in the Fall. You could thus easily drive in from anywhere in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, or Illinois. You'll come to campus for two weeks in the summers and graduate in 4 years. One more course a semester and you'd be able to finish in 3 years (accelerated).

In Ministry: You take courses as you do ministry, taking your church with you to seminary. You get immediate pay off and insight where you need it most. If you are not at least doing 20 hours a week in a church (the precise amount is being discussed), we'll work with you to find a church, which of course should be near where you live.

The MDIV is for pastors and for people involved in church ministry. If you are a parachurch person or a layperson who wants to tool up in specific areas, an MA is more appropriate and we welcome suggestions for specialized MA's you think we should design and add to our program. One prognosticator among us pictures a seminary with far more MA degrees and students than MDIV students!

Application Oriented: The MDIV curriculum is shaped by the nitty-gritty goals and problems of ministry rather than the ivory tower concerns of the academy. We present theory in the service of the practice of ministry by way of adult education models.

Spiritually Formative: A process of personal and spiritual change follows the student through the degree, leading toward increased wisdom, self-understanding, holiness, and sensitivity to the Holy Spirit. This is not the myopic "go read your Bible and pray," highly individualistic Western spiritual formation program. We're Wesleyan here. We're interested in real change with a corporate twist.

Integrative: Other MDIV programs typically present Bible, theology, and Christian history in isolation from courses like preaching, worship, and discipleship. All the praxis courses of our MDIV involve problem based learning that involves a team of biblical, theological-historical, and practical experts. You'll do pastoral theology relevant to your on the ground ministry in every praxis course.

Residential Requirement
The default expectation of the MDIV program will likely be to take at least 18 credit hours of the degree in intensive onsite courses. The student could then take the remainder of the program (57 credit hours) either online or onsite. Intensive courses will likely be offered around a weekend of yearly convocation, during which all students and faculty in the program come to campus to worship and fellowship.

The Curriculum
Here's the normal curriculum:

August:
1. Pastor, Church, and World (3 hour onsite intensive)

2. Cultural Contexts of Ministry (3 hour onsite intensive)

Fall Semester 1
3. Missional Christianity (6 hours onsite or online)

4. Spiritual Formation 1: Change and Transformation (1 hour onsite or online)

Spring Semester 1
5. Christian Leadership (6 hours onsite or online)

6. Spiritual Formation 2: Self Awareness and Appraisal (1 hour onsite or online)

Summer 2
7. The Bible as Christian Scripture (3 hour onsite intensive)

8. Introduction to Christian Theology (3 hour onsite intensive)

Fall Semester 2
9. Congregational Relationships (6 hours onsite or online)

10 Spiritual Formation 3: Goal Setting and Accountability (1 hour onsite or online)

Spring Semester 2
11. Christian Worship (6 hours onsite or online)

12. Spiritual Formation 4: Mentoring and Spiritual Direction (1 hour onsite or online)

Summer 3
13. Global Christian History (3 hour onsite intensive)

14. Elective (3 hours online or onsite)

Fall Semester 3
15. Congregational Spiritual Formation (6 hours onsite or online)

16. Spiritual Formation 5: Personal and Corporate Disciplines (1 hour onsite or online)

Spring Semester 3
17. Christian Proclamation (6 hours onsite or online)

18. Spiritual Formation 6: Recovery and Deliverance (1 hour onsite or online)

Summer 4
19. Integration Capstone (3 hour onsite intensive)

20. 12 additional hours of electives (or concentration in leadership or youth ministry, 15 total hours of electives)

Totals
It's a 75 hour MDIV, with 15 hours of electives. It is likely that you would be able to transfer in up to 27 hours of prior graduate courses, including up to half the hours of a completed MA.

God will get the glory for any success, but let me just say that this is BIG. If God enables us, this will end up being, in my opinion, one of the best MDIV's that has ever existed. Pray for us as we continue the writing process this semester and summer.

This will be a heavily "outcomed" program. Individual professors obviously will get to teach electives (if it's something students will sign up for! no esoteric courses you can't attract students to take). But there will be carefully set out objectives for these courses to where a professor can't just blab about their stuff. In fact, blabbing is not an effective teaching method and shouldn't be more than about a third of the time. Courses will be more about action research in your local church, and we will use tested adult learning methods.

Pray for us!

Before the Maccabean Revolt

We can at least wonder what Judaism would look like today if the Maccabean crisis of 167-64BC had not occurred. Indeed, we can wonder whether Judaism would even have continued to exist over time if efforts to Hellenize Israel in the early second century BC had not gone just a little too far. We can wonder whether Christianity would ever have arisen without this particular crucible of Jewish identity, a crucible forged significantly in the aftermath of the crisis.

The excerpts in this section fall into three basic groups. The first two sources, Tobit and Sirach, would eventually make their way into the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Old Testament. Tobit probably dates from the 200's or early 100's BC. The original, Hebrew version of Sirach similarly dates to around 200BC. In the second group are the more Hellenized Alexandrian writings that have survived in various forms from the late 200's and early 100's. These include excerpts from Artapanus, Ezekiel the Tragedian, The Letter of Aristeas, and the slightly later Aristobulus.

The final group of exercepts that date to before the Maccabean crisis are several writings that would eventually become 1 Enoch. These include selections from the Book of the Watchers, the Astronomical Book, and the Apocalypse of Weeks. This collection ends with some excerpts from 1 and 2 Maccabees, as well as Josephus. These paint a picture of the increased Hellenization just before the Maccabees, the context of the seventh week in the Apocalypse of Weeks.

Saturday Sources: Early 2nd Centry BC

For the next few days, I will keep the announcment of IWU's MDIV on top, but will still post some of the other things I'm working on.

In thinking of somewhat direct "historical" sources for the period just before the Maccabean revolt, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, and Josephus came to mind. Of the three, 1 Maccabees is the closest and least skewed, it would seem. In fact Josephus probably used it as a source.

1 Maccabees dates from the first half of the first century BC (104-63BC). 2 Maccabees dates from the same general period (124-63BC) and is much more theologically driven than 1 Maccabees. Josephus wrote at the end of the first century AD.

Here are some short excerpts that seemed helpful in setting the stage for the period. 1 and 2 Maccabees sources are taken from the NRSV. Unfortunately, I am at home, so I have paraphrased Josephus slightly from the older Whiston translation.

1 Maccabees 1:10-15
From [the descendents of the officers of Alexander the Great] came forth a sinful root, Antiochus Epiphanes... (began ruling 175BC)

In those days, certain renegades came out from Israel and misled many, saying, "Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles around us, for since we separated from them many disasters have come upon us" This proposal pleased them, and some of the people eagerly went to the king, who authorized them to observe the ordinances of the Gentiles. So they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to Gentile custom, and removed the marks of circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant. They joined with the Gentiles and sold themselves to do evil.

2 Maccabees 4:7-10, 12-14, 16
When... Antiochus, who was called Epiphanes, succeeded to the kingdom [175BC], Jason the brother of Onias obtained the high priesthood by corruption, promising the king ... three hundred sixty talents of silver, and from another source of revenue eighty talents. In addition to this he promised to pay one hundred fifty more if permission were given to establish by his authority a gymnasium and a body of youth for it, and to enroll the people of Jerusalem as citizens of Antioch. When the king assented and Jason came to office, he at once shifted his compatriots over to the Greek way of life...

He took delight in establishing a gymnasium right under the citadel, and he induced the noblest of the young men to wear the Greek hat. There was such an extreme of Hellenization and increase in the adoption of foreign ways because of the surpassing wickedness of Jason... that the priests were no longer intent upon their service at the altar. Despising the sanctuary and neglecting the sacrifices, they hurried to take part in the unlawful proceedings in the wrestling arena after the signal for the discus-throwing... For this reason heavy disaster overtook them.

Josephus, Antiquities 12.5.1
Menelaus ... retired to Antiochus and informed him that they wanted to leave the laws of their country and their Jewish way of living and to follow the king's laws and the Hellenistic way of living. Accordingly, they wanted his permission to build a gymnasium for themselves in Jerusalem.

And when he dismissed them, they undid the circumcision of their genitals, so that when they were naked they would appear to be Greeks. They left the customs of their own country and imitated the practices of other nations.

On the Eleventh and Twelfth Days of Meier...

On the eleventh and twelfth day of Meier, his Marginal Jew brought to me, 12) some more final endnotes, 11) a chronology of Jesus' life, 10) Jesus' family, 9) a long stretch of endnotes, 8) Jesus' language, education, and social status, 7) origins of Jesus of Nazareth, 6) part 2 criteria for the historical Jesus, 5) part 1 criteria for the historical Jesus, 4) agrapha and Nag Hammadi, 3) Tacitus and other Jewish sources; 2) Josephus and the books of the canon; and 1) and an introduction to the historical Jesus.

Lest you think I can't finish anything I start (whoever "you" are), here is the final installment of Meier's first volume. Chapter 11 of his book is titled, "In the Fifteenth Year... A Chronology of Jesus' Life."

1. Pontius Pilate...
... held office from AD26-36, so Jesus presumably ministered during these years.

2. Luke 3:1-2
The fifteenth year of Tiberius isn't as easy to fix as it might first seem. Anywhere from AD26 to 29 is possible. If it weren't for John, Meier probably would say AD29, I think. John has a two plus year ministry. The Synoptics don't require even one, although Meier has a lengthy endnote about the green grass in Mark at the beginning and end of the gospel, which could give the impression of at least two Springs involved.

Philip's rule over Trachonitis ended in 33 or 34. These two parameters would further restrict the beginning of Jesus' ministry, assuming the accuracy of Luke 3:1-2, to 26-34. And the death of Jesus then looks more like AD28-33 to Meier. I'm not sure where he gets the AD33 for the end limit of his death, since presumably Philip need not still live at the time of the crucifixion.

A little later on in the chapter Meier revisits the fifteenth year of Tiberius. This discussion reminds you of your gratitude to the detailed people who do this sort of work, while perhaps making you glad you aren't one of them. Meier mentions at least 4 different calendars that were in use at the time, the Jewish, the Julian, the Syro-Macedonian, and the Egyptian, each of which started the year on a different date. Then there is the question of whether the years are counted from the ascension of Tiberius or more according to the calendar year.

Once your head stops spinning, Meier notes that of the four most likely ways of reckoning, AD28 is a part of the likely year. So he suggests Jesus began his ministry in AD28, give or take a year.

3. Jesus birth during the reign of Herod the Great
Even though Matthew and Luke differ is several respects, they both place Jesus' birth during the last days of Herod's reign. Herod died in 4BC. The idea of Herod killing children two years and younger would suggest 4-6BC. This of course assumes that some historical memory is at work in Matthew's account.

4. Luke 3:23; John 8:57; and 2:20
These confirm these general limits. Luke 3:23 give the ballpark figure of Jesus starting his ministry around the age of thirty. The fifty years old of John 8:57 is not so much about Jesus' precise age but a very general figure in comparison to how long ago Abraham lived. The question of the temple being under construction for forty-six years also does not yield a precise date. Was the reconstruction begun in 19BC? That's a majority position. But is the 46 years from when it was started (thus placing John 2:20 around 27BC) or from when the central temple part was finished in 17BC (thus 29BC)? Do we go with John's chronology of a temple cleansing in the first year of Jesus' ministry or with the Synoptic last week of Jesus' ministry?

Basically, we end up exactly where we were, 27-33ish.

5. Last Supper and Passover
From the "fifteenth year of Tiberius," Meier is thinking AD28 has a high probability of the beginning of Jesus' ministry. Now he focuses on the date of Jesus' crucifixion.

The gospel traditions agree that Jesus was arrested on Thursday night and crucified on Friday morning. The problem is that the Synoptics present the Last Supper as a Passover meal. In other words, the lamb would be killed in the afternoon on the 14th of Nisan and then eaten after sundown on the fifteenth (the Jewish day begins at sundown). In John, however, the Last Supper is not presented as a Passover meal and in fact John seems to imply several times that the Passover meal had not yet taken place when Jesus was crucified (e.g., 19:14).

Meier dismisses attempts to reconcile these two accounts, going through a few. One interesting summary comment Meier makes is that such attempts--and one in particular--make the gospels "all right when they disagree, all wrong when they agree" (194). What he means is that in order to make them all agree at points of apparent disagreement, a particular interpreter has to deny points on which they all seem to agree (namely, that Jesus ate a last meal with his disciples on Thursday night and was crucified Friday morning).

In the end, Meier chooses John's chronology at this point as he understands it, namely, that Jesus died the morning of the 14th of Nisan. He thinks in anticipation of his coming arrest, Jesus ate a solemn farewell meal with his disciples a day early (399). He mentions a couple frustrations when we next use astronomy to find years when the 14th of Nisan was on a Friday. You have to be able to see the new moon for the month to begin officially. Then leap days were added to the year as needed... and we don't know when!

But going by Jeremias, Meier fixes on either Friday, April 7th, AD30 or Friday, April 3, AD33. The latter date would require a four or five year ministry of Jesus, so Meier concludes that the AD30 date is more likely.

So Meier concludes that Jesus likely began his public ministry in AD28 soon after John the Baptist and that he was executed on April 7, AD30.

Here endeth the Marginal Jew.

Happy Epiphany!

The beginning of the semester at IWU has slowed down finishing Meier and any interesting Epiphany post I might do (I had originally thought of doing Explanatory Notes on the wise men in Matthew 2). Meier should appear mysteriously as a Monday post below :-)

But I should at least say Happy Epiphany. This was the date of celebrating Christ's birth before December 25 became the day. The twelve days of Christmas are the days from Christmas to yesterday. Now today is traditionally a day to think of the wise men visiting Jesus.

While we have the wise men around the manger in our Christmas plays, Matthew of course doesn't have a manger. Matthew pictures the wise men coming to Bethlehem probably some time after Jesus was born. Herod is said to kill children under two years of age in accordance to the first appearance of the star, so Matthew likely pictures Jesus as around two years old when they come.

Happy Epiphany!

Does Israel have the moral high ground?

This article in the Washington Post thinks so. I certainly have no time for Hamas. But is Israel doing the right thing? I've wondered if this is a last ditch Israeli smack down before Obama takes office, and they have to play nice nice. But then again, Obama hasn't had anything to say about it either, as many have noticed.

What do you think? I don't know enough of what's really going on behind the scenes and on scene really to guess much.

In today's excerpt from Calvin's Institutes...

... he says of "katabaptists" (groups against infant baptism=today's Baptists), "And when [Satan's attacks on the Reformation by the Roman Catholic Church and its surrogates] didn't work, he turned to stratagems: he aroused disagreements and dogmatic contentions through his catabaptists and other monstrous rascals in order to obscure and at last extinguish the truth."

Ha!

Monday BCS (Bible as Christian Scripture) 1.2

1.2 The Problem of Meaning
At the heart of the problem of Christian Scripture is the problem of meaning in general. In popular usage, words are imagined to point rather straightforwardly to things. The meaning of the word dog is thus aptly captured in the picture of a dog that appears in the bubble above my head when you say the word. In this sense the meaning of words is fixed by the things to which they refer and is thus relatively stable. Understanding meaning is simply a matter of finding the things to which the words point.

But this model has proved to be vastly inadequate for a number of reasons. For example, words often do not point to things. Concrete nouns may refer to things. But it is hard to say what picture will appear in the bubble above your head when you hear the word "righteousness" or "is." And the picture of a "wild goose chase" or a "red herring" will hardly help you understand the meaning of these phrases in English, and you will have to find completely different idioms if you try to translate them into Chinese.

A word may have also more than one meaning. As an instance of our conundrum, these meanings need not have anything to do with one another. It is simply not the case that getting "fired" from your job has some current semantic connection to the meaning of getting all "fired" up for a football game or the fact that a hunter "fired" a rifle.

We may sum up the situation of meaning in the following way. First, the relationship between words and meaning is arbitrary and constantly changing. To put it in more precise language, the relationship between "signifiers" and that which is "signified" is in no way fixed or constant. [1] I can write a note to my family in what seems the simplest of English language and in ten years those same words may have taken on quite new and different connotations than today.

This is the hidden irony of the use of the King James Version by so many English speaking Christians in the United States today. Such individuals may think to themselves, the meaning of the words is perfectly understandable to me. Yet they may at the same time not realize that the way the words strike them is sometimes different from how those words were used when the fifth updating of the language was made in 1789 to give the King James its current wording. A good translation into some language today will thus inevitably become less and less accurate and helpful over time. [2]

Secondly, meaning is a function of word use, not a matter of fixed truths to which words point. [3] The dictionary entry of a word is a snapshot of how that word is being used at a particular point in time, listed from most frequent to least. A dictionary thus technically does not tell us what a word means, but how it is being used at any given time. Meanings are constantly added and removed over time.

The implications of this simple shift in understanding are quite momentous for the meaning of the Bible. For example, what use of these words at what point in time is the one that renders the meaning that is Christian Scripture. Is it the way the words of the Bible were being used at the time the book in question was written (which will not clearly be the meaning of the words in the other books at the time they were written)? Is it the way Christians in general have taken the words over time? Is it the way the words strike me in my way of using words?

Certainly meaning is not purely a matter of individual words added together. Combinations of words--especially into clauses but also into sentences and paragraphs--have a greater tendency to clarify and delimit the possible meanings rather than to further ambiguate them. [4] Nevertheless, even a careful reading of a text can frequently leave ambiguity--especially when the text is somewhat removed from us in context. And many readers of texts are far from careful.

When we couple the arbitrary nature of words as signifiers with meaning as a function of use, we begin to see the scope of the problem. The meaning of a word, phrase, or semantic unit at any point in time can differ widely from the meanings it previously had or subsequently will have. That meaning is tied to the way the word is being used at the time. Accordingly, the meaning of the same words will shift over time so that the same book of the Bible will inevitably take on different meanings depending on who is reading it against what general set of word uses. And thus we begin to appreciate better why there are over 35,000 different Christian denominations, most of which have little awareness of the fact that the way the words have struck them in their way of using words is different from the way other groups use words and still vastly different from the way the original authors and audiences of these books used words.

Thirdly, the use of words goes far beyond "denotation" and statement. Words can say things far beyond what they say on a surface level or on a literal level, and words do things far beyond simply making assertions. That is to say, we often use words in complex ways. If I try on some clothes I have not worn for twenty years and say to my wife, "Yeah, that fits," I may actually mean the exact opposite of what the words seem to say. When I say, "He went through the roof when I told him how much it was going to cost," I do not mean to suggest he is now dead or in the hospital with major head injuries.

Yet even these "non-literal" statements are statements--they are used to assert things. Words do many things other than make assertions. [5] When I see someone and say, "How are you?" I may or may not really be asking them of their current state. My words may rather simply be performing a social pleasantry--one that is completely sincere, but not a matter of an actual question. Some of our language is "cohesive" in nature, meant to perform social functions, rather than logical ones.

If I yell, "Fire!" in a crowed room, chances are I am telling everyone to get out of the building as quickly as possible. If I say, "I do," at my wedding, I am not simply making a statement. I am marrying a person with those words, making them my spouse with those words. Those who fight tooth and nail for the propositional nature of biblical truth thus ignore the fact that words do much more than make assertions--and even assertions are often figurative to one degree or another.

It does seem possible to make carefully worded absolute statements. "All single men are bachelors" would seem to be such a statement. When all the words in this sentence are taken in the way those words are normally used at this particular point in the history of the English language, the statement is always true in all times and all places. It is a proposition that is absolutely true because it is true by definition.

At the same time, absolute propositions are not the stuff of ordinary speech. They are the stuff of a Western philosophy class. Most statements we use in ordinary language are not meant to be absolute in scope, and we would "misinterpret" the statements of others to take them as such. And the "connotations" are often more to the point of our meaning than the precise "denotation" of our words. We frequently employ figurative language--understatement, hyperbole, irony. And we use metaphors.

A good case can be made that metaphor stands at the root of all or at least most human language. [6] Nevertheless, it still makes sense to distinguish between the "dead metaphors" that constitute the baseline of human language, and new meanings we create when we juxtapose unlike things together in new ways or at least ways that are new enough to be fresh in connotation. [7] The metaphorical use of language alone vastly multiplies the possible meanings that words can have in the use any individual makes of it.

The matter of genre also affects the meaning words have in a particular context. If I am reading fiction, I am not meant to take the individuals in a narrative as individuals who actually lived in history. If I am reading satire, I should expect irony and a more critical stance toward a topic than normal. The function of genre also changes over time, to where one cannot assume that what is appropriate for history writing today is the same as what it was at another time in place.

We thus face significant questions of meaning when we approach a library of texts such as the Bible. We have narratives, laws, prophecies, letters, and apocalyptic material. The overwhelming majority of the biblical material does not seem to be in the form of absolute philosophical propositions. We have irony, understatement, hyperbole, metaphor, allegory, and other non-literal language. We have not only language that asserts but language that honors and shames, language that binds author and audience, language that commands and wishes, language that expresses emotion, and so forth. The potential for a multiplicity of interpretations is enormous, as the history of interpretation embodies.

Fourthly, the use of words is a function of community and culture. The history of what words have meant in the past is interesting, but ultimately irrelevant to what words mean at any given point in time. Herein lie many of the fallacies of the way words are and often have been treated in Christian rhetoric. The etymological fallacy, for example, supposes that the way a word has been used in the past is somehow determinative of what it means today. Not so. Even if one could show that the Greek word "to sin" originally meant "to miss an archery target" (and that is incredibly dubious in itself), it would have no necessary connection whatsoever to what the word meant at the time of the New Testament or to how the word "to sin" is understood in a given Christian culture or sub-culture today.

The fact that the Greek word for "church" is a compound of "ek," "out of," and "kaleo," "to call," does not in any way imply that the meaning of ekklesia has anything to do with being called out. In fact, the word was used of an assembly of people for centuries before the New Testament with no apparent thought for its origins as a word. These sorts of semantic games that readers of the Bible often play with words give the impression of meaning as something present in each word and readily identifiable. But such is simply not the case.

The meaning of words at any given time and place is the individual actualization of potential meanings based on the way words are being used in a local community, which is usually bears a relationship to the way words are being used in a broader culture. If I am using the "sweeper" in Indiana, I am using something more typically called a "vacuum" in broader American language, although a "Hoover" in England. Local dialect has its own way of using words at a particular time and place.

The dynamics of word usage involve two poles of influence. On the one end is the understanding of the world in which language is used--paradigms, worldviews, the socially constructed nature of the way we think and talk about our worlds. On the other is the individual actualization we make of the potentialities of language, including all the metaphorical uses to which we put language. We are often unaware of how differently one group of human beings in one cultural or social setting think about the world in contrast to other people groups or subcultures. This is the most insidious factor in meaning as moderns approach the biblical text, for our default is to see our own paradigms behind language that originally pointed to quite different paradigms of a different socially constructed reality.

It is highly doubtful, for example, that the typical Westerner reads language of sacrifice and atonement with anything like the cultural lenses that the original audiences of the Bible did. Indeed, it is possible that New Testament audiences did not understand such language with quite the same glasses that Old Testament ones did. Our sense of families or of individual identity may differ widely as well. We read words like "father," "mother," "I," "we," "discipline," "wife," and may be completely unaware of the vast differences in connotation in the biblical worlds, deceived by the common denotations of these words.

So the question of the Christian meaning of Scripture comes into clearer focus than ever. We have not only the distinction between the way any specific group of readers might understand the Bible and the way its original audiences might have. But we have the fact that the books of the Bible themselves span a thousand year period involving not only vastly different individual situations but also vastly different cultural contexts. We thus have not only the question of the gap between us and the Bible in time, culture, and situation. We have the gap between the individual books of the Bible themselves.

The Bible itself largely does not address these gaps, wherein lies the incoherency of the notion that the Bible alone might serve as guide to the Christian. This view inevitably treats the Bible naively as a single book whose words have common meanings that are definable by a common human dictionary that is the same as the dictionary I use. Every element of this assumption is false. The Bible is dozens of books whose words were originally a function of the way words were used at particular times and places. There is no common human dictionary--human thinking differs far more from culture to culture than is usually appreciated. And the way I understand words is a snapshot of my time and place, not of universal linguistic meaning.

So the individual books of the Bible largely do not tell us how to integrate their words in their situations with the words of the other situations presupposed by the other books of the Bible. And the books of the Bible largely were not written with whether readers thousands of years later would know how to appropriate their words in quite different times and situations. The task of finding a unified meaning to these texts is far more an extra-biblical task than a task that the Bible itself can perform for us. Again, the multiplicity of Christian traditions is a witness to the multiple ways in which the varied content of the Bible can be configured in systematic form.

When we find a unified meaning to Scripture, the organizing principle of that meaning will be, of necessity, a function of something outside the text. Some current hermeneuticians speak of a different order of speech that is God speaking to us through the text of Scripture as a whole. [8] The problem with their suggestion is not so much the suggestion itself but their apparent sense that this overall meaning is in some clear relation to the particular original meanings these books had and their apparent sense that this meaning is still in some way "in" the Bible rather than a function of a particular point of view brought to the Bible read as Scripture.

Finally, meaning is ultimately a function of the individual reading (hearing, etc...) a text, not a function of the author of that text. [9] As one philosopher of language put it, a text becomes autonomous once it is uttered. [10] It takes on a life of its own that is not limited to whatever meaning its author might have intended it to have. Indeed, the meaning a "reader" finds in it may have little or nothing to do with the originally intended meaning.

This recognition is not to deny that author's have intentions in relation to texts or that authors intend to do things with their words. [11] This meaning, while not always easily accessed by others when the author is not present to confirm intention, is in theory a relatively fixed meaning and an appropriate object of inquiry. Nevertheless, an author cannot control the meanings a text will take on once it is uttered. Meaning is a ultimately function of "readers," regardless of authorial intent.

Further, we do not come at texts as objective thinkers detached from our own biases and presuppositions. And we will meet the horizon of the text as it meets us, possibly with all sorts of semantic baggage that text has accrued over time, if we read it within any sort of tradition at all. [12] But if we affirm that communication can take place at all (and thus would seem to be a useful suggestion if we at all use words), then we must affirm that authors have intentions when they make utterances, and that we can at least in theory receive their communication appropriately to their intention, even across the span of time and place.

However, the assumption that the intended meaning is the only or the most valid one is an one that bears significant examination, especially when it comes to the question of Christian Scripture. Some hermeneuticians have argued that it is an ethical duty to try to read an author's words in terms of their intended meaning. [13] The New Testament authors in general felt no such compunction in relation to the Old Testament text. It is one thing to consider it a loving obligation to try to listen to a living speaker trying to communicate with you. It is quite another to extend that duty when an author has been dead for thousands of years and was writing to someone else.

As we will argue in the remainder of the chapter, the "Christian" meaning of Scripture turns out to be distinct to varying degrees from the original meanings and connotations of the biblical words. We will argue in this chapter, and then assume and demonstrate in the rest of the book, that the Christian meaning of Scripture is a significance that the words of Scripture take on when read from a Christian point of view. We will further argue that the most appropriate starting point for identifying such a point of view is the consensus of Christendom throughout the ages, a fairly stable point of view on key issues.

[1] de Saussure

[2] Ironically, many King James only advocates do not realize that the version of the King James Version that they use has already undergone four revisions to update the language. In other words, their adamancy over fixing the wording of the Bible was not shared by those most responsible for the wording of the King James itself. This is particularly true of its original translators, who made the translation in a day when the Geneva Bible was the translation of choice. Some King James advocates, upon realizing the incoherency of their position, have turned from the ridiculous to the sublime by beginning to use the 1611 version of the King James, whose language is even further removed from current English usage than the fifth revision of 1789 currently in use.

[3] Wittgenstein

[4] This is the strength of Ricoeur's response to Derrida.

[5] J. L. Austin. Searle and subsequent attempts to standardize the various things words do have been less helpful.

[6] Lakoff and Johnson

[7] definition, Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor

[8] Vanhoozer

[9] A "text" of course need not be words.

[10] Ricoeur

[11] Vanhoozer, Thiselton

[12] Gadamer

[13] Vanhoozer, who then negates his claim with his notion of the Bible as a whole as a divine speech-act, which requires one to discard the originally intended meaning in deference to this new meaning of the whole.

On the Tenth Day of Meier...

On the tenth day of Meier, his Marginal Jew brought to me, 10) Jesus' family, 9) a long stretch of endnotes, 8) Jesus' language, education, and social status, 7) origins of Jesus of Nazareth, 6) part 2 criteria for the historical Jesus, 5) part 1 criteria for the historical Jesus, 4) agrapha and Nag Hammadi, 3) Tacitus and other Jewish sources; 2) Josephus and the books of the canon; and 1) and an introduction to the historical Jesus.

I should be able to finish the eleventh and twelfth days of Meier tomorrow, because I underlined the last chapter some time ago :-) So today, chapter 10, "In the Interim... Part II: Family, Marital Status, and Status as a Layman. It is an interesting chapter to read given that Meier is Roman Catholic. There are potential landmines for him in this chapter that are of little concern to us Protestants.

Immediate Family
Meier suggests that Nazareth might have had 1600 people. He concludes with most that Joseph was likely already dead by the time Jesus was thirty. Perhaps Mary was around 14 when Jesus was born.

He spends a good deal of time discussing the question of whether James, Joseph, Simon, Jude, and Jesus' sisters were really his brothers and sisters. Or were they cousins or children of Joseph from an earlier marriage? The standard Roman Catholic position is that they were cousins. In the Eastern church, they are Joseph's children from an earlier marriage. One new tidbit I didn't know is that Martin Luther and John Calvin held to Mary's "perpetual virginity" as well--that she never had any other children after Jesus and that the birth of Jesus itself miraculously did not alter her physical virginity.

Meier is keen to point out that Rudolf Pesch, Catholic author of a German two volume commentary on Mark that argues James, etc. were "true siblings," has never been censured by the Roman Catholic Church, despite the controversy his commentary caused. Similarly, he points out that the idea that they were cousins does not appear in Christian literature until Jerome in the late 300's. The idea that they are children from an earlier marriage appears in the Protogospel of James in the 2nd century. But the "true siblings" view was held by Hegesippus, Tertullian, and Irenaeus in the second century.

After discussion of the gospels, Paul, the early church, etc., Meier draws what to most of us is the obvious answer, "the most probably opinion is that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were true siblings" (331). I hate church constraints on historical and exegetical conclusions. They don't help anything but simply force sincerely truth-seeking scholars to have to play games. Churches should worry about theological beliefs, not historical and exegetical conclusions, except in those very few cases like the resurrection where historical belief is inextricably tied to theological belief.

Jesus Married?
This is also very important to Catholics. It is often important to Protestants too in an unthinking way. But I can't think of anything that would have been theologically problematic if Jesus had been married and had had sex.

But of course, there is no evidence of Jesus ever having been married, other than the fact that it was the default. But Meier notes that the New Testament and other early Christian literature had opportunity to mention that Peter had been married. Women followers of Jesus are mentioned, including his mother. There would have been no problem with him being married. Why would his wife not be mentioned? There would have been no need for a cover up.

Further, Meier notes that there were celibates in the ancient world, not least probably John the Baptist and many Essenes.

Layperson
Here Meier points out the simple fact that Jesus was not a priest while he was on earth. Only Hebrews in the NT says anything about Jesus' priesthood and here it is a heavenly priesthood. "We should think of Jesus as belonging to a pious Jewish laity that regularly went up to Jerusalem to worship even as it bewailed the failings of at least the upper-level priests who officiated there" (349). There may even have been an anticlerical aspect to his ministry.

On the Eighth and Ninth Days of Meier...

On the ninth day of Meier, his Marginal Jew brought to me, 9) a long stretch of endnotes, 8) Jesus' language, education, and social status, 7) origins of Jesus of Nazareth, 6) part 2 criteria for the historical Jesus, 5) part 1 criteria for the historical Jesus, 4) agrapha and Nag Hammadi, 3) Tacitus and other Jewish sources; 2) Josephus and the books of the canon; and 1) and an introduction to the historical Jesus.

Because I'm just now doing yesterday's summary--and since the ninth day is a rather large stretch of endnotes, I'm just going to post under today's date and pronounce myself caught up. I'll try to do two days worth on Monday to finish before Epiphany, January 6.

Language
Meier looks at four languages spoken in Palestine at the time of Christ and asks which one Jesus is most likely to have used in his life and ministry. He rules Latin out fairly quickly. There are Latin inscriptions in Palestine, but they were mainly statements of power. The Romans wrote them for themselves and couldn't care less whether anyone else understood their specific meaning other than to say, "We're in control and you aren't."

Greek is more difficult to say. Meier concludes with those who think Jesus probably knew enough Greek to conduct business transactions and such. About a third of the funeral inscriptions in Jerusalem are in Greek. Nevertheless, Meier draws on some statements in Josephus indicating that Greek was a challenge for him to indicate that even for him Greek was a second language. The Roman general Titus had Josephus deliver his message to the revolutionaries walled up in Jerusalem "in the language of their forefathers," which wasn't Greek.

Hebrew is also a possibility. The greater portion of the Dead Sea Scrolls is in Hebrew, indicating that Hebrew never stopped being spoken in Palestine, perhaps especially by those who were reacting in a conservative direction against Hellenization and such. But Meier concludes in the end that Aramaic is the most likely, especially given Aramaic words and phrases in the gospels (like Abba, Talitha Cum, Eloi, Eloi, Lama...). Some Aramaic targums found at Qumran are fairly wooden translations of Scripture, meaning that they were to help people understand rather than interpret. This fact indicates that enough people only knew Aramaic rather than Hebrew and thus needed translation.

Education
In this section Meier asks whether or not it is likely that Jesus could read. Here we must remember ourselves. We tend in Western culture to assume that if a person is illiterate, he or she is not intelligent. This is false enough in our own culture, but it is especially true when we are talking about oral cultures like the ancient world. The vast majority of the ancients could not read or write.

By the end of this section, Meier concludes that Jesus' "literacy probably extended beyond the mere ability to sign one's name or to conduct basic business transactions ('tradesman's literacy') to the ability to read sophisticated theological and literary works and comment on them ('scribal literacy')" (278). I must confess that I didn't find Meier's arguments very convincing. I'm not even sure that he made any real arguments.

In the first part he mentions three possible passages that would support Jesus being literate, including Luke 4 where Jesus reads in the synagogue gathering of Nazareth. But Meier does not consider any of these passages certain indicators, especially if Luke 4 is Luke's expansion of Mark 6. Meier discounts later Talmudic traditions about standardized Jewish education as much later than Jesus' day and quite possibly legendary.

Then he pulls Jesus' literacy out of a hat. He thinks there was a "strong conservative streak" in Galilee. He hasn't convinced me of this--the names of Jesus' family seem a pretty thin basis for this claim. I'm open to it but not convinced. Then he talks about Jesus' debates with religious leaders. Again, I can believe that Jesus had the entire Old Testament memorized and it wouldn't mean that he could read.

Was Jesus literate? He certainly could have been. The historical data is not conclusive. I will resist going off on a tangent discussing whether or not it would be important for faith for him to be literate. I can't think of any reason why it would be. Our prejudices about literacy are wrongheaded, as are any understandings of Jesus' humanity that would not allow for such.

Carpenter?
This is a very helpful section. Meier indicates that a tekton was a woodworker who made things like furniture or, according to Justin Martyr, plows and yokes. Meier finds no evidence that Jesus or Joseph helped build Sepphoris.

Stats on my websites

Now that 2008 is over, I thought I might mention the stats I have on this blog and my archive site in terms of unique visitors.

According to Freestats.com, I had over 1500 unique visitors to this blog a month. Google Analytics says that I had 18,012 absolutely unique visitors last year, meaning that 18,012 different computers accessed this website. I've had visitors from almost everywhere in the world, with the exception of Greenland, Belarus, and Mongolia. Ok, Ok, there are a couple countries missing in South America and most of Africa.

On my archive site, kenschenck.com, I had about 90,000 hits last year, over 20,000 visits (not unique visits).

I know these stats pale next to many other bloggers, but it gives you some sense of who is here with you.

On the Seventh Day of Meier...

I know I'm a day late, but hey, I can pre-date it...

On the seventh day of Meier, his Marginal Jew brought to me, 7) origins of Jesus of Nazareth, 6) part 2 criteria for the historical Jesus, 5) part 1 criteria for the historical Jesus, 4) agrapha and Nag Hammadi, 3) Tacitus and other Jewish sources; 2) Josephus and the books of the canon; and 1) and an introduction to the historical Jesus.

This chapter treats of some basics about Jesus' birth, naming, etc. I feel confident that Meier believes in the virginal conception as a Christian, but he is asking what is most likely given the historical evidence and he doesn't pull any punches.

Jesus' Name
He begins the chapter, "In the Beginning.. The Origins of Jesus of Nazareth," with a discussion of Jesus' name. The name for Joshua (Yehoshua) had been typically shortened after the exile to Yeshua. The Galilean dialect, Meier suggests, would probably have dropped the final ayin in pronounciation and said Yeshu (following correspondence with David Noel Freedman).

It was a very common name, although not from the 2nd century on, Meier thinks in reaction to Christianity. Rabbis from then on do return to the fuller Yehoshua. But at the time of Jesus, "so current was the name Jesus that some descriptive phrase like 'of Nazareth' or 'the Christ (Messiah)' had to be added to distinguish him from the many other bearers of that name" (206).

It was unusual, Meier suggests, to have so many in Jesus' family named after patriarchs and such. To him this suggests "the family's participation in this reawakening of Jewish national and religious identity" (208) that took place after the Maccabean crisis. The appointment of twelve disciples, he suggests, may fit into this pattern as well.

Problem of Sources about Jesus' Birth
Little or nothing can be said with certainty about Jesus' birth and childhood from a historical standpoint. Interestingly, the events of the "infancy narratives" are almost never referred to outside of Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2. Jesus' miraculous birth never appears in any of the early preaching in Acts or in Paul. I will merely note that Meier unflinchingly discusses some of the tensions and difficulties within the infancy narratives themselves.

Meier finds the most important agreements between them as Jesus' birth toward the end of the reign of Herod the Great and that Jesus' putative father was named Joseph and his mother Mary. He goes on in the following section to mull over whether Jesus was more likely, given the historical data, to have been born in Bethlehem or Nazareth. He concludes that Nazareth was the more likely place of Jesus' birth, although he does not rule out Bethlehem.

At the same time, he finds it overwhelmingly likely, given the data, that Jesus was indeed descended from David on his father's side. Luke might point more toward a descendency from Levi on his mother's side, but Meier does not think any conclusion about Mary is possible if one is only following historical canons.

Virginal Conception
When Meier is dividing faith and reason, he places faith in the virginal conception of Jesus on the faith side of the line. In other words, we might conclude historically that Joseph was not likely Jesus' father and we might conclude that no other father was known and that people believed he was born of no human father. But belief that he was born of the Holy Spirit will be a theological interpretation of that historical data, not a historical datum itself. I say above, "we might," as a hypothetical, for Meier does not seem to think any conclusion either way is possible using only historical canons.

So he merely discusses how early belief in the virgin conception seems to appear in early Christian literature and some details of the term "virgin." Here the most interesting thought is that a woman could be called a parthenos up until she gave birth. In other words, what is miraculous in Christian belief is not that a virgin conceived--virgins conceive all the time--but rather than Mary conceived without a human father involved.

Finally, Meier addresses the claims of some scholars--as well as some ancient non-believing Jews--that Jesus was born illegitimately. Meier finds this charge a second century response to Christian claims about the virgin conception (by the way, technically, a virginal conception is more accurate than a virgin birth), not a long standing tradition about Jesus' birth. In other words, the charge that Mary was raped was anti-Christian propaganda invented after the fact, not a tradition that had been around forever.

Happy 2009!

It doesn't feel as futuristic as that number sure seemed twenty or thirty years ago! I certainly thought we'd be further along scientifically by now. I imagine we actually are... just not in terms of space exploration, antigravity and stuff :-)

Anyone have any New Year's resolutions? I figured I might read Calvin's Institutes with the Princeton crowd since I've never read them. A couple other reading goals but who cares. And maybe I'll actually finish one of my novels this year. I have one on page 64. There's an Amazon/Penguin novel contest but there's no way I could finish it by February 9th unless I locked myself away...

On the Sixth Day of Meier...

On the sixth day of Meier, his Marginal Jew brought to me, 6) part 2 criteria for the historical Jesus, 5) part 1 criteria for the historical Jesus, 4) agrapha and Nag Hammadi, 3) Tacitus and other Jewish sources; 2) Josephus and the books of the canon; and 1) and an introduction to the historical Jesus.

Today we finish the first half of Meier's book, "The Roots of the Problem." First there is the rest of Chapter 6: "Criteria: How Do We Decide What Comes from Jesus?" In yesterday's part of the chapter, he mentioned 1) the criterion of embarrassment, 2) the criterion of discontinuity, and 3) the criterion of multiple attestation.

The rest of the chapter finishes, first, with two more criteria that he believes are very valuable as primary criteria, although in the end making historical judgments is more an art than a science and about probability rather than certainty (183-84).

4. The Criterion of Coherence
After one has established by the first three criteria a body of probable Jesus material and events, "The criterion of coherence holds that other sayings and deeds of Jesus that fit in well withthe preliminary 'data base' established by using our first three criteria have a good chance of being historical (e.g., sayings concerning the coming of the kingdom of God or disputes with adversaries over legal observance)" (176).

Meier does warn us, however, that "Jesus would hardly be unique among the great thinkers or leaders of world history if his sayings and actions did not always seem totally consistent to us" (176). In other words, it would be ridiculous if we did not find statements from Jesus that were in tension with each other, especially since Jesus "delighted in paradoxical statements that held opposites in tension" and very importantly, "There is no reason why the preaching of Jesus may not have contained elements of both apocalyptic eschatology and traditional Israelite wisdom" (176-77).

5. The Criterion of Rejection and Execution
Jesus met a violent end at the hands of Jewish and Roman officials. So what historical words and deeds of Jesus might explain his trial and crucifixion as King of the Jews? Here's a quotable:

"A tweedy poetaster who spent his time spinning out parables and Japanese koans, a literary aesthete who toyed with 1st-century deconstructionism, or a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at the lilies of the field--such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no one" (177). :-)

Meier ends the chapter with five more criteria that have been mentioned from time to time, all of which he finds more dubious and thus dubs the first three as secondary criteria. The last two he considers useless or wrong.

Secondary Criteria and Criteria to be Rejected
1. Criterion of Aramaic
Joachim Jeremias was big on this one. By the way, for those of an earlier generation who were taught in seminary to think that Jeremias was the bomb--Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus and The Unknown Sayings of Jesus--let me just say that I'm glad Jeremias is dead. He has received such an extensive thrashing these last twenty years that I am thoroughly embarrassed for the man.

I believe he was a great man and a pious believer, but his name never comes up but that the shoddiness of his methods and conclusions are at issue. E. P. Sanders has been downright mean, almost accusing him of deliberate skewing under the guise of "he couldn't have been that stupid." Meier is much more respectful--as is appropriate to the man--but scarcely has he mentioned him but to take exception to his method. Indeed, I am so glad he isn't living to go from a position of such respect to looking like an incompetent.

Of course I believe people like John Dominic Crossan and Helmut Koester already look the same in some of their historical Jesus work.

Anyway, the criterion of Aramaic suggests that if a saying of Jesus translates back easily into Aramaic, it has more likelihood of being original. Meier suggests this might be icing on the cake, but he pokes numerous holes in this as having much force at all. For example, Aramaic speaking Christians could have invented sayings of Jesus just as easily as Greek speaking ones. Further, Greek speaking believers in Jerusalem would have translated Jesus' words at a very early stage into Greek, from which time they had decades to be paraphrased in transmission. And many believe that Luke composed various speeches in a Septuagintal style, which would give the appearance of Semitisms.

In short, the criterion might corroborate a decision already made by primary criteria, but it has little force by itself.

2. Criterion of a Palestinian Environment
Does a saying or event fit the environment in which Jesus ministered? Again, Christianity continued in Palestine throughout the first century, so just because something fits that setting doesn't prove it was said by Jesus there. Meier suggests that the criteria works better in its negative rather than positive force. Thus it might more cast doubt than corroborate: "parables that reflect concern about the delay of Jesus' parousia, the mission of the Church to the Gentiles, or rules for Church leadership and discipline are post-Easter creations, at least in their final, Gospel form" (180).

I might mention an example that Meier does not mention here, although he does mention it elsewhere. Mark's version of Jesus' prohibition on divorce prohibits both men from divorcing their wives and wives from divorcing their husbands. However, it is commonly said that women were not able legally to divorce their husbands in Palestine. If this is true, then it seems unlikely that Jesus would have said the second half of the prohibition. Meier elsewhere suggests that Mark added the second half to appropriate Jesus' message for a Roman world where women could divorce their husbands. If he and others are correct, then this would be an example of the criterion of a Palestinian environment at work.

3. Criterion of Vividness of Narration
"Vincent Taylor inclined to accept vivid, concrete details in Mark's Gospel as signs of high historical value" (180). But Meier doesn't think this is a very definitive criterion at all. For example, some literary forms may lead to terseness. Does this mean it isn't original?

Meier ends the chapter with two criteria he doesn't think are useful at all:

a. Criterion of tendencies in the gospel tradition
E. P. Sanders' doctoral dissertation thoroughly undermined some of the things people like Bultmann had in mind when they spoke of such tendencies: "we can find examples of the tradition becoming longer and shorter, of discourse becoming both direct and indirect, and of proper names being droppedas well as added" (182).

b. Criterion of historical presumption
Some have argued that non-historicity should be presumed until proved otherwise. Others have argued that historicity should be presumed until proved otherwise. Meier concludes, "the burden of proof is simply on anyone who tries to prove anything" (183). The rest go in the irritating category of the "not clear."

CONCLUSION TO PART 1
Meier ends the first section with the question, "Why Bother?"

First, Meier suggests that two groups in particular are prone to ask this question, Bultmannians and fundamentalists. The Bultmannian thinks the quest for the historical Jesus is irrelevant to faith. The fundamentalist makes no distinction between Jesus as presented in the gospels and the historical Jesus. Meier does not agree with either group but feels he should take off the hat of a historian for a moment and put on his theologian's hat for this concluding section of Part 1.

On the one hand, he agrees with the Bultmannian that the Jesus we as Christians are interested in is not some historical reconstruction. Whose would we pick? Also, "the object of Christian faith is a living person, Jesus Christ, who fully entered into a true human existence on earth in the 1st century A.D., but who now lives, risen and glorified, forever in the Father's presence" (198). This is the Jesus of faith, not Jesus as we might reconstruct him using historical methods. To this extent Meier agrees with the Bultmannian.

At the same time, Meier argues that "Theology is a cultural artifact; therefore, once a culture becomes permeated with a historical-critical approach, as has Western culture from the Enlightenment onward, theology can operate in and speak to that culture with credibility only if it absorbs into its methodology a historical approach" (198). "The historical Jesus, while not the object or essence of faith, must be an integral part of modern theology" (198-99).

He suggests four benefits of this integration:

1. It keeps faith in Christ from being reduced to a mythic symbol or timeless archetype. "Christian faith is the affirmation of and adherence to a particular person who said and did particular things in a particular time and place in human history" (199).

2. It keeps pious Christians from swallowing up the real humanity of Jesus into a one-sided emphasis on his divinity.

3. It keeps us from domesticating Jesus for a comfortable, respectable, bourgeois Christianity.

4. The historical Jesus also subverts revolutionary ideologies as well, such as liberation theology.

Meier doesn't really address fundamentalist concerns. He merely describes them at the beginning, "Fundamentalists object to the quest for the exact opposite reason [to the Bultmannians]: the historical Jesus is naively equated with the Jesus presented in all Four Gospels. All tensions and contradictions in the four narratives are harmonized by hilarious mental acrobatics" (197).

Obviously he is not writing for fundamentalists but for people who have questions about what Jesus was likely to have been like if one uses the methods of historical study. His results cohere well with orthodox faith, as we will see.

Watched Memento

I watched Memento (Latin for "remember") last night and this afternoon. It's messed up my mind. It's a guy who only has short term memory since his wife's death. He pursues her murderer by way of tatoos, notes, and polaroid pictures he takes of things and writes on.

The movie ingeniously gets you into his perspective by starting from the end and gradually moving backwards. You see a scene, then you see the scene before that scene, until you reach certain aha moments.

But it's messed my mind up. I just wrote some notes to myself on a chapter of the philosophy book I'm writing, knowing that I'll forget it if I don't put it there now. My psyche is disjointed enough already... it's why I blog so much... little snapshots of my psyche for as long as I can hold attention... But who am I--what's the glue that holds these moments together, that constitutes any of us as a whole person?

Oh well, maybe I'm just having some sort of psychotic break. No biggie... it happens.

On the Fifth Day of Meier...

On the fifth day of Meier, his Marginal Jew brought to me, 5) part 1 criteria for the historical Jesus, 4) agrapha and Nag Hammadi, 3) Tacitus and other Jewish sources; 2) Josephus and the books of the canon; and 1) and an introduction to the historical Jesus.

I've looked ahead and I can actually catch up to the actual days of Christmas on Friday because of a particularly long stretch of endnotes. Meier nicely keeps the surface text on a college level and relegates the more scholarly discussion to endnotes at the end of each chapter. It has made it easy to reach my 35 pages a day with only 10-20 pages of reading most of the time... my kind of book.

So today I only need to cover about 9 pages of Chapter 6 to keep on pace: "Criteria: How Do We Decide What Comes from Jesus?" In this chapter Meier covers the standard criteria that mostly evolved during the "New Quest" period of the mid-twentieth century. His caveats are a great statement of mature reflection on these criteria over the intervening years.

These nine pages cover three biggies:

1. The Criterion of Embarrassment
The idea here is that there are certain events that the early church is very unlikely to have invented because they only raise questions and issues that are problematic. Indeed, the gospel traditions themselves may reflect some attempt to address their problematic nature.

The baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, for example, is not something an early Christian would likely have invented, since the baptism was for the forgiveness of sins. Matthew includes a dialog where Jesus directly addresses this question. Luke doesn't mention who baptizes who and John doesn't even mention the baptism at all.

Similarly, the fact that Jesus doesn't know when the Son of Man will come is missing from many later manuscripts of Matthew and Mark, and Luke himself omitted the statement. John presents Jesus as far more omniscient than any of the other gospels. Meier thus argues that there is a conservative as well as a creative thrust in the early tradition (170).

Not everything we might first think as embarrassing might have been to the earliest believers. For example, although Luke and John do not have Mark and Matthew's, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me," Meier does not think this statement would have been clearly embarrassing to Mark, given its Scriptural nature. Meier thus would not conclude that it is original simply because it seems a possible issue for later Christians or the fact that Luke and John don't mention it.

2. The Criterion of Discontinuity
The idea here is that if there are words or deeds of Jesus that cannot be derived either from Judaism at the time of Jesus or from the early Church after him, they are likely historical because no one would have invented them or applied them to Jesus from somewhere else.

The problem of course is that "a successful teacher and communicator ... would have had to submit himself to the constraints of communication, the constraints of his historical situation" (173). Thus, "while the criterion of discontinuity is useful, we must guard against the presupposition that it will automatically give us what was central to or at least fairly representative of Jesus' teaching." The real danger is that it will give us a caricature of Jesus "by divorcing Jesus from the Judaism that influenced him and from the Church that he influenced" (172).

What we get from the criterion of dissimilarity is the "strikingly characteristic" or "unusual," not what is unique. At the end of this section, Meier writes, "when we deal with the public actions of Jesus, it may be wiser to speak of the 'sort of things Jesus did' ... instead of asserting that a particular story tells us precisely what Jesus did on one particular occasion. The same distinction can be applied to the sayings tradition taken as a whole. We can have some hope of learning the basic message of Jesus, the 'kind of thing' he usually or typically said (the ipsissima vox). Rarely if ever can we claim to recover his exact words (the ipsissima verba)" (174).

3. The Criterion of Multiple Attestation
This is the idea that if a saying or event appears in multiple layers of Jesus tradition, it is more likely to have been original. As a footnote, this does not mean that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all have the same story. If Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, then this only counts for one attestation. The idea of the kingdom of God being a major theme of Jesus' teaching, on the other hand, appears in Mark, Q, special Matthean tradition, special Lukan tradition, John, echoes in Paul.

Examples of such teaching in multiple layers also includes Jesus' words over the bread and wine and his prohibition on divorce. He ends the pages for today with the apt quote: "no criterion can be used mechanistically and in isolation" (175).

On the Fourth Day of Meier

On the fourth day of Meier, his Marginal Jew brought to me, 4) agrapha and Nag Hammadi, 3) Tacitus and other Jewish sources; 2) Josephus and the books of the canon; and 1) and an introduction to the historical Jesus.

"Agrapha" is a term used for scattered sayings attributed to Jesus that appear here and there, "unwritten" sayings. Joachim Jeremias, mid-twentieth century German scholar, found eighteen candidates he accepted as genuine words of Jesus found elsewhere than in the gospels. Meier is not so optimistic. Jeremias' arguments amount to Jesus could have said this. "Hypothesis is piled on hypothesis" (114) and "even when all eighteen are accepted, nothing new is added to our picture."

The rest of the chapter dives into two bodies of literature that are potential candidates for Jesus material independent of the gospels. The first are the "apocryphal gospels" like the Protoevangelium of James, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of the Nazarenes, the Gospel of the Ebionites, the Gospel of the Hebrews, etc... He leaves the Coptic Gospel of Thomas for the final section.

Meier rightly dismisses the Protogospel of James and the Infancy Gospel as fanciful and bizarre second century speculation about Jesus' childhood. Then he considers the Jewish Christian fragments of the Gospel of the Nararenes, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Hebrews. All, he believes are dependent on the canonical gospels rather than relayers of independent Jesus tradition.

Finally, this section treats some of the sources that have been favorites of John Dominic Crossan. Meier finds Crossan's theory that the Gospel of Peter reflects a earlier "Cross Gospel" that was used as the basis of Mark's passion story unnecessarily complicated. Basically, "the simplest theory that explains the most data is to be preferred" (116). And the simplest explanation of the Gospel of Peter is that "it is a 2d century pastiche of traditions from the canonical Gospels" (117). He does offer linguistic evidence as well.

As far as the Egerton Papyrus 2, Meier similarly concludes that we get no new information about Jesus and that it is nevertheless still more likely than not that they are based on the canonical gospels.

The final possibility in this section of the chapter is the Secret Gospel of Mark. Once again, Meier finds the hypotheses of Crossan and Helmut Koester ridiculously complicated in comparison to the simplest hypothesis that it is based on the canonical gospels. Further, "to use such a small fragment of dubious origins to rewrite the history of Jesus and the Gospel tradition is to lean on a reed" (121).

His summary of these 2nd century gospels is basically that they come from the "overheated imaginations of various 2d century Christians" (122) and that "they belong in a study of the patristic Church from the 2d to 4th century" (123).

The final section of the chapter deals with the Nag Hammadi discoveries of 1945. He defers to the study of others like Christopher Tuckett who find no independent information on Jesus. He quickly dismisses works like the Gospel of Philip and gets right down to the real point of interest, namely the Gospel of Thomas. Of all the material in the chapter with any likelihood at all to give us information about Jesus independent of the canonical gospels, it is the Gospel of Thomas.

Meier in the end concludes, "I think that the Synoptic-like sayings of the Gospel of Thomas are in fact dependent on the Synoptic Gospels and that the other 2d-century Christian gnosticism" (139). My conclusion, for whatever it's worth, is similar. The most distinctive sayings in Thomas are later and represent a gnosticizing tendency--far too realized an eschatology for the historical Jesus. The remainder could very well be independent Jesus tradition, but it doesn't really add anything startling to our understanding of him.

Monday BCS (Bible as Christian Scripture) 1.1

1.1 The Problem of Christian Scripture
The contemporary problem of Christian Scripture is a by-product of two primary features of modern times: 1) the decentralization of political control over the meaning of the Bible and 2) the rise of the historical-cultural method. In themselves, neither of these developments was bad. Indeed, in many respects they have been great boons to the pursuit of truth. Nevertheless, as with so many correctives, they unleashed a chain of events that has resulted in a situation on the opposite extreme--one that currently is no better than the one they sought to correct and indeed, that is arguably even worse.

In the West, when the church was unified as the Roman Catholic Church, the Christian meaning of the Bible was relatively stable, as it remains in the Orthodox East. The RCC did not have official interpretations of every verse in the Bible, but there were clear cut canons of what a Christian could believe. In the late medieval period, it was not necessary for the teachings of the church to map closely to the Bible, so it was not necessary to explain away biblical passages that seemed to contradict the church's teachings. In any conflicting situation, the church held the final authority anyway.

This is not to say that the Bible was not an integral part of the reasoning of the medieval church. If we look at the writings of Thomas Aquinas in the 1100's, for example, we find references to the Bible permeate his thoughts. At the same time, no premium was put on following the "literal" meaning of the text. Without limitations on non-literal interpretations, texts of the Bible could be interpreted allegorically, especially if the apparent surface meaning of the text seemed incongruent with the church's desired meaning.

The reaction of Martin Luther and other reformers to this church hermeneutic is well known. Luther rejected any number of developments in Roman Catholic thought without clear precedent in the Bible, beliefs like purgatory or the practice of priests needing to be celibate. Under the banner of sola scriptura, "Scripture alone," Luther sought to peel back the development of doctrine and practice beyond the New Testament. A premium was placed on the "literal" meaning of the text, so that such developments could not be maintained by recourse to meanings that were not obvious. And the "second canonical" books that might be used in support of ideas like purgatory were rejected as "apocrypha."

In his famous debates with Erasmus, Luther contended that individuals did not need the church to help clarify for them the meaning of the Bible. Under the twin headings of the "priesthood of all believers" and the "perspicuity of Scripture," Luther held that Christian individuals did not need someone to interpret the Bible for them and that the meaning of the Bible in relation to salvation was sufficiently clear in itself that an individual did not need the help of the church to interpret it.

Another element in Reformation hermeneutics was Luther's contention that "Scripture interprets Scripture." The thrust of Scripture as a whole is clear and the meaning of central passages relating to salvation are clear, but there are unclear passages in Scripture. These unclear passages should be interpreted by recourse to the clear ones.

If we try to analyze the situation of the Reformation as objectively as we can, it is obvious that much more was going on here than ideology. Luther recognized corruption at the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church of his day and he recognized conflict between commonly recognized core ideals of Christianity and the priorities and emphases of the church of his day. These are the driving forces behind the Reformation's beginning. But these ideals would not have sustained the Reformation if there were not others--including others with power--who wished to undermine the power of the church over them or who resented the corruption and derailment of core values. A movement was thus born.

The hermeneutical theory Luther devolved from this political situation is epiphenomenon. It is a tool to support the political detachment of the Protestants from Rome and the separation of core Christian values from issues of central conflict at the time of Luther. As we will see, radicals like the Anabaptists and the Socinians probably represent a more thoroughgoing example of sola scriptura than Luther or Calvin. But in the end, the notion itself is incoherent, an impossibility of language given the nature of the biblical texts as situational documents written in such diverse contexts.

The decentralization of political control over the Christian meaning of the Bible has resulted in as many meanings as there are centers of power. When a Christian group consolidates power and becomes a denomination with a central creed, then there is a more or less common reading of the Bible for that group. But the principle of the "priesthood of all believers," accompanied by the rise of the printing press and a culture of literacy, has resulted in virtually as many meanings to the Bible as there are interpreters.

Practically speaking, it makes no difference how much authority a person assigns to the Bible when there is no clear meaning of the Bible. A person might affirm the inerrancy of Scripture in the strongest of terms and yet believe the Bible tells them to murder any practicing homosexual they might find. Affirmations of Scripture's authority thus are only as meaningful as the interpretation is appropriate.

In this sense, the basic Protestant hermeneutic has set in motion the disintegration of the Bible's meaning as Scripture. It has left us with no way of knowing what the Christian meaning of Scripture actually is. It has left us with words of the highest significance that nevertheless have no clear meanings. It is true that most mainstream Christian traditions do hold certain basic understandings of the Bible in common. But, as we will show, this commonality derives from the fact that they remain in the common tradition of the church rather than because the words of the Bible demand these understandings in themselves.

A second repercussion of the Renaissance and Reformation is the rise of contextual reading of the Bible. When John Calvin and other reformers began to seek after the literal meaning of the Bible, they set in motion a movement that would eventually give rise to the historical-cultural method, as I will refer to it. This method is the attempt to read the books of the Bible in their original settings and contexts, to read them roughly as their first audiences would have read them, with the meanings generally their original authors and editors intended them to have.

For the interpreter who wishes to arrive at the most likely original meaning of a text given the available evidence, in the most objective manner possible, an inductive method has developed. The person who approaches the biblical texts in this way approaches them as a scientist would approach a set of evidence. For example, if we ask who the author of Genesis, Matthew, Mark, or Luke was from an inductive standpoint, we will conclude that these writings are all anonymous, for they nowhere tell us who their authors were. When we ask what the meaning of a word in a biblical text was, we look for the potential meanings that those words had at the time they were written. At the same time, we would not presume that the way a word was used in Mark would necessarily be the way that word was used in John for these are two different texts from two different authors.

The result of this quest for the original meaning of the biblical texts, which stands in continuity with Luther's desire to get back to Scripture alone, has not yielded exactly what the reformers thought it would. In general, it has led to an "ugly ditch" between the likely meaning the books of the Bible had in their original contexts and the theological meanings that Christians have found in these texts throughout the centuries. We see the result in various sociological movements in late nineteenth and twentieth century Protestant Christianity.

First there was the rise of theological liberalism, in which the ability of the biblical texts to speak to today almost completely unraveled. The original meaning and the Jesus of history both together became strangers to the modern mind. We should not create a "straw man" out of thinkers like Adolf von Harnack or Albert Schweitzer, as if their only problem was a lack of faith and a disbelief in miracles. Many of the issues that the late nineteenth century interpreters of the Bible raised were real issues, issues that we are still addressing today.

Liberalism is a direct heir of the Protestant Reformation and its insistence that it is the original, literal meaning of the Bible that is the only legitimate one. When Adolf Jülicher insisted that there could only have been one meaning for any parable Jesus spoke--and thus that any gospel parable that is an allegory cannot possibly have come from Jesus--he was simply playing out the "literal meaning" trajectory set by the Protestant reformers.

The fundamentalism of early twentieth century America was a reaction to this unraveling of the Bible as Scripture. Without answers to the questions raised by modernism and liberalism, many Christian groups retreated from the discussion. They founded little colleges where their children could be educated without being exposed to the evils of evolution and higher criticism. They could simply be indoctrinated in the beliefs of the group. Most of the Bible teaching in these Bible colleges returned to the pre-modern, earlier non-contextual interpretive methods. The main difference from the medieval period was the political body telling the group what the right interpretations were. Each group imposed its own political reading of the biblical text on its children and people and removed itself far enough away that no one could question it.

Others became militant and enlisted brilliant thinkers and scholars to find ingenious ways to address the questions of liberalism on its own terms, namely, historical ones. Places like Westminister Theological Seminary were founded as intellectual military establishments. At the same time, this variety of fundamentalist inadvertantly found himself accentuating the importance of historicity and scientific accuracy in ways completely foreign to the biblical texts themselves.

The late 1940's saw the rise of neo-evangelicalism, a slightly more intellectually and socially respectable version of the earlier fundamentalists. The intervening years have seen significant changes in the nature of American evangelicalism and its hermeneutic. For one thing, time has only increased the awareness of evangelical scholars of what it means to read biblical texts in context. The professed goal of evangelical study is indeed the original meaning of the text. Rising evangelical scholars have thus learned all the tools of historical study--the same ones that were developed and used by the earlier liberal scholars. As long as no fundamental doctrine is at issue, evangelical scholars have felt free to follow the historical-cultural method to its logical conclusion.

The problem comes when the canons of reading in context appear to lead to a meaning for the biblical text that conflicts with the evangelical "rule of faith," the commonly agreed Reformation principles or the beliefs and practices of the specific evangelical tradition in question. In such cases, evangelical scholars have typically applied their great intellect to finding possible readings of the text that fit with their understanding rather than going with what at first glance might seem a more probable one.

A good example is the interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2 by some evangelical interpreters. The most straightforward reading of the Hebrew text is, "When God began to create the heavens and earth, the earth was formless and empty, and darkness was over the face of the Deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters." In this translation, God does not create the world out of nothing, but He creates order out of a pre-existing chaos of waters, not too dissimilar to what we find in other ancient creation stories of the time like the Babylonian Enuma Elish or the Greek Theognis. Further, we have no clear evidence of any Jewish literature holding to a creation out of nothing (ex nihilo) until around the time of Christ, perhaps even a couple centuries after Christ. The most probable conclusion, it would seem, given the evidence alone, is that the original meaning of Genesis pictured God creating the world out of primordial waters.

This situation would not have been a problem for medieval interpreters. They could either take the passage figuratively or insist that the later church's understanding of the text is the correct Christian one. But Protestant ideology is driven to find the Christian meanings in the text, not in later developments of understanding. Evangelical scholars have thus often felt compelled to argue that the original meaning of this text pointed to an ex nihilo creation. Various evangelical scholars have applied their considerable intellect to find possible ways in which the text might be taken that way. Perhaps they are correct, but to outsiders it has called the scholarly integrity of evangelical scholarship into question--and has led to not a few faith crises and even loss of faith to sincere students within evangelical communities.

The limits of what an evangelical scholar could or could conclude was the original meaning loosened considerably in the last decades of the twentieth century. We would argue that much of this loosening resulted from the Bible itself and the genuine desire to hear what it says. In some circles this loosening was further facilitated by the rise of the "church growth" movement, which allowed thinkers in these churches the freedom to pursue interpretation without as much political involvement from church leaders. The focus was on increasing numbers in the pew and on a bare bones gospel, not on holding the line on some set of inherited doctrines or practices. Of course ideological purity remained a central concern in the most central evangelical circles.

The evangelical mechanism of joining "that time" with "this time" is somewhat complicated, but has gained in considerable sophistication from the early days of the 1950's and 60's. The text is read in context (within the understood evangelical boundaries of what it is allowed to mean). Then points of continuity and discontinuity are identified between the original situations and our current context. Then the fundamental principles are played out today. Thus the ugly ditch is crossed.

Yet at the turn of the twenty-first century, the ditch remains a major concern. Many evangelical Bible scholars are turning to theological interpretation, the desire to join back together the reading of the Bible with Christian theology. The popularity of this movement must surely indicate that, for all the complex method of joining that time with this time, the presence of the ditch is still felt. Someone like Grant Osborne in The Hermeneutical Spiral can say that the inductive method is available to anyone, but in reality, the canons of evangelical hermeneutics--and indeed of historical-cultural interpretation--effectively take the Bible out of the hands of the individual Christian and put it back in the hands of a new priesthood, the priesthood of biblical scholars.

The historical-cultural method has thus helped us to read the books of the Bible in context, but it has shown us at the same time that the original meaning was an ancient meaning that is often far removed from our situations today. It has also, as we will see, led us at times to meanings that are not clearly Christian or at least that are less Christian than the way we as Christians have tended to read the Bible throughout history. Further, the process of original meaning interpretation is one that requires great expertise in ancient languages and knowledge of hermeneutics and ancient cultures. The simple reality is that only a small minority of individual Christians will ever be competent at the historical-cultural method and, ironically, even those that are regularly disagree on the original meanings of the biblical texts.

The problem of Christian Scripture today is thus the problem of knowing what the Christian meaning of the books of the Bible actually is. Christendom lacks a central political body to dictate such a meaning, and the pursuit of the original meaning results in 1) countless fragments of meaning corresponding to the individual, dozens of biblical books. These meanings 2) correspond to a myriad of ancient situations and contexts that 3) are not always clearly Christian in the sense of what Christians historically have come to believe and practice. We are, however, at a point in the history of ideas where we are not only able to understand our hermeneutical situation better than ever before. We are at a point where we are able to find an equilibrium between the concerns of the Reformation and the importance of common Christian tradition.