FYI, I have provided a link in this post to a blog belonging to a colleague and friend of mine
here. Beyond his fine collection of religious hilarity, I highly recommend reading his series of posts entitled:
"Does Higher Criticism Attempt to 'Destroy the Bible'"
I got busy yesterday, and was unable to finish my thoughts on this subject. As this is a field of professional expertise and a deep personal passion of mine, I have a lot to say. I think that I will probably continue to come back to this thread and post musings whenever they come up, just in case anyone is interested in such matters.
I have already discussed very briefly the problems of defining the Bible and its function, and the undeniable influence of changing culture and competing worldviews to the enterprise of reading and understanding the Bible. I should like to continue today with a third installment, which deals with the problem of history, and the Bible's own historiographic methods.
I'm sure a number of you are well aware that for hundreds of years, Scripture's presentation of the past was widely accepted as entirely accurate and divinely sanctioned. With the emergence of rationalism, empiricism, the birth of science, modernity and critical methods, it was not until around the 17th–18th century that scholars began to read the Bible according to a developing set of literary and historical theories. Where once the Bible was immune to scholarly probing, it gradually become more widely acceptable to treat the text as one would treat any ancient piece of literature, and in so doing, the totality of the Bible's historical claims came under prodigious scrutiny, and this resulted in a nearly wholesale rejection of the Bible's presentation of the past as accurate. Without going into great detail, the "historical critical method(s)" basically attempt to assume a position of non-confessional skepticism, and procede carefully through comparing the biblical text to contemporary pieces of ancient Near Eastern literature, to the archeological record, anthropological and sociological studies, and finally, these are considered together with textual matters such as manuscript evidence, linguistic evidence, and patterns within the various genres. These methods have met with a tremendous amount of success in both increasing our general knowledge of the religious and political history of ancient Israel and Palestine. Interestingly enough, what has been gleaned from the other disciplines does not accord with the Bible's own presentation of history.
Scholars have come to realize that the Bible—very much like the vast majority of surviving "texts" from the ancient world—functioned largely as royal or religious propoganda: the production of literature in the period was both enourmously expensive and difficult, and as a result, literature was basically entirely a product of either the state or the cult, which was usually sanctioned by the state. The Bible appears to be no different: the texts that came to form the Old Testament for the most part betray fairly obvious signs of various, and often competing, forms of partisanship. Ancient myths were reshaped and reproduced in an effort to legitimize a ruling power, or to polemicize against opponents, and most often this was framed in supernatural terms under the guise of the foreboding formula: "Thus says the Lord!" Because of this, the bulk of Old Testament history now resides under a cloud of suspiscion; a number of reputable scholars even going so far as to doubt ENTIRELY virtually every story or legend or king or prophet from before the time of the Babylonian exile in 587 B.C.E.
The principle reason for the skepticism is that there really is only a scant amount of third-party verifiable information concerning the existence of "Israel", and even less for the shape of its history from the biblical period. The sensible approach has been to start with what we do know, however, this has also resulted in offending the sensibilities of a vast number of confessional Christians and Jews who consider their history according to a divinely sanctioned design, and this is really what is at stake here:
History and its representation is the framework for both Judaism and Christianity. To put it another way, since the beginning of Judaism sometime in the fourth century B.C.E., the religion has ALWAYS been integrally tied to its understanding of God's activity in the history of Israel, and the same holds true for Christianity. The earliest evidence for "Scripture" that we have comes from around the third cent. B.C.E. (think Alexander of Macedonia), and virtually all of it seems to suggest that Scripture was always founded upon some sort of ideal concerning the past. Events and figures were deeply meaningful, and entire religious establishments rose and fell upon how one understood that history.
The problem this presents for the Bible is twofold: First, the Bible
by its nature (see my first entry above) must conform to a given concept of history. The Bible that you have on your shelf, regardless of who translated, published or has sanctioned it, is DELIBERATELY ORGANIZED according to a deeply engrained idea about God and his activity in history. Because of this, the Bible is really nothing more than a construct: a sweeping idea about the past that depends upon a fairly specific set of presuppositions concerning the events it purports to retell.
The second problem is that from a scholarly point of view, this idea that eventually became the Bible is actually not nearly as ancient as was once presumed. Virtually every Christian or Jew will point to the Pentateuch, or the Torah—the first five "Books of Moses"—as the virtual heart, or foundation for all of Scripture. It is widely presumed to be the oldest part of the collection, and it is also generally considered to be the most authoritative.
*This last statement requires a caveat as far as Christianity is concerned: While Christians have long adopted the position that the New Testament has "trumped" the Old, this is only as far as certain elements of doctrine or theology are concerned. By and large all mainstream Churches adhere to the position that the Pentateuch remains the foundation of Scripture, and is properly interpreted through the matrix of the New Covenant.
Unfortunately, scholars now concede that there is NO MATERIAL EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF A TORAH, OR EVEN OF A SINGLE, COMPLETE BOOK FROM THE TORAH PRIOR TO THE EARLY THIRD CENT. B.C.E. Lester L. Grabbe of the University of Hull has written one of the most comprehensive histories of Judaism in after the Babylonian exile, and in it, he has presented a very convincing case for the late origins of the Pentatuech, based on his reading of Ezra Nehemiah in conjunction with the material evidence from the Elephantine excavations. What these show is that while this Jewish community living in an Egyptian city had a fairly well developed concept of Jewish religious practice, there is no indication that they had any sort awareness of a “Torah” of any kind. So then, Scripture depends a great deal on both its understanding of history, and upon the perception of its own antiquity, and yet both of these ideals do not conform with an actual picture of how Scripture developed and was received.