Liberating the Bible: A Pastor’S Guided Tour for Seeking Christians

By Thomas Calnan Sorenson

Liberating the Bible offers readers a handbook to help them make their way through a front-to-back exploration of the riches contained in the Bible. Thomas Calnan Sorenson blends scholarship with a down-to-earth presentation in a survey of the Bible that uncovers the basics of its many books and reveals the persuasive power of its messages to nurture faith, expand understanding, and deepen connections to God.

Liberating the Bible organizes its guidance into three parts. In Approaching the Bible, eleven stops on the tour investigate the basics of the Bible, its status in the church, methods for reading and interpreting it, and the grounding of its claims. The second part, The Old Testament, groups the books of this testament and covers over sixteen stops. Each of the stops delves into a book or cluster of books, examining historical background, organization, key passages, and distinctive themes and messages. The third part, The New Testament, provides similar guidance while making eleven stops along the way.

If you are one of the millions who have a Bible--or several--on your nightstand, but find yourself confused or intimidated by its size and scope, then this guidebook offers its companionship. It promises to serve as a seasoned and knowledgeable resource to consult as you make your trip through the Bible. It will help you find a deeper faith and stronger ties to God through the Bibles powerful witness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Oct 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480809987

Thomas Calnan Sorenson

Thomas Calnan Sorenson has earned advanced degrees in history, law, and theology. He is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. He and his wife, the Rev. Jane Sorenson, live in Sultan, Washington. He is the author of Liberating Christianity: Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium.

Book preview

PART ONE

Approaching the Bible

Introduction to Part One

Perhaps you expected a guided tour of the Bible to start with the text of the Bible itself. Perhaps you expected to start reading about Genesis immediately after a brief introduction. Well, I hope you’re not disappointed. Genesis is not where this tour starts. The Bible is, as we shall see, an immensely complex book. Indeed, it really isn’t a book at all. The Protestant Bible that we will consider on our tour is a collection of sixty-six different writings. They weren’t written to be combined into one book, and none of them is what we would consider to be a book in our modern understanding of that term. All of them were written in cultures so radically different from ours that we can hardly comprehend the life of the people who produced them or the socio-cultural-linguistic norms that they took for granted. So just jumping into the Bible itself is, in your humble tour guide’s opinion, a big mistake. There are a lot of things to learn before reading the Bible itself that will help you understand what you read. Introducing you to those things is the intent of this Part One of our tour.

STOP 1

The Nature of Holy Scripture

Holy Scripture Defined

So now we begin our tour of the Bible, and we begin with a very basic subject. The most basic thing we can say about the Bible is that it is the holy scripture of Christianity. The Bible is Christianity’s sacred text. Saying that the Bible is the holy scripture of Christianity, that it is our sacred text, however, raises more questions than it answers. What does it mean to call the Bible Christianity’s holy scripture? After all, if we’re going to call the Bible our holy scripture, we would do well to know what we mean by that term. We can’t just assume that everyone knows what it means or that everyone means the same thing by it. So we need first of all to answer the question of what we mean when we call the Bible Christianity’s holy scripture.

To begin to answer that question we start with definitions of the two words in the phrase, the words holy and scripture. Scripture is an English word that derives from a Latin word that simply means writing. A scripture is a writing. The word is related to the word scribe, which means someone who writes things down or who copies text. In theory scripture can be any writing, although today we rarely use the word except with the adjective holy either implied or expressly attached to it. When we say holy scripture we mean a writing. In the religious context we mean particular writings that play a particular role within a particular tradition.

The Bible of course isn’t just scripture for us. It isn’t just a writing. It is holy scripture for us. So we must next address what we mean when we call our scripture holy. The most basic meaning of the word holy is related to the divine. It can also mean considered worthy of devotion or venerated as if divine. Divine means of or pertaining to a god or God and can also mean preceding from a god or from God. When we call a scripture holy, then, we are saying that it is related to the divine, or that it is considered worthy of devotion, or that it is venerated as if pertaining to God or as if preceding from God.

Some of the possible connotations of the word holy actually raise significant problems when applied to the Bible. Many Christians think that God wrote the Bible or at least that the people who wrote its various parts were directly inspired by God. To them, the word holy as applied to the Bible probably has those connotations. The term holy may indeed suggest that a writing comes from God more or less directly, but we must make clear that calling the Bible holy scripture does not necessarily have that implication. The Bible can be holy in that it is venerated, that is, it is honored or regarded with respect or deference because it relates to God, not necessarily because it comes from God. I do not believe that the Bible comes from God, but I still call it my holy scripture. That’s because calling the Bible holy doesn’t necessarily mean that God wrote it. So try to understand the Bible as holy scripture this way: The Bible is our holy scripture because it is a writing that we venerate because for us it pertains to God. It contains our stories about God and God’s relationship to us and to all of creation. We learn about other people’s experiences of God from it. We are challenged to live in certain ways by it. We use it for guidance and instruction. In all of those ways, and probably in many more, the Bible is not only Christianity’s scripture, it is our holy scripture.

Holy Scripture in World Religions

Christianity is not unique in having holy scripture as part of its religion. Many world religions have something that they consider to be holy scripture. The oldest religion in the world is Hinduism, the origins of which are lost in deep antiquity several thousand years ago. Hinduism has holy scripture. The holy scripture of Hinduism is the vedas, writings that some think came directly from Brahman (God) and are not of human origin. The basic statement of the vedas is the Bhagavad Gita, an epic poem whose title means Song of the Lord.

Buddhism developed out of Hinduism some 2,500 years ago or so. It too has holy scripture. The primary holy scripture for Buddhism is the sutras, which are considered to be the sayings of Buddha. There are issues of authenticity about the sutras that are, if anything, more maddeningly complex than issues about the Bible, but mercifully we needn’t consider them here.

All of the western monotheistic religions have holy scripture. The most ancient of them of course is Judaism. The holy scripture of Judaism is basically what Christians call the Old Testament. Jews call it simply the Bible. In Jewish tradition the Hebrew Bible is arranged a bit differently than is the Christian Old Testament, but it contains the same writings as the Protestant Old Testament. (More about why a Protestant Old Testament below.) Jewish tradition separates the Hebrew Bible into three parts. It uses an acronym made from the beginnings of the Hebrew words for those parts and calls the Hebrew Bible Tanak. The parts are the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Torah has priority of authority over the other parts. It consists of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (and of the Christian Old Testament)—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Torah is usually translated as law, I suppose because it contains so much law, but it actually means something more like teaching. In Jewish tradition the prophets include all of the books we think of as prophetic—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve minor prophets, who we’ll get to in Part Two of this tour, but they also include the books that we think of as historical rather than prophetic—Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. The writings are everything else, including the Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Ruth, Esther, and some others. In the Christian tradition Daniel is considered a book of prophecy, but in Judaism it is one of the writings.

Islam too has holy scripture. It is called the Qur’an (or the Koran), an Arabic word that means basically recitation. The Qur’an is foundational for Islam, more so perhaps even than the Bible is for Christians or Jews. Islam teaches that the Qur’an consists of words that come directly from God (Allah) that the Archangel Gabriel recited to the Prophet Muhammad in a long series of visionary experiences. Muhammad memorized the words. Later he recited them to others, who wrote them down (Muhammad having been, by tradition, illiterate). In Islam the Qur’an in the original Arabic is literally the words of God. This orthodox Muslim teaching is similar to what many Christians believe about the Bible, namely, that God wrote it. The difference between Islam and Christianity in this respect is that God creating the words of the Qur’an is orthodox Islamic teaching. That God created the words of the Bible is not and never has been orthodox Christian teaching.

A more modern holy scripture is the Book of Mormon, the holy scripture (along with the Bible) of Mormonism. The story goes that around 1830 Joseph Smith discovered golden tablets with writing in an otherwise unknown script and language called reformed Egyptian. The tablets supposedly contained the words of prophets who lived in the Americas between about 2600 BCE and 421 CE. Smith published the texts in 1830 as The Book of Mormon, An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon Upon Plates Taken From the Plates of Nephi. Smith claimed that he later lost the tablets, and no one else has ever seen them. Except for the Mormons, no Christians consider the Book of Mormon to be holy scripture, and I will not discuss it further on this tour.

The Function of Holy Scripture

Holy scripture doesn’t necessarily function in exactly the same way in every religion that has holy scripture, but there are some general statements we can make about the function of holy scripture. Holy scripture generally tells the foundational stories of a faith tradition. Every faith tradition has foundational stories. They may be stories of gods like Shiva and Vishnu as in Hinduism, or stories of the Buddha, or the story of the salvation history of Israel, or the stories about Jesus and the beginnings of the Christian movement, or the story of the Prophet Muhammad and the origins of the Qur’an. All religions have stories and are grounded in those stories. One major function of holy scripture is to contain those stories and to convey them from generation to generation.

Because holy scripture by definition pertains to God, another major function of holy scripture is to convey teachings about God that the faith tradition considers to be true. A tradition’s holy scripture is its primary source of understandings about God. Holy scripture conveys to the faithful understandings about who God is and how God relates to creation in general and to the faithful of the specific tradition for which a text is holy scripture in particular. Because it contains truth often understood to be divine, holy scripture functions as a source of morals for the faithful. It functions as a guide for their lives both individually and as a community. The faithful look to their holy scripture for guidance in their lives and for their understanding of themselves and their relationship to God.

Because it is foundational for its faith tradition, holy scripture functions to lend authority to beliefs that can be supported by reference to the scripture. In many faith traditions no assertion can be accepted as true if it is not supported by reference to the tradition’s holy scripture. Faith traditions use their holy scripture for instruction, for teaching the people the stories and the truths of the faith. They use holy scripture in worship. In many traditions the reading of passages from holy scripture is a primary act in communal worship, and expounding on the truths or meanings of a passage from holy scripture is a major part of the tradition’s worship services. The faithful of the tradition also use holy scripture in their personal devotions, finding in the scripture comfort, hope, encouragement, challenge, and inspiration. Faith traditions consider reading their holy scripture to be a foundational spiritual practice. In some traditions memorizing all or parts of the tradition’s holy scripture is considered important. Islam even has a special title for people who have memorized and can recite the entire Qur’an. Such a person has the privilege of putting the title Hafiz before his or her name. In our Christian tradition many people, especially children, are encouraged, or even required, to memorize passages from the Bible. Many of us, for example, at some point in our lives, memorized Psalm 23. Still, I doubt that very many Christians, however devout, have ever memorized the entire Bible. Memorizing all of it would be an enormous task and hardly worth the effort.

The Bible, including both of its Testaments, is holy scripture for us Christians. It functions within Christianity in all of the ways that holy scripture generally functions in any religious tradition. It contains our foundational stories. It teaches us about God, although just how it does that is a complex question. It teaches us Christian morality, although again just how it does it is a complex question. We read it in worship. Preachers preach on its meaning. Faithful people read it on their own and find in it all of the gifts that Christianity offers—hope, comfort, challenge, even salvation. The Bible is arguably the most important book in the world. This tour will take you through it. The Bible is not an easy book. There is no easy translation of it. Reading it as simple is to read it in error. My hope is that this tour will give you what you need to read it well.

STOP 2

The Christian Bible: An Overview

In our first stop on this tour we considered the nature and function of holy scripture generally. Now we turn to the Christian Bible itself. This stop is only a quick overview, an introduction to what’s actually in the Bible.

The Canon and the Testaments

The Bible consists of a particular group of documents, but the ancient Hebrew and Christian worlds produced a great many more documents than appear in the Bible. At some point the Hebrew and Christian traditions chose which of those writings they would consider to be part of their sacred scriptures. The writings they chose constitute the Bible in those traditions. The list of writings that make up the Bible, the ones the traditions chose to include as sacred scripture, is called the canon. The word canon comes from the Greek word "kanon," which means standard or measuring stick. The canon determines what a particular religious community considers to be holy scripture and excludes writings that the community does not consider to be holy scripture. The canon of the Christian Bible is divided into two basic parts, usually called the Old Testament and the New Testament.

The Christian Bible has a canon, that is, a list of included documents, of the Old Testament and a canon, a list of included documents, of the New Testament. We Christians use the word testament freely, but I wonder how many of us really know what it means. The word testament has come to mean simply one of the two major divisions of the Christian Bible, but it has an etymology and a more specific meaning. The word is related to words like testimony. A testament is a witness to something. You hear it in the legal phrase last will and testament, where testament means a person’s statement of what she wants to have happen to her property after her death. When applied to the Bible the word is often equated with covenant. The two Testaments are sometimes called the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Although the canon of the Old Testament varies some between different Christian traditions (most importantly for our purposes between the Catholic tradition and the Protestant tradition—again more about that below), all Christians use the same New Testament.

The Old Testament

The Old Testament is essentially the Hebrew Bible, or at least in the Protestant tradition it is. We use the term Old Testament, and it is important to consider what we mean when we call the Old Testament old. Some people today hear old as a disparaging term, as though the Old Testament were somehow superseded and no longer valid. Some Christians object to the term Old Testament on these grounds and call the Old Testament Hebrew Scripture or the Hebrew Bible instead. I often do so myself. As early as the second century CE a man named Marcion argued that Hebrew Scripture was not scripture for Christians at all and had indeed been superseded by specifically Christian writings. He wanted Christian churches to reject the Hebrew Scriptures altogether. The larger tradition rejected his position and branded it a heresy. It held that the Hebrew Bible was also holy scripture for Christians. So the Christian tradition has never officially maintained that the Old Testament is not valid or not authoritative. Quite the contrary. The orthodox⁵ Christian position is that it was and remains valid revelation. Nonetheless you will still hear some uninformed Christians dismiss the Old Testament as not relevant to Christians. They’re wrong about that. There certainly are passages in the Old Testament that are difficult and that we find hard to understand as scripture, but then there are passages in the New Testament that are difficult and that we find hard to understand as scripture too. That we struggle with parts of the Old Testament is no reason to reject it as scripture. That the documents of the Old Testament were written by and for Hebrew people long before the time of Jesus and the early Christian movement is likewise no reason to reject it as scripture for us. After all, Judaism is our mother faith. Christianity is grounded in Jewish faith and is incomprehensible without it. Hebrew scripture simply is scripture for us Christians.

Old in the term Old Testament simply means that those writings came before the later revelation that Christians see in Jesus Christ and in the documents of the New Testament. The Old Testament is the first testament. It is the original scripture of the Christian tradition. A Greek translation of the Hebrew Scripture called the Septuagint was scripture for the first Christians. When the New Testament refers to scripture, it means the Old Testament and specifically the Septuagint. The Septuagint is important for Christianity, and I will refer to it several times on this tour.

In all Christian traditions the Old Testament either is or at least includes the same documents as the Hebrew Bible, albeit in a different order than the traditional Jewish order. All of the books of the Hebrew Bible and of the Protestant Old Testament were written in Hebrew.⁶ Hebrew was an ancient Semitic language spoken by people called Hebrews. It became a written language at least by the 900s BCE, albeit in rudimentary form. It was a fully developed written language probably by the 700s BCE. It was written in a particular alphabet. It was written from right to left (which doesn’t mean that it was written backwards, as my Hebrew Scripture professor in seminary went to great pains to remind us over and over again). The alphabet in which Hebrew was written included only consonants. Vowels were not written. By the time of Jesus Hebrew was an ancient, dead language. Jewish people living in the Jewish homeland in Jesus’ time mostly spoke Aramaic, a Semitic language related but not identical to Hebrew. Here’s a quick example of the difference. The Hebrew word rabbi means teacher. The Aramaic version of the word, which appears in the New Testament, is rabbouni. The similarity is easy to see, but the Aramaic word is also clearly distinct from its Hebrew counterpart. Even when the Hebrew people spoke Aramaic they continued to read their scripture in Hebrew.

The documents of the Hebrew Bible were written over a very long period of time. We will consider how the different writings of the Old Testament came to be later on our tour, but, for now, here is some general information about those documents. The oldest written documents are probably those of the prophets of the eighth century BCE including Micah, Amos, and Hosea. Some of the other Old Testament documents were originally written in the late seventh century BCE, including what we call the Deuteronomic History, that is, the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. The book of Deuteronomy, or at least the original part of it, dates from the 620s BCE. At least part of the book of Jeremiah dates from the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Part of the book of the prophet Isaiah was written during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE. Many of the Hebrew texts were edited into their current form after the return from Babylon in the late sixth century BCE. These include Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus, among others. Other books dating from after the Babylonian exile include 1 and 2 Chronicles, Nehemiah, and Ezra. The last book of the Protestant Old Testament and of the Hebrew Bible to be written is the Book of Daniel, from the second century BCE during a time of Hellenistic occupation and oppression. It’s not surprising then that it is essentially impossible to generalize about all of those documents. They reflect diverse cultural and religious times and diverse historical contexts.

I have already noted that the Hebrew Bible is traditionally divided into three parts called Torah (Law or Teaching), Prophets, and Writings. The Torah is the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Prophets are traditionally divided into major and minor prophets, based on the length of their books. The major prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. There are twelve minor prophets, which only means that their books are shorter than the books of the major prophets. It doesn’t mean that the minor prophets are minor in significance. They are Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The Writings are everything else. We don’t generally think of the Old Testament as being divided in that way, but the Hebrew Bible is often called the Tanak (or Tanakh), from the first letters of the Hebrew words for Torah, Prophets, and Writings.

The Old Testament contains a number of books that have a quasi-historical character. The most important are the books Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. In the Jewish tradition, although not in the Christian one, they are consider as part of the Prophets. Collectively they are called the Deuteronomic History because they reflect the theology of Deuteronomy, about which much more during later stops on our tour. We will look at them in more detail later, but it is important to understand at the beginning that while they probably sound like history to us they are not history in any modern sense. They were written for political and theological reasons, not to report accurately on factual historical events, which is of course how we think history should be done. Nonetheless, they are works of immense significance in the history of culture. In them is expressed for the first time the idea that God is present and active in human history, that God cares about how people behave on earth, and that our actions have consequences in which God is involved. We probably understand God’s involvement in human history differently than these books do, but the idea that God is indeed involved in human history first appeared in them.

Let me also say another word about the prophets here, before we actually get to their books later on. Unfortunately, many people today understand prophecy to be about predicting the future. If someone has accurately predicted something that actually happened we call that person a prophet. While the writings of the Hebrew prophets do some predicting of the future, predicting the future is not primarily what prophecy is about in the Hebrew Bible. In the Hebrew Bible a prophet is primarily a person who speaks a word from God. The prophet (they’re mostly men, but there are rare occasions when women are called prophets too) believes that he has received a message from God with an instruction to proclaim that message to the people, often specifically to the political, economic, cultural, religious, and social elite among the people. There were a great many prophets in Hebrew history, but only a few of them made it into the Bible. They are mostly the ones whose predictions of coming destruction turned out to be correct, but those predictions are not why they are primarily important to us. They are important to us, or at least some of them are, because they proclaimed God’s demand for justice for the poor and the vulnerable among the people. They also condemned idolatry, that is, worship of gods other than Yahweh. Specifically, they condemned the worship of the Canaanite gods and goddesses. No one worships those gods and goddesses today, but idolatry is still a huge issue for us. We don’t call the object of our devotion gods, but many people today make their nation, or wealth, or success, or their family their primary concern. When we do, we are committing idolatry. Keep that truth in mind when we come to our stops at the Hebrew prophets.

The Apocrypha

I said above that not all Christians have the same Old Testament. They don’t, and the fact that they don’t raises the issue of what Protestants call the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha are Hebrew writings other than the writings included in Protestant Old Testaments and the Hebrew Bible that are sometimes included in editions of Protestant Bibles (especially study Bibles) and are always included in Catholic Bibles. They are sometimes printed in Protestant Bibles but not as part of the canon. They are not canonical, that is, they are not considered to be part of the Bible, in the Protestant or Jewish traditions. They are considered canonical in the Catholic tradition. They are Hebrew writings from the late Old Testament period. They were written in Greek not Hebrew, which is the reason they are not considered part of the canon in the Jewish and Protestant traditions. They were part of the Septuagint, that Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures that was the Bible for the early Christians. They therefore became part of the canon for early Christianity. The Jewish tradition excluded them early in the Christian era, and at the time of the Reformation Martin Luther decided to follow the Jewish practice and excluded the Apocrypha from his Old Testament.

It is perhaps puzzling that Judaism and Protestantism excluded the Apocrypha from their canons. They are not excluded because there is anything particularly heretical about their content. They are Hebrew writings, and some of them contain and develop themes that also appear in some of the books that are included in the Hebrew Bible and the Protestant Old Testament. For example, the books The Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach develop the figure of the Wisdom Woman who appears in the book of Proverbs. The books of the Maccabees are in the Hebrew tradition of telling the history of the Hebrew people. So don’t reject these books because you think there’s something wrong with them. For the most part there isn’t. It’s just that they were written in Greek not Hebrew. They may reflect some Greek influences on Hebrew thinking, but then the book of Genesis reflects Babylonian influences on Hebrew thinking and part of the book of Isaiah reflects Persian influences on Hebrew thinking. If you are Jewish or Protestant you probably aren’t all that familiar with the Apocrypha. It might be worth your time to read those books, but I will not include them on this tour.

The Apocrypha are canonical in the Roman Catholic tradition. Or rather some books that Protestants call the Apocrypha are canonical in the Roman Catholic tradition. Other Christians, including the Orthodox traditions, also include apocryphal writings in their canons, but they don’t all include the same apocryphal writings. Because we will cover the books that are canonical in the Protestant and Jewish traditions on this tour I won’t go into all of the details of those differences here. Many study Bibles include lists of the books that are canonical in different Christian traditions. You can look for more information there if you’re interested.

The New Testament

Christian Bibles of course contain a New Testament as well as an Old Testament. The New Testament consists of the specifically Christian writings in Christian Bibles. We can call the Old Testament the Hebrew Bible, which of course it is; but we can’t call the New Testament the Christian Bible. That’s because the Christian Bible also includes the Old Testament. The term new in New Testament is perhaps a bit problematic. We so think of new things as better than old things that we probably hear a value judgment in our use of the term new for the New Testament. That’s unfortunate. The term new in New Testament doesn’t mean better. When we call the New Testament new we simply mean that the New Testament comes chronologically after the Old Testament. The revelation that Christians see in Jesus came chronologically after the revelation that Jews and Christians see in the Old Testament. That’s all that the term new in the phrase New Testament means.

Unlike the canon of the Old Testament, the canon of the New Testament is the same for all Christian traditions. The documents in the New Testament also have in common that they were all written in the same language, a language called koine Greek. There are a few Aramaic words in them here and there, but the language of the New Testament is koine Greek. Koine Greek was the common language of culture and commerce in the eastern Mediterranean world from roughly the fourth century BCE (the time of Alexander the Great) to the seventh century CE, when the rise of the Arabs and the new religion of Islam caused the Arabic language to displace koine Greek in much of the Middle East. Koine Greek was written in the Greek alphabet, which included vowels. However, it was written without punctuation and even without spaces between the words. We’ll take a closer look at New Testament language issues in a bit.

The New Testament consists of twenty-seven books. I put the word books in quotes just now because the New Testament doesn’t actually consist of books in any modern sense of that word. It actually consists of several different kinds of writings. We will consider them in greater detail later. For now it is important to know these things about those writings.

The New Testament opens with four Gospels. They have the traditional names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but those names are merely traditional attributions. We do not know who wrote the Gospels, and the texts of the Gospels do not name their authors. The Gospels sound to us like factual accounts of the life and sayings of Jesus, but that is not primarily what they are. They most definitely are not biographies in any modern sense. They are rather the faith confessions of four different early Christian communities. They speak more to who Jesus was for those communities than to who he was as an historical person. They were written roughly between 72 CE and 100 or perhaps 110 CE. They are proclamations of who Jesus was for these early Christian communities, not merely reports of the facts of Jesus’ life. That is not to say that they do not contain some facts about Jesus’ life. They do, but teasing out of the Gospels just what in them is fact and what is not is nearly impossible. Many have tried it, but there is little scholarly consensus about the matter. It really is much better to think of the Gospels as proclamations of Christian faith rather than as factual accounts about Jesus.

Next in the New Testament, after the four Gospels, comes the Book of Acts, or more completely The Acts of the Apostles. Acts is actually the second volume of the Gospel of Luke, written by the same author as Luke. It tells a story of the spread of the Christian faith from the Ascension of Jesus and Pentecost until Paul goes to Rome toward the end of his life. It focuses on Paul, but some of the things it says about Paul are different from what Paul says about himself in his letters. It is difficult to determine what in Acts is actually historical. It purports to recount the history of the spread of Christianity in the faith’s early decades, but we know that not everything it says is historically accurate. Like the Gospel of Luke to which it is tied, Acts is probably more faith proclamation than it is a recounting of historical facts. It is nonetheless, along with the authentic letters of Paul, a major source for understanding the spread of Christianity throughout the eastern Roman Empire in the decades after the death of Jesus.

After Acts comes a series of twenty-one letters. Most of them really are letters written by specific people to specific people. We can divide the New Testament’s letters into three categories, namely, the authentic letters of Paul, the pseudo-Pauline letters, and other letters. Thirteen of the letters say that they were written by Paul. There is, however, a rather broad scholarly consensus that only seven of those letters were actually written by Paul. They are Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. 1 Thessalonians is the oldest of them and is the oldest text in the New Testament, having been written around the year 50 CE. As we will see when we get to them later on this tour, even some of the authentic letters of Paul contain later, non-Pauline material that has been inserted into them.

The pseudo-Pauline letters, that is, those that say they are by Paul but that scholars are more or less sure were not by Paul, are Ephesians (there is some doubt about this one, some scholars thinking it is by Paul—I don’t), Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus. The last three of these, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, are called the pastoral letters. They very obviously are not by Paul and reflect a rather late stage in the development of early Christianity. Scholars base their judgment about Pauline authorship of the different letters on differences of theology and language between the authentic Pauline letters and the pseudo-Pauline letters.

Whether Paul actually wrote a particular letter or not may or may not matter to you. It depends on what your purpose is in reading the letter. They all are, after all, in the Christian Bible. That may be all that matters to you if you are reading one of them for devotional or instructional purposes. You may consider all of the letters attributed to Paul to be equally authoritative simply because they are in the Bible (although, frankly, I hope that by the end of this tour you will reconsider that conclusion). If, however, you are reading the letters to gain an understanding of Paul, then of course it matters whether Paul wrote a letter (or each passage in a particular letter) or not. I find the question of Pauline authorship to be an interesting scholarly issue. I suppose that’s the main reason I address it on this tour.

After the letters that either are by Paul or are at least attributed to Paul comes the letter called Hebrews. Hebrews is not actually in the form of a letter, but it is always included among the letters. Its author is unknown. It has a distinctive theology not found elsewhere in the New Testament. It is the New Testament book that most clearly supports the theology we call substitutionary sacrificial atonement. That’s the notion that Jesus’ saving work consists of his suffering and dying to pay the price God demanded before God would or could forgive human sin. Many people today think that that theory is what Christianity is. In fact, however, most New Testament authors did not think of Jesus that way. The author of Hebrews more or less did.

The other letters are named after Apostles, but their actual authors are unknown. They are James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2, and 3 John, and Jude. The letters 1, 2, and 3 John were written by the author of the Gospel of John or at least clearly reflect a theology similar to that of the Gospel of John. Martin Luther wanted to exclude the Letter of James because he didn’t like its theology, but he couldn’t do it because the New Testament canon was so firmly established by his time.

The last book in the New Testament is the Book of Revelation. Not Revelations. It’s a singular not plural name. Revelation is easily the most problematic and difficult book in the New Testament. It is the most violent book in the Bible, Old Testament or New; and, as we will see, that takes some doing. It begins with letters to several churches in Asia Minor, but most of it takes the form of supposed visions had by an author known as John of Patmos. (He’s not the author of the Gospel of John, although people often confuse the John of Revelation with the John of the Gospel. Neither is he the Disciple John the son of Zebedee.) We will deal with Revelation in more detail of course when we come to it on our tour. For now just know that it really isn’t about how God is going to destroy and remake the world, which is what it sounds like to us. It is about the evil of the Roman Empire, not about the end of the world.

So there you have a quick flyby of the Bible. I hope that even this brief overview will give you some idea of how complex—and difficult—a book it is. We have several other subjects to cover in this introductory part of our tour before we get to the Bible itself in more detail. I understand if you are anxious to dive into the Bible right now, but please be patient. The subjects to which we now turn are worth the time we will spend on them.

STOP 3

The Art of Biblical Interpretation Part One: Hermeneutics

This book is a guided tour of the Bible. Most readers of this work have very probably already read the Bible or, more likely, have read parts of the Bible. Not all that many people have read all of it, although of course some have. I’d be willing to bet (not that I’m a betting man) that by far most of the people who have read the Bible or parts of it were unaware that as they read the Bible they were simultaneously interpreting the Bible. Well, here’s the truth of the matter: They were. They probably didn’t think they were. They’d probably be surprised to be told that they were. Still, they were. As I hope to explain to you here, it is impossible to read the Bible—or anything else—without interpreting it. Just take that assertion as true for now and understand that because reading necessarily involves interpretation it is important to understand the basics of interpretation before we start reading the Bible together. It is my aim to give you the basic understandings and techniques of interpretation here. Please don’t skip ahead to stops more obviously related to the Bible itself. This one is really important.

All Reading Is Interpretation

In the course of my work as a pastor I have had people say to me that they just want their Bible straight, without interpretation. I suppose it isn’t a surprising request. After all, we live in a culture that tells us that a document means what it says and says what it means. If you want to know what a document means all you have to do is know what it says. Some of us however have been exposed to a different understanding of meaning. Any of us who have taken any sophisticated literature courses know that different readers interpret literature in different ways. We encounter numerous issues as we read. Sometimes a passage is intentionally vague. In Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy, for example, did the protagonist mean to kill the woman in the boat or not? Some read the book as saying yes, others as saying no, and still others as the book not answering the question at all. Each of those readings is an interpretation of the text. Many of us know Orwell’s great book Animal Farm. The characters are farm animals, but is the book really about farm animals? Or is it about Communism? Or is it about capitalist society? It’s pretty clear that it isn’t just about farm animals, but even saying that much about it is an interpretation. Once we interpret the book as not really being about farm animals we can’t help but ask what it really is about. We might give different answers to that question, but no matter what answer we give we are interpreting the book simply by asking and answering the question.

You may well be saying OK, but some texts are so simple that no interpretation is involved in reading them. I suppose that is at least sort of true, yet even when we read something like See Spot run we’re probably doing some interpreting. At the very least we are forming mental images of the situation we understand the text to depict. Those of us of a certain age may remember the illustration of that text in our first grade reading books. That illustration is an interpretation. It depicted Spot as a dog. It showed Spot running with a particular gait. It may have shown the dog’s tongue hanging out even though the text says nothing about the dog’s tongue hanging out. Even if we don’t remember an illustration we probably form a mental image that is in effect an illustration, and that image is an interpretation of the text. It fills out the picture to which the text points with its three short words. It interprets what run means. It interprets what Spot is and what Spot looks like. We really don’t even read something as simple as See Spot run without interpretation. We really can’t read anything without interpreting it.

Seeing as how the Bible is the subject of this tour, let me give an example from the Bible. We probably all know the famous verse John 3:16, often said to be the most quoted verse in the Bible. It reads, in the well known King James Version translation, For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. I am sure that Christians without number have read, and do read, that verse with absolute certainty that they know what it means and with absolute certainty that they are just reading it and are not interpreting it. I’m afraid that they are wrong about that. Say someone reads the word gave as meaning sent to earth to be crucified. I’m sure many Christians read the verse that way; but the verse doesn’t say gave to be crucified, it only says gave. So gave to be crucified is an interpretation of the verse even if the person reading it that way doesn’t think that she is interpreting it but is only reading what is there. Most Christians probably understand the word believeth in the verse to mean take certain alleged facts about Jesus to be true, that he is God Incarnate, that he is Savior, and so on. That’s mostly what believe has come to mean today, to accept certain factual assertions that we take but can’t prove to be true. Yet reading that meaning of the word believe into the text is in fact interpreting the text. Scholars today don’t think that is what the Greek word used here and in many other places in the New Testament that is translated as believe means at all. They give the word a different definition, which means that they give the text a different interpretation. There are similar issues around the words that the King James Version translates as have everlasting life. More modern translations tend to render that phrase have eternal life rather than everlasting life. Most people probably read eternal as meaning the same thing as everlasting. They think it means unending life in heaven after death. Actually, in the Gospel of John that isn’t what eternal life means at all. We won’t get to John until Part Three of this tour, so if you want to know now what eternal life means in John go look up John 17:3. That’s where John defines it, and it has nothing to do with heaven. John gives the term an interpretation when he defines it as he does in that verse. Readers give the term a different interpretation when they define it differently. However we define it, we are giving the verse an interpretation as we do.

These examples suggest a truth about reading. It is simply impossible to read anything without interpreting it. I suppose you could say that when you look up a phone number in a phone book (or today more likely online) you aren’t interpreting the number when you write it down and dial it (or today more likely punch some buttons on a phone, a motion we still oddly call dialing even though our phones don’t have dials). You certainly aren’t doing any very deep interpreting when you do that, but you are at least reading the number characters as actual numbers, which I suppose it is a very basic kind of interpreting. You are interpreting the figure 6 that you see in the number as meaning you need to press the 6 on your phone in the proper place in the order of the number. Even in that simplistic, numerical example you are doing some interpreting.

Yet of course here on this tour of the Bible we aren’t dealing primarily with numbers, and we aren’t dealing with simplistic texts either. We will discover on our tour that the biblical texts are far from simplistic, sometimes maddeningly so. Those texts are extraordinarily complex. They come from cultures that understood reality far differently than we do. They were written by people with what to us are very primitive understandings of nature, the structure of the universe, and humanity. Those understandings affected how they thought and how they wrote. When we bring our very different understandings to our reading of the text, what may seem to us the obvious meaning of the text is perhaps very different from what the author understood when he wrote it. Those different understandings may well lead us to interpret the text differently from the way the text’s author meant it. As we will learn shortly that doesn’t necessarily make our interpretation wrong, but it does mean that we are interpreting the text even when we think that we aren’t.

So on our tour we will look at the nature of interpretation. We will do that in two stages, each of which has a four bit word to name it. We deal first with hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation. Then on our next stop we will take up exegesis. Exegesis is the practice of interpretation. If we can’t read the Bible without interpreting it—and we can’t—then we are well advised to understand interpretation before we dive into the Bible. So here we go.

Hermeneutics Defined

The fancy word hermeneutics means the theory of interpretation. When I was in seminary we used to joke that the great benefit of a seminary education is that we can use the word hermeneutics in a sentence. It’s easy to be flip about it, but hermeneutics is really, really important. But why do we have hermeneutics, that is, why do we have a theory of interpretation at all? Isn’t reading a text just about reading the words and understanding what they mean? No, we have just seen that that isn’t all that reading a text is about. The process of a reader reading and understanding a text is actually quite complex. Reading always involves a process of interpretation. Wherever there is any kind of process scholars will come up with theories about how that process works. There are different theories about the interpretation of a text that takes place in any reading. In particular here we will deal with what I (and scholars generally) call modernist and postmodern hermeneutics. I am an adherent of postmodern hermeneutics, but to understand postmodern hermeneutics we have to start with what came before postmodern hermeneutics, namely, modernist hermeneutics.

Modernist hermeneutics

Modernist hermeneutics is a particular way of reading and interpreting a text. Modernist hermeneutics is the way of reading and interpreting texts that is part of a much larger worldview called modernism. Today we are all products of modernism. Modernism has shaped our view of reality. It has shaped what we think is true and what we think is good. To understand modernist hermeneutics—and you probably use modernist hermeneutics even if you’ve never heard the term before—we have to understand the larger concept modernism.

Modernism is the worldview that developed during the Enlightenment, that revolutionary period of human thinking that took place in western Europe in, roughly speaking, the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries CE. It was shaped in major ways by the scientific revolution that was a part of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was to a considerable extent a reaction against what had come before it, so to understand the Enlightenment we have to understand the pre-Enlightenment worldview that prevailed in western Europe for centuries before the seventeenth century. In particular we have to understand what the pre-Enlightenment world understood to be the nature of truth and of how we come to know truth. It’s not a simple subject, but we need here at least to scratch the surface of it.

Before the Enlightenment western European culture understood truth and how we know truth in a rather complex way. Some commentators say that pre-Enlightenment people didn’t understand truth as consisting of facts. They say that before the Enlightenment people didn’t read the Bible literally, that is, factually. This school of thought says that the understanding of truth as consisting of facts arose only in the Enlightenment under the impact of the scientific revolution. We, or at least I, might wish that were true, but I’m afraid it is an oversimplification. Unfortunately, the fields of philosophy, theology, and biblical studies are often ruled by oversimplifications. Before the Enlightenment people did understand facts to be truth. We humans can’t really live without understanding truth as consisting at least in part of facts. Specifically, pre-Enlightenment Christians and Jews did understand the stories in the Bible to be factually true. That’s why, for example, the Roman Catholic Church reacted so strongly against the developments in the science of astronomy by scientists like Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo. Those scientists used careful, detailed observations of heavenly phenomena to overturn the old understanding that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun rotated around the earth. That, of course, is the cosmology of the Bible. Christianity had understood that cosmology to be factually true from its beginnings. When the Bible says that Joshua caused the sun to stand still in the sky (Joshua 10:12-13) people believed that the sun moves across the sky as it appears to do and that it could, and did, stand still. There is no reason for us to deny that premodern people understood truth as fact. Marcus Borg calls the epistemological state in which premodern people lived precritical naiveté. People believed that the Bible was factual simply because, before the advent of critical methods of analysis and scientific investigation, they had no reason not to.

They did not, however, understand truth only as fact, or at least the more sophisticated minds among them did not. The premodern world understood kinds of truth other than simply factual truth. Here’s a famous quote from the ancient church father Origen (active early to mid third century CE) that illustrates the point:

For who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun, and moon, and stars? and that the first day was, as it were, also without a sky? And who is so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden, towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life? and again, that one was a partaker of good and evil by masticating what was taken from the tree? And if God is said to walk in the paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.⁷

Origen knew that the seven days of creation story found at Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 makes no sense as fact. He knew that the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, found in chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis, is very odd indeed if we insist on taking it as a record of actual facts. Yet he says that these stories indicate certain mysteries. What did he mean by that, and does what he meant mean anything for us?

What we see in this quote from Origen is that premodern people weren’t tied to the Bible as fact. When Origen says that the scripture indicates certain mysteries he is speaking of a kind of truth that the premodern world most commonly called allegorical. Premodern people had no problem with reading the Bible as what they called allegory. Unlike Origen many of them did understand the Bible stories factually, but they recognized both that there are other layers of meaning in the stories and that their factuality just isn’t the most important thing about them. They were comfortable with the understanding that the stories, so much more than being mere statements of fact, point beyond themselves to a truth that cannot be reduced to fact. At the end of this Part One I will introduce you to the concept that symbol and myth are the language of faith and of the Bible. In the ancients’ understanding of the Bible as allegory we see that, though they may have used different language for the notion than we do, they too understood truth to be far deeper than fact.

All of that changed with the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. In the Enlightenment human reason became the standard for all truth. The Enlightenment had forerunners of course. The origins of modern science, which became a major hallmark of the Enlightenment, go back at least as far as Aristotle, in the fourth century BCE. The scholastic theology in the High Middle Ages, represented by towering figures such as Anselm and Aquinas, was rationalistic in the extreme. Yet before the Enlightenment human reason was not the only measure of truth and was indeed not even the primary measure of truth. Rather, fundamental truth, the most profound truth, came from divine revelation. Anselm and Aquinas used reason in support of the truth they believed to have been revealed by God. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, the primary text for classical atonement soteriology, sounds very rationalistic; but Anselm simply accepted as divine revelation that God came to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Before the Enlightenment in western Europe essentially nobody doubted the reality of God. Anselm, Aquinas, and others may have made rationalistic attempts at proving the reality of God, but they never thought that faith in the reality of God depended on the validity of those rationalistic proofs. God was more or less taken for granted, as was the reality of God’s revealed truth.

That understanding of truth began to change in the sixteenth century with new discoveries in astronomy brought about by precise observation and measurement of the movements of heavenly bodies. Then the credibility of the church and of the Christian faith generally came crashing down for a great many people through a period of violence and devastation in western Europe called the Thirty Years War. Between 1618 and 1648 forces identified in part by political allegiance but primarily as Protestant or Catholic ravished cities and the countryside across western Europe. The violence of the Thirty Years War would be surpassed by orders of magnitude in the twentieth century, but in the first half of the seventeenth century Europe had seen nothing like it.

In those conflicts Christians slaughtered other Christians in enormous numbers. People of an intellectual bent began to question the validity and authority of religious teaching when religious teaching led to such widespread death and destruction, much of it done at least nominally in the name of religion. People began to look for an authority for truth other than the church, and that meant other than faith. What they found was human reason. Even before the Thirty Years War was ended by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, Rene Descartes, a French mathematician and philosopher, wrote cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, and the world hasn’t been the same since.

In the decades that followed, human reason became the standard of all truth. In fields including philosophy, political science, economics, demographics, and virtually every other field of human knowledge reason ruled the day. Eventually Enlightenment philosophers including Hume and Kant sowed the seeds of the end of the Enlightenment, but that end would not come for a long time. Rationalistic thinking spread to the New World and produced the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Rationalistic thinking eventually led in the nineteenth century to the positivist philosophy of Comte and the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx. The German philosopher Hegel went so far as to say that the real is the rational and the rational is the real. By the early decades of the nineteenth century human reason had displaced revelation as the standard of truth in virtually every field of human endeavor.

As people began to apply the methods of human reason to the physical world, scientific knowledge expanded far, far beyond what it had ever been before. Scientific methodology became sophisticated and powerful, revealing truths of which people had had no inkling in earlier times. The discoveries of science astounded the general public and advanced thinkers alike. People in fields as far from physical science as theology began to want their truths to be like the truths of science—objective, observable, verifiable. Science produced truths that were demonstrable in a way that truth had never been before, or so at least it seemed at the time. Thinkers across the board wanted to demonstrate their truths as convincingly as science demonstrated its truths. The world that this kind of thinking produced is what we call modernism.

There is a truth about science that is actually profoundly significant for hermeneutics. Science deals with facts. Science establishes facts. At least, science establishes what it takes as facts until some new scientific discovery requires it to rethink what the facts are. Scientific truths are demonstrable. They can be tested by experimentation. Scientific truths are in that sense objective. The issue in science, at least in theory, is not what someone thinks about something. Scientists do disagree on some supposed scientific truths to be sure, but the issue in their disagreement is less what someone thinks and more what the demonstrable evidence shows. The issue in a scientific dispute isn’t as much what