Theological Consensus or Historicist Evasion? Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies [J. Levenson]

Chapter 4 from The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies, Jon D. Levenson, 1993

Two sentence summary. Biblical studies will not of itself lead to a useful dialogue between Jews and Christians, since its practitioners meet as historians, and not as Jews and Christians. Neither will it much benefit either Judaism or Christianity, as long as scholars restrict themselves to studying the bible’s history and ignore any relevance or contemporary application that the bible might have.

Introduction. Biblical studies aims to recover the original meaning of the bible by investigating the historical context of the biblical documents and their authors. A purely historical discipline, it requires its practitioners to bracket any religious beliefs they have. In principle, therefore, biblical studies favours no religion. This arrangement has benefits, but it also has both problems and limitations. In part 1, we examine the problem that Protestant scholars have failed to bracket their beliefs as the method demands, skewing biblical studies for the church, and against Judaism (1.1). We also look at why this is unjustified (1.2-3). In part 2, we look at a pair of limitations of bracketing one’s beliefs. First, Jews and Christians may meet as equals in biblical studies, but this meeting will not lead to any profound dialogue between them because they meet not as Jews and Christians, but as historians (2.1). Second, scholars restrict themselves to studying the bible’s history, ignoring any relevance the bible might have, and how it might be acted upon. They suggest by their disregard that neither the bible nor religious practice have meaning, and so harm both Judaism and Christianity (2.2). Levenson concludes (3) that Jewish and Christian scholars must maintain both intellectual integrity (from part one) and spiritual vitality (from part two).

1. The problem of scholars failing to bracket their traditions.

1.1 The results of modern biblical studies are skewed to favour Protestantism over Judaism. Examples include:

• Sympathies with the Northern secession. Scholars often sympathise with Jeroboam’ rejection of entrenched power and centralised worship because it lines up with their Reformation ideals, even though Deuteronomistic history considers Jeroboam’s secession a sin of the highest order.
• Indifference to the cult and postexilic books. Scholars aren’t very interested in the cult or in postexilic books because of their Protestant preference for word over sacrament, prophet over priest, and the spirit over institutional structures, especially those structures that suggest the Israelite religion’s ‘devolution’ into Judaism, the Judaism that Jesus overthrew.
• Languages. NT students are taught biblical rather than mishnaic Hebrew, even though the latter is more relevant to their studies. Not only so, but the same scholars who ignore rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic will still energetically learn 7th c. Arabic. And though much relevant academic literature is written in modern Hebrew, almost no scholars know the language.
• Christian supersessionism. Scholars implicitly support the idea of Christian supercession when they end histories of Israel after the defeat of the Jewish rebellion in 135 C.E.
• The boundaries of biblical studies. Scholars have assumed that there is a definitive break between the last book of the Hebrew Bible/OT and the following period of Qumran and Diaspora, even though there are other historically legitimate ways of cutting the pie (e.g. putting the break at the exile, and grouping Ezra and the rabbis together). They refuse to put biblical and rabbinic Judaism on a continuum because as Christians they believe that the history of Judaism underwent major revolution about the time of Jesus.

1.2 It is not the case that the results favour Protestantism because the method employed by biblical studies is essentially Protestant. Renaissance thinkers and Jewish exegetes got there before them, and Catholics and later Jews got there after them, all without assuming Protestant attitudes.

• The medievals and the Renaissance
• The medievals didn’t see the value in historical criticism because they didn’t think that the past was qualitatively different to the present. Renaissance thinkers, however, strongly felt the pastness of the past. By the 17th c., this feeling had evolved into skepticism about the eternity of the Bible, fueling the modern passion for understanding the Bible in its historical context. For example, Petrarch explored Roman ruins, collected coins and used them as historical evidence, and thought that laws had a historical context and not—as the medievals did—that law was something outside of time.
• The medievals thought that since the Bible is from God, and God is eternal, the Bible is not so much a historical document as oracular one, speaking to the present and the future. The Bible’s history didn’t matter to them. Renaissance thinkers, however, liked to evaluate historical evidence. The 18th c. successors of the Renaissance adopted this approach when studying the Bible, exposing supposed pseudonomy and discerning sources. For example, one the one hand, medieval Jewish exegetes doubted that Moses wrote entire Pentateuch, but didn’t care to consider when and by whom the non-Mosaic passages were written. On the other hand, Renaissance thinkers exposed a series of forgeries, most notably the Donation of Constantine. Nicholas of Cusa wrote a history of the Koran’s ideas, and discerned distinct three components or sources (one of which was Nestorian Christianity; another a Jewish adviser to Mohammed).
• From the 11th c. on, Jews increasingly preferred the basic sense (peshat), and were increasingly aware that the midrashic interpretations weren’t a source of valid exegesis.
• More recently, Jews and Catholics have joined the modern biblical studies and employed its methods, without adopting classical Reformation attitudes.

1.3 The method of biblical studies is at odds with the assumptions of Protestantism. We’ll demonstrate this by looking at the Renaissance humanist, Spinoza, and showing that Biblical criticism has followed Spinoza’s programme.

• The bible is like any other book. First, humans wrote it like they write any other book. The writings of the prophets and apostles aren’t unique, rather, revelation is universally available to all humans, as all human minds contain and partake of God’s nature. Second, humans can interpret the Bible like any other book. Just as they did not need Spirit to write the Bible, they need only Reason to understand it. Modern biblical criticism has followed his conclusions, even if it might get to those conclusions differently. For instance, Jowett, writing in 1860, argued that we should read the Bible like any other book.
• Spinoza denies the sufficiency and necessity of scripture, undermines its inspiration, and denies that one needs the Spirit to understand it: all core Protestant doctrines.
• The meaning of Scripture is therefore not God’s, but the author’s. To find the author’s meaning we must uncover the life of the author, his setting, the occasion of his writing and his adressees: biblical studies is now the study of history. If we discover that the real history of the Bible is different from the one that it claims, and we should give normativity to our reconstruction. His reconstructed history takes precedence over the Bible’s literary unity. Again, Jowett argued in 1860 that the meaning of the Bible is solely the meaning in the mind of its original writers and hearers.
• Spinoza undermines classical Protestant doctrines once again, not least inerrancy.

2. The limitations of scholars bracketing their traditions.

2.1 Jews and Christians meet as equals in biblical studies because they meet as historical critics. But in doing so, they don’t meet as Jews and Christians.

• The good.
• Given how poorly Jews and Christians have often related to each other, they should value this opportunity, and take the chance to correct their misconceptions of the other.
• The limitations and difficulties.
• As constructive as this is, Jews and Christians are still meeting only as historical relativists, not as Jews or Christians, and so biblical studies will not, on its own, lead to profound dialogue between the two religions.
• Some have suggested that Jews and Christians have found common ground in historical criticism; but they have really found neutral ground, ground on which neither the Jewish nor Christian religion is at home.
• Biblical studies requires that scholars with diverse religious beliefs become homogenous historians, a requirement that implies the distinctive elements of those beliefs (e.g. the cross) matter so little that they can be ignored.

2.2 Biblical scholars uncover the historical context of the Bible and its composition. These discoveries can be of enormous benefit to Judaism and Christianity. Yet they do so in a manner that suggests the Bible has no meaning, making their religious practice, the practice of others, or the lack of both, of no relevance.

• The good.
• Historical study can and does add vast depth and vitality to religious study of it.
• The limitations and difficulties.
• Scholars with religious convictions restrict themselves to descriptive history and ignore contemporary application. By talking about the Bible only in the past tense, they suggest that the Bible is irrelevant in the present; that it once meant a lot, but now means little. Many institutions try to resolve this problem by claiming that contemporary application is the theologian's domain: historians only recover what the text ‘meant’, and theologians interpret that ‘meant’ into what the text ‘means’. But this distinction doesn’t help, since it suggests that the Bible’s meaning is discovered best by people who investigate its history the least.
• Scholars parasitically rely on the very religious commitments that they ignore. Without the church or synagogue, theology would not be studied at universities; but very few biblical scholars study with those religious institutions in mind.
• Historical critics drive a wedge between the bible’s history, and its traditional or contemporary uses. Jews and Christians think that the past is related to their religions, and they may be right; but that relationship is only problematised by scholars who restrict themselves to showing how alien the past is. Scholars risk burying Judaism and Christianity, as each vanishes into the past in which neither had yet emerged.
• By merely dismembering the bible, scholars destroy its literary unity, and eliminate some of its ability to speak. Making the historical context sovereign, they assign its parts to different periods and schools, to different religions and theologies. What does Isaiah have to do with Qohelet, or the NT with the OT? If the bible were just a collection of fragments, this would not be an issue. But religious traditions hold that the bible is one book, with one coherent story developing through typology. The bible’s fragments speak as parts of a whole. This way of thinking about the bible is ignored by scholars. Nevertheless, it is not a useful solution to wholly drop historical criticism, and do literary criticism instead. While literary criticism looks at the Bible in its unity, Jewish and Christian literary critics will work from different Bibles (Tanakh/OT+NT), and will consequently lose the neutral ground and consensus of historical criticism. Christians cannot read the OT the same way after they have read the NT, just as the first ten books of the Aeneid will never be the same after the last two have been read and Turnus has been slain. Jews and Christians can identify with other’s context, but imagined contexts are only that, and at some stage the consensus of historical criticism is impossible.

3. Conclusion  and prospect: Jews and Christians must maintain both intellectual integrity and spiritual vitality.

• Conclusion. We saw in part one that it is valuable for biblical scholars to bracket their traditions—and that they have often failed to do so. Yet in part two we repeatedly saw that bracketing one’s tradition has limitations: scholars did historical criticism without also thinking about contemporary practice, or dismembered the bible without also considering how it might speak as a whole, or estranged tradition from history by focusing on history without also considering how it relates to religion. The problem is not historical criticism with its bracketing of religious beliefs: the problem is that these ‘without also’s undermine religious beliefs.

• Prospect. We determine, therefore, that practicing Jews and Christians must maintain both intellectual integrity and spiritual vitality. For instance, Christians must not only affirm that different books/chapters belong to different periods, but also affirm the meaningfulness and interpretative relevance of larger contexts (e.g. the rest of the canon), contexts that homogenise the literatures of different periods.