‘The Rise and Fall of the Bible’: Rethinking the Good Book
Salon book reviewer Laura Miller dives into a new book on the Bible:
[…] In his new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book,” religion professor Timothy Beal describes all the angst and doubt that Bible reading provoked in him during his youth, as well as the frustration many American Christians experience as a result of their own encounters with the book. This doesn’t prevent them from buying truckloads of the things — Beal notes that “the average Christian household owns nine Bibles and purchases at least one new Bible every year” — but actually reading them is another matter. Beal believes that’s because today’s Christians are seeking a certainty in their holy book that simply isn’t there, and shouldn’t be.
“The Rise and Fall of the Bible” is a succinct, clear and fascinating look at two phenomena: what Beal calls “biblical consumerism” — in which buying Bibles and Bible-related publications and products substitutes for more meaningful encounters with the foundational text of Western Civilization — and the history of how the book came to be assembled. The latter story, albeit in a severely mangled form, came as a revelation to many readers of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel “The Da Vinci Code.” Beal, who teaches an introductory course in biblical literature at Case Western Reserve University, estimates that more than half of the students who come to his classes know more about the Bible from Brown’s conspiracy-crazed potboiler than from “actual biblical texts.”
Well, if one could consider spaghetti merely to be “a severely mangled form” of wheat then I suppose Dan Brown’s book could be considered a form of historiography… but the point Beal has still stands - most American Christians are pretty clueless about how the Bible came to be. (To be fair, Ms. Miller does go on to diss Brown’s ideas.)
[… W]ith “The Rise and Fall of the Bible,” Beal wants to argue against the common perception of the Bible as God’s infallible handbook on how to live, “totally accurate in all of its teachings” — a view, incidentally, that nearly half of all Americans (and 88 percent of “born again” Christians) claim to believe. Beal is the sort of Christian who doesn’t want to raise his son to “think that creationism is a viable alternative to evolutionary biology or that homosexuality is sinful,” but he is as skeptical of liberal attempts to simplify the Bible as he is of the more predominant right-wing reductionism. He would rather see his co-religionists embrace the fact that the Bible is full of contradictions and inconsistencies and come to regard it not as “the book of answers, but as a library of questions,” many of which can never be conclusively resolved.
What Miller rightly labels as “right-wing reductionism” explains well the deeply religious nature of the current atavistic political movement in this country that labels itself “conservative” or “Tea Party”. Besides being revisionist in American historical outlook, these people are also revisionists when it comes to religious history.
[…] Even more insidious, in Beal’s eyes, is the trend over the past couple of centuries away from word-for-word translations of the Bible and toward “functional equivalence” and “meaning driven” translations. These considerably fiddled-with versions iron out the wrinkles and perplexities in the ancient texts and nudge them closer toward the advice, directives and “values” so many people expect from their Bible. Beal argues that the Bible industry resorts to this sort of thing precisely because the Bible doesn’t offer cut-and-dried guidance — or Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, as one popular modern acronym would have it.
While I empathize with Beal’s distrust of the American religion industry which wants to push new Bible translations continually (to sell more books), I will note here that “functional equivalence” arises from and is driven by the nature of human languages, and that modern languages can not be mapped to ancient Hebrew and Greek on a “word-for-word” basis. I fear that Beal is letting his own biases color his analysis too much here.
[…] Beal thinks the current boom in biblical consumerism amounts to a “distress crop,” the last great efflorescence of the old authoritative ideal before people move on and learn to embrace biblical ambiguity. I’m not so sure. Craving the certainty and absolutism of fundamentalism is a fairly common response (across many religious faiths) to the often terrifying flux of modern life. If certitude is the main thing American Christians are seeking when they turn to the Bible, then they’re unlikely to tolerate, let alone embrace, Beal’s “library of questions” model. You can learn a lot about how the Bible was created in the past 2,000 years, and about the many strange forms it has taken in the present, from “The Rise and Fall of the Bible.” But where it’s headed in the future is a mystery much harder to solve.
I agree with Ms. Miller in that the goal of so much of current American Christianity is to find shelter in certitude, and furthermore that the current culture in this country is torn apart by those atavists who wish for the certainty of the past versus the modernists who want to progress towards the future.
And, I too am skeptical that our society will anytime soon find a majority of actively self-proclaimed “Christians” embracing biblical ambiguity.
