The Methods of Modern Textual Criticism

My last post was intended to give some context to the work that modern Biblical scholars do in order to give us the Bibles that you and I read. In short, I noted that, because writings in the ancient world had to be copied by hand, mistakes and intentional alterations were commonly made while the books that made it into our NT were copied. This leaves us with thousands of various manuscripts and fragments, many of which differ from one another in more than a few areas.

What we have in our English NT are translations of copies that were made over a century after the originals were supposedly written. The earliest copy of Galatians that we have, for example, is dated to around the year 200 CE, some 150 years after the apostle Paul wrote the original.

Thus, the problem that biblical scholars are attempting to solve with much of their work could be summarized as follows: How can we know what the originals of the NT books said considering what we have today are copies of copies of copies that were written much later than the originals and most of which differ from one another due to errors (or deviations from the originals) made by the copyists?

I want to highlight some of the tools that scholars employ in order to help them solve this problem. (The following is summarized from Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus).

There are two categories of evidence that scholars look for when attempting to determine which readings are more likely to reflect the originals: external and internal. External evidence has to do with examining everything about the manuscripts themselves rather than what they actually say. Internal evidence looks into the content of each manuscript.

External Evidence

• Number – How many manuscripts support a given reading of a text? This criterion is rather straight forward. If more manuscripts support one reading over another then this counts as evidence for the reading that has greater representation being more original. However, in isolation this criterion offers us rather weak evidence. The fact that more manuscripts reflect a given reading over another does not ipso facto mean that that reading is more likely original. It simply means that the given reading was copied more than others.
• Age – How old is the manuscript? Older manuscripts are generally believed to reflect the original better than later manuscripts because it’s thought that texts get changed more with the passing of time. However, this criterion, like the ‘Number’ criterion above, must not be applied uncritically. Sometimes manuscripts that are in fact from a later time better reflect the original because they were copied from manuscripts that predate our oldest surviving manuscripts as well as the copies that the earlier manuscripts used. For example, a manuscript from the 8th century may have been dependent on a non-extant manuscript from the 3rd century whereas an earlier manuscript we have from the 5th century may have been dependent on one from the 4th. In this case, the 8th century manuscript would be considered more reliable despite its later date.
• Geography – Where was the manuscript written and how does it compare to manuscripts that originated in other areas? Readings that are attested to in multiple geographic regions are thought to be more reliable. If a number of manuscripts from Antioch, for example, support one reading whereas manuscripts from Alexandria, Rome and the region of Asia Minor support another reading then the reading from Antioch is thought to likely represent a local variation rather than the original.
• Reliability of the manuscript – Has the manuscript proven to be reliable in the past? After rigorously applying the above criteria as well as others to the manuscripts that we have for many years, scholars have been able to show that some manuscripts are more trustworthy than others. For example, if a manuscript from Rome represents one reading and a manuscript from Palestine represents another then scholars will take into consideration how both of these manuscripts have fared in the past with other variant readings. If the manuscript from Rome contains more variants that scholars believe to be reliable then this counts as evidence in favor of the reading in the Roman manuscript. Ehrman’s illustration is helpful: “When you know that a person is prone to lying, then you can never be sure that he or she is to be trusted; but if you know that a person is completely reliable, then you can trust that person even when he or she is telling you something you can’t otherwise verify” (kindle location 2089).

Internal Evidence

• Intrinsic Probabilities – What was the original author of this text most likely to have written based on writing style, vocabulary and theology? If a given reading contains words that can be found nowhere else in this author’s corpus or if the theology seems to contradict what’s known of this author’s theology from his other works then the reading under consideration is more than likely a later scribal addition.
• Transcriptional Probabilities – Which reading is likely to have been the result of a scribe’s  redaction? The more problematic reading is likely to be original based on the fact that later copyists would want to harmonize or simplify any difficult passages they were copying. This criteria, which many scholars believe to be the most reliable text-critical principle, is summarized well in the following adage: The reading that best explains the existence of the others is more than likely to be original.

Copying the Bible

Reading the Bible as we know it isn’t possible without the work of countless scholars who, over the course of the last few centuries, have devoted their professional lives to making it possible for us to do so. This was the point I tried to make in my last post and here I want to elaborate a bit on what that scholarship actually looks like. In short, I want to ask the following question: What sort of work is required in order to give us our Bibles?

I’ll try and answer that question with my next post but first some background.

From the beginning Christianity was a religion of the book. That is, from the outset Christianity was a movement that was centered around a number of writings that the various churches scattered throughout the Mediterranean found authoritative. This can be best explained by remembering that Christianity began as a Jewish movement and Judaism was also a bookish religion. Thus the early Christians, seeing themselves as a part of the Jewish tradition, understood the Hebrew Bible (that is, what Christians today call the “Old Testament”) as very much their own book. We could say that the early Church’s “Bible” was a form of what we today call the Old Testament. There was no New Testament.

It didn’t take long, however, for specifically Christian writings to surface. The apostle Paul began to write around the year 50 CE (some 20 years after Jesus was crucified) and the gospels that are included in our canon were soon to follow, being written sometime between 70-95 CE (Mark being the earliest and John the latest). These writings, along with countless others, many of which didn’t make it into our New Testament, quickly took on an aura of authority and so began to be widely copied and circulated throughout the Roman world.

I want to emphasize that last part: these texts were copied by hand. In a world without the luxury of the printing press, there was simply no other way to copy texts but by rewriting them by hand. This was no doubt a tedious and time consuming task.

But who was responsible for copying the texts of the early Church?

In a brilliant little book called Misquoting Jesus, New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman attempts to answer this very question. One of the things that Ehrman makes clear is that outside the Christian community in the rest of the Roman world, texts were copied by professional scribes or literate household slaves. Generally speaking, the copyists were doing there work for others whether their patron or master. Within the Christian community, however, the texts were copied by those who themselves wanted the text. If a letter or gospel showed up in a Christian community and it was desired then a literate Christian from that community would take the time to copy the book by hand.

It doesn’t require a lot of imagination to see how quickly something like this could get out of hand. And get out of hand it did. The Christian theologian and scholar Origen, writing some 200 years after the earliest Christian texts were produced had this to say about the matter:

The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please. (Origen’s Commentary on Matthew as quoted in Ehrman)

Origen mentions two types of textual alterations here. The first might be described as a simple slip of the pen on the part of the copyist and the second is a blatant changing of what the text said in order to, presumably, bring the text more into alignment with the copyist’s own theological agenda. Both were commonplace in the early days of these texts.

The result of these alterations, whether the result of an honest mistake or a blatant and purposeful changing of the texts, is that today we are left with thousands of different manuscripts and fragments most of which differ from each other in one way or another.

The task of the scholars whose job it is to help produce the Bibles that you and I read, then, is to figure out which of these manuscripts most likely represent the earliest form of the book under consideration. A number of brilliant techniques have been developed by scholars in order to aid them in this task and it’s these techniques that I’ll highlight in my next post.

The Bible And Anti-Intellectualism

I’ve been told more than a few times that I rely too much on the opinions of scholars when it comes to reading and interpreting the Bible. Instead of reading books that talk about the Bible, I’m told I ought to “just read the Bible” and “believe what it says.”

Those who advocate this just-read-the-Bible-and-do-what-it-says approach fail to acknowledge, however, the centuries of Biblical scholarship that have taken place in order to allow them to read their Bible in the first place.

The truth is, all of us, especially those of us who don’t know the Biblical languages (Hebrew and Aramaic for the OT and Greek for the NT), are dependent on the work of countless scholars who have devoted their professional lives to sorting through the wealth of ancient manuscripts in order to determine which ones are the earliest (more on this in another post) and then translating these manuscripts into English so that we can read them in our native language.

There simply is no such thing as “just reading the Bible” apart from the work of modern Biblical scholarship. If you read your Bible in English then you are dependent on the work of modern scholars.

The great irony of anti-intellectual Fundamentalism is that it’s fully dependent on centuries of rigorous intellectual achievement. That is, those who claim we ought not concern ourselves with the work of modern Biblical scholarship but instead on the Bible and the Bible alone are themselves dependent on the very scholarship that they scorn–and often unknowingly!

As if the Bible dropped out of the sky, bound and translated with a nifty 1 year reading plan placed at the back for your devotional convenience…

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See also: Reading the Bible Is More Complicated Than You Think OR Why Proof-Texting Is Bad OR The Lens Through Which I Read the Bible

 

The American Church’s Fear of Death AND How Neurotic Anxiety Makes Us Violent

In my last post I introduced the two different types of anxieties Beck discusses (basic and neurotic) along with the four main cultural shifts that have led to our denial of death in Western culture. The fact that death has become pornographic in our society betrays the fact that we are, deep down, enslaved to a fear of death that manifests itself in neurotic anxiety. Rather than confronting our fear of death we “indulge the collective illusion of a deathless society” (31). In short, we pretend we’re immortal.

Beck notes a number of ways in which this illusion is maintained. First, the illusion of immortality is dependent upon a constant bombardment of distractions, entertainment and comforts, all of which the “invisible hand” of the market is happy to provide for us. The industry of entertainment and distraction is a lucrative one and so the powers that be have a vested interest in keeping us enslaved to our fear of death. Ironically, a great deal of entertainment in America is centered on violence and death. It’s almost as if death has been relegated to another realm altogether. Death is something that happens only in the mythological realm portrayed on the big screen where it is at a safe distance from our real lives which show no sign of death or mortality.

This leads to the second way we maintain the illusion of our immortality, namely, by expunging our lives of every appearance or intimation of death as well as every weakness, debility, ugliness, etc. (McGill quoted by Beck on pg. 32). This idea helps us understand why, for instance, most Westerners are obsessed with looking young. We spend thousands of dollars on cosmetics or even surgery so that we can maintain our youth and not be reminded of the fact that our own death is nearing. In addition, the “American way” says we are to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps in order to achieve success. To ask for help is to be a failure. We all have knowledge of our own shortcomings and flaws however, one of the ways we indulge the collective illusion is by hiding them and, instead, projecting an image of self-sufficiency.

It’s not only our personal lives that are expunged of any reminders of our death but, in addition, our public spaces must be clean, shiny, spotless and devoid of anything that reminds us of our mortality. This is the third way the illusion is maintained: the poor, weak, sick, needy and deformed are relegated to the margins of society. Think of how awkward the sight of a homeless person on a nice suburban street is. Why does this make us awkward and uncomfortable? Because such “unsightly” folks shatter the illusion of perfection and immortality. We’d rather not have to see them; out of sight, out of mind.

Unfortunately, the Western church is nothing short of complicit in maintaining this illusion. Beck in his own words:

Vast portions of American Christianity are aimed at propping up the illusion, giving religious sanction to American death avoidance. We see this in the triumphalism within many sectors of Christianity–the almost manic optimism of church culture that cannot admit any hint of debility, disease, death, or decay. These churches are filled with smiling cheerful people who respond with “Fine!” to any inquiry regarding their social, financial, emotional, physical, or spiritual well-being. Due to many churches’ explicit and implicit religious sanctioning of the American success ethos, church members become too afraid to show each other their weakness, brokenness, failure, and vulnerability. Such admissions are avoided, as they threaten to expose the neurotic lie that sits at the heart of Christian culture and American society–that death doesn’t exist. (32-33).

It’s for this reason that the act of lamenting–of crying out to God in pain, sorrow and grief in the face of the evil in our world–has all but disappeared from modern American (especially Evangelical) worship services. This is true despite the fact that well over half of Israel’s prayers as recorded in the book of Psalms are laments. To lament is to admit that life is not going well, that we are weak and frail in the face of life’s seeming meaninglessness. To lament is to admit that it does not seem like God is in control. These types of prayers were a crucial part of Israel’s worship tradition however, they couldn’t be less a part of the modern Evangelical worship experience.

It’s also in this chapter that Beck introduces the work of psychologist Ernest Becker. There’s a million things that could be said about the way Beck engages Becker’s work but, for the sake of brevity, I’ll just offer a short summary of his ideas. Becker theorized that human culture offers us a sense of meaning and self-esteem in the face of the existential angst that comes with knowing that we will one day die. In other words, every one of us is aware that we are going to die and this knowledge makes it difficult to find meaning in life. Culture, then, steps in with what Becker called a system of heroics which we all attempt to fit into in one way or another and doing so makes us feel like we have meaning and purpose. This system of heroics is essentially a set of life pathways that are commonly agreed to be “virtuous” or “honorable” or “heroic” within the society under consideration. For example, I would argue that in American culture some of our heroic archetypes are the “American Patriot” (one who, in word and/or deed supports the American cause no matter what), the “Self-Made Man” (one who beats the odds and becomes successful [read: “rich”] by means of their own hard work), or the “Cultured Navigator” (one who follows in the footsteps of Christopher Columbus and travels the world).

By fitting into these predetermined heroic “molds” we gain a sense of meaning and are considered a success by the rest of society. Our existential angst is covered over with our sense of personal accomplishment. Thus, Becker argues, our pursuit of self-esteem is driven by our neurotic fear of death. Our identities are ultimately founded on a lie. Whatever it is that makes you feel good about yourself, whatever you’ve accomplished that gives you a sense of meaning in life–this all, like us, will be ravaged by the sands of time.

In my last post I mentioned that the question driving chapter three of this book was the following: How does our neurotic anxiety, which is really just a manifestation of our slavery to the fear of death, make us violent? With Becker’s work on cultural heroics summarized, Beck ventures an answer. In essence, the only way a cultural hero system can “work”, that is, give us a sense of meaning and purpose in the face of life’s seeming meaninglessness, it must be experienced as “absolute, unassailable, true, eternal, transcendent, and ultimate” (41). Thus, whenever we encounter someone with a different cultural hero system we are forced to recognize a scary reality: our cultural hero system is totally and absolutely relative. It is less than ultimate. Our cultural hero system is just one among many. So what is our natural response to those who do not fit into our cultural hero system? Often, we demonize, oppress and marginalize them with the final goal being to completely eradicate them.

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Up Next: Principalities and Powers

How We Forgot About Death AND Why Ash Wednesday Is, Like, The Coolest Tradition Ever

A whole bunch of truth bombs get dropped in chapter 3 of Richard Beck’s The Slavery of Death. It just might be my favorite chapter in the book. In fact, I liked the content of this chapter so much that I’ve decided to dedicate two whole posts to it! It’s here that Beck turns from theology to psychology as he attempts to show that the latter discipline actually confirms what he laid out in part one of the book, namely, that our fear of death is the root cause of our sin.

He begins by introducing two different manifestations of our fear of death: basic anxiety and neurotic anxiety. A brief word on each of these:

• Basic anxiety is fear of death in the form of our need to survive in a world of either real or perceived scarcity. Your basic anxiety causes you to carefully monitor your physical well-being. Beck describes it as your fight or flight response, that side of your instincts that helps you to stay alive when you find yourself in a dangerous situation. You know how you get a bit crabby when you’re really hungry? That’s your basic anxiety telling you that you need to eat or else you’re going to die.
• Neurotic anxiety, on the other hand, is related to our “worries, fears and apprehensions associated with our self-concept, much of which is driven by how we compare ourselves to those in our social world” (28). Neurotic anxiety “sits at the root of our experience of self-esteem, the motive force behind our vigilant monitoring of how we compare to others and to cultural standards” (28).

The question that drives chapter 3 onward is the following: How do these different types of anxiety, which are really different manifestations of our fear of death, make us violent? In other words, how might they be connected to our sinful behavior? When looking at basic anxiety the answer is pretty clear. When we feel physically threatened our sense of self is heightened and we are driven to compete with those around us for whatever it is we need whether it’s safety, food or shelter. When humans don’t have enough of those things that we consider basic necessities then stuff tends to get pretty ugly in a hurry. But what about neurotic anxiety? How does our pursuit of self-esteem make us violent? As I said, this is the question driving the chapter and Beck eventually answers it at the end. However, before getting there there are some preliminary matters that need to be discussed in terms of what neurotic anxiety looks like in our own society.

Beck begins his examination of neurotic anxiety in Western culture by noting four cultural shifts that have taken place since the Industrial Revolution that have changed our view of death.

1. Food. Back in the day food was closely associated with death because people literally killed their own food. Before eating a chicken you had to kill it, bleed it, gut it, skin it, prepare it, etc. When you actually ate the chicken you bit the meat off of the bones. Here in China when you order fish at a restaurant you get the entire fish. The eyes are staring back at you as you pick the delicious meat off its body, reminding you that something had to die in order for your dinner to happen. Beck asks us to compare the entire death-saturated process of killing your own food with eating the pinnacle of Western industrially processed food: a Chicken McNugget. Chicken McNuggets do not, in any way, resemble the living animal that the meat was once a part of. Food, in the West, no longer reminds us of death.
2. How and where we die. Back in the day people used to die at home with their family and close friends present. Every house used to have a “parlor” where funeral services were held for loved ones who passed away. With the advent of the modern hospital, death was removed from the home. Parlors turned into “living rooms.”
3. Relocation of cemeteries. Cemeteries used to be located on family property or at your local park or on your church’s property. Having cemeteries around served as a constant reminder of death. In today’s world we have relegated the cemetery to the edge of town where we don’t have to see it and be reminded of the fact that there’s a coffin-sized plot of land reserved just for us.
4. Modern medicine and longer life spans. The leading cause of death in the industrialized world is degenerative disease that comes with old age. The result of this reality is that we expect to live a long life, something that, back in the day,  only the naive hoped for. Death in our context, especially, an early death (anything shy of, say, 70) is experienced as a shock.

In summary, we have become largely insulated in our everyday lives from the reality of death. Death, even as a subject of conversation is considered a taboo. One who brings up death at the dinner table is dismissed as “morbid” or “dark.” Beck quotes Geoffrey Gorer who coined the phrase “the pornography of death.” The idea here is that death has become something that is off limits or illicit and should, like pornography, be kept out of public view.

What the “pornography of death” as well as the various cultural shifts we discussed above have done is helped to create the illusion that we are immortal, that we will never die. Beck:

What has happened is that all these advances have created an illusion of immortality, making it feel as though death has been banished from our lives. Because as a day-to-day reality, it largely has been. This is why speaking of death is generally avoided, why death is pornographic. Pausing to note death’s existence destroys the illusion. Rather than face the reality of death–which takes some effort in our society, given how death has been delayed–it’s easier to indulge the collective illusion of a deathless society. (31)

In light of all this I couldn’t help but be reminded of the church’s tradition of the Imposition of Ashes that takes place every year on Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent. As a part of the liturgy, participants have ashes smeared on their forehead as they hear the words, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19). Within a culture that wants us to believe we are immortal, each year we hear the opposite.

You are dust. You are mortal. You are going to die one day.

These are subversive words.

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Up Next: How the Illusion Is Maintained, The Ways in Which the American Church Is Enslaved to the Devil, and Culture as a System of Heroic Death Denial

On Christus Victor OR Is the Devil Real?

Chapter 2 of Richard Beck’s book The Slavery of Death wraps up Part One of the book in which he lays the theological foundation for his thesis that death, not sin, lies at the heart of humanity’s predicament. If chapter one makes clear that the Bible sees death as the problem, then chapter 2 attempts to outline what the solution might be. In short, chapter 2 is Beck’s summary of what has been termed Christus Victor–Christ the Victor–which is usually brought up in discussions about the various views of the atonement. For Beck, however, Christus Victor is more than just a theory of atonement. The word “atonement” itself tends to cause us to think of salvation in terms of deliverance from sin whereas, for Beck, salvation is a more holistic reality that includes, primarily, a freedom from the fear of death. To be clear, freedom from sin is included in Beck’s view of salvation. It’s just that, rather than being the root of the problem, sin is understood as a symptom caused by a larger ailment, namely, the fear of death itself.

So what does Christus Victor say about salvation?

In short, a Christus Victor telling of salvation emphasizes the power of Christ to emacipate, liberate, or rescue humanity from the power of death and the devil. Telling the gospel story through the lens of Christus Victor will highlight Jesus’ clashes with the devil throughout his ministry, clashes that eventually culminated in Jesus’ own death on the cross. Beck quotes New Testament scholar N.T. Wright’s book Simply Jesus:

Wherever we look, it appears that Jesus was aware of a great battle in which he was already involved and that would, before too long, reach some kind of climax. This was not, it seems, the battle that his contemporaries, including his own followers, expected him to fight. It wasn’t even the same sort of battle–though Jesus used the language of battle to describe it. Indeed, as the Sermon on the Mount seems to indicate, fighting itself, in the normal physical sense, was precisely what he was not going to do. There was a different kind of battle in the offing, a battle that had already begun. In this battle, it was by no means as clear as those around Jesus would have liked as to who was on which side, or indeed whether “sides” was the right way to look at things. The battle in question was a different sort of thing, because it had a different sort of enemy…. The battle Jesus was fighting was against the satan. (18)

I’ll be the first to admit that when talking about salvation I often hesitate to do so using the themes of Christus Victor. My hesitation mostly arises from my uneasiness surrounding any sort of talk about “the devil” in the context of our modern scientific age. I spend enough time trying to figure out what I mean by the term “God” that I usually find myself without the desire or the energy to entertain thoughts of a supernatural entity that is responsible for the world’s evil. Thus, I was thankful for Beck’s careful analysis of the devil and what he means to communicate by invoking the term. Beck has two responses to those who want to push back against this sort of language:

1. His book is focused primarily on the role of death in human psychology. In other words, Beck’s argument in The Slavery of Death can be followed and understood even if one has no desire to use the language of the devil/satan.
2. Using theological language like “the devil” can be helpful when describing actual realities that we are all familiar with but may lack the terminology to describe.

I found Beck’s latter response to be most intriguing. In essence, even if Satan is not a real person, many of us can bear witness to what it’s like to feel the moral pull of forces that we experience as greater than ourselves. Beck quotes N.T. Wright at length here:

Many modern writers, understandably, have tried to marginalize this theme [of Christ’s conflict and victory over the satan], but we can’t expect to push aside such a central part of the tradition and make serious progress. It is, of course, difficult for most people in the modern Western world to know what to make of it all; that’s one of the points on which the strong wind of modern skepticism has done its work well, and the shrill retort from “traditionalists,” insisting on seeing everything in terms of “supernatural” issues, hardly helps either. As C.S. Lewis points out in the introduction to his famous Screwtape Letters, the modern world divides into those who are obsessed with demonic powers and those who mock them as outdated rubbish. Neither approach, Lewis insists, does justice to reality. I’m with Lewis on this. Despite the caricatures, the obsession, and the sheer muddle that people often get themselves into on this subject, there is such a thing as a dark force that seems to take over people, movements, and sometimes whole countries, a force or (as it sometimes seems) a set of forces that can make people do things they would never normally do. (20-21)

The forms that these “suprahuman” forces take in our lives is fleshed out more by Beck in chapter four on the principalities and powers. For now, let it be enough to say that I appreciate both Wright’s and Beck’s more nuanced view of the devil/satan because it relates to a real-life thing that is experienced by you and me rather than a supernatural reality experienced only by cooky Pentecostal types or an outdated and ancient “mythology” easily dismissed by highly evolved moderns.

With this excursus on the devil out of the way, Beck turns to a discussion of how salvation is evidenced in the life of one who claims to have been set free from the power of death. Once again, he makes use of the Eastern Orthodox’s perspective on the matter. According to the Eastern tradition, “To be set free from the slavery to the fear of death is to be liberated from self-interest in the act of genuine love. Thus the sign of Christ’s victory in our lives over sin, death, and the devil is the experience and expression of love. This is resurrection and life.” (24)

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Up Next: The Denial of Death

Ancestral Sin vs. Original Sin OR Why Sarx Sucks

In my last post I introduced the thesis of Richard Beck’s book The Slavery Of Death, namely, that death, not sin, is at the heart of the human predicament. It’s no wonder that the first place Beck turns to flesh out this contention is to Genesis 3 where we find the story of Adam and Eve, their disobedience and subsequent exile from the Garden of Eden.

In the Western church we have traditionally read this story as the foundation of what we call the doctrine of Original Sin. This doctrine states that because of the disobedience of our first parents, Adam and Eve, all of humanity has inherited a moral stain and sin nature that renders us inherently rebellious toward God and his purposes. In short, the West has read the problem that this story narrates as a moral one. Sin is the causal agent responsible for bringing death into the world.

The Eastern Church has come at this story from a bit of a different angle. In short, the Eastern Orthodox church understands the introduction of death into the world as the primary focus of Genesis 3. The question that is being answered here is not, “Where did sin come from?” but rather, “Where did death come from?” What can we glean from this passage when we approach it with this question in mind?

First, we notice that death was not a part of God’s original intention for creation. It’s seen as an invasion, as something that is attempting to thwart God’s purposes for his good creation. Beck quotes the following passage from the book of Wisdom* to add to the discussion: “For God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world” (2:23-24a NRSV). This fits nicely with what we find in Genesis 3: it’s the serpent who tempts Eve to disobey God hence, “the devil’s envy.”

But this is not the whole story. As Beck quickly points out, the devil needed willing participants in this story. Again, the book of Wisdom:

Do not invite death by the error of your life, or bring on destruction by the works of your hands; because God did not make death, and does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth. For righteousness is immortal. But the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death; considering him a friend, they pined away and made a covenant with him… (1:12-16a, NRSV).

Thus, in the Eastern reading of this story death is the result of both the devil’s envy as well as humanity’s summoning of death. Beck summarizes:

…the primary purpose of Genesis 3 might be to provide a story about the origins of death rather than the origins of sin. Phrased another way, Genesis 3 might be less interested in explaining why humans are “depraved” than it is in explaining why we die. We do inherit a predicament from the Primal Couple, but what we inherit isn’t a moral stain. Rather, we inherit the world they have left us. We are exiles from Eden. The world around us is not as God intended it. Death exists, but this was not God’s plan.

This is the key to understanding why the Eastern Orthodox church reads Genesis 3 as the foundation of what they call the doctrine of Ancestral Sin (rather than Original Sin). Placing the emphasis on death rather than sin, the doctrine of Ancestral Sin says that the reason why death is in the world is because of the Primal Couple’s disobedience (our Ancestors’ sin). As their offspring, we now live in a world that is riddled with death and decay. Thus, the condition we inherit from Adam and Eve is, in Beck’s own words, “less moral than mortal.” 

Beck concedes that in the Genesis 3 story sin precedes death but with death now introduced into creation and Adam and Eve’s offspring now infected with mortality, death becomes the operative force behind humanity’s sin. Beck:

As mortal creatures, separated from God’s vivifying Spirit, humans are fearful and survival-driven animals, easily drawn into sinful and selfish practices. Because we are mortal and driven by self-preservation, our survival instincts make us tragically vulnerable to death anxiety–the desire to preserve our own existence above all else and at all costs.

Paul’s use of the Greek word sarx carries this idea, that death is the cause of our sin, into the New Testament. Sarx is used ninety-one times throughout the course of Paul’s letters and so, given the multitude of contexts in which this word is used, it is somewhat difficult to pin down a meaning. The word is often translated as “flesh” but Beck provides his readers with a helpful list of possible interpretations: “human limitation,” “natural limitation,” “weakness of the flesh,” “the weakness of our natural selves,” “the weakness of our human nature,” “the weakness of our sinful nature,” “sinful nature,” “fleshly desires,” and “sinful flesh.” Citing the work of New Testament scholar James Dunn, Beck brings us to 1 Corinthians 15 which he sees as an important passage when it comes to understanding Paul’s use of sarx. In this chapter Paul is discussing the resurrection and the nature of our bodies after the resurrection: “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power, it is sown a natural body [soma], it is raised a spiritual body [soma]” (vv. 42b-44).” According to Paul, embodiment is not lost in the resurrection. The Greek word soma, meaning “body,” is used to describe what we will have post-resurrection. What is done away with in the resurrection is the perishability of our bodies (v.42b). Beck again: “While soma/body will be carried forward in the resurrection, sarx will be left behind. As Paul explains in verse 50, ‘flesh [sarx] and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.'” In short, sarx, which according to Paul will be shed at the resurrection, is human frailty and mortality, the very thing that Paul sees as the root of human sinfulness.

* The Book of Wisdom is a deuterocanonical (literally means “belonging to the second canon”) book which is read as inspired scripture in both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions but is relatively unknown in the Protestant tradition. It’s important to note, as Beck does, that the book of Wisdom informs most Christian’s understanding of Genesis 3 as is clear from our discussion above. I’ve written a bit on canonicity and what it means for a text to be “authoritative” here.

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Next: Reclaiming Christus Victor

Lent and Death

Nothing says Lent like a good book on death.

So, as a sort of Lenten discipline I’m going to be blogging through Richard Beck’s latest book The Slavery of Death. There are two reasons why I want to blog through the book:

1. Re-reading and summarizing each chapter will help me to process the content of the book and reflect a little bit on how it relates to my own life.
2. I am loving this book and think that it’s well worth a read or, at the very least, more exposure. So if you’re not going to read the book then hopefully these posts serve as a small window into his ideas which, I think, are absolutely worth reflecting on.

If you’ve never read Richard Beck, you should. He’s a psychologist who also happens to have a passion for theology so much of his writing deals with the intersection of these two disciplines. You can familiarize yourself with his thinking by reading his blog which can be found here.

So, onto the goods.

The Slavery of Death begins with a challenge to reconsider how we view the relationship between sin and death. Traditionally for Protestants sin came first and is what corrupted God’s good creation and so led to death. This idea, that death is a consequence of sin, is reinforced by the account of Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden and their subsequent exile and separation from the Tree of Life (Gen. 3). Paul seems to affirm this idea in Romans when he famously declares that the “…wages of sin is death” (6:23).

As I mentioned above, if you’re a Protestant you are more than likely familiar with this way of thinking. Interestingly, however, the Eastern Orthodox church tends to emphasize death as the center of the human predicament. For our brothers and sisters in the Eastern church sin is a result of our slavery to the fear of death. A great deal of Beck’s project in this book aims to reclaim the Eastern perspective on this issue and to shed light on many of the passages in the Bible that are usually neglected by Protestants–those that seem to affirm the notion that death, rather than sin, lies at the heart of humanity’s predicament. Take a look at these passages for instance: 

• 1 Cor. 15:24-26 — Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
• Rev. 20:13-14a — The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and everyone was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.
• Romans 7:24 — What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?
• Hebrews 2:14-15 — Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death–that is, the devil–and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

In each of these passages death seems to be showcased as the main enemy of humanity. In 1 Corinthians death is the “last enemy to be destroyed” before God becomes all in all. In Revelation, death and Hades are the last things to be thrown into the lake of fire. In Romans, Paul attributes his struggles with sin to the fact that he has a body that is subject to death. The author of Hebrews understands salvation as a liberation from the “fear of death.”

Rather than do away with the Protestant formulation (sin leads to death) and replace it with the Eastern formulation (death leads to sin), Beck is aiming to give us a more balanced perspective, one that will allow us to make more sense of the wealth of biblical material that speaks of death as humanity’s main problem. In his own words:

The Bible presents us with a dense and complex causal matrix in which sin, death, and the devil all mutually interact. Consequently, an exclusive focus on sin tends to oversimplify the dynamics of our moral struggles. I argue that a fuller analysis is critical as it will present us with a clearer picture of Christian virtue–love in particular. By exposing the dynamics of “the devil’s work” in our lives, works produced by the “slavery to the fear of death” [Hebrews 2:15], we will be better positioned to resist the satanic influences in our lives, better equipped to do battle with the principalities and powers of darkness, and better able to love as Christ loved us.

It’s no surprise that when you begin to reconsider the foundation of the problem then how we understand the solution changes as well. Thus, salvation becomes more about liberation from our fear of death rather than exclusively focused on the forgiveness of sin. Beck: “Salvation…involves liberation from this fear [of death]. Salvation is emancipation for those who have been enslaved all of their lives by the fear of death. Salvation is deliverance that sets us free from this power of the devil.”

As it turns out, there has been a great deal of ink spilled in the field of psychology over the wealth of negative behaviors that result from our fear of death. This is why I find Beck’s perspective so illuminating: he puts psychology and theology in dialogue with each other and the results are more than interesting.

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Coming Next: Ancestral Sin or Original Sin?

Rethinking Scripture

I’ve always loved the story behind the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. It’s said that in the third century BCE Demetrius of Philerum, director of the renowned library of Alexandria in Egypt, petitioned King Ptolemy Philadelphus to have the sacred Jewish writings translated into Greek in order to fill an apparent gap in his library’s shelves. King Ptolemy, having a passion for the world’s religions himself, granted the request and so had a delegation sent to Jerusalem in order to recruit the most learned of the Jewish scholars and scribes. The tradition has it that 72 men in all agreed to undertake the colossal task of translating the sacred scriptures. Each of these 72 scribes, it is said, translated the text independently of one another, waiting to compare their finished products until all of them had completed the task. By what could only have been an act of God himself, each of the 72 translations are said to have been identical. The Septuagint, as this great literary work would be called, was clearly a divinely inspired translation.

From a historical perspective this story is suspect for obvious reasons. Most scholars posit that, rather than emerging at the behest of a gentile librarian, the Septuagint (which is abbreviated as “LXX” – the Roman numeral for 70) was probably developed over the course of a few hundred years primarily by Alexandrian Jews who were increasingly desirous of a more readily accessible body of Scripture in light of the fact that Hebrew, the language of the ancient texts, was no longer spoken. The lingua franca, thanks to the Hellenization of the Mediterranean by Alexander the Great, was now Greek.

Despite being developed in the Jewish community which no doubt found considerable use for it, the LXX would be far more influential in the Christian community that would emerge some 300 years later (a reality that would cause later Jews to regret the fact that their Scriptures, having been translated into a language that was spoken throughout the gentile world, had fallen into the wrong hands). The “Bible” that all of the writers of the NT would have been familiar with is the LXX. Paul’s famous statement about Scripture being “God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16) is a reference to the LXX, not the Hebrew original. All of the OT references we find in the gospels intended to show Jesus as the fulfillment of the Law are quotations from the Greek LXX.

This last point is especially interesting when one considers the disparity between the LXX and the original Hebrew text. For example, the Hebrew of Isaiah’s famous prophecy about Immanuel can be rendered this way:  “Look, the young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son. Let her name him Immanuel” (7:14). The scribes responsible for translating the LXX took the liberty of translating the Hebrew word for “young woman” into the Greek word parthenos which means “virgin.” Not knowing the original Hebrew and convinced that this prophecy was foretelling Christ’s birth, the gospel writers concocted a fabulous story about Jesus being born of a virgin. You may have heard of it. It could be argued that the entire doctrine of the virgin birth, a doctrine that is now forever enshrined in the creeds of Christendom, is based on a mistranslation!

A brief survey of the history of the LXX raises some questions about the way we view Scripture today. For example, is the LXX inspired Scripture even though it’s a translation of a more original textual tradition? If not, then are the fragments that have made it into our NT inspired? Were the scribes who translated Isaiah, for example, quickly taken up in the Spirit while contemplating how to translate the Hebrew word for “young woman” only to have the Spirit leave them shortly after the translation of that single verse?

To make matters even more complicated, the earliest copies of the Hebrew text we have are those of the Masoretes from the 7th to 11th centuries CE. The Masoretes, being faithful preservers of the oral tradition of the Scriptures that were passed on from generation to generation, decided that it was time their tradition be put on paper and so they transcribed the documents that we use today for the translation of our own English Bibles. The fact that we consider the Masoretic Hebrew text to be the authoritative version of the OT is based on the (not small) assumption that the Hebrew oral tradition was indeed successfully passed down from generation to generation completely untarnished. In fact, modern Christian translators are so committed to this assumption that we overlook the fact that the LXX predates the Masoretic Text (MT) by over 1,000 years! Could it not be argued that even though the LXX is a translation of a more original textual tradition it nevertheless ought to be considered more reliable than the MT simply because of its much earlier date of composition?

Many Evangelical Christians today claim that we ought to defer to the tradition of the Church when faced with difficult matters such as the status of homosexuals in the community of faith or the nature of the atonement. But if we are going to claim tradition as a source of authority then should we not be translating our English Bibles from the LXX since that is what the early church (not to mention the writers of the NT!) considered inspired? Some of these same Evangelicals boldly proclaim that every book that we have in our canon as Protestants (and only the set that we have in our canon) is without error. Again, where does that leave our sisters and brothers from the early Church (or the Eastern Orthodox tradition which uses the LXX)?

Personally, what I would advocate is not that we choose one of the two ancient textual baskets to put all our interpretive and lexical eggs in (although I think, if this is the route we are going to continue to travel, a strong case could be made that it ought to be the LXX over against the MT) but rather that we adopt a more fluid and organic understanding of what Scripture is to begin with. Doctrines like the inerrancy or infallibility of the Bible (but especially inerrancy) become increasingly difficult to hold the more one digs into the history of what we now call the Bible. Not only does one have to assume the original authors were inspired but also that each scribe, redactor, compiler, translator, and Church official responsible for ultimately making the Bible what it is for us today were inspired as well. That’s a lot of fallible and errant human beings involved in making up what some consider to be an infallible and/or inerrant group of texts. Indeed, that’s the stance some choose to take which I find not only incredibly difficult to defend but also completely unnecessary.

The doctrines of infallibility and inerrancy both attempt to protect the divinity of the Bible in the face of its all too human of origins. To say that the Bible is divine and is, therefore, without error is to make the same mistake as those throughout Church history who asserted that Jesus was so utterly divine that some part of his human nature must have been done away with and replaced with pure divinity, be it his will, his ego or whatever.  Luckily, the councils did away with such thinking and the Church continued to affirm the paradoxical union of humanity and divinity in the person of Jesus. The point of the incarnation, at least as I see it, was not to show us that humanity could be replaced with divinity, as if the two were at odds, but rather that to be fully human is precisely what it means to be divine. The two categories are two sides of the same coin. God is to be found no where but right here in the midst of this chaotic, messy and complicated story that we call human history. Thus, the fact that the Bible is complicated and does indeed have mistakes whether historical, scientific or even, dare we say, theological, is precisely the point! We ought to expect nothing less (or perhaps, more) of a book that bears witness to this messy, mysterious and complex God.

To say that Scripture is inspired is to say that, in a unique way, it bears witness to the God we believe was fully revealed in the person of Jesus. To say it is authoritative means that as a body of believers we are committed to reading the text and rereading it, both devotionally and liturgically, wrestling with it, discussing it over a meal, and maybe even at times disagreeing with it but never, despite all the frustrations it may cause us, doing away with it. In other words, the authority of the Bible is not something it inherently holds but is something we grant it as the Church. The Bible is authoritative because we say it’s authoritative and we need no reason beyond that. And none of this has anything to do with whether or not there are any mistakes in the Bible or if it’s scientifically or historically accurate or if the virgin birth was based on a mistranslation.

To close I’ll say this: I have a love-hate relationship with the Bible. For so many reasons I am frustrated to no end with what I find in it–the violence, misogyny, exclusivism, etc. Most of the time these frustrations keep me from even cracking it open as much as I probably should (and when I finally do I’m usually left cursing under my breath). But regardless of my frustration I remain fascinated by the story this book tells. I think it has the potential to allow us to catch a glimpse of a reality that is much greater than the status quo. When it is enacted liturgically I think it offers us an opportunity to take part in something bigger than ourselves, something that calls us beyond the as-is structures of the societies we live in today.

Trayvon Martin and the Event of Justice

In his book The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event  John Caputo introduces the reader to the idea that words like “hospitality” and “God” contain within them an undeconstrucible event that calls into question the way we regularly use those words. In a discussion about the difference between laws and true, undeconstructible justice he says it like this:

To deconstruct the law means to “negotiate the difference” between the law and justice, where the law is thought to be something finite, and “justice” calls up an uncontainable event, an infinite or unconditional or undeconstructible demand. Deconstruction is…a negotiation undertaken between a conditioned name and an unconditional event. To deconstruct the law is to hold the constructedness of the law plainly and constantly in view so as to subject the law to relentless analysis, revision, and repeal, to rewriting and judicial review, in the light of the unconditional demand of justice (27).

What Caputo is getting at is that the laws of the land, laws that are intended to uphold and defend justice, are actually called into question by the word justice itself. Justice is an uncontainable event, something that can only be dreamed of and when we dream of it we realize that our so-called “just laws” fall short of embodying the true nature of justice. Deconstructing the law in light of the event of justice helps us to critique the status quo and dream of a more just world and as we dream of it we begin to look for ways in which we can make our dream come true.

The disparity between the event of justice and the deconstructible laws of our land is clearly illustrated by the story of Trayvon Martin. The trial of George Zimmerman allowed both sides of the story to be told.  Zimmerman was, it is said, given a “fair” trial. The final verdict of the jury to acquit George Zimmerman was given in the name of “justice.”

But the very word “justice”, as Caputo points out, stands in judgment over our entire judicial process. True justice, the event contained within the word “justice”, does not leave an unarmed black boy dead.

True justice does not lead to rioting in the streets.

The event contained within the word “justice” is not satisfied with a simple verdict that says we can all forget about Trayvon Martin now, that it’s been settled, that Zimmerman killed in self-defense and so we can all relax and go on living our lives in peace knowing that “justice” has been served.

True justice asks why opinions about the Trayvon Martin incident are sharply divided along racial lines.

The undeconstuctible event stirring within the word “justice” calls into question the notion of “Stand Your Ground” and causes us to realize that a world in which excuses are made for people to kill each other, a world in which murder is legalized, is really no just world at all.

May we not confuse our “justice” system, which is really a pseudo-justice system, with the true event of justice.

May we be haunted by the true event of justice, always aware of the fact that what we call “justice” in this nation pales in comparison with what the prophet Amos imagined when he said “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (5:24) or when Isaiah speaks of “seeking justice, reproving the rulthless, defending the orphan and pleading for the widow” (1:17).

May we never be satisfied with the ruling of a six person jury as if that’s all that’s required by justice.

Justice calls us to go deeper, to dream bigger, to continue questioning the status quo so that our laws may begin to do justice to the event stirring within the word itself.