Pavia: History and Faith – An Opening Dialogue

A few days ago I posted some off-hand remarks about paintings on a wall in a church in Pavia.  The flood of reaction was interesting.  Almost all of it was about the “accuracy” of biblical history.  Some readers were so upset they determined to leave the community.  Others were challenged to rethink their assumptions.  I am always a bit surprised when my remarks touch such sensitive theological nerves, so I thought it might be useful to have more discussion about this concern.

Let’s talk about history. Let’s talk about the way we view history, the importance we give to it and the answers we expect to find from it. But, first, let’s talk about the paradigmatic nature of history.

For starters, history is an invention of the Hebrews. Before the Hebraic view, Man was concerned with what Maurice Eliade calls, “the myth of eternal return.” Before the Hebrews, we just went around in a gigantic circle, always returning to the primal beginning, starting over. We have remnants of this idea in contemporary life. New Year’s celebration, birthdays, yearly religious rituals, etc. all keep the “circle of life” going. But the Hebrews changed that. They invented the idea that time is going somewhere; it is not just an endless circle, it has a purpose and destination. In Hebrew literature, this destination is the Messianic Age. Events proceed in the direction of this conclusion. What we do actually matters because it is not simply the repetition of all that has come before.

Of course, you can find elements of both of these views of time (circular and progressive) in the Bible. Ecclesiastes is an example of “nothing new under the sun.” Isaiah is not. The point is that the evidence of historical events doesn’t determine direction. We can see the events as part of a circle or we can see them as directionally unique. The choice is determined by the paradigm. In other words, how we see the events is not built into the events themselves. This should be patently obvious. If the events of history were self-interpretive, then anyone who examined those events would come to the same conclusions about the meaning of those events. But this is not the case, even for the people who experienced the events. We need only consider Peter’s explanation of the events in Acts 2 to notice that the events themselves did not force uniform conclusions. In order for history to have meaning, it must be interpreted. How it is interpreted is a function of the paradigm of the author, the audience or the reader.

This introduces another important element in historical investigation. History is typically written by the winners. History is not the complete catalog of everything that ever happened. The victors determine what is recorded as important. Other things are ignored. This means that historians select events based on their paradigmatic view of what matters. No one really cares about the growth of wheat in the twenty-third acre of Sam Jones’ farm in Iowa unless an historian decides that this particular acre has significance. Then it matters.

The Bible is filled with this kind of selectivity. For example, Matthew deliberately modifies the genealogy of the Messiah in order to make it fit a prior paradigmatic commitment to gematria. No scholar doubts this. It is easily confirmed. Some scribe in later centuries added words of Trinitarian theology to what the King James version printed as 1 John 5:7. No scholar doubts this either. The list could be expanded. Every apostolic author either modifies, selects or re-translates cited passages from the Tanakh in order to make those passages fit the present context or argument of the author. This was completely typical because these authors (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, etc.) were not interested in accurate citations of the Tanakh. They were interested in getting across their points, and if that meant changing a bit of the text, that was perfectly acceptable. They were not trying to fool their audiences. They were simply doing what everyone knew they were doing, that is, following the acceptable cultural rules for use of the Tanakh in rabbinic context. They were writing according to their culture, not ours! As soon as we force their writings to fit our ideas of accurate citation, we create conflicts that did not exist in the authors’ minds.

The point we’re making is this: the doctrine of inspiration associated with conservative Christianity recognizes these facts but says very little about their implications. Instead, the doctrine is supported by the claim that a sovereign God would not allow deliberate “mistakes” and misrepresentations in the sacred text. As a result, most believers have no idea that the text actually contains alterations and manipulations. They choose not to believe this because they have predetermined to believe the doctrine. The question is why?

I suggest that one of the principal reasons we hold on to a doctrine of inspiration that ignores the implications that the authors of Scripture had political and personal agendas that caused them to selectively alter the text in both citations and events is because we are products of a Western worldview. Fundamental to that worldview is the idea of certainty. We believe wholeheartedly that if something is true then it is always true and can never be otherwise. Furthermore, we believe that the Bible fits this definition of truth, and since its ultimate author is God, it is therefore guaranteed to be true. The idea of certainty is foundational to our Christian doctrine of inspiration. It claims that because God speaks the truth and the Bible is His word, the Bible must be absolutely true. The Bible must be certain. It cannot be doubted without serious jeopardy to the soul because doubting the words of the Bible is the equivalent of doubting God.

This is why conservatives play the “original documents” card when confronted with copy errors in the fragments, and why they dismiss the textual evidence of altered citations in the apostolic material. The claim of total accuracy cannot be established on the basis of any of the texts we have today, so it is projected into the ancient past to documents that we do not have. The justification of this attribution of total accuracy to documents that cannot be examined is based on a presupposition, a theological idea, not on evidence.

When it comes to history, the debate gets much more intense. It’s one thing to say that if we had the original documents all the copyist errors would be removed or that the textual alterations of the apostolic authors were simply citations from the LXX, but it’s quite another to say that the accounts of Solomon’s wealth and power are not supported by any archeological evidence so far. That causes panic in a world were the Bible must be certain and true. It results in considerable effort to re-date the archeology and/or claims that we just haven’t looked hard enough (that is, the real evidence that would support the biblical record is still buried somewhere in the sand). It’s possible that continued archeological investigation will confirm Solomon’s 37 trillion dollars in gold, but the idea that the text must be regarded as true even though no evidence has been found is a paradigmatic commitment based on a theological idea. The problem is not the evidence or lack of evidence. The problem is the paradigm that generates this kind of commitment.

This is not a trivial issue. For most conservative Christians, the veracity of the Bible is an “all or nothing” deal. If what the text tells us about the conquest of Canaan in the book of Joshua is not factually accurate, then the whole Bible is suspect. And since the faith of most believers in anchored in the book, the certainty of faith collapses if the book isn’t absolutely accurate. It is little consolation that Joshua’s account might not be historically accurate given the time and the audience of the author. If Joshua isn’t true, then God didn’t oversee the account to guarantee it, and consequently, the same might be said of all the rest of the biblical text. Suddenly our insistence on certainty is shaken. We don’t know what to believe. This threat usually pushes us to dismiss all scholarly historical inquiry and retreat to a pre-determined faith based on faith. “I’m comfortable with what I believe,” is the siren call of those who no longer desire to investigate.

We should notice, however, that the Tanakh does not even have a word for certainty. The idea of absolutely indubitable evidence is a Greek idea. It stems from the Greek conflation of mathematics and reality. In other words, the Greeks attempted to reduce the external world to mathematical conformity. And in mathematics, some things are absolutely certain. Therefore, if our worldview is based in the idea that mathematics is the true language of the universe, we will inevitably be drawn to the conclusion that events in the world are best described with the same terms as mathematics. The long philosophical history of the “problem of the external world” is witness to the effort of Greek thinking to reduce the world to mathematical structure. Because this effort has been so successful in producing technological advances, we think that it must be true. In other words, we think that the cell phone (which is based on mathematical algorithms) is an accurate representation of the world, to stretch the point.

But Eastern thinking, and in particular Middle Eastern Semitic thinking (like the Bible), does not share this view of reality. Richard Nisbett’s book goes a long way to show that even in the contemporary world, Eastern thinking is much more holistic. It embraces contradiction as a part of the much larger view of causal influence. It is far less concerned with concepts like certainty than it is with problems of behavioral choice. In fact, Moses’ declaration, “Choose life,” should probably be written with the emphasis on the word “Choose” rather than on the word “life.” Why? Because in the East, what matters most is the choice to believe, not the “evidence” that compels believing. An Easterner could not write a book titled “Evidence that Demands a Verdict” because for an Easterner, evidence doesn’t demand anything. The critical element is not the evidence but rather the choice initiated by the experience and the evidence. Easterners are concerned about how to live, not about why we believe. Apologetics is a Greek endeavor.

Try reading the Bible from the perspective of the authors, all of whom were Eastern, Semitic thinkers. Instead of compilations of facts used to argue for propositional doctrines and confessions, the text is about determining the proper course of action in the world. That means that the text is concerned with the sitz im laben of the audience, that is, what was happening to the people who were the intended hearers of these words. The text is an effort to change their choices. If we miss this point, we will read the text out of context. For Easterners, history is not a recollection of events. It is an effort to understand what those past events mean to us now! We should notice that the men whom Peter confronted do not ask, “How did this happen?” They ask, “What does this mean?” They are from the East, not the West.

So now the critical question, the one that makes Western thinkers so upset. “Did the events in the Bible really happen?” Notice how Greek this question really is? It assumes that the biblical record must describe past events with historical accuracy. But that assumption already includes the Greek idea of history. If the Easterner answers, “What does it matter?” the Western thinker throws up his hands and raves about certainty and accuracy. In other words, the Westerner retreats to the paradigm, not realizing that the Easterner’s statement is not about the accuracy of the text but rather about the application of the message to behavior. Does it matter if the events actually occurred? Of course it matters, but for the Easterner it matters because the events give instruction about how to live, not because they portray some external observer’s recording of temporal occurrences. The Bible is not the evening news. The stories in the text are more than a record of events. They are insights into human behavior and it is this element that comes forward in Eastern thinking. There is a good reason why Jewish thought deals with ethics rather than apologetics.

Western believers will be distressed by this explanation. They will insist that the focus must be on the historical accuracy of the record. They will read the text according to their paradigmatic presuppositions and conclude that if all we have are stories of insights into human interactions with God, we have no sure foundation for belief. The Easterner, of course, will point out the “all or nothing” fallacy in this reaction. But it won’t do much good. Why? Because as long as we approach the text from the perspective of the West, we will fail to see its fuller impact. We will be caught in our own concerns about Western ideas of truth, accuracy and certainty. We will actually worship the text rather than the God revealed in the text. We will be incapable of understanding the faith of Abraham, a man who had no text at all. For the West, belief is a function of propositional accuracy, not devotion to a relationship. Heschel pointed this out years ago when he remarked that Christianity was a creedal religion, not a relational experience.

Can we now see that this insistence on Western ideas of history is a function of the paradigm? Can we now appreciate that Eastern thinkers are much more concerned with the relationship than the accuracy? Can we embrace the thought that accuracy is secondary?

Or does all this still make you feel so uncomfortable that you just want to pretend the Bible is a special book guaranteed to be historical accurate because God said so?

I am sure that many readers will still want to know if my thoughts are aligned with their thoughts.  They will want to know if I think that the events in the Bible really happened.  They won’t be satisfied until they know that I hold the same view of historical accuracy that they do.  So if I write, “Yes, I do believe that the gospel accounts speak about events that really occurred in the life of the Messiah,” they might be less fearful.  But if I write, “I’m not so sure about the details in the life of David and Solomon,” they will feel the need for Western history pressing upon them.  But I’m not here so that you can be assured that what I believe is the same as what you believe.  I’m here to investigate!  I’m here to look deeply into those assumptions we make about what we believe and ask why we believe these things.  In the end, we probably believe the same things about biblical history, but I want to understand why we believe these things.  I want to know why we choose to believe, not just what we believe.  If that’s not sufficient for you, then you will need to find another way.  That’s okay too.  Every path is a bit different even if they are all in pursuit of the same goal.