Recent Reads
While I am being an invalid confined to the apartment, I have had time to read, and I just finished the second of two books worth mentioning.
First is William Tucker’s Marriage and Civilization (Regnery, 2014). While you might not embrace Tucker’s early evolutionary view of the development of monogamy in animal kingdoms and pre-historical Man, I am sure you will find his analysis of the role of polygamy, conquest and violence quite fascinating as he looks at the history of China, India and Islam. The insights are penetrating and shocking, especially as he draws back the curtain on contemporary American parallels. I’ll have more to say about some of his material as I reflect on this work, but it is enough to note that his analysis explains why the biblical model is monogamous and why the patriarchs rarely practiced it. I am anxious to apply his insights to the book I am trying to write about David and Solomon.
Second is the work of Craig Allert, A High View of Scripture? (BakerAcademic, 2007). I wish I had availed myself of a copy of this when it first became available. I would have saved a lot of time working my own way through the complexities of the formation of the Christian Bible canon. What Allert shows, in detail, is that the Bible as we know it today in the Protestant and Catholic versions of Christianity is far more doctrinally influenced than it is historically understood. What I mean is this: Our Bible is not the result of spiritually-led men instructed by God to gather a collection of sacred material into a canon of faith and practice. It is much more like the case of progressively whittling away a much larger corpus of acknowledged sacred writings until what was left fit the theological doctrinal positions of the Church. In other words, during the first 400 years of Christianity, the canon was still not fixed and various documents that no longer appear in the Bible were accepted and used within the faith community. But doctrinal wars changed that and over time material that did not conform to the Church’s interpretation of the faith actually altered what books were acceptable. Canon is the result. As Allert says, “The Bible is the church’s book, and as many of the fathers show, the church has the responsibility to properly interpret the Bible because this same church formed it” (p. 145). That is an amazing claim. It suggests that the canon is really also doctrine and that this canon called the Bible is to be understood only as the Church deems necessary. If this is true, then one must not be too surprised that the Hebrew Scriptures take a back seat to any apostolic material and that the apostolic material was viewed as anti-Semitic for centuries.
Allert’s work goes a long way to explaining the inconsistency of claiming inspiration and inerrancy as necessary and complimentary, but it does even more to show that the very idea of canon played almost no role in the earliest believing communities, Christian or Jewish. Allert leaves us with the suggestion that the Church is the final authority on the meaning of the biblical text because the Church invented the canon over the progress of several centuries. But this, it seems to me, leave us with an even bigger question. If the biblical canon today is really the product of doctrinal positions of the Christian Church, why should we accept it as the sole authoritative text when we know that the earliest believing communities did not? This is especially true when we consider that the authors of most of the documents in the “New Testament” were not Christian. Why should we accept an exegesis of the text based on the doctrines of a religion that did not exist when the texts were written? And if we were to read these texts—and all the others that circulated in the first century—as Jewish, would we draw the same conclusions about the Messiah, the community and the faith that have dominated Christianity for twenty centuries?
More to come over the next few weeks.
