(A liberal Christian view)

Dec. 2, 2007

By Harry T. Cook
It is common wisdom that the Gutenberg revolution coupled with the translation of the Bible into the vernacular was a monumentally great thing for the human race, or at least the part of it that calls itself Christian.

It may seem retrograde to say so, but some time ago I came to see all that in a somewhat negative light. Those 15th and 16th Century translations from Hebrew and Greek rendered without the benefit of modern biblical criticism into the vernaculars of the time supposedly made every literate person his or her own interpreter: “If I can read it in hoch Deutsch, I guess it’s not catapult science.”

Moreover, Johann Gutenberg’s marvelous invention mass-produced the Bible in a way that made it appropriate for binding in book form. Thus for 555 years it has been possible to hold significant portions of several cultures’ literary heritage in two hands, and, in a mere turning of a leaf or two, seem easily to move across time by centuries and space by hundreds of pre-modern transportation miles. The ease is deceptive.

Largely ignored is the derivation of the word “bible,” from the German bibliothek, meaning “library.” The “library” Anglophones possess in a single volume is a remarkable collection of documents, some in fragmentary form, which has come to them, via William Tyndale’s lyrical translation, Gutenberg’s press and China’s even older moveable type. Thus they may be fooled into thinking, along with our imaginary 16th Century Thuringer braumeister, that its reading and study isn’t rocket science.

Of course, biblical studies absolutely are the literary equivalent of rocket science. Some of us spent years of our lives immersed in learning the so-called biblical languages (in my case, Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian and Greek – backed up by Latin and German), then in applying that knowledge to fresh translations. We became historians, as well, as we explored the approximate provenance of ancient documents, the times and cultures out of which they came.

One does not simply learn that stuff like a trade and go forth to ply it. Those who wish to be considered in the least credible as an interpreters of the Bible must continue their research over time, keep up with their peers’ work, pay attention to the relevant archaeological and philological enterprises and be willing always, like all scholars worthy of the term, to have their working hypotheses proved wrong.

Thus do I grind my teeth a lot when I hear the television preachers dispense their one-dimensional, skin-deep, uncritical commentaries on the Bible. As the cameras pan rows upon rows of their devotees, you can see them leafing through their own Bibles, nodding their heads in silent “amens.”

What passes for so-called bible study in all too many churches can be summed up in this statement, “Tell us, Matilda, what John 3:16 means to you.” If Matilda says it means her belief in the saving blood of Jesus guarantees her safe passage to heaven, she is praised for her insight. And so on around the circle of ignorance in which everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion.

No, no, a thousand times, NO!” Everyone is not entitled to his or her own opinion in the building of rockets, because there are no opinions in the building of rockets, only facts and ever-evolving procedures. I have not become popular by telling people unschooled in biblical studies that they are not entitled to their own opinions about “what the Bible says” until they can deal with and master at least some of the facts.

Fact No. 1: “The Bible” doesn’t “say” anything. Its texts made their appearance across as much as a millennium, none later than 1900 or so years ago, out of disparate cultures, in different alphabets and languages, out of countless necessities of one kind and another, many of which are lost in the jumble of fragmentary history. The texts have been cobbled together by religious hierarchs starting, perhaps, with Ezra in the mid-fifth century B.C.E. down to the fathers of the third century C.E.

And speaking of fragments: A lot of what one encounters in bibles with their neat columnar type is far more fragmentary than it appears. One sentence seems to flow into another as seamlessly as those in a good who-dun-it. But that is not the case for the Bible. As I have said, the Bible is a library, a collection of documents and parts of documents sometimes of very different kinds, nary a single one of which was translated from anything close to an original.

The vocabularies and syntaxes of the languages from which the documents have been translated are, even to many master interpreters, still largely a mystery. Only approximate translations can be made of a great number of passages, and that only through the haze of receding history and puzzling echoes of lost dialects.

All of which is to say, parish clergy are kidding themselves and their congregations if they don’t own up to this reality. For their part, congregations must insist that those whom they suffer to interpret the Bible for them are given the time and resources to continue their learning and scholarship – if they have had the benefit of either to begin with.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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