IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO

Jerry Harkins

Wadoo!  Wadoo!

Zim bam boddle-oo!  Zim bam boddle-oo!

Hoodle ah da waah da!  Hoodle ah da waah da!

Scatty wah! Scatty wah!

                                                                                                   —Sportin’ Life

Sportin’ Life [1] is not a biblical scholar but rather the purveyor of Happy Dust to the denizens of Catfish Row.  But he is certainly right that, “De t'ings dat yo li'ble / To read in de Bible…It ain’t necessarily so.”

You don’t have to be a skilled copy editor to find contradictions, ambiguities, blatant immorality and logical fallacies in the Bible.  For example, you may have been taught that Jesus came to bring peace on earth and good will to men [2].  But the man himself is supposed to have said, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” [3].  Luke (12:49-52)  records the same teaching even more dramatically by prefacing it with these ideas:  “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!  But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed!  Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.  From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three.”  Granted, a few days earlier he had said, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9).  But a few days after that he reverted to his original idea, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).”  A sentiment shared by every maniacal tyrant through history!

I have often said the evangelists needed better copy editors.  Without doubt, the principal theme of the four gospels is love which is said by Jesus to be the greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37-38, Mark 12:29-31).  We are told to “…love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).  But this did not apply to everyone.  When the disciples asked him why he taught in parables he said, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.  But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven” (Mark 4:11-12).

This sort of thing goes on and on.  Jesus says he has not come to abolish the old law and then immediately proceeds to re-write four of the ten commandments and to add a prohibition of casting pearls before swine.

Suppose Jesus had added a sentence like this to the Sermon on the Mount:  “You have heard it said of old, ‘…the pig, though it has a divided hoof, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you.  You must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you.’  But I tell you that unless you eat bacon cheeseburgers on the Sabbath, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”  Can you imagine the learned essays the theologians would have written about this down through the centuries?  You would undoubtedly learn more about the cryptic meanings of ancient Hebrew verbs than you wanted to know.  Hundreds of learned essays would paraphrase the famous remark of President Clinton, “It depends on what you mean by eat.”

Bible bashing is an ancient sport but it is no more sporting than shooting sitting ducks.  A lot of it, of course, is pure fiction beginning with the first chapter of Genesis.  Its themes were not revealed to a man named Moses by a God named Elohim or Yahweh but were borrowed and bowdlerized from the mythologies of the neighboring tribes of the Israelites.  Some of the stories are probably true at least in the sense that some of the stories in the Odyssey and the Iliad are based on real history.  But not the story of Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant cannibal or, sadly, the one about the lovely Sirens whose song would “spellbind any man alive” [4].  Similarly, Noah did not build an ark and the world did not flood to a depth of fifteen cubits [5].  Joshua’s priests did not blow down the walls of Jericho with seven trumpets and the shouts of their soldiers [6].  Nor did the sun stop in its orbit around the earth when he fought the Amorites, possibly because the sun does not orbit the earth.  Jesus was not a magician.  He did not raise the dead or turn water into wine or feed five thousand with five loaves and two fishes.  He was an itinerant preacher whose words were recorded many years after his death by scribes who had never met him and who forged the names of disciples and other followers who had [7].  These scribes had heard the stories and sayings at second and third hand.  The only contemporary who wrote parts of the New Testament was Paul who also never met Jesus but claimed to have been granted a private interview with him in heaven during which he corrected the mistakes being made by his disciples (2 Corinthians 12).  However, Paul actually quotes Jesus only twice, both in brief aphorisms.

The King James Version of the Bible consists of 80 books, 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament and 14 in the Apocrypha.  It has a bit more than 31,000 verses and nearly 775,000 words.  Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew beginning perhaps around the time of King Solomon (r. 970 – 931 BCE).  Christian scholars believe the Apocrypha were also written around that time.  It is believed that the New Testament was written between 50 CE and 100 CE with significant editing as late as 400 CE. Finally, there are scores of additional Jewish and Christian texts many of which were considered for inclusion in the canon but ultimately omitted.  Many of these were preserved by Gnostic Christians in Egypt who also preserved the most complete copies we have of the Pauline epistles.

In spite of everything, the Bible is the most influential book ever produced.  It is the unquestioned foundation of the entire Judeo-Christian enterprise and the principal inspiration of European and Middle Eastern culture.  There is nothing like it, not the Tao-te Ching, not the Vedic texts and not even the Quran which can be thought of as the final part of the revelation tradition begun by the Bible.  There are, however, two fairly obvious problems with it:

First, reader beware.  Every single author who had a hand in its creation also had an ax to grind.  Now this may be true of any book purporting to be non-fiction but the Bible is more explicitly contentious than most other works.  Paul’s epistles constitute a running, fractious debate with the apostles regarding the fundamental nature of the new sect.  Mark (whoever he was [8]) wrote the first gospel.  Matthew thought Mark’s version was not rigorous enough while Luke thought it missed the poetry of the good news.  Believers often call these the three “synoptic” gospels implying that they are similar in content, structure and wording.  But their differences are much more interesting.  You can check out, for example, the different accounts of the resurrection.  How many went out to the tomb that morning?  Who were they?  Who met them at the entrance?  What exactly did they find?  If you’re tempted to think these are trivial details, please remember the resurrection is the lynchpin of the Christian faith.  As St. Paul says, “If Christ be not risen, then is our faith in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14).  Well, some translations say it’s your faith that’s in vain.  In any event, one might expect the “synoptic” gospels to agree on what happened that first Easter.  But your expectation is in vain;  they do not.

Second, the synoptic gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are factually unreliable.  They are the beginning of a hagiographic tradition that persisted in Christianity for more than fifteen hundred years.  Their primary purpose is not education but edification and in this respect they differ markedly from both the Old Testament and the Epistles.  The stories, parables and miracles ascribed to Jesus, including the resurrection, have almost exact counterparts in multiple cultures throughout the world and in the lives of the early Christian saints.  From a literary point of view, this should not be surprising in that there are only a limited number of themes that have attracted the attention of writers, philosophers and historians.  Theologically, the similarities point to the almost universal human sense of the divine.  From a narrower, purely Biblical perspective, they illustrate the intense intellectual and cultural evolution that occurred throughout the eastern Mediterranean basin in the millennium leading to the birth of Christ.  An example is the Book of Job which is now thought to have been written in the middle of that millennium about events imagined to have taken place a thousand years earlier.  Job has many close parallels in neighboring cultures, among them:  the Institutions of Amenemope is a similar and roughly contemporaneous work from Egypt;  A Dialogue About Human Misery is a slightly earlier treatment of the Job story from the Akkadian Empire;  I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom is an even closer telling from nearby Mesopotamia dated about 1000 BCE.  The story of evil befalling a good person is profound but Job, the carrier of the story, is a fictional or mythical character.  At the same time, he is Everyman.  There has never been any shortage of people who had reason to cry, “Why me, O Lord?”  No amount of scholarly exegesis about Job’s patience or lack thereof or the identity of the “Redeemer” (go’el) upon whom he relies can alter the fact that Job is a victim of Jehovah’s injustice just as Odysseus is a victim of Poseidon’s injustice.

Perhaps it was Mark Twain who claimed, “God created man and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”  But from the beginning, God has been a necessary explanation for everything we don’t understand, including good and evil.  The Bible struggles with such issues and offers the reader both wheat and chaff.  There are, for example, better strategies than turning the other cheek, plucking out an eye that looks at a woman with lust or weeping and gnashing one’s teeth because of a failure to wear the right clothes to a banquet you were dragooned into in the first place.  The laborers in the vineyard would have been better advised to form a union and the last thing the good shepherd should do is to lay down his life thereby leaving the wolf free to dine on the sheep at its leisure.  But the beatitudes, the corporal works of mercy, the golden rule and the great commandment to love one another are the perfect recipe for building the shining city on a hill.  Read chronologically, the Bible tells the story of the Jews gradually coming to the recognition that God is love and that may be the most hopeful idea that the human race has ever had.

Love is not some adolescent sentiment found in saccharine Valentine cards. It is not sexual attraction or infatuation although it can emerge from such over time [9].  Rather it is a sense of fellow-feeling that expresses itself across a wide spectrum of emotions.  Most generally, it is the ability to stand in the shoes of others, to feel their emotions and to act with sympathy toward them.  Sympathy, in fact, is the word used by Adam Smith, the preeminent genius of the Scottish Enlightenment, as almost a synonym for love.  In his first major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he argued that sympathy brought about three great virtues, prudence, benevolence and justice which, together with self-interest, formed the basis of what Rousseau would call the social contract three years later.

Like Smith, we need to be careful here.  Love is by no means the strong force of the social contract.  That, of course, is self-interest or, more precisely, what is perceived as essential to self-interest [10].  But untempered by sympathy, self-interest very quickly becomes toxic.  As Smith said, we do not gain our supper through the benevolence of the butcher.  At the same time, the butcher cannot long survive without the good will of the community which will ameliorate any temptation he may have to cheat [11].  For Smith, good will or benevolence tempers self-interest thereby enabling what he famously referred to as the “invisible hand.”

Ultimately, we are trying to deal with extraordinarily complex concepts which are impossible to quantify.  The Bible deals with nebulous intimations of a reality beyond our senses.  How should we behave and why?  Is there a purpose to our existence?  We seem to be born with a sense of alienation or estrangement from something very important, something many people have called God.  Entire mythologies have been built up to explain this something including the oxymoronic idea of an uncaused first cause who or which continues to act in history.  The Bible is a record of the thinking that has been done on these matters.

To return to a chronological reading of the western scriptures, the Israelites appear to have borrowed the idea of monotheism from the Babylonians who worshiped Baal, a fearsome and unforgiving deity.  When Genesis was written, the historians portrayed Yahweh as having had a similar sociopathic personality.  He slaughtered the innocent including the innocent women and children of Sodom and Gomorrah in spite of his pledge to Abraham not to do so.  He committed genocide with his flood.  He toyed with Abraham and Isaac and forced Jeptha to sacrifice his only child (Judges 11: 30-39).  He tormented Job, a blameless and upright man who “feared God and shunned evil” (Job 1:1) merely to win a whimsical bet with Satan.  But Job is a turning point in that, unlike Abraham who begs obsequiously for God to spare the innocent Sodomites, Job confronts his tormentor and is finally restored [12].  From then forward, God begins to realize that love is a two-way street.  And as embarrassing as it may be, God needs the love of his creatures [13].

Until recently, the idea that God is love (1 John 4:16) was stoutly resisted because it is the same thing as saying love is God.  As indicated above, both the Old Testament and the New are replete with examples of this resistance.  When God is about to give Moses the ten commandments, he says, “The Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.  Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished;  he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” (Exodus 34: 6-7)  There is only one explanation for the apparent contradictions.  The Bible has been extensively edited by those with a vested interest in God’s wrath.  Almost every example of God’s love is quickly paired with an example of his irrational wrath.

Cui bono?  Who gains from a fearsome, mercurial even capricious God?   If many are called but few are chosen what is a pilgrim to do?  How do you get to the promised land from this world of trials and temptations when your God seems so arbitrary?  Neither saint nor sinner has a chance without the brokerage of the anointed, the magic of the sky pilot.  Neither Porgy nor Bess can escape the evil strewn either by the distant white demi-gods of Catfish Row or the devil in the guise of the aptly named Sportin’ Life whose Happy Dust brings only despair.  Interestingly, there is no God figure in the folk opera but there are several priests, Clara and Serena among them.  They pray and lead the community in prayer but to no effect.  The prosperity of the priesthood depends on the fear of God.

It is often said that Martin Luther translated the Bible into German so that common people would be able to read it and that was likely part of his motivation.  But he also had a variety of axes to grind to make scripture consistent with his own theology.  Among other things, he tinged his version with some not-so-subtle anti-Semitism.  He even refused to acknowledge that Jesus made his final trip to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover.  Instead, he translated the Hebrew word Pesach as Ostern, Easter.  He did not bother to explain to the common people why Jesus, a Jew, would celebrate an event that was yet to occur.  The Bible and all its translations are, first and foremost, products of their times and places and of the preconceptions and  prejudices of those who produced them.  The wisdom it contains is real and remains vital today even if it must be carefully separated from what ain’t necessarily so.

Notes

1.  From Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, 1935.

2.  Luke 2:14.  Some versions translate it as “good will to men” while others say “to men of good will” which is different entirely. The Greek and Latin versions are not ambiguous; it is the men who must display good will.  Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical quotations in this essay are from the New International Version, Biblica, 1973.

3. Matthew 10:34-36.

4.  The Odyssey of Homer translated by Robert Fagles, Book 12, Line 45, Viking, 1996.

5.  Fifteen cubits is only  about 22 feet but spread out among the 197 million square miles of the earth’s surface, it’s a hell of a lot of water especially since it has to flood Mount Everest and the Grand Canyon.  Where did it all come from and, more importantly, where did it all go when God finally pulled the plug?

6.  Actually the Bible says they were rams’ horns or shofars in which case the cacophony probably drove the inhabitants crazy enough to tear down the walls themselves.

7.  Two of the Evangelists, Matthew the tax collector and John were said to have been among the twelve apostles.  Mark was thought to be an associate of Peter, some say his son-in-law.  Luke was a physician and may have been literate.  He is also said to have written the Acts of the Apostles.  Both works underwent heavy editing for at least two hundred years after they were written.  None of these works however was written before about 60 AD, nearly thirty years after the death of Christ.

8.  No one really knows who “Mark” was.  One ancient and widely help opinion is that the gospel that bears his name was an amalgam of Peter’s sermons in Rome.  Peter is thought to have been crucified in 64 CE and internal evidence suggests the gospel was written between 65 and 70.

9.  In his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI makes a similar point, differentiating between eros, essentially sexual love, and agape which he does not define but which is usually thought of as, “the highest form of love, especially brotherly love, charity; the love of God for man and of man for God.”  The encyclical is brilliant although I would argue that he is wrong to think that eros can only be fulfilled in agape when it is “disciplined and purified.”  An English version is published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops but the translation is unreliable and argumentative.

10.  Or as E.Y. Harburg’s lyric has it, necessity “…is the curse that makes / The universe so all bewilderin'.”  In the aftermath of World War II, Finian’s Rainbow (1947) was a modernist and progressive take on both individual and social ethics.

11.  Adam Smith is best known today as the father of capitalism, an economic system which illustrates the propensity of humans to ignore the lessons of history.  The pursuit of capitalist incentives periodically becomes addictive and metastasizes into greed which invariably brings about the collapse of the system.  Still, it is the only system that has historically been able to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number over extended periods of time.

12.  Confront may be too strong a word.  But where Abraham pleads and whines, Job is merely polite.  As he tells his friends, “I will maintain my innocence and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.”

13.  The great Puritan theologian and poet, John Milton, wrote “God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts, who / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.”  The first two lines have no application to the post-Job God.