Maronite Meditation 71
Reading the Bible
Welcome to the first of our Maronite meditations on reading Scripture. We are going to commence by clearing the ground. We will look at how Scripture is read according to what I call the “Bible studies establishment,” that is, the method taught in universities today. And when we see where and why that sometimes makes great contributions to our understanding, but also sometimes goes wrong, we will have a clear path before us to learn tried, true and traditional ways of reading the Bible.
The traditional Maronite way – and I dare say Catholic way – is to reverently and humbly read the Bible as a holy book, applying the truths of Scripture to our own lives, confident that both Old and New Testaments reveal to us the true image of Christ, whom we are called to imitate as best we can. Traditionally, Scripture is not read as if it were ordinary literature. That is all the more reason why we should read it with minds, hearts and spirits alert: all our faculties working in unison. But the intellect does not operate alone, it is a co-worker with feelings of reverence and humility. I hope that the next 15 minutes will furnish you with a clear example of why these religious feelings are necessary attributes of one who seeks to profit spirituality from Scripture, and why emotional pride renders such a happy result impossible. In short, my aim is that this series of Maronite meditations will help you see the value of the traditional Catholic approach to the Bible.
In today’s world, a relatively new position, which is often called “scientism” dominates biblical research (as to which I shall say more in future episodes). It brings with it not only a new intellectual method, but also a new attitude to Scripture, which imports a new view of humanity, God, and religion. The fundamental assumption is that Christianity is a completely human construct, and not something revealed – even if many who use these methods would sincerely deny that they hold this belief. Those who receive Scripture as revelation do not deny that there is a human element in the faith, including in the writing and passing on of our holy books. The point is that the methods of the Bible studies establishment are based on this assumption of it being exclusively a human and social product, and will lead those who practise them into conclusions they would have disavowed at the very start of their undertaking. I reiterate the dividing question: is Christianity entirely a human construct, or is it based on revelation?
For the present, I will take one specific example from the Gospel of St Luke – and use that to illustrate the dangers of relying on the opinions of scholars and theologians, unaware of how inclined they are to follow the in-house fashions of their guild, and make outright blunders, while complacently disdaining contrary opinions. To be clear, I am not speaking against scholarship and theology as such, after all, it was a scholar and theologian who pointed out the common misconception in reading St Luke which I shall discuss. But I am tackling the abuse of scholarship and theology, and I am attempting to show why a moral dimension is needed when reading Scripture.
Let us consider St Luke’s Gospel, 2:22-24:
Now when the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, Joseph and Mary brought Jesus up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (just as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male will be set apart to the Lord”), and to offer a sacrifice according to what is specified in the law of the Lord, a pair of doves or two young pigeons.
Writers, including leading Catholic scholars like Raymond Brown and J.A. Fitzmyer, both priests, asserted that St Luke had been confused: he had not understood the Jewish rituals. What St Luke was describing could not have happened, they said, and he has mixed things up. This led them to suggest that he must have been a gentile, and working from outside of Judaea, because a Jew or someone close to the Temple would have known.
Raymond Brown wrote: ““Imprecisely Luke seems to think that both parents needed to be purified.” Note first the tone: it is rather condescending, even smug and self-satisfied. I am not saying that Brown felt or intended that, but that is how it comes across to me, and I would suggest that this is too typical of how academics write about the evangelists. Brown opens the sentence with a chiding school-teacher’s “imprecisely,” which — whether it was intended or not — conveys the impression that he is in a position to draw a fine point of distinction about ancient Judaism which the evangelist – unlike himself – did not comprehend. Brown then spends pp.449-451 of his book The Birth of the Messiah trying to explain how St Luke could have made this mistake. He ingeniously invents things for St Luke to have thought and then dismisses his own inventions. For example, he wonders if Saint Luke may have meant to show us that Jesus was internally dedicated to God’s service, but then he says that that might be an appropriate thought for later Christian theology, founded on the complete New Testament picture, but scarcely explains what Saint Luke would have been thinking.
But no one had raised that question for consideration, so if it is an inadequate explanation, why raise it in the first place? Brown’s coming up with these theories and then dismissing them give us the impression that he is carefully surveying all the historical possibilities, and judiciously sorting through the arguments, meticulously discrediting the Lucan narrative, when in fact, he is only telling us what is in his own mind, and how he discussed it with himself.
Fitzmyer’s tone is not so condescending as Brown’s, but it is equally absolute: Luke is mistaken, because there is no evidence for presenting the firstborn in either the Old Testament or the later Jewish Mishnah. He spends time discussing each word, who does this pronoun refer to, what is meant by that, and concludes that St Luke did not understand the purity laws. This reinforces certain assumptions about St Luke and how to read his Gospel with a critical eye. If you did not know any more, you would think that Brown and Fitzmyer had made out a most powerful case, and you might even pity poor St Luke and the imperfectly educated people who do not have access to luminaries like our Bible experts.
So, when we are reading and writing about scripture, we might be just a little more circumspect? We might show some awareness that ourr knowledge of ancient Israel might not be complete and perfect; that there might be more to the story than surviving sources known to us reveal, and matters which we have not correctly understood.
I was fortunate to have been taught by the late Dr Noel Weeks, a highly intelligent and equally fearless servant of the Lord, who would point out to us that we have to be somewhat humble before the ancient sources, and especially Scripture. We may think we know the ancient languages better than they do, and they did sometimes make errors, but, he would say, it is more likely to be them who teach us about their own world and culture, and not we who correct them.
And so it proves in this case. When I did some research, I found that Matthew Thiessen had had done the research, and established that St Luke had been accurate. I will not set out all his arguments, but they can be found in his article “Luke 2:22, Leviticus 12, and Parturient Impurity” Novum Testamentum 54 (2012) 16-29. “Parturient impurity” is the ritual impurity associated with childbirth.
This is Thiessen’s own abstract or summary of the article:
In Luke 2:22 Luke attributes parturient impurity to both Mary and Jesus (and/or Joseph). Interpreters have often concluded that this verse demonstrates that Luke misunderstands the levitical legislation pertaining to childbirth impurity (Leviticus 12), which discusses only the impurity of the new mother. This article argues that, despite the apparent contradiction between Leviticus 12 and Luke 2, Luke has not misunderstood Jewish conceptions of impurity after birth. Not only is it possible to conclude that Leviticus 12 implicitly ascribes impurity to the newborn child, but some Second Temple Jewish writers, such as the authors of Jubilees and 4Q265, also believed that the newborn child suffered the same manner of impurity as the new mother. Luke’s gospel, therefore, demonstrates familiarity with contemporary Jewish purity beliefs and practices.
Thiessen notes that the logic of Leviticus 12 does in fact lead one to infer that the newborn child is also impure – it just does not set out all the consequences which flow from the principles. Second, this was what some writers of the period believed, notably the authors of the book called Jubilees, and in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He even shows that cross-cultural parallels would point to the “unstated assumption of the child’s impurity” (21). It is the sort of thing where, when one considers what Leviticus 12 does say, and one grasps the trajectory of the impurity laws, one could ask how it could possibly be that the child not be rendered impure (22-23).
This is a critical point: Thiessen points to the “Ancient Near Eastern context and the logic driving the legislation of the book of Leviticus” (23). This is too little done by scholars: they tend to read the scripture as a sort of textbook. This is another matter Dr Weeks used to show us: they tend to read documents from the Ancient Near East as if they were a modern text or even the Napoleonic Code. To put it in my own words: although the Law of Moses only explicitly referred to the impurity of the mother and her purification, one would naturally infer from this the impurity of people in close connection with her, most especially her husband and child. Then, all of those rules and customs would be seen as part of the Mosaic Law. Brown and Fitzmyer, among many others, never arrived at this simple point because they read the law as if it were a modern penal statute which has to explicitly state what it bans.
At p.28, Thiessen turns to Brown’s conclusion that St Luke was probably a gentile who had only “book knowledge” of Jewish customs. Fitzmyer equally confidently states that “What has to be recognized is that Luke, not being a Palestinian Jewish Christian, is not accurately informed about this custom …” I agree with Thiessen’s last words:
perhaps the fact that Luke-Acts evidences sophisticated knowledge of ritual practice should cause us to reconsider long-cherished orthodoxies on the identity of Luke and his portrayal of Judaism and the Jewish Law. (29)
We have now reached the position that those who simply accepted the gospel on its face would have arrived at the correct conclusion immediately and easily, without having to go through the arguments in this direction or that direction. In other words, nothing has been gained from the entire academic exercise except to arrive back at the start – which is the Gospel proclamation of Saint Luke.
In conclusion, perhaps we may read St Luke from his text and not through the eyes of modern scholars, confident in their learning, and equally confident in their errors. Further, the changes in intellectual fashions and trends should not be taken as signs of progress or dismissed as meaningless. They are, rather, indications that we must at all times exercise our judgment so that we can benefit from what is true, and take profit from the knowledge that what is confidently asserted, even by many or all scholars, may be quite wrong.
The proper approach is not to rush to disbelieve St Luke on the basis of our own research from a distance of two thousand years, but rather to ask: “Since St Luke says this, but our reading of Leviticus would indicate that, what has happened: how did the precept in Leviticus turn into the practice we see in the Gospel?” Such a question will dispose us to searching through relevant literature such as the Book of Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls and also to considering comparative studies of how impurity rules have been applied in other societies. The difference between the two attitudes, the condescending and the humble, is small but significant: and one not only makes for better scholarship, but for a better Christian soul.
I reiterate once more, it is not reason, logic, scholarship and learning I am criticising. In biblical matters, these are fine when exercised with wisdom and prudence; but false friends when wedded to scepticism, pride and modernism. I am not judging any particular scholar as a moral being, but it is true that one’s moral character, one’s pride or absence thereof, one’s vanity, or absence thereof, sets the limits within which one reads Scripture. So if I transgress in any way, when my error is pointed out to me, I acknowledge it, and correct it.