Sarx

OK, the Document Hypothesis is passé. My readers (especially Fr E) know it and I learned it last night reading the wiki article. Seems that it is no longer kosher to talk about the JEPD sources. Instead:

The collapse of the consensus began in the late 1960s, with the spread of new scholarly tools and a growing recognition of the limitations of Wellhausen’s analytical framework. The result has been proposals which modify the documentary model so far as to become unrecognizable, or even abandon it entirely in favour of alternative models which see the Pentateuch as the product of a single author, or as the end-point of a process of creation by the entire community. Thus, to mention some of the major figures from the last decades of the 20th century, H. H. Schmid almost completely eliminated J, allowing only a late Deuteronomical redactor; Rolf Rendtorff and Erhard Blum saw the Pentateuch developing from the gradual accretion of small units into larger and larger works, a process which removes both J and E, and, significantly, implied a supplemental rather than a documentary model for Old Testament origins; and John Van Seters, using a similar model, envisaged an ongoing process of supplementation in which later authors modified earlier compositions and changed the focus of the narratives. With the idea of identifiable sources disappearing, the question of dating also changes its terms. The most radical contemporary proposal has come from Thomas L. Thompson, who suggests that the final redaction of the Torah occurred as late as the early Hasmonean monarchy.

But let’s be conservative, for a moment, and stick with JEPD.

If you’re an strictly Orthodox Jew you believe the Torah to have been written by Moses, (perhaps?) with direct dictation from God. Further you believe that the Oral Torah was also given to Moses at Sinai and that the understanding of the Torah that has been expounded through the ages is only the gradual declamation of these Oral and Written Torahs delivered once, 3000 years ago.

So what do you do with the idea that it might have been written in four or more parts over several hundred years and edited or redacted into its final form centuries after it claims to have been produced?

Easy! You ignore the theory and move one.

What do you do if you are a Professor who teaches Bible and an Orthodox Jew? Well, first off, you compartmentalise everything…

James Kugel’s How To Read The Bible looks to be an incredibly interesting work. Here are two reviews of the book, both from the New York Times.

One purpose of “How to Read the Bible” is to recapture the Bible from literalists, and Kugel certainly succeeds. His tour through the scholarship demonstrates why it makes no sense to believe that every word of the Bible is true history. Piling on, he also contends that modern Bible literalism, that brand of six-day-creationism favored by fundamentalists [Jewish and Christian - DHR], is wildly out of step with traditional Christian interpretation. Such monomaniacal focus on the Bible’s literal truth is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s not so much that readers of yore didn’t believe the Bible’s truth; they just didn’t waste a lot of time trying to prove impossible events like the Flood.

There is no way to be a literalist about the Bible in light of today’s understanding. But there is room to be a believer:

But vanquishing the literalists is only half of Kugel’s project. He also seeks a safe haven for rationalist believers. In other words, having broken all the windows, trashed the bedroom, stripped the wires for copper, sold the plumbing for scrap, and jackhammered into the foundation, Kugel proposes to move back into his Bible house.

Or so the Times snarks.

I was more interested in the conclusion of the second Times review, however:

How to Read the Bible runs through the entire Hebrew Scriptures, matching modern scholarship and ancient interpretation. The journey is fascinating enough to render frustrating the author’s conclusion. Although he admired both approaches, Professor Kugel writes, they are “quite irreconcilable.”

Is this conclusion as unavoidable as he makes it sound? Modern minds still seek deeper meanings and still want relevant instructions for living. As for the ancient worry about seamlessness, modern [Postmodern - DHR] minds, sensitized to multiple perspectives, often find more coherence in contrasting accounts than perfectly harmonized ones.

I like that a lot. Modernist Either/Or professor fails to understand that Both/And Postmodernists won’t have as much trouble with total contradiction because we find “more coherence in contrasting accounts than perfectly harmonized ones”. Yes, that sounds possible. I entertain several impossible contradictions all the time and in most times I feel no need to reconcile them (and when I try to, I have no doubt that Fr E will call me back to postmodernist agnosticism by ably arguing for whichever side it is I’m rejecting). It makes sense that someone would try to maintain that the flood was real but not or that Sinai was real, but not, on an inner level, at least.

This book prompted some questions from a loyal reader. And the Professor answered the questions, which dialogue I found very enjoyable. (If you can not yet see how any of this applies to Christians, just wait.)

From out of the entire email exchange my attention was drawn to one portion of the dialogue.

From the Question:

I feared that if I were to be convinced that the Torah is not a divine document, that the foundations of my faith (in halacha – not God) would be shaken and that I would not be able to take halacha seriously. Because if the foundational text that the entire halacha is based upon was not in fact divine – then chazal’s primary assumption no longer holds true. If Rabbi Akiva or Rav Ashi or Maimonides or Rav Feinstein all operated under the assumption of a divine Torah and that assumption is not valid (either in whole or part) - well…

From the Answer:

In your e-mail you say that if modern scholars have proved that the Torah is not a “divine document,” then our whole system of halakhah collapses. I don’t think I’d ever accept that premise in the first place: modern scholars may have proven a lot of things, but I don’t think they’ve ever tried to determine what is or is not divinely inspired, simply because there is no litmus test by which you can decide such a thing. Words are words, whether written by prophets or interpolators or editors, whether written in this particular set of circumstances or another; the words never carry little flags identifying some of them as divinely inspired and others and ordinarily human.

That sounds pretty durn postmodern to me! And, in fact, liberating.

Is the divine content of the Torah (or the Prophets or the Gospels or whatever) contained in the story, the para-historical account? Or is it contained our communal relationship to the story; those things that we might draw out or put in? Is the story of Jonah 100% literal history? Is it a cute little fable? Or is there something to be gained from reading it together, as a community, pondering its meaning and trying to live out what we might learn?

I think divine inspiration is there, in that last option.

And the Professor goes on to say, “When you actually consider Judaism as it is, the role of the Torah in it is really not what you say it is. Ultimately, Jews are not Torah-fundamentalists. On the contrary, our whole tradition is based on adding liberally to what the Torah says (despite Deut. 4:2), sometimes reading its words in a way out of keeping with their apparent meaning, and sometimes even distorting or disregarding its words entirely.”

And Christians do that as well. Despite the fact that all the Gospels and St Paul use the Greek word indicating leavened bread, the western ecclesial communities insist on paralleling the Eucharist with Passover and using unleavened bread. Why? Because the community’s tradition has moved that way. Baptism of babies, images, the entire liturgy… it’s the product of community. Orthodox also make the claim that what we do now was part of the deposit of the faith handed from Jesus to his apostles. And we do so often in hyper-pious ways claiming “We’ve always done so.” Feh. The only thing we’ve always done is claimed “we’ve always done so” over and over after every innovation.

The professor seems to posit that it’s not “calling the Bible into question” that is the sine qua non of an attack on Judaism. Rather it is the authority of the rabbis to make decisions about Tradition and Law. Equally, for the Christian, the text, per se, is not what is sacrosanct, but rather the Tradition. It is the authority of the community to read and interpret the Bible that is the source of our faith.

A thousand alternative readings or possible histories do not make up for “What we do as Christians”. It is only a recent development that places so much emphasis on text - ie modernist fundamentalism - that forbids Christians from accepting “both/and”. This comes from inside and outside. Non-Christians think that by rejecting the text, they are rejecting the faith. And Christians reply by acting as if they must defend the text almost as if it were God himself.

It is the authority of the Christian community to define itself that is the essence of the religion.

I agree with Rabbi Rami here:

In the Bible alone we find a host of Judaisms: Abrahamic, Priestly, Prophetic, and a Judaism of Wisdom that is almost atheistic in its iconoclasm. Which one of these is THE true Judaism? None and all. And then there is rabbinic Judaism, and kabbalistic Judaism, and Yiddish secular Judaism, and the plethora of modern Judaisms. If any one of these had to encompass all Jews for all time, there would be no Jews or Judaism at all.

Likewise there are a host of Christianities (most of them defining as mutually exclusive) or else there is none at all. And while they may be as widely variant as Old Calendar Orthodox and Emergent House Churches and Charismatic Catholics and Calvinist Fundamentalists - and three of them want to admit they are related to each other. All of them developed in the same way: a community relating to the story. I want to be clear about this assertion: it’s not that Christians don’t (or shouldn’t) do this. We already do. Everywhere I’ve been we already do this. But everywhere I’ve been we are in denial about doing so. For we come up with elaborate mythologies to prove otherwise. We pretend that we are doing something different - that our Tradition (whatever it is) is the way Jesus and the 12 did things.

If the Torah is JEDP (or 100s of accretions over time) and if the Gospel 95% post-apostolic midrish (on 5% of possibly-authentically Jesus) it matters not one whit to the truth of the relationship one develops in the community of faith. Scripture is not the allegedly eternally static content of the text. It is the constantly evolving content of the relationship. We continue to write it now.