The Once and Future Bible: An Introduction to the Bible for Religious Progressives

By Gregory C. Jenks and Jay Harold Ellens

This book offers a way to engage with the Bible as a set of sacred texts that can serve as a song sheet for believers in exile-those people Bishop John Shelby Spong calls the "church alumni association." This includes those internally displaced persons of faith who have not yet become spiritual refugees but who feel the pressure to conform to traditional expressions of faith that no longer serve as springs of living water for the journey of life.
These ancient texts come from another world and another time, but they can serve as maps for the journey of life. They can best do this when the sacred wisdom of the Bible is accepted as permission to voice the new questions we face today in the confidence that authentic faith has always required such boldness.
Religious progressives are people who live the questions, not dodge them. Our task is not to guard a set of traditional answers, but to live life boldly, taking risks for God's sake and our own. One of the hallmarks of this book is that the problems posed by the Bible are acknowledged. In particular, the contributions of recent critical scholarship are embraced, rather than being ignored or neutralized by pious ambivalence.
The intended reader of this book is not a traditional believer, secure in her assumptions about God and salvation, but someone struggling to live with integrity in a time when traditional religion seems increasingly irrelevant. The goal is not to persuade the reader that the Bible is credible but-more modestly-to offer an account of the Bible that may encourage religious progressives to reclaim the Bible as a valued part of our spiritual baggage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jan 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781621891208

Gregory C. Jenks

Gregory Jenks is an Anglican priest and biblical scholar. He is Academic Dean at St Francis Theological College, Brisbane and Senior Lecturer in the School of Theology, Charles Sturt University. A long-time Fellow of the Jesus Seminar, and a former Associate Director of the Westar Institute, Dr Jenks is also director of the Jesus Database project and a co-director of the Bethsaida Archaeology Project in Israel. His recent books include The Once and Future Bible: An Introduction to the Bible for Religious Progressives (2011), and Wisdom and Imagination: Religious Progressives and the Search for Meaning (co-edited with Rex Hunt, 2014)

Book preview

Foreword

Gregory Jenks is serious about the Bible. He thinks everybody ought to read it thoughtfully and know it thoroughly. He teaches as many people as he can sign up in his university classes to read it with informed wisdom and discernment. He claims that if you know how to read it well it will change who you are, who you think you are, and how you handle life. Jenks is wise and passionate. He is also right about the Bible, but what I mean by that is going to surprise you if you should get serious about reading his book, The Once and Future Bible: An Introduction to the Bible for Religious Progressives.

Of course, you already know that almost nobody reads the Bible today. The Bible has been a bestseller since Gutenberg invented moveable type for printing lots of copies of the Bible. Moreover, for a couple of centuries after Gutenberg people not only bought it but actually read it. People still buy it, usually to give away to their kids, who they wish would read it—more than they do themselves. That is, people still identify with the Bible all over the place but almost no one is a serious reader of it anymore.

The very interesting thing about Jenks’s attempt to get us all to read the Bible sensibly and sensitively again is that he is not an idealist. That is, he has not glorified the Bible in writing his book about it. Neither has he junked it as so many scholars spent their time doing during the twentieth century. He is simply a practical realist. Jenks is serious about the Bible—and especially about letting the Bible tell its own story, for good or ill, just as it stands there in the middle of history, shouting to us about God. Jenks carefully points out in his work that sometimes what the Bible is shouting about God is horrible stuff, like the divine warrior of the Old Testament who solves all of his large and ultimate problems by immediate resort to large and ultimate violent solutions. Jenks agrees with me, and is at some pains to intimate, that any such deity is a monster and nobody should respect him, to say nothing about worshipping him.

That Old Testament deity solves his problems by throwing people out of decent living space (Eden), spoiling their fun, suppressing their exploration of new insights, cursing and dispersing people who finally try to unify society and get along with each other (Babel), drowning as much of the world as he can get the water for (flood), exterminating the Canaanites, threatening to exterminate his own buddies (Sinai), constantly yelling at everybody through awfully mouthy prophets, and then in the end killing his unique beloved son. Jenks knows that such a story makes God sounds psychotic.

Jenks likes the Bible. Not that violence stuff of course, but the important stuff that makes up the mainstream of the biblical narrative: the story of the God of grace, mercy, and love; the one true and living God for whom every human hungers. Jenks thinks that if you know how to read the Bible wisely and well this is the God you meet on its pages and that will change your life. God’s story is a really surprising and wonderful story. Moreover, we have it here in the Bible as told by an ancient people in a far away land, who paid sufficient attention that they could see the mighty acts of God¹ happening throughout their lives, right in front of their own faces. About this work David Boulton observed that Jenks sees the Bible as an ancient text that humans produced and that continues to speak to us today in the words of yesterday. Jenks has found the way to sing the Lord’s song in a time and place today that would have been strange to the biblical authors; and if you do not catch that metaphor, you prove my point. You have not been reading the Bible. You need Jenks’s book. It will turn you on and inform you well. You will miss less of the fun of your own life.

Jenks understands the power and the problems of the Bible text and does not dodge either one. He addresses them straight on, face forward, head up, and lets their inherent force empower his readers while leading us through the minefield of difficulties in the Bible that often turn people away toward neglect, antipathy, and disuse of that important book. He has given us a volume that every ordinary person of all religious persuasions, as well as those who have no significant spiritual perspective, urgently needs. It is highly readable, entertaining, immensely informative, and fills an obvious vacuum in the meaningful religious literature of our present moment and culture. The notable Anglican bishop John Shelby Spong declared that Jenks takes his readers on a new journey through the Holy Scriptures, reclaiming them with keen scholarship for our post-religious world. After reading the work of this emerging progressive religious thinker, the Bible will shine with a new luster.

There are three general characteristics in this volume, and numerous specific details that engage and inspire me most gratifyingly. The first characteristic is the comprehensive scope of Jenks’s scholarly treatment of the Bible. He sees it as a unified whole, not as sixty-six individual books. The simple organization of his volume makes it possible for a nonspecialist to grasp his whole project right from the outset, so to speak. When one opens it, it does not give the impression that its meanings are inaccessible and hard to discover. From the outset it gives the correct impression: that The Once and Future Bible speaks plainly on the important issues of biblical study, content, and faith.

Second, a brilliant overview of the whole Bible, and the people who produced and populate it, developed in the first of three main sections of this book, sets the course engagingly. This is followed by a fairly intensive section on the Old Testament literature, and then another on the New Testament texts. This easily accessible structure entices and engages the reader immediately. If anyone is put off by Jenks’s book, it must be because he or she is superficial or resistant in their approach to the Bible. All who lay hold of the well organized and engagingly delivered content of The Once and Future Bible and give themselves to it will find that quest infinitely rewarding.

The third general characteristic with which this book rewarded me was its plain and forthright style. Frequently, when scholars write books about the Bible, theology, religious traditions, or God, the language they use is some special kind of jargon that most of us cannot really understand. We quickly lose interest in bothering with it. It makes you wonder for whom such authors are writing. I suspect that even God cannot figure out a lot of it. That reminds me of my experience in college. Studying for ordination to the pastorate and priesthood, I had to read a lot of nineteenth-century tomes in theology and philosophy. At least half of them were so obtuse and obscure that I could not figure out exactly what the author had intended by his jargonistic language. I was thoroughly intimidated. I thought there was something wrong with me and that I must be stupid. However, the time came when I realized that actually I was a very intelligent guy and that if I could not figure out what those tomes intended to convey, nobody else could understand them either—and probably the author himself could not either. For whom was he writing? For his own ego, and not for communication to anyone else who might care at all about his obscure junk.

Greg Jenks’s book is just the opposite, and that is the third reason, as I said, that I like it. It is offered to us in our language. It is written like we talk to each other. It is not intimidating but inviting, not off-putting but enticing. It offers every one of us the gratifying relief of realizing that we can all understand a good book about the Bible, religion, theology, or scholarly interpretation. It makes you want to really get into the world of reading about these things of God, about God’s spirit dynamically active in the world, and about God’s ideas and ways of thinking about us and his world. This book gives the impression that finally we can all get our hearts’ hunger for spiritual meaning really satisfied. Here, finally, is a chance, as it were, for thinking God’s thoughts after him in a way that is honest to God and authentic to our own urgent quest for sensible and rational faith and understanding. The one true and living God is not so much an infinite mystery. God makes sense, and Jenks offers us a chance to see that clearly.

J. Harold Ellens

Farmington Hills

Autumn 2010

Abbreviations

ABD David Noel Freedman, ed. The Anchor Bible

Dictionary. 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

BCE Before the Common Era

CE Common Era

LXX Septuagint, the ancient Greek version of the Bible

MS, MSS manuscript, manuscripts

MT Masoretic Text, the standard edition of the Hebrew

Bible

NT New Testament

OT Old Testament

Q Sayings Gospels Q

NRSV The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard

Version including the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical

Books, with Concordance. Edited by Harold W. Attridge

and Wayne A. Meeks et al., with the Society of Biblical

Literature. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006.

References to biblical texts and other ancient documents follow the conventions of the Society of Biblical Literature Handbook of Style.

Introduction

The Bible has had an immense influence on our history and our culture, but it is also a problematic text for many people in today’s world. For many millions of people the Bible is a sacred text, but biblical literacy is at record low levels. Without effective skills for reading the Bible, and for discriminating between different interpretations of the Bible, many contemporary people cannot make responsible use of this treasury of spiritual wisdom.

It can seem at times that the Bible belongs to the traditionalists or worse, the most reactionary elements in conservative religion. Fundamentalist preachers, television evangelists, and anti-abortion activists claim exclusive rights to interpret Scripture. People with a progressive religious outlook can easily conclude that the Bible has little to offer for faithful living in our day.

In fact, the origins of the Bible are best attributed to earlier generations of believers in exile.

²

Those who wrote these texts often struggled with the disconnect between their own sacred traditions and the complex realities in which they lived. While the Bible explores themes of identity, justice, land, and relationships with the Sacred, many of these texts were written by people uncertain of their identity, desperate for some divine reversal to correct the injustices they had suffered, distant from the traditional lands celebrated in the Bible, and searching for an authentic relationship with God.

A classic expression of this confusion is found in the poignant words of the Psalmist:

By the rivers of Babylon—

there we sat down and there we wept

when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there

we hung up our harps.

For there our captors

asked us for songs,

and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,

Sing us one of the songs of Zion!

How could we sing the Lord’s song

in a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

let my right hand wither!

Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,

if I do not remember you,

if I do not set Jerusalem

above my highest joy. (Ps 137:1–6)

Even those biblical texts composed within the biblical lands continued to be treasured, and in some cases elaborated and modified, by people living on the edge of life. Ancient traditions had to be reinterpreted to address new situations. The very idea of Scripture, and the historic triumph of the prophetic Book over the priestly cult of the temple, owes its origins to the cognitive dissonance generated by the collapse of traditional religious claims in ancient Israel and Judah.

This book offers a way to engage with the Bible as a set of sacred texts that can serve as a hymnal for believers in exile, a song sheet for the church alumni association. This includes those internally displaced persons of faith who have not yet become spiritual refugees but who feel the pressure to conform to traditional expressions of faith that no longer serve as springs of living water for the journey of life.

These ancient oriental texts come from another world and another time, but (to change the metaphor) they can serve as maps for the journey of life. They can best do this not when modern reality is squeezed into the Bible’s simpler understanding of human existence, but when the sacred wisdom of the Bible is embraced as permission to ask the new questions we face today in the confidence that it has ever been thus.

Religious progressives are people who live the questions, not dodge them. Our task is not to guard a set of traditional answers, but to live life boldly, taking risks for God’s sake and our own. One of the hallmarks of this book is that the problems posed by the Bible are acknowledged. In particular, the contributions of recent critical scholarship are embraced, rather than being ignored or neutralized by pious ambivalence.

Such an approach to the Bible may still affirm the Scriptures as a gift bestowed on us in many and varied ways (to cite words from the Anglican Ordinal). But it avoids any unfortunate assumptions of supernatural involvement in the generation of Scripture. It also has a profound appreciation of the collective or communal character of the processes of reception and interpretation.

To some extent this book is a primer on radical biblical scholarship, prepared for the contemporary equivalents of Theophilus to whom the anonymous author of the Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles dedicated his two-volume work.

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed. (Luke 1:1–4)

Like the ancient Christian author whose words are preserved for us in the opening paragraph of the Gospel according to Luke, I am conscious that many others have written accounts of the Bible, including books intended to provide readers in successive generations with helpful introductions to the origins, literary forms, and theological interpretation of the Scriptures. As with Luke, so with my own effort, there is an implicit criticism of the earlier work—at least with respect to its suitability for the needs of the intended reader.

³

Like Luke, I am writing with a purpose. I want to provide the reader with an introduction to the Christian Bible. The intended reader is not a traditional believer, secure in her assumptions about God and salvation, but a person struggling to live with integrity in a time when traditional religion seems increasingly irrelevant. My goal is not to persuade the reader how well founded the teaching is that [they] have received, but more modestly to offer an account of the Bible that may encourage religious progressives to reclaim the Bible as a valued part of our spiritual heritage.

Much of the content of this book had its origins in classes introducing students to the world and literature of the Bible. That subject was offered in a Christian theology program, rather than the multifaith context of a university studies in religion program. This book shares that orientation, and consistently considers the Bible as a Christian text. This is not to deny the Jewish origins of almost every part of the Bible. Nor do I wish to ignore the continuing significance for Jews of that section of the Bible that Christians traditionally call the Old Testament. However, this book deals with the significance of the Bible, not the Tanakh.

⁴

My own engagement with the Bible began as a child. I was raised in a very conservative Churches of Christ congregation in rural New South Wales. This was a community where the Bible had immense significance as part of its particular mix of Campbellite Restorationism (seeking to restore a presumed primitive New Testament Christianity) and premillennialist dispensationalism. We eagerly anticipated the second coming of Jesus, and the Bible provided a prophetic timetable for key events, including the rapture and Armageddon.

As an eleven year old I allocated the £12 carefully saved for a Hornby model train set to buy myself a Bible. The edition recommended by my pastor was the Scofield Reference Bible,⁵ and I spent many hours in close study of the extensive notes and charts that came in that volume.

The Bible provided a veneer of certainty in a world where the Communists (remember them?) seemed to be a constant threat. Con-siderable effort went into memorizing key passages from the Bible. There were two reasons for this. One was the perceived spiritual benefit of knowing portions of the Bible by heart. Another explicit reason was to prepare for the time when the Communists would incarcerate Christians and deprive us of access to our Bibles.

Upon finishing high school I enrolled at a local Bible college, with the intention of becoming a Bible translator with the Summer Institute of Linguistics. For many years after my eighteenth birthday I wore a stainless steel watch given to me as a present by my mother. She chose the watch because it would be suitable for a missionary on a posting in the tropics!

As it happened, I did not become a Bible translator—but an Anglican priest and a biblical scholar with a PhD on the origins and early development of the Antichrist myth. As a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar and something of a minimalist when it comes to the history of ancient Israel, I have moved a long way from the religious beliefs of my childhood congregation. However, I have never regretted the thorough grounding in the Scriptures that my upbringing provided me.

For me, the Bible is a theological umbilical cord that connects me with earlier generations of Christians—and before them, with even earlier generations of Jews. This puts me in the context of a historical community that understands itself as the people of God, and I choose to remain within that faith community as I pursue my own sense of being a person called into some kind of relationship with God. Within my personal spiritual practice, engaging critically with Scripture and reflecting on its implications for my own life are sources of hope and insight.

A glance at the table of contents indicates that the twelve chapters that comprise this book are divided into three modules. This arrangement may also be helpful for anyone wishing to use this book as a text for discussion as each of the modules could be studied in its own right.

The first module, People of the Book, deals with the literary character of the Bible and broad hermeneutical issues. The second, Jewish Texts in the Bible, seeks to honor the Jewish character of the Old Testament while also affirming its distinctive Christian character. The final module, Christian Texts in the Bible, acknowledges the Christian debt to Judaism but also the radical new shape given to the Jewish Scriptures as they were enlarged to include the New Testament writings.

Chapters 5 to 11 begin with a précis of the relevant biblical material, since many readers may not be familiar with the flow of the narrative. Where relevant, indications of probable timelines, key theological themes, and major characters are also included. A brief cameo item concludes each chapter, to highlight a selected aspect of the material under consideration.

In a book such as this, it is not possible to provide extended critical discussion of all the matters we will cover. There are many excellent technical discussions of these matters, but to serve the needs of the intended reader critical apparatus will be kept to a minimum. Footnotes will also be used sparingly so that the focus remains on the presentation of recent biblical scholarship of interest to religious progressives. However, supplementary materials, including a free study guide for discussion groups, will be available on the dedicated Web site.

⁶

A project such as this book reflects the shared energy and goodwill of many more people than the author whose name appears on the title page. Directly or otherwise, consciously or entirely unawares, a great many people have contributed to the shaping of this book. Special acknowledgments and thanks must be given to valued colleagues who encouraged me in the writing of this book.

John Shelby Spong has been a mentor and friend since he and Christine first stayed as guests in the rectory of St. Matthew’s Anglican Church, Drayton—in Toowoomba, one of the most conservative rural cities of Australia. This book is in your hands largely because of Jack’s generous insistence that I step up to the plate as a colleague in the quest for a new Christianity that offers hope and meaning to people inside and far beyond the boundaries of the church in which we are both privileged to serve as clergy.

My colleagues within the Biblical Characters in the Three Traditions Seminar of the Society of Biblical Literature must also be acknowledged. Mishael Caspi, John T. Greene, and J. Harold Ellens have made me welcome in that fascinating forum and encouraged me to publish material that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. I am profoundly blessed to have such colleagues and mentors, and I look forward to further collaboration in the years ahead.

Steven Ogden, Principal of St. Francis Theological College in Bris-bane, has been unstinting in his encouragement of this project. Leading by example as he combines administration, teaching, and writing into a seamless whole, Steven has brought a new focus on intellectual inquiry within a seminary that was better known for its formation program than its research and publication profile.

Closer than any of my valued colleagues has been my wife, Eve, and our daughters, Clare and Lizzie. They have each contributed more to this project than they realize. Ultimately, this book is dedicated to them and to the love we share within that intimate human community, the family.

Greg Jenks

Brisbane, Australia

Epiphany 2011

1. See Wright, Mighty Acts; also Wright and Fuller, Book of the Acts of God.

2. John Shelby Spong often describes his intended audience as constituting the church alumni association and at times he refers to them as believers in exile. For such people—and those who share much of their outlook but still maintain some form of active participation in the public life of the churches—the Bible is an especially troublesome text.

3. Among the earlier works that I have found especially helpful are Borg, Reading the Bible, and Spong, Rescuing the Bible. One conscious point of difference from these earlier works is that I pay more attention to recent developments in biblical studies. In particular, I will be seeking to address the implications of important changes in critical assessments of the historicity of the OT traditions, and I also reflect the decline in support for the traditional forms of the Documentary Hypothesis.

4. Tanakh is an acronym for Torah, Nebi’im, and Ketubim—the three parts of the Jewish Bible.

5. This is an annotated edition of the Bible that helped to popularize the dispensational premillennialism of John Nelson Darby. It was first published in 1908 and the 1917 version of the notes can be accessed online at http://www.studylight.org/com/srn.

6. http://www.onceandfuturebible.com.

Part One: People of the Book

1

The Invention of the Bible

The Bible is a book with a history. Contrary to some pious assumptions, the Bible neither dropped out of heaven nor was it dictated by some heavenly author to a human scribe.¹ There is a very natural history to the Bible, a story of human involvement in the writing of the texts and in the reception of these writings as (sacred) Scriptures as well as in the preservation, transmission and interpretation of the Bible.

This chapter and the one that follows will trace some of the Bible’s history. First we will consider the origins of the Bible, and then we will review some of the ways in which the Bible is used—and abused.

Even if the Bible had dropped from heaven, fully formed, it would be possible to identify the moment when the revelation happened. The appearance within our world of such a text would be an event subject to historical research. As it happens, the history of the Bible is both simpler (no supernatural explanations are required) and more complex (since so many people in so many places and at so many times are involved).

A World Religions Perspective

It can be helpful to note the way that sacred texts function in the major faith traditions. There are, of course, significant differences in the role of sacred writings in each of these religions, as well as within different traditions within the same religion. Without blurring those distinctions, paying some attention to the cross-cultural realities of sacred texts can assist us in gaining a perspective on the Christian Bible.

²

Judaism

In addition to the Tanakh, the Talmud has a special place as a sacred text since it gathers together rabbinic discussion on a variety of topics. There are two versions of Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud dated around 400 ce and the Babylonian Talmud dating around one hundred years later. The Talmud represents a codification of the ancient oral tradition of Judaism. Some traditional Jewish schools believe that the oral Torah was revealed to Moses at the same time as the written Torah, but there is as much variety in Jewish views towards the character and authority of the Talmud as there