Dear Professor Dawkins,

Your new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, is both entertaining and informative when you are dealing with biology. Please get this straight, however: the Hebrew Bible was not written by “Bronze Age desert tribesmen.” This is not the first book in which you have propounded this error. Please let it be the last.

Sincerely,

Chris Heard

Now the true reason I expressed skepticism about the SBL/Biblioblogger hookup has been revealed. I can keep it secret no longer.

Through some combination of my own poor self-expression and my readers’ inexperience trying to use Unicode Hebrew in iWork, my earlier post on drew some blank stares and comments along the lines of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Maybe this time I can actually write understandable sentences. I also have pictures.

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Just take a tip from Henry Farrell.

It frustrates me very much that Apple’s iWork suite does not handle complex Unicode Hebrew better. In particular, pointing does not line up properly if you use SBL/Tiro Hebrew in Keynote and other iWork applications. (Unpointed text seems to work fine.) The New Penninim font works fine, but does not have any of the accent marks. I want to use an accent mark (ole, to match what the students see in their textbook) when the accent falls somewhere other than the ultima, for now at any rate.

I have found a solution that produces decent final results, though actually managing it requires attention to detail. Here’s what works for me.

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Once again I come to you, my colleagues who teach biblical studies to undergraduates (or graduate students who aspire to this high calling) with a pedagogical question.

Because I want my Religion 101 students to see the Bible itself as an historical phenomenon, I continue to introduce them (in a simplified fashion, of course) to source analysis. Yes, I even continue to use Julius Wellhausen’s version of JEDP (or rather, a streamlined version) to illustrate the type of work source critics do.

I also offer students the opportunity to work through puzzles in source analysis for themselves. In the classroom, I usually use the wife-sister stories of Genesis 12; 20; 26 and the flood narrative of Genesis 6–9 as test cases on which the students may practice classic Wellhausen-style source analysis.

Of course, I make sure the students understand that source analysis applies to texts other than the Pentateuch, and that the classic Documentary Hypothesis currently has many detractors. I present the Wellhausen hypothesis as an example of how source critics work, not as the assured results of scholarship.

By the way, before we get to JEDP, the students have already heard about the possibility of the ark narratives and the “History of David’s Rise” as separate, earlier books lying behind 1–2 Samuel, and they’ve already looked at biblical references to the Book of the Wars of the LORD and the Book of Jashar, so they have a little background in source analysis already without using that terminology.

This brings me, at long last, to my question: what other texts would you suggest as accessible examples where source analysis might be fruitful? I’m looking for biblical passages on which students who have just been introduced to source analysis could practice the method in a simple way with a minimum of light secondary research, at most. A good example text will support a treatment of 900–1,000 words.

I address this post to my professional colleagues, that is, those who teach biblical studies or a closely related discipline to undergraduates, or who for other reasons are extremely well versed in the Old Testament storyline. For an activity in my class tomorrow, I need to assign each student a discrete event within the Old Testament (Septuagint) storyline. My larger (of two) sections has 53 students enrolled at last count, so I’d like to have 53 events on my list.

Please note the phrasing: I wrote “Old Testament storyline” rather than “history of ancient Israel and Judah.” Because I’m interested, for this class period, in the Old Testament (including the Septuagintal surplus) storyline, the master narrative is provided by Genesis (starting with Abraham) through 2 Kings. However, since I’m talking about storyline and making no historical claims at this stage, I’m open to integrating the books of the latter prophets into the relevant slots within the storyline. More controversially, I’m open to integrating the books of Ruth, Jonah, Daniel, and Esther into this overall storyline, even though I suspect at least three of those books, and probably all four, to be (intentionally) fictional.

At any rate, I extend to you here a time-sensitive offer. If you would like to help me refine my list, please send me an e-mail (cheard [at] pepperdine.edu). I’ll send you my existing list, and you can suggest refinements. This event happens tomorrow, and I need to print up some props tonight, so there isn’t much turnaround time. I want to be through with all this before kickoff (Chargers vs. Raiders, naturally). Act now before this special offer moves to late-night cable television!

From Peter Enns, on his blog:

For example, Jesus was human but without sin, but that does not mean that he was not a product of his culture and embodied the limitations of any human being. The fact that Jesus showed fully all the marks of humanity is part and parcel of the incarnation—the atonement and resurrection depend on it. No element of humanity was withheld from him, other than sinfulness. In other words, any aspect of Jesus’ life that speaks to his human limitation is not a function of his sinfulness but of his humanness, for example: that he bled, got hungry, got sick, did not know when the end would come, thought the world was flat, did not understand String Theory, could not speak French. These things do not make Jesus less the Son of God, but are part of what is inherent in Immanuel, God with us.

Who knew that expressing doubts could cause such a kerfuffle? With parallel discussions happening in comment threads here at Higgaion and on Bob Cargill’s blog, it’s hard to know where to continue the conversation. I probably should just drop it, but I do want to make sure my point about “academic respectability” is clear.

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Peter Enns posted an interesting piece a few days ago. Entitling his post “A Thought on the ‘New Atheism’ and Old Testament Morality,” Enns observes:

NA is quick to point out that no reasonable, compassionate person would model his or her morality by much of Old Testament behavior.

Much of what we find in the OT is, to use an NA phrase, “Iron Age tribalism”: our god is better than your god, and he told us to take your land, kill all of you, and keep the booty. When Christians respond that the OT also carries the injunction to “love your neighbor,” NA responds that one’s ”neighbor” in the OT is fellow Israelites. God is not telling the Israelites to walk on over to the Canaanites and “love them.” Rather, he is telling them to wipe them out and take their land.

I don’t think this observation by NA is cynical or driven by a blind bias (as some of their observations are). Rather the observation is correct. Here the Christian reaction, motivated as it is to defend their understanding of the Bible against criticism, is unconvincing.

Rather than protecting the Bible against such criticism by justifying such instances of OT morality, I think Christians would do better to understand the nature of the OT, accept it for what it is, but then do the necessary theological thinking to give a reasonable and sophisticated account of things. Central to that necessary theological thinking is to bring the NT into the discussion.

In my opinion, Enns puts his finger on one of the biggest weaknesses in recent atheist criticisms of religion in general, and Christianity in particular: like religious fundamentalists, some atheist critics of religion implicitly or explicitly disallow (sometimes a priori) the legitimacy of any change in religious doctrine over time. Enns puts it in terms of “bring[ing] the NT into the discussion,” but that’s not the only way to think about it. Religious fundamentalists often claim (or at least assume) that, at some definable point in the past, a fixed and unchanging body of truth was delivered to one of their religious forebears. Within Christianity, for example, Christian fundamentalists (nowadays) take the Bible as the “final word” on any topic addressed therein. Atheists, of course, do not take the Bible as the “final word” on anything, but in quite a few recent books and speeches, some atheists have dismissed any Christians who do not take this approach. To read some atheist treatments, you’re either a fundamentalist Christian or you’re not a real Christian. Sam Harris makes this rhetorical move very explicitly in Letter to a Christian Nation, but you can find the same maneuver, more or less obviously, in a number of other places.

But religions have always experienced change, and without the religionists themselves feeling that changes in religious doctrine or practice somehow invalidated their religion. The ancient believers whose stories, memories, prayers, and teachings (and so on) are now reflected in the Tanakh, for example, sometimes encouraged their audiences to look back to the ways of their forefathers, and sometimes to abandon the ways of their forefathers. My own specific Christian heritage is that of the Churches of Christ, which have historically tried to marry biblicism and primitivism, resulting in the notion that “restoring the first-century church” by “going back to the Bible” is the most appropriate way to be Christian in the modern world—but ironically, the whole New Testament swells with the idea that God has done something fundamentally new (but not inconsistent) in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Roman Catholic Church has long recognized the earliest Christian communities as the starting point for a trajectory through time, not a static pattern that must be maintained regardless of changing circumstances.

Change is normal in religions, including Judaism and Christianity. To admit that “we” (in a particular religion) once thought x about a particular topic, but now think y does not invalidate that religion, nor does it demonstrate the non-existence of whatever deity that religion reveres. Change over time in a religion may speak to the character of that religion or its deity, but changes as such can hardly carry the freight that some recent atheists want to put on them.