Soul Force

Listening to the Bible – Again

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

March 1, 2009

Jaroslaw Pelikan suggests this story in his book Whose Bible Is It?

In a variation on all those old jokes about the rabbi, the priest, and the minister walking together into a bar, three women take advantage of the lunch hour in their downtown office to visit the bookstore across the street. One of them is Jewish, the other two are Christian—one Roman Catholic and the other Protestant. Because it is the season of Passover and Easter (closely related holidays that are nevertheless observed on separate dates), each of them wants to buy a Bible for her daughter. And yet each of the three needs to buy a different Bible. Therefore, a knowledgeable clerk should ask each of them, "Which Bible do you want?" For not only must any buyer or reader of whatever religious affiliation find the many English translations of the Bible bewildering (King James Version, Revised Standard Version, New Revised Standard Version, Good News Version, Jewish Publication Society Version, New English Bible, Revised English Bible, Jerusalem Bible, New Jerusalem Bible, etc.), but the buyer has the right to expect "the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible." Yet the table of contents … is fundamentally different in the different Bibles. The difference between the Jewish Bible and all the Christian Bibles is the greatest: there is no New Testament, and the Jewish buyer ought to be able to demand "nothing but the Bible…." But the Protestant Bible is also very different from the Roman Catholic Bible: it has no Apocrypha, so the Roman Catholic customer may well ask, "Is this the whole Bible?" It is sometimes said that these differences are "discernible [only to] ecclesiastical scholars," but five or ten minutes of comparison shopping ought to be enough for anyone to see the contrasts….

The history of Jewish-Christian relations, and then the history of the divisions within Christendom, is at one level the history of biblical interpretation. The parties have faced each other across a sacred page that they held in common but that only served to emphasize their separation.[1]

So, it matters which Bible we use; we here, of course, come from the Protestant tradition, so we almost never refer to the Apocrypha; and unlike our Jewish neighbors, we refer to the New Testament, especially to the gospels, which contain the teachings of Jesus. It is here we learn what is meant by “the spirit of Jesus,” in that phrase at the very center of our covenant.

All my life I have been drawn to and away from the Bible in different ways; first as a child of Bible-believing Christians who took the Bible quite literally and believed that it was inerrant and that it was the literal Word of God; then as a skeptic who found no end of contradictions, misstatements and errors; and more recently as a believer who struggles to understand and interpret the Bible in a much more complex world than the one in which it was written. I wanted to talk today about insights and questions from our just-completed overview of the Bible at Linden Ponds.

One of the most interesting aspects of the course was the combination of people from completely different religious backgrounds – Catholics who never read the Bible until recently, Jews who had never read the New Testament, Protestant ministers, agnostics, die-hard atheists who wanted to acknowledge no God of any sort but professed strong ethical commitments, and everything in between. Each of us brought a particular range of experiences and training to the class, and yet each of us was able to find meaning in measuring ourselves against the challenges the Bible posed to us.

I want to suggest that the Bible matters deeply to us for three significant reasons. First, literacy in English virtually requires familiarity with at least some of the stories and sayings of the Bible. Second, the Bible serves as a touchstone to help us see our own idolatry – our own commitment to the part instead of the whole in our own time, in our own perspectives on the world, in our “modern” sensibility – instead of to the whole, the transcendent, the divine if you will. Third, the Bible constantly reminds us what justice demands of us; it constantly holds before us obligations to care for our neighbors, for the weakest among us, and to challenge wealth and power in the name of truth and righteousness. Before returning to these key themes, though, I want to clear away some of the underbrush which distracts us from appreciating how the Bible can speak to us.

Marcus Borg in his excellent introduction to the Bible, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, suggests four reasons why our ways of reading the Bible have changed over the last century or so. First, we are aware of religious pluralism. As a six-year-old, I was meeting kids at school for the first time and tried to construct a hierarchy of faiths from the little information I had; I suggested to my mother that there were three religions: ours was on top, Lutherans in the middle (I wanted it to be okay to play with a new friend who worshipped in the Lutheran church just down the block from ours); and Catholics were at the bottom (because after all the Catholic kids next door went to parochial school and we didn’t or maybe weren’t allowed to play with them). My mother was a little puzzled by the question, and it was only the beginning of my quest to figure out how all the different beliefs and religions of the world fit together. In the end, I found it implausible to believe that I had the amazing good fortune to have been born into a family which had discovered the one true church (of maybe seven in the whole world) with the one true teaching and that everyone else would have to come around to our beliefs or risk eternal damnation. Beyond religion, Borg suggests, we are also aware of cultural and historical relativity. As he puts it, “We are aware that how people think is pervasively shaped by the time and place in which they live, as well as by social and economic class.” – and we recognize that we, too, are conditioned by these factors. We are therefore suspicious that any collection of teachings or of scriptures can be absolutely true for all time.[2] Third, we are shaped by modernity and particularly by the scientific ethos of skepticism as the only way of coming to scientific certainty; our understanding of creation, the age of the earth, the possibility of miracles and so on are all shaped by our now-customary modern ways of viewing the world. At the same time, we are living on the edge of postmodernity, and we are beginning to realize that modernity itself with its fixed categories of investigation and its pervasive skepticism of the sacred is itself not the final word about reality but is in fact culturally conditioned; as a result, this time in our history is marked by a turn toward experience and spirituality as well as a “movement beyond fact fundamentalism to the realization that stories can be true without being literally and factually true.”[3] In this way we can say, for example, that the story of Cain and Abel and the fratricidal envy it embodies never literally happened but is always happening, over and over, generation after generation.

One more bit of brush-clearing: translation. The original versions of the texts which eventually become part of our Bibles were written in Hebrew, Aramaic and (for the New Testament) in the common dialect of Greek spread by Alexander the Greats’ armies as they conquered and spread throughout the known world. We have none of the originals of the texts and there are numerous variants in the texts we do have; in the case of the New Testament, there are more variants than words in the entire book. In most cases these variants are minor – ancient scribes didn’t necessarily know how to spell better than some of us do – but in some cases they can make a significant difference in the theological meaning of a given passage. We even get situations where quotations from one part of the Bible used in another get it wrong, most tellingly when the Gospel of Matthew quotes from a prophecy in Isaiah which refers to a “young woman” in the original Hebrew but was translated in the Greek translation Matthew used as “virgin” – a translation which Matthew then uses to “prove” the virgin birth.

There is a dizzying array of English translations, most famously the version authorized by King James of England in 1611 – the King James Bible. For many of us, this translation is the only one which really sounds “Biblical.” Its wonderful Shakespearean cadences are inspiring and enduring, though it is a bit heavy on thee’s and thou’s and on “th’s” in general – speaketh, sayeth, meaneth, and so on. I’ve heard it said that no other translation is needed – that if it was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for us – but of course it postdates Jesus by sixteen centuries, and Jesus after all most likely spoke Aramaic and not even Greek, much less English, Elizabethan or otherwise. Modern translations often disappoint because they don’t have the exalted language of the King James, but in fact the original language was not exalted, it was common speech for its time – Greek and presumably Hebrew vernacular. On the other hand, just try referring in a Christmas Eve service to wrapping the Baby Jesus in “bands of cloth” rather than in “swaddling clothes” and you’ll realize the extent to which the King James Version is what we understand to be “Biblical.”

One aspect of translation which has changed in recent memory is a new sensitivity to gender inclusiveness. Fifty years ago, everyone understood that “mankind” meant “everyone” and “he” in many contexts meant “he or she.” With the second wave of feminism in religion and elsewhere, these male-centric formulations were challenged and we are now much more careful using such expressions – and, judging from the reactions of members of our Bible class, this change matters – though it seems that women – or at least many women – “get” why it matters more than men do.

Consider, for example, the first line of our call to worship, Psalm 1:1, which I read in Steven Mitchell’s translation:

^KJVPsalm 1:1 Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.

^NRS[Contemporary gender sensitive Ecumenical translation] Psalm 1:1 Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers;

One of our practices in the class was to bring multiple translations to the table to ensure that we were not stuck in a particular set of words which have become too familiar or seem to have some fixed meaning in our minds. Sometimes it helps to go even farther afield and to transpose the words from their original setting into something more closely approximating the world we live in so that we can grasp the core of meaning with fresh eyes; that’s what we did in listening to the translation from the Japanese of Psalm 23 in this morning’s reading, and that of course is what Stephen Mitchell does in his translations. Another variation is Clarence Jordan’s “cotton patch” version of the Bible. He explains the need for his version this way:

Why a “cotton patch” version? While there have been many excellent translations of the Scriptures into modern English, they still have left us stranded in some faraway land in the long distant past. We need to have the good news come to us not only in our own tongue but in our own time…. So the “cotton patch” version is an attempt to translate not only the words but the events. We change the setting from first-century Palestine to twentieth-century America. We ask our brethren of long ago to cross the time-space barrier and talk to us not only in modern English but about modern problems, feelings, frustrations, hopes and assurances; to work beside us in our cotton or on our assembly line, so that the word becomes modern flesh.[4]

Here’s one of my favorites from the Sermon on the Mount: the King James Version translates Matthew 5:48 this way: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” – which seems to impose a standard that no human could achieve. Here’s the cotton patch version: “Now you, you all must be mature, as your spiritual Father is mature.”[5]

Or consider the cotton patch version of the Parable of the Good Samaritan (remember, this is Georgia in the 1950’s and 60’s):

25. One day a teacher of an adult Bible class got up and tested him with this question: "Doctor, what does one do to be saved?"

Jesus replied, "What does the Bible say? How do you interpret it?"

The teacher answered, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your physical strength and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself."

"That is correct," answered Jesus. "Make a habit of this and you'll be saved."

But the Sunday school teacher, trying to save face, asked, "But ... er ... but ... just who is my neighbor?"

Then Jesus laid into him and said, "A man was going from Atlanta to Albany and some gangsters held him up. When they had robbed him of his wallet and brand-new suit, they beat him up and drove off in his car, leaving him unconscious on the shoulder of the highway.

"Now it just so happened that a white preacher was going down that same highway. When he saw the fellow, he stepped on the gas and went scooting by.

"Shortly afterwards a white Gospel song leader came down the road, and when he saw what had happened, he too stepped on the gas.

"Then a black man traveling that way came upon the fellow, and what he saw moved him to tears. He stopped and bound up his wounds as best he could, drew some water from his water-jug to wipe away the blood and then laid him on the back seat. He drove on into Albany and took him to the hospital and said to the nurse, 'You all take good care of this white man I found on the highway. Here's the only two dollars I got, but you all keep account of what he owes, and if he can't pay it, I'll settle up with you when I make a pay-day.'

"Now if you had been the man held up by the gangsters, which of these three – the white preacher, the white song leader, or the black man – would you consider to have been your neighbor?"

The teacher of the adult Bible class said, "Why, of course, the nig - I mean, er ... well, er ... the one who treated me kindly."

Jesus said, "Well, then, you get going and start living like that!"[6]

Let me return, then, to the key reasons I find myself drawn back to re-reading and studying and teaching the Bible. The stories remain challenging to us across the generations because they remind us, in almost archetypal ways, of the strengths and weaknesses of the human condition, of the false presumptions into which we so easily fall by which older siblings are entitled or might makes right, or we convince ourselves to do things we shouldn’t by blinding ourselves to their consequences. In this way, the Bible has been and continues to be a significant source of wisdom and strength for anyone who has ears and is willing to listen. In a broader sense, the Bible as a whole, by bringing us as it does back to a very different world, provides us a ruler against which to measure ourselves. It is not our own world, of course, but by giving us a yardstick it reminds us that this modern era of ours, this day in which we are living, is neither the finest time to be alive nor necessarily the best time or place to be living. It reminds us not to make an idol of the way we live, to blithely assume that life as we know it here in the United States is the best or only way anyone on earth today or at any time wants or should want to live. Finally, the Bible reminds us over and over that God sides with the underdog, that the youngest and weakest is not therefore less human or capable than the eldest or strongest – that David can hope to beat Goliath. Over and over the younger son comes out on top, or a woman leads the way to victory in battle because the man who should be doing it is a coward, or the weakest army prevails because it has justice and righteousness on its side. Over and over, we are reminded that the measure of a society lies in how well it cares the widows and orphans, the weak and defenseless, the least among us.

Stories matter, standards against which to compare ourselves matter, and reminders of the need for righteousness matter; and therefore the Bible matters as a source and an ongoing inspiration within our whole culture, whether we are conservative or liberal, Protestant, Catholic or Jewish, skeptic or believer.

Since we started our service with the Psalm 1 as translated by Stephen Mitchell, perhaps it is fitting to close with the last Psalm, 150, from the same source:

Praise God in the depths of the universe;
praise him in the human heart.

Praise him for his power and beauty,
for his all-feeling, fathomless love.

Praise him with drums and trumpets,
with string quartets and guitars.

Praise him in market and workplace,
with computer, with hammer and nails.

Praise him in bedroom and kitchen;
praise him with pots and pans.

Praise him in the temple of the present;
let every breath be his praise.[7]

Amen.