Actually opening up and reading a bible can be a pretty surprising experience for people nowadays. Go ahead and google any phrase involving \u2018controversial\u2019 and \u2018Christianity.\u2019 You\u2019ll end up with a whole slew of clickbait-esque slogans, from whatchristianswanttoknow.com\u2019s \u2018Top 5 Controversial Bible Verses With Commentary\u2019 to Buzzfeed\u2019s \u20187 Shocking Bible Verses You Probably Won\u2019t Hear in Church.\u2019 Probably not all that shockingly, the articles aren\u2019t generally very academic.<\/p>\n
Now, the lack of sophistication should in no way negate those articles\u2019 relative importance. The fact that people are so startled by the violence, sexism, and slavery found in these verses speaks to the current conception of Christianity. Christians and atheists alike are somewhat justified in only expecting specific topics from the Bible. They\u2019ve rarely seen any others.<\/p>\n
I have heard plenty of sermons, attended plenty of theology classes, read plenty of biblical commentary. And I\u2019ve come across an odd misconception related to this ancient text. It\u2019s not just that there are currently misunderstandings of what exactly the Bible does or does not say. It\u2019s that there always have been. On the most basic level, societies have assigned a specific authority to this book — the Book — with the assumption that it means the same thing that it has always meant, that there\u2019s some unchanging base-level authority which has remained constant.<\/p>\n
That base authority is, of course, supposed to be God. But such simplified thinking allows several degrees of cultural ignorance: the events that actually happened, the people that wrote the events down, the people that translated the writings, the people that interpreted the translations, and — most importantly — the cultures in which all of this happened.<\/p>\n
Lauri Thur\u00e9n, a writer who knows a whole lot more about the Bible than I do, points out that over time, \u201cthe assessments of literary history on early Christian writing have fundamentally changed\u201d (106). In other words, the way we look at biblical texts is not a constant. And this is particularly problematic because the way we interpret the Bible changes the way some people will live their lives. God is supposed to be the base constant of the work, so we ignore how the words themselves have changed over time.<\/p>\n
Now, avoidance of such oversimplification means being able to peer outside of our own narrow views and opinions; ignoring how others have<\/em> thought is to ignore how others will<\/em> think, and to assume that our current \u2018correct\u2019 understanding of a concept is and has always been right. You and I will see the same letters when we read a chapter, but even if you are from the exact same culture and time that I am, I doubt we\u2019ll read quite the same thing. The variable is whether we let our values cloud our reading without considering what has shaped them. Ignoring our personal bias makes it impossible to understand what a text means beyond our own specific reading.<\/p>\n Some make this distinction by foregoing their personal opinions entirely. In \u201cParables Unplugged\u201d — unplugged, supposedly, from any bias of the reader — Jesus\u2019s stories are explored within a clean framework: the \u2018claim\u2019 made by the story, the \u2018data\u2019 enforcing the credibility of the claim, and the \u2018warrant\u2019 connecting the the story to the facts. Employing this robotic framework takes every bit of individuality out of the reading. It\u2019s an attempt to carry the story back its origin. On this practical basis, the author walks through every parable in Luke.<\/p>\n The end of Luke 5 contains one of those parables where Jesus uses inanimate objects to explain why on earth his disciples are not doing what every other good religious person is doing. In this particular case, a group of Pharisees (the straight-laced high-class Jews) comes questioning why Jesus\u2019s close Jewish followers are not observing the basic tradition of frequent fasting, which was essentially common courtesy for religious people at that point. Jesus has three answers for them: people don\u2019t fast with a bridegroom, people don\u2019t fix old clothes with new clothes, and people don\u2019t fill old wineskins with new wine. And that\u2019s all; I can\u2019t imagine the Pharisees were completely satisfied with such an explanation.<\/p>\n But Thur\u00e9n breaks it down for them. According to her structured reading of the latter two parables, Jesus presents the \u2018warrant\u2019 that \u201cold and new should not be mixed,\u201d based on the \u2018data\u2019 that \u201cJesus\u2019 message means something new,\u201d thus pushing the \u2018claim\u2019 that \u201cold rules do not apply to Jesus\u2019 message.\u201d Her academic reading makes historical sense, and moreover is largely agreed upon as the right one. I\u2019ve heard that sermon before, explaining why Christians don\u2019t exactly follow Old Testament rules or why maybe some of those 7 Shocking Bible Verses aren\u2019t so damning after all; because they\u2019re old, and we\u2019re concerned with the new, and Jesus said we don\u2019t want those mixed together. Or our wineskins might break.<\/p>\n But I don\u2019t think the Pharisees were as convinced as Thur\u00e9n was that \u201cthe issue can no longer be simply the disciples\u2019 fasting\u201d (262). They asked Jesus why his followers weren\u2019t obeying the rules of his religion, and he gave them sewing advice. The academic jump Thur\u00e9n so easily makes between Jesus\u2019s metaphors and old rules not being applicable to his message was not all that easy at the time. Even if the Pharisees were willing to sacrifice their original question for this theological explanation, whether they would agree on Jesus\u2019s meaning is doubtful.<\/p>\n Not even all current academic readings come to the same conclusions. While Thur\u00e9n has her step-by-step process, Ruben Zimmermann writes on the slew of ways scholars have taken the stories apart before: some create groupings like \u201ca) family, village, city, and beyond; b) masters and servants, c) home and farm,\u201d or \u201cparables of the temple, parables of the land, parables of the economy, and parables of the people\u201d (187) to provide further clarification as to what a parable might mean. Other scholars \u201cdistinguish between formal and textual aspects,\u201d from the genre to the number of words to the introductory sentences (185), all to provide a structured basis for coming to a particular conclusive meaning.<\/p>\n Debates on what Jesus meant in Luke 5 range from the small-scale reading of this parable to a large-scale perspective on how much of the entire Bible remains relevant. And that second argument is further broken down into whether we should only follow the rules that Jesus restated, or continue to follow all rules except for those Jesus changed. Even within the conceptual reading of the parable, disagreements range all over the place. Some have popular sway now, in a time when most Christians very easily set aside the more conservative sets of biblical codes; and some have been much more popular in the past, notably the far more strict (and profitable) reading favored in the Catholic church\u2019s heyday in Europe.<\/p>\n Those readings are all hugely based on context. The society in which I read the parable today is not the society in which my great-great-great-grandparents read it, and theirs isn\u2019t the one in which their ancestors read it either. Who read it, and when they read it, changed what they read.<\/p>\n And the possibilities are endless. Put the text in front of someone unfamiliar with the Bible without the name Jesus, and chances are they would wonder at the advice they just got on when to fast, something they probably never do, how to fix their clothing, something they probably never do, and how to decide what to put in their wineskins, something they probably never do. Taken without a little theology the passage is remarkably irrelevant. I absolutely wouldn\u2019t care about it if I hadn\u2019t been told it means something more.<\/p>\n And that highlights the danger of all these uninformed interpretations. I was told that this string of sentences about old and new possessions helps to determine how much of the Bible I should listen to. That\u2019s a pretty weighty decision, considering the sort of claims it makes throughout, from the very irrelevant and ignored — \u201cThou shalt not wear a material mixed of wool and linen together\u201d (Deuteronomy 22:11) — to the incredibly relevant and written on protest signs — \u201cThou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is an abomination\u201d (Leviticus 18:22). The decisions Christians make about whether to follow those rules are important today. If they\u2019re going to make them based on Luke 5 and other passages like it, understanding this variability becomes absolutely paramount.<\/p>\n The problem we\u2019re hitting here is the difference between what the Bible is meant to be<\/em> and what the Bible is.<\/em><\/p>\n It is meant to be the timeless text central to its religion, meant to be the word of God always present to guide those on earth.<\/p>\n What it is is a book. And it carries with it all the flaws big old books intrinsically bear, and even more because of the nature of this specific text. Nowhere will you find a book more discussed, more studied, more translated, more interpreted. The Bible has been through an awful lot: the stories themselves hold a huge amount of history, and many were passed around orally for quite some time before being written down. Then they were narrowed down into which specific books would be included in the final draft, then translated from Ancient Hebrew and Greek into hundreds of modern languages. Every step of the way, more interpretations emerged, more specifications arose for how it should and must be read to truly follow the word of God.<\/p>\n The vague background assumption that the way we read the Bible now is how it always has been and always will be read becomes dangerous with the potency of the text. If Person A reads the passage and decides that it means nothing in the Old Testament is relevant, Person B reads the passage and decides that it means both testaments are important in different situations, and Person C reads the passage and doesn\u2019t think it relates to the Old Testament at all, there will be disagreement. If all of them fervently believe that their reading is the true word of God and refuse to consider the other views, the fight gets ugly. Moreover, they might all still be wrong.<\/p>\n The original importance of the text has to be taken into account for interpretation here; where and when and by whom it was written changed what ended up on those pages and should, at the very least, help decipher the original intentions. But words and context are changeable. Expecting one and only one reading to be foundationally and undeniably correct provides grounds for arrogant fundamentalism, which can help people use the Bible to justify next to any opinion. There are a lot of words in that book, words that have traveled very far, and if people look hard enough for their interpretation, they will be able to find it; how out of context and how twisted it is depends on them.<\/p>\n To step back and understand what is really being said means moving away from these bafflingly quick readings. I wouldn\u2019t scroll through one of Derrida\u2019s texts, grab the sentence \u201cWriting is no more valuable\u2026 as a remedy than as a drug\u201d just because it agrees with me, and then forcefully argue that anyone who doesn\u2019t think that\u2019s what Derrida believes is wrong. It\u2019s out of context, out of place; that\u2019s an oversimplification of an issue as multi-layered as that of the Bible, but the principle of the thing still stands. Where words came from and what we use to interpret them are key to what conclusions we come to. Explaining the contexts behind those interpretations can help move us away from our bias to understand why other people think how they do. Debate can then shift from unexplained perception to justified reason about what the Bible might actually be explaining.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Works Cited<\/p>\n Thur\u00e9n, Lauri. \u201cThe Parables as Persuasion.\u201d Parables Unplugged: Reading the Lukan Parables in Their Rhetorical Context<\/em>, Augsburg Fortress, Publishers, 2014, pp. 249\u2013344, www.jstor.org\/stable\/j.ctt9m0vdv.10.<\/p>\n Zimmermann, Ruben. \u201cReading and Analyzing Parables.\u201d Puzzling the Parables of Jesus: Methods and Interpretations<\/em>, Augsburg Fortress, Publishers, 2015, pp. 183\u2013210, www.jstor.org\/stable\/j.ctt155j2q7.9.<\/p>\n Imitating Chuck Klosterman, particularly in \u201cDeath by Harry Potter\u201d (http:\/\/www.esquire.com\/entertainment\/a3556\/klosterman1107\/). Actually opening up and reading a bible can be a pretty surprising experience for people nowadays. Go ahead and google any phrase involving \u2018controversial\u2019 and \u2018Christianity.\u2019 You\u2019ll end up with a whole slew of clickbait-esque slogans, from whatchristianswanttoknow.com\u2019s \u2018Top 5 … Continue reading
\nAn earlier draft of this essay was read by Emma Lezberg and Joelle Troiano.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"