Scroll down or click here for a list of general links for Biblical studies
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At the start of this class on the Bible, a logical question to start with is ‘What is the Bible?’ The answer is probably not as obvious as you might think! Many people would immediately reply by saying, ‘A book’, but even this seemingly obvious ‘fact’ is mistaken, believe it or not. What we today call the Bible is in fact a collection of books, written by many different authors, over the course of a millennium or so.
Religiously/Devotionally: This is probably the way of reading the Bible that the majority of you are most familiar with. This essentially refers to that approach to the Bible where one reads the Bible as essentially a message from God for oneself.
Advantages: It is presumably obvious to everyone that most of the books in the Bible are fundamentally religious in character. And for this reason, reading the Bible with an ear attuned to finding a spiritual and religious message in it will be a sympathetic reading. To read the Bible while excluding from consideration its religious claims would be like studying a symphony of Beethoven’s while excluding from consideration anything musical!
Disadvantages: Nevertheless, reading the Bible devotionally also has a number of problems and pitfalls. The biggest danger is probably that the reader will ignore the distance (of language, culture, historical setting, etc.) between our time and that in which the book was written. Devotional reading also tends to ignore the importance of context and of recognizing the type of literature one is reading. For example, if you read Moby Dick or Les Miserables or some other piece of literature for another class (or for your own enjoyment), you will not (I hope!) open the book at random, read a few lines, and then put the book down again content that you have understood its message. Yet often this very approach to reading the Bible is encouraged in many religious traditions. Reading the Bible devotionally also tends to ignore the fact that the Bible was not written to us or specifically with us in mind. There are letters from Paul to the Romans, the Philippians, the Corinthians, but nothing to the Hoosiers, the Americans, or anyone else alive today. In this class, we will be attempting to read the literature of the Bible in a manner that takes things like context and genre very seriously. The approaches to reading the Bible that we shall be adopting in this class are by no means opposed to you as an individual reader finding meaning and inspiration in the text, if you come from a tradition which regards some or all of the Bible as sacred Scripture. Yet the Bible is clearly not a book that is of interest to, or can only be studied by, those who already have prior faith commitments. If you are someone who regards the Bible as Scripture, then you will still find that this course helps as a prelude to seeking to find meaning in the Bible for your own life. But you will also find many things in this class that will challenge the way you have read the Bible up until now and the conclusions you have drawn from it. I hope you will find the experience beneficial!
Apologetically (i.e. reading with an axe to grind) – This refers to reading with the aim of seeking to prove or disprove doctrines. Perhaps the hardest thing for some students will be attempting to read the Bible without the whole process being about simply trying to prove or disprove certain doctrinal beliefs. Obviously, there will be few if any in the classroom who read the Bible without having something they want to prove – whether that be their own personal faith, or their own personal skepticism. However, our aim in this class will be something much more balanced and much more modest: simply to understand what these books are about. There are two main approaches to doing this: historical approaches, and literary approaches.
Historically/contextually – Reading historically means reading with such questions in view as who wrote the book, why, and in what context. These approaches aim to discover (to whatever extent possible) what the author probably ‘meant’ and the original readers probably would have understood. Reading the Bible historically generally means also trying to use the biblical texts to give insight to ‘what really happened’ in the distant past. A problem with this is that postmodernism has questioned whether we can ever know what an author meant. After all, all we have is the text, and we cannot ask the author when we are uncertain. Postmodernism also stresses that each of us reads from a particular perspective, and thus there can be no objective interpretation of a text, biblical or otherwise. There is certainly a lot of truth in this, but I am not convinced that this means there is nothing to be gained by trying! Even if we can never read a text the way the original readers would have, that does not mean that we content ourselves to each simply read from our own perspective. By studying the cultural context, the historical setting and background, and other related matters, we can at the very least challenge our own assumptions and presuppositions. This will not make us objective, but it may make us ‘better’ readers than we would have been otherwise.
We have many resources available to help us in reading a text historically. Archaeology is an important resource: it not only provides us with early manuscripts of the books we are studying, but it also provides us with supplementary information that can confirm, complement/supplement, or call into question the information given in a biblical text. Another important resource is the literature we have from around the time the books of the Bible were written. Imagine watching Jay Leno without ever watching the news – most of his jokes and one-liners would make no sense to you if you didn’t know what was happening in the world at the same time. In the same way, many parts of the Bible make more sense if we know what was going on at the time, what other people were writing about, and the ideas that the biblical authors were interacting with. And obviously since the books of the Bible were written in ancient Hebrews, Aramaic and Greek, study of these languages (and of other texts written in them) is also an essential part of studying the Bible – although you’ll be happy to hear it won’t be expected of you in this class! Yet this raises an important point to remember: you will not be reading the Bible, but a translation of what scholars consider most likely to have been the original text on the basis of the manuscripts we now have. Do not forget that you are dependent on the work of scholars and translators for your ability to read the Bible, and that any particular points of view and emphases they have, or errors they make, will affect their translation, and thus affect your interpretation as well! How can you avoid this when you don’t know the original languages? The best way is to use more than one translation. That way, you will at least avoid basing your interpretation of the text on a single person or group’s viewpoint.
Historical study of the Bible tends to be looked at suspiciously by many religious believers. After all, it is scholars using the methods of historical criticism who have tended to do things like question the dearly-cherished doctrines of Christians, such as the virgin birth. However, the conclusions of historical study should not frighten Christians. Historical study will by definition be skeptical of claims to the miraculous. Historians deal in cause and effect, in probability. They are like a court of law, trying to make a judgment or ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ based on available evidence. Now imagine if you could bring Mary the mother of Jesus into a courtroom to try to ‘prove’ the virgin birth. How would you go about it? Would you submit her to a medical examination? Would you send Jesus, Mary and Joseph to a lab for DNA-testing? What, if anything, would that prove? And in the absence of such evidence (if any of you have DNA from Jesus, Mary and Joseph, please do let me know!) could one ever hope to conclude with even a fractional probability that the virgin birth occurred? Or to take another example, what kind of evidence would it take to convince you that someone (other than Jesus) had risen from the dead? If you apply the same standards to all historical evidence and all religious claims, you will find that the best verdict you can come up with is ‘not proven’. And when one does not see things like virgin births happening regularly today, a historian is completely justified as a historian in viewing such claims with skepticism. This is not because a historian can definitively disprove that miraculous events occurred. It is simply that, when the evidence is cross-examined with the same methods and scrutiny that are applied to other ancient texts, one cannot conclude that the events have been proven ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.
Literarily (N.B. This doesn't say 'literally'!) – Taking a literary approach means reading the books as literature, seeking to understand the plot, the interaction of characters, and any message or meaning communicated by and through it. This means reading books as books (i.e. not just opening at random and reading a few lines), reading poetry as poetry, etc. While a historical approach seeks to get ‘behind’ a text (whether to the author who wrote it, or to historical events it purports to describe), a literary approach studies the text in and of itself as literature.
Different methods of studying the Bible produce different results. A literary approach will be able to draw your attention to the role of Peter and the other disciples in Mark’s Gospel, for example. But by definition, by focusing on the text as literature, this approach will not be able to answer questions like ‘Were Peter and the other disciples really like that?’
History of Religions/Comparative Religions - One can also study the Bible in order to learn about the history of ideas, and/or to trace the development over time of Israel’s religious beliefs and practices. This type of approach will relate the beliefs expressed in the Bible to those found in other cultures and societies. Examples of questions taking this kind of approach might be: “How does the idea of the ‘Word’ (Greek logos) relate to what other writers of that time had to say on this subject?” or “What is different between the way Abraham is presented in the Bible and in the Qur’an?” This approach can use either a literary or a historical approach to the text of the Bible: one may trace the development of religious ideas over time, or look at how two sacred texts in their final form compare to one another.
Critical Thinking: The main thing that you need to learn in order to do well in this class is to apply critical thinking (for definitions see my main Butler home page at http://blue.butler.edu/~jfmcgrat/) to studying the Bible – in other words, learning to read with your head, using your brain. It is crucial that, whatever perspective you already have about the Bible, you come to this class willing to ask questions that they do not talk about in Sunday School, and to look at both sides of the evidence before drawing a conclusion. No one will be penalized in this class for being a believer or an unbeliever, but it will affect your grade if you are unwilling to listen to both sides of the evidence before drawing your conclusions. You will get the highest grade, not be repeating a ‘right answer’ you learned either in class or in a textbook, but by showing that you have understood the issues and are capable of evaluating the evidence. Once you have done that, the conclusions that you draw are up to you…
GO TO A PAGE ABOUT DISTINGUISHING SCHOLARLY AND DEVOTIONAL COMMENTARIES
GO TO A PAGE ABOUT THE QUESTION OF THE BIBLE'S TRUTHFULNESS
D. J. A. Clines, The Bible in the Modern World
Robert D. Lane, Reading the Bible
Internet Theology Resources: Scripture
Significant Dates in Biblical History
The Bible: The Book that Bridges the Millenia
Jay Treat's Internet Resources for the Study of Judaism & Christianity
Jim West's Biblical Studies Resources
Antiquities & Biblical Studies Web Page
And Adam Knew Eve: A Dictionary of Sex in the Bible
Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (Pontifical Biblical Commission)
75 Bible Questions Your Instructors Pray You Won't Ask
Inscriptions from the Land of Israel
Notes by Dr. Thomas L. Constable
Life Notes on the Bible (by Dr. Carey Ford)
Learning Ancient Biblical Languages (links)
Encyclopedia of NT Textual Criticism
Textual Criticism & Manuscript Interpretation
Rodney Decker: Resources for NT Studies
Josh McDowell – Evidence for the Resurrection
The Verdict? A Reply to Josh McDowell
Christian Apologetics & Apologists: Josh McDowell
Carr – Critique of Josh McDowell
Todd Pence – Some Mistakes of McDowell
{I’ve provided you with some links here that evaluate the arguments of Josh McDowell and other Christian apologists from a skeptic’s perspective. The reason is not to convince you to abandon your beliefs, but to make you aware of how those who are not already adherents of the Christian faith view such arguments}
Narrative Theory & Literary Criticism
Arthur Wainwright, “History or Literature or Scripture?”
Literary Criticism –Definitions
