Reading the Bible as it Is or as it Was

Marcus Terentius Varro, a Roman scholar-author-soldier-politician and all around smart guy, wrote a three volume set on agriculture entitled Rerum rusticarum libri tres. Oddly, in an era of limited medical and scientific knowledge that ascribed human disease to imbalanced "humors" (fluids in the body), alignments of stars, or an enemy looking at you wrong, he had the audacity to claim the following:

"Precautions must also be taken in the neighborhood of swamps, both for the reasons given, and because there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases."

 De Re Rustica. Loeb Classical Library. I.12.2

Aside from the swamp vapors, Varro was on to something akin to germ theory that wouldn't become common knowledge until the 1890's with Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Why did it take so long to work this out? Two reasons: first was a lack of technological devices like microscopes to test Varro's idea, the other had to do with the lack of a critical psychological technology: prioritizing the idea of testing claims through experiment, or as we know it: the scientific method.

Without the capabilities of modern science, in ancient times one could only build inferences about reality upon other sources of authority- yours, Aristotle's or some other known expert's. The original documents of the New Testament were composed and listened to by people who had very different intellectual foundations from ours, one in which verification rested on foundations that required a much lower level of rigor.

Picture this: upon exiting your time machine in a medium-sized provincial Roman town in 10 CE, you encounter a woman with an obvious chest cold. You ask a passerby what made her sick. "Her jealous cousin cast an evil eye upon her and now she is suffering for it," is the reply.

Finding ourselves in a society that simply assumes germ theory, it's terribly difficult to understand how a person can strongly believe otherwise. Were you to propose a virus as the cause of that chest cold and prescribe a remedy of fluids and rest, you'd meet with a whole lot of blank stares and raised eyebrows.

Knowing this informs how we interpret ancient behaviors and references like amulets that are supposed to ward off that evil eye, or the sure belief in the effectiveness of curses and counter-curses.

The New Testament is full of this kind of thing. Matthew has Jesus talk about the eye being "the lamp of the body." Might it help to know that it was indeed an ancient belief that our eyes emitted some kind of light energy that illuminated one's field of view? We now know it's the complete opposite, but it does help explain what Matthew was getting at. (Matthew 6:22-23)

Candida Moss outlines four Hellenistic theories about the dynamics of vision in an article in Catholic Biblical Quarterly.* First was the "intromission" theory which held that vision is accomplished by way of effluences from that emanate from an object and enter the eye, resulting in seeing an object. Democritus and Epicurus were fans of this hypothesis.  Second is an idea attributed to Pythagoras that imagined the eye as a kind of emitter of light that radiated a kind of "ray" that contacts and perceives external objects. Most Stoics held to this "extramission" concept. Next we come to Plato's description in Timaeus, (ca. 360 BCE) a mashup of the first two in which a substance like fire is contained in the body and exuded by the eyes and meets up with the emanations produced by ambient light bouncing around and forms a coherent, accessible image that enters the body to be recognized as seeing.

Finally, the ever iconoclastic Aristotle had his own opinion. He proposed that the real action of seeing happened in a diaphanous medium between observer and object. Like an underwater sonar, the eye picks up on movements in the medium according to color or shape of an object such that one does not actually see the real object, only the impression of it on the intervening medium.

Sophocles, Euripides, and even Philo the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher (20 BCE – c. 50 CE) all refer to the widespread acceptance of the extramission theory (that the eye emits some kind of illuminating ray). This helps us understand Matthew 6:22-23 a bit better- if your internal fiery-stuff is ethically compromised, forget about enjoying a single-mindedly honest life. Both your perception and eye-produced effect on the world is compromised.

What are some other behind-the-scenes beliefs popping up in the New Testament that let us in on the unstated beliefs of the writers? Do these beliefs still make sense? What do we do with them when we find them? Is it OK to ignore them as out of date- meaningful to them but not to us?

A significant slice of the American church is told that the words in their English Bibles are in fact timeless and unchanging truth direct from a perfect eternal God… But what if some of the assertions in our Bibles are simply reflections of standard ancient philosophical ways of seeing the world? How can we tell if any given proposition in the Bible is actual revelation- information that was otherwise impossible to discern- or simply variations on explanatory themes that were already present in the worlds of the gospel writers and Paul?

If the Bible is the revelation of ultimate truth, why do we so vehemently disagree on what it is?

Our assumptions about the world are always informed by the information we have collected from others. Starting with family and peers when we were young, our brains were trained and ingrained to imagine what the world is like and how we should respond. A PTSD sufferer sees everything as potentially dangerous resulting in high anxiety and alert levels, ready to fight or flee at any moment. A sheltered child might believe in the utter goodness of all human beings until she encounters a bully in middle school.

And there are broader categories of belief we have absorbed from those who influenced us. We walk about the world with some kind of answer to questions like these:

• What makes a good life?

• Who is a good person?

• How did we get here, and do our origins say anything about what we are now? What is our relationship to the natural world?

• Is there something beyond nature?

• If there is, what is our relationship to it?

Your answers to all these questions emerge from the complex of stored data points that have found a place in your mind as a justified assumption. They dwell in a carefully constructed apparatus that is used to explain the world out there. New information is assimilated according to the rules of the apparatus. Challenging ideas are ignored or manipulated to fit in.

The ancients pondered these questions too. Like us, they looked for guidance that could give them hints about meaning, purpose, ethics and destiny. They looked up at the night sky with its repeating patterns and connections to the seasons, wondering if there was a connection between our fates and the bright lights in the sky. The result? Astrology: the "science" of understanding the movements of constellations and planets as if they expressed an agency similar to our own.

The natural world as humans experienced it was far from perfect except for the reliable movements of the zodiac through seasons and years. Truly magnificent human beings, especially those who could show a god or goddess in their lineage, must be exalted to an appropriate eternal fate of cruising the skies in perfect harmony with an unsullied heavenly realm.

And, since it was a given that the gods supervised the goings-on down here, it must be that events in the sky must reflect some form of communication with us. Comets, supernovae, meteors and eclipses had to be messages from the divine realm.

So when Matthew chooses to include a moveable star in his nativity story, and Luke depicts the sudden appearance of angelic singers, their audiences would immediately "get it." Just like many other VIPs who entered our world, Jesus can safely be numbered among them.

Reading the Bible as it was, or as it is?

Arising from discussions about the intellectual resources available to the ancients versus what we bring to the Bible, is a dilemma. When Christians are confronted with an ancient book that is supposed to house the very words of the one and only source of capital "T" Truth, which interpretive value wins when we try to understand what God is saying? Do we go for what the original authors were trying to say? Or do we lean toward what we think it says to believers here and now?

Scholars spend a majority of their efforts on reconstructing what the original authors were trying to say when they wrote their stories. Proper interpretation, let alone application, cannot happen without understanding as much as possible about the world in which the work was produced. The who, when, where ,why and how matter just as much as the what. If a reader wants to dig truth out of the Bible, it makes a big difference if you know things like the state of literacy in the first century. Writing was an elites-only activity, as was reading; what does that indicate about the existence of the four gospels?

Pastors and preachers tend to major on connecting the words of scripture to individual and community life as it is now. Accessing truth is simply a matter of plain sense reading for the purpose of application to daily life. There may be a single correct interpretation, but many different ways one can use it. This democratization of meaning emphasizes the action of the Holy Spirit who supposedly gives every true believer the mystical ability to understand and employ biblical concepts in their personal lives.

There are pros and cons to each point of approach.

Adding interpretive insights into what might perplex modern people, for example, knowing that the terms "Grace" and "Faith" are elements of the ancient Mediterranean patronage system of social exchange can help us get closer to an accurate representation of what an author like Paul was trying to say. Otherwise, attaching our own meanings to these technical terms will result in misinterpretation and misapplication of what we read. 

If God was speaking in and through a particular culture and time period, readers must take that into account when attempting to bridge those meanings into our own. When Paul speaks of his enemies, for example, how can we consider his perspective when identifying possible enemies in our own lives? Not many of us have circumcision-promoting Jewish "Christians" following us around, but what circumstance creates the same dynamic for us?

Translations would be impossible without the work of scholars whose job it is to convey meaning from one language to another, especially when there isn't an exact equivalent.

Knowing when hyperbole is in play can be crucial to the ways we use biblical language. Jesus' command to "hate one's own family" (Luke 14) in favor of being a disciple could (and has) led to abuse if taken without some nuance. And what about the command to "honor one's father and mother" in the Ten Commandments? Was Jesus ignoring a clear directive from God? Good scholarship can rescue the church from applications of scripture that are based on the aims of coercion and control instead of beneficial truth.

Texts can be living and fluid. Meanings can change over time and though our interpretations may differ from the original sense, there can be valuable pro-social uses for acontextual readings. For example, one can use Philippians 4:13 as a motivational aphorism in spite of the meaning Paul was actually going for.

Most of us are simply trying to get through life with a minimum of stress. We often find our intellectual resources depleted before we are asked to apply them to scripture. In other words, it's much easier to share opinions than confront the mountains of historical and social data that inform a scholar's work.

Reading devotionally meets a need that an originalist approach ignores. Asking the Bible to connect us relationally with God is a bit different than asking it to reveal difficult truths. One does not explain the physiology of the dying process to a person who is grieving the loss of a close friend or relative.

Sometimes faulty interpretations are transferred from original to present contexts with bad results, for example the idea that the Christian movement has intractable enemies led by Satan or other dark spiritual forces. Persecution is a much discussed problem throughout the Bible and when transported from then to now can result in unproductive barriers to compromise and cooperation. It's not uncommon for some modern Christians to categorize everything they disagree with as "evil" when it's actually just a simple difference of opinion among groups that both want the best for their community.

It can be argued that if the Bible is in fact God's word to benefit all believers, it follows that its contents should be clear and easy to comprehend for anyone who can process written or spoken language. It also follows that these clear and discernable words count as ultimate and nonnegotiable truth from the mind of God. Adding in a layer of detailed scholarship seems unnecessary to those who affirm this.

One last can of worms. Why divide our intake of scripture into two methods? Can one relate to God without some basis for their assumptions about this God? If we experience God apart from any Bible, will we find agreement with someone else whose concept of God is mainly Bible-based? Blogger Allen Browne:

Start with God, and you can’t get that division. The God of Scripture is both rational and relational and more. God is love, so knowing God shapes us devotionally. And God’s awesome mind pre-planned goals he faithfully implements across centuries and millennia, plans he progressively revealed as the big story of Scripture unfolds. We could never know the mind of the Lord as if to offer him advice, but we have the mind of God revealed in Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16).**

How does this writer know that "The God of Scripture" is…

• Rational

• Relational

• Love

• Has an awesome mind

• Has pre-planned goals

• Able to reveal his mind through Christ (and where do we get our data about Christ?)

Which comes first, notions about God wrought by study of scripture or a personal relationship with this God that is verified after the fact?

In the western Christian tradition, it is asserted that the Bible consists of information about God that is supposed to usher believers into a personal relationship with the same. But what if that same Bible produces the opposite conclusion?

*Candida A. Moss; Blurred Vision and Ethical Confusion: The Rhetorical Function of Matthew 6:22-23 The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 4 (October 2011), pp. 757-776 (20 pages)

**Allen Browne  Academic or devotional? How do you read? May 2022

Further Reading:

Richards, E. Randolph; O'Brien, Brandon J. Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible . InterVarsity Press 2013

Kugel, James, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now Free Press 2012