This post is now available in Polish translation here. Thanks, as always, to Malgorzata at Racjonalista.
Jerry Coyne has just finished reading through the Bible (the Christian Bible, or at least one version of it — the Ethiopian canon, for example, contains 9 extra books, not included in the Western canon, and the Western canon includes 11 books (depending on how they are counted) not included in most Protestant Bibles), and he has some comments about the experience over at Why Evolution is True. I have done it myself about four times. The last time I tried, some fifteen years ago, I gave up after finishing the Torah, or the five books of Moses, because it became so oppressive and unintelligible, so Jerry deserves our congratulations for persevering to the end, though, to be frank, the only reason for doing something like this is to be able to say that you had actually done it.
It’s a bit like climbing mountains. Edmund Hilary, the first white man to climb Mount Everest (he was accompanied in the feat with his Sherpa guide, Tenzin Norgay), once said that the reason for climbing mountains is “because they’re there,” and the same, I suppose, could be said for reading the Bible, or any other supposedly holy book. Because they’re there. And scaling the mountains of words — or (perhaps a more appropriate image) descending the cliffs into trenches or rift valleys towards the nadir of human thought – is almost as treacherous as climbing real mountains, because anyone who has read through the Bible, and, perhaps, even more so for someone who has scaled the treacherous depths of the Qur’an, with its unremitting hatefulness, is bound to be a poorer person for the effort. If reading changes you, reading these texts can only change you for the worse, for to confront human evil sanctified by centuries of blind adulation is a risky business, to say the least.
At least now, though, when the issue of the value of such ancient texts is more frequently raised by critical voices, the danger is much less than it once was, for now it is possible to forget the patina of holiness and read them as the irreducibly human works that they are, with all their blotches and wrinkles. One of the things that should be clear to anyone who has read the Bible or the Qur’an straight through is how uneven these texts are. Perhaps I should qualify that, because the Qur’an is not as uneven as the Christian or the Jewish Bible. There are at least high points of literary achievement in the Bible, and this cannot be said for the Qur’an. I’m told that in Arabic the resonance of the language can reduce a person to tears. It is hard to believe that the thoughts themselves can do so, the Qur’an containing, amongst holy books, the most stultifyingly constipated thought ever to enter the minds of men, and being so unremittingly boring and repetitious that it is hard to stay awake, let alone retain what little intellectual content is to be found in it. How anyone can think the thoughts and call them holy is simply beyond reason and the most fertile imagination.
The Bible, though, has some genuine treasures, amongst them the Song of Songs, a lively erotic work of some subtlety, and the book of Job, perhaps the most unrelentingly searching study of the problem of evil ever written. The book ends, of course, on an entirely false note, as though lives can substitute for lives, or wealth for suffering, but the poetic heart of the book is an ageless and so far unanswered challenge to the justice of any imaginable god. Another text of some value is Ecclesiastes, the author of which was almost certainly not a true believer, who provides as convincing a case for atheism as any of the new atheists. It’s fundamental message is that “shit happens.” The world goes on in its accustomed way without any sign of design or purpose, and so one should live stoically, drifting with the tide of change, accepting the goodness that may come one’s way, and enduring the suffering without complaint.
One of the things that oppressed me, the last time I undertook the task of reading the Bible straight through, and failed, was the way its main character, the one I had learned to call God, and to think of as loving and caring, was so violently unpredictable, almost like an electric charge that could suddenly ground itself in human life and bring about cataclysmic catastrophe wherever it struck. Perhaps it was this that the writer of Ecclesiastes noticed, when he realised that things simply happen without apparent reason, that each thing has its time or season, and nothing that we can do or say will really change the way things are. War or peace, sickness or health, life or death simply happen to us, without apparent reason or purpose, and the attempt to provide reasons is just a pathetic ex post facto ad hockery that never does answer questions that real people ask. I remember my pastoral theology teacher, trying to suggest ways of comforting parents whose child has just died, saying: ”You could tell them that God always picks the fairest flowers” — a suggestion which not only answers no questions, but in fact refuses to address the questions that parents really ask. The incomprehensibility of God having, with casual brutality, picked the fair flower of youth is precisely the problem, not the answer. And — here’s the point — the Bible is like that. Like everything we say about god or gods, its answers largely consist in a suppression of the questions that ordinary people ask, but it does so in such a way as to suggest that real answers have been given. Holy books are illusions that people play with words.
This is something that it took me a long time to recognise. It’s most obvious in the case of the problem of evil, but it is also present in practically everything that religion proposes about itself, and this is where apophatic theology gets its leverage, because, in the end, there are no answers to the kinds of questions that religion asks. The Bible, and religion in general, recognises the mystery of human life, the urgent questions, all unanswered, that most people, in one way or another, are exercised with most of their lives, and it pretends that, by talking about them, by thematising them, they are somehow answered, without noticing that the answers are really questions rephrased as words of worship, praise and adulation, or are simply the same questions asked in the context of worship. The problem of evil and suffering is dealt with by discussing it in the context of an achieved belief in God, as though simply discussing it in that context provides the answer. The problem of unresolved guilt is supposedly resolved by telling a story in which we are somehow implicated, even though no one can say how. Jesus died, Christians say, for our sins, but how does a man do this, how can the dying of a man deal with someone else’s guilt? And even if you believe that Jesus was God (with a capital ‘G’), how does that help? No one has ever been able to say. Though there have been many attempts to explain it, no theory has been satisfactory, and the problem of the Atonement, the at-one-ment that Jesus is supposed to have achieved on the cross between God and humanity, is still unresolved. Nor is it ever explained, in the first place, what it means to say that humanity is alienated from God. If all it means is that we can think of a being who is perfect where we are not, this is not so great an achievement.
Think of the great prophets of the Old Testament (as the Christian Bible prejudicially renames the Jewish scriptures, because believed by Christians to prophetically anticipate the New Testament), writings which are supposed to explain the holiness and majesty and singleness of God against the backdrop of what became, in the end, the defeat and exile of God’s chosen people. One thing that the prophets do seem to have recognised, too late, is that the earlier writings – in which the Israelites are recognised as a people set apart and chosen by God, tell a tale of violence and oppression against others in the name of their God, who was thought to have commanded the sanctification by destruction of those who were not sharers in the covenant with God – are fundamentally at odds with holiness, and that God is somehow (as it says in Isaiah) “high and lifted up,” above the madnesses and travails of men, a figure of justice, mercy and compassion, not of vengeance and destruction. The very suffering of the Chosen People is now seen to be included in God’s intention, as a demonstration of God’s humane and loving purposes, which will be fulfilled through, and in some sense, despite the failure of that same Chosen People.
It is now widely believed that the traditions of the Promised Land, with its account of the wholesale destruction of its former inhabitants, and its occupation by the Chosen People, is not grounded in history. If this be so, the question then arises as to why religious intolerance and genocidal violence was added to the story, and left to stand. It seems very likely that there are competing narratives in the text: on the one hand, violence of God traditions, which express the religious intolerance of monotheism, or at least henotheism, alongside, on the other hand, humility of God traditions, which see God as somehow present in and active through a Chosen People which is made to suffer in order to draw all people to himself. Unfortunately, the part that Islam seems to have borrowed from its limited knowledge of Judaism are the traditions which sanctify the violence and intolerance of God, even though Allah’s mercy and compassion are constantly reiterated throughout the Qur’an, even in those suras in which God is depicted as most lacking in mercy and compassion.
The problem of holy books should be evident from the start, for books are, after all, every single one of them, open to interpretation, and therefore subject to the whims and fancies of their interpreters, whose ideas thus come to be clothed in the full panoply of the unapproachably sacred. This itself is an odd result, for if the books themselves are unapproachably sacred (as things which “burn the hand”), how does anyone dare approach them to interpret them? Yet they do — and must, if the text is to speak to us at all. And with this, the problem of sacred texts only becomes greater, for not only do interpretations claim the authority attaching to the original words, they must also assume that the words to which authority is attached are genuinely original. Almost all religious texts are ancient — and if not ancient, then fabricated, like the Book of Mormon — and therefore transmitted by means of copying, before the printing press was invented, and every book was a manuscript (that is, written by hand). Hebrew and Aramaic texts were often unpointed, that is, they were purely consonantal texts, without the points indicating the vowels being included with the text. Early Greek and Latin texts were often uncial, that is written in capital letters straight through, without spaces to indicate the beginnings and endings of words. As a consequence, variant texts abound, and even if text critical questions can be resolved, there is no assurance that this will get us back to the original texts. Thus, when some confessions of faith include the qualification, as many do, that the Bible is held to be inerrantly true in the original text, reference is being made to a text that is no longer accessible, and authority grounded in something the content of which cannot be known. And yet, despite this, the supposed “truths,” thus so insecurely grounded, are held to be absolute and unrevisable. The same applies to all texts which have a documentary history which is unrecoverable, and which have acquired the status of holiness.
All this is why, by the way, the idea of a revelation from a god, or from any supernatural source, is simply unworkable. Not only must the words themselves be human — for otherwise they would be unintelligible — they must be contextualised in time and space, in terms of specific groups of people, with a common cultural frame of reference. Accessing something written in another language is already a problem of interpretation, but this problem is multiplied several times over when we are talking about another language written thousands of years ago in a world comprehensively different than the world we live in today. We can see a microcosm of the problem in the way Muhammad (or whoever finally compiled the collection of writings included in the syncretistic Qur’an) treated the Jewish and Christian and Zoroastrian sources, and how they are deformed and reshaped to fit into a new narrative structure. Christians did the same thing with Jewish sources, and received their own comeuppance in Islam. Each tells a different story, rooted in its time and place, prioritising its themes in preference to the emphases in the older stories, which are subordinated to a new controlling narrative – and so the whirligig of time moves on. Why can the religious not see how this takes place, and how it relativises everything that they proclaim and regard as holy? There is now no excuse. We can see the gears move and the levers used to direct narrative energy into new courses. Anyone who reads can know this. How is it still possible to pretend that these things are holy?
The Atheist Experience has a post up entitled Confirmation is not a Rebuttal saying very much this same thing:
This inability to offer theologically compelling answers is actually what led me to reject the Catholicism of my upbringing. Long before I reached disbelief in god, I knew none of priests had any clue what they were talking about. They were used to offering platitudes, not arguments; excuses, not explanations. It was clear early on that they weren’t actually interested in whether any of it made any sense.
Good post Eric. I think, the texts so called holy only survive as long as the adherents are told they are sacred. Once this is taken away and they are looked at as work of man for that is what they really are, I think religion has nothing on which it can lay claim.
Eric:
Very profound, and very pertinent.
Reading the bible as if it were one single book is an illusion due to packaging. It is based on the codex presentation, where everything can be bound together, whereas the scrolls kept all writings separately. Reading the bible as one single book is overlooking the fat that it is the product of some 50 to 100 hands, if not more, over a period of around 1,000 years. It’s not like reading all of Shxpr, or all of Karl Marx, or all of Friedrich Hegel. The parts are so unequal that it is impossible to see this collection as parts of the same work.
I totally agree with you that Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth by its proper name, is simply extraordinary, unique in all Western literature. After rereading it in the context of reviewing the whole Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Testament, I marveled that this text ever got into the Bible and stayed there. I would add that other sections of the Wisdom literature are also noteworthy. I am deeply impressed by the Wisdom of Sirach, again ridiculously misnamed “Ecclesiasticus”.
You share the same respect and admiration for Job that William Safire felt. But the Wisdom literature has also its valuable parts. I am not surprised that biblical scholars such as Arthur Drews and G.A. Wells felt that a good section of Jesus’s figure was literally issued from the figure of Hebrew Wisdom.
And in the New Testament, if you are able to read the Gospel of Mark as a movie script, forgetting all the rest, as if you had never read anything from the Bible, you have to recognize a product of genius that no other playwright or scriptwriter, not even Raymond Chandler, has ever approached for speed, directness, and intensity.
When you compare the best passages of Wisdom and Mark to the gooey stuff that professional pundits of biblical studies produce week after week, you have to place Qoheleth, Sirach and Mark among the great authors of our Western literature.
Still, the project of reading the Bible “en suite” is such a bizarre idea that it strikes me as a product of our achievement culture. You are absolutely right, the only benefit is to be able to brag about it at dinner parties. And the major drawback is to make you disgusted with the uncertainties, the fickleness, and the absurdities of the Hebrew/Christian god and church writers.
When Jerry Coyne announced his project, I voiced my skeptical amazement, saying the idea sounded a bit “demented”, the way you tell a friend, “you’re far off,” “this is a crazy idea”, using a strong word to express surprise. Jerry, who has his intolerant side, took it literally and never forgave me.
The problem with the internet is that it does not allow for nuances and humor. Nuances get lost and misunderstandings arise. Jerry Coyne and everybody else is not above being misled by Internet words, the same as readers of the Bible can be terribly misled by its words as well. Holy books can become extremely dangerous in the hands of fanatics.
In one of his dialogues, Plato’s Socrates supported the paradoxical view that written words are in essence deceptive and cannot lead to “truth”, and that only oral discussion, the kind of exploration favored by Socrates himself in his focused conversations, can hope to dissipate misunderstandings and clarify meaning. He certainly had a point.
And the treatment of the Bible by successive generations as well as the never-ending disputes on the Internet about “but that is not what I meant” is an example of the pitfalls of the written words. A textbook does not replace a teacher, a mentor or a tutor. Holy books do not produce saints, it produces tyrants and monsters.
The authority of sacred texts is an ever present danger. Simply watching the religious zeal defending the Second Amendment is revealing: It makes the US the only modern country where any citizen can grab a gun and shoot his family or neighbors for any kind of grievance.
The authority of the Bible itself is a strange phenomenon. Saving mankind from sin, from the fear of death, and promising eternal life with the Lord, seems more like a subtle way to instill obedience to orders imposed by the rulers of society than an intent to correct inner moral failings.
With Moses at least things were clear: Here were the commandments, ten of them, respect them or else. But Hebrews’ brain cells had nothing else to keep them occupied than brooding on religious matters, none of the wonderful pastimes that their contemporary Greeks had — poetry, music, sports, seduction, sex, dancing and frolicking, all kinds of art (architecture, sculptures, painting, vases), processions, festivities, science and philosophy. The fertile Jewish minds increased the number of Jewish rules to a mindboggling number of 613! Absolutely unbelievable! 365 negative commandments (number of days in the year), and 248 positive commandments (number of bones in the body. Enough to render a sane man really “demented”. Reading the Bible is child’s game compared to having to remember the 613 commandments every second of the day, and spending one’s life trying to respect them.
This idea of “sin” and disobeying the “commandments” is so crippling and so ingrained in the Jewish and Christian religions that I was hoping you would touch upon it in your article, since you’ve been dealing with the ideas and realities of sins during all your preaching years.
There is some evidence that people who have had spiritual or religious experiences (such as transcendence) find them ‘realer than real’ because the experience is recorded in the parts of the brain which are not open to rational inspection. Indeed all the subsequent emotions and stimuli are filtered by this life changing process before reaching the rational areas. So the answer to your question is that, for those affected, the holiness of the texts is earmarked as more ‘real’ and more meaningful before any later consideration can be given by the rational areas. There is no need for pretence even if confabulated ‘reasons’ are made to explain the emotional beliefs. Of course social Christians/Muslims etc may not have been ‘imprinted’ this way, but there are also the pressures of social conformity at play.
Even if god was taken out of spiritual experiences some people would still experience something compelling. According to Kevin Nelson in his book ‘The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain’ William James identified four qualities of what he called mystical experience:
1) The experience is beyond language
2) The experience imparts an insight – the ‘knowledge’ is more convincing than that generated by conceptual thought.
3) The experience is of brief duration (although the memory of it is exceptionally strong)
4) Passivity. The person feels as if his or her will is in the complete grasp of a higher power.
Kevin Nelson (a neurologist) argues that these qualities suggest that the spiritual experience happens when the switch that regulates consciousness in the primitive brainstem gets ‘stuck’ briefly between the REM dream state and full consciousness. A quirk of the brain, not a vision of the supernatural.
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Eric, read Stephen Mitchell’s translation for clarity wrt the beginning and end of the Book of Job. His introduction is sufficient for understanding, but the entire translation is superb.Well worthwhile. Thanks for your ongoing good work, it is much valued.
I suspect that a necessary foundation for any successful religion is a set of scriptures which are long and discursive enough to provide support for any viewpoint that might prove expedient to adopt at the time. When things are good, we can love our neighbours; when they’re bad we can call them witches and adulterers, and stone them to death. I can’t think offhand of any popular religion that has, say, just a half-page of simple rules.
When my partner and I were travelling in Europe nearly thirty years ago, a German friend of hers said: “I really admire the British legal system — there are so many crimes on the books that if you really need to lock someone up, you can always find a way to do it.” The odd thing was that he actually meant it. The Bible is designed to cater for people who feel the same way.
To Roo Bookaroo:
From my reading of Jerry Coyne’s not-blog, I think that he decided to read the entire bible for the same reason he has read books by “sophisticated theologians”. This is because he is a critic of bible- based morality and the convoluted nonsense preached by some theologians, as well as much of anything else religious. Whenever a person criticizes someone else they are open to the charge or the rhetorical question “Have you even read the ….?”, or they get the “no true Scotsman” defence from the people/person being criticized. I think Jerry Coyne wanted to be able to say “Actually, yes I have read such and such or books by so and so.”, in response to the defences of rhetoric offered by the people he criticizes. This is so that he could put one more (albeit probably ineffective) chink in the armour of the people and their arguments that he often takes to task.
Obviously I don’t know the actual reason Jerry Coyne took up the challenge but that’s what I think it was.
Pliny, I do have, and have used Stephen Mitchell’s translation (with introduction), though I think he gets too much wrong in his interpretation. The interpretation that makes sense to me is the one by Hermann Tønnessen, and which is available in pdf under the “recommended” tab above. For example, Mitchell says, towards the end of his introduction, that “once Job has learned to surrender, his world too gives up the male compulsion to control.” (xxx) I think this is reading too much into the text. I do not think it has the feminist subtext that Mitchell supposes. Indeed, I agree with Tønnessen that Job’s “repentance” in dust and ashes is the response of a man cowed by a bully, not a genuine act of religious resignation, and this makes the end of the book (which was likely from the original folk tale, very doubtfully specifically Jewish or Hebrew) something that works entirely at cross purposes with the heart of the book, which consists in Job’s justified defence of his innocence, and his refusal to accept the appeal of his friends to admit his faults and accept God’s chastisement. The book itself, as Tønnessen says, is, I believe, an act of existential blasphemy. God in the book is just an overgrown bully, and in his great theophany gives Job no reason to bow down penitently. For Job knows better than the god of the theophany what it is like to be human, and God’s power is no match for his quick intelligence, nor for his justified sense of having been wronged.
I should add, here, that “because it’s there” is not the only reason for reading the Bible, as Jerry says in response (see the trackback). But there are other ancient writings which are unjustly ignored, because such exaggerated claims are made for the Bible. The Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, is a marvellous story, and well worth while reading. The Bible’s flood narrative probably depends upon it, yet Gilgamesh is so much more human and humane. But, of course, if you are in the business of religious criticism it is best to have some understanding of the basis upon which the faith of Christians and Jews is founded. When you do, of course, it is astonishing that these writings have retained their cachet for so long. It seemed to me worthwhile, both as a young teenager, and then, later, as a cleric, to read the Bible straight through, so that at least I knew what it did say, and was not dependent on exegesis alone. However, as time wore on, it seemed more and more preposterous to think that the origin of this collection of writings could in any sense be considered to be in something “revealed” from some supernatural source. Of course, this is dismissed by many Christian apologists by speaking of “the words of God in the words of men,” but this won’t do, in my view, for this simply opens the text up to the hermeneutic auction. However, if it is not opened up to the hermeneutic auction, the text will be used, as it is still used by the Vatican, to prescribe certain readings, and to punish those who read it differently. Best to give up the pretence of revelation altogether. As human writings, the Bible is a mixed bag, most of it eminently forgettable. So, quite aside from any other claim that might be made for these writings, some of which are legitimately thought to be literary treasures, the suggestion that they are revealed, or that it makes sense to speak of revelation at all, simply cannot stand. This, of course, goes for any supposed sacred text. The Qur’an, it seems to me, has even less claim to this distinction, being, of all the “holy” texts in existence, one of the most stultifyingly boring texts amongst the world’s surfeit of such writings. I suspect the Book of Mormon is worse, but I simply cannot bring myself to read it. Holiness is always a danger, because so easily translated into inhumanity. Give anything an authority greater than human, and it can be used to oppressive effect, and almost always is.
As far as the Book of Mormon is concerned, I will simply trust Mark Twain’s assesment.
I salute all who have the persistence to complete the task. Leviticus was enough to defeat my attempt at the Bible. The tedious and repetitive instructions for sacrifice were enough to convince me the text was most definitely not divinely inspired. It seems like a population of even a few hundred observant Jews would have to eliminate all birds and livestock in the area they occupied in short order if Leviticus was to be believed.
Jesus does seem to have a few good ideas. All people have an inherent value that is not dependent on their social status (albeit a very bizarre afterlife type of value.) Do not be a hypocrite and treat people in a consistent way, and the arguments against vengeance are fairly valuable. He also had some really poor advice as well, though. Give up everything and trust in god, or the concept of eternal damnation, undo all his credibility as a good moral teacher in the end.
TO STEEVE:
Of course you’re right. For his own personal satisfaction, Jerry Coyne is not content with limiting his qualifications to those of an expert biologist.
He wants to share his moral convictions and indignations with the public, and so he tries to metamorphose into the figure of another pundit in the morality/religion field, which is much vaster than the one interested only in the scrutiny of biological research, and which finds a ready response in practically all members of the average public.
But it is a fact that, since Darwin, modern biology has been intimately connected with the criticism of established religion and the artificial (not to say phony) morality peddled by priests who claim the protection of their holy books.
And it is a fact that some of the most strident critics of religion and Christianity with their foundation myths have been scientists or scientifically-minded thinkers: Not just Democritus, Epicurus, Plutarch, and Lucretius in antiquity, but the Renaissance minds of Giordano Bruno, Descartes, Galileo, David Hume, Baron d’Holbach and the Enlightenment thinkers, all the way to Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
This trend has simply been amplified with the introduction of Darwin’s theory of evolution and its advocacy by biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (not to be confused with Aldous Huxley).
And today we have a host of scientists and admirers of science joining the bandwagon of critique of religion and Christianity: Bertrand Russell, Thomas Alva Edison, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Richard Feynman, Edward O. Wilson, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Steven Weinberg, Victor Stenger, Douglas Adams, Lawrence M. Krauss, PZ Myers, Stephen Hawking, and many more.
So Jerry Coyne certainly wanted to join a crowd of pretty famous names, all animated by their strong skepticism of religion and Christianity. And he’s done pretty well in educating himself with the basics facts and literature necessary to conduct such polemical activity. And, no doubt, as you suggest, learning about the Bible and getting to know it, is part of that essential education.
However, that was not the stated intent of Jerry Coyne. He explained that he wanted to check for himself whether the Bible was such a literary jewel as claimed by its supporters. His stated interest was in VERYIFYING, as a scientist, the claims of literary excellence, in terms of beauty of prose, story telling, and poetical bits.
I simply objected, when I used my friendly “DEMENTED” interjection, that the stated objective made no sense as such, from a very scientific perspective. Because the experiment (reading the whole Bible “en suite”) was poorly designed and loaded with intrinsic faults.
Simply because the Bible is a creation of packaging technology. It put together through the art of binding a collection of disparate writings which have nothing in common, except references to beliefs in God or in his right-hand man Jesus, and produced in many different countries, vastly different cultures and over a duration of nearly one thousand years. The Bible is an artificial construction, not a literary work produced by any literary mind.
If you want to evaluate literary excellence, you can’t take the Bible as it is commercialized, you have to separate what is intrinsically separate and was created separately.
And, in this perspective, yes, truly, most parts of the Bible are boring, ugly and forgettable.
But other parts are scintillating jewels that only a professional in literary evaluation can recognize: Qoheleth, Proverbs, Job, Sirach, many psalms, Mark’s Gospel, etc.. Putting those in the same bag as the tinsel and junk is gross injustice.
This is why people in their right minds don’t even think of the Bible as a unit. They refer to the specific master pieces that make it worth quoting and remembering. Eric McDonald, William Safire, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Ingersoll, H.L. Mencken (who derided the primitive beliefs of the American South by calling it the “Bible Belt”), approached the various texts of the Bible this way, and that remains the only justifiable approach.
I think it has to be said, Boo Bookaroo, that Jerry’s reading of the entire Christian Bible was not quite as ridiculous as you suggest. The Bible is, from the religious standpoint, holy writ, every word of it. Indeed, it is taken for granted that the Bible speaks the word of God to humankind. It is possible, and reasonable, to take some of the literary gems of the Bible and consider them as in some sense independent of the whole, and valuable for their own sake. (I do not, however, include Mark in that number, which seems quite quixotic to me.) But, as holy writ, it is important that the Bible as a whole be read, and some attempt made to achieve some sort of canonical reading of the whole. The latter part is the more difficult one, since there are so many different possible (and indeed, existing and competing) interpretations. Nevertheless, in order to comment thoughtfully on Christian or Jewish beliefs, the biblical text as a whole must be taken into consideration, for that is what is canonical for the religions, whose texts are chosen, not for literary merit, but for their ability to ground a belief tradition. Of course, in that sense, they cannot be taken, in themselves, as prescribing particular beliefs, since the Bible itself is used only hermeneutically, even by fundamentalists. But the entire canon is the basis for the belief traditions in which various groups of believers stand.
Eric, all what you say is true on the unity of the Bible as a canonical text.
But your view is entirely religious and theological. You discuss the Bible in terms of its validity as a holy text for the established Christian religion and its believers.
That was not Jerry Coyne’s view, nor is it mine.
In addition, it was Jerry Coyne intention to approach his reading it as a literary EXPERIMENT to verify for himself its literary value alone, not its justification as a holy text supporting Christian beliefs.
And this is what I was discussing when criticizing Jerry Coyne’s procedure.
While he was attempting a scientific goal of evaluation of objective literary merit, he was unconsciously accepting the religious dogma that the Bible is a unity as representing the word of God and the final authority for a Christian believer.
That was my objection to Jerry: His goal was scientific, but he unconsciously accepted a false premise based on an uncritical acceptance of the religious view that the book is a unity.
I argued that this was DEMENTED, because, from a purely scientific viewpoint, which was ostensibly the stated goal of Jerry, he was accepting a NON-SCIENTIFIC assumption of unity.
I am simply more rigorous in my view than Jerry, who is concerned about the popular appeal of his comment. His goal is to pass as a pundit, my goal was to criticize the false assumption that the Bible represent ANY kind of literary UNITY.
Those texts existed as fifty or sixty scrolls that were lying separately on the shelves of libraries in antiquity, until people like Irenaeus and the voting bishops of the Nicaea council voted for unification of all those texts as essential parts of the Canon.
And the new technology of cutting up scrolls into pages and binding them together into codices made possible the creation of bible books in our modern sense.
So Jerry accepted the version of the artificial Canon as created by the council of Nicaea, instead of the historic reality of independent literary creations. Jerry was concerned about commenting on the literary value of the Bible as a religious texbook, instead of the scientific historical reality of their independent existence and independent value.
He no longer was using the methodology that he is following as a scientist in biology where he keeps separate things that ARE objectively and perceptibly separate for following a religious interpretation of the physical object.
All this sounds complex, but it isn’t. Jerry was forgetting his scientific background and turning into a literary critic of a religious artifact.
Well, but Jerry also wanted to be conversant with the text to which so much religious importance has been attached. As he says, in his post responding to this one of mine (check the trackback above):
So, however he expressed himself before, since he is writing a book on science and religion, the theological or religious content of the text was as important as its literary value, and I think that was fairly clear from the start. Certainly, he accepted a canonical version, since he is trying to respond to the claims of those who hold this text to be, in fact, canonical. I simply don’t see your point. As he says, he wanted to find out for himself, about both the literary claims (which he still disputes), and the religious content. I think you are trying to make careful distinctions where none are warranted. The task was to read the Bible, to find out whether it had the literary value often ascribed to it, but also to find out about its value as a source of religious and moral belief.
You say the task was demented, but it wasn’t. The text is, from the religious point of view, a unity. To understand and respond to it, as a religious text, it has to be treated as a unity, and it was that understanding that Jerry wanted to achieve. There is, of course, a problem here, as I have indicated, for the religious text is only understandable as a religious text in the context of its exegesis, and that is an almost insurmountable task. So, I think to have at least read the Bible, as that upon which so much religious belief is based, is an important step towards understanding the beliefs based upon it. How much more is needed? It’s hard to say. From the religious point of view, I suppose, no one can really know enough unless they are convinced that the relevant religious beliefs are true. But that is a standard that cannot be reasonably required. But a Christian could ask: Well, have you at least read the Bible? And now Jerry can say that he has.