Talk Three: Who Wrote the Bible?
A few years ago I visited my eldest daughter who was living at the time in Lancaster in England. Someone suggested we visit a particular church during our stay. It was an evangelical Anglican church that attracted many university students. I went to an evening service with Angela. It was full of people of all ages. The vicar was a man in his early forties. He was speaking about the central role of women in the Bible and Church, and finished with a panel of people responding to questions (asked via text messages from the congregation’s mobile phones!!). Some of the panel held very different views to him. He managed it all with grace and good humour. All this was very refreshing and engaging, but what really struck me was that he made a good deal of reference in his address to the Documentary Hypothesis of the origin of the Bible, and drew points in his address from it. I had never experienced this before in any sermon I had heard, let alone given; I had of course studied it in theological college but had never learnt how to bring it into parish life. What really struck home of course was that this was happening in a staunchly evangelical parish, for whom the Bible was central. This seemed extraordinary. I loved what he was doing and I regretted my own hesitation in the past to present the Bible in this way.
Mind you I had felt tensions in my understanding of the Bible and its place in the christian mission from the early days of my pilgrimage. I remember listening to a famous Baptist preacher Sidlow Baxter, a most delightful human being, talking about Jews, Muslims and Christians all being People of the Book. No, I thought in my new found faith. Jews and Muslims maybe, but Christians are People of the Man, not the Book.
I have continued to feel strongly about this ever since, in a world in which Christians, at least at the popular level, seem to have increasingly understood God’s primary revelation to be the Bible. I use a computer App called Accordance, and hence receive their promotional material. I am truly staggered at the number of Bible Commentaries and other aids that are continually coming out. Accordance does cater for conservative evangelicals, but it also caters for all traditions including professional scholars and Jews.
That the Bible is the Word of God seems now to be part of Christian DNA. Yet nowhere does the Bible say it is the Word of God. It does say that Christ is the Word though, the Word made flesh, which to me clearly means an ultimate revelation.
I have always found this a very difficult issue to raise because it lies close to the sense of self for many Christians, and like so much debate nowadays, discussion can become a heated interchange of unreflected opinion that is nonetheless essential to the individuals’ sense of identity. What has been particularly difficult is to persuade any interlocutor that the Bible is very important to me, but after Christ and the Spirit. I consult it in both Hebrew and Greek. I am fascinated by it, but I am convinced that those who say it is the Word of God don’t read it with fresh eyes but through the tradition of the group they belong to. Shaking off the traditio is no easy feat, and if you are happy in the group you belong to, why bother. So important conversations tend not to take place.
Well I think we should bother because I think the place of the Bible in relation to Christian understanding and faith needs to be reviewed. The meta narrative it reveals has been superseded, whether we like it or not, if Christ followers are going to stay with our culture. A new Origin Story has emerged and is being worked on and is fast becoming our new myth of how we got here. Either we take up the great apologetic challenge of putting Christ in the centre of this new myth or we fail, I believe, Christ’s mission. At the same time, however, we continue to honour and treasure the Bible in our apologetics, but we see it in history, just as we need so much to see Christ in history. In other words we come to see the Bible as a very important story within the Story, a meta-narrative within a Meta-Narrative.
The question then is how do we do that, and how do we use the Bible in the life of our congregations. And for us Protestants there is the even bigger question, Where does authority ultimately lie for us if not in the Bible? This is the big one.
I don’t think for a moment I have all the answers but I do live with the questions. I have been helped in part by the work of the great Old Testament student and scholar, Richard Elliot Friedman. Friedman is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia. One of his great strengths is that he writes as a scholar in a popular and engaging way, giving the reader the sense of joining him in an exciting detective story. This annoys other scholars, but for him it is very important. He wants to be heard by us punters. His books that have helped me most are Who Wrote the Bible?, and his latest The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters. But where Friedman is so good for me is that he treasures the Bible personally (which includes the New Testament). Let me give you a few quotes from Who Wrote the Bible?:
The first and last pages of this book recognize the greatness of the Bible, its beauty and its power. What comes in between is a picture of how critical biblical scholarship accounts for this greatness. (Kindle Locations 91-92)
Above all, this book is meant to enhance people’s appreciation of the Bible: to understand better the world in which it was born and how inextricably connected it was to that world; to appreciate the wonder of how it came together; to appreciate that literary study and historical study of the Bible are not enemies, or even alternatives to one another. Rather, they enrich one another. Whether one is a Christian or a Jew or from another religion or no religion, whether one is religious or not, the more one knows of the Bible the more one stands in awe of it. (Kindle Locations 141-142).
So Friedman has a very high view of the Bible but an historical one. I think we need to develop this in relation to Christ and our witness to him.
I don’t intend to go into great detail about the Documentary Hypothesis itself, or other aspects of his critical engagement of the ancient texts. He has published the J,E,D and P documents separately in his The Bible with Sources Revealed: A New View into the Five Books of Moses, and he did a particular study of the J source earlier in The Hidden Book of the Bible: The Discovery of the First Prose Masterpiece, where he argues for the J document to be considered one of the first pieces of prose ever written.
But I do want to draw heavily on him in setting out how I am seeing the Bible and its relation to Christ, and in this I am thinking particularly of the Old Testament.
What I am getting from Professor Friedman is that in thinking and teaching about the Bible historically, we have to begin with Ezra. This turns our approach to the Bible on its head. Ezra is rarely mentioned in the life of the church, and only makes it into the text at the very end of the Biblical period. But his importance in Judaism is second only to Moses, at least in relation to the Torah. But Friedman believes Ezra’s influence extends over the final form of the whole Old Testament because he is the final Redactor or editor of all that had gone before, with the possible exception of the post exilic prophets. Although this may never be finally proved, the evidence that does exist points very strongly to this being the case. In relation to the Torah, which includes of course D and hence the Deuteronomic history also, Friedman wrote:
The first time that we find the full Torah of Moses in Judah, it is in Ezra’s possession. He sought it out, he was a scribe who worked with it, he personally carried it to Jerusalem, and he personally gave it its first public reading. And when he read it to the people, they heard things that they had never heard before. This does not prove that it absolutely had to be Ezra who fashioned the Five Books of Moses. But he was in the right priestly family, in the right profession, in the right place, in the right time, with the authority, and with the first known copy of the book in his hand. If it was not Ezra himself who composed the work, then it was someone close to him—a relative, a colleague in the priesthood, a fellow scribe—because it could not have been produced very long before he arrived with it in Judah. The Temple had been standing for only about one generation when he came to Jerusalem. (Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 3728-3732).
This final redaction is an extraordinary piece of work because the redactor had to weave strands of text written from different periods by different individuals belonging to different groups telling the stories from their different perspectives and theological understandings, into one more or less coherent story. It became, in the minds of all who followed, the history of the Hebrews who became the Jews, and their God who lived in a dynamic tension between his great love and compassion for those he had chosen, and his great regret and anger at how they responded or failed to respond to him.
Why did [Ezra or the final Redactor] do it? Why commit this extraordinary
irony, combining texts that were diametrically opposed to each other? He did it, presumably, for the same reasons that J and E had been combined about 250 years earlier. By this time, all of his source texts were famous. J and E had been around for centuries and were quoted in D. P had been around since Hezekiah’s days, it had been associated with a national reform, and it had the support of the priesthood that was in power. D had been read publicly in the days of Josiah, and it contained a law requiring that it be read again publicly every seven years. How could the redactor have left any of these out? The issue again was successful promulgation. Who would have believed that it was the Torah of Moses if it did not include the famous stories of Adam and Eve (J), the golden calf (E), Phinehas (P), and Moses’ farewell speech (D)?(Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 3752-3757).
It is clear the final redactor was an Aaronid priest or someone closely associated to such a group. Ezra was such a person, a Levite in descent from Aaron, a group who had been closely associated with Jerusalem from the days of Solomon.
This is the next key for Friedman in thinking about the Bible afresh, the central role of the Levites in the history. It begins for Friedman with the Exodus, an argument he introduces in Who Wrote the Bible?, but which he develops fully in The Exodus. Unlike many current Biblical scholars who take the archeology of the period seriously, Friedman believes there was an actual Exodus. But it was the Levites who came up out of Egypt with their god Yahweh, who was possibly originally a Midianite god. They settled in amongst the existing indigenous tribes who worshipped El, but without ever having land of their own, but still exerting great influence. As Friedman discusses in detail, El and Yahweh became identified as the same God, and the Levites acted as priests of this God. Some Levites traced their ancestry to Aaron, some to Moses, and there was significant tension between the two.
The Aaronid Levites became associated with Jerusalem, the Mushites with Shiloh, with Judah on the one hand and Israel on the other.
In Friedman’s analysis, E, P and D, and the final redaction, which of course included J are all the work of Levites. They were all written before the Exile, J and E before the Assyrian destruction of Israel, as was JE. P dates from the time of Hezekiah and D from the time of Josiah. J was an unknown advocate
of the Davidic royal house and is centred in Jerusalem. There is no evidence he was a Levite. E was produced at Shiloh in the north by Levites descended from Moses. It was taken south and combined with J. This composite text threatened the Jerusalem Aaronid Levites who responded with P. Then at the time of Josiah, D was produced along with DH. Friedman is convinced the writer of D was Jeremiah, probably with his scribe Baruch. All these sacred documents were then taken into exile to be finally redacted into one text by Ezra. It was this final redaction that produced the God of the Bible, so called.
Let me quote Friedman now to give you a taste of the significance of all this, and some of the differences in the sources, both at cosmic and personal levels, which nonetheless were redacted into one final form.
P never once uses the word “mercy.” It also never uses the words “grace” or “repentance.” It never refers to the faithfulness of Yahweh. The priest who wrote it rather emphasized the divine aspect of justice. That is, you get what you deserve. Obedience is rewarded. Transgression is punished. There is no throwing oneself on the mercy of the divine judge. J and E are virtually the opposite. They emphasize the divine aspect of mercy. Transgression can be forgiven through repentance. God is gracious and generously faithful to his covenant. In J’s depiction of the ultimate human experience of the divine, when Moses actually sees God on Sinai, Yahweh declares that he is Yahweh, merciful and gracious God, long-forbearing, and abundant in faithfulness.....The words that P never mentions occur about seventy times in J, E, and D. (Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 3978-3984).
The redactor combined them. When he did that, he created a new formula, in which justice and mercy stood in a balance in which they had never been before. They were more nearly equal than they had been in any of the source texts. God was both just and merciful, angry and compassionate, strict and forgiving. It became a powerful tension in the God of the Bible. It was a new and exceedingly complex formula. But that was the formula that became a crucial part of Judaism and of Christianity for two and a half millennia. The justice-and-mercy balance is more charged—psychologically as well as theologically—than the cosmic-and-personal balance. There is a constant tension in Yahweh between his justice and his mercy. They are not easily reconcilable. When should one predominate, and when should the other?
(Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 3993-3999).
Reading the Bible will never be quite the same. Aware of the Bible’s extraordinary history and its resulting complexity, we can—and probably must—read the book with a new depth of appreciation. We can read a page of the Bible and know that three or even four persons, all artists, all writing from their own experience, in their own historical moments, separated by centuries, contributed to composing that page. And, at the same time, we can read the page as it is, to enjoy the story, to learn from it, to find out how others interpreted it over millennia. (Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 4081-4086).
One of the great strengths of Friedman’s analysis is that while he takes serious account of the archeological background, the bulk of the evidence for his analysis is taken from the Biblical text itself. He has learnt to read it critically but lovingly, and hence historically. I think this is the only future for an intelligent approach to the Bible. And it is in this intelligent approach to the Bible as this intersects with us and our life in the Spirit that the Word of God manifests in the here and now.
Let me tell you two stories. I have run training groups for chaplains and pastoral carers for many years. Quite some time ago a discussion arose in a group that led me to say something about the discovery of the book of Deuteronomy, at least the proto-version, in the temple at the time of Josiah. A number in the group, good Protestant church members as I recall, were upset with me. They thought I was attacking the integrity of the Bible by suggesting such a thing. They had in fact never read the story in 2 Kings. Like so many, they had been schooled in the beliefs that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible and that the Bible is the Word of God. They had little or no historical sense at all.
The second story is far more recent. I was speaking to a Catholic couple who had once been very active in the Church but had become disillusioned and no longer attended. They are well educated and highly intelligent people. In the course of the conversation I mentioned Friedman’s book. There was immediate interest. It then came out that they had little knowledge of the Bible at all, even very simple things. They had been brought up on the
catechism and attending Mass. St Paul and the Spirit was a closed book to them, never opened. What was delightful was the sense of excitement, particularly in the husband, to go off and read ‘Who Wrote the Bible?’ It was as if something had been switched on.
It is something we need to face: the Bible is little known now, not only in the wider community, but within the Church, and where it is taught the teaching is actually aimed at affirming constantly the tradition of the group, and especially the belief that the Bible is the Word of God. This is a Biblianity, not a Christianity.
I think that what is now needed is an easily read history of Israel taken from both archeology and scripture but beginning with Ezra and the enormity of what he did as the final redactor of the traditions and the emergence of the God of the Bible. Then what came before can be traced back both through the final redaction and/or through each of the traditions, with their different feel for God. Just as we take authorship seriously in looking at the New Testament so we take authorship seriously in looking at the Old. We focus on the writers and their experience of the times in which they lived and wrote, the personal and political tensions they lived under, and most of all their experience of the Spirit and their feel for God. This is nothing else really than the process of exegesis writ large for the benefit of people in the pews.
What Friedman excels in, it seems to me, is to bring alive the cultural and political context in which the authors of the Bible lived. So for example the writer or writers of the P tradition, which was once thought to be post exilic but Friedman argues convincingly against this, seemed to be motivated in part by feeling threatened by the northern Levites whose E document had come to Jerusalem and been combined with the J document. The P document strongly affirms the Aaronid tradition and the centralisation of worship in Jerusalem against E. There is certainly political tension in all this, and rivalry between key Levite groups. It is an exciting story. What can be discerned here of the Spirit?
To put this another way, to what degree can we discern the Spirit both in each of the traditions, over and perhaps against other factors such as political
self-interest, and also in the form of the final redaction. The preacher at the church in Lancaster believed that the Spirit was very much involved in the final redaction. Let’s not doubt that, but the implication is that for this reason we can trust what the Bible says. But of course, but let’s really read the Bible, and not just make the same sort of assumption that has been made in fundamentalism but only now applied to the redactor. What if we don’t go there but rather stay with the Spirit. What this does is bring us to focus primarily on our experience of God here and now, not as something fixed in concrete in texts that we try to relate to objectively, but as a living experience in which we make decisions about our actions and relationships. It is our discernment of the Spirt in our own lives over and against all the other factors and spirits that seek to influence us that really matters. And we read the Bible and listen to preaching to help us with this. It is the Word of God in the here and now that we so desperately need to hear.
This brings us to Christ and the Spirit. However much we may struggle to discern the Spirit in the traditions of the Old Testament, there can be no doubt in my mind that the Spirit is central to Christ and the New Testament. The presence of the Spirit is the Kingdom of God. And yet as we shall see in my next talk, the Spirit has not faired well in the history and life of the Church. The same political and personal tensions can be seen between the ecclesiastical structures that developed as can be seen in the Old Testament struggle between different groups of Levites. So also in relationship with the secular authorities. Discerning the Spirit in all this is the challenge. Can we take it up. Our next author thinks we can and must.
Talk Four: The Age of the Spirit
One of the most important questions asked in the New Testament, in my opinion, was asked by St Paul when he first went to Ephesus.
While Apollos was
A few years ago I visited my eldest daughter who was living at the time in Lancaster in England. Someone suggested we visit a particular church during our stay. It was an evangelical Anglican church that attracted many university students. I went to an evening service with Angela. It was full of people of all ages. The vicar was a man in his early forties. He was speaking about the central role of women in the Bible and Church, and finished with a panel of people responding to questions (asked via text messages from the congregation’s mobile phones!!). Some of the panel held very different views to him. He managed it all with grace and good humour. All this was very refreshing and engaging, but what really struck me was that he made a good deal of reference in his address to the Documentary Hypothesis of the origin of the Bible, and drew points in his address from it. I had never experienced this before in any sermon I had heard, let alone given; I had of course studied it in theological college but had never learnt how to bring it into parish life. What really struck home of course was that this was happening in a staunchly evangelical parish, for whom the Bible was central. This seemed extraordinary. I loved what he was doing and I regretted my own hesitation in the past to present the Bible in this way.
Mind you I had felt tensions in my understanding of the Bible and its place in the christian mission from the early days of my pilgrimage. I remember listening to a famous Baptist preacher Sidlow Baxter, a most delightful human being, talking about Jews, Muslims and Christians all being People of the Book. No, I thought in my new found faith. Jews and Muslims maybe, but Christians are People of the Man, not the Book.
I have continued to feel strongly about this ever since, in a world in which Christians, at least at the popular level, seem to have increasingly understood God’s primary revelation to be the Bible. I use a computer App called Accordance, and hence receive their promotional material. I am truly staggered at the number of Bible Commentaries and other aids that are continually coming out. Accordance does cater for conservative evangelicals, but it also caters for all traditions including professional scholars and Jews.
That the Bible is the Word of God seems now to be part of Christian DNA. Yet nowhere does the Bible say it is the Word of God. It does say that Christ is the Word though, the Word made flesh, which to me clearly means an ultimate revelation.
I have always found this a very difficult issue to raise because it lies close to the sense of self for many Christians, and like so much debate nowadays, discussion can become a heated interchange of unreflected opinion that is nonetheless essential to the individuals’ sense of identity. What has been particularly difficult is to persuade any interlocutor that the Bible is very important to me, but after Christ and the Spirit. I consult it in both Hebrew and Greek. I am fascinated by it, but I am convinced that those who say it is the Word of God don’t read it with fresh eyes but through the tradition of the group they belong to. Shaking off the traditio is no easy feat, and if you are happy in the group you belong to, why bother. So important conversations tend not to take place.
Well I think we should bother because I think the place of the Bible in relation to Christian understanding and faith needs to be reviewed. The meta narrative it reveals has been superseded, whether we like it or not, if Christ followers are going to stay with our culture. A new Origin Story has emerged and is being worked on and is fast becoming our new myth of how we got here. Either we take up the great apologetic challenge of putting Christ in the centre of this new myth or we fail, I believe, Christ’s mission. At the same time, however, we continue to honour and treasure the Bible in our apologetics, but we see it in history, just as we need so much to see Christ in history. In other words we come to see the Bible as a very important story within the Story, a meta-narrative within a Meta-Narrative.
The question then is how do we do that, and how do we use the Bible in the life of our congregations. And for us Protestants there is the even bigger question, Where does authority ultimately lie for us if not in the Bible? This is the big one.
I don’t think for a moment I have all the answers but I do live with the questions. I have been helped in part by the work of the great Old Testament student and scholar, Richard Elliot Friedman. Friedman is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia. One of his great strengths is that he writes as a scholar in a popular and engaging way, giving the reader the sense of joining him in an exciting detective story. This annoys other scholars, but for him it is very important. He wants to be heard by us punters. His books that have helped me most are Who Wrote the Bible?, and his latest The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters. But where Friedman is so good for me is that he treasures the Bible personally (which includes the New Testament). Let me give you a few quotes from Who Wrote the Bible?:
The first and last pages of this book recognize the greatness of the Bible, its beauty and its power. What comes in between is a picture of how critical biblical scholarship accounts for this greatness. (Kindle Locations 91-92)
Above all, this book is meant to enhance people’s appreciation of the Bible: to understand better the world in which it was born and how inextricably connected it was to that world; to appreciate the wonder of how it came together; to appreciate that literary study and historical study of the Bible are not enemies, or even alternatives to one another. Rather, they enrich one another. Whether one is a Christian or a Jew or from another religion or no religion, whether one is religious or not, the more one knows of the Bible the more one stands in awe of it. (Kindle Locations 141-142).
So Friedman has a very high view of the Bible but an historical one. I think we need to develop this in relation to Christ and our witness to him.
I don’t intend to go into great detail about the Documentary Hypothesis itself, or other aspects of his critical engagement of the ancient texts. He has published the J,E,D and P documents separately in his The Bible with Sources Revealed: A New View into the Five Books of Moses, and he did a particular study of the J source earlier in The Hidden Book of the Bible: The Discovery of the First Prose Masterpiece, where he argues for the J document to be considered one of the first pieces of prose ever written.
But I do want to draw heavily on him in setting out how I am seeing the Bible and its relation to Christ, and in this I am thinking particularly of the Old Testament.
What I am getting from Professor Friedman is that in thinking and teaching about the Bible historically, we have to begin with Ezra. This turns our approach to the Bible on its head. Ezra is rarely mentioned in the life of the church, and only makes it into the text at the very end of the Biblical period. But his importance in Judaism is second only to Moses, at least in relation to the Torah. But Friedman believes Ezra’s influence extends over the final form of the whole Old Testament because he is the final Redactor or editor of all that had gone before, with the possible exception of the post exilic prophets. Although this may never be finally proved, the evidence that does exist points very strongly to this being the case. In relation to the Torah, which includes of course D and hence the Deuteronomic history also, Friedman wrote:
The first time that we find the full Torah of Moses in Judah, it is in Ezra’s possession. He sought it out, he was a scribe who worked with it, he personally carried it to Jerusalem, and he personally gave it its first public reading. And when he read it to the people, they heard things that they had never heard before. This does not prove that it absolutely had to be Ezra who fashioned the Five Books of Moses. But he was in the right priestly family, in the right profession, in the right place, in the right time, with the authority, and with the first known copy of the book in his hand. If it was not Ezra himself who composed the work, then it was someone close to him—a relative, a colleague in the priesthood, a fellow scribe—because it could not have been produced very long before he arrived with it in Judah. The Temple had been standing for only about one generation when he came to Jerusalem. (Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 3728-3732).
This final redaction is an extraordinary piece of work because the redactor had to weave strands of text written from different periods by different individuals belonging to different groups telling the stories from their different perspectives and theological understandings, into one more or less coherent story. It became, in the minds of all who followed, the history of the Hebrews who became the Jews, and their God who lived in a dynamic tension between his great love and compassion for those he had chosen, and his great regret and anger at how they responded or failed to respond to him.
Why did [Ezra or the final Redactor] do it? Why commit this extraordinary
irony, combining texts that were diametrically opposed to each other? He did it, presumably, for the same reasons that J and E had been combined about 250 years earlier. By this time, all of his source texts were famous. J and E had been around for centuries and were quoted in D. P had been around since Hezekiah’s days, it had been associated with a national reform, and it had the support of the priesthood that was in power. D had been read publicly in the days of Josiah, and it contained a law requiring that it be read again publicly every seven years. How could the redactor have left any of these out? The issue again was successful promulgation. Who would have believed that it was the Torah of Moses if it did not include the famous stories of Adam and Eve (J), the golden calf (E), Phinehas (P), and Moses’ farewell speech (D)?(Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 3752-3757).
It is clear the final redactor was an Aaronid priest or someone closely associated to such a group. Ezra was such a person, a Levite in descent from Aaron, a group who had been closely associated with Jerusalem from the days of Solomon.
This is the next key for Friedman in thinking about the Bible afresh, the central role of the Levites in the history. It begins for Friedman with the Exodus, an argument he introduces in Who Wrote the Bible?, but which he develops fully in The Exodus. Unlike many current Biblical scholars who take the archeology of the period seriously, Friedman believes there was an actual Exodus. But it was the Levites who came up out of Egypt with their god Yahweh, who was possibly originally a Midianite god. They settled in amongst the existing indigenous tribes who worshipped El, but without ever having land of their own, but still exerting great influence. As Friedman discusses in detail, El and Yahweh became identified as the same God, and the Levites acted as priests of this God. Some Levites traced their ancestry to Aaron, some to Moses, and there was significant tension between the two.
The Aaronid Levites became associated with Jerusalem, the Mushites with Shiloh, with Judah on the one hand and Israel on the other.
In Friedman’s analysis, E, P and D, and the final redaction, which of course included J are all the work of Levites. They were all written before the Exile, J and E before the Assyrian destruction of Israel, as was JE. P dates from the time of Hezekiah and D from the time of Josiah. J was an unknown advocate
of the Davidic royal house and is centred in Jerusalem. There is no evidence he was a Levite. E was produced at Shiloh in the north by Levites descended from Moses. It was taken south and combined with J. This composite text threatened the Jerusalem Aaronid Levites who responded with P. Then at the time of Josiah, D was produced along with DH. Friedman is convinced the writer of D was Jeremiah, probably with his scribe Baruch. All these sacred documents were then taken into exile to be finally redacted into one text by Ezra. It was this final redaction that produced the God of the Bible, so called.
Let me quote Friedman now to give you a taste of the significance of all this, and some of the differences in the sources, both at cosmic and personal levels, which nonetheless were redacted into one final form.
P never once uses the word “mercy.” It also never uses the words “grace” or “repentance.” It never refers to the faithfulness of Yahweh. The priest who wrote it rather emphasized the divine aspect of justice. That is, you get what you deserve. Obedience is rewarded. Transgression is punished. There is no throwing oneself on the mercy of the divine judge. J and E are virtually the opposite. They emphasize the divine aspect of mercy. Transgression can be forgiven through repentance. God is gracious and generously faithful to his covenant. In J’s depiction of the ultimate human experience of the divine, when Moses actually sees God on Sinai, Yahweh declares that he is Yahweh, merciful and gracious God, long-forbearing, and abundant in faithfulness.....The words that P never mentions occur about seventy times in J, E, and D. (Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 3978-3984).
The redactor combined them. When he did that, he created a new formula, in which justice and mercy stood in a balance in which they had never been before. They were more nearly equal than they had been in any of the source texts. God was both just and merciful, angry and compassionate, strict and forgiving. It became a powerful tension in the God of the Bible. It was a new and exceedingly complex formula. But that was the formula that became a crucial part of Judaism and of Christianity for two and a half millennia. The justice-and-mercy balance is more charged—psychologically as well as theologically—than the cosmic-and-personal balance. There is a constant tension in Yahweh between his justice and his mercy. They are not easily reconcilable. When should one predominate, and when should the other?
(Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 3993-3999).
Reading the Bible will never be quite the same. Aware of the Bible’s extraordinary history and its resulting complexity, we can—and probably must—read the book with a new depth of appreciation. We can read a page of the Bible and know that three or even four persons, all artists, all writing from their own experience, in their own historical moments, separated by centuries, contributed to composing that page. And, at the same time, we can read the page as it is, to enjoy the story, to learn from it, to find out how others interpreted it over millennia. (Friedman 2011: Kindle Locations 4081-4086).
One of the great strengths of Friedman’s analysis is that while he takes serious account of the archeological background, the bulk of the evidence for his analysis is taken from the Biblical text itself. He has learnt to read it critically but lovingly, and hence historically. I think this is the only future for an intelligent approach to the Bible. And it is in this intelligent approach to the Bible as this intersects with us and our life in the Spirit that the Word of God manifests in the here and now.
Let me tell you two stories. I have run training groups for chaplains and pastoral carers for many years. Quite some time ago a discussion arose in a group that led me to say something about the discovery of the book of Deuteronomy, at least the proto-version, in the temple at the time of Josiah. A number in the group, good Protestant church members as I recall, were upset with me. They thought I was attacking the integrity of the Bible by suggesting such a thing. They had in fact never read the story in 2 Kings. Like so many, they had been schooled in the beliefs that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible and that the Bible is the Word of God. They had little or no historical sense at all.
The second story is far more recent. I was speaking to a Catholic couple who had once been very active in the Church but had become disillusioned and no longer attended. They are well educated and highly intelligent people. In the course of the conversation I mentioned Friedman’s book. There was immediate interest. It then came out that they had little knowledge of the Bible at all, even very simple things. They had been brought up on the
catechism and attending Mass. St Paul and the Spirit was a closed book to them, never opened. What was delightful was the sense of excitement, particularly in the husband, to go off and read ‘Who Wrote the Bible?’ It was as if something had been switched on.
It is something we need to face: the Bible is little known now, not only in the wider community, but within the Church, and where it is taught the teaching is actually aimed at affirming constantly the tradition of the group, and especially the belief that the Bible is the Word of God. This is a Biblianity, not a Christianity.
I think that what is now needed is an easily read history of Israel taken from both archeology and scripture but beginning with Ezra and the enormity of what he did as the final redactor of the traditions and the emergence of the God of the Bible. Then what came before can be traced back both through the final redaction and/or through each of the traditions, with their different feel for God. Just as we take authorship seriously in looking at the New Testament so we take authorship seriously in looking at the Old. We focus on the writers and their experience of the times in which they lived and wrote, the personal and political tensions they lived under, and most of all their experience of the Spirit and their feel for God. This is nothing else really than the process of exegesis writ large for the benefit of people in the pews.
What Friedman excels in, it seems to me, is to bring alive the cultural and political context in which the authors of the Bible lived. So for example the writer or writers of the P tradition, which was once thought to be post exilic but Friedman argues convincingly against this, seemed to be motivated in part by feeling threatened by the northern Levites whose E document had come to Jerusalem and been combined with the J document. The P document strongly affirms the Aaronid tradition and the centralisation of worship in Jerusalem against E. There is certainly political tension in all this, and rivalry between key Levite groups. It is an exciting story. What can be discerned here of the Spirit?
To put this another way, to what degree can we discern the Spirit both in each of the traditions, over and perhaps against other factors such as political
self-interest, and also in the form of the final redaction. The preacher at the church in Lancaster believed that the Spirit was very much involved in the final redaction. Let’s not doubt that, but the implication is that for this reason we can trust what the Bible says. But of course, but let’s really read the Bible, and not just make the same sort of assumption that has been made in fundamentalism but only now applied to the redactor. What if we don’t go there but rather stay with the Spirit. What this does is bring us to focus primarily on our experience of God here and now, not as something fixed in concrete in texts that we try to relate to objectively, but as a living experience in which we make decisions about our actions and relationships. It is our discernment of the Spirt in our own lives over and against all the other factors and spirits that seek to influence us that really matters. And we read the Bible and listen to preaching to help us with this. It is the Word of God in the here and now that we so desperately need to hear.
This brings us to Christ and the Spirit. However much we may struggle to discern the Spirit in the traditions of the Old Testament, there can be no doubt in my mind that the Spirit is central to Christ and the New Testament. The presence of the Spirit is the Kingdom of God. And yet as we shall see in my next talk, the Spirit has not faired well in the history and life of the Church. The same political and personal tensions can be seen between the ecclesiastical structures that developed as can be seen in the Old Testament struggle between different groups of Levites. So also in relationship with the secular authorities. Discerning the Spirit in all this is the challenge. Can we take it up. Our next author thinks we can and must.
Talk Four: The Age of the Spirit
One of the most important questions asked in the New Testament, in my opinion, was asked by St Paul when he first went to Ephesus.
While Apollos was
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