I don’t know how other private high school teachers approach teaching the Bible to their students but since I work at a college preparatory school sponsored by the Episcopal Church, I introduce them to the best of scholarship available to us. For example, this means that my students encounter the Synoptic Problem. They come to see the similarities and differences between the accounts of the different canonical Gospels (and they do read some non-canonical Gospels as well). For some of my students, there’s an indifference to what they’re learning. For others, there’s a sense of adventure while being simultaneously overwhelmed because they’ve never studied the Bible before taking my class. (Often this is the case for students who aren’t raised by Christians.) For others, there’s an excitement, possibly because they’re being given a space to read the Bible critically without judgment, some for the first time. (Now, “critically” doesn’t mean disparaging the text but instead reading it thoughtfully: not taking the claims of the text at face value but instead putting in the intellectual work required to determine how I understand and how I receive what I’m reading.) For others, my class can lead to a bit of an existential crisis.
Now, I see my role as primarily that of an academic guide to the text. I don’t favor any particular confessional approach. I don’t try to pursued my students of the truthfulness of the text’s claims. I don’t try to convert or proselytize my students. When I’m asked what my religion is (because sometimes my approach makes them wonder), I’m honest that I’m a Christian because I don’t want to feign objectivity even if methodologically I try to be as objective as possible. Since I’m a Christian who has been studying the Bible academically for a couple of decades, and since I’ve found a way to find peace between my own religious commitments and the demands of scholarship, I’ll talk to students who want to think through how what they’re learning might impact their faith. And here I want to share one of two examples I use for students who wonder how I remain Christian while reading the Bible critically. I’ll discuss one here and one in a future post.
First, I share Carl Schleicher’s Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud (above). This 19th century oil painting provides me with a perfect visual for how I read the Bible, academically and religiously, often simultaneously. In this painting, five rabbis are reading the Talmud. They’re debating its meaning with some intensity. The fifth rabbi listens in from behind the group. This depicts one of the beauties of the Jewish tradition: internal debate about the meaning of sacred texts isn’t a bug but a feature. Christianity hasn’t done as well in this regard. Our obsession with orthodoxy versus heresy has killed much of our theological creativity.
Personally, when I read the Gospels, specifically, this image comes to my mind. As I told a student recently who’s troubled by the reality that non-canonical Gospels exist and that the depiction of Jesus differs between Gospels, I see myself in this picture. As I reflected on this further with a friend who I was talking to yesterday, I see myself as the man in the back listening to the debate. And I imagine the four rabbis as representing how I see the four evangelists. Who is Jesus? These four accounts present different pictures. I’m invited to listen, to ponder, and to decide for myself.
Now, as I told my student last week: this puts more responsibility on us. We can settle for a shallow “Bible-in-a-year” approach to reading the text that checks a box but never stops to truly wrestle with what we’re reading because we may care more that we’re reading than that we’re understanding and interpreting what we’re reading. But if we care to interpret and understand, this takes work. We must listen intently. We must hear the different presentations and then we must decide what we’re going to do with them. I understand why someone would want to outsource this responsibility to their clergy. I understand why someone might prefer to encounter the Gospels primarily through the filter of sermons and liturgy. That’s a legitimate approach. But if you take the challenge of reading—really reading—then you inherit the responsibility as well.
Again, this can be seen as a negative thing. Who wants the responsibility of sorting out who Jesus was and is for themselves? That may feel high stakes. But for others, like me, and I hope for many of my Christian students, this is an invitation to truly encounter what the Gospels are within their canonical setting: four sages exploring the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth.
(What about the non canonical Gospels? How does this fit my analogy? Well, I read those too. I find them fascinating. But on historical grounds even more so than theological grounds, I find their lateness less interesting and inviting. Note: I think even the Gospel of Thomas is a later second century text that derives from the canonical Gospels, as has been argued by scholars like Mark Goodacre and Simon Gathercole. It’s fascinating. Other noncanonical Gospels provide me with comfort knowing that Christians have been wrestling with who Jesus was and is to them from the earliest generations, and that sometimes their understanding of Jesus clashed with what they found in what became the canonized Gospels, but I find them less compelling. Maybe this means the concept of canonization has a greater pull on me than it should.)
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