Category: Biblical Studies

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Some uninspiring reasons to read the Bible

In a few days, I’ll begin my seventeenth semester/ninth year teaching classes on the Bible in a high school setting. As I’ve mentioned in a few other posts, I’ve struggled at this stage in my life to find motivation for reading the Bible or about the Bible. (Start with “Is Biblical Studies Boring or Am I Just a Fox Now?” if you’re interested.) There is part of me that worries that this will impact my teaching; there is part of me that’s confident that I can continue to find joy in teaching the material, even as I adjust my personal rationale for engaging it. In this post, I want to talk about four reasons for reading the Bible that used to be inspiring to me at different life-stages but that no longer attract me. In a future post, I’ll provide a few reasons for continuing to read the Bible that are valuable to me now.

Inerrancy/Infallibility
When I began reading the Bible, it was because I had accepted the claim that the Bible is a divine book, the “Word of God,” and that it was perfect in all its claims with regard to history, science, morals/ethics, etc. It didn’t take too long to realize that this view was untenable, though in some of the evangelical circles with which I affiliated, it was a necessary “shibboleth,” so I did spend a few years trying to determine whether I could speak about the Bible this way by which I mean, I spent a few years trying to determine whether I had a place in evangelicalism. I didn’t. I can’t argue for the historicity of the Great Deluge. I don’t think the creation myths in the Bible should be held to the standard of our modern cosmologies or even read as doing the same thing. I don’t think there’s justification for the violent and genocidal theology of the Book of Joshua.

Admittedly, in retrospect, there was something very attractive about the doctrine of inerrancy. It’s a proud doctrine. Basically, it empowers people to say, “I may not be educated in [insert one of the many hundreds of fields of human knowledge from biology to physics], but I know the Bible”. This leads to a dangerous arrogance that can be heard over pulpits all across our country every Sunday, as pastors talk about everything from the origins of humanity, to gender and sexuality, to warfare and violence, etc. These preachers, usually men, act as philosopher kings ruling over mini-kingdoms justifying their foundationless claims by citing a random part of the Bible. It can be an addictive drug.

Doctrinal proof texting
Related to the previous motivation is the motivation to read the Bible as a source of doctrinal proof texting. I was raised Oneness Pentecostal. According to many in our circles, we were the “true church” with the “whole Gospel”. Since we began with “the Truth” (yes, capital “T”), we didn’t need to learn so much as learn to defend. This same phenomenon can be found in many Christian denominations, to a greater or lesser degree. The Bible serves as a repository of timeless, errorless truth claims, often of a metaphysical variety. Lip service is given to hermeneutics, so it’s acknowledge that interpretation plays a role, but the subtext is that we know the answer is “4” so our only real question is whether we need to use “3+1”; “2+2″; or 1+3” to get there. This is apologetics in a nutshell.

The book that rescued me from this admittedly terrible and boring way of reading the Bible was R. Alan Culpepper’s Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel: A Study in Literary Design. The realization that the Bible is more narrative than anything else was freeing. We read narrative differently than we read case law. The Bible turns boring really fast when all we’re doing is reading it to confirm that this or that proposition from the Bible is the right and defensible one.

Originalism
When I abandoned inerrancy/infallibility, and the desire to debate using proof texting, the next step was originalism. By this I mean something like “constitutional originalism,” i.e. the idea that the true meaning of a text is the meaning intended by its original author. But I should add that even after I had abandoned the idea that this text was without error, I was shaped by the idea that the parts of the Bible that continued to be normative and authoritative for my life were the parts that reflected historicity, especially around the person of Jesus of Nazareth. I spent many years obsessed with the field of study known as “historical Jesus studies”. It wasn’t a dispassionate interest. Instead, it had more to do with whether we could discover the “real” and “original” Jesus through the biblical text, and once he was found, he could become the hermeneutic tool for reinterpreting the Bible, Christian tradition, and theology.

For many liberal Protestants, this is a way to have the foundationalism offered by doctrines like inerrancy but with a little more sophistication. I’m thinking of scholars like John Dominic Crossan or the late Marcus Borg but also even some more conservative theologians like N.T. Wright who realize inerrancy is difficult to defend but who want to retain some source of authority that’s akin to inerrancy without falling back on “Christian tradition”. My problem is that historical Jesus studies has created hundreds of different Jesuses. We didn’t find the “real” Jesus. We won’t. We don’t know much about him, honestly. (This isn’t the same claim as the mythicists who think there was no historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth; instead, it’s the claim that what we can know about him through our sources is pretty sparse, though a lot more than most people from his social and ethnic grouping in his geographical reason during his time in history.)

The basic idea here is that if we can get back to Jesus, or get back to the “original” Christianity, then we can realign ourselves with the right, correct vision that Christianity offers. But this assumes that Christianity in the first-century CE had “arrived”. That the “original, apostolic church” got it and that we lost it and that we need to recover it. This is the inspiration of the Pentecostal movement that I left as well as every “restorationist” Christianity from the Latter-day Saints to the Jehovah’s Witnesses to the Adventists to twentieth-century American Fundamentalism…you get the idea. But what if Christianity has never “arrived” and what is there’s no perfect, correct Christianity to recover kind of like there’s no single, accurate, unified interpretation of the United States Constitution to which we can return? I’m of the persuasion that those of us who remain Christians at this time must (1) try to create a Christianity that makes sense for us here and now and (2) accept that this will never be the “correct” approach to Christianity because no such objective vantage point has or ever will exist.

Professional development
The first three are rooted in an epistemology. They’re rooted in an approach to knowledge and a desire to know, which isn’t bad in and of itself, obviously, but each approach puts more weight on the Bible than the Bible is able to bear. Once I realized this, my main interest in researching and writing about the Bible, attending conferences about the Bible, etc., was for professional development. I wanted to be the best scholar of the Bible that I could be. But this has lost its shine. For now, I’ll remain somewhat engaged with the Society of Biblical Literature but as I prepare to welcome my first child in November, I admit that I’m wondering to myself whether I want to travel during the first part of Thanksgiving Break every year, likely around the time of my child’s birthday, to hear academic papers about this or that bit of biblical minutiae. Not to disparage this field of study. It matters. States like Oklahoma and Texas are trying to shove the Bible back into public school curriculum and they’re doing it in bad faith. They’re not teaching the Bible as part of objective cultural history or to understand this or that aspect of our modern world; they’re doing it to indoctrinate. We need scholars of the Bible who can challenge and check this disingenuous dogmatism. And for those scholars to exist, they need to do increasingly specialized research on a limited collection of texts that has been mined over and over and over again for centuries now. This keeps them adding to human knowledge and making our colleges and university system what they are. But I’m not that person.

I work in a private high school. I rarely get questions about the text that are provocative or new. In a sense, the depth of my teaching remains more like an introductory textbook on the Bible than a monograph about “gender relations in ancient Persia as reflected in the Book of Esther”. I’m providing my students with the very basics and it’s rare that I’ll have any students who will go on to do a deeper dive after they’re left high school. (As I’ve mentioned, out of the hundreds of students that I’ve taught the Bible to, only one has gone on to study the Bible in college and then go to seminary.) This has made it difficult for me to want to do too deep a dive. It has become apparent that there are better uses of my time and intellectual pursuits not because the academic study of the Bible isn’t valuable but because I don’t have much of a professional reason to dive into the nitty gritty of John’s Christology or Paul’s vision of justification. Mostly, I provide general overviews of the interpretive options that my students have and mostly, they’re satisfied with that.

For years, I’ve tried to muster the energy to turn my doctoral thesis into something but I don’t have it in me. I don’t think another book on John the Baptist is a good use of my time since it won’t (A) do much of anything for the world and (B) satisfy my own curiosity. If it would be (A) or (B), then maybe I’d find the inspiration. Maybe this will change but it’s how I feel right now and honestly, it’s how I’ve felt increasingly since finishing my Ph.D.

All four of these reasons for reading the Bible were once my primary motivation. This isn’t the case anymore, so as I said above, I need to reflect on what does bring me back to these texts, which I’ll address soon.

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Is Biblical Studies Boring or Am I Just a Fox Now?

In my last post, I pondered “midlife” and how I feel like I’ve avoided a “midlife crisis” so far. As comfortable as I am, there remains one thing about midlife that I’m trying to comprehend right now: how do we live when our life circumstances can’t/shouldn’t change but we change. My example is a mild one but a real one. This August, I’ll enter my ninth year teaching high school. I’m still very excited about teaching religious studies. I’m even more excited about the possibility of a couple of philosophy courses that I’d like to create over the next couple of years. I’m not as excited about my biblical studies classes.

This may seem odd because I cut my teeth, academically, on the study of the Bible: undergrad, graduate school (2 x’s), Ph.D. All biblical studies related! And when I’m in the classroom, more often than not I enjoy teaching my biblical studies classes. But I don’t enjoy scholarship on the Bible all that much. I’m having a paper presented on my behalf at this year’s Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) (which I’ll miss because the birth of my first child is going to happen around the time of the conference) but when I try to sit down to read and write about John the Baptist, I lack motivation! And I lack curiosity about current trends in the field of biblical studies, in general. The past few years, I get a bit of a spark when I attend the annual SBL meeting, but then when I have time to read afterward, I don’t want to read biblical studies. I want to read philosophy, history, sociology, pedagogy, sometimes even science, but I stare at my biblical studies books with disinterest. I’m part of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Educational Resources and Review Committee and I’m beginning a second term. We’re doing good work and often I enjoy it…but it doesn’t motivate me like it used to. For example, you’d think I’d have all kinds of thoughts about Oklahoma’s state superintendent ordering public schools to offer Bible classes, but I don’t!

When I started studying the Bible, it had a magical quality to it. Literally. I was taught what I’d recognize now as the “doctrine of inerrancy”. The Bible was the direct “Word of God” from heaven, free from error, and the key to eternal life. In the zero sum game of conservative Christian soteriology, there was no object of study more important than the Bible. But I’ve long abandoned both that soteriology and that bibliology. (I remain a Christian, just not that type of Christian.) So, the theological grounding for dedicating all my time to the study of the Bible is missing. Once the Bible is demystified, it becomes an important source of wisdom but not the sole arbitrator of it. In many ways, an ongoing, academic study of the Bible ends up deconstructing its own value unless you retain certain confessional anchors or professional obligations. Now days, I might say something like “all truth is God’s truth” recognizing “truth” can be found outside of the Bible: hence, philosophy, sociology, etc.

Professionally, my study of the Bible matters but it’s not high stakes. In eight years, I’ve taught one student who went on the study the Bible thoroughly beyond high school. A total of one student (out of hundreds!) is on her way to seminary. So, while many students enjoy my biblical studies classes, they don’t seem to value them as much as they do the classes that will matter when it comes to getting them into the college of their dreams or getting them that ideal job. I help my students think critically about their faith (or lack thereof) but since few of my students come from the biblicist subculture in which I was raised, few of them obsess about the Bible like I did around their age. This means I’m ready for most of their inquiries with minimal preparation. My curriculum is set and it hums along quite nicely. In fact, on that front, last year’s classes may have been my best ever!

On the other hand, religious studies continues to have immediate relevance to me and to my students. And even if my students don’t major in religious studies, what they learn in my classes “Religion in Global Context” and “Religion in the United States” remains immediately relevant as it teaches them how to think critically as members of a religiously pluralistic society. The Bible as a smaller circle within the much larger circle of religious studies makes sense to me:

The Bible as a category equal to religious studies doesn’t:

But every year, enrollment is basically equal. So, that tells you that my students and their families value these classes equally. Though this may not be true of all Episcopal schools, my institution values these classes as well. And yes, when I’m teaching them, I see their value. Subjectively and contextually, these classes matter and by enrollment data standards, they matter equally. But personally, I don’t feel the same connection.

So, the problem lies with me. Did I wake up to realize that biblical studies have been boring all along? Unlikely. A bunch of the smartest people that I know are nerds about the Bible (in a good, academic way…not a troubling, fundamentalist way). So, maybe I’ve become a fox?

The Greek poet Archilochus wrote the following: “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing”. Isaiah Berlin took this statement and made it into an entire book, The Hedgehog and the Fox, mostly about Leo Tolstoy. It’s become something like a personality test over the years. As someone who despises “personality tests” like Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram—mostly because I think Buddhist thought, and similar philosophies that emphasize the fluidity of our persons, make better sense of reality—I want to be cautious with this but it may capture something about me at this stage in my life.

When I was in graduate school, I thought I’d be a “Pauline” scholar (i.e. an expert in the writings and theology of St. Paul). As a doctoral student, I thought I would be a “Gospels” scholar, likely with an emphasis on John the Baptist—a topic that wasn’t receiving a ton of attention in the mid-to-late 2010s, until suddenly it was. There was a drastic change around 2018. Several months after I finished corrections on my doctoral thesis, Joel Marcus published John the Baptist in History and Theology. In 2021, the Enoch Seminar focused on John the Baptist with a lineup of heavy hitters such as Marcus, Joan Taylor, Rivka Nir, and a bunch of other scholars who have written on the subject . A couple of months later, he was the focus of a Freedman Lecture Panel at the University of Michigan. This year, James McGrath has two books on the Baptist being published: Christmaker and John of History; Baptist of Faith. SBL has a two John the Baptist sessions now, one that my paper is part of! But I can’t get myself to be a hedgehog. I can’t read everything out there about John the Baptist. Honestly, I’m having a difficult time reading enough to write the aforementioned short conference paper! I’m bored with the Baptist!

I’ll do what needs to be done to finish that paper so that it can be presented but I’m stuck wondering, what does this mean? My “active” book pile covers topics like Spinoza’s religion, a couple of books on the philosophy of sports and one on the sociology of sports, the dangers of smart phones and social media for kids, an evolutionary history of fathers, a book on philosophy for kids, and more. Notice: nothing on the Bible.

This is due, in part, to the requirements of my job. I got hired to be a generalist, not a specialist. I’ve worked as a generalist, not a specialist. My task hasn’t been “publish or perish” but “teach high schoolers effectively and relevantly”. My curriculum has been shaped by my on the ground experience teaching certain kids in a specific context. John the Baptist gets about 45 minutes of attention in the spring semester. It would’ve been a waste of mental energy to focus on him all the time.

Now that I have a kid of my own on the way, I’m reevaluating what it means for me to be a teacher, presuming that this will be my career by the time they reach high school. If my child becomes my student, what will matter? How will I teach them? What do I really want them to learn? If I’m honest, I want them to be a clear thinker and an honest one. I hope they have a spiritually vibrant life but I don’t wish dogma on them. I want them to be curious and open. I want them to pair wisdom with knowledge. I don’t want them to be dualistic, so I hope they cultivate their bodies as well as their minds. Obviously, I hope they enjoy athletics and/or being in nature as much as they enjoy bookish knowledge. And I hope that whatever YouTube and social media looks like in a decade and a half, I will have taught them to be discerning when consuming content.

With this in mind, the Bible is a small, small slice of the pie of my future parental concerns. If they find the Bible interesting, I hope it’s as a collection of wisdom literature that needs to be read cautiously and carefully and not as a magical book or something to be weaponized. But I doubt that they’ll have my relationship with the Bible because they won’t be raised in a biblicist subculture. These concerns are reshaping me.

I’d like to be a hedgehog again. I want a project. I want to dig deep into a small area of knowledge again. I don’t know what that will be but I sense that my days trying to be a “biblical scholar” are fading and have been for several years now. I doubt that I’ll ever get around to publishing on John the Baptist. That window seems to have closed. Maybe I need to become a fox in order to emerge as a different hedgehog someday. We’ll see.

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Movies that I show in my classes: The Prince of Egypt (1998)

In my class, “Introduction to the Bible I: The Hebrew Scriptures,” the second movie that I show is The Prince of Egypt (1998). As I said in my post introducing this series on the movies that I show in my classes, I’ll provide brief commentary on the following: (1) why I show the movie; (2) the strengths of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish; (3) the weaknesses of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish.

1. Why I show The Prince of Egypt (1998)

    The Prince of Egypt is an excellent movie. Full stop. I’ve seen it dozens of times over the past two and a half decades and enjoy it still. The soundtrack is amazing for 90s children (Whitney Houston, Maria Carey, Boys 2 Men) and the voice acting cast is stacked (Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Sandra Bullock, Steve Martin, Patrick Stewart, Martin Short, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum). It tells one of the most important stories of the Hebrew Bible in a memorable way. Honestly, what part of the Hebrew Bible is better known in broader, popular culture than the Exodus narrative? And how much credit should we give this animated film for the probability that it’s the Moses-story.

    After reading through the wonderful, but heavy narratives of the Book of Genesis (Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebekah; Jacob, Rachel, Lead, Bilhah, and Zilpah; the Twelve Sons of Israel, especially Joseph), this film provides a little break in what can be a demanding stretch of the semester, especially for students who aren’t used to doing this much reading!

    2. The strengths of The Prince of Egypt

      As I noted above, it makes the Exodus-narrative memorable. I tell my students that I need them to remember at least three names into adulthood: Abraham, Moses, and David. This helps cement Moses in their memory.

      Related, it’s designed so that the main outline of events is easy to track. Just reading Exodus 1-19 doesn’t guarantee this.

      It’s fun. I know few people who dislike the movie. Sometimes my students dislike it, but they’re teenagers, so the odds are that I’ll have some who dislike it from a demographic that often dislikes a lot of things!

      Even though the video sounds negative (“The Most Successful Animated Failure Ever Made”), I recommend the below video because it shows how excellent a movie The Prince of Egypt was for its time and is even now:

      3. The weaknesses of The Prince of Egypt

      I ask my students to reflect on how the movie relates to the biblical narrative. One question I want them to consider is whether “cartooning” events like the plagues, especially the death of the first born, undermines the story itself. Some students feel that it does. In a sense, this can be turned into a strength as it provides an opportunity for my students to think about the media they consume, especially when it’s religious and/or mythological in nature.

      Some students dislike the singing and dancing when paired with such a serious story. There have been years when I’ve shown Exodus: Gods and Kings instead. That movies avoids the childishness of The Prince of Egypt though it has its own problems. (For example, everyone is white, which is weird for a narrative set in 2nd millennia BCE Egypt. Another is how it tries to naturalize the miracles of Exodus, even presenting Moses as a leading a form of guerrilla warfare. So, there’s aspects of either movie that will trouble any given viewer.)

      As always, biblical films rewrite the Bible a bit. The decision to make Moses and Rameses brothers and to make “Pharaoh” into “Pharaoh Ramses” specifically is, well, a decision. Any time students watch biblical movies, they’re bound to intertwine the movie’s version with the Bible’s version in their memories. This leads to a different discussion that I won’t take up here: does this matter? Is the literal narrative of the Bible what students need to know or is the received cultural narrative that originates in the Bible as important?

      This being said, if you’re going to be critical of The Prince of Egypt, at least be entertaining about it…like this video!

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      Movies that I show in my classes: Noah (2014)

      In my class, “Introduction to the Bible I: The Hebrew Scriptures,” the first movie that I show is Noah (2014). As I said in my post introducing this series on the movies that I show in my classes, I’ll provide brief commentary on the following: (1) why I show the movie; (2) the strengths of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish; (3) the weaknesses of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish.

      1. Why I show Noah (2014)

        During the first few weeks of this class, I introduce my students to the difference between reading the Bible in a classroom setting like ours and what they may have experienced in a church or synagogue setting, or during personal or family devotionals. Unit 1, “How We Read the Bible” doesn’t try to establish a universal, objective approach to reading the Bible but I do tell students that we’ll be wearing a few different “lenses”: those of historians, literary critics, sociologists, philosophers, and theologians. In other words, I try to familiarize them with the different “academic” approaches to the Bible. Usually, students are a bit confused still about these different approaches as we end this unit but the goal is to familiarize them with how we’ll be reading. The next three units practice these approaches, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. For students who take “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures,” the work continues and often I see that most students have gained a “hands on” understanding of how academic approaches to the Bible differ from what they’ve experienced at home or in religious communities.

        The content that I use to help them practice different approaches to reading is the First and Second Creation Narratives found in Genesis 1-2 and the narratives found in Genesis 3-4 where the humans interact with their environment and their Creator. During this unit, I introduce the concepts of “canonical” and “non-canonical” literature and I have them read from a historian’s perspective (considering the historicity, ahistoricity, and mythology of the passage); a literary critic’s perspective (structure, context, setting, characters, etc.); a sociologist’s perspective (gender relations, family structure, humans and their environment, attitudes toward violence, etc.); and the perspectives of philosopher’s and theologian’s (what messages do we find? what presumptions are in the text? what’s being claimed and assumed? what is this text saying about concepts like “God” and “humanity” and “animals” and “the world”?).

        To wrap up the unit, students read the entire Flood Narrative of Genesis 6-9. Then we watch Noah to see how Darren Aronofsky has read and re-imagined this text both in itself, in dialogue with non-canonical traditions, and in hermeneutically merging the ancient and modern horizons of this narrative and our own collective, modern narrative(s).

        2. The strengths of Noah

        First, Aronofsky helps students see how the narrative “gaps” in Genesis 6-9 have invited interpreters to “fill in” what’s missing. When I have them focus on the literary aspects of the Hebrew Bible, I point out how little we are told about what’s happening in the background, or the internal, psychological states of the characters. This gives the Hebrew Bible life. What’s Noah thinking when he goes about building an ark as all of his fellow humans prepare to experience an omnicide? Only the interpreters can fill in those details because they narrator provides us with nothing but silence.

        Second, I find that this visuals help many students understand the “ancientness” of this story. In a sense, Aronofsky makes Noah and company look very modern. The weapon technology is creative, to say the least. So is the clothing. But it still feels like an ancient, pre-historic world and the movie feels like mythology which helps students realize, consciously or unconsciously, that we’re not dealing with stories that align with modern historiography. Adjacently, elements of ancient patriarchy, ideas and values around reproduction, religion and mysticism, attitudes toward violence, etc., are different from our own, which corresponds to the sociological lens I ask my students to consider.

        Third, Aronofsky is familiar with Jewish tradition and non-canonical material. For example, there are places in this story that aren’t from Genesis 6-9 but are from Genesis. The Akedah tradition where Abraham is ready to sacrifice Isaac is imported back into the Noah story for creative reasons but also theologically rich ones as the Torah itself can be read as juxtaposing Noah, Abraham, and Moses when it comes to divine judgment and their response to it. Additionally, “the Watchers” are a somewhat silly, kind of “Transformers” inspired presentation of material from the Enochian tradition. This helps teach students about reception history and how interpretation of the Bible is never from “nowhere” but always from a point of view. The canon influences how we interpret material in the canon but non-canonical traditions, whether the Book of Enoch, the Protevangelium of James (with regard to the subsequent semester’s content), or even just denominational traditions, also shape our interpretation.

        Fourth, Aronofsky modernizes the message of Genesis 6-9 so that it speaks to a few contemporary concerns. First, those who have watched Noah become aware that in many ways, this movie is about human degradation of our environment. The “descendants of Cain” plummet the earth. They’re greedy. The environment is destroyed wherever they go. Meanwhile, the “descendants of Seth,” which is limited to Noah, his wife, and his sons, care for the earth, use only what’s needed, and practice a vegan diet. I point out to my students that Aronofsky isn’t just parroting the Bible’s story: he’s using an ancient story of environmental destruction and the “judgment” that follows to ask about our own rising waters (i.e. climate change) and how we humans are bringing about our own judgment—one that impacts us but also non-human animals and all the life on our planet. This corresponds to the philosophical and theological lens that I ask my students to consider.

        3. The weaknesses of Noah

        As always, students often conflate the movies that I show with the texts themselves. I’ll catch in later assignments times when students talk about what happened in the Book of Genesis but they’re describing what happed in Noah. For better or worse, “Noah” is the movie’s Noah who experiences a psychotic break and tries to kill his own grandkids, rather than the vague, 2-D Noah of Genesis 6-9. I try to prevent this by having them read Genesis 6-9 while listing 25 observations about the text that they juxtapose to the movie when we’re done but the influence of visual art is strong!

        The Transformers quality keeps their attention but when I ask students if they picked up on Aronofsky’s environmental message, very, very few ever have. Once I make it evident, they see it, but they don’t see it as the descendants of Cain storm the Ark while fighting against the Watchers!

        Some may be concerned that the movie departs too far from the Bible’s source material. Other than what I mentioned above about how students conflate the two, I think every sermon, every week, in every church and synagogue does this with the Bible and the Bible would be boring, dead, and meaningless if people didn’t expand on its content interpretively. But I do know that it is a very creative interpretation and this can offend some and confuse others.

        Obviously, something can be said for all these ancient people being English speaking white folk. I think this is less problematic with a mythological, prehistorical movie like Noah than it was with the other 2014 biblical epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings that is set in Egypt in the middle of the second millennia BCE. But I do recognize how it can create a subconscious assumption that the Bible is about white people when in fact it very much isn’t!

        Overall, the strengths outweigh the weaknesses. Noah starts conversations about the Bible and it keeps my student’s attention. They have strong emotional responses both in favor of and against how it interacts with the Bible’s materials, which I see as a good thing either way. It gets them thinking and doing their own interpretive work!

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          The movies that I show in my classes

          Movies are a teacher’s friend. They give you a reprieve from lecturing. They shrink the amount of time that you have to invest in lesson planning. They provide visuals for students to help them better understand what you’ve been trying to teach. They act as helpful summaries of previous material. I could say more.

          I want to write a few short posts explaining why I’ve chosen the movies that I’ve chosen for my classes. It should be noted, I teach high school, so I’m limited in what I can show. Some of those limits are self-limits because I don’t want to have to address certain concerns or skip past controversial sections. For example, Life of Brian is a film that I would like to show in my “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures” class but it has enough controversial content that I’ve decided it’s not worth it. I do show a couple of “R” rated movies so my students have to have parental consent forms signed but they’re not the type of “R” rated movies that upset parents. Here are the movies that I’ll discuss over a series of future posts:

          “Introduction to the Bible I: The Hebrew Scriptures”

          1. Noah (2014)
          2. The Prince of Egypt (1998)

          Also, I supplement my lessons with the first five episodes of the miniseries The Bible.

          “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures”

          1. The Star (2017) or The Young Messiah (2016)
          2. Mary Magdalene (2018)

          Also, I supplement my lessons with the second five episodes of the miniseries The Bible.

          “Religion in Global Context”

          1. Free Guy (2021)
          2. Seven Years in Tibet (1997)
          3. An American Pickle (2020)

          “Religion in the United States”

          1. Malcolm X (1992)
          2. Cesar Chavez (2014)
          3. The Apostle (1997)

          When I write my posts, I’ll explain (1) why I show the movie; (2) the strengths of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish; (3) the weaknesses of the movie for what I’m trying to accomplish.

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          SBL paper proposal accepted + panel discussion

          I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email this morning with this greeting:

          As many scholars have begun to question whether the Q hypothesis makes the most sense of the relationship between the Synoptics, I’ve been wondering what it would mean for John the Baptist scholarship if we remove Q from our historical reconstructions of the Baptist. That’s what I’ll explore in the paper.

          Additionally, I’m excited to see that the “Educational Resources and Review Committee” of which I’m part has had our panel approved: “Why I Love Teaching Secondary Education with my Ph.D. in Biblical Studies, and You Could Too.” I’ll be on that panel. I look forward to a fruitful discussion with those who may be considering applying for jobs in the fun and wacky world of high school teaching!

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          Belief beyond propositions

          A couple of months ago, I wrote about how Carl Schleicher’s painting Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud works as a visual analogy for how I read the Bible as someone who (1) is committed to the methodologies associated with various academic approaches to the Bible who (2) happens to identify as a Christian as well (see “Carl Schleicher’s Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud and Reading the Gospels”). In that post, I stated that I want to “share one of two examples I use for students who wonder how I remain Christian while reading the Bible critically”. That post provides my first example, as I talked about Schleicher’s painting. In this post, I want to talk about the second example that I provide.

          In the Gospel of John, there’s a scene that strikes me every time I read it. In John 20:3-10, we read the following:

          3 Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. 4 The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7 and the cloth that had been on Jesus’s head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8 Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed, 9 for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10 Then the disciples returned to their homes.

          Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb. She tells the male disciples. Peter runs to the tomb with that mysterious, unnamed “other disciples” who is known as “the disciple Jesus loved” in other passages. That disciple looks in the tomb and sees the wrappings from Jesus’ body. Simon Peter enters the tomb, seeing the same thing. Then that other disciple entered the tomb. When I read this passage with my students, I stop after v. 8: “Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in and he saw and believed…” Then I ask them, “What did he believe?” They respond, “That he had resurrected from the dead.” I tell them that this is a reasonable answer but then I continue with v. 9, “for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

          Many commentators talk about how this idealized disciple believed in the resurrection. They present this disciple, “the Beloved Disciple,” as the one who believes without seeing (contra Thomas in 20:26-29). That may be accurate but I think it needs to be qualified. As Lidija Novakovic writes about v. 9 in John 11-21: A Handbook on the Greek Text:

          The main problem, however, is that this clause describes a situation that is not yet characterized by the proper understanding of scripture, which forms the basis of the resurrection faith. This verse thus stands in tension with v. 8, which seems to claim that the Beloved Disciple believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. If, however, ἐπίστευσεν in v. 8 refers to incomplete resurrection faith because it is based on seeing rather than hearing, the explanation in v. 9 becomes intelligible if it describes a fully developed resurrection faith that can only be derived from the correct interpretation of scripture. This tension with v. 8, however, is thereby not completely resolved because the implied subjects of the γὰρ clause are both the Beloved Disciple and Peter, whereas the subject of v. 8 is only the former.

          I don’t think you can avoid the reality that the narrator tells us that the Beloved Disciple believed and “did not understand” along with Peter. If he believed that Jesus had been resurrected, he didn’t quite understand what it was that he was believing. He wasn’t believing a mere proposition like “and the third day he rose again” as we see the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. When I read that the Beloved Disciple “saw and believed” (καὶ εἶδεν καὶ ἐπίστευσεν), I think there’s more to it. I think he believed in Jesus. Yes, maybe he had some foggy concept like “Jesus has risen” but if we’re to take v. 9 seriously, it’s not a fleshed out belief.

          Honestly, akin to what I said about my own Christianity being more comfortable with Good Friday and Holy Saturday than Easter Sunday (see “A Žižekian Good Friday”), this captures my state during this Easter season. I believe…but I don’t know, nor do I understand. We see something similar in Matthew 28:16-18: “

          16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted.

          Likewise, in Luke 24:41a, the disciples are described this way:

          41 Yet for all their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering…

          Worshipping while doubting. Feeling joy while disbelieving. Believing but not understanding. These are the narratives that Christians have inherited about the people who are reported to have seen the resurrected Jesus.

          Because of this, I see no contradiction in applying the critical tools of scholarship, of questioning the texts we’re studying, and all the while maintaining a rootedness in Christianity. I see no contradiction in feeling agnostic while believing, or even atheistic at times, while believing. Are there days when my studying leads me to think, “I’m a fool and this is my mythology”? Yes. Are there other days when I think, “My mythology gives me life”? Yes. Is this contradictory? Probably but it’s a tension I’m willing to accept. I can’t find it within me to abandon the traditions that have given me hope and a language for expressing that hope. I can’t pretend that I don’t live in 2024 which is a universe away from the world of the first-century. And I don’t think we have to choose, contrary to fundamentalist thinking pulling us one way or the other. I think we can rest in the tension, sometimes quite comfortably.

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          PLATO’s “Philosophy in High School” Conference

          Lucio Mare’s presentation of Hadot and the philosophy of history and science

          Yesterday, I spent a few hours attending a conference via Zoom called “Philosophy in High School”. It was organized by the Student Advisory Council of PLATO: the “Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization”. What I admire about this conference most was that it combined presentations from faculty and students. As a member of the “Educational Resources and Review Committee” of the Society of Biblical Literature, I can say that I’ve been part of conversations around what it could look like to do something like this for the field of biblical studies. I’ll say more about that idea below. For now, let me praise the student organizers who made the “Philosophy in High School” conference a reality. They did a great job!

          Sin Man Lea Cheng and Xiaotong Chen presenting on how philosophy is useful for teenage life

          I attended four presentations. The first was by Lucio Mare of Stanford Online High School. He spoke on “Philosophy as the Education of High Schoolers: Using Pierre Hadot’s ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ to Teach History and Philosophy of Science”. The remaining three presentations were by students: Sin Man Lea Cheng and Xiaotong Chen, “Philosophy: making life vibrant”; Sophie Zhang, “How can learning about ethics help high school students inside and outside of school?”; and Kate Given, “Transforming Classroom Conversation with Philosophy”. All three were well done! As a high school teacher, I know that it can be difficult to get students prepared for 5-10 minutes of presentation. These young people had a half hour set aside for presentations and discussions!

          Sophie Zhang’s presentation, “How can learning about ethics help high school students inside and outside of school?”

          While philosophy has its own uphill battle agains the cult of STEM (and FYI, philosophy and STEM shouldn’t be rivals at all, so this means we’re doing STEM wrong!), biblical studies is much further down the hill when it comes to attracting enough young people to do a conference like this one. There are a few reasons.

          First, philosophy is far more accessible. Yes, the Bible can be found anywhere but good tools for studying the Bible are difficult to find. Where I live in San Antonio, it’s difficult to keep up with current biblical scholarship because there are few libraries who do. For example, when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I could spend a day at the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. There were a ton of resources there. But San Antonio has nothing quite like this. While I know there are topics within analytic philosophy (e.g. philosophy of mind) that share similar limitations when it comes to resources and that prevent entry by people who can’t keep up with the quickly unfolding literature on the topic, there’s so much more than you can do under the purview of “philosophy” than you can under “biblical studies”.

          Kate Given’s presentation, “Transforming Classroom Conversation with Philosophy”

          Second, and this is related, you can philosophize from anywhere about anything at any time. There’s the story of how Raymond Aron was sitting with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Bec-de-Gaz bar in Paris in 1932-33 drinking apricot cocktails when Aron, who had been studying the “phenomenology” of Edmund Husserl, told Sarte and Beauvoir, “if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” (See Sarah Bakewell’s The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, pp. 1-3.) I can philosophize about friendships, education, music, movies, traffic, city planning, travel, etc. I can do biblical studies with regard to the Bible and the reception history of the Bible, which is extensive but also limited in comparison.

          Third, as I’ve discussed recently, biblical studies are less attractive to young people because the Bible is becoming less attractive to young people. We’re in the midst of a cultural shift away from Christianity, so there’ll be fewer people reading the Bible in the future. Teens are philosophizing all the time, whether or not they’re aware of it. Teens aren’t reading the Bible all the time. You would know it if you’re were doing it! What it means to study the Bible is a more restricted activity.

          If we’re to create a conference on biblical studies that includes high school participants, we’d have a fourth and final obstacle: philosophy has a rational air about it. When people encounter the Bible prior to reading it in an academic context, the vibe is something like “devotional”. How a conference for high school readers of the Bible wouldn’t devolve into a series of devotionals or apologetics is something that would need to be discussed. Religious studies may have more promise here. (In other words, something connected with the American Academy of Religion.)

          That being said, it was wonderful to see a conference like this one. Kudos to PLATO and their Student Advisory Council. I hope to see future conferences like this one!

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          An assessment that I’m glad I gave (and how it relates to what I’ve been saying about biblical studies)

          As the past quarter drew to a close, I introduced a new assessment to my students: a “Quarterly Writing Assessment”. I asked them to write a short response (ten sentences minimum) to a prompt that in summary asks them to tell me one thing they’ve learned that has changed their perspective/shifted their paradigm; one thing that would be missing from their education if they hadn’t taken my class.

          For my own psychology, I’m glad I gave this assessment. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether students are really learning anything. How much are they memorizing for a quiz or test? How much are they turning your required work into passing busy work? Will it stick?

          As I’ve been grading these assignments, I’m heartened. My “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures” students have been telling me about how they’ve come to recognize the Bible’s internal diversity; how interpretive paradigms have shifted over time; how it’s ok if someone else interprets the Bible differently; how “messianism” as a concept has shifted how they look at Jesus as “Christ”; how the differences between the Gospels has influenced who they understand Jesus to be; why Mark’s Jesus is so secretive about his identity and John’s Jesus is so loud about it; how Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and in his parables have them pondering why Jesus favored the oppressed and marginalized.

          My “Religion in Global Context” students have told me that they understand why studying religion is important; how religious illiteracy has negative consequences; how they’ve realized that not all religions look alike; how they’ve realized that there’s no single way to define “religion”; how they’ve learned a bit about Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam; how they’ve been introduced to questions about reality and metaphysics through Indian philosophical categories (e.g. Brahman, Atman, karma, samsara, moksha, dharma) in ways that have them rethinking what they understand to be “real”.

          My “Religion in the United States” students have told me how they learned about the diversity of Christianities in the original Thirteen Colonies and adjacently how diverse Christianity is; how the Founding Father’s views of Christianity weren’t monolithic; how some Founding Fathers (e.g. Samuel Adams; John Jay; John Witherspoon) may receive approval from confessional/creedal Christians today while others (George Washington; John Adams; Thomas Jefferson) are more complicated; the importance of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment; the role of the Supreme Court and IRS in shaping how Americans view “religion” and how religion is practiced here; the nature of Indigenous American religion.

          As I read what my students wrote, I felt like each class was indispensable to their education. It made me proud of what our catalog offers. The funny thing is this: I think we need a class on ethics and I think we need a class introducing philosophical thinking. Since students have to take only 2 semesters of religion to graduate, I don’t know where these classes fit or if they do fit at all. I do know that as frustrated as I may be at times when it comes to teaching religion in a world where STEM is squeezing the humanities to death, I don’t doubt for a second that our society needs what our humanities classes have to offer.

          I want to return to my biblical studies students because I’ve been writing a lot about those classes the past few days. First, I mentioned that I’m faced with an existential crisis when teaching this class. I’m teaching the sacred texts of a dying institution in America: the Bible of the Christian Church. I’m aware that many of my students, presuming trajectories hold, won’t be reading their Bibles as adults and likely many won’t be part of any Church.

          This led to me reflect on how critical approaches to the Bible play a part in demystifying the Bible but also this act results in the eventual demise of biblical studies. As more and more people see the Bible as another human creation (and the Church as a human institution), fewer of them will be interested in it. Eventually, this will impact the future of biblical studies, shrinking our ranks, leading to the closure of our programs and our presses, because I’m confident that many biblical scholars entered biblical studies in order to have religious questions answered. The irony is that in our effort to dismantle dangerous forms of biblicism, we’re simultaneously depleting our “farm system” (to use a baseball term) because biblicist cultures give rise to future biblical scholars (or so I presume until empirical data proving otherwise is shown to me).

          Finally, I argued that critical approaches to the Bible remain the right approach, even knowing the consequences, because at this time and place (21st century United States), if we fail to help students deconstruct biblicist views of the Bible then biblicist views of the Bible will remain the default interpretation of the Bible. This isn’t to say that people will read the Bible accepting its authority through a biblicist paradigm alone. Many will reject the Bible outright presuming that the line that biblicist draw in the sand (read it as the inerrant “Word of God” or leave “the Church’s Bible” alone) is a real line that one either crosses or doesn’t. In other words, I think there’s a necessary gamble. If we want contemporary young people to mature into adults who show interest in the Bible as “wisdom literature” with which they can wrestle in a life-giving way—even non-Christians, just as I, a Christian, wrestle with the Vedas and Upanishads, the Dhammapada, the Quran, etc.—then we must show that the black-and-white paradigm of biblicism is a false dichotomy. If we want them to approach the Bible as a source for creative theological thinking, they must realize the Bible is a conversation-starter, not a conversation-ender.

          Do I wish we could skip past the deconstruction of biblicism in order to help students read the Bible wisely? Yes. Do I think we can do this without risking the effects of residual biblicism remaining with our students? No. I don’t see how we can lead students to a mature understanding of the Bible without dispelling the mythologies of our culture. If you doubt what I’m saying, go to Barnes & Noble. Walk through the section related to the Bible and to Christianity. Recognize that this is the dominant understanding of what the Bible is and what Christianity represents. Realize that many adherents to Christianity and readers of the Bible think the selection at Barnes & Noble is normative; recognize that many who reject Christianity and the Bible agree. This shouldn’t be. It doesn’t have to be. At least I hope it doesn’t have to be.

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          The Bible is a talisman (for many). Reading it leads to deconstruction. Deconstruction is necessary.

          Jacques Derrida tried to point out that deconstruction isn’t a method. It’s what happens when you read (at least when you read closely). When you read something, you see the flaws in the text, you notice the gaps, you recognize what’s being fronted and what’s being supplanted, you hear the silence.

          One can read a text and one can READ a text. When I speak of critical biblical studies, I’m not saying that the readers are disparaging of the text. To think critically is to be cautious, careful, aware. It’s to try to set aside assumptions. When we do this, texts deconstruct themselves.

          Yesterday, I wrote a post claiming that critical biblical studies has a death-drive. My claim is that critical biblical studies exist in reaction to modernity, primarily, but it has come to exist in reaction to fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, being that those two ideologies are themselves reactions to modernity. The tone of the post could lead people to think that I’m saying we should abandon critical biblical studies or that we should leave the first naïveté alone. If we want students to value the Bible, then we need to let them retain the Sunday School version of the Bible that they’ve been taught.

          Let me be clear: that’s not what I’m saying at all. I do think there’s a place for a second naiveté (something like a theological-reading of the Bible or seeing the Bible as a “wisdom text”) but I don’t believe we should leave the first naïveté alone because doing so is safe. It’s not. In an original draft of this post, I unpacked how concepts like biblicism and inerrancy are dangerous but that’s being redundant. One can find this information all over the Internet. And, to be honest, I don’t want to draw the attention of a particular class of online apologists. If you know, you know. And if you know, you know that the first naiveté is rich soil for ideologies ranging from homophobia to Christian Nationalism. If you know, I don’t need to say more.

          What I do need to say is this: I don’t see how we can lead students from the first naiveté into the second naiveté without them experiencing the process of deconstructing the text as they engage modern critical scholarship on the Bible. Could this result in many students who abandon the Bible altogether? Yes but also no. My bet is that many of those students weren’t reading the Bible anyways. They had magical ideas about the Bible as a pretext that justified whatever ideology they associated with it. Critical scholarship is necessary if we’re going to de-weaponize the Bible. If students decide that the Bible isn’t for them and that’s it irrelevant now, then this may be better than if they grow to become the type of people who assume the Bible is their talisman, they magic amulet that curses their enemies and blesses their friends.

          For the student who will mature to the point where they can experience a second naïveté, the deconstructing process is essential. We can’t force students to continue their journey toward learning how the Bible can be life-giving wisdom literature that doesn’t have to be read as anti-modernity, anti-democracy, anti-science, etc. We can open the door for them though. In fact, that’s all we can do. And critical scholarship is a key. If we could jump from first naïveté to second naïveté without the deconstruction that may cause disillusionment and disinterest in the Bible and in the Church, that would be wonderful. But we can’t ignore the cards we’ve been dealt. And we can’t pretend that the Bible hasn’t been given some sort of artificial meaning by our society that likes to cite it without reading it in order to weaponize it.

          As I told a friend over text this morning, I have gained so much from the theological writings of people like David Bentley Hart. Will he sell as much as say “new atheists” like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, on the one hand, or fundamentalists like John Piper and Mark Driscoll, on the other hand? No. These books sell better and are consumed more because of their polarized simplicity. Sadly, interesting thoughts about the concept of “God” won’t be encountered because the sloppy stuff is easier to access and understand. But that doesn’t mean Hart is wrong for offering us the opportunity to become mature thinkers.

          Similarly, yes, people may polarize around the Bible as the inerrant, infallible “Word of God” that justifies their every ideology, or around the Bible as a book of forgettable collection of outdated, ancient myths that needs to be rejected from the first page to the last. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the responsibility of offering students a way forward. The way forward to an informed rejection of the Bible (rather than merely a reactionary one) or toward a second naïveté (rather than a reactionary religious fundamentalism) goes through a critical engagement with the text first. At least, that’s my view at the moment.