Category: Biblical Studies

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The “death-drive” of critical Biblical Studies

Biblical Studies, at least in its critical form, has a death-drive. Let me explain. On the one hand, there are those who study the Bible academically “for the church” (but as I discussed in my last post, the church is declining, at least in North America and Europe). Their goal is to preserve the relevance of biblical studies for religious reasons. If they were successful in their mission, not only would interest in the Bible spread but more importantly Christianity would. For many Catholic and Evangelical scholars, the study of the Bible is part of the mission. Globally, they might be a success, but not in North America and Europe, which is my focus here.

On the other side, you have critical scholars who hope to deconstruct the Bible’s meaning and message. While they may not be aware of it, there’s an attempt to demystify the Bible which means to normalize it. Once it’s normalized, its significance will fade. As its significance fades, fewer people from future generations will be interested in studying it, especially in a professional capacity. College and university administrations will find little reason to fund biblical studies because, well, why? They want their schools to be attractive and this means highlighting the programs that are en vogue.

And these two poles need each other. As much as critical scholarship may despise Evangelicalism’s biblicism, there’s little relevance to critical scholarship without Evangelicalism’s biblicism to deconstruct. Be honest: as much as I respect and admire Bart D. Ehrman‘s scholarship, does it mean anything without fundamentalism and Evangelicalism? Will there be a place for future Ehrman-types in a post-Christian America in say 2040 or 2050? Without the Green Family, the Museum of the Bible, Evangelical voters, etc., there’s an argument to be made that the Bible does’t mean much anymore. Paradoxically, some of the more toxic means of preserving the Bible’s cultural relevancy simultaneously keep critical scholars in the news.

(And in some sense, we might say that Evangelicalism and fundamentalism are feeder programs for critical scholarship. Our current selves reacting to our past selves. While I know of no such poll, I wish there was data on how many members of the Society of Biblical Literature entered biblical studies because they had religious questions they needed addressed. Even if their current study of the Bible is for purely professional reasons, I doubt they found their way to an academic study of the Bible primarily because they had interesting historical, literary, linguistic, etc., questions divorced of any religious/spiritual curiosity.)

Let me provide an analogy. My friend, the religion scholar James McGrath, alongside Charles G. Häberl, published an English translation of the Mandaean Book of John back in 2020. Objectively, this is a great scholarly accomplishment. Will this text receive wide-spread, long-term attention. Unlikely. Why? Because there are probably no more than 100,000 Mandaeans globally and Mandaeanism is a dying religion. Most of them won’t be reading English-language scholarship on their religion, if they’re reading any scholarship on their religion at all. The broader public may be curious about Mandaeans for a moment but only for a moment. For this reason, few people will pursue advanced degrees in “Mandaean studies” (presuming any such program exists even now). There are a handful of scholars globally who are experts on Mandaeanism at the moment, and I don’t foresee their ranks growing.

Why do I mention the plight of Mandaeanism? Christianity’s global population sits at more than 2 billion. This is comparing apples to something even less apple-like than oranges. But biblical scholarship is centered in North America and Europe. In North America and Europe, Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, seems to have entered an irreversible decline. Without something to deconstruct, there won’t be many jobs for critical biblical scholars of the future.

Of course, there are mainline Christians who want to show that you can be scholarly, and secular, and pluralistic, and value the role of the Bible within “communities of faith” while also being Christian. But this middle ground, even as I try to stand here with all its complications, lacks population and influence. We want our cake and we want to eat it too. Reality seems to favor polarization and extremes at the moment. Trying to reconcile critical scholarship with an active Christianity bores many. Drama sells!

And this makes sense. When your Christianity lacks an oppositional stance to culture, future generations can’t see why dedicating themselves to something like the study of the Bible or ordination in ministry is important. Yes, Jesus said to choose between God and Money, but it appears that I don’t have to do this. Yes, Jesus said to put our treasure in heaven rather than on the earth, but it appears I can have treasure in both places. Why dedicate myself to the study of Scripture, theology, sacraments, etc., when I can be “just as Christian” working for a Fortune 500 company. We’ve demythologized ourselves to death, and I’m not saying it was wrong to do this. But it is to say that there is cause-and-effect. We’re so much a part of culture that there’s no reason to dedicate ourselves to Christianity and the institution of “the Church”. (I can hear the screams of Kierkegaard, Wesley, and others as they realize that “western culture” and Christianity are beginning to return to this synthesis even as “western culture” distances itself from Christianity!)

This isn’t to say that Catholic and Evangelical culture is otherworldly; it’s to say Catholic and Evangelical culture does a better job of presenting itself as such so that people may be just as materialistic, just as this-worldly as we mainliners, but they don’t think of themselves this way. They still have a sense of mission. They still see themselves as outsiders who must “save” what is “lost”. (And if I learned anything from Harvey Whitehouse’s dense book The Ritual Animal: Imitation and Cohesion in the Evolution of Social Complexity, it’s that people often bond closer to each other when their subculture is demanding and entry and preservation is difficult, even traumatic—think fraternity hazings or joining the Marines.) If you’re a young Evangelical, there’s a better chance that you’ll see a reason for dedicating yourself to professional ministry than if you’re a young mainliner. And the statistics support this, I think. In the interview that Tripp Fuller did with Ryan Burge that I mentioned in my last post, Burge pointed out that all of the largest, still growing seminaries are Evangelical save Duke Divinity (see around 13:00-50:00-ish for that discussion).

Screen shot from Fuller’s YouTube video linked above

This may be good news for critical biblical studies, even if it makes critical biblical scholars cringe. But it’s temporary, I think. Even as Evangelicals have a sense of mission, even as it may draw them closer together, and even as it serves to feed their academic institutions, their numbers will continue to decline unless for some reason “the great de-churching” reverses. This seems unlikely. Millennials are secular by greater numbers and even as they age and have children, they’re not returning. This seems to be the probable trajectory for Gen Z as well. Many who left Evangelicalism did so because of how Evangelicals treat LGBTQIA+ people and because of the nature of their involvement in politics (see the PRRI graphic below). These things don’t appear to be bugs in the Evangelical system but instead features. Therefore, while Evangelicals will outlast the mainline, this doesn’t mean they won’t fade as well.

If the Bible isn’t the sacred text of our culture, even a sacred text that we pretend to read, what takes its place? What provides us with unifying language and symbols? What provides us with something to deconstruct and reject as we grow older? Maybe nothing. Maybe STEM textbooks will be peak literacy! But I digress. Returning to my main point: those of us participating in the project of critical scholarship on the Bible since the 19th century have collectively begun to accomplish what we set out to do: we’ve naturalized the Bible. This is likely a good thing considering how the Bible has been (ab)used throughout history. But we appear to have been telling people that our own irrelevancy is a goal. And maybe it has been. If it has been, we need to be ready for the closing of our departments. We should expect fewer students to show interest in our programs and our scholarship. We shouldn’t be surprised as our publishers close up shop. It was the inevitable consequence of our collective demythologizing project. It was the predetermined end of our death-drive.

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The Fading Bible of Dying Churches

This week, I was talking to a clergy friend. I mentioned to them that over the past few years I’ve faced an existential crisis. When I teach my biblical studies courses, I have acute sense that I’m introducing my students to an increasingly irrelevant cultural artifact. I don’t feel this way when I teach my theory of religion course, “Religion in Global Context”. I don’t feel this way when I teach my course “Religion in the United States”. But when I teach my introductions to the Bible, something feels strange.

Image: “Old Bibles” from Henry Hartley’s blog

Sometimes it’s the subtle emotional and mental tug of war that I must do with my student’s attention. Sometimes it feels like they’re just not interested. And while I know that some “edu-influencers” out there might suggest that the problem lies in my pedagogy, I reject that notion. I know I’m an engaging and creative teacher. I know that I’m good at keeping student’s attention, even in an age where TikTok, Snapchat, and other forms of social media, along with the constant demand of the smartphones in their pockets (which is where they’re at, even if school policy says otherwise), compete with me. When “Religion in Global Context” and “Religion in the United States” students are asked to stick with me as we wade into some deep concepts, they’re usually willing to trust me. They appear willing and eager to learn.

This is true of more than 50% of my biblical studies students as well. I don’t want to be dramatic. I don’t want to paint a picture of classes filled with disengaged teens. That’s not the case at all. But when I do struggle to keep them with me, when I do struggle to hold their attention, when I do receive the occasional, sharp and targeted question, “Why do I have to learn this? Why does this matter?” it’s always when teaching the Bible.

My clergy friend faces something similar. They’re working in the world of mainline Christianity. If you haven’t paid attention, while Christianity’s influence is fading in the United States, the mainline leads the way. My friend is working on the ship as it sinks. This doesn’t mean that the work they’re doing is irrelevant but it can be hard to know that you’re providing end-of-life care for an institution you love. For example, the political scientist Ryan Burge told Tripp Fuller on a recent episode of “Homebrewed Christianity” that 52% of PC (USA) ministers are retired. That’s a dead-man-walking denomination. The Episcopal Church, for whom I work indirectly, is “dead” by 2040 (or 2050?), which doesn’t mean that there actually will be zero Episcopalians in a decade and a half…but there won’t be many.

(This change has been coming for a long time. I’ve been listening to “Emerged: An Oral History of the Emerging Church Movement” created Tripp Fuller and Tony Jones. It reminds me of why I was interested in the “emerging church” in my 20s. I knew then that the choice was between a dying church or a remade one. John Piper’s “Farewell Rob Bell” tweet may as well have said “farewell Millennials and Gen Z”. I tried to make it work in evangelicalism once I saw the emerging movement fading as quickly as it had risen, but I couldn’t do it.)

As someone who works with adolescents, I see the decline in religiosity before many others see it, which in the United States means mostly a decline in established Christianity. Ryan Burge shared some statistics recently on the decline in church attendance among high school seniors from 1995-2022, and it’s a steep drop! In 1995, only 15% of high school seniors said that they never attend church. It’s 30% now. In 1995, 32% attended weekly. It’s 22% now. Secularization has won the day, for better or worse. Returning to Burge’s research, Gen Z is 48-49% atheist/agnostic/non-affiliated. Now, about 31% of Gen Z are “Nones,” or non-affiliated. They may be “spiritual but not religious” (see Burge’s graphic below) so this doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned ideas about “god” or “the afterlife” completely; it means they’re not accepting wholesale packaged doctrine. It means they’re not interested in doing what I did as a kid: spending two or three days a week at a local church.

I’ve created my biblical studies course with this in mind. I don’t presume biblical literacy from my students. My classes are academic in nature but I begin with the basics (“Genesis 1:1 means book-chapter-verse” level basics). I try to provide space for personal engagement without being confessional. While I work for a school affiliated with the Episcopal Church, we accept students from a wide-variety of religious traditions—Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Jewish, Muslim—I’ve taught them all. And many students from these traditions have taken my classes on the Bible. Often, they seem to be more engaged than my Christian students. As the old saying goes, “familiarity breeds contempt”. The other private Christian schools in the greater San Antonio area are confessional in nature. Many of these schools wouldn’t admit students who come from non-Christian families. I’m confident that in those mostly Catholic and Evangelical settings, engagement with the Bible is stronger but that’s because I was raised and became an adult within these biblicist subcultures, so I know what role the Bible plays. This doesn’t mean that I think the Bible is taken more seriously in those contexts. It can be a bit of a good luck charm; it can be studied through the lens of apologetics where you begin with the answer and work back to the question. But it’s more important to those students because of biblicism than it is to most of my students who better represent the generational trends we see nationally.

There’s panic because of this cultural paradigm shift. Gallup reports that fewer Americans see the Bible as the literal “Word of God”. Christianity Today reports, many Americans have stopped reading their Bibles. Organizations like “The Gospel Coalition” that are built on biblicism speak of a “Bible Literacy Crisis!” The pope of the SBC, Al Mohler, wrote about this “scandal” several years ago. As important as the Bible has been within American culture, “the time they are a-changin” as Bob Dylan sings. I don’t think a reversal of trends is in the forecast though.

As our society becomes more culturally secular, and more pluralistic, I wonder what it means to teach the Bible to high school students, even from the perspective that I teach it. (And yes, I can hear some say that maybe I need to shift to a more confessional, more theological approach…but I can’t do that in good faith nor does it make practical sense when most of my Christian students are Roman Catholic and I’m not. It wouldn’t solve anything.) My field of study has been dying. There are fewer jobs in academic biblical studies. The Annual Report of the Society of Biblical Studies shows that while there are more members than there were in 2000, we have likely peaked and I’m skeptical that we’ll see a rebound (see the graphic below from the Annual Report). I’ve encouraged fellow members of SBL to consider teaching high school but I know that this likely doesn’t mean teaching the Bible but rather teaching history or social studies using the skills your education gave you.

In my eight years as a high school teacher, I’ve encouraged many students to minor in religion; I’ve hoped that more would major in it (since I see religious studies and philosophy as very employable majors). But I’ve encouraged only one student to consider theological/biblical studies and that’s because they were interested in being both clergy and an academic. I suppose that they could survive with two skis but not with one! I can’t encourage working for only a dying church or only a dying field of academics but maybe they can piece the two together for good life working for both?

When I teach my students to question how people use the word “religion,” or about comparative religion, or about how the Supreme Court interprets the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, or about how Mormonism and Pentecostalism arose in the American context, I sense the immediate relevancy. When I teach them about the Bible, there are moments—moments when I read their reflections and see them truly wrestling with the nature of the Bible, and how it’s read, and how it’s been interpreted, and how it’s been applied—that I see they’re learning something and that they’re critically thinking which is my goal as an educator. But as I’ve been saying, there’s the lingering sense that I’m teaching them something they’ll never revisit in adulthood. Why? Because they won’t be reading the Bible and they may not be attending church anymore. Is this good or bad for the future of our society? I don’t know. Has Bible reading and church attendance made Americans better people, better neighbors? Does secularism lead to healthier societies or more sickly ones? I don’t know. But I do know we’re in the middle of a massive cultural shift—one that’s been going on since before I was born in 1982—and we’re just beginning to see what this shift means but not clearly enough to truly know what a future of biblical illiteracy and American secularism entails.

(Final note: yes, Christian Nationalism has been loud. But it appears most Americans reject it or are skeptical of it. This doesn’t mean that the Christian Nationalist philosophy can’t win the day but that’s a different discussion altogether. And I would choose most forms of secularism over Christian Nationalism all day, every day.)

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Carl Schleicher’s Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud and Reading the Gospels

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.

Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud via Wikimedia Commons

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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A balanced high school religious studies curriculum

I’m writing this for myself. All my blogging is basically journaling. If I wanted more interaction, I’d have to catch up with the times and shift to Tik Tok. But Tik Tok isn’t like journaling, so I won’t be doing that. Also, this is for me because there are few people with jobs like mine who work in schools like mine with departments like mine. So, why do I put it on a blog? Well, a way that blogging isn’t like journaling is the decision to make your thoughts public. I want to make these thoughts public just in case (A) someone out there has feedback to contribute or (B) one of the estimated seven people in the world who are in similar situations come across it and find inspiration—or whatever the opposite of inspiration is.

What’s my situation? Well, I teach at an Episcopal school. Episcopalianism isn’t a monolith but among Christian traditions in North America, it tends to be one of the most hospitable to academic freedom. I’m confident that there isn’t even one other school in the Greater San Antonio region that would give me the green light to teach what I do like I do. Also, I teach high schoolers, and as anyone reading this is aware, very few high school teachers get to say much about religion in their courses let alone teach multiple classes completely devoted to the discipline. While you can teach religion in a public school setting, for various reasons related to sensitivity around the Establishment and Free Exercises Clauses of the First Amendment, and trouble budgeting for someone qualified to teach these types of classes, few public schools are willing to offer anything like what I teach. If you teach religious studies in a high school, usually you have major “confessional” restraints. You need to stay in line with the Catholic or Evangelical doctrine of the schools that exist independent of the public school system for the central purpose of raising young people to adhere to the worldviews they are promoting. Episcopalian schools exist to shape young people from within the Christian tradition but most Episcopalian schools see fidelity to Christianity as compatible with higher levels of pluralism and academic freedom than their Catholic and Evangelical counterparts.

Many public high school teachers won’t be interested in what I’m saying because while they may be able to talk about Hinduism for a class period while teaching more specifically about India, they can’t spend a month on Hinduism. Many private school teachers won’t be interested in what I’m saying because they either disagree with my approach or have administrations that would never allow anything like it. This brings me back to the seven or so people out there who may be in similar situations! And this ends a prolegomenon to this blog post.

When I first began teaching high school religious studies, our courses were (A) “Old Testament”; (B) “New Testament”; (C) “World Religion”; (D) “God Debate: An Introduction to Philosophy”. I’ve worked to change some of the names to better align with how I teach and how I think religious studies should be taught at our school. “Old Testament” is now “Hebrew Scriptures” because we consider Jewish interpretations of the Tanakh as much as, if not more than, Christian interpretations of the Old Testament. “New Testament” is now “Christian Scriptures” because we don’t restrict the content to what’s canonical—for example, the Gospel of Thomas and Infancy Gospel of Thomas get a lot of attention—and most of the class is now spent on the Gospels with only a little time being given to the Epistles. “World Religion” has been abandoned in favor of “Religion in Global Context” because (1) our freshman-sophomore classes, Global Studies I and Global Studies II, led me to realign the focus to parallel those classes and (2) the “world religion” model tends to focus on overviews of some of the “big” religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, usually—at the expense of literally every other religion. Since my pedagogical philosophy is concerned more with teaching students how to think about “religion,” the concept, rather than trying to provide them an impossible overview of these “major” religions, it made sense to change the name. Finally, due to personnel changes, the “God Debate” class was dropped.

A few years ago, I added a class titled “Religion in the United States” that examines, amongst other things, the concept of “religion” as it has been interpreted and applied in this country. We talk about Supreme Court “definitions” of religion and rulings related to the First Amendment; the role of the IRS; Native American spirituality; religion when the United States was founded; race and religion; how religions that were “imported” (i.e. pre-existed the country’s birth, e.g. Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism) have evolved in this context; and what expressions of religion have been created in and “exported” from this country (e.g. Scientology, Pentecostalism).

As I prepare for my seventh year, the catalog (not including classes like “Religion in San Antonio” that were designed specifically for the summer school context) will be:

  • The Hebrew Scriptures
  • The Christian Scriptures
  • Religion in Global Context
  • Religion in the United States

Now, what I’m about to suggest may be rejected by my superiors but I want to process it out loud here anyway. Generally, I’m comfortable with these offerings but I think some improvements can be made. For one, while Episcopalians are Protestant or Protestant-ish (the so-called “Middle Way”), they aren’t biblicist, usually. Many within the Anglican tradition, of which Episcopalianism is part, talk about a “three-legged stool” upon which the tradition sits: (1) the Bible; (2) the “great” tradition; and (3) reason. Some within the Wesleyan/Methodist tradition add (4) experience, which I see as a positive addition. (Pentecostals add experience too…though their meaning is slightly different at times!) For this reason, while most of my academic training has been in biblical studies, I think the catalog is flawed when half of the religious studies offerings are related to the Bible. This means that the Bible receives as much attention as every other religion combined—including Christianity, which isn’t limited to the Bible (even when traditions are biblicist ones). One alternative would be to shrink “The Hebrew Scriptures” and “The Christian Scriptures” into a single class and then add a course on church history or theology. There are contexts where this may work. Ours might be one of those contexts but I’m doubtful for a whole variety of reasons, beginning with my presumption that only a handful of students want to talk about the intricacies of the Trinity or care for a week on the Nicene-Arian controversies.

What then is the alternative I’m suggesting? In my uniquely Episcopalian context, with the pluralistic student body we educate, and considering the present context of the world into which they’ll be graduating, here are the four courses I think would provide the most balanced high school religious studies curriculum (if only four can be offered):

Why these four? First, they encourage critical thinking that’s introductory in nature and “meta”. By the latter, I mean I’ve noticed that most of my students are very engaged when we’re thinking about the subject we’re thinking about. In other words, I can teach them the content of the Bible but they’re more interested in the concept of the Bible. The content of the Bible becomes more relevant when they’re considering what the Bible “is” and what’s at stake when we interpret it. Second, this balances what they need to know as emerging citizens while also aligning with the decision to go to a private school with a religious affiliation. Third, and related to the second point, it’s an alternative to the aforementioned approach of Catholic and Evangelical schools—our school has a daily chapel where constructive spiritual formation occurs for a pluralistic student body through the paradigm of Episcopalian spirituality. How that works exactly is the concern of our chaplain. My concern is that spiritual formation will be as strongly equated with human formation as possible so that my atheistic and agnostic students can take a religious studies class and come away just as mature in their thinking and acting as my Christian or Muslim students. In other words, there shouldn’t be any confessional barriers to their learning and participation.

“Introduction to the Bible” would retain the Bible’s place within a school that reads from it in daily chapel while focusing more so on what the Bible “is” than the type of deep dive that may be better suited for seminarians who plan on preaching and teaching from it. It would connect to whatever literary studies are happening in our English classes and study of the ancient world that’s happening in our history classes.

This would bring philosophy back into the mix. When my colleague Fr. Nate Bostain left, our curriculum developed a gap that needs to be filled. Also, I’m increasingly interested in philosophy, sponsored our school’s philosophy club for years, and have incorporated philosophy into our biblical and religious studies classes, so this would be more natural than say a course on historical theology or church history.

The theory class, “Introduction to Religion,” would be “Religion in Global Context” with a simplified name. It would retain the “global” focus which aligns nicely with “Religion in the United States” which has more of a local focus and is more historical and social in nature with an emphasis on our civic lives. Also, as I plan on doing this year, it’ll place more emphasis on the 3 B’s model that encourages students to recognize that while “belief” is part of what makes something religious, religions don’t always center on belief—rituals, holy days, communities, etc. can be even more central to someone’s religious identity.

Finally, and most importantly, each of these classes can become stand-alone so that there’s no need for one to be a prerequisite for the other like “The Hebrew Scriptures” is for “The Christian Scriptures” and “Religion in Global Context” is for “Religion in the United States” in our current catalog. I’m sure that would make scheduling easier for our Registrar!

Now, this blog post may be a futile writing exercise, and it may be that my superiors will disagree, but I plan on making a pitch like this to them this year in preparation for the 23-24 academic year.

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A non-confessional alternative to BibleProject

This morning a news article was shared in my Facebook feed that provided yet another example of why so many public schools avoid promoting/offering religious studies courses in spite of the obvious danger that religious illiteracy presents. It’s titled “‘How to Torture a Jew’: Chattanooga mother raises concerns with Bible class taught in public school”. In short, in public schools you can teach about the Bible, contrary to the imagination of some, but you can’t teach the Bible from a religious perspective or with the intent to proselytize. The teacher mentioned in this article appears to be doing the latter.

In a Facebook post by the mother, she mentions that the teacher uses BibleProject videos. This got my attention because I use BibleProject videos in my classes as well. For those who aren’t familiar with BibleProject, they are videos about the Bible made by Evangelical Christians mostly for Evangelicals though maybe with a less stated goal of proselytizing. My main concern with BibleProject, which admittedly makes excellent videos, is that they’re clearly supersessionist. Often they talk about how the whole Bible is a “unified story that leads to Jesus” which is a fine thing to say in the Evangelical bubble but very problematic outside of it, for the basic reason that you have to apply that meta-hermeneutic to the Bible. The very existence of Jewish hermeneutics indicates that there are other ways of reading the Bible that don’t point to Jesus as the central figure of the canon, not to mention that Judaism doesn’t recognize the Christian New Testament as authoritative. Likewise, critical scholarship from the past few centuries strongly pushes against the idea that the Bible is unified. It takes a special kind of confessional hermeneutic—like “inerrancy” or “infallibility”—to arrive at that conclusion.

Now, I teach at an Episcopal school, so the legal questions related to using these videos (i.e. basically violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment) don’t apply to me but (!) I do try to teach from a non-confessional; non-sectarian perspective. I have students who are Christian but also students from a wide array of religious and non-religious persuasions. I’m proud of the fact that my students constantly recognize my classes as a confessional neutral space. Some of them may be bothered by the critical scholarship that’s employed but I don’t try to make my Evangelical kids give up their identity any more than I do my Muslim kids. The goal is to introduce them to the Bible as a cultural item that continues to influence civil discourse. I want them to be biblical literate not because I’m concerned with influencing their religious identity but because I want them to be informed citizens in a society where political and legislatures still quote and appeal to the Bible.

One thing that’s nearly essential when teaching a generation shaped by Instagram and TikTok is that you use visuals. I use plenty of YouTube videos. As I said, I use BibleProject. I’ve tried to balance it by using Unpacked’s videos which provide a Jewish perspective (works for Hebrew Bible but not Christian New Testament). Unfortunately, the only really good resource that consistently creates videos from a non-confessional perspective is Andrew Henry’s “Religion for Breakfast” project which is excellent but needs more financial resources if it were to offer a non-confessional alternative.

So, what’s to be done? Can AAR and SBL members take up the task of finding something like this? We have Bible Odyssey which is great and provides us all with resources. I know some members of SBL wouldn’t be interested in creating a Religion for Breakfast alternative to BibleProject because BibleProject fits their hermeneutic and pedagogy but what about the rest of us.

As Gen Z continues to enter college and grad school, I’m convinced that teachers at that level will want high-quality resources like what Henry produces. I know as whatever-is-after-Gen Z arrives, I’ll continue to need videos to supplement my teaching. How can we make this happen? How can we create a BibleProject-alternative? How can we help Religion for Breakfast become that alternative?

[If you’ve benefitted from Henry’s Religion for Breakfast, or if you agree with what I’m saying in this post, here’s his Patreon.]

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Book Note: Edward L. Greenstein’s “Job: A New Translation”

Edward L. Greenstein, Job: A New Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). (Amazon; Bookshop)

The Book of Job is my favorite book in the Bible, I think. Sometimes it’s the Book of Ecclesiastes. Sometimes, I’m captured by the narratives of the Book of Genesis. Sometimes the Gospels of Mark or Luke are were I’m at. But usually, it’s the Book of Job…unless it’s the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Edward L. Greenstein, a professor emeritus in Bible at Bar-Ilan University, completed a new translation of Job a couple years ago. Finally, I got around to reading it. It’s excellent.

Greenstein has spent a lifetime thinking about the Book of Job—a notoriously difficult book for even experts in ancient Hebrew to translate. His wealth of knowledge with regards to ancient Semitic languages allows him to see Job with new eyes: eyes that noticed loan words from other languages or concepts from Babylonian or Egyptian literature that may make more sense than the received Masoretic Text (or even the ancient versions like the Greek translation of Job). So, what you’re getting isn’t just a fresh translation, like we might receive from Robert Alter, but a fresh translation combined with a lot of textual criticism.

Greenstein’s translation is annotated with footnotes so that the scholar can follow along with his thinking. The rest of us who aren’t in that league can enjoy a fresh interpretation of the text.

The “key” reinterpretation of the Book of Job is found in how Greenstein renders two verses: 42:5-6. So you can get a sense of the difference, here’s the NRSV’s rendering next to Greenstein’s:

NRSV: I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”

Greenstein: “As a hearing by the ear I have heard you, And now my eye has seen you. That is why I am fed up; I take pity on ‘dust and ashes’.”

As you may have deduced if you’re familiar with Job: this is Job’s response to the deity’s monologue in chapters 38-41. In the NRSV, Job is overcome and admits defeat, even repentance. But according to Greenstein, Job doesn’t accept divine bullying as a legitimate response to his lawsuit against the deity. Instead, he recognizes the deity to be the very tyrant he feared he’d be and dismisses god’s lecture. Obviously, this puts a completely different spin on how we read the book.

Greenstein gives an in-depth explanation for how he got to this translation on p. xix-xxi of the Introduction, so I won’t duplicate that here. If you’re interested, find a copy. But also, if you’re interested in this topic, you may just want to purchase a copy. It’s worth adding to your library!

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Book Note: Bruce Chilton’s “The Herods”

Bruce Chilton, The Herods: Murder, Politics, and the Art of Succession (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021). (Amazon; Bookshop)

If you’ve ever read Tom Hollands’ histories/historical fiction (e.g. Rubicon; Persian Fire), or Anthony Everitt’s (e.g. Cicero; Augustus), you’ll have a sense of what to expect from Bruce Chilton’s new book The Herods: Murder, Politics, and the Art of Succession. You trust their scholarship, and you know they take their methodologies seriously, but when you read their books they’re more like a novel. I may be forgetting but I can’t remember when Holland or Everitt stop to try and prove their interpretations (it’s been a while since I’ve read those books though, so maybe I’m mistaken). Instead, the reader can search endnotes if they’d like to know how a decision was made to tell the story the way it was told.

So, with this stated upfront, The Herods is a wonderful book. It’s extremely readable. It introduces you to major figures at a pace where you can remember who’s who, which can be notoriously difficult with the family tree of Herod the Great. If you can read this book without obsessing too much over whether he trusts his primary ancient source, Josephus, too much, then it’s worth your time. But be aware that Chilton will get creative in his interpretation, like when he presents Jesus’ “temple-cleansing” as less an individual act (which is how I’ve always read the Gospels) and more a mob act of which Jesus was part, which included several hundred followers, and involved Barabbas:

“Jesus’ incursion into the temple was bold, prophetic, and necessarily violent because the outer court of the temple was vast, amounting to some twenty acres, and clearing it of merchants devoted to trade, their animals, and their associated equipment required several hundred sympathetic, able-bodied, and motivated followers. One of them, Barabbas, even killed someone during the melee (according to Mark 15:7).”

p. 168

I’m not saying that this is an impossible interpretation of the gospels, but it would be a contested one, for sure. And that’s the nature of this type of history. A decision is made to tell the story “as it happened,” even when we’re not sure about this or that, because the genre, and the necessity of readability, demands this sort of oversimplified presentation.

I recommend the book for anyone interested in Second Temple Judaism, Jesus of Nazareth, incipient Christianity, and related subjects.

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Book Note: David Janzen’s “Trauma and the Failure of History”

David Janzen, Trauma and the Failure of History: Kings, Lamentations, and the Destructions of Jerusalem (Semeia 94; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2019). (Amazon; Bookshop)

If much of the Jewish Tanakh/Christian Old Testament can be understood as apologetic for the god of Judah after the events of the Babylonian Exile, then what catches my attention are the voices of dissent. For example, the Book of Proverbs with its emphasis on wisdom can be interpreted rigidly, almost mathematically, to read that those who do well in life must be the ones who lived by the guidance of divine wisdom while those who struggle must be the fools. Then comes along the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes and overthrows that whole ideology by pointing out that it’s too simple/simplistic.

The Deuteronomistic impulse is to justify the divinity while blaming the humans for what happened during the Exile; it’s to warn how the people shouldn’t behave if they want to avoid a repeat. That impulse is found in the Book of Kings where the blame for the Exile sits on the shoulders of the people—and as Janzen observes, specifically the people, not the royalty of the House of David. But the Book of Lamentations, which sometimes tries to fall in line and echo the rationale found in the Kings, but often simply can’t, is evidence of a dissenting voice.

In Trauma and the Failure of History, Janzen presents “history” as a narrative about past events that attempts to explain them and provide a true presentation and interpretation. The Book of Kings is such a work. It narrates past events leading to the Exile as a way of explaining “how did we get here”.

But trauma can’t make simple sense of what’s been experienced. There’s no metanarrative that comforts. Trauma doesn’t explain the past because in a sense the past is present, the effects linger. For Janzen, this is what we find in the Book of Lamentations. This texts fails to explain what happened to Jerusalem because it simply grieves what happened to Jerusalem.

I highly recommend this book, especially for those who are interested in the internal conversation found in the Hebrew Bible around topics related to theodicy. It reminds me a little of a couple other books I’ve mentioned on this blog:

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Publication Notice: Visions and Violence in the Pseudepigrapha

While I may have been a third wheel whose most important contribution was being a gofer-editor, I’m happy to announce a volume that Bloomsbury is publishing titled Visions and Violence in the Pseudepigrapha. It was edited by Craig A. Evans, Paul T. Sloan, and yours truly. If it’s any good, they get the credit. I was happy just to be included so that I could learn a bit about editing and the publication process.