How I became a Humanist #10: How to Read and Understand the Bible #2

Before studying theology, I think I read the Bible the way most Christians do.  If I read a section about Jesus healing a leper, I thought of it as history.  If I read a story about Jesus' geneology, I read it as history.  I looked at most the Bible as a sort of text book with stories that were more or less chronologically related.  It didn't occur to me that instead the stories might be theologically related, which is why the stories don't always occur in the same order in the various Gospels.  It's also why the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew differs from the one in Luke.  The two authors are making different points.  (I'll explain the difference between the theological difference between the genealogies if someone asks.)

Jesus Heals the Leper

One of the most common ways to see theology at play in the Bible is to observe how stories are placed alongside one another, that is, how they contrast and compare with one another (You don't need to know Greek to do this).  I'll use two examples.  Let's first start with the Gospel of Mark 1:40 - 3:6.  If you want to get the most out of this, read the text before continuing (If you can, read from a text that has no subtitles.)

Notice the following themes in several of the stories.

• Faith: 
• The leper demonstrates faith by saying, "if you will, you can make me clean."
• The friends of the paralytic man demonstrate faith by going out of their way to get to Jesus
• Mercy
• Jesus touches the leper before he heals him (this is technically against the law).  The man probably hasn't been touched by a clean person for years.  Jesus dignifies his humanity before he heals his body.
• Jesus forgives the sins of the paralytic man before healing him (again, treating the soul).
• Jesus recruits a tax collector (who worked for the Romans - they were hated as traitors).  Jesus recognizes the outcast (same with the paralytic and the leper).
• Jesus chills with tax collectors and sinners.  He's ridiculed for this - these people haven't straightened out their lives yet.  They're not the picture of charity work that you would put on a poster.  They're sinners.  He dignifies their humanity before they get it right.  He spends time with them before he heals them. 
• Jesus heals on the Sabbath.  Again, he's breaking the law, kind of.  What he's saying is "this person's humanity is more important than protecting our most sacred laws, even the Sabbath."

Jesus Heals the Paralytic (By Jan Luyken)

• Jesus Power
  If you go back even further in the text to 1:21 you see a theme of Jesus' power permeate each story.
• Jesus has power over demons
• He has power over illness
• He has power to forgive
• He has power over the Sabbath
• He even has authority to interpret scripture that the scribes don't.

When we split the Bible up into memory verses and subsections with neat little headlines, we can miss these themes.  We also miss them because we haven't been taught to look for them.  The stories tie together and are generally told alongside one another to bring about a variety of nuanced theological points.

On account of the lengthy section of scripture, I'll continue this topic next week.

How I Became a Humanist #9: Understanding the Bible and How to Use It #1

I was brought up to believe that Christians have a duty to read the Bible.  From age 8, I read it regularly.  The funny thing is, no one ever told me how to read the Bible.  In church, we sometimes went through books, but often we had lessons in which the teacher would bounce around the Bible from verse to verse.  In my preteen years, when I was taught how to preach, I was given a concordance and told that I could look up topics and words to support what I had to say.  This way of reading the Bible is common in churches that grew up on American soil during the 1800s and afterward.

One of the first serious Bible classes I took in undergrad was a course in how to read the Bible.  In it, we learned a lot of things that changed the way I saw scripture and how Christians ought to use it.

One of the first things I learned was the Bible was not originally written with chapters and verses.  Admittedly, I already knew this, but I'd never taken the time to think about what it meant.  I'd also never taken the time to consider the fact that most of the Bibles we read don't just have those additions, they also have labeled subheadings.  Sometimes the subheadings explain the meaning of the scripture.  Even when they don't, they separate one story from another in a way that the author of the text might not have intended.

Matthew Chatper 5 - 6 NIV (Notice the Subtitles)

It will surprise some readers to know that chapters were not commonplace in the Bible until the 900s (though versions with chapters showed up in the 4th century), and that verses didn't become commonplace around the 1500s, which is why there are a few places in the Bible where Catholics and Protestants separate verses differently (the process hadn't completed when the Reformation started). (More Information)

Obviously, concordances like the ones we use today couldn't exist without verses.  The Bible wasn't written to be used in the way that Evangelicals use it - topically.  It was written book by book, and the books were meant to be read as wholes.  Imagine for a moment that a friend of yours is trying to convince you of something I want to say to you, but instead of giving you several paragraphs from me, he takes a sentence from my writing here, a sentence there and combines them to support his intended message.  Can you be sure that I would agree with his message?  Taking time to think about how the Bible was written and originally delivered to us forced me to think about how to read it well and to not force it to say whatever I might want it to.

One of the other things I learned, probably in a history class, is that the printing press didn't exist in a form useful to the masses before the mid 1400s.  In order to copy books, you needed a scribe to write down every single letter of every single word.  Imagine how long it would take to write a copy of the whole Bible - and that would be just one copy.  If you wanted another copy, the scribe would have to repeat the entire process.  Books were really expensive.  A copy of the Bible could cost more than the average person would make in his entire life.

Early Christians didn't own copies of the Bible.  In fact, since books were inaccessible to most people, the average person had no reason to learn how to read.  And so, he didn't.  Instead, just like there were scribes to make copies of books, there were professional readers who would read texts to audiences.  This is why Mark 13:14 says, "Let the reader understand."  Mark wants to make sure that the reader, obviously not you or I, understands.  For the first 1500 years of Christianity, the Bible was inaccessible to the average Christian not simply because of persecution from the Catholic Church, but because a single book was too expensive to buy and the average person couldn't read anyway.

The people who taught this to me rarely questioned what this meant for the Churches of Christ and other Evangelical Churches, but I did.  It occurred to me that if our churches couldn't have even existed in their current form with their current assumptions for the first 75% of Christian history, then we must have some false assumptions about what is required to be Christian.  Clearly, reading the Bible regularly isn't something God expected of the average Christian, otherwise he would have waited to send Jesus until the 1500s, or somehow inspired society with an efficient printing press much earlier.  God saw no need to intervene.

The Bible was originally handwritten.  This is a cleaned up version of Koine Greek.  The earliest versions didn't have dots or spaces between the words, which sometimes created confusion for copying or translating scribes.

I knew this was a problem for the Churches of Christ, but I didn't realize how much this information changed my perspective.  Looking back, I realize that I no longer trusted the Churches of Christ to interpret scripture.  Our founding assumption that God wanted us to all interpret it personally seemed to be false.  Moreover, we were using it in a way that early Christians couldn't have, with chapters, verses, concordances and cherry-picking.  

Comparing Baha'i with Christianity

When I visited the Baha'i Center in DC two weeks ago, I found myself comparing the Baha'i faith with Christianity.  I suppose this is only natural.  As I did this, I found several similarities.  This is especially true if one views Christianity through the lens of the early church.  Here are just a few observations.

• The Baha'i meet in houses, just like the earliest Christians
• They often have central houses for larger Sunday meetings, but not always
• During the week they meet in each other's houses for meals
• The main house is used for community events during the week (like AA meetings or yoga).
• They emphasize charitable work
• Early Christians stayed behind during plagues to care for the sick
• They paid for burial for the poor and took in orphans
• The Baha'i actively work on justice issues in their neighborhoods
• Like early Christians, they strongly encourage adoption
• They emphasize fellowship
• Early Christian worship usually involved a communal meal that culminated in the Eucharist
• The Baha'i Center is built for fellowship.
• The Baha'i meet in each other's homes for a meal during the week.  They call these Fireside chats.

Even their claim that Baha'i is a successor to previous revelations is a Christian theological move. From the beginning Christians have claimed that their religion was a natural successor to Judiasm, and that their savior fulfilled Jewish prophesy.  The Baha'is claim that Baha'ullah is the return of Jesus, because Jesus comes again and again to different cultures with different names.  They claim that Baha'i is the fulfillment of the prophesy that Jesus would come again.  And just like Christians see the Old Testament as instructive, but not binding because it's part of an older covenant, the Baha'is see older scriptures as instructive, but not binding because they are part of earlier revelations for earlier time periods.

While Christians didn't adopt non-Jewish scriptures, their early apologists sometimes claimed that Jesus was the fulfillment of pagan religions hopes or even prophesies.

• Paul claims that his God is the unknown God that pagans are worshiping Act 17:23
• Zoroastrian Magi visit Jesus in Matthew 2
• The Zoroastrians had a prophesy that the Savior would be born of a virgin
• They also believed in a Holy Spirit through which goodness is revealed - the ideas are not identical.
• Matthew doesn't directly say that Jesus is the fulfillment of Zoroastrian prophesy, but this is probably the only logical conclusion to draw.  

The place that I found the traditions most aligned, however, was in the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven.  When talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus preaches a certain kind of moral life.  It's one where the peacemakers, rather than the war hawks, are honored.  It's one where his followers don't judge, because the standard they use will be used against them.  It's one where they love their neighbors and their enemies.  Jesus' Kingdom of Heaven is a new social order his followers bring to earth through faith, love and action.

Baha'is also use the term "Kingdom of Heaven."  I'm not sure if they mean the same thing, but the idea of God's servants bringing peace and justice to the world through love, action and faith is a dominant Baha'i theme.

The two religions fail to see eye-to-eye in several respects.  Most Christians see Jesus as God, but Baha'i see his as a divine man/being who continually returns to humanity to reveal God's will.  Christians are not likely to accept the idea of Jesus returning as a teacher, rather than a divine being calling them up into the sky.
Baha'is don't seem to think that Jesus died for the removal of their sins.  I didn't ask.  The topic never came up.  Evangelicals in particular are unlikely to agree with the Baha'i understanding of Heaven and Hell.  Most Evangelicals believe that Jesus (as defined by Christianity) is the only way to Heaven.  Several even believe that their particular sect of Christianity is the only sure guarantee.  Baha'is, on the other hand, think that one's spiritual development on earth will continue along the same path in the afterlife, regardless of dogma.

Certainly other comparisons and contrasts could be made, but I know too little to say more.

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If you have a religious tradition you'd like to learn more about, let me know in the comments below and I'll try to visit and write about it.