I'm reading Jacob Taubes's 1987 Heidelberg lectures on St. Paul, published a few years ago by Jan and Aleida Assmann as The Political Theology of Paul. It's brilliant, provocative and complicated stuff and I expect I'll be chewing over it for a while. But this little quote from an essay by Niezsche called The Philology of Christianity just jumped out at me. It perfectly encapsulates a lot of my frustration with being a Biblicist these days:
How little Christianity educates the sense of honesty and justice can be gauged fairly well from the character of its scholars' writings: they present their conjectures as boldly as if they were dogmas and are rarely in any honest perplexity of the interpretation of a passage in the Bible....Again and again they say 'I am right, for it is written--' and then follows an interpretation of such impudent arbitrariness that a philologist who hears it is caught between rage and laughter and asks himself: is it possible? Is this honourable? is it even decent?--How much dishonesty in this matter is still practised in Protestant pulpits, how grossly the preacher exploits the advantage that no one is going to interrupt him here, how the Bible is pummelled and punched and the art of reading badly is in all due form imparted to the people: only he who never goes to church or never goes anywhere else will underestimate that. But after all, what can one expect from the effects of a religion which in the centuries of its foundation perpetrated that unheard-of philological farce concerning the Old Testament: I mean the attempt to pull the Old Testament from under the feet of the Jews with the assertion it contained nothing but Christian teaching and belonged to the Christians as the true people of Israel, the Jews being only usurpers. And then there followed a fury of interpretation and construction that cannot possibly be associated with a good conscience: however much Jewish scholars protested, the Old Testament was supposed to speak of Christ and only of Christ, and especially of his Cross; wherever a piece of wood, a rod, a ladder, a twig, a tree, a willow, a staff is mentioned, it is supposed to be a prophetic allusion to the wood of the Cross; even the erection of the one-horned beast and the brazen serpent, even Moses spreading his arms in prayer, even the spits on which the Passover lamb was roasted--all allusions to the Cross and as it were preludes to it! Has anyone who asserted this ever believed it? Consider that the church did not shrink from enriching the text of the Septuagint (e.g. in Psalm 96, verse 10) so as afterwards to employ the smuggled-in passage in the sense of Christian prophecy. For they were conducting a war and paid more heed to their opponents than to the need to stay honest.
This quote, however many liberties I've taken by ripping it from the context Taubes intended for it, gets me close to the heart of something I've been struggling with as a reader of biblical text for a while now. "Honesty" and integrity seem to me cardinal virtues in relation to one's reading of sacred text. The Bible is hard enough to confront on its own terms; the doctrinal or confessional pressure we bring to bear on it only takes us further from its essential, historically-situated quality. To misquote the Nazi playwright Hanns Johst: whenever I read the word kerygma, I reach for my gun. Such "pious dishonesty" as Nietzsche was indicting (and which is, shockingly, still so prevalent today in both the secular and religious academies), seems to me a more than passing problem. The aim of biblical scholarship should be honest effort at recapturing the patterns of thought of those who inscribed and preserved the text which is our legacy, no matter how unpalatable or difficult those thoughts might be. For the believer, this confrontation ought to form one half of the challenge of faith after modernity. For the secularist, it should be a reminder of all we have lost now that mammon reigns unopposed.
I'd originally thought to write about these things when I started this blog. Now that I'm back in the States, I'm hoping I'll have a chance to do some of that, at least from time to time.
Comments