March 2010 Archives

Today, Christians celebrate Palm Sunday -- the day when Jesus rode into Jerusalem to great "Hosanna!" acclaim. But just exactly how did he do it? The stories disagree in a puzzling way... unless you know something about the conventions of biblical Hebrew and that the New Testament writers (Matthew, especially) often looked to the Old Testament, for ways to understand Jesus. 

Mark and Luke agree that Jesus rode in a donkey, and that's the story that's told in thousands of churches today. Matthew, on the other hand, has Jesus riding two beasts at the same time. An odd, albeit remarkable(!) feat to include. Unlike the other two, Matthew explains that Jesus did so to fulfill the scriptures (Hebrew Bible), and he partly quotes the reference in Zechariah, writing, "Tell the daughter of Zion, 'Look your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.'" That quote usually makes it into contemporary Palm Sunday retellings because of how it underscores the unusual nature of Jesus' kingship -- humble, in this case. But the bit about simultaneously riding both a donkey and a colt gets glossed thanks to Mark and Luke.

Zechariah's text appears as poetry, and the primary characteristic of biblical Hebrew poetry is parallelism. In its purest form, one line is followed by another that repeats its sense. Here's a great example from Proverbs 4:6 (about the importance of wisdom): "Do not forsake her, and she will keep you/ love her, and she will guard you." Get it? "Do not forsake her" is parallel to "love her," "she will keep you" is parallel to "she will guard you." Sometimes the parallelism is not so tidy, though, but rather integrated into a sort of stepped structure that builds with repetition. That's true in Zechariah 9:9 which ends, "riding on an ass [hold the jokes here];... on a donkey, the son of a she-beast." Now add this additional bit of info about Hebrew convention: one single letter serves as every conjuction (our "and," "but," or "or"), and sometimes it shouldn't really be translated at all.

That little letter appears right before "on a donkey," so together with what you now know about Hebrew poetry, you can see that Matthew went literal with his quote. He read Zechariah without poetic parallelism (but rather as a straightforward narrative) and translated the shadow conjunction literally, too. The result: Jesus enters Jerusalem straddling two animals. Spoiler alert: this will not be Jesus' final miracle. The "good news" gospel writers agree on that.

  

Wonderful to see so many people at the Charlottesville Barnes and Noble last Wed eve! As moderator David Bearinger noted, Winn Collier's Holy Curiosity and my Bible Babel are very different projects, though both concern the Bible. The Virginia Festival of the Book (a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities event) has included panels on religion and spirituality in the past but not specifically on the Good Book. The conversation and questions reflected well the two ways that Winn and I worked with the Bible in our books -- confessional and informational -- and pushed each of us to think and talk about the other. After all, one cannot assume a confessional position without reflecting intellectually, even if just to read and interpret, the text, on the one hand. On the other hand, any academic treatment of the Bible is still treatment of a religious and sacred text, which inevitably draws the investigator into the world of spirituality, even if only to think about how that text has affected and informed the faith of others. Thanks to all who attended!

The Virginia Festival of the Book kicks off today, St. Patty's Day! I'm on for a Bible Babel book talk tonight -- 6pm at the Charlottesville Barnes and Noble on Emmett. If you're in the area, do come! I had a chance to visit over coffee yesterday with my fellow panelist, Winn Collier, and our charming and insightful moderator, David Bearinger. I think it's going to be great fun. The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities has been putting on this remarkable event for years. You can check out the line-up for each day (it goes through Saturday) by following the link above. Hope to see you there!

Bible Babel's been getting some good love lately. Now a national best-seller, thanks esp to the good folks I saw in MN and wonderful readers at Politics and Prose in DC! Many thanks to Martin Sieff for bringing an open mind and sense of humor to his Washington Times review yesterday. Meanwhile, spring is bustin' out in Charlottesville, and my Richmond garden promises tulips soon to come,... whether or not I peel the winter's mulch away. How generous, all ~

Atheist students at a Texas university are offering porn in exchange for Bibles arguing, "same diff." Inflammatory, to be sure, but are they right? The Bible is indeed full of racy material, from its very first book on. Robert Crumb's Genesis in graphic novel form warns on the cover that adult supervision is recommended. The Song of Solomon's highly suggestive erotic poetry is inspiration for a line of Christian sex toys that you can buy at Book22.com (in one Christian ordering of the books, it is the 22nd). In the New Testament, Paul explicitly lists some of the ways that people "got off" in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Revelation, the final book of Christian canon, describes in gory (albeit symbolic) detail the whoring of Babylon. And that's just a wee sampling of the sex. But pornography isn't just about sex, is it? There's something more that makes it what it is... and so difficult to define. There's something of the forbidden and shameful about it. There's the debasing and humiliating, the using and abusing of others for a temporary pleasure that drives porn. Violence and the horrors that lay a person out raw, which we watch hungrily, disaffected and complicit. Isn't that combination -- the repulsive and our inability to tear our eyes away from it -- porn, too? 

Wouldn't it be nice to say that the Bible includes no such narratives, images, and invitations? But it does. Saul is castigated for showing mercy to a vanquished king, so we watch smugly as he carries out the righteous act of butchering Agag. We watch as a nameless woman, gang-raped and left for dead, is cut into eleven pieces to rally the Israelite tribes against their own. The prophet Ezekiel likens the capital cities of Samaria and Jerusalem to two young women and proceeds to subject them to graphic humiliations and abuse. We watch comfortably even titillated, knowing that "they deserved it." Doesn't Jesus's crucifixion -- an innocent submitting to a twisted power of the state, of hatred and fear, brutally humiliated and strung up in bloody torture... and accepted as somehow right and good -- meet the criteria for porn? Paul's stern rebukes (whether they came from him or became attributed to him) of women thinking, acting, and speaking with equal humanity as men, and the ways in which those texts have denied women their fullest expressions of humanity... is that porn? Or when biblical texts serve the purposes of the powerful to circumscribe individual growth and even to dehumanize the other... well, a case could be made.

Finally, though, the Bible is isn't the same as the porn those university students are handing out. It is far more rich and nuanced. It is also full of the very things that lead us to push back against the arrogance of brutality and to cringe and to cry out in sympathy and compassion for the oppressed and abused. Even while it throws into our faces the ugliness of hatred and fear, violence and humiliation, it invites us to challenge (demands that we do!) whatever is life-denying to the least of these, the poorest, and most vulnerable. For that's finally what each of us is, what we all are. Hannah's song becomes Mary's Magnificat. Power is overturned and the weak become the strong. Expectations and assumptions are derailed and reborn in compassion and joy. 

If we loose our grip on what the Bible can and cannot do, on what we allow that the Bible says and doesn't say, then maybe we'll witness the Bible embrace what seems pornographic only to assimilate and transform it into a mandate for the fully realized life for all beings in a family at home on this breathing earth.