The End of Christianity (16 page)

Example 2: Endorsement of Genital Mutilation

The Contemporary English Version (CEV) sanitizes Jesus’ seeming endorsement of genital mutilation with this translation of Matthew 19:12:

Some people are unable to marry because of birth defects or because of what someone has done to their bodies. Others stay single for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Anyone who can accept this teaching should do so.

Compare this translation to that of the older Revised Standard Version:

For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.

In other words, the RSV conveys much more accurately the idea that people can make themselves eunuchs, which might literally involve castration, for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Jesus does not seem to object, and, in fact, he can be interpreted to endorse the idea of self-mutilation. That this passage could be so understood is shown by the fact that Origen, the famous church father, is reported to have castrated himself in light of this verse.
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The rendition of “stay single” seems most disingenuous in light of how the CEV is portrayed by its advocates: “The CEV is not a paraphrase. It is an accurate and faithful translation of the original manuscripts.”
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Yet, commenting on the CEV's “stay single” translation, Stanley Porter, the New Testament scholar, remarked: “Is it possible, in light of the overtly evangelistic purpose of the CEV, that the New Testament has been toned down in some places so that it does not scare off those attracted to Christianity?”
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Example 3: Anti-Semitism

The Holocaust generated a lot of self-critical analysis on the part of many Christians, and rightly so. Some Christian scholars have acknowledged the anti-Judaism in their history, while others have claimed that any anti-Judaism has been the result of misunderstanding crucial passages.
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But one of the methods used to atone for a long Christian history of anti-Judaism centers on hiding the anti-Jewish statements in the New Testament.
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According to the proposal by IrvinJ. Borowsky in
Removing the Anti-Judaism from the New Testament
:

The solution to erasing this hatred is for bible societies and religious publishers to produce two editions, one for the public similar to the
Contempovary English Version
which reduces significantly this anti-Judaic potential, and the other edition for scholars taken from the Greek text.
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Orwellian doublespeak could not be celebrated more fervently. The proposal is paternalistic because it assumes that readers need to be protected from their own Bible. Borowsky adds, “[T]he stakes are high. People have been murdered because of these words.”
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Similar and no less satisfactory attempts to address anti-Judaism have also been outlined by Norman A. Beck, a Lutheran biblical theologian.
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Such efforts only expose the fact that scholars themselves know that “the Bible” is a violent document that must be sanitized to keep it alive.

TEXTUAL CRITICISM

Textual criticism is the scholarly discipline that seeks to reconstruct the most original text possible for any particular written work.
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Such a discipline, therefore, is not restricted to the Bible. Most of the famous works of antiquity were not preserved intact. Unlike most works of antiquity, however, the textual criticism of the Bible carries crucial theological and moral consequences for those who believe they must have an accurate record of God's word to guide the conduct of their lives.
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Yet in the past few decades, there have been some prominent textual critics who have worried whether this field will survive. In 1977, Eldon J. Epp, a prominent New Testament textual critic and the 2003 president of the Society of Biblical Literature, wrote:

The reasons for this recent and rapid erosion of the field of [New Testament] textual criticism are elusive. Most of it has taken place in a little more than a decade. Whether the disappearance of opportunities for graduate study in the field is a cause or a symptom of the erosion is not clear, though certainly the discipline would seem to have no bright future in America and little hope of survival here without opportunities.
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The findings of textual critics devastate any claim that the Bible has been transmitted faithfully from any original text.
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Powerful computers have made the task of sorting through variations easier, though there are still major problems with determining even how many variant readings there are. Yet it is those very advances and new discoveries that have made the whole goal of textual criticism—if that means finding the original text or providing believers with some intact record of God's word—all but obsolete. Textual criticism, in fact, has helped destroy any notion that there was ever a stable entity called “the Bible.”

The most important fact to consider in trying to reconstruct an “original” is that we do not possess the autograph of any biblical writing (i.e., the very first text that the author himself/herself wrote), and this much is admitted by the staunchest religionist apologists. This means all we have are copies of the originals, so we usually cannot reconstruct an ancient autograph that is no longer available—nor could we recognize the autograph even if we found it. The “original text” proves to be a mirage unless we have access to the entire transmission process from inception to current copy. Such access is something we don't have, and probably never will have in the case of the Bible.

We can illustrate the problem quite simply. Let's suppose that we have six surviving manuscripts labeled A, B, C, D, E, and F, which are related to a hypothetical original X. X could be the
autograph
, the text from an original author's own hand, and from which all subsequent copies derive. Perhaps, we might plausibly conclude that A, B, and C derive from the same source because their wording is very similar. For example, only those three share some hypothetical expression (“seal of God”) as opposed to D, E, and F, which have “lamb of God” at the equivalent slot in the text. Thus, we can reasonably conclude that A, B, and C must have a common
antigraph
(i.e., the presumed written source behind any copy) with the words “seal of God.” Likewise, we might plausibly conclude that copies D, E, and F must go back to a different antigraph that has the wording “lamb of God.”

However, since both antigraphs are different in at least one reading (“lamb of God” versus “seal of God”), then it would be difficult to decide which one of them was “the original.” In fact, their variants tell us they must have been copied from a still-earlier antigraph from which subsequent copies diverged. Even if one reconstructed X as the source behind both presumed antigraphs, it does not show that the X manuscript is the autograph. Why? Because X itself could be a copy of another antigraph that was not derived from “the original.” How would we know?

Textual criticism has made important contributions to our understanding of the Bible. However, those contributions have spelled the end of textual criticism. Historically, the primary goal of biblical textual criticism was to reconstruct the original text. Textual criticism has shown that this is impossible. Thus, textual criticism has ended in that sense. Textual criticism of the Bible becomes more than ever an elite leisure pursuit that will have difficulty asking taxpayers and churchgoers to continue funding an endeavor that brings joys akin to solving Sudoku puzzles but provides little benefit to anyone else.

BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Biblical archaeology lies in ruins, be it literally, socially, or metaphorically.
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Biblical archaeology once was a premier and even glamorous field within biblical studies, and now even some of its most famous practitioners are proclaiming its death. In 1995, William G. Dever, a doyen of the archaeology of ancient Israel, declared that “American Syro–Palestinian and [b]iblical archeology are moribund disciplines; and archaeologists like me who have spent a lifetime in the profession, feel like the last members of an endangered species.”
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In 2006, Ronald Hendel, a professor of the Hebrew Bible at the University of California at Berkeley, remarked, “Biblical Archaeology doesn't really exist today in the way it once did.”
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To be fair, Dever and Hendel are speaking of “biblical” archaeology in the sense of archaeology focused on supporting the historicity of the Bible. Dever himself once advocated the broader term “Syro-Palestinian” archaeology, though now his terminology is more varied. Nonetheless, part of the problem lies in the fact that the study of biblical history, which has been intimately tied to biblical archaeology, is itself increasingly under attack. As Dever phrases it, “If the actual
history
of the biblical world no longer matters, then archaeology is clearly irrelevant.”
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There was probably an entity called “Israel” by the Egyptians at the time of Merneptah (ca. 1210 BCE), but whether “Israel” was a self-designation at that point is not clear. A location for this group or territory in the steppes of Transjordan is just as plausible as in the highlands west of the Jordan River. Whether “Israel” saw itself as part of Canaan or as part of some larger Canaanite group is unclear at that point. “Israelite” is no more an appropriate designation for the people occupying the hill country in the so-called Iron I period than “Canaanite” or the designation for any other people living in those highlands according to the biblical texts.

There is no independent evidence for a kingdom headed by Solomon either, so that is where we have to leave that claim—inconclusive. The gates at Gezer, Hazor, and Megiddo speak nothing about Solomon. In terms of illuminating the religion of the “Israelites,” Dever had it right when in 1983 he wrote, “[A]rchaeology of either the ‘biblical’ or the ‘secular’ persuasion has scarcely augmented our understanding of the actual cult in ancient Israel in any fundamental way.”
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Within the DeuteronomisticHistory, it is reasonable to believe in the existence of the following kings based on independent corroboration in Assyrian and Babylonian documents:
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Overall, this is a very impoverished yield for any sort of “biblical history” when one compares it to many of its Near Eastern neighbors.

Biblical archaeology has helped to bury the Bible, and archaeologists know it. Ronald Hendel was exactly right when he said, “Archaeological research has—against the intentions of most of its practitioners—secured the nonhistoricity of much of the Bible before the era of kings.”
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We can now expand Hendel's observation and affirm that there is not much history to be found in the era of kings either.

So does biblical archaeology matter anymore? Since archaeology has failed to reveal much biblical history that matters, biblical archaeology not only has ceased to be relevant, but it has ceased to exist as we knew it. Instead of revealing biblical history, archaeology has provided a fundamental argument to move beyond the Bible itself. If biblical archaeology has to serve theology once more to be relevant, its days as a secular academic field are numbered. Either way, biblical archaeology ended in ruins—literally, socially, and metaphorically.

THE UNHISTORICAL JESUS

While the search for Abraham, Jacob, and Moses is now dead in academia, the search for the “historical” Jesus seems to be even more vibrant than at the time of Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), who is credited with initiating the modern scholarly search for the historical Jesus. According to Tom Wright, by the late twentieth century we had arrived at a so-called Third Quest for the historical Jesus.
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While we have accumulated much information about first-century Palestine, there is a terminus in the amount of knowledge that we can extract about Jesus in the first century.

In the case of the liberal Jesus, we shall concentrate on the project known as the Jesus Seminar and its members in order to show that while the supernatural has been eliminated from the reconstruction of the historical Jesus, the portrayals that have resulted are so inconclusive that we still cannot say with any confidence what Jesus said or did.
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Even John Dominic Crossan, one of the most recognized members of the Jesus Seminar, admits to the chaos that is historical Jesus scholarship today. Note his remarks, which also serve as a historical summary of historical Jesus research in the last four decades:

There is a Jesus as a political revolutionary by S. G. F. Brandon (1967), as a magician by Morton Smith (1978), as a Galilean charismatic by Geza Vermes (1981, 1984), as a Galilean Rabbi by Bruce Chilton (1984), as Hillelite or proto-Pharisee by Harvey Falk (1985), as an Essene by Harvey Falk (1985), and as an eschatological prophet by E. P. Sanders (1985)…But that stunning diversity is an academic embarrassment. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.
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The Jesus Seminar bears all the features identified as part of the third quest, and so it is reasonable to see how successful their criteria and results have been. Briefly, the Jesus Seminar began in 1985 under the auspices of the Westar Institute. It was founded by Robert Funk, who served as president of the
Society of Biblical Literature
in 1975. Thirty scholars met in the initial year, but eventually some two hundred members, called “fellows,” became part of the seminar. The epistemology follows in the positivist tradition, judging by this statement: