A series of essays. I haven't read them all or checked their sources yet, but they all bring up noteworthy points.
The Corruption of Biblical Studies
From the first essay:
In the 2017 edition of The State of the Bible, its annual survey, the American Bible Society reports that more than half of all Americans who regularly read the Bible now search for related material on the Internet. This shift in how the faithful learn about scripture has resulted in unprecedented public exposure to one particular kind of Bible study—namely, the academic kind. Major websites now offer the latest that scholars have to say about the Bible—its authorship, its historical accuracy, its proper interpretation—and those websites attract hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month. In an age when interest in the humanities is generally waning, the department of biblical studies is providing enrichment to what has become the most popular online branch of the liberal arts.
This is surely a blessed development. Men and women of good faith engage with these study materials in pursuit of that purest religious ideal: the truth. In doing so, moreover, they fully recognize that academic researchers ask important questions and often offer compelling answers by drawing on resources and insights unavailable through denominational venues. For many users, these answers and insights do not merely supplement but may also challenge the traditional Jewish and Christian teachings in which they have been brought up. So the interest in academic scholarship of the Bible increases—and with it the authority of the scholars purveying it. As a Jewish day-school teacher recently put it to me: “Often, I find that students might not be so well informed about the meaning of a scientific or archaeological claim; it’s enough that many academics holding respected titles have advanced a certain way of understanding something.” In today’s climate, the university biblicist, even before he or she speaks, enjoys a deep line of credit.
For Jews in particular, nothing in biblical studies draws so keen an interest as the issue of the origins of the Torah: the Five Books of Moses, or Pentateuch. The scholarly pursuit of the Torah’s putative sources and how they evolved into the text we have today is referred to in the academy as “source criticism”: the discipline’s oldest sub-field and still its largest. And source criticism of the Torah is also front-and-center in the Jewish public eye.
Over the past fifteen years alone, four major projects by Jewish scholars have showcased the methods and achievements of source criticism. I have in mind two books, How to Read the Bible by James Kugel and Richard Elliott Friedman’s The Bible with Sources Revealed; the section on the Pentateuch in the JPS Study Bible; and, most recently, the website www.TheTorah.com, which is explicitly devoted to “integrating the study of Torah with the disciplines and findings of academic biblical scholarship.”
It would seem hard to find fault with any of this. Intuitively, readers of all ages know that their rabbis or pastors have to affirm the antiquity and accuracy of the biblical accounts. By contrast, the academic biblicist is duty-bound to “tell it like it is” on the basis of a rigorous scholarly method and rational, humanistic modes of discovery. For many raised with a traditional approach to scripture, this is a breath of fresh air. Here, finally, we find scripture without an agenda, and a method that leads only where reason and data take the faithful researcher. Here, we find the truth.
If only it were so. But the fact of the matter is otherwise. From the time of its inception 200 years ago, the field of biblical studies has never been value-free. Instead, and precisely because of the Bible’s unique and central role in Western culture, study of the Bible in the academy has been influenced—and, I would argue, tainted—by a range of cultural and intellectual forces, and repeatedly led astray from its calling as a rigorous mode of inquiry. Never has this been truer than in our own times, when many claims made in the name of the critical study of the Bible have been turned into weapons in a political struggle between liberals and conservatives.
In what follows, I offer an insider’s tour of today’s field of biblical studies—my field—and question whether some of its central conclusions really deserve the high pedestal on which they have been placed.
... and 4 responses to the first.
The Corruption of Biblical Studies
From the first essay:
In the 2017 edition of The State of the Bible, its annual survey, the American Bible Society reports that more than half of all Americans who regularly read the Bible now search for related material on the Internet. This shift in how the faithful learn about scripture has resulted in unprecedented public exposure to one particular kind of Bible study—namely, the academic kind. Major websites now offer the latest that scholars have to say about the Bible—its authorship, its historical accuracy, its proper interpretation—and those websites attract hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month. In an age when interest in the humanities is generally waning, the department of biblical studies is providing enrichment to what has become the most popular online branch of the liberal arts.
This is surely a blessed development. Men and women of good faith engage with these study materials in pursuit of that purest religious ideal: the truth. In doing so, moreover, they fully recognize that academic researchers ask important questions and often offer compelling answers by drawing on resources and insights unavailable through denominational venues. For many users, these answers and insights do not merely supplement but may also challenge the traditional Jewish and Christian teachings in which they have been brought up. So the interest in academic scholarship of the Bible increases—and with it the authority of the scholars purveying it. As a Jewish day-school teacher recently put it to me: “Often, I find that students might not be so well informed about the meaning of a scientific or archaeological claim; it’s enough that many academics holding respected titles have advanced a certain way of understanding something.” In today’s climate, the university biblicist, even before he or she speaks, enjoys a deep line of credit.
For Jews in particular, nothing in biblical studies draws so keen an interest as the issue of the origins of the Torah: the Five Books of Moses, or Pentateuch. The scholarly pursuit of the Torah’s putative sources and how they evolved into the text we have today is referred to in the academy as “source criticism”: the discipline’s oldest sub-field and still its largest. And source criticism of the Torah is also front-and-center in the Jewish public eye.
Over the past fifteen years alone, four major projects by Jewish scholars have showcased the methods and achievements of source criticism. I have in mind two books, How to Read the Bible by James Kugel and Richard Elliott Friedman’s The Bible with Sources Revealed; the section on the Pentateuch in the JPS Study Bible; and, most recently, the website www.TheTorah.com, which is explicitly devoted to “integrating the study of Torah with the disciplines and findings of academic biblical scholarship.”
It would seem hard to find fault with any of this. Intuitively, readers of all ages know that their rabbis or pastors have to affirm the antiquity and accuracy of the biblical accounts. By contrast, the academic biblicist is duty-bound to “tell it like it is” on the basis of a rigorous scholarly method and rational, humanistic modes of discovery. For many raised with a traditional approach to scripture, this is a breath of fresh air. Here, finally, we find scripture without an agenda, and a method that leads only where reason and data take the faithful researcher. Here, we find the truth.
If only it were so. But the fact of the matter is otherwise. From the time of its inception 200 years ago, the field of biblical studies has never been value-free. Instead, and precisely because of the Bible’s unique and central role in Western culture, study of the Bible in the academy has been influenced—and, I would argue, tainted—by a range of cultural and intellectual forces, and repeatedly led astray from its calling as a rigorous mode of inquiry. Never has this been truer than in our own times, when many claims made in the name of the critical study of the Bible have been turned into weapons in a political struggle between liberals and conservatives.
In what follows, I offer an insider’s tour of today’s field of biblical studies—my field—and question whether some of its central conclusions really deserve the high pedestal on which they have been placed.
... and 4 responses to the first.
