I Can't Shut the Door on What I Know
Posted by Kushana Torumekia at 6/16/2007 2:31 AM 
Categories: Scholarship, Josephus, Dead Sea Scrolls, Media, The Bible, Dead Languages, Archaeology, Gnostic Gospels
Categories: Scholarship, Josephus, Dead Sea Scrolls, Media, The Bible, Dead Languages, Archaeology, Gnostic Gospels
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A few thoughts have come together in my head today. I joined LibraryThing — it made me think about my professional books: when I bought each one and why, what I've yet to read, what I don't have, what I've read and why, and what was going on in my life when I was reading it, the books I own from people I knew who are now dead, the books written by dead people whom I feel I know, and I thought about Homer and immortality.I thought about a favorite used bookstore — the one that makes me feel like I've walked into a pastor's office or a small church or synagogue library from 40 years ago, when so many things were unknown. To judge from it, textual criticism and the history and nature of Biblical manuscripts was a highly esoteric subject, there were only three kinds of Judaism before Christ (Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes) known from Pliny, Philo, and Josephus, all we knew of early Christianity (and much of what we knew about the history and development of Judaism) came from the Bible itself, and perhaps the adventuresome dabbled in archaeology.
Greek and Hebrew were all there was to study, for languages — and perhaps a bit of Latin (almost everyone had Latin in school, anyway.) Like many fields, at some point in the 20th century Religion Studies it lurched from being something a spirited amateur could do (and one could be very competent in several academic fields) to something you had to be a specialist in ... perhaps a specialist in only a portion of a field. Today I went grazing for blogs-like-mine and again I often had that feeling, of the insular world that Biblical studies was 40 years ago.
That 'pastor' study' body of knowledge is important, essential — I wouldn't send anyone out to preach or teach about the Bible without it; but the history of Judaism has become wild and wide with the discovery and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls (I can't think of any one book that explains this concisely), early Christianity is not at all what we thought it was (Pagels' Beyond Belief is a good start to understanding this), the Roman Empire was lively with foreign religions actively seeking converts for them and them alone (a new idea in polytheistic culture) in populations displaced from their tribal and historical homelands (and gods) — usually for economic and social reasons (again, I can't think of any one book, here ... Arthur Darby Nock might be a good start, as would Marvin Meyer's sourcebook on Roman Mystery Religions.) Archaeology has gotten enormously technical and scientific (see, for example Jodi Magness' new book on Qumran), plus you need more languages than I know to properly to digest the information in the longer footnotes of the Greek New Testament (and in some language dictionaries ... why no, I don't know Akkadian).
Online, I see some commentators divide scholars into "liberal" and "conservative". There has been a genuine flood of new information over the past 40 years, and an armada of new skills necessary to keep afloat in it (both professional and electronic — try getting an emertus colleague to download a pdf of a journal article) — information nothing could have prepared us to expect. (Well, if you paid very sharp attention to the edges of the field, you would've had a degree of warning...) I don't think these labels are accurate: let me explain.
Today I was also talking with a friend at TheHallofFire.net and they were asking me to explain the hype surrounding the Gospel of Judas. I responded that the hype came more from the press than from the scholars involved (I heard one of the National Geographic team speak on it, this Spring), from the press' imposition of the idea that "the story" is: 'this will overturn Christianity'. So far as I can tell, none of the scholars on the National Geographic team feel that way; from their prior careers, none of them are sensationalists. In fact, the scholar I heard speak was carefully quizzed by National Geographic before they would hire him on whether he'd try to make anything theological of the Gospel of Judas — he said, as anyone in the field would say, "No".
I think the idea that there is a dramatic conflict — for the press, for some commentators — is a story whose appeal has overwhelmed their ability to think. They would rather imagine a simple story of sides and battle lines (when, in fact, every scholar disagrees with every other scholar
) over the task of trying to do history with an immense amount of information (Judas is just the latest addition to that.) I sometimes imagine they must not know much about the new information, or (if they're a journalist and not a historian) about how scholars do their work. (This should not be, the ideals and working methods of the two professions are very similar.)It's true that new information can feel like an attack — on what you knew, on what you felt sure of — but that does not mean it is an attack. It may simply be more to know, more to master; to be approached with the same delight and curiosity with which you learned what you already know, now. The idea that there are only two sides is a pernicious and inaccurate one — and I will try to write about Biblical Studies once I no longer feel like I am standing in a small, and somewhat stuffy, room with a 40-year-old atmosphere.
-Kushana
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