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About a year ago, Wheaton College hosted a Christian teacher known for his emergent faith, black T-shirts, and popular cultural explanations of the gospels. We heard all about how Jesus' disciples had to walk "in the dust of his sandals," and we even had prayer shawls explained. As this continued, a few of my senior students knew I was slumping deeper and deeper into my seat in Wheaton's Edman Chapel. In a moment I'll explain why.
Most scholars recognize that a cultural gap exists between what we read in the gospels and what actually happened in Galilee some 2,000 years ago. Modern exegesis labors to extract meaning from these gospels using well-established methods of interpretation. Every student has to master the Greek text along with the nuances of its syntax and grammar, word choices, and idioms. The problem with this method is that, just as a gap exists between that Greek text and our modern English translations, so too a gap existed long ago between the original stories of Jesus told by Aramaic-speaking Jews and their final write-up in Greek by the evangelists, who understood Middle Eastern culture (though they were writing in Greek).
The ministry of Jesus was practiced in an Aramaic-speaking culture and was preserved by witnesses for whom this language and culture were native. This is not to deny that Greek was known and used in the Roman province of Judea, but it is to recognize that the world of Jesus and his followers was different from, say, the world of Romans living in Ephesus. Then this Aramaic apostolic witness was translated into Greek, which was in turn taken up by the evangelists, who unsurprisingly penned their gospels in the lingua franca of the empire. Note carefully: an Aramaic story (the Jesus story) emerged onto the public stage of history in Greek dress (the gospels). And whenever a story moves from one culture frame to another, something inevitably gets lost for those who don't know both cultures.
For some time, scholars such as Bruce Malina at Creighton University, Omaha, complained that without a careful understanding of the cultural anthropology of antiquity, many nuances of our Greek gospel texts might elude us. His 1981 book The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (revised in 1993), in which Malina outlined the cultural values presupposed behind countless New Testament stories, was a watershed for me and many others. Today students who read his popular book Windows on the World of Jesus: Time Travel to Ancient Judea (1993) are lucky indeed, and immediately become converts to another way of reading the Scriptures. Occasionally they wander through the library and find older voices like that of the famed New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias (The Parables of Jesus, 1962; English trans., 1970), whose father was the pastor of the German Lutheran Church in the Old City of Jerusalem and who grew up on its streets.
Kenneth E. Bailey has raised the same alarm. I first came across Ken Bailey in the mid-1970s. I was a student at the American University of Beirut, where an ugly civil war was just emerging from the shadows. My fellow students traded studying for heaving classroom desks at Lebanese soldiers in the street. I managed to find a small Arab-Armenian seminary where I could take classes that would transfer back to my university at home. It was one of the smartest things I ever did. Because that is where Bailey was teaching.
Bailey grew up in Egypt, where both of his parents served as Presbyterian missionaries. From 1935 to 1995 the Middle East was his home. He spoke Arabic like a native and was welcomed to countries throughout the region as a New Testament professor. (Arabic is a notoriously difficult language. I've heard Arabs remark that Bailey speaks it in a way even they admire.) Instinctively Bailey knew what Malina and others were talking about. When the gospels traveled from the Jewish Middle East to the Gentile Greek-speaking world, they contained stories about foreigners. And the cultural clues needed to interpret them were sometimes lost.
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