The nearly simultaneous appearance of Peter Thuesen’s In Discordance with the Scriptures (Oxford Univ. Press) and Paul Gutjahr’s An American Bible (Stanford Univ. Press), which are probably the two best books ever published on the cultural meaning of the Scriptures in American history, marks an important coming of age for scholarship more generally. Throughout most of this century, the immense quantity and often surpassing quality of biblical commentaries, dictionaries, archaeologies, and theologies was not matched by equal interest in practical questions—that is, how Scripture entered into the daily lives of all sorts of people.
More recently, published work in a number of scholarly domains has dramatically altered this situation. Now many authors are writing persuasively about how Scripture has actually functioned as a complex, but fully active, force in artistic, social, cross-cultural, denominational, scientific, ethnic, and intellectual matters; in addition to those mentioned below they include—as a very partial list—Philip Barlow, Ruth Bottiger, Gerald Bray, Shalom Goldman, David Impastato, David Jeffrey, Thomas Olbricht. David Rosenberg, Leland Ryken, Lamin Sanneh, Theophus Smith, Laurence Wieder, Peter Wosh, and Davis Young. Brief sketches of four pairs of books, each treating distinctly separate domains, can illustrate the variety of works that has begun to appear.
• Two multi-authored reference works underscore the reality that those who interpret the Scriptures are fit subjects for interpretation themselves. For his Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters (InterVarsity, 1998), Donald McKim recruited 92 authors to write 108 articles. The book includes six general essays alongside 11 biographies of interpreters from the early church (Athanasius and Augustine are the first), seven from the Middle Ages, 19 from the era of the Reformation (16 Protestants and Desiderius Erasmus), 28 from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (including Wesley, Edwards, and Kierkegaard), 24 for twentieth-century Europe, and 13 for twentieth-century North America. The wide ideological reach of the modern sections—taking in, for example, the dispensationalist C. I. Scofield, the Catholic Raymond Brown, the feminist Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza—is especially welcome. Each article contains something about its subject’s life, an ample sketch of the person’s intellectual contributions, and a full bibliography.
A collection edited by Walter Elwell and J. D. Weaver, Bible Interpreters of the Twentieth Century: A Selection of Evangelical Voices (Baker, 1999), is more restricted but is equally instructive for its 35 evangelical scholars. Especially interesting for insights on how personal circumstances shape biblical understanding are the two instances where the same scholar is treated by different authors in the two volumes. To note differences between Ward Gasque (IVP) and Murray Harris (Baker) on F. F. Bruce, and between Lee McDonald (IVP) and Donald Hagner (Baker) on G. E. Ladd, is to see that hermeneutical self-consciousness is important for interpreting the interpreters, as well as for interpreting the text.
• Two other books offer up-to-date treatment of questions about the facticity of Scripture. In their self-consciousness about the history of such questions, both Jeffrey Sheler and Mark Kidger also add a great deal to understanding the attitudes of past generations. In Is the Bible True? How Modern Debates and Discoveries Affirm the Essence of the Scriptures (HarperSanFrancisco/Zondervan, 1999), Sheler, the religion editor at U. S. News and World Report, carefully summarizes a great deal of recent archaeological and historical work. For classically minded Christians it is encouraging to see Sheler conclude that “despite all remaining uncertainties, … most scholars would agree that there is a historical core behind the biblical stories of Israel’s emergence in Canaan,” and that testimony for “the core historicity” of New Testament narratives is even stronger.
Where Sheler’s focus is broad, Mark Kidger, an astronomer and science writer based in Tenerife, Spain, treats only one question. Yet Kidger’s book, The Star of Bethlehem: An Astronomer’s View (Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), contains much more than learned arguments about what that star might actually have been. In particular, Kidger discusses ways in which previous students in many places worked at the problem of past heavenly appearances and how Christians particularly have read the account in Matthew’s gospel. Both Sheler and Kidger make important contributions to understanding historical engagement with Scripture.
• In light of the Bible’s centrality in Western experience, it is not surprising that new emphases in Western thought engender fresh discussion of Scripture. Modern feminism has always engaged Scripture, since the Bible was so important in promoting some varieties of early feminism and since the Bible has always been so important for some opponents of feminism. Cullen Murphy, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, is both a practicing Catholic and a longtime observer of women who study the Bible. An early report from that observation appeared in his magazine in August 1993. Now The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own (Houghton Mifflin, 1998) offers expanded treatment. Much as Ved Mehta did some years ago with The New Theologians (1965), a book arising from interviews with contemporary theologians, Murphy has observed and spoken with prominent women biblical scholars like Phyllis Trible and Amy-Jill Levine in order to communicate a fuller sense of how and why they read the Scriptures as they do. The result is not earth-shaking revelation, but rather a document that humanizes the lives of scholars whose work often puts them in the anything-but-tranquil front lines of ideological combat.
Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Indiana Univ. Press 1999), a collection edited by Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, offers a different kind of resource. It contains a number of well-chosen selections from ancient and modern commentary on the passages in Genesis dealing with sex and gender. While no such compilation could be comprehensive, this volume ranges widely, both chronologically (from pre-Christian rabbis and early church fathers to the present) and ideologically (the modern section contains extracts ranging from the Danvers Statement, defending a biblical view of male hierarchy, to Judith Plaskow’s construction of feminist theology from the story of Lilith). If I were ever privileged to teach a full-length college course on the history of the Bible in Western cultures, this would be my first choice for a book of readings.
• Surprisingly infrequent until re cent years have been historical studies tracing the interpretation of a single biblical passage or biblical theme. The assignment is a natural, since nothing reveals more sharply the cultural rootedness of biblical interpretation than witnessing wide swings across time in what are considered natural, simple, commonsensical, or axiomatic interpretations of a single text.
Two of the best recent books taking up such history are Richard C. Trexler’s The Journey of the Magi: Meanings in History of a Christian Story (Princeton Univ. Press, 1997) and Jeffrey Burton Russell’s A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (Princeton Univ. Press, 1997). Trexler’s research shows that accounts of the Magi were first used as external proof for the truth of the divine incarnation in Christ. Later interpretations stressed the sanctifying of gift-ex change and merchandise transactions. Still others featured children, African Americans, or Native Americans dressed up as the Magi and so reversed the imperialism that the Three Kings had also been asked to serve. Trexler, a historian at SUNY-Binghamton, is an adept in cultural studies whose prose is sometimes mystifying, but the issues he writes about (and the illustrations he interprets) are consistently provocative.
The prize for depth of insight among recent studies of biblical themes in history must go to Russell’s study of the notion of heaven from slightly before the time of Christ through the fourteenth century of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Russell, whose multi-volume history of human conceptions of the Devil has become a landmark, explains in his opening words the subject of his ambitious new work, also projected to comprise several volumes:
To the modern mind heaven often seems bland or boring, an eternal sermon or a perpetual hymn. Evil and the Devil seem to get the best lines. Dante knew better: nothing could possibly be as exciting as heaven itself. … The central theme of this book is the fulfillment of the human longing for unity, body and soul, in ourselves, with one another, and with the cosmos. The book is aimed at deepening understanding of a blessed otherworld by engaging the Christian tradition of heaven.
A byproduct is Russell’s convincing case for Dante as the Christian poet of the millennium. More important, his study, which is a beautiful book in every respect, illustrates how profoundly the Bible’s central realities shine out from the most careful studies attending to the centrality of the Book in Judaic and Christian history.
Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College.
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