Hector Avalos, The End of
Biblical Studies. Prometheus Books, 2007.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
What a
refreshing book! Professor Avalos questions the utility and advisability
of continuing to keep the superannuated field of Biblical Studies alive in
its present form: as a species of apologetics on behalf of Christianity,
whether in its evangelical/apologist form or its
academic/ecumenical/liberal form. Avalos urges that, minus the arbitrary
partisanship for the Bible that Christian allegiance brings, there is no
particular reason to keep the patient on the respirator. The period of
productive scholarship (which “happened” to coincide with the shattering
of the Bible’s credibility) ended a century (or even two centuries) ago.
The alien, immoral, and irrelevant character of the Bible has been evident
long enough for us to realize it cannot and should not be accorded status
as the moral authority we have made it. What we clearly ought to do is to
place the book on the shelf and devote the huge amount of resources and
energy now directed to Biblical Studies to other fields of research more
likely to benefit a starving and oppressed humanity. There remains a task
for biblical scholars in the meantime, namely to reverse the course of
mainstream (in-the-pocket-of –religion) scholarship. Whereas every issue
of the JBL, every meeting of the SBL, is devoted to hiding the ancient
offensiveness of the Bible, scholars ought henceforth to highlight and
accentuate these features of scripture so as to dissuade the masses who
still mistakenly look to the book as an authority. The discerning reader
of Avalos will understand that he does not mean to vilify the Bible, only
to destroy it as an idol. No one would attack the morals of the Iliad
and the Odyssey unless some fanatics started litigating to have
Homer made the basis of our laws and morals, as people do with the Bible.
Avalos argues in considerable
detail that Biblical Studies pretty much finished its job long ago. He
shows how Biblical Archaeology, once, in Albright’s day, thought to
vindicate Bible accuracy, actually turns out to deprive the Bible stories
of any hint of historical accuracy. Avalos is always imaginative and shows
how, if one resists the conclusions of the so-called Minimalists (who are
unsure even of the existence of David and Solomon), one might as well
maintain the fact-character of the King Arthur legends. Similarly, he
shows that any apologist who argues for a historical resurrection of Jesus
had better make room in his pantheon for the Virgin Mary (the apparitions,
that is), too, since the same arguments “prove” both.
Barring some dramatic
discoveries of manuscripts, Avalos proposes, Textual Criticism, too, has
run out of gas. It cannot breach the wall of silence between the original
autographs and the earliest copies we possess. And, on the other end, the
widespread adoption of eclecticism has reduced the method to sheer, albeit
principled, subjectivity. Sadly, the Magisterium of the United Bible
Societies has ended up manufacturing and defending a new Textus Receptus
which, in the absence of the irrecoverable original, is now officially
anointed as (to paraphrase Ritschl) “having the value of the autographs
for us.”
Translation of the Bible has
rendered scholarship moot, since Bible publishers refuse to incorporate
critical results into their renderings, remembering the book-burnings that
greeted the debut of the RSV. Scholarship is ruined, utterly compromised,
by marketing considerations. Often new Bibles are Targums, retooled
according to either Politically Correctness or Evangelical devotionalism
or, nightmarishly, both! But it gets even worse, since all this is
only a more crass version of the whole “hermeneutical” enterprise of
scholars: making the Bible sound like it fits the modern day when clearly
it does not. Again, such gap-crossing might be necessitated by a
commitment to make the Bible an authority for our day, come hell or high
water, but that would be incumbent upon scholars only if they were still
Christians. And most are. Like apologetics (of which it is but a species,
after all), hermeneutics poisons itself with a built-in dishonesty, the
substitution of a false, familiar Bible for the real, unpalatable one.
Historical Jesus studies come
in for Avalos’s righteous wrath, too. Has there been any advancement
beyond Schweitzer? Or rather a shocking retreat, a cringing away from his
insight that Jesus scholars cannot help using “Jesus” as a ventriloquist
dummy for their own wise views? In a few brief strokes, Avalos lays bare
criteria new and old for determining what Jesus “really” said. It can only
be the will to believe that has scaled over the eyes of so-called critics
who, e.g., discovering that a “tradition” that Jesus said something is
attested in two sources, vote it “red,” oblivious of what ought to be
obvious: groundless rumors may have any number of attestations that are
“independent” in the trivial sense that one is not a direct copy of the
other.
Avalos’s indictment of the
Society and Journal of Biblical Literature, which comprises the real-life
Sitz-im-Leben of American Biblical Studies rings true to me. It is
a “professional society” in both the best and the worst senses. The SBL is
a Lonely Hearts Club for up-and-coming wannabes who haunt the meetings,
trying to prove themselves worthy of employment (even though there are
virtually no jobs for them) by presenting papers (with a due sense of
pomposity) dealing with ever more microscopic minutiae. The more of them
there are, the less there can be to say of an original or valuable nature,
and so the farce continues and the field grows self-stultified. There are
still new thing to be learned at these meetings and in their publications,
but I think Avalos’s diagnosis is on the mark. The very “professionalism”
of the profession is quickly reducing it to absurdity and uselessness.
One detects an altogether
different spirit in the deliberations of the Jesus Seminar. A younger and
fresher endeavor, as well as a very much smaller one, it lacks the baggage
of the SBL. But it has been marked with an irony that illustrates another
of Avalos’s points. Robert W. Funk (like Avalos himself, a veteran boy
evangelist turned unblinking biblical critic) sought to bring Biblical
Studies out of the ecclesiastical ivory tower where its revelations never
trickled down to the Babbitts in the pews. He wanted Biblical Studies to
thrive in secular institutions, but, like Avalos says, even in university
religion departments the field was isolated, insulated, and semi-covertly
confessional. So Funk took it to the streets, founding the Westar
Institute as a gadfly think-tank that could feed its results into the
popular consciences via cultivating links with mainstream media. It
worked, and the index of that was the hue and cry raised in the media and
in churches. But that was all right: any publicity was good publicity:
even if the Seminar was slandered and vilified (as it usually was/is), it
got people talking about the issues. Funk and the others were not shy
about calling the bluff of hermeneutics, repudiating (in language
reminiscent of Bishop Pike) the whole metaphysical worldview of Bible
religion. The Seminar Fellows always liked to think they (we) were pure
historians of early Christianity, not defenders of it, despite our own
various religious stances.
But the Seminar’s critics (or
so I always thought) were right on one crucial point: permeating the whole
endeavor was an implicit Christology of a Politically Correct kind. Jesus
was remade yet again into a chic savior for the 1990s. And, once the basic
work was done (it took eleven years), weighing both the sayings and the
stories of the gospels, there was an interim period of drift in which the
further direction was up for grabs. In this window period it became more
and more obvious, really overt, that Funk’s goal for the Westar
Institute/Jesus Seminar had always been to reinvigorate the Christian
Church for the new millennium. To this end the Seminar cultivated liberal
religious superstars (Bishop Spong, Karen Armstrong, Ann Primavesi, Lloyd
Geering, and Don Cupitt among them) who had no business being there—unless
the agenda had changed. And it had. Or it had become explicit. And this is
a perfect example of what Hector Avalos is talking about. Even what first
appears to be objective, outside-the-box new versions of Biblical Studies
eventually reveals itself as a new Bible Society seeking to propagate the
true faith. It will be interesting to see what may come of even newer
efforts, like The Jesus Project, which, without opposing and denigrating
religion, exist for the very purpose of keeping New Testament scholarship
honest.