On Reading the New Testament

The New Testament is a collection of twenty-seven books, written by at least nine authors (the conservative view) and possibly by as many as 15 (the mainstream academic view). Even if the conservative position is right, and there are only nine authors (assuming, for instance, that the "John" of the letters is the same "John" who wrote the Revelation, and that the unnamed author of the Gospel we call "John" was that person as well), it would be unusual to assume that a Galilean fisherman (John or Peter) had the same undertsanding and position as a Diaspora Jew from Syria (Paul) or a Roman Gentile of the second or third generation of Christianity (Mark). Culture, language, age, and the immediacy or lack of it have everything to do with how a person experiences an event or a person. It requires an enormous stretch to believe that, unlike with every other historical experience, there is complete harmony in the convictions these people shared.

Think this way: there are 27 New Testament books. The text is more or less concrete -- we can all look at the same book(s) -- but we disagree violently over what they are saying. Apparently, the fact that the topic is Jesus is not enough to guarantee singleness of view. So on what basis do we hold that -- absolutely unlike any other moment in human history -- the production of these works was different?

As I teach, I approach the books not as a single choral work with perfect harmony, but as an unfolding dialogue in the broad community we label "Christianity" (they did not themselves use that word). In other words, we are not looking for the message they shared, but for the themes that engaged them in disagreement. Our "hermeneutic" (our rules for how we read) assumes that one author cannot be used to "complete" another -- that approach has allowed people to read an earlier writer (like Paul) with the perspective of a later author (like John). Unfortunately, that would assume that Paul's intended readers would have been unable to understand him correctly -- unless we assume they had John stop by every time one of Paul's letters arrived. It gets silly if we imagine that Mark (in Rome) wrote a gospel that did not mean what it was supposed to mean until John wrote his gospel 30 years later.

No -- we assume each one has his own voice. Paul is the earliest writer. Since he never mentions the virgin birth, or the miracles Jesus did, or the trial before Pontius Pilate, or any other significant historical detail about Jesus, we will have to assume that those things were not central to his perspective (the appearance to the disciples in John's gospel would have been an enormous help in Paul's argument that we are going to be physical when we are raised from the dead -- but he never mentions it. Did he not know?)

It is important to stress that this approach does not intend disrespect to any of the authors. On the contrary, it is deeply respectful, in that it takes the actual human writer completely seriously. Every word they wrote will be assumed to be intentional. When one uses this word when that word would have been just as correct on the surface, we will be driven to consider the reason this was used. For example, when Jesus says "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani" in Mark's gospel, Mark translates it as "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" That is the way we would translate the words of Psalm 22:1, which Jesus may be quoting. But the word "forsaken" in Hebrew in Psalm 22:1 is not sabachthani, but rather azabthani - in Mark's Gospel Jesus uses a different word than the Psalm uses. Why? Did Jesus misquote? Was it a quote at all? And did Mark mistranslate (sabachthani means "slaughtered")? Or is he playing a game with the reader who would have seen through the "mistake" to something deeper? We want to pay very, very close attention. Anything less is dismissive of the people upon whom Christianity is based.

A Note on the Difficulty

We are separated by 2000 years from the life of Jesus, and almost 1900 years from the last writer of the New Testament collection. That is an enormous gulf. We have a hard enough time understanding the world of 19th century America. That world spoke our language (mostly), lived in places we live, wrote enormous amounts of material -- it would seem easy enough. But how do we reconcile Thomas Jefferson's call for liberty with his slaveholding? How can we reconcile a land of religious freedom with the intentional destruction of American Indian traditions? If that is hard, how would we understand a world that spoke Aramaic and Hebrew (Jesus' Galilee and Jerusalem) or Greek (the rest of the Roman empire)? How do we understand Jesus as a Jew, when the only first-century Judaism that gave us any writings was the extremist Essenes? How do we understand Jesus' (and the NT writers') view on wealth and poverty, when we don't know what the socio-economic world of the first century was like?

All of the New Testament documents are written in Greek. Jesus was almost indisputably NOT primarily a Greek-speaker, although he may have known a little just to get by. Whether he spoke it or not, his audience didn't know Greek -- they were the out-of-the-way Jews of the Galilee and the trans-Jordan (see the map). We will have to ask how accurate the translation of Jesus' words (from Hebrew to a language as different as Russian is from English) could be. But that isn't all.

We also have to ask whether the texts we have before us are the exact texts that the New Testament writers created. No original survived -- all we have are copies of copies of copies, and no two copies are identical. To show the writers the respect they deserve, we must try to find a responsible way to guess which of the very old versions of their work is most likely the one they created -- and that means we have to let go of what WE want the text to say, and listen for what THEY wanted the text to say.

And finally, we will have to move from their language (Greek) to ours. That is no easy task, either. Just as Greek is not Hebrew, English is not Greek. A pun on the word pneuma doesn't work in English -- where pneuma can be translated as "wind" or "breath" or "spirit". Jesus tells Nicodemus, "The pneuma blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it." We cannot possibly translate the sentence into an English equivalent with the same force.

 

by Thomas P. Shoemaker (copyright 2003).