#he also made a joke about if you're a liberal arts major that wants to get good at math

[cesium-sheep]

matt hung out for much of the evening, but there's a very loud dog below the new apartment and it's so bad he said he's willing to move back out over it if it can't get addressed, which kinda put him in a bad mood. but he was telling me about his friend in idaho trying to convince him to come out there and he refused "until my partners have federal protections", and he was joking that arin and I don't need a housekeeper cuz we have him. and we figured out some furniture logistics and stuff. I wanna go home.

[gaast]

Two classes I took in undergrad were Hebrew Bible and New Testament classes. I went to a Methodist school and you had to take at least one REL course to pass. (It was also a liberal arts school with a notable theater troupe, so we were also required to take at least one Theater course. I mention this in case anyone wants to get on a high horse about this.) Both these classes were held in the basement in the main chapel they have on campus.

So anyway, I'm an atheist, never been to any kind of church service, only ever read some of Genesis as assigned reading in 10th grade, but I was super excited for these classes because I was an English major. Do you know the kinda shit you miss out on in literature when you're not super familiar with the Bible? We weren't required to read the whole thing and I didn't (I did less than what we were assigned because, again, English major--I had so much the fuck to read). If you were following me back on my old blog at this point you might actually recall this era of my life.

The professors for these courses, who I believe were married, obviously treated the courses as biblical studies courses, rather than your Sunday School fare. One made several jokes about how you can get an entire degree, hell, a doctorate just by reading, as he put it, "one book." But frankly, everything I learned about biblical scholarship itself was fascinating. If you want to talk about media archaeology and the intersections of dozens, if not hundreds, of differently scholarly and scientific fields, look no further.

The content of the Bible is one thing--as a foundational text inspiring the thought and lives of billions of people, reading it is an odd experience. Learning about Genesis, the whole Torah really, you learn that several different apparent editors (called redactors) very clearly changed the text that we received over time. These redactors even have names (that scholars have given them). If Exodus was edited to lend more legitimacy to the priesthood, you can bet that P did that shit.

But it also verges into book history. Ancient authors didn't have a concept of plagiarism. If you read lines you liked and wanted to use in your own writing, you just copied them wholesale. This is the only reason why we have some surviving fragments of otherwise completely lost texts--for example, Jesus' beatitudes. And if you wanted to give yourself more authority, you'd sign your work as if you were some other actually famous person. Many of the epistles were absolutely 100% DEFINITELY not written by Paul, but they all say they were because that was the practice. (The epistles are ordered by date and the ones after Paul's execution are way more shit-Christian than anything Paul wrote. But they claimed to be Pauline and maybe that was enough to include them, or maybe their inclusion in the Bible was more because their ideology was agreeable. Speaking of...)

But also, consider this: so many people wrote so many books that could have found their way into the Bible. Religious leaders at the time decided what books to include in the collection, and what books to exclude. The Book of Enoch was incredibly popular in its time, but it's now considered apocrypha. Meanwhile, Ecclesiastes isn't even really religious in tone or subject and it was included. (It's also fun to think about why English style rules exclude canon biblical book names from the otherwise-standard italicization of book titles.)

And one more consideration: ancient biblical texts had this pernicious tendency to be written in ancient Greek, which didn't really use things like "spaces between words." To make more scrolls so more people had access to these texts, scribes, who often couldn't actually read, would have to copy the incredibly cramped handwriting of people who they may not have known, from a language they couldn't understand, whose characters they could easily have confused. This happened in a chain of people, from scribe to scribe from town to town, over the course of centuries. Beyond that, imagine copying a scroll of, say, the Book of Isaiah by hand. Can you guarantee that you'd never copy the same line twice in a row by accident, especially if you, again, didn't know the language?

So what even is "the Bible?" Is it the document we got all these millennia later? Is it the original scrolls as written by the original authors--which we can never and will never have? Is it somewhere in between? Should it include this book, exclude that book?

The Bible is still alive. It's a living document that scholars and faith leaders are still debating to this day. If you don't believe me, why are you a Protestant and not a Catholic, or a Lutheran and not a Quaker, or a Baptist and not a Muslim, or Jewish and not an Episcopalian, or an Eastern Orthodox Christian and not an Anglican? Its meanings and histories will be debated for as long as we do, for better or worse. And frankly, there's no right answer. The Bible contradicts itself. We have Lilith because people noticed that Creation happens twice in Genesis because a redactor added extra versions of the earliest Genesis stories to fit their own agenda. You ever read Genesis? It's right there. Two parallel Creations happen side-by-side. They both contradict each other. Jesus contradicts the Hebrew Bible, using people like Isaiah's words to assert that his coming was foretold, when Isaiah, as a prophet during the time of the split kingdom of Isarael, was speaking metaphorically to damn the people in charge (and the people writ large) who let a culturally and ethnically singular people become separated ideologically. Looking at it from one perspective, Jesus was a rabbi, but he was also a biblical scholar, working to recontextualize meanings that were ancient even to him. And yet many claim it mjst be followed dogmatically. How? It contradicts itself! Do I do nothing on the Sabbath or can I take care of some shit I gotta do? How soon after my brother dies do I need to impregnate my sister-in-law for him? Do you really want me to bring up Lot's daughters?

If this kind of shit doesn't make you want to be a biblical scholar I really don't know what could.

But for one last little thing. The Exodus didn't happen. We can get archaeological evidence for a surprising number of things said to occur in the Bible. We can say with reasonable certainty that yeah, Jericho was toppled pretty quickly, for example (probably not with the mere use of trumpets, but you know). We're also reasonably certain that Jesus existed, because EVERYONE agrees this dude was crucified, and if you were someone's follower at the time you'd do everything in your power to assert that he was execured by any other means because of just how humiliating crucifixion was considered, but allies and enemies of his claim he was crucified so that's honestly enough for us to say, yeah, he probably existed and died that way. But we can't find evidence for the Exodus. Ancient Egyptians were notoriously good record keepers and they never recorded the mass departure of a nation's worth of slaves. We'd also be able to see in the earth evidence of that many people walking anywhere, especially if they were wandering for forty years. But that evidence hasn't manifested. It's very unlikely those events occurred.

But that doesn't mean the Exodus isn't real. How many millions, if not billions, of people have accepted that the Exodus occurred in their shared history as a people? How has the fact of that belief shaped their self-conception and the ways they interacted with the world? How has this simple story influenced hundreds of generations of people, and how did it guide them through the numerous awful diasporas they were forced through over the centuries?

Even if the Bible is fictitious--and much of it is--fiction has a power over people. It influences us. That's why we consume it. The Song of Solomon isn't included in the Bible just because it says Solomon wrote it. It's in there because it reflected the thoughts, beliefs, and culture of the people who produced and read it. Anyone who writes fiction could stand to think a little more deeply about religious texts and the ways they affect people's lives. It might make us feel a bit more responsible.