Writing at Salon, Laura Miller reviews a new book by professor of Religion, Timothy Beal.
"The Rise and Fall of the Bible": Rethinking the Good Book
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The thing is, many Americans -- especially those raised in the less reflective Christian denominations -- know nothing about how the Bible was compiled. That's why so many of them were amazed to learn from "The Da Vinci Code" that the Old and New Testaments are assemblages of texts written at different times by different authors, most of whom were not eyewitnesses to the events they describe. In Brown's crackpot version, the Emperor Constantine gets cast as the arch-villain, ordaining that conservative texts be officially canonized, while more politically radical (and less misogynistic) works got kicked out of the scripture clubhouse. The real story is even more unstable than Brown's inaccurate potted version, with dozens of official and semiofficial variations (including or excluding certain marginal books) produced in the centuries after the death of Jesus.
The bestselling New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, who, like Beal, was raised in a conservative evangelical family, has written in greater depth on early Christian texts; that isn't really Beal's purpose. Ehrman became an agnostic, but Beal is still a Christian, and with "The Rise and Fall of the Bible," he wants to argue against the common perception of the Bible as God's infallible handbook on how to live, "totally accurate in all of its teachings" -- a view, incidentally, that nearly half of all Americans (and 88 percent of "born again" Christians) claim to believe. Beal is the sort of Christian who doesn't want to raise his son to "think that creationism is a viable alternative to evolutionary biology or that homosexuality is sinful," but he is as skeptical of liberal attempts to simplify the Bible as he is of the more predominant right-wing reductionism. He would rather see his co-religionists embrace the fact that the Bible is full of contradictions and inconsistencies and come to regard it not as "the book of answers, but as a library of questions," many of which can never be conclusively resolved.
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Even more insidious, in Beal's eyes, is the trend over the past couple of centuries away from word-for-word translations of the Bible and toward "functional equivalence" and "meaning driven" translations. These considerably fiddled-with versions iron out the wrinkles and perplexities in the ancient texts and nudge them closer toward the advice, directives and "values" so many people expect from their Bible. Beal argues that the Bible industry resorts to this sort of thing precisely because the Bible doesn't offer cut-and-dried guidance -- or Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, as one popular modern acronym would have it.
Much like the professor who assigned the Old Testament during my sophomore year of college, Beal would prefer that people read the Bible as if it were a work of art -- that is, as a text permitting multiple interpretations and as a spur to further thought and self-examination rather than as the last word on all of life's enigmas. Or, as he rather fetchingly puts it at one point: "This is poetry, not pool rules." His approach is, of course, more congenial to nonbelievers than the conviction that the Bible describes historical facts and constitutes the "inerrant" word of God. Still, even an optimistic secularist may find it difficult to credit Beal's prediction that his way of reading the Bible is just about to catch on, big time.
Beal thinks the current boom in biblical consumerism amounts to a "distress crop," the last great efflorescence of the old authoritative ideal before people move on and learn to embrace biblical ambiguity. I'm not so sure. Craving the certainty and absolutism of fundamentalism is a fairly common response (across many religious faiths) to the often terrifying flux of modern life. If certitude is the main thing American Christians are seeking when they turn to the Bible, then they're unlikely to tolerate, let alone embrace, Beal's "library of questions" model. You can learn a lot about how the Bible was created in the past 2,000 years, and about the many strange forms it has taken in the present, from "The Rise and Fall of the Bible." But where it's headed in the future is a mystery much harder to solve.
http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/02/13/rise_and_fall_of_bible