Pulp Bible

44 Comments

Everyone is an expert on the Bible. This is one of the factors that provides professional biblical scholars with generous ulcers. Everyone is an expert because they know what they believe about the Bible. The difficulty is very few people actually know much about the Bible. Belief and knowledge are very different features of the human psyche. In my introductory course on the Hebrew Bible last night, I showed the clip from Pulp Fiction where Jules exegetes Ezekiel 25.17 (which is a fictional verse concocted for the movie). This offers a springboard to discuss how the Bible is perceived in society at large. Many people believe that Ezekiel 25.17 actually reads as Jules quotes it. The writer/director of any movie may freely manipulate the Bible since they are as expert as anyone else on the subject. (Of course, Ezekiel is a safe bet for a false citation since few people have actually read the book.)

As an officially trained “expert” on the Bible who has learned the original languages and who has read far more books on the Bible than health or common sense would dictate, I often wonder about this. When the Jehovah’s Witnesses stop by, knowing that I have these credentials, they plow straight ahead and tell me what the Bible really means. They are experts as well. When my wife was pregnant and we visited the obstetrician for an initial interview, as soon as he discovered my vocation, the physician quoted Scripture for this nervous young couple before him. Would you not rather have a Bible expert deliver your first child? Where is there room for the bone fide Bible specialist?

Having read Hector Avalos’ The End of Biblical Studies some months ago, I found myself largely in agreement. In many quarters the Bible receives a privileged treatment that only creates problems. Politicians, rap artists, physicians, movie directors, and janitors are all experts on the Bible; why do we need those of us who’ve made it a life’s work? The answer, I believe, is that knowledge of the Bible is at an all-time low. Many venerate the Bible without understanding what it is. Until society gets a grasp on what it means to have so many experts on the Bible, everyone should ponder the meaning of the passage that reads, “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

44 thoughts on “Pulp Bible”

  1. Pingback: Dr. Platypus » Blog Archive » Everybody’s a (Biblical) Critic

  2. Sabio Lantz

    (1) Avalos’ book must have been bit depressing for you, eh?

    (2) I must come to the defense of those who twist the Bible and misquote to their own end. Afterall, Mr. Bible expert, didn’t the writer of Matthew do that with some Old Testament passages while trying to squeeze Jesus into a more marketable package? I forgot the verses — and didn’t other NT authors do the same a few times? If so, then it seems non-professionals are the ones who made the Christian Bible. Ironic, eh? But you tell me, you are the trained professional!

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  3. Pingback: Yes, I am a Bible Expert… And You Can Be Too! « A ‘Goula Blogger

  4. Jules Aimé

    Okay, I’ll bite. Why should anyone care what professional Bible scholars think about the Bible?

    It seems to me that your authority, such as it is, ends the second you leave the lecture room at the school you teach at. After that you’re just an ordinary person like the rest of us and the force of your opinions is a function of your ability to persuade the rest of us that you’re worth listening to. If you can’t convince us, then, sorry but you’re out of luck.

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    • Steve Wiggins

      Precisely my point, Jules. I’ve been in the biz for nearly two decades, and that is two decades too long. As I tell my students, you can believe whatever you want about the Bible, but there are facts about the Bible as well (dates, contexts, worldviews, etc.). I’ve experienced many, many people having taken the class and having left with not even a dent in their unexamined assumptions. While I do not reveal my own personal religious outlook here (or in the classroom), I would feel safe in saying that Avalos worth reading on this subject because he gets quite a few things spot on.

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  5. Henk van der Gaast

    You have to feel sorry for young quarterbacks and their partners when they see an obgyn fixated on the top 100 pass plays of all times.

    Just hope that this was just a garrulous professional trying to chit chat.

    Until he gets to the 50 hail mary’s of all time. Run Forrest Run!!.

    There are some kudos for teaching things dispassionately when the content material requires great passion to understand the writers.

    The best theological teachers I’ve seen have been the ones who do not interpret their belief but interpret the text, the history (if available) and the archaeology and what the author is saying with relation to the other author.

    Thats why words such as exegesis, eisegis etc etc are so important. Short hand to convey to the student, this is the task methodology I want you to practice.

    Amasingly, only a few folk make good teachers. The colleges snap them up.

    Church would be a different place if we had teachers rather than preachers.

    Now as to my Ezekiel phrases, only when the kids don’t do house cleaning! They know the difference between improbable flying/deity couch chairs and the threat of fatherly punishment.

    The pocket money thing no longer works. The dirty clothes in a hidden 19″ * 19″ box does.

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  6. Ian

    I’m not sure I get this. I don’t understand this existential angst over biblical studies.

    How is it becoming anything more than just another niche academic interest? How is it the end of biblical studies when everyone thinks they’re an expert (but as you point out, clearly isn’t)? How is it the end if nobody cares about the bible?

    Is it really the end of the pretence that the bible is somehow special? Is what we’re actually seeing the fulfilment of the historical critical method – where the bible becomes just another thing: another ancient text for scholars to debate, another cultural meme for holywood to exploit?

    I’m really not getting why that is a bad thing…

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    • Steve Wiggins

      Hi Ian,

      It’s a matter of perspective. Some of us (including Avalos) entered this field only to find a truth much larger than we’d been led to believe. It is like English majors learning that Shakespeare did not write all of his plays, or music majors learning the Bach did not compose Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Only with the Bible there is much less you can do with it. A scholar of English can teach in high school; a musician can busk or find a position in a secular setting. The Bible scholar has slammed all doors. The misfortune is not on society’s part, but on an individual level.

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      • Ian

        I see, thank you.

        I think holding up busking and high-school teaching for former scholars in other subjects is a little mean on them. I know musicians, for example, who end up working in supermarkets because there really isn’t much you can do with a degree in orchestral percussion if you can’t get a job in the (dwindling) numbers of professional orchestras.

        Biblical scholars have a steady stream of people to teach too. There is still an ample supply of naive religionists to disabuse of their preconceptions!

        And still, fundamentally, there is a social essential for good biblical studies. Our society is under attack by malevolent forces who wield their poor understanding of the bible as a cudgel. I think it essential to have professional scholars to call them out.

        What’s difficult is that the latter role is in tension with the former. We need more biblical scholars willing to call BS on religiously motivated fuzzy headedness. But those scholars probably won’t be in demand by seminaries, obviously!

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        • Steve Wiggins

          Please don’t think of my comments as belittling. I am married to a musician (ABD at Illinois!) who has had to take jobs well beneath her abilities for years just to support us. All of her talented friends are in just about as dire straits. Same goes for English majors. My point is that society wants the benefits of highly trained specialists in the humanities but then clubs them over the head when they bother to get qualifications. I know this because I was in the market a long time. I was a full-time seminary professor who was fired for being too liberal when I didn’t get much beyond suggesting students should at least recognize what J, E, D and P stood for. Be sure to read my post for today since I address this yet again.

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  7. rey

    Any real Bible expert would know that Chrestianity (popularly known as Marcionism) came before Christianity. That fits into your “there are facts about the Bible as well (dates, contexts, worldviews, etc.)” Yep, I’m a Bible expert too!

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  8. Henk van der Gaast

    I’ve more bibles than I have electrochemistry texts. That doesn’t make me an expert in either.

    There are 400 page books on topics like the world around Paul and many more on how Paul and his fellows felt about their end times.

    It makes far more sense to be an expert on the little components that the scholarly body comprises.

    Mind you, some students will make sweeping statements from non verifiable sources. You see them debating Hitchens and co where even they can’t help but raise their eyebrow.

    A very nice young man called Dinesh makes a habit of falling flat on his face in monthly public debates.

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  9. N. T. Wrong

    When Barack Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, he would often encounter students who thought they were already quite familiar with the subject. And so, they would fail to seriously consider the subject in the detail it deserves.

    Barack Obama makes a worthy comparison with the teaching of biblical studies:

    “Sometimes I imagined my work to be not so different from the work of the theology professors who taught across campus—for, as I suspect was true for those teaching Scripture, I found that my students often felt they knew the Constitution without having really read it. They were accustomed to plucking out phrases that they’d heard and using them to bolster their immediate arguments, or ignoring passages that seemed to contradict their views.”
    – Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, 2008: 85.

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      • Henk van der Gaast

        Now there! I just heard Obama reduce his oratory when criticised for talking to experts.

        I am In Obama’s camp on good speeches and going as far as he can with what is at hand.

        Clearly he doesn’t spend his time getting science policy from the local market place.

        Just wish he would get his head into gear and just veto any attempt to hinder education, science and technology in your country.

        Maybe the golden hairdo that runs this country would get the hint.

        Every child that gets a real education is another that despises the irrationalities that governments have carried out in the generation before and during its development.

        When I was younger, education was a privilege not a right. I think that governments who do not see that duty to make sure that folk are as literate and as numerate and as worldly as they can be have failed that and a future generation.

        Theological education being derided? Stop feeling that way. There are as many courses on Greco-Roman history, the civil war, pre saxon britain and the rise of the first world war post 1843 . Everything that leads to furthering knowledge is invaluable.

        I just wish we wouldn’t teach kids to be calculator dependent in school.

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  10. Jules Aimé

    Thanks for your response.

    It seems to me that there is a difference between us and it might be summed up this way: we agree about the facts of the situation but while I take it to be a good thing you take it to be a bad thing. I see nothing but good in the declining respect for authority in the humanities.

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    • Henk van der Gaast

      That’s either being disingenuous or not understanding the humanities.

      Maybe the humanities need an overhaul. I really don’t know. From the theses I’ve read; the humanities show great promise for nurturing wise people.

      I have met many insular folk in the humanities, science and medicine. I would scrap any of them.

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  11. jimgetz

    The other night I was asked by a friend what “biblical scholars” thought about the historicity of Job and Esther. As a writer by trade, he thought the literary merits outpaced the facts on the ground. I, unfortunately, responded honestly, discussing issues of genre and how a text would have been heard by original audiences.

    This drew ire from a few other friends and put me in an awkward situation for the rest of the night (if not for weeks to come). I’m inclined any more to go with Ibn Ezra and say let those who know keep silent. Or, as the Daodejing states, let the sage stay silent to keep the people ignorant.

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    • Ian

      No, no, no.

      Surely that *is* the end of biblical studies. When we sit on the truth and we abandon the debate to the lunatics.

      Let’s face it, critical biblical scholarship is not compatible with cultural Christianity. Surely that is incentive for biblical scholarship to be in the midst of a counter-cultural movement.

      Everybody thinks they know the bible. But they’re wrong. So why whimper away?

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      • jimgetz

        Ian, I used to hold to your point of view; but I’m starting to tweek it recently.
        Just as my colleagues in literature and first year writing don’t feel they need to teach their friends the proper use of the semicolon and my colleagues in philosophy don’t regularly lay logistical smackdowns on friends over a couple of beers, I don’t think that professors of biblical studies have to correct biblical misunderstandings 24/7.

        It’s not a matter of whimpering away, but knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.

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        • Ian

          Well that’s just being socially well adjusted, surely.

          Your original comment painted the scene when you were asked for your opinion, and gave it, but drew ire as a result. You then seemed to suggest that you wouldn’t venture to put forward the truth if asked.

          That was my response.

          I don’t go around telling people when they’re wrong like an idiot, either. But I’ll gently put forward doubt if someone goes starts holding court on their ignorance, and I wouldn’t feign a lack of knowledge if asked.

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  12. pf

    This is just one of those things that is part of human nature. It is unfortunate for the inquisitive because you can learn nuance, but that is upsetting to most people, particularly the religious faithful.

    It is much easier to think you know something than to admit that you don’t and that the truth is complicated.

    As the Avett Brothers sing in a song on their current album: “Ain’t I like most people, I’m no different, we love to talk on things we don’t know about…”

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  13. Henk van der Gaast

    Guy’s, its not just good Biblical studies that cop a caning in this “modern world”.

    Authority has to bite its tongue on a lot of things under the popularism umbrella.

    Apparently explanation and correction is considered a faux pas in this world of mutual mindless tittering.

    Of course, I don’t follow suit at all. But at least when someone shows me I am wrong I will correct my aberrant ideas.

    It’s very easy to follow the path of no-think. Any TV station will offer and confer D. Lit’s in the field on a second to second basis.

    Magnetic pillows anyone?

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    • rey

      What other ‘authority’ do you refer to? Frankly I find talk of authority bothersome. Do you really long for the return of the middle ages and burning people at the stake for not believing what the ‘authority’ tells them to? I thought modern society valued freedom. But I guess authoritarianism is a symptom of academia. The university is modeled on the Catholic church of the middle ages and therefore thinks of itself as an authority on everything that has the right to control all our beliefs.

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  14. Henk van der Gaast

    I am sorry you read authority that way. I didn’t mean it in the sense that you go around telling people what to do.

    I am sure that the next time you are talking about something and somebody pipes up from a career of research into the self same issue, you may understand the term in which I used it.

    I am sure academia varies as much as society. I certainly have no interest in beliefs unless I was to be observing practices alongside beliefs. It’s no speciality of mine.

    I do not try to foster any beliefs at all. I don’t operate in the world of belief. Nor do most researchers. The only ones who do are those who spend their days defending their own beliefs. I’ve gone into this previously.

    I am in the wrong tree for those accusations. Toddle along to the colleges where a few mainstream believers still exist should you want satisfaction on that score.

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    • rey

      I’m just trying to understand what you meant by “Authority has to bite its tongue on a lot of things under the popularism umbrella.” You’re the one who brought up authority, not me.

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      • Henk van der Gaast

        Oh that is easy, I thought that was understood by society.

        There is a lot of poor analysis of a situation in every conversation.

        Listening to someone generate an entire conversation about something that is scientifically proven and in fact is at best, not at all demonstrated, and at worst, disproven and demonstrably so, deserves to be countered.

        Yet, its nicer to accept the blither over somebodies real understanding of the matter.

        For example;

        It’s one of the reasons why people do not trust vaccines or pharmaceuticals but will leap to placebo therapy, even if they really do not understand the concept of placebos or the underlying failures of their arguments.

        If somebody who actually has gone down the path of the science, the economies, the law and the trials actually pipes up during such conversations they are immediately declared a “Stooge to Big Pharma”.

        That’s what authority gets you nowadays. I feel sorry for scientists working in the field to have to put up with such blither. They may have a masochistic streak.

        Everything is natural, the woo is only more so. Its evidenced in every walk of life.

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        • rey

          “If somebody who actually has gone down the path of the science, the economies, the law and the trials actually pipes up during such conversations they are immediately declared a ‘Stooge to Big Pharma’.”

          Well, I’d say you’re obviously on the side on the loonytoons on this one, considering that the conspiracy theorists were all proven to be quite sane with out latest vaccine hype. The swine flu didn’t do anything. People refused to get the shot out of abject fear of Obama’s regime, and mistrust of the trumped out completely fabricated death-count, and nothing happened to them. Clearly the self-appointed ‘experts’ with all their fancy learnin’ were nothing but stooges of big pharma. We needed that shot about like a hole in the head. Of course, who knows, the swine flu may miraculously reappear in November as a ploy to keep voters indoors and away from the polls this November.

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  17. Sabio Lantz

    @ John Loftus
    I saw you do the same on others sites. How about responding to this blog a bit before redirecting to yours. (let’s see if you are even following comments or if this was just a spam fly-by)

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    • Steve Wiggins

      Hi Malcolm. Ezekiel 25.17 reads “I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful punishments. Then they shall know that I am Yahweh, when I lay my vengeance on them.” Not, “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee” as “quoted” in Pulp Fiction. There some overlap, but the movie made up the quote from Ezekiel.

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  20. Ed

    I sure hope some Bible-thumper isn’t delivering *my* first child. I’d rather have someone with a little more scientific mindset. You know, a doctor.

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    • Henk van der Gaast

      You wont believe this my friend, but there ae a goodly proportion of doctors who are creationists and believe that alternative medicine is ok…start worrying.

      PS ED, how many months are you in to this very unique situation?

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