Review: The Bible by Karen Armstrong | Books | The Guardian
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Richard Harries praises Karen Armstrong's study of the origins of Jewish and Christian scriptures, The Bible
Richard Harries
Sun 14 Oct 2007 08.57 AESTFirst published on Sun 14 Oct 2007 08.57 AEST
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Buy The Bible: The Biography at the Guardian bookshopThe Bible: The Biography
by Karen Armstrong
302pp, Atlantic Books, £14.99
What on earth are we to make of the Bible? Literally a closed book to so many now, and when opened found to be an amazing mixture of the obscure, the horrendous and the sublime. A book that is still used by millions for daily reflection and misused by a good number for political purposes. Karen Armstrong's study, which appears in the series "Books That Shook the World", manages to organise a large amount of complex material in a clear and orderly way. She shows how the highly disparate writings that now compose the Jewish and Christian scriptures came together and examines the very different methods of interpretation used over the centuries. Her book's great strength is the way she unfolds the Jewish and Christian histories of formation and interpretation in parallel with one another.
The two pivotal points for her are the destruction of the temple in the 6th century BCE and the even more devastating destruction of Herod's great temple in 70 CE, followed, some decades later, by the flattening of the whole of Jerusalem.
These traumatic events resulted in the formation of religious communities no longer so dependent on a physical building but on words written down on scrolls and later collected together in books. The destruction of the second temple resulted not only in the young Christian church, which saw itself as a temple of the Holy Spirit, the locus of the divine presence in the world, but in the gathering of a small group of rabbis in Yavneh, a coastal city southwest of Jerusalem, and later in Galilee. Indeed you feel that Armstrong's heart is with this group of heroic rabbis trying to recreate Judaism after their terrible loss and urging that scripture should always be interpreted as encouraging compassion even when it is against the surface meaning of a particular text.
The stories continue, showing the continuing tension between those who wished to see a historical truth in a text and those who sought what they thought of as its real ethical and mystical meaning through allegory. But as Armstrong shows, an exclusively literal interpretation of the Bible is a recent development. I particularly liked the statement by Calvin, who is so often appealed to by fundamentalists, that the story of creation in Genesis is God adapting a complex, profound truth to our very limited minds and is therefore to be seen as balbative or "baby talk". All interpretations are in any case inseparable from the ideology that is brought to bear, whether it is the conviction that all scripture is about Christ, or the one behind certain forms of the Kabbalah, with its mysterious idea of a divine spark now scattered and implanted in each one of us which has to be reunited with its source.
One of the book's underlying themes is that there is no definitive meaning of a text. Each has been and will be endlessly disputed. William Blake summed it up succinctly: "Both read the Bible day and night, / But thou read'st black where I read white." This has been a great source of embarrassment to Christians but is regarded as something of a strength in Judaism. Indeed there is a wonderful story, which Armstrong cites, of some early rabbis trying to find the true meaning of a text. One of them appeals to heaven for a miracle or divine voice to show them what it is, and the answer comes back that the responsibility for interpretation now lies with them. This cannot be overridden by anything from heaven. As a later rabbi said: "We pay no attention to a heavenly voice." On hearing that he had been overruled, God had the decency to laugh and say: "My children have conquered me."
The second theme is well put, not only by the rabbis of Yavneh but Augustine: "Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbour does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived."
In the light of that it is strange that space is given to Rabbi Meir Kahane - whose biblical justification of ethnic cleansing led Baruch Goldstein to shoot 29 worshipping Palestinians dead - but not to any of the heroic figures, some of them martyrs, such as Archbishop Oscar Romero, who have been inspired by the Bible to struggle for the most marginalised against the forces of oppression.
Armstrong takes a tough-minded approach to alleged facts, observing for example that "the scholarly consensus is that the story of the exodus is not historical". She doubts whether we can get beyond what the Gospels give us to assemble a historic life of Jesus. Yet sceptical scholars, whether Jewish like Geza Vermes or Christian like JN Sanders, have come up with outlines of Jesus's life and teaching that are very similar.
The book has a helpful glossary, footnotes and index. But I would have liked to see a final chapter that considered how feminists, liberation theologians and literary critics are looking at scripture with new enthusiasm and insights. Also there is the Orthodox Christian east, as well as western Europe and America, to take into account in any full story; and, not least, the way the Bible is now being interpreted and used in a host of developing countries.
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Lord Harries of Pentregarth is honorary professor of theology at King's College London. His book The Re-enchantment of Morality: Wisdom for a Troubled World is due to be published by SPCK.
The stories continue, showing the continuing tension between those who wished to see a historical truth in a text and those who sought what they thought of as its real ethical and mystical meaning through allegory. But as Armstrong shows, an exclusively literal interpretation of the Bible is a recent development. I particularly liked the statement by Calvin, who is so often appealed to by fundamentalists, that the story of creation in Genesis is God adapting a complex, profound truth to our very limited minds and is therefore to be seen as balbative or "baby talk". All interpretations are in any case inseparable from the ideology that is brought to bear, whether it is the conviction that all scripture is about Christ, or the one behind certain forms of the Kabbalah, with its mysterious idea of a divine spark now scattered and implanted in each one of us which has to be reunited with its source.
One of the book's underlying themes is that there is no definitive meaning of a text. Each has been and will be endlessly disputed. William Blake summed it up succinctly: "Both read the Bible day and night, / But thou read'st black where I read white." This has been a great source of embarrassment to Christians but is regarded as something of a strength in Judaism. Indeed there is a wonderful story, which Armstrong cites, of some early rabbis trying to find the true meaning of a text. One of them appeals to heaven for a miracle or divine voice to show them what it is, and the answer comes back that the responsibility for interpretation now lies with them. This cannot be overridden by anything from heaven. As a later rabbi said: "We pay no attention to a heavenly voice." On hearing that he had been overruled, God had the decency to laugh and say: "My children have conquered me."
The second theme is well put, not only by the rabbis of Yavneh but Augustine: "Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbour does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived."
In the light of that it is strange that space is given to Rabbi Meir Kahane - whose biblical justification of ethnic cleansing led Baruch Goldstein to shoot 29 worshipping Palestinians dead - but not to any of the heroic figures, some of them martyrs, such as Archbishop Oscar Romero, who have been inspired by the Bible to struggle for the most marginalised against the forces of oppression.
Armstrong takes a tough-minded approach to alleged facts, observing for example that "the scholarly consensus is that the story of the exodus is not historical". She doubts whether we can get beyond what the Gospels give us to assemble a historic life of Jesus. Yet sceptical scholars, whether Jewish like Geza Vermes or Christian like JN Sanders, have come up with outlines of Jesus's life and teaching that are very similar.
The book has a helpful glossary, footnotes and index. But I would have liked to see a final chapter that considered how feminists, liberation theologians and literary critics are looking at scripture with new enthusiasm and insights. Also there is the Orthodox Christian east, as well as western Europe and America, to take into account in any full story; and, not least, the way the Bible is now being interpreted and used in a host of developing countries.
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Lord Harries of Pentregarth is honorary professor of theology at King's College London. His book The Re-enchantment of Morality: Wisdom for a Troubled World is due to be published by SPCK.
