Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  24In the fall after I graduated from high school, my parents drove me to New Haven and moved me into my dorm on Old Campus, where all freshmen lived. I was in a fifth-floor walk-up in a quad with three other young women. I met my roommates, nice enough girls I would get along well with. My dad bought me a small blue love seat for the common room that he and another father hauled up those five flights. My mom made my bed with brand-new sheets and helped me unpack. We went out to dinner before they headed to Nebraska, where they were moving once again. It all seemed very normal. Before we parted, they wished me luck and encouraged me to work on my problem, my weight of course, and then I was on my own once more. I have no doubt my parents were afraid to leave me at another school. The last time they did that, I gained a massive amount of weight. I’m sure they were terrified of what would happen in college, of how much bigger I could get. They didn’t worry about drinking or drugs because they already knew my chosen vice. Still, they believed in the importance of education, and I think they hoped that I had some sense of self-preservation, that I would embrace the opportunity I was being given and would want to lose weight so I could be more like other girls, so I could be smaller and therefore better. Having attended boarding school, living on campus for the first two years, I didn’t have any of the typical growing pains associated with going to college. I knew how to take care of myself on a campus, or at least how to make it seem like I was taking care of myself. But I struggled, a lot more than I had in high school. I had acquaintances but no one with whom I felt I could be honest about myself. I was unraveling so much more because there was far less supervision. There were far more temptations and ways to spend my time. New Haven, Connecticut, is a very different city from Exeter, New Hampshire, much bigger, urban, with a diverse population. There was so much more food available to me, both on and off campus—I loved going to Atticus, part bookstore, part café, with delicious salads and sandwiches. I rarely went to class, and when I was in class, little made sense. A biology teacher informed us that it was his mission to weed out the wannabes from the students who were destined to become doctors. I was weeded out, quite efficiently, because the workload was outrageously demanding. There were labs and homework and lab reports to be written according to very strict guidelines. In Calculus III, the math was so complex, so esoteric, it was almost amusing. The professor may as well have been speaking another language.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  85I am taking small steps toward the life I want. For the past twelve years, I have lived, rather unhappily, in rural America. As a black woman, this has been trying, at best. If I’m being honest with myself, other than graduate school, where I didn’t have a choice in where I lived, I have been hiding. I’m afraid to live in a city where, at least in my mind, everyone is thin, athletic, beautiful, and I am an abominable woman. I spent five years in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—a place I didn’t even know existed until I moved there to attend graduate school. I lived in a town of four thousand people. The next town over, over the portage bridge, had seven thousand people. In my town, the street signs were in both English and Finnish because the town had the highest concentration of Finns outside of Finland. We were so far north that my blackness was more a curiosity than a threat. I was a woman out of place, but I did not always feel unsafe. There were the abandoned copper mines and the vast majesty of Lake Superior and so much forest cloaking everything. During fall, deer hunting, so much venison. The winters were endless, snow in unfathomable quantities, the aching whine of snowmobiles. There was loneliness. There were my friends, who made the isolation bearable. There was a man who made everything beautiful.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 35—Letters for Sojourners 237 1 Peter ‹Scholars disagree over whether 1 Peter was written by the apostle Peter or by someone else in his name. The letter is addressed to Christians in Asia Minor, who had once been members of Greco-Roman society but had joined the Christian community. ‹The opening line of 1 Peter addresses these readers as sojourners or resident aliens. They have sometimes been verbally abused and treated as outsiders in mainstream society. Peter responds with an affirmation of belonging. He says that these resident aliens have been chosen by God, belong to God, and are valued by God. They have also been given new birth into a living hope through the message of Jesus’s resurrection. That image of new birth refers to them coming to faith and indicates belonging. It’s a way of saying that in faith, they have received a place in the family. ‹Peter goes on to say that they have an inheritance that comes from God. When New Testament scholars read these lines, they sometimes point out that a sense of belonging is a major factor in identity, but the readers of 1 Peter lived in a context where much of the public approval had been withdrawn. They felt pressured to give up their faith. Peter counters by appealing to a higher authority. Given that God’s opinion is what matters, Christians have an incentive to hold on to their identity in the face of pressure to relinquish it. ‹Earlier, we saw that the writer of Hebrews identified Jesus as a priest, but 1 Peter refers to the followers of Jesus as priests. On public occasions, priests had the honor of offering prayers, incense, and other sacrifices. In this book, Peter ascribes that same honor to his readers, whose sacrifices are the words of praise they offer to God, as well as their acts of righteous conduct in ordinary life. ‹The writer also knows that belonging to the community has a downside. Some are suffering verbal abuse from their former friends and associates. Others are slaves, whose masters might be harsh. And many women are married to men who do not share their beliefs. In each case, Peter urges them not to respond to abuse with abuse.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  25 LECTURE 4 Jacob, Joseph, and Reconciliation T wo notable features of the narratives of Jacob and Joseph are disguises and dreams. Both play an important role in many kinds of literature and can serve both positive and negative ends. Dreams, in particular, often provide clues to the meaning of the story. In many contexts, dreams are seen as a means of divine communication. Some dreams are rather clear, while others are cryptic, but with interpretation, even cryptic dreams can disclose the will of God. That is the assumption in the stories of Jacob and Joseph. T ogether, the disguises and dreams create an interplay between concealment and disclosure, challenging us to ask where we see things clearly and where the truth might be hidden. Jacob as a Trickster ‹ The trickster is a recurring figure in literature, a clever figure, who gets what he wants through deception. Jacob as trickster is introduced in the last half of Genesis 25. At this point, Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac has married a woman named Rebekah, and Rebekah has given birth to twins who are as different as night and day. ● The first of the twins is Esau, who has a ruddy complexion and is coarse and covered with hair. He spends his life outdoors because his passion is hunting, for which his father loves him. In Isaac’s eyes, Esau, the older twin, is the rightful successor as head of the household. ● Jacob, the younger twin, loves the softer side of life. He likes to stay around the tent, making conversation by the fireside. Because he is a homebody, he is the favorite of his mother, Rebekah. She is determined to make him the privileged one. ‹ The critical moment in the story comes when Isaac knows he is approaching death. Nearly blind, he wants to enact a ritual blessing of the son who will become head of the household and receive a large inheritance. Isaac tells Esau

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation134 ‹ Ezra’s role marks a shift from the pattern that was in place under the Babylonians. Before the exile, the people of Judah were governed by their own king and their own law. But when Jerusalem fell, the Davidic monarchy ended; what remained was a form of Jewish law, which will be implemented by a scribe. ‹ Ezra returns to Jerusalem, where he is confronted with an issue of law and identity. He is told that some of the men have married non-Jewish wives, and he is convinced that these marriages threaten the community’s ability to maintain its distinctive identity. ● In chapter 9, Ezra tells God that he understands that mixed marriages are a violation of the law’s command to remain separate from other nations. He takes the draconian step of requiring people to divorce their foreign wives and send away their children. For him, maintaining a sense of identity requires breaking up families that seemed to compromise Israel’s distinctiveness. ● In Nehemiah 8 to 10, Ezra has people gather in an open plaza near one of the city gates, where he reads the law to them and where others can provide commentary. This scene contains many elements that characterize synagogue services of later generations, including the reading of the law and Ezra is seen as one of the great shapers of Jewish tradition; his reading of the law reflects many elements of synagogue services that are still practiced today.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 20—Jewish Identity and Rebuilding after Exile 133 ‹ The groups starts by building a new altar on the foundation of the old one, offering sacrifices, and celebrating traditional holidays. The altar, the sacrifices, and the festivals all give this returning group a clear sense of identity. They are the bearers of Israel’s distinctive tradition. ‹ Things go well for a while, but then trouble begins, centering on the issue of identity. In chapter 4, a group of people who have been in the region for some time ask if they can join the newcomers in rebuilding the temple. This group consists of people whose ancestors were foreigners, having been brought into the region by the Assyrians many generations before. They, too, worship the God of Israel. ‹ But the returning group doesn’t like the idea. They believe that the descendants of the foreign settlers continue to worship their own ancestral gods alongside the God of Israel. Do the two groups have enough in common to build a joint house of worship, or are the differences significant enough that they can’t work together and maintain their integrity? ‹ In Ezra 4, the returnees decide that building the temple is not a case where shared effort is possible. They see too many differences between their group and the others. Their refusal to cooperate prompts the other group to retaliate. If they can’t participate in the rebuilding, then they’ll try to stop it. Ultimately, the new temple isn’t completed until 515 B.C., more than two decades after Cyrus authorized the rebuilding. Following the Law ‹ Another factor that shapes a distinctive sense of identity is the Law of Moses. In Ezra 7, almost six decades have passed. The year is now 458 B.C., and again, a Persian monarch plays a positive role in renewing Jewish life. King Artaxerxes II authorizes Ezra, a Jewish scribe, to return to Jerusalem to teach people the Jewish law and to ensure that they obey both the Jewish law and the law of the Persian king. This reflects the Persians’ belief that the best way to run an empire was to give people a certain amount of local autonomy.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation240 ● In this case, there was no immediate threat of violence. Instead, the readers felt a broader social pressure to compromise their beliefs and assimilate into the dominant patterns of society. ● Here, the specific issue was whether to eat food that had been offered to idols as sacrifices. The followers of Jesus wondered whether they should join in sacrificial meals to be sociable, even though they didn’t believe in the traditional deities, or whether they should be true to their beliefs and stay away, even though that would seem antisocial. Followers of Christ had to ask how far they could blend into their surroundings before they lost their identity. ‹ A third issue was complacency. The clearest example was the church at Laodicea, described at the end of chapter 3. For these believers, the problem was not that they felt threatened but that life was too comfortable. The writer pictures them saying that they are rich and prosperous, without a care in the world. Thus, he gives them a revelation about themselves: that their material wealth is coupled with spiritual poverty. They are affluent in one sense but empty in another. Their wealth has lulled them into a complacency that has no appeal or vitality. Protagonists of Revelation ‹ The protagonists of Revelation are God the Creator and Jesus the Lamb. At the beginning of chapter 4, we are taken from earth into heaven, where John sees the dazzling throne of God. ● He also sees four mysterious creatures surrounding God: One has a human face and another, the face of a lion. Another looks like an ox, and the last is an eagle. The four creatures are the heavenly representatives of God’s creation. They show that the world’s many creatures have a place in the presence of God. ● Finally, there are 24 elders with gold crowns on their heads. The elders are the heavenly representatives of the worshipping community on earth. ● The scene has clear connections with the Old T estament. And by drawing from earlier prophetic writings, Revelation emphasizes that the God in this scene is Israel’s God. ‹ The central element in God’s identity is that he is the Creator. The heavenly chorus says that God is worthy of glory and honor because he created all things. As we said, people often assume that Revelation is all about Lecture 36—Revelation’s Vision of New Creation 241 Jesus is often associated with a lamb because he exercises the power of God through self-sacrifice; he conquers or overcomes by giving himself for the sake of others.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The Law and the prophets had been the scripture of the New Testament authors. But Schleiermacher believed that the Old Testament was not as authoritative as the New for Christians. It had different views of God, sin and grace and relied on law rather than spirit. In time, the Old Testament might even be relegated to an appendix. Schleiermacher’s biblical theology gave birth to a new Christian movement known as Liberalism, which looked for the universal religious message in the gospels, discarded what seemed peripheral, and tried to express these essential truths in a way that would engage a modern audience. In 1859, Charles Darwin (1809–82) published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which marked a new phase in the history of science. Instead of merely collecting facts, Baconian-style, Darwin put forward an hypothesis: animals, plants and human beings had not been created fully formed but had developed slowly in a long period of evolutionary adaptation to their environment. In The Descent of Man, a later work, he suggested that Homo sapiens had evolved from the same proto-ape as the gorilla and chimpanzee. The Origin was a sober, careful exposition of a scientific theory that attracted a large popular audience: 1,400 copies were sold on the day of publication. Darwin did not intend to attack religion and at first the religious response was muted. There was far greater outcry when seven Anglican clergymen published Essays and Reviews (1861), which made the Higher Criticism accessible to the general reader. 25 The public were now informed that Moses had not written the Pentateuch nor David the Psalms. Biblical miracles were simply literary tropes and should not be understood literally, and most of the events described in the Bible were clearly not historical. The authors of Essays and Reviews argued that the Bible should not be given special treatment but must be approached with the same critical rigour as any other ancient text. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Higher Criticism rather than Darwinism was the main bone of contention between liberal and conservative Christians. Liberals believed that in the long term the critical method would lead to a deeper understanding of the Bible. But for conservatives, the Higher Criticism symbolized everything that was wrong with the post-Enlightenment world that was sweeping old certainties away. 26 In 1888, the British novelist Mrs Humphry Ward published Robert Elsmere, the story of a young clergyman whose faith was destroyed by the Higher Criticism. It became a bestseller, indicating that many people sympathized with Robert’s dilemma. As his wife said: ‘If the Gospels are not true as fact, as history, I cannot see that they are true at all, or of any value.’

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  17 In Western Europe, however, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find God in scripture. The ethos of the Enlightenment had inspired more scholars to study the Bible critically, but it was impossible to experience its transcendent dimension without the gestures and disposition of prayer. In England, some of the more radical deists used the new scholarly methods to undermine the Bible. 18 The mathematician William Whiston (1667–1752) believed that early Christianity had been a more rational faith. In 1745 he published a version of the New Testament from which he had erased every reference to the Incarnation and the Trinity, doctrines that, he claimed, had been foisted on the faithful by the fathers of the Church. The Irish deist John Toland (1670–1722) tried to replace the New Testament with a manuscript that purported to be the long-lost Jewish-Christian gospel of Barnabas, which denied the divinity of Christ. Other sceptics argued that the text of the New Testament was so corrupt that it was impossible to determine what the Bible actually said. But the distinguished classicist Richard Bentley (1662–1742) mounted a scholarly campaign in the Bible’s defence. Using the critical techniques now applied to Graeco-Roman literature, he showed that it was possible to reconstruct the original manuscripts by collating and analysing the variants. In Germany the Pietists, who wanted to get beyond the arid doctrinal polemics of the competing Protestant sects, also seized on these analytic methods to reinstate the Bible, convinced that the biblical critic should be above denominational loyalty. 19 The Pietists’ aim was to liberate religion from theology and recover a more personal experience of the divine. In 1694, they founded a university at Halle to bring the new scholarship to the laity in a non-sectarian guise and Halle became the centre of a biblical revolution. 20 Between 1711 and 1719, its press printed 100,000 copies of the New Testament and 80,000 complete Bibles. Halle scholars also produced the Biblia Pentapla to encourage a trans-denominational reading of scripture: five different translations were printed side by side, so that Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics could read the version of their choice but could consult the wording in another column if they encountered a difficulty. Others translated the Bible in a wholly literal way to show that even in the vernacular the Word of God was far from clear. Theologians should be more reticent in their use of ‘proof texts’ that could not bear the weight of theological interpretation imposed upon them.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Mark wrote in about 70; Matthew and Luke in the late 80s, and John in the late 90s. All four gospels reflect the terror and anxiety of this traumatic period. The Jewish people were in turmoil. The war with Rome had divided families and communities and all the different sects had to rethink their relationship with the temple tradition. But the apokalypsis of the ruined shrine seemed so compelling to the Christians that they felt inspired to proclaim the messiahship of Jesus, whose mission, they believed, had been bound up with the temple. Mark, who was writing immediately after the war, was especially preoccupied by this theme. His community was in deep trouble. Christians had been accused of rejoicing at the temple’s destruction, and Mark shows that members of his ekklesia were being beaten in the synagogues, dragged before the Jewish elders and universally vilified. Many had lost faith. 62 Jesus’s teachings seemed to fall on stony ground and Christian leaders seemed as obtuse as the Twelve, who, in Mark’s gospel, rarely understood Jesus. 63 There was a grim sense of painful rupture with mainstream Judaism. You could not patch an old garment with new cloth, Jesus warned: ‘the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and the tear gets worse. And nobody puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost and the skins too!’ 64 Discipleship meant suffering and an endless struggle with demonic forces. Christians must stay awake; they must be perpetually vigilant! 65 Paul, who wrote while the temple was still standing, had scarcely mentioned it; but the temple was central to Mark’s vision of Jesus. 66 Its destruction was only the first stage in the imminent apocalypse. 67 Daniel had already foreseen this ‘desolating sacrilege’ long ago so the temple had been doomed. 68 Jesus was not a renegade, as his enemies claimed, but deeply in tune with the great figures of the past. He quoted Jeremiah and Isaiah to show that the temple had been intended for all the nations as well as for the Jews. 69 Mark’s ekklesia, which admitted gentiles, had fulfilled these ancient prophecies but the temple had not conformed to God’s plan. No wonder it had been destroyed. Jesus’s death was not a scandal, but had been foretold in the Law and the prophets: 70 it had been foreseen that he would be betrayed by one of his own followers 71 and deserted by his disciples. 72 Yet the gospel ended on a note of terror.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  As they watched their fellow Jews assimilating, many Jews were deeply concerned for the loss of tradition and the more orthodox felt increasingly embattled. In 1803, R. Hayyim Volozhiner, a disciple of the Gaon of Vilna, took a decisive step when he founded the Etz Hayyim yeshiva in Volozhin, Lithuania. Similar yeshivoth were founded in other parts of Eastern Europe during the nineteenth century and became the Jewish equivalents of the American Bible colleges. In the past, a yeshivah had simply consisted of a few rooms for the study of Torah and Talmud behind the synagogue. Etz Hayyim, where hundreds of gifted students from all over Europe gathered to study with experts, was quite different. R. Hayyim taught Torah and Talmud in the method he had learned from the Gaon, analysing the text logically but in a way that produced a spiritual experience. Students were not there to learn about Torah; the process of rote-learning, preparation, and lively, heated discussion were rituals that were just as important as any conclusion reached in class. This method was a form of prayer, and its intensity reflected the spirituality of the Gaon. The curriculum was demanding, the hours long, and the young men were separated from family and friends. Some were allowed to spend a little time on secular subjects, but these were secondary, regarded as stealing time from Torah.40 The original purpose of Etz Hayyim had been to counter Hasidism and reinstate rigorous study of Torah. But as the nineteenth century progressed the threat of the Jewish Enlightenment became a more pressing danger, and Hasidim and misnagdim joined forces against the maskilim, whom they saw as a sort of Trojan horse, smuggling the evils of secular culture into the Jewish world. Gradually the new yeshivoth became bastions of orthodoxy to ward off this encroaching peril. Jews were developing their own type of fundamentalism, which rarely begins as a battle with an external foe, but rather as an internal struggle in which traditionalists fight their co-religionists. Fundamentalist institutions respond to modernity by creating an enclave of pure faith – the yeshiva or the Bible college – where the faithful can reshape their lives. It is a defensive move, which has the potential for a future counter-offensive. The students of a yeshiva, madrasah or Bible college are likely to become a cadre, with a shared training and ideology, in their local communities.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  In his lectures on Galatians, Luther expanded on ‘justification by faith’. In this epistle, Paul had attacked those Jewish-Christians who wanted gentile converts to observe the entire law of Moses, when, according to Paul, all that was necessary was trust (pistis) in Christ. Luther had begun to develop a dichotomy between Law and Gospel.19 Law was the means God used to reveal his wrath and the sinfulness of human beings. We encountered the Law in the inflexible commands that we find in scripture, such as the Ten Commandments. The sinner quails before these demands, which he finds impossible to fulfil. But the Gospel revealed the divine mercy that saves us. ‘Law’ was not confined to the Mosaic law: there was ‘Gospel’ in the Old Testament (when the prophets looked forward to Christ) and plenty of daunting commandments in the New. Both Law and Gospel came from God, but only the Gospel could save us. On 31 October 1517, Luther nailed ninety-five theses on the church door in Wittenberg, protesting against the sale of indulgences and the Pope’s claim to forgive sins. The very first thesis pitted the authority of the Bible against sacramental tradition: ‘When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said “Repent,” he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentence.’ Luther had learned from Erasmus that metanoia, which the Vulgate translated poenitentiam agere (‘do penance’), meant a ‘turning around’ of the Christian’s whole being. It did not mean going to confession. No practice or tradition of the Church could claim divine sanction unless it had the support of the Bible. In his public debate in Leipzig with Johann Eck, theology professor at Ingolstadt (1519), Luther made his controversial new doctrine sola scriptura (‘scripture alone’) explicit for the first time. How could Luther understand the Bible, Eck asked, without the popes, councils and universities? Luther replied: ‘A simple layman armed with scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it.’20

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Revelation continued to unfold and the insights of all Jews past, present and to come derived from God as surely as the written Torah given to Moses. 49 The position of Jews in the Roman empire deteriorated after the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312. After the Bar Koseba revolt, when the christos had so signally failed to return, Jewish Christianity had dwindled and the churches were now predominantly gentile. When Theodosius II (401–50) made Christianity the official faith of the empire, Jews were forbidden to hold civil or military posts, Hebrew was prohibited in the synagogues, and if Passover fell before Easter, Jews were not allowed to observe it on the correct date. The rabbis responded by obeying the instructions of the sages in Pirke Avoth, who had urged their disciples to ‘build a fence for Torah’. 50 They produced more scriptures, which encircled the living Torah with learned, devoted commentary, shielding it from a hostile world as the temple courts had once protected the Holy of Holies. The Tosefta, a ‘supplement’ to the Mishnah, was composed in Palestine between 250 and 350: it was a commentary on the Mishnah, gloss upon gloss. Sifra, also written in Palestine at about the same time, tried to reverse the trend that seemed to be taking Jews away from the Tanakh, and attempted, respectfully, to subordinate the Oral to the written Torah. But the two Talmuds made it clear that the Jewish people did not feel inclined to take this path. The Jerusalem Talmud, known as the Yerushalmi, was completed in the early fifth century in Palestine, at a very bad time for the Jewish community. Talmud means study; but the Yerushalmi studied the Mishnah not the Bible, though it mitigated the Mishnah’s proud independence of the Tanakh. 51 The Yerushalmi quoted from the Bible more frequently, and often demanded scriptural proof for its legal rulings – though it never allowed the Bible to be the sole arbiter of legislation. Legal cases involve matters of fact as well as principle, and the Tanakh could not provide this necessary information. But one sixth of the Yerushalmi consisted of scriptural exegesis and anecdotes about the great rabbis, which helped to humanize the formidable legal corpus. Poor conditions in Palestine may have prevented the completion of the Yerushalmi, which should, perhaps, be regarded as work in progress. But during the sixth century, the Jews of Babylonia produced a more satisfying and polished Talmud. 52 There had been constant interchange between the rabbis of Palestine and Babylonia. The Iranian rulers were more liberal than the Christian emperors, so the Jews of Babylonia had the freedom to manage their own affairs under an officially appointed exilarch. As Palestinian Jewry declined, Babylonia became the intellectual centre of the Jewish world and the Babylonian Talmud, known as the Bavli , has a quiet confidence that reflected these more favourable circumstances. It would become the key text of rabbinic Judaism.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE to 66 CE, London and Philadelphia, 1992, pp. 342–7.45 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 17.42.46 Akenson, Surpassing Wonder, pp. 144–70.47 Ibid., pp. 171–89.48 Psalms of Solomon, 17 : 3. Akenson translation.49 Florentino Garcia Martinez (ed.), The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated, Leiden, 1994, p. 138.50 Josephus, The Jewish War, translated by G. A. Williamson, Harmondsworth, 1959, 2 : 258–60; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 20: 97–9, cf. Acts of the Apostles 5 : 36.51 Matthew 3: 1–2.52 Luke 3: 3–14; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 18 : 116–19.53 Mark 1 : 14–15. The terms ‘Kingdom of God’ and ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ were used interchangeably. Some Jews felt it more respectful to avoid the word ‘God’ and preferred ‘Heaven’ instead.54 Jaroslav Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages, New York, 2005, pp. 36–44; Akenson, Surpassing Wonder, pp. 124–5; Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture?, p. 58; Bruns, ‘Midrash and Allegory’, pp. 636–7.55 Moses Hadas (ed. and trans.), Aristeas to Philcrates, New York, 1951, pp. 21–3.56 Philo, The Life of Moses in Philo, translated by F. H. Colson, Cambridge, Mass., 1950, 6 : 476.57 Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1941, pp. 3–4; Bruns, ‘Midrash and Allegory’, pp. 637–42; Burton L. Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth, San Francisco, 1995, pp. 254–6; Akenson, Surpassing Wonder, pp. 128–32; Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It?, pp. 46–7.58 Philo, The Migration of Abraham, l.16, in Philo in Ten Volumes, translated by F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker, Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1958, vol. II.59 Bruns, ‘Midrash and Allegory’, pp. 638–9.60 Philo, On the Birth of Abel and the Sacrifices Offered by Him and His Brother Cain, vol. II, ll. 95–7. Colson and Whitaker translation.61 Philo, Special Laws, 1 : 43. Colson and Whitaker translation.62 Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues, ll. 146–7.63 Philo, Abraham, l. 121. Colson and Whitaker translation.64 Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues, l. 147. Colson and Whitaker translation.65 Philo, The Migration of Abraham, ll. 34–5. Colvin and Whitaker translation.66 Dio Cassius, History, 66: 6; Josephus, Jewish War, 6 : 98.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Yet Calvin himself did not always live up to these high principles, and was prepared to execute dissenters in his own church. The Protestant Reformation expressed many of the ideals of the new culture that was emerging in the West. Instead of being based on a surplus of agricultural produce, like every previous civilization, its economy would be based on the scientific and technological replication of resources and the constant reinvestment of capital. This society had to be productive, and Calvin’s theology would be used to support the work ethic. Individuals had to participate, even at a humble level, as printers, factory hands and office clerks, and had, therefore, to acquire a modicum of education and literacy. As a result, they would eventually demand a greater share in the decision-making process of government. There would be political upheaval, revolutions and civil war to establish more democratic regimes. Social, political, economic and intellectual change was part of an interlocking process; each element depended upon the others and religion was inevitably drawn into this spiral of development. People now read scripture in a ‘modern’ way. Protestants stood alone before God, relying on the Bible alone. But this would have been impossible before the invention of printing made it feasible for all Christians to own individual copies and before they had the literacy skills to read it. Increasingly, as the pragmatic, scientific ethos of modernity took hold, scripture was read for the information that it imparted. Science depended upon rigorous analysis, and this made the symbolic system of the perennial philosophy incomprehensible. The eucharistic bread – the issue that had divided Luther and Zwingli – was now ‘only’ a symbol. The words of scripture, once seen as earthly replicas of the divine Logos, had also lost their numinous dimension. But the silent, solitary reading, which freed Christians from the supervision of religious experts, expressed the independence that would become essential to the modern spirit. Sola scriptura had been a noble, if controversial ideal. But in practice it meant that everybody had a God-given right to interpret these extremely complex documents as they chose. 40 Protestant sects proliferated, each claiming that it alone understood the Bible. In 1534, a radical apocalyptic group in Munster set up an independent theocratic state based on a literal reading of scripture, which licensed polygamy, condemned all violence and outlawed private ownership.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Etz Hayyim, where hundreds of gifted students from all over Europe gathered to study with experts, was quite different. R. Hayyim taught Torah and Talmud in the method he had learned from the Gaon, analysing the text logically but in a way that produced a spiritual experience. Students were not there to learn about Torah; the process of rote-learning, preparation, and lively, heated discussion were rituals that were just as important as any conclusion reached in class. This method was a form of prayer, and its intensity reflected the spirituality of the Gaon. The curriculum was demanding, the hours long, and the young men were separated from family and friends. Some were allowed to spend a little time on secular subjects, but these were secondary, regarded as stealing time from Torah. 40 The original purpose of Etz Hayyim had been to counter Hasidism and reinstate rigorous study of Torah. But as the nineteenth century progressed the threat of the Jewish Enlightenment became a more pressing danger, and Hasidim and misnagdim joined forces against the maskilim , whom they saw as a sort of Trojan horse, smuggling the evils of secular culture into the Jewish world. Gradually the new yeshivoth became bastions of orthodoxy to ward off this encroaching peril. Jews were developing their own type of fundamentalism, which rarely begins as a battle with an external foe, but rather as an internal struggle in which traditionalists fight their co-religionists. Fundamentalist institutions respond to modernity by creating an enclave of pure faith – the yeshiva or the Bible college – where the faithful can reshape their lives. It is a defensive move, which has the potential for a future counter-offensive. The students of a yeshiva, madrasah or Bible college are likely to become a cadre, with a shared training and ideology, in their local communities. By the end of the nineteenth century the world could indeed seem a Godless place. Instead of being a shunned minority, as in the past, atheists were beginning to take the high moral ground. Hegel’s pupil Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) argued that the idea of God diminished and devalued our humanity. For Karl Marx (1818–83), religion was the symptom of a sick society, an opiate that made the diseased social system bearable and removed the will to find a cure. And radical Darwinists fired the first shots in a war between scripture and science that continues to the present day. In England, Thomas H.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Paul did not share this hostility towards Judaism, but much of the New Testament reflected the widespread suspicion, anxiety and turbulence of the period immediately after the destruction of the temple, when the Jews were so bitterly divided. In their anxiety to reach out to the gentile world, the synoptics were too eager to absolve the Romans of their responsibility for Jesus’s execution and claimed, with increasing stridency, that the Jews must shoulder the blame. Even Luke, who had the most positive view of Judaism, made it clear that there was a good Israel (represented by Jesus’s followers) and a ‘bad Israel’, epitomized by the self-righteous Pharisee. 106 In the gospels of Matthew and John, this bias had become more entrenched. Matthew made the Jewish crowd cry aloud for Jesus’s death: ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children’, 107 words that for centuries inspired the pogroms that made antiSemitism an incurable disease in Europe. Matthew was particularly incensed by the Pharisees: they were self-important hypocrites, obsessed with the letter of the law to the utter neglect of its spirit; they were ‘blind guides’, a ‘brood of vipers’, fanatically intent on the destruction of the Christian churches. 108 John too denounced the Pharisees as malicious, oppressive and chronically addicted to evil; it was the Pharisees who gathered information against Jesus and engineered his death. 109 Why this vitriolic hatred of Pharisees? After the destruction of the temple, the Christians had been the first to make a concerted effort to become the authentic Jewish voice and initially they seemed to have had no significant rivals. But by the 80s and 90s, Christians were becoming uncomfortably aware that something extraordinary was happening: the Pharisees were initiating an astonishing revival. CHAPTER 7 Sola Scriptura By the sixteenth century, a complex process was under way in Europe that would irrevocably change the way Western people experienced the world. Inventions and innovations, none of which seemed momentous at the time, were occurring simultaneously in many different fields, but their cumulative effect would be decisive. The Iberian explorers had discovered a new world, astronomers were opening up the heavens, and a new technical efficiency was giving Europeans more control over their environment than ever before. A pragmatic, scientific spirit was very slowly beginning to undermine medieval sensibility. A series of catastrophes had left people feeling helpless and anxious. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Black Death had killed a third of the population of Europe, the Ottoman Turks had conquered Christian Byzantium in 1453, and the papal scandals of the Avignon captivity and the Great Schism, when as many as three pontiffs had claimed the See of Peter, had alienated many from the established Church.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Today scripture has a bad name. Terrorists use the Qur’an to justify atrocities, and some argue that the violence of their scripture makes Muslims chronically aggressive. Christians campaign against the teaching of evolutionary theory because it contradicts the biblical creation story. Jews argue that because God promised Canaan (modern Israel) to the descendants of Abraham, oppressive policies against the Palestinians are legitimate. There has been a scriptural revival that has intruded into public life. Secularist opponents of religion claim that scripture breeds violence, sectarianism and intolerance; that it prevents people from thinking for themselves, and encourages delusion. If religion preaches compassion, why is there so much hatred in sacred texts? Is it possible to be a ‘believer’ today when science has undermined so many biblical teachings? Because scripture has become such an explosive issue, it is important to be clear what it is and what it is not. This biography of the Bible provides some insight into this religious phenomenon. It is, for example, crucial to note that an exclusively literal interpretation of the Bible is a recent development. Until the nineteenth century, very few people imagined that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life. For centuries, Jews and Christians relished highly allegorical and inventive exegesis, insisting that a wholly literal reading of the Bible was neither possible nor desirable. They have rewritten biblical history, replaced Bible stories with new myths, and interpreted the first chapter of Genesis in surprisingly different ways. The Jewish scriptures and the New Testament both began as oral proclamations and even after they were committed to writing, there often remained a bias towards the spoken word that is also present in other traditions. From the very beginning, people feared that a written scripture encouraged inflexibility and unrealistic, strident certainty. Religious knowledge cannot be imparted like other information, simply by scanning the sacred page. Documents became ‘scripture’ not, initially, because they were thought to be divinely inspired but because people started to treat them differently. This was certainly true of the early texts of the Bible, which became holy only when approached in a ritual context that set them apart from ordinary life and secular modes of thought.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  People now read scripture in a ‘modern’ way. Protestants stood alone before God, relying on the Bible alone. But this would have been impossible before the invention of printing made it feasible for all Christians to own individual copies and before they had the literacy skills to read it. Increasingly, as the pragmatic, scientific ethos of modernity took hold, scripture was read for the information that it imparted. Science depended upon rigorous analysis, and this made the symbolic system of the perennial philosophy incomprehensible. The eucharistic bread – the issue that had divided Luther and Zwingli – was now ‘only’ a symbol. The words of scripture, once seen as earthly replicas of the divine Logos, had also lost their numinous dimension. But the silent, solitary reading, which freed Christians from the supervision of religious experts, expressed the independence that would become essential to the modern spirit. Sola scriptura had been a noble, if controversial ideal. But in practice it meant that everybody had a God-given right to interpret these extremely complex documents as they chose.40 Protestant sects proliferated, each claiming that it alone understood the Bible. In 1534, a radical apocalyptic group in Munster set up an independent theocratic state based on a literal reading of scripture, which licensed polygamy, condemned all violence and outlawed private ownership. This short-lived experiment lasted only a year, but it alarmed the reformers. If there was no authoritative body to control biblical reading, how could anybody know who was right? ‘Who will give our conscience sure information about which party is teaching us the pure Word of God, we or our opponents?’ asked Luther.‘Is every fanatic to have the right to teach whatever he pleases?’41 Calvin agreed: ‘If everyone has a right to be judge and arbiter in this matter, nothing can be set down as certain and our whole religion will be full of uncertainty.’42

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  As late as 303, the emperor Diocletian began a war of annihilation against the Christians. This time of terror and anxiety left its mark. The martyr, who was ready to follow Jesus to the death, became the Christian hero par excellence. Some Christians tried to persuade their pagan neighbours that Christianity was not a destructive break with past piety by writing apologiae, ‘rational explanations’, of their faith. One of their chief arguments was that Jesus’s life and death had been predicted by the Hebrew prophets, an argument that the Romans, with their respect for augury and oracles, took very seriously. The evangelists had relished their pesher exegesis, but the apologists found it more difficult. Once Marcion had urged Christians to jettison the Hebrew scriptures, gentile converts felt increasingly uneasy about their Jewish heritage. 1 They no longer worshipped in the synagogues, so what had they to do with the Jewish god? Had God changed his mind about the old covenant? How could the sacred history of Israel be Christian history? What had the prophets really known about Jesus and how had they known it? Why had Isaiah and Zechariah been preoccupied by Jesus, the founder of a gentile religion? One of the earliest of these apologists was Justin (100–160), a pagan convert from Samaria in the Holy Land who eventually died as a martyr. He had studied various Greek philosophies, but found what he was looking for in Christianity. The logos in the prologue to John’s gospel reminded Justin of the fiery, divine breath that the Stoics believed organized the whole of reality and called Logos (‘Reason’), Pneuma (‘Spirit’) or God. Evidently Christians and pagans had a set of common symbols. In his two Apologiae, Justin argued that Jesus was the incarnation of the Logos, which had been active in the world throughout history, inspiring Greeks and Hebrews alike. It had spoken through the prophets, who had thus been able to foretell the coming of the messiah. The Logos had taken many forms before its definitive revelation in Jesus. It had spoken through Plato and Socrates. When Moses thought he heard God speaking from the burning bush, he had really been listening to the Logos. The oracles of the prophets had not been uttered ‘by the inspired [prophets] themselves, but by the divine Word who moved them’. 2 Sometimes the Logos had foretold the future; at other times, it spoke in the name of God. But the Jews had imagined that God was talking to them directly and had not realized that it had been God’s ‘first-begotten Logos’.