Is the Bible true? Measuring religious texts against criteria of truth and accuracy

 

A page from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the sources discussed in The Unauthorized Version [Public Domain]

I used to recommend that all theology departments in universities should be closed down, since their very title “department of theology” suggested to me at the time that they were at odds with the disinterested search for the truth that is the essence of the enlightenment institution. This was the result of reading a lot of Voltaire, I must admit. He used to sit at home of an evening, with his partner Madame du Chatelet, having great anti-clerical fun in discovering inconsistencies and impossibilities in Bible texts

Reading Robin Lane Fox’s The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible (1991) has changed my view somewhat. It makes me realise that much of the output of theological departments is valuable, in that it demonstrates the impossibility of any kind of belief in the “truth” of scripture. Within a few pages, Fox reveals a very different view held as a consensus by biblical scholars about the Bible: for example, that the Gospels were mainly not written by the person whose name is attached to them. In the Old Testament, anonymous (and often multiple) authors are the norm. So not  only is there a “Q”, a supposed source for the New Testament narratives, there are also sources J, E, P and D for some of the most familiar Old Testament books such as Genesis.

So this I can understand. University departments of Literary Studies are used to trying to establish an accurate text, and in some cases, this is simply not possible. Lane Fox has tried to apply the skills he has learned from working in a classics department to determine the truth or otherwise of Biblical books, regarded simply as another classical-period text.

The result is fascinating, even if more difficult to read than it should have been (see below). Basically, Lane Fox tries to determine if Biblical books make use of primary sources (they do not), and if they can be regarded as proper history (they cannot, for the most part). This is where his argument becomes interesting, because he applies, I think, rather simplistic criteria to assess his texts. Here, the index fails completely: it is only an index of proper names, so there is no index term “primary”. So I have to hunt for myself, using the digital version in The Internet Archive, to find Lane Fox’s discussion about what constitutes history. There is a very relevant passage in Chapter 11, “Ideas of History”. Lane Fox describes the distinction between primary and secondary sources, that we are all familiar with from school, and claims to use this as one criterion for evaluating Bible texts:

For the question of historical truth, the line between primary witness and secondary source or tradition is more fundamental than the line between oral and written. In the Hebrew Old Testament it is clear that no book is primary in this strong sense. [p173, Penguin edition]

While I am fascinated by Lane Fox’s careful survey of a mountain of over a hundred years of Biblical scholarship, I think his idea of what constitutes history is somewhat simplistic. Probably 99 per cent of all historical writing is not based on primary sources, and this book is a typical example. I don’t expect Lane Fox to have read all, or even any, of the primary sources he is discussing; it would take a lifetime. Instead, I am grateful that he has summarised what many scholars, no doubt based in university departments of theology, have done: to review, line by line, the original texts, and to determine their authenticity, the theological equivalent of the Arden edition of Shakespeare. We read the Arden edition because it is the considered thought of a scholar much more knowledgeable than us, and with more time than we have, to reach a conclusion. When we read, we use a variety of means to assess how far we can trust the scholars, and then we make our own judgement -- and at various points in the narrative Lane Fox is very emphatic to state his own view of the evidence, for example, on page 85, “The mission of Ezra … involves the law more historically; in my view, it is historical and belongs to 398 BC (others opt for 458).” In writing this, Lane Fox is telling the reader, trust me, I’ve read this stuff, and I have weighed the evidence for myself.

In departments of literature, scholars may spend several years preparing a critical edition of one text. For the most part, all of us, academics, students, or general readers, we assume the decisions taken by the textual scholar are trustworthy, and we move on to assessments of interpretation of the text. Something of this kind must happen in science, also; a narrative is used as the explanation for what is happening, and for most purposes, we work within the limitations of each model.

So I’m very grateful to Lane Fox for the work he has put in to assemble this view, even though his is a secondary work. Most of my historical reading (and, I guess that of most people) has been of this kind of level. After all, it’s how we operate. We read or listen to the news and we don’t have time to investigate primary sources. If we hear a news clip, we know it has been heavily edited and selected and may not reveal the truth of the story, but we have no choice but to accept it, for the most part, until we find some reason to doubt.

Incidentally, my only complaint about Lane Fox is, paradoxically, his slapdash referencing system. He does not use footnotes, but links to references by using references to the main text. But his use of references is partial (he doesn’t cite all his sources) and uncertain: many direct quotations in the text at not cited properly in the endnotes (e.g. p81 “exemplified by completeness” – which book is this extracted from?), plus, equally annoying, the assumption that the readers know more than they do. For example, the reference to “Samson’s unfortunate foxes” on the same page (p81) made no sense to me, until I looked up the reference and found out what the episode was about. Lane Fox has a rather cavalier attitude to his readers: they don’t know scholarship about the Bible, but they do know (a) the outline of Jewish history, including all the major exiles, and (b) the books of the Bible and everything they contain, even if they don’t know the latest scholarship. Finally, there should be a full list of all books cited or referred to, in alphabetical order. As often happens in books for a wide audience that have scholarly pretensions, Lane Fox assumes in his bibliography you may want a review of the latest year’s articles, when most of his readers are struggling to follow his basic text. Still, I'm grateful that this book exists; it's made me think much more deeply about topics that are taken for granted for so much of our lives. 

With Ruskin in Florence

 

Guide books, let’s face it, are dull. They are all too frequently reduced to lists of things to see, and all too often they repeat each other. Many of them give the impression they were written by AI, repeating the same anecdotes. Certainly that’s what I felt on my most recent visits to Florence.

Of course, the problem with Florence, perhaps the biggest challenge, is that it is a heavyweight cultural destination. I don’t know anyone who has seen every room in the Uffizi. As for churches, they are numberless. Florence is not for the faint-hearted, especially if they don’t know their Gothic from their Renaissance (Florence is mainly restricted to these two, but that doesn’t make things easier for the average tourist).  

That’s why reading Ruskin seemed so inviting. Ruskin never minces his words; of all the guides, Ruskin is the one who makes a direct appeal to your emotions, and the only one who is prepared to say some of the prized cultural objects are dreadful. I like a guide with opinions – at least I can disagree with them!

It seemed, therefore, a good way to see Florence to have Ruskin’s volume Mornings in Florence (1874) in hand. After all, who could resist such a direct openinng line?

If there is one artist, more than another, whose work it is desirable you should examine in Florence, supposing that you care for old art at all, it is Giotto. [Mornings in Florence, First Morning]

Notice the throwaway remark “supposing that you care for old art at all”, as if to say, you are already part of an elite group of art appreciators. Ruskin, in other words, is the flattering, knowledgeable tour guide, who promises to show you the best sites, without you having to worry about the dross. There is far too much to see in Florence, anyway, so you need someone to say which things to focus on. Even the legendary Guida Rossa, the definitive Italian art guide, does not include detals of all the altarpieces, chapel statues, and incidental bulidings, despite its 847 pages devoted to the city of Florence (in my edition, from 2016).

So we strode purposefully, with Ruskin in hand, into Santa Croce, one of the three largest churches in Florence, and headed for Giotto. As instructed by Ruskin, we ignored the roof of the church (it “has no vaultings at all, but the roof of a farm-house barn”). We don’t look at the famous Renaissance tomb of Marsuppini by Desiderio di Settignano, as “very fine of its kind; but there the drapery is chiefly done to cheat you … It is wholly vulgar and mean in cast of fold.” No, we press on to see the Giotto chapels. Similarly, we are told we shouldn’t even think about Ghirlandaio’s astonishing frescoes in Santa Maria Novella (“it is all simply – good for nothing … Ghirlandaio was to the end of his life a mere goldsmith”).

Having dismissed in this way both the early Renaissance of Ghirlandaio, and the full 16th-century Renaissance, what does Ruskin see in Giotto (and Cimabue, his contemporary?) What matters for Ruskin is that their work expresses religious belief! Such a view would be unthinkable in art criticism today. The art historian might praise an artist for their grasp of perspective, for their use of colour, even, at times, for their social criticism, but never for conveying a sense of the divine. According to Ruskin, Giotto taught three things: “You shall see things as they are … And the least with the greatest, because God made them … but also the golden gate of Heaven itself, open and the angels of God coming down from it.” [Second Morning]. Well, I saw the Giottos, and I didn’t see the gate of Heaven open.  

If to be a tourist is to imagine yourself, for a brief moment, as the original audience saw a work, then Ruskin is your ideal guide. The word “cheat” is very significant: for all his immersion in art history, Ruskin was never beyond being a tourist, despite more than 15 lengthy visits to the continent, over a period of more than 50 years. Nonetheless, he reveals in his letters and diaries how he was constantly concerned at all times of the presumed danger of being cheated. For Ruskin, most Italians he encountered had no concept of art, and could only be influenced by money.

Perhaps I am being too harsh on Mornings in Florence. It originated as a series of lectures, and was never intended for publication at all, but, it would appear, was faithfully transcribed by Ruskin’s student Alexander Wedderburn, who attended each lecture. The transcript was subsequently published, with, it would appear, minimal involvement from the author; this explains why Ruskin frequently admits he cannot be bothered to find a reference, for example:

And in one place (I have not my books here, and cannot refer to it) I have even defined sculpture as light-and-shade drawing with the chisel [Val d’Arno]

When I read this kind of thing, I start to think that Ruskin’s references to paintings or sculptures that I cannot locate might not be my error, but perhaps indications of his poor memory. For example, he spends a long time talking about works by Giotto that I can see are located in Padua rather than Florence.

I’m somewhat reassured to find I am not alone in finding Mornings in Florence distasteful. Henry James, for example, was shocked by it:

 I had really been enjoying the good old city of Florence, but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that this was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have gone about with an imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in the choir of that very church [Sta Maria Novella]; but it appeared from one of the little books [Mornings in Florence] that these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce and had thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most positive assurance I knew nothing about them. After a while, if it was only ill-humour that was needed for doing honour to the city of the Medici, I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it was Mr. Ruskin himself I had lost patience with, not the stupid Brunelleschi, not the vulgar Ghirlandaio [Henry James, Italian Hours]

Had Ruskin lost his critical faculties by this stage (Italian Hours dates from 1874, while his major works, such as Modern Painters, date from 1843)? Perhaps, as Kenneth Clark states, Ruskin’s strength and weakness was lack of self-awareness. He is insightful and objectionable in successive sentences. It was “sheer self-indulgence of him to give his opinion on every single topic” [Ruskin Today, 1964]. Certainly, from my experience in Florence, Ruskin is to be enjoyed at arm’s length, with the reader’s critical faculties fully intact, questioning every sentence. There may be gems there, but they perhaps reveal more about Ruskin and 19th-century taste than eternal truths about art.