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Whose Bible Is It Anyway?
Whose Bible is it Anyway? Ask an Atheist!
Source: http://www.americanatheist.org/smr97/T1/whosebible.html
It is still a curiosity to most persons in the street that there are University professors of Bible Studies who, like me, do not believe in God. Or rather, do not believe in the god(s) of that Bible (or 'those bibles', since Jews and Christians do not share the same bible, nor do many Christian denominations). Atheist scholarship is now becoming slightly less curious to biblical scholars themselves, though the development of a genuinely atheistic (or post-theist, if you prefer) agenda within the discipline is not taking place without a good deal of resistance from traditional circles (or squares, if you prefer). This struggle cannot be understood without a brief history, for which I apologize in advance.
A Brief History of Biblical Studies
Biblical studies is a relatively new discipline. Since the invention of the university, initiated by the Muslims and introduced into the Christian, but relatively barbaric, Europe in the Middle Ages, the study of theology (Islamic or Christian) has been a major part of its curriculum. 'Scripture' comprised a part of Christian theology (as did the Quran in Muslim theology), and although the orthodox theological systems of both religions heavily overlay their revealed texts with Aristotelian philosophy, the insistence by the leaders of the Christian Reformation on the exclusivity of scripture as the basis of salvation (and thus implicitly of doctrine) laid the foundations of a process in Christian theology that split into two contrary directions.
On the one hand, the enhanced authority of scripture and the precedence given to the literal over other (e.g. allegorical) interpretations of its contents, led to the emergence of fundamentalism, a mindset (if mind is the right word) that believes not only that the Bible is true, inspired, and inerrant, but that it is literally so. This particular and peculiar view of scripture (which fundamentalists mistakenly suppose to be older than a few centuries) unfortunately grew with the advent of the modern, scientific age, with the result that the pre-Reformation clash between Galileo and the Pope became a running post-Reformation battle between a biblical and a scientific epistemology. The notion that the bible imparted timeless truths -an idea that pre-Reformation theology had sustained by means of Greek philosophy and typological or allegorical interpretation -was retained, but in a literal mode. The Bible was, accordingly, held by fundamentalists as composed of plain statements that were always and everywhere correct.
On the other hand, that same emphasis on the literal meaning of scripture induced among scholars a strongly historical reading, especially of the Old Testament. More intelligent, inquiring minds - open to the Enlightenment project of reason yet still attached to the authority of scripture - initiated a program of historical criticism. The result of this was the discipline of biblical studies as it was known until recently - indeed, known to me as an undergraduate student in the 1960s. Priding itself on its secular credentials, yet practiced almost without exception by Christian believers, biblical criticism (as it more commonly called itself) was concerned with matters of authorship, dating, and original meaning of biblical texts. The theology of the Bible, which continued to thrive, was understood by biblical scholars to be descriptive and not prescriptive. That is, it simply explained what the authors believed. In this way, despite enshrining certain archaic beliefs and practices like polygamy, genocide, or slavery, a certain distance could be set from what modern Christians actually did.
Well, for the Old Testament, at any rate. After all, the writers of the books of the Old Testament were not Christians, and did not really have to be made into Christians. On the other hand, like the saints waiting in hell for Christ to burst the bonds (or perhaps to be baptized as Mormons), these books had to be acclaimed as Christian scripture, somehow. For the most part, they were more or less equated with ancient Israel religious beliefs, which were not quite Christian but on the right track, more or less. For the New Testament, however, things were (and still are in many circles) rather different. I am weary of commentaries on, say, the Letter to the Romans that read: "Paul assures us that..." Us? Paul did not have the faintest idea that there would be a twentieth century. If he had thought there would be, his entire world would have collapsed! NO imminent return of the Christ? The prospect of marriage to keep a human race going for two more millennia at least? I would not take an 'assurance' from this man. The superficial impartiality of the historical-critical enterprise had its limits, and the words of St. Paul (and, of course, of Jesus, and of James, Peter, and other assorted pseudepigraphic authors) retained their full authority. These authors were Christians writing to Christians. They were, after all, inventing Christianity between them. The mere biblical scholar (and Christian) saw his (yes, his) task as making that perennial message clearer, and not just for dispassionate comprehension, but for informed obedience.
Creeds, credence, and credentials
And so here we were, or here I was, a few decades ago: Biblical scholarship is an oblique form of Christian theology practiced by Christians for the benefit of Christians. A cheap jibe? Consider this: not many years ago, a British University rejected an offer of funding from an Arab to set up a chair in Islamic theology. The problem was that the holder of the chair was to be a Muslim. Muslims, as is well known to us all, are incapable of critical reflection on Islam, because they believe the Quran is inspired by Allah, who, though the only god (like the Lord, Yahweh), is a different unique deity. So I was taught Arabic, and Islam, at my mediaeval University by non-Muslims, though I was taught some modern Arab literature by an Arab (he might, of course, have been a Christian...). Christians (and, to some extent, Jews who have been sufficiently Westernized) can do real criticism of their religious texts while retaining their faith. Those of other religions must be viewed with suspicion. They cannot tell the difference between criticism and confession. Myopia? It was worse than that. You might think that because Christian bible scholarship thought it was critical, it would not mind having Atheists doing the same thing (because surely their presence would prove that the discipline was not Christian). But I can speak from experience when I tell you that it is still sometimes rather embarrassing to admit to being an Atheist. You have, after all, to keep speaking of 'God' rather than 'the ancient Israelite deity' and are constantly encouraged to explain how superior biblical ethics and myths and practices and laws were to those of non-proto-Christians. The British learned society for Old Testament study struggled hard before it recently decided not to keep prayers on its annual meeting agenda (the prayers are held, of course, but no longer as part of the official business). And the terrible German habit of introducing preaching into commentaries and monographs is far from gone. But in so many ways the language and habits of Christian confession remain. The chief problem is the confusion of the deity Yahweh with the god of the scholar (more on this later), and the Christian spectacles lead to such perceptions as preaching prophets who really get messages from this god and deliver sermons to massed congregations, or the support of prophets against kings in the matter of political government (how would that work today?)
But while biblical scholarship taken on the whole has exhibited a critical sheen over a Christian piety, we must not forget the conservative evangelicals. These are rather like Cape Coloreds in South Africa, frowned upon by the whites (who represent in my metaphor the 'real scholars') but treated better by them than the blacks (the fundamentalists). They themselves believe they are scholars, however, and distance themselves from fundamentalists ('blacks'). They believe in something called 'evangelical scholarship' (repeat the phrase, then ask yourself: why should scholarship be evangelical?). And they have a battalion of publishers (many in Western Michigan) to put out their stuff. True, their attitude to scholarship distinguishes them from fundamentalists and other conservatives, who distrust scholarship, because these latter suspect that all critical wisdom comes from Original Sin and stems from Unbelief, and so will lead the thinker to Hell. This makes their eagerness to get a 'PhD' (or some sort of 'doctor' title) hard to understand. The aim must be, I think, to so discredit these degrees and titles that no real scholar can ever use them.
"Ideology" and "I.D. Ology"
But things have changed, and during my own lifetime. Academic study of the Bible is still largely conducted in religious establishments (German Faculties of Protestant or Catholic Theology; seminaries, Bible colleges, denominational Universities) and by professional officers of one or other church. But a terrible plague has hit biblical scholarship: interdisciplinarity. Biblical scholars have started reading philosophy, linguistics, politics, and even worse - cultural studies. I am no expert, but I think the Americans deserve the credit. The multidisciplinary agenda of most American syllabuses has turned out graduate students in Bible programs who have taken courses in literature, philosophy, even 'theory'. These more broadly educated persons do not see the barbed wire around the ghetto that biblical scholarship had long occupied. Many of them are even postmodern, for God's sake. By the time they get to graduate school they are too old to be fully converted back.
And let us not forget political correctness. I am no great defender of its massive stupidities, but its heart is in the right place. Democracy gave birth to the oppression of minorities by majorities (and some think that was not so bad). But now minorities have changed their names, and call themselves collectively 'the Other'. They are blacks, women, homosexuals, Third World citizens, to name the obvious.
What does this broader education and this political sensitivity mean to the discipline of biblical studies? What happens, for instance, when a feminist reads that the woman sinned first and that she must therefore be subject to her husband? What does she make of the incredible fact that ancient males begot so many sons and so few daughters - yet the men managed to have more than one wife (a lot of wars, she supposes)? If she is a Christian (and this is the majority), she discovers that something is more important to her than the Bible: herself, her gender. She does not agree with this sacred inspired text.
I think it was feminism that made the decisive breach in the wall of 'bible-affirming' scholarship. Behind the women poured in others. Many of these were white males, suddenly becoming feminist too, but also enjoying an inner liberation from slavery to these ancient texts. Another breach is just opening up: post-colonial interpretation. The idea of bringing the Bible to colonized regions of the globe was to show them not only how they could be saved for eternity but how wonderful the colonizing civilization was, what a loving god their exploiters had (or vice-versa). With the colonizers, they could read about the 'god of the fathers' who led the Israelites from slavery via genocide to their own land, which they alone would inhabit.
Wait a minute! From slavery? Genocide? Their own land? It took surprisingly long for the proponents of Liberation Theology to realize that they had the wrong title for their project, unless they meant liberation from the Bible. The Bible is not only the great stay and comfort of the Colonizing White Human. It is a pro-colonial book. Abraham is led to a land that other people occupy already, and is told it will be his. The Israelites are later promised they can have this land if they exterminate the indigenous folk. Centuries later, having been exiled for their stupidity/sinfulness, the aristocrats of Judah (or their offspring) come back to the land and do it all over again. The poor people left behind are ignored, the self-styled 'exiles' take over again, claiming to be the rightful inhabitants of the land.
How much more natural, then, for a Christian Native American, for instance, to identify with the Canaanites? The same goes for the black races of Africa, whom some colonials had indeed identified as the descendants of the cursed son of Noah, Ham (father of Canaan). And we should not forget the Palestinians, too, who suffer the double misfortune of playing Canaanites and Red Indians, to those American-Jewish gun-toting settlers of the Wild West Bank. The Bible has indeed been the chief weapon of their colonizer. The Palestinian case is particularly sensitive, because it brings into play the tacit (and often not tacit) support of biblical scholarship itself for the State of Israel, busy recolonizing Palestine's past as Israel (even when it was Muslim, as it was for over a millennium). That Christians feel responsible for the Holocaust makes the whole business more tricky. But sympathy for one set of victims ought not preclude sympathy for other victims. The Bible has been used to impose false identities on colonized and marginalized readers. Once they see where their true political, social and personal interests lie, they realize they have to renegotiate their attitude to the Bible.
Is There a God in This Text?
Recent literary and semiotic theory, as every undergraduate at a decent school learns, has shown that texts do not have objective meanings. Their readers, as individuals and as groups, create interpretations. Anything expressed in language is subject to the shifts of meaning and usage in language, while literary works of the best sort exploit ambiguity (seen any Shakespeare lately?) The recognition over the last decades that the Bible is literature has exposed it as a text continuously manipulated in the past (and present) by the Roman Catholic Church, by pastors, politicians, parents, evangelists, and colonizers of every sort. The manipulation has not always been bad: what I would regard as good things have come of it. But the increasing awareness of biblical scholars that this collection of literature is not innocent, is not necessarily to be affirmed, is leading to a crisis far greater than Darwin ever inflicted. If reading is more than ever an ethical act, then the hitherto unspoken question must be shouted out loud: do you agree with this text? Do you affirm its values? If not - who is right?
My earlier sketch of the history of biblical scholarship showed how the Bible was once necessarily affirmed; then, with critical scholarship, it was quietly affirmed, but with qualifications, and under a cloak of critical neutrality (except for the Germans, I suppose). Now, there is a cacophony of voices resisting, fighting, undermining and challenging this literature. Some still seek to redeem it for modern Christians. Others want to reject it. A great majority, I suspect, wriggle in silence or semi-silence. The Bible has finally been outed. It is, if you like the metaphor, not a respectable white middle class middle-aged heterosexual pillar of society. It is a racist, sexist, sadomasochistic deviant, an offense to modern values. It offers an appalling role-model for modern civilization.
So what of its deity? Or perhaps one should say its deities? The god of the Old Testament is a loving husband and father who promises to strip naked his erring wife in front of the neighbors, who confesses that he has repeatedly been violent to her, and who persecutes his children if they are disobedient, even to the point of killing them all (you can find the texts easily enough). He is also the Almighty King, the despot who by definition cannot do wrong, since what is Right In His Sight rules, OK? His favorite title is 'Yahweh of Armies' (the 'Lord of Hosts' or 'Lord of Sabaoth' of the King James Bible). He consumes enormous quantities of meat, reared and slaughtered by humans who sometimes get a share (especially if they are priests). He is Lord of All, but extremely nepotistic, preferring his son Israel (despite his severity towards the child) to all others. And so on. This is a fearful character, a terrible character; he is Saddam Hussein.
His role in the New Testament is little better. He is so angry/upset with humans that he has to be propitiated by human sacrifice and sends his own son to be tortured and killed. And, as with the flood so much earlier, this violent act has served little if anything to reduce the level of sin in the world, to make it a better place to live in. Ask the many victims of Christianity all around the world. At best, the benefits of Christianity (they exist) have mitigated its disadvantages.
Given all this, what biblical scholar could possibly review a bible with undiminished benevolence? Only the kind of scholar who, until recently, was the norm - and indeed still makes up most of the constituency: a Christian studying her/his scriptures. Is the Bible, I am inclined to wonder, a safe weapon in the hands of Christian believers? Or do we need a policy of Affirmative Action in favor of Atheists?
Well, let us not be too hasty. There is a strategy for believers that copes with some of the difficulty. It is offered by the 'Bible as Literature' movement. Literature, runs the creed, does not reflect the real world, but worlds of the imagination. Characters that inhabit stories do not inhabit the real world. Even in historical fiction, the Caesars, Borgias, Wyatt Earps and Jesuses of history are not identical to the creations of the authors who write them up. The god, at least of the Old Testament (we must take this in easy steps) is really not the real 'God' but a literary creation. Hence, when we criticize this character for doing horrible things we are not being blasphemous (as a pious student might suppose) but implicitly pointing out the imperfections and inadequacies of the deities that humans invent (as compared to the real deity!)
A deist can then claim that no one can really describe the real deity, because it is beyond our capacity to comprehend (and this line has the support of some strands of Christian theology which declare that God is unknowable, though such Neoplatonic traditions are generally not invoked). There is, all the same, a problem - a rather simple one. If the deity of the Bible is a real deity, the Bible is an unreliable, even libelous portrait, and burning it would constitute extreme piety. If your biblical deity is not real, then what on earth is a Bible for? So what is a Bible for in either case? Clearly theists cannot really answer this question. If bibles are worth anything at all to the human race, it is up to Atheists to make the case!
The Peril of the Postmodern
When Nietzsche said that God was dead he did not mean this as a metaphysical statement, of course, but a cultural one, and terrible consequences were foreseen. Nietzsche predicted that not long after the divine funeral, the bereaved human race (or at least the humanity of Western civilization) would enter into violent conflict, after which their world of values would continue to crumble as meaning drained out of existence. Two world wars and then the end of modernism (i.e. the end of truth, progress, logic, and all that) duly happened. But one curious outcome was not foreseen. Postmodernism has not induced the complete dissipation of allegiance to objective values, authority, transcendence, the rule of the phallus. This allegiance has simply given up on logic, reason, and the idea of progress. Faced with something more threatening than liberalism, the authority-hungry, certainty-hungry moral fascist junkies who constitute the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition (and are more rabid than the fundamentalists of Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or Israel, because they only terrorize their fellow-citizens) have simply revived the nauseating spectacle of a Crusade. The medieval crusaders, in search of the kingdom of Christ in the Holy Land, having trampled en route the Christians of the East, then inflicted on the Jews and Muslims of the Holy Land an orgy of slaughter and imperialism in the name of a sick religious fervor (and a greedy Pope). The modern crusaders are draped with pseudomoral banners such as 'Life' (thousands of African children die each year of disease and hunger; many more lives could be saved and much cheaper), or 'Family Values' (those spurned by Jesus, presumably) and the enemies that they identify are not so different from those that Adolf Hitler picked on. We are witnessing a kind of moral eugenics. Reason, compassion, and tolerance (the collective term for these is 'liberalism') have given way to unreason and intolerance, unmistakable symptoms of the sickness known as Religious Conviction. Curiously enough, this attitude pretty well reflects the portrait of the biblical god, who was not one to reason, nor indulge those who want to 'do their own thing', nor tolerate those who could not make their minds up about his existence.
At a slightly more respectable level, a parallel phenomenon has occurred among conservative evangelicals, who are learning not only how to spell 'postmodernism' but even to claim it as an ally. Why? Simply because their greatest enemy always was reason. It was reason in the hands of their opponents that constantly drove them back from the front line of scholarship. It was always being taken too far for their liking. But reason is now out of fashion: it represents the domain of oppressive androcentrism; it is the tool of oppression, the denier of subjectivity; it leads to 'positivism,' 'reductionism,' 'materialism,' or whatever. With reason disarmed by the postmodern intellectual establishment, critics now have no grounds on which to challenge absurd propositions and illogical arguments about the Bible. Indeed, 'absurd' and 'illogical' are now meaningless terms. Modernism was about progress, human improvement, science. But the improvement of humans was never much liked by conservatives, because humans were supposed to be forever cursed in their sin, saved only by the grace of God. History, too, had no meaning other than the Millennium, the Second Coming, Armageddon. Evangelical Christianity and postmodern have agreed that the notions of progress and of a meaning to history are both dead.
The Bible and Atheists Need Each Other
The number of Atheists among the community of biblical scholars is rather small, and they are not a well-knit community. After all, people who don't believe in fairies don't form groups, nor do those who doubt that dragons breathe fire or that Martians ever made it to Montana. Atheists are constituted as a group only by theists, when they want to attack or isolate people. But whether Atheists as a group need to express their solidarity within society as a whole (and I can see why this might be the case in North America), they certainly need to be outed within biblical scholarship. For we have a positive agenda - or we should! There are at least three reasons why the Bible needs Atheists, and two more why Atheists need the Bible.
The Bible needs Atheists to protect its authors.
For two thousand years Jewish and Christian commentators and preachers have been forcing its wonderfully varied contents into a Procrustean bed of religious dogma, a statement of faith or of the divine Law. They have been formulating what 'the Bible says.' But any knowledgeable reader knows that 'the Bible says' is a stupid statement. For it usually says, or implies, the opposite as well. It is not a coherent and unified text, but a collection, the work of many authors, most of them intelligent and accomplished, but a few rather dull. We do not really know who these persons were (tradition has as usual assigned some appropriate authors), or indeed when, where, or why they wrote. We do know, however, that the authors of the contents of the Old Testament (as it is known by Christians) were not Christians, and their idea of a god was not a Christian one. They were mostly not Jewish either, in the sense that they could be claimed as paid-up members in what has passed for Judaism for two thousand years.
This may strike you as an obvious point, but it has made little impact on the way pious Christians or Jews have read the Bible -which is, as Jewish or Christian literature. Yet clearly they are not reading it as the original authors intended it to be read. Now, no modern reader can claim to be able to understand a text as the author (or even the first readers) did. But there is upon us a moral obligation to accord the author some respect. I do not expect my own writings to survive for long. If people want to read meanings into my writings that suit themselves, I can't stop them. But I would not like them to pretend they are representing me. Now, can we read Paul as his first addressees did? Well, we can try, with the aid of historical research. Do biblical scholars try? Despite the amount of historical research within New Testament scholarship, my impression is that on the whole the answer is 'no.' One obvious illustration of this is that many of these original readers (as the letters themselves make clear) disagreed with Paul. Go and find biblical scholars who do the same. You will have less chance than did old Diogenes of finding an honest citizen. Reading Paul as scripture means making him say something that Christians can accept; it means being on his side. That, paradoxically enough, is extremely unfair to the old missionary. It seems he used to like arguments. Now scholars quibble about exactly what he meant, but practically never argue about whether he was right! Hopefully, some of the recent books on Paul by Jewish scholars might change that state of affairs. One only hopes they will not have the effect of merely turning him into a good Jew.
The Bible's modern readers also need protecting.
Since the Bible contains some fine poetry, some glorious prose, and some very subversive ideas and statements, as well as some awful ones, modern readers need to be able to distinguish the good from the bad if they are to develop any serious appreciation of it. After all, it opens with the account of a deity at his wits' end when confronted by human ingenuity, forced to resort to violence, bluff, and deceit as he kicks them out of his specially-constructed garden. Later on it satirizes (Jonah) and condemns (Jeremiah) prophets and berates corrupt priests (Malachi). It claims that the deity tells lies (1 Kings 22) and that he treats evil and wicked people alike (Ecclesiastes, stating the obvious). It also criticizes the accumulation of wealth by abuse of power, and condemns injustice and hypocrisy. On the other hand, its deity drowns the entire human race (and animals) - with the exception of one family; it endorses slavery, and commands parents to have disobedient children executed by the neighbors. It advocates slaying homosexuals, yet punishes rapists by forcing them to marry their victims (or, better, forces the victims to marry the rapist. Just consider that for a minute!). It calls for lepers to be banished from society. Because these are all biblical ideas, they can be made to compel obedience from credulous and manipulated congregations. There is a desperate need for a counter-attack, one which takes both the Bible and the reader seriously and responsibly. And it goes without saying that the Bible must be read, if at all, thoroughly and directly, and not absorbed second-hand and in selected morsels from self-appointed ministers of religion, who have no interest in undermining their own status by dismantling the authority of the Bible on which their own authority so often rests.
Finally, the Bible itself needs protecting.
It is, after all, only a collection of writings which later political and religious authorities deemed worthy of preserving, then decided to canonize, then finally to attribute to their god. But some people expect it to stand in the place of the deity himself, idolizing big black bibles placed in pulpits, preserving family bibles as heirlooms, having witnesses in a court of justice swear on it. I have seen (in Africa) a heavy bible balanced on the head of a girl who, every month or so, got herself possessed by a spirit (I never knew if it was the same one each time) and needed to be exorcised. Whether she enjoyed this ritual or not I have no idea, but her posture and deportment certainly became better than all the other girls in the town. Yes, this Bible has been idolized, turned into a charm, a bran tub for the fishing out of texts that magically give you a personal message from Up There: a Holy Thing. In reality, a bible is a sheaf of pages of translated ancient human compositions, ritually abused from time to time and perhaps silently longing to be released from the bonds of devotion and allowed to show what it can really do when it lets its hair down. If you haven't guessed it already, I am very fond indeed of this Bible, despite its many dangerous faults. But I wish it would carry a health warning and that only people who have proved they know how to read properly should be licensed to teach it. Is there any doubt that the Bible would be safer in the hands of Atheists?
But why do Atheists need the Bible?
The obvious answer (one often imputed to us by theists) is that we need something not to believe in, like the Welshman (one of my ancestors, no doubt), who, shipwrecked on a desert island, built two chapels: one to attend, and the other to avoid. Or the Irish politician who came to the Palace of Westminster from his constituency especially to 'abstain in person.' We need, the charge runs, to have something specifically not to believe in. We are engaged in adolescent rebellion against the Parent.
Well, it is true that Atheism is not a shrug-of-the shoulders denial of deities. That attitude is closer to agnosticism, the position of the great philosopher Parmenides, who said that the existence of the gods is too complicated a question and human life to short to make it worth bothering with. Atheism is a direct challenge to theism, its other side. And as such it is not worthy of an Atheist to shrug shoulders at the Bible which, unlike gods, does really exist, and is, at least in some extreme Protestant forms of veneration, an idol to be broken.
But the Atheist's claim on the Bible is not fundamentally a negative one. It is not an enemy. People may have been killed for translating, or even owning one, and horrible things have been done for its sake. But, just as guns do not kill people, neither do books. The real reason Atheists need the Bible is because it belongs to us as well. Despite the claims that it is the property of the church (or synagogue), it is, like the pyramids, Stonehenge, Chartres cathedral, or the Easter Island sculptures, the product of human imagination and labor. These artifacts are all our heritage, and all, as it happens, are inspired by religious ideas and built for religious motives. Most great works of the past were similarly inspired, because our species has a long history of religion - one that is far from over. But we also have, I think, a moral duty to claim ownership, as humans, of the Bible. For to make the claim is do deny and to frustrate those who want to place their hands upon it and draw from it the power that they can then exert over others. Those who cannot live without the notion that the secrets of life (including their own) are determined in writing, that God's Plan for Them is encoded in random texts needs counseling. But there are many more who can?t be bothered with the Bible because they associate it with a certain kind of religiosity. That is a shame, because the Bible deserves to be read for what it is: one of the great works of literature, and one that has shaped our civilization - the civilization, note, in which secularism was born.
Postscript
Is it true that many non-deist biblical scholars are the children of religious households, even of an ordained father? The answer is, I suspect, 'yes,' because this is the way in which people acquire a knowledge of and interest in the Bible that is developed enough to impel them towards a career studying it and its workings. Such a biography says little about the motives of these biblical scholars, despite the jibes of theists that we are all rebelling against a religious upbringing.
My father was a Baptist minister - a learned, gentle, humorous and courageous man, genuinely liberal, and a lover (as I am) of the Bible that he knew pretty well. But despite my continued affection for him (he died over twenty years ago) I moved from being an Agnostic to being an Atheist through reading the Bible, and through reading what people (scholars, mostly) said about it. I have faith in the power of literature to change people's minds, and in the power of this classic to wean people away from theism. I have a few acquaintances who admit to the same. I wonder how many readers of this article might be able to offer the same testimony.
About the author
Educated at Oxford and St. Andrews, Dr. Davies is a professor in the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield in England and a recognized authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is co-founder and co-publisher of Sheffield Academic Press and serves as the editor of the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. In addition to four books on the Dead Sea Scrolls, his books include In Search of Ancient Israel and Whose Bible Is It Anyway? Among the many articles of which he can boast is an essay on the film Monty Python's Life of Brian, which he declares is 'still the most historically authentic biblical movie yet made.'