You're listening to Tim Bulkeley's 5 minute Bible
Gavin at Otagosh has said some
nice things about these podcasts but in
pointing to them and saying nice things he
raises a question. He writes: "I'm a bit worried
about the distinction Tim
makes between a historically married God
and a theological entity who wasn't..."
So maybe I actually need to talk a bit more about that.
You see,
it seems to me that the Bible comes to us
not like your average ancient texts,
your average ancient text comes to us dug up
up from the desert or whatever and it's
dated we know when it was written and
give or take a decade or two the Bible
comes was quite differently it comes to
us having been passed down by a
complicated process of tradition and the
only form of the Bible or any particular
Bible book that we have access to is the
canonical form that was passed down to us.
That's not quite accurate because
the Dead Sea Scrolls for example give us
access to what was probably an earlier
stage in that process,
but by and large it's true
this means that all of the historical
stuff that I try to reconstruct around
the biblical text is speculation.
It should be intelligent speculation
should be intelligent speculation based
on evidence but in the end it's guesswork!
I can we construct with some
plausibility the history of the
development of particular biblical
books, though if you look at the
scholarship on the issue there's obviously
going to be a considerable amount of
disagreement and argument.
I can econstruct again with some plausibility
the history of Israel making use of
the biblical text, among other evidence but
again any such reconstruction will be
highly debatable
On the other hand, I have this text that comes to
me as part of a canon of texts
part of a collection of texts, that give meaning
to each other and shape each other's
meaning. Now out of all that mess, questions
like: Did an average ancient Israelite
in the street believe that God was married?
can be answered reasonably sensibly
those are historical questions
they're questions about what was going on in
the world behind the text not questions
about what's going on in the text
historical questions not literary questions
or theological questions
sometimes we have to say "I don't know"
and often our answers will differ a bit
depending on how we weigh the evidence
but they're historical questions but as well
as being a historical document of some
kind
the Bible is also a literary document it
is a text, one text now that it's all
being collected together and that
document says things, whether or not you
believe in the God that the Bible talks about
the Bible talks about God and what the
Bible says about God can be answered by
the same kind of a process
except that this time we're not looking
at what may have happened behind the text
in history but we think within this
document what's happening
now on the question of God's wife
within thedocument the answer is quite clear the
stupid idiots who thought God had a wife
had misunderstood God completely they
reduced God with a capital G to a god
just like all the other gods a male god
just like all the other male gods and
the Bible quite clearly says that that
belief was wrong headed. So the God the
Bible speaks about cannot be married
because God isn't male for a start you
have to be male to be married
that's what i mean by the distinction
between reading the Bible looking for
history and reading the Bible looking
for theology