I am reading through (and already blogged once<\/a>) on a fascinating book, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition<\/a><\/em> One of the things I try to stress in my teaching, blogging, and writing<\/a> is that modern biblical scholarship does more than just unsettle certain views of the Bible.<\/strong><\/p>\n It most certainly does that for some, and that process of being unsettled is in and of itself a\u00a0spiritual plus in that it helps wrest us from the \u201csin of certainty<\/a>,\u201d meaning from the false belief that true faith in God rests on our having and then holding dearly to an impenetrable theological system rooted in the \u201cclear teaching of Scripture.\u201d The Bible, simply by its diversity, effectively deconstructs that kind of thinking.<\/p>\n But modern biblical scholarship is of theological value to us in another way, and this is where Sommer comes in.<\/p>\n Speaking of the heart of Jewish scripture\u2014Torah, aka Pentateuch, the Five Books of\u00a0Moses\u2014Sommer sees great value for observant Jews in taking to heart the longstanding scholarly fact<\/em> (yes, I\u2019ll use that word\u2014let the comment section blow up), that the Torah\u00a0was not written at one time, in one place, by one person, but developed, grew, \u201cevolved\u201d so to speak over several centuries.<\/p>\n This modern scholarly idea is often referred to by its early name (19th century), the \u201cDocumentary Hypothesis,\u201d which effectively argued that Torah is made up of 4 distinct voices (written sources) stemming from the days of the divided monarchy (9th c. BCE) to after the return from exile in (539 BCE).<\/p>\n That particular iteration of the theory of the origin of the\u00a0Pentateuch has been greatly modified and debated ever since, but\u00a0the general idea of multiple voices preserved and brought together centuries later in one collection called \u201cTorah\/Pentateuch\u201d is not seriously questioned.<\/p>\n As such, the Pentateuch bears witness to and preserves<\/em>\u00a0these ancient Israelite voices\u00a0about what it means to hear God\u2019s voice.<\/p>\n So what? Knowing something about this development and the distinct voices contained in Torah is about\u00a0more than just satisfying a historical curiosity (\u201cWho wrote the Pentateuch and when?\u201d).<\/p>\n It can and should function\u00a0for us today (Jew and Christian) as a theological model.<\/em><\/p>\n Here is one of several ways Sommer puts it.<\/p>\n The varied memories found in the Pentateuchal sources serve as religiously\u00a0valuable testimonies that provide guidance to people for whom the Bible functions as scripture. Attending to these testimonies allows us, first, the sense the extent to which teaching about revelation were already subject to rich debate in the biblical period itself<\/strong> and, second, to see how the modern debates about revelation recall and reenact this older debate<\/strong>.<\/em> (p. 45)<\/p>\n In other words, knowing how the Pentateuch came to be, with all its diverse \u201ctestimonies,\u201d is spiritually beneficial for those who read the Bible as sacred scripture. How so?<\/p>\n That debate is not a later\u00a0distortion\u00a0of scripture to be settled by an appeal to scripture. Rather,\u00a0scripture\u00a0preserves and\u00a0therefore\u00a0authoritatively supports the idea that such debate is ongoing.<\/em><\/p>\n Judaism has its own vigorous internal debates about what the Bible is and how to use it, but on the whole, Judaism has a tradition of seeing the wisdom, even commonsensical-ness, of Sommer\u2019s point: \u201cYes. Duh. Of course Torah is diverse. Not apparently<\/em> diverse, but actually<\/em> diverse. The only question is what we do about\u00a0it.\u201d<\/p>\n Sommer\u2019s bigger point in all this is that Torah itself is not God\u2019s word given once-for-all in pristine perfection and now under a protective, vacuum-sealed glass case we call \u201cthe authoritative canon.\u201d Rather,\u00a0precisely in\u00a0its diversity and contradictions,\u00a0Torah\u00a0bears witness to an active theological tradition<\/em> that goes back to the very beginning of Israel\u2019s experience.<\/p>\n And that is exactly why conservative Christians are traditionally very, very nervous about seeing the Pentateuch as a collection of diverse theologies: it is no longer the pristine original whose diversity is only alleged, the result of \u201csinful man\u201d willfully or unintentionally misinterpreting it. Diversity is\u00a0a theological problem to be overcome\u00a0rather than a source of theological energy.<\/p>\n To drive home the point further, we can\u00a0point to two analogous issues\u00a0that may be more familiar to\u00a0Christian readers of the Bible.<\/p>\n First is the actual text of the Bible.<\/strong>\u00a0We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls (the oldest and massive collection of\u00a0copies of the Bible going back to a century or two before Christ) that the further back you go in time, the more diverse the\u00a0Bible becomes<\/em>. The idea of a \u201cpristine original\u201d Bible, <\/strong>an originally straightforward\u00a0communicative\u00a0act form God to dutiful writers that got corrupted over time, is a notion that can only take root later on, after the original diversity was\u00a0streamlined in both Jewish and Christians traditions (2nd c. CE and onward).<\/p>\n Second is the matter of\u00a0Christian origins.<\/strong> Many Christians assume\u00a0that the further back we go\u00a0in time, the closer we get to \u201coriginal Christianity\u201d when all followers of\u00a0Jesus were\u00a0essentially in agreement on all important\u00a0matters. Diversity was only introduced later when the early church quickly\u00a0forgot the\u00a0simple original message.<\/p>\n But scholars who study Christian origins are quick to point out how diverse and even tense the early Jesus movement was right from the very beginning: the ground-level tensions between Paul and Peter, different ways of looking the crucifixion, the role of the law, the nature of faith\u2014even who Jesus was and what he did (there are 4 Gospels, after all).<\/p>\n Both Christian and, as Sommer reminds us, Jewish origins are diverse, a fact born out by their\u00a0founding documents. The role of modern biblical scholarship has been to\u00a0help us understand how scripture itself bears witness to the early Israelite and Christian movements\u00a0as living, breathing, growing, changing\u00a0traditions,\u00a0<\/em>grappling with the nature of God and what it means to live as God\u2019s people.<\/p>\n As serious readers of scripture, we participate in this biblical tradition. To tame it or explain it away is<\/a>, ironically, to lose sight of our biblical roots.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=inspirandinca-20&l=am2&o=1&a=0300158734\")
We see in the Bible a theological process modeled for us\u2014a \u201crich debate\u201d over what it means to hear the voice of God.<\/h2>\n