The Bible Is Really Old
I like to listen to my parents' stories about their time in college. They met each other in college, so that's fun. But the most fascinating part of their stories is that they went to college in a different time. There were curfews. Women couldn't go in male dorms and vice versa. My parents went to a small school and everyone ate their meals at one cafeteria. They didn't have video-games. But at the same time, it was college, and there's a lot of the same types of experiences. Young adults were going through a lot of the same things in the late 60s as they were at the turn of the new millennium. So in listening to their stories, I'm simultaneously relating to their experience while intrigued by the jarring differences.
The jarring differences in their experience and mine don't cause a great problem in our communication on account of two things:
1. They themselves are aware of how society has changed, so they can recognize how things from their stories are different than they now are. And so a lot of sentences take the structure, "These days X happens, but back then you have to understand that Y was the case." They provide context to the parts of the stories that seem strange to me.
2. I can say with deep gratitude that my parents are both alive and actively a part of my life. I'm in communication with them. I can ask questions immediately after something strikes me as odd. And they can provide the context.
How does this relate to the Bible?
The Bible is very old. Much much older than my parents. All of the documents in the New Testament date back to at least the middle of the 2nd century, and some of the Old Testament texts date back much further than that.
Like my parents' college stories, there are aspects of the Bible to which we strongly relate, and there are parts that seem foreign and odd. Many people can relate to the sibling rivalry between Jacob and Esau. Few modern readers can understand why there's so much sacrificing of animals going on.
The problem with the Biblical stories, as compared to my parents' college stories, is that the context is not easily accessible. The authors and editors of the Biblical texts did not include explanatory phrasings for the people who would be reading their words 2,000 years later in another language on an ipod.
What does this mean? It means that to read and interpret the Bible, we have to try to gain as much knowledge as we can about the world of the Bible. It's extra work, and that's a drag. Nonetheless, it's not nearly as much of a downer as the idea of people misreading and misunderstanding the foundational text of their religion.
The Bible deserves the extra work. And that extra work just goes to show that the Bible is hard.
The jarring differences in their experience and mine don't cause a great problem in our communication on account of two things:
1. They themselves are aware of how society has changed, so they can recognize how things from their stories are different than they now are. And so a lot of sentences take the structure, "These days X happens, but back then you have to understand that Y was the case." They provide context to the parts of the stories that seem strange to me.
2. I can say with deep gratitude that my parents are both alive and actively a part of my life. I'm in communication with them. I can ask questions immediately after something strikes me as odd. And they can provide the context.
How does this relate to the Bible?
The Bible is very old. Much much older than my parents. All of the documents in the New Testament date back to at least the middle of the 2nd century, and some of the Old Testament texts date back much further than that.
Like my parents' college stories, there are aspects of the Bible to which we strongly relate, and there are parts that seem foreign and odd. Many people can relate to the sibling rivalry between Jacob and Esau. Few modern readers can understand why there's so much sacrificing of animals going on.
The problem with the Biblical stories, as compared to my parents' college stories, is that the context is not easily accessible. The authors and editors of the Biblical texts did not include explanatory phrasings for the people who would be reading their words 2,000 years later in another language on an ipod.
What does this mean? It means that to read and interpret the Bible, we have to try to gain as much knowledge as we can about the world of the Bible. It's extra work, and that's a drag. Nonetheless, it's not nearly as much of a downer as the idea of people misreading and misunderstanding the foundational text of their religion.
The Bible deserves the extra work. And that extra work just goes to show that the Bible is hard.
posted by Bret at
10:24 AM
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