postal scrotum: on the Bible and self-contradiction

Richardson writes:

Kevin,

I hope your covering the difference between Genesis chapters one and two gets some interested students to read the Bible more – and that they will do a little research, aside from the Bible, to help in their understanding. It got me to look into it a bit, at least for what those more scholarly than me (in addition to you) on the matter have to say:

LINK 1

LINK 2

LINK 3

Hebrew vocab, vastly different styles of writing, and greater context aside, if one doesn’t take a strict literalist view in looking at the Bible, one won’t have a problem with chapter one vs. chapter two; I view the two stories of creation as outline vs. detail. I don’t even take the six days literally, but view them more as eras of development of the universe, solar system, and Earth.

Such a view makes nitpicky positions like this

LINK 4

irrelevant, IMO.

Maybe I’m presumptuous in interpreting what I think is literal and what is not, but when people read the Ten Commandments they’re understood to be literally followed, and Revelations are understood to be representations but not literal. When creation is viewed in the same manner, geological history as we know it makes a lot more sense, and I’d even say that in many ways geology would serve to reinforce what’s in Genesis.

Hopefully those students looking into this will not get stuck in a literalist interpretation and become discouraged.

V/R,
Richardson

Richardson, thanks for the above links. The notion of scriptural contradiction isn't new, of course; the debates about these verses have been going on since at least the Enlightenment if not before. As people began to view the biblical scriptures as more than just untouchably sacred writ, they came to evaluate the scriptures as literature, noting narrative points, gauging writerly style, and eventually coming to the realization that the Bible might be divinely inspired, but that it is also very much the product of human hands.

If my students are encouraged to read more of the Bible, that'll be great. I remember one pastor I know saying that that's often a problem among Western Christians-- Bible literacy. Literacy isn't enough, though; scripture needs to be wrestled with, and I think that approaching the Bible with an overly literalist outlook is a recipe for constant insecurity and disappointment.

Editorial inconsistencies are shot through the entire book. This isn't to say the Bible should be discarded or discredited, but such problems should be a heads-up to the overly literal crowd, to wit: if the Good Lord did indeed have a hand in developing this magnificent work, He didn't say He was going to make things easy for His readers. Personally, I prefer a scripture loaded with inconsistencies and contradictions to one that is smooth and absolutely self-consistent, like an over-lawyered document (my apologies to lawyers... hee).

Genesis has at least three authors. The books of the Pentateuch/Torah have strands that can be classifed in four major schools conventionally labeled J, P, D, and E: Yahwist, Priestly, Deuteronomic, and Elohist (if I'm not mistaken, "J" for "Yahweh" simply reflects the fact that many of the foremost biblical scholars were and are German). The Priestly account of creation dominates Chapter 1 and spills over into Chapter 2. This awkward division is the result of bad editing and versification early on-- something that is corrected in most modern Bibles through improved paragraph indentation and other forms of text editing.

I'm somewhat familiar with certain certain scholarly (?) attempts at "saving" Genesis from self-contradiction, such as can be seen in some of the links you provided. Clever reinterpretation of the Hebrew (and it's not always obvious whether Christian thinkers have consulted with Jewish thinkers on these points-- these are originally Hebrew/Jewish works, after all) is done to show that the two stories somehow actually match perfectly. I'm not sure why there's this mania for demonstrating the Bible's self-consistency. If we accept that the scriptures were written even partly through human action, we shouldn't be surprised to find very human problems in them.

It's usually the literalists who are at pains to resolve all "apparent" contradictions. They've got a lot to address, after all. A sample of typical inconsistencies covered in Bib Lit:

how long was Jesus' ministry?
what was Jesus' final utterance on the cross?
how many angels were at the empty tomb?
what did God say at Jesus' baptism, and who heard it?
was Jesus crucified during Passover? before? after?

That's just Jesus and the gospels. Old Testament accounts present many more problems, as do other parts of the New Testament. One could spend one's entire life chasing after these inconsistencies, and some people have done just that, but... what the hell for?

I see the situation this way. Parents are never perfectly consistent, and when we're kids, especially when we get into our teens, that inconsistency can be bothersome, even a cause for disrespect. "Ha!" we think. "My parents don't know everything, and they don't practice what they preach!" The immature might take those flaws as grounds to dismiss parental wisdom and authority entirely, as some very childish people do. But as we get older and, we hope, wiser, we begin to realize that those contradictions, while remaining contradictions, do fit into a larger picture-- a subtle one that can't be seen when looked at directly. The awareness of this larger picture is our first real, practical glimpse into the true mystery of who our parents are: they are not, we discover, merely the sum of their faults-- they are something more, something we will never totally understand. By analogy, then, a mature person can eventually embrace scriptural contradictions as signposts to be followed with the eyes of faith-- signposts for people who don't need neat, clear-cut, absolutely self-consistent answers that are, in the end, completely useless for dealing with the fuzzy logic of human existence.

This is why I can't stand Pat Robertson, whom Drudge linked to the other day because Robertson made another stupid "God told me an enormous disaster was in the works" announcement. One thing people need to grow out of is the idea that God is a parent who wants us, His children, to be perpetually stunted, such that God is always providing, er, intracranial voice messages and nature-defying miracles to prod us along and keep us from tripping over ourselves. Whatever true spirituality is, I think it's something much deeper than literalism, parlor tricks, and special effects.

Regarding this:

Maybe I’m presumptuous in interpreting what I think is literal and what is not, but when people read the Ten Commandments they’re understood to be literally followed, and Revelations are understood to be representations but not literal. When creation is viewed in the same manner, geological history as we know it makes a lot more sense, and I’d even say that in many ways geology would serve to reinforce what’s in Genesis.

I wrote a post on biblical literalism a while back. Here, from November 2005:

on biblical literalism

As for this:

Hopefully those students looking into this will not get stuck in a literalist interpretation and become discouraged.

Because many Christian scholars from all countries have been hard at work trying to resolve scriptural contradictions, usually for apologetic (as in "apologia," not "I'm sorry") purposes, I'm sure that, if my students are sufficiently motivated, they'll find plenty of Korean-language info online that addresses the inconsistencies in the Genesis accounts in some manner or other. In a strongly Christian country like Korea, I'd guess that there's no shortage of such information.

For me, Occam's Razor suggests that simpler is better ("Do not multiply entities beyond necessity" was the original caution, I think). The simplest explanation for the difference between Genesis 1 and 2 is the one known to anyone who has taken a Bib Lit class anywhere other than at a fundie Bible college: two different authors from two very different traditions and time periods, each influenced by creation narratives from the surrounding culture, wrote very different accounts of the Beginning. Their stories were later redacted and stitched together into a single, not-quite-seamless account, with no thought to questions of form criticism, which wasn't around back then.

I decided to see what my Oxford Annotated Revised Standard Version had to say on the matter, and the footnote was curt regarding the creation story that begins partway into Chapter 2: "This is a different tradition from 1.1-2.3 as evidenced by the flowing style and the different order of events of creation."

I agree with your hope that my students won't get stuck in literalism. There are far better things to be doing than trying to resolve contradictions that are, in my opinion, the true gateway to the holy: they're the Good Lord's way of saying, "Kid, you better figure this out for your damn self." Heh.

While I'm at it, I should take a moment to address certain of my atheist readers who view scriptural self-contradiction as absolute proof of the Bible's overall uselessness. While I am not a literal theist, I like to think that the best scientific attitude is one that remains open to possibilities, including metaphysical ones. I seriously doubt that the Judeo-Christian God exists, and that He exists in the form described in the Christian Bible, but I am open to the idea that reality nevertheless has an ineffable numinous aspect. Influenced as I am by my readings in Buddhism and Taoism, I'd say that this Numinous is nothing more or less than the ordinary reality we see and experience every day. That nirvana is this samsara. But all religious scriptures and traditions-- not just the Christian ones-- contain contradictions. These are to be welcomed for the work they provide, and for me, spirituality is, at bottom, work. Like Jacob, the believer needs to wrestle with the angel. Like Jacob, he's going to lose. But if wrestling leads to a moment of, as Karl Rahner might put it, self-transcendence, then it's worthwhile.

Yes, yes: scriptural literalism leads to all sorts of human stupidity, which we see on TV and read in the papers. But literalism is not the fault of scripture: it's the fault of how we approach scripture. Imagine finding an eloquent poem about plumbing, then attempting to use that poem as a guide for fixing your leaking sink. The poem is blameless; the idiot who mistakes a poem for a handyman's fix-it manual is the problem. Human stupidity resides inside the skull, not on the page.


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