Subject: Responses
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Jul 15 2002 - 01:11:49 EDT
Jim said:
<< ...I think you're overestimating the illiteracy of Jesus' crowd (any
male
of any significance was taught to read Hebrew, I believe) [. . . .] >>
Are you supposing this or do you know of some specific evidence? I wasn't
sure of the Jewish literacy rate of the time, so was sure to mention
illiteracy with a "perhaps" or three. Jewish culture today and for quite a
long time has placed great value in literacy and, to varying degrees, even
in Hebrew (the effort to revive the language in the late 19th and early 20th
century was described as something like persuading people to use
conversationally a language that they already knew). But I am unsure of the
state of things in Jesus' time. I would be very interested to learn more,
if you can point to something I am unaware of.
I think now that my suggestion of illiteracy was based upon the tacit belief
that, in ancient times, most of the world was illiterate, coupled with the
presumption that the large community of Jews in Jerusalem at that time was
so sufficiently secure that Hebrew literacy was not, as it was at other
times, an important point of cultural identity.
Now that you've brought me to think of it, though, I am also reminded of the
surprise expressed at several places in the gospels when Jesus, a
carpenter's son, demonstrates erudition. I found John 7:15, where the Jews
in the temple courts say, in Greek: "Pos houtos grammata oiden me
memathekos," which, translated, is something like, "How has this one known
the written things (or drawn, or etched - grammata) without having learned?"
The word that I have translated as "having learned" is "memathekos," which
is a form in the perfect of "manthano." The lexicon attached to my Greek
New Testament actually points to this very verse in its entry for "manthano"
with a suggested meaning of "attend a rabbinic school." I doubt that this
interpretative translation is justified, but the Jewish authority is
described as having surprise that the child of an ordinary blue-collar Jew
would be so learned in the "written things." I am sure that several other
instances of this occur, although I am not sure precisely where. I trust
that your knowledge and memory of the New Testament is generally better than
mine.
I can't say that this is evidence that most Jews could not read, but it does
seem to suggest that most were not highly literate. I would take this to be
true at least of the carpenters and the rest of their class, which I would
presume to be the majority. You suggest something like this when you say
parenthetically that any male "of any significance" would be taught to read
Hebrew, but I wonder what exactly you mean by that. I am not prepared to
make a controversial assertion, but now that you've made me think more about
it, I rather more suspect as true what before I only suggested in passing.
Literate or not, though, I think that nothing in this conversation is at
stake here.
Jim said:
<< [I think you are] ignoring how
the Hebrew Scriptures were used in the NT. I think it's significant that
Christ referred to "the" law and "the" prophets -- that was not an unusal
division. >>
I don't understand what you're asserting, here. It is true that the
division between the law and the prophets was not unusual. It seems to me
like a natural division. I should add that the Talmud was not yet written,
and it records law: so the law in Jesus' time might have included law that
is not in the Torah. The use of the definite articles there seems to me
perfectly usual in both Greek and English, whether the law and the prophets
refer to canonized books or not.
Jim said:
<< It could be argued, of course, that the use of the Hebrew
Scriptures by the NT writers contributed to the NT canon, but a Jewish
canon arose at least eventually that had amazing parallels to the Christian
canon -- I find it difficult to believe that these two traditions developed
a very similar canon separately after the time of Christ, or that either
was dependent upon the other after the time of Christ. It makes more sense
to me to think they were both drawing upon a root tradition before the time
of Christ. >>
What ancient Hebrew books were denied entry to either canon? The books that
were not canonized were excluded, it seems to me, on the grounds that they
were written in Greek and/or were not ancient enough.
The wide differences between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint, the
inclusion of the Hebrew of both versions and others in the collection at
Qumran, seems to me like all the necessary evidence to make a damn strong
case for what I have been saying. It seems certain that shortly before the
Christian era, at least to the people in the Near East, the idea of the book
was a different beast than it is now. It seems to me that would be
necessarily true for the Hebrew variants to have existed and survived long
enough to be archived by the Qumran community. I suspect that this was also
true apart from major intellectual centers prior to that time and in
different places. Books allowed for significant emendation and evolution in
a way that they do not today. I don't think that it can be said with
certainty that this attitude lasted into Jesus' time, but it MIGHT have. I
don't think that it can be ruled out with the evidence at hand.
Jim said:
<< Swete goes on and cites other evidence, then asserts that
"though the direct evidence is fragmentary, it is probable that before
the Christian era Alexanria possessed the whole, or nearly the whole, of
the Hebrew Scriptures in Greek translation" (25).
[. . .]
Swete closes his introductory remarks by saying "thus while the
testimony of the first century AD does not absolutely require us to
believe that all the books of the Hebrew canon had been translated
and were circulated in a Greek version druing the Apostolic age,
such a view is not improbable; and it is confirmed by the fact that
they are all contained in the canon of the Greek Bible which the
Christian Church received from its Jewish predecessors" (27).
[. . .]
I think it's important to note the use of the word "canon." The
importance of this collection and its being quoted with some authority
in Philo, Josephus, and by the NT authors -- and being accorded some
authority by simply being gathered with the books of the Law -- is that
the canon existed more in a sacred sense than in a literary sense. I
suspect the LXX, which does indeed seem to have been a fairly complete
collection of the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings and hagiographa
prior to the time of Christ, is also testimony to the idea of a sacred
canon prior to the time of Christ. While the boundaries of this canon
were somewhat fluid, it seems they did exist. >>
That Swete says where you quote him, "though the direct evidence is
fragmentary, it is probable that [. . . .]" and, "the
testimony of the first century AD does not absolutely require us to believe
that [. . . .]" ought to give clear enough the idea that he is saying things
not everyone agrees with. And it's true. As I said before, it is also
credibly asserted on various grounds that the post-Torah Septuagint was
composed early in the Christian era. The composition post-Torah is too
speculative for me to place much value in. But the translation into Greek
is not synonymous, it seems to me, with canonization since it so abundantly
clear by reading the Greek that the books were translated by different
people and probably at different times, to be gathered as "Septuagint"
later. Even if every book of the modern Tanakh were translated into Greek
by the third century B.C.E., they might have been gathered from different
sources and locales to become something of a compilation only in the
Christian era. It just isn't clear.
It is clear that the (then) recently written books concerning the Jews, most
of them written in Greek, were not canonized and probably on account of
their language and recent composition, which would make them less sacred to
the canonizers. It is clear that as recently as when the founders of the
Qumran community decided to leave town (first or second century B.C.E.)
several versions of Hebrew texts that varied WIDELY were coëxisting. It is
clear that versions disappeared within the mainstream community at an
unknown time and for unknown reasons, leaving one text that become the
canonized Masoretic. It is clear, after the Qumran find, that the
Septuagint has preserved actual Hebrew texts whose separation from the
Masoretic must have come prior to the canonization of the Masoretic and
elimination of others.
It seems perfectly within reason to me that the ultimate canonization
included all available Hebrew-language books that seemed to be of a certain
antiquity, eliminating all variants and favoring one version per book on
grounds that are still utterly mysterious. It seems perfectly within reason
to me to say that this happened sometime after the first or second century
B.C.E. But when, exactly, it happened? Can't say. Before the Christian
era? Maybe. But maybe not. Just can't say.
But my assertion that books were much more dynamic than they are today is
certainly true, it seems to me, within the Jewish community before the first
and second centuries B.C.E. It might be true for a good while after that.
I suspect that it's also true of different times and places, apart from
copyright laws, printing presses, and major centers of scholarship.
Cecilia said:
<< So, in the nineteenth century, a scholar named Julius Wellhausen
presented
the Authorial Hypothesis of the Pentateuch, that is, that Torah was
composed by multiple people. Various scholars picked up that ball and
established the actual number of authors, the temporal order of the
authors, and the phases of the Hebrew faith associated with each. The
authors are four [. . . .]>>
I think that it's worth saying that the dates you gave for the sources --
especially J and E -- are very controversial, perhaps more controversial
than the rest of this stuff. It is usually agreed that P came pretty late,
but you placed J firmly before E, in the Davidic dynasty around the tenth
century B.C.E. This is one frequently held position, but another big one is
that J and E were roughly contemporary, with J coming from the southern
kingdom of Judea and E coming from the northern kingdom of Israel. Most
opinions roughly follow one of these two, and I think it's pretty evenly
divided now.
Cecilia also said:
<< David Rosenberg supplies the text, stripped of any non-J
elements, and Bloom the literarian analyzes it not as an exalted text but
as a work of literature, which indeed it was. >>
And in a later message:
<< Bloom's book is supported almost solely by the text. >>
The biggest question about Bloom's book is not if it is supported by the
text, but What text? Because the text that he criticizes owes its existence
to Rosenberg, and if it represents cohesively a real text that existed
before is not clear. The hypothesis of multiple authorship is almost
universally acknowledged, but most all of the details are vehemently
debated. There has (relatively) recently been great controversy over
whether J and E were written by single authors or schools, and assertions of
a J1, J2, J3, et cetera. I find most of the efforts to distinguish the
strands with precision to be utterly unconvincing, and I am not at all
alone. Various extractions of, for instance, the J material, differ widely,
and different scholars account for the sources in particular passages very
differently. Happily for me, it seems that many of the younger generation
of scholars are losing patience with whole mess, and the bibliophilologists,
as I called them in a previous post, seem to be growing in numbers.
In short, I agree enthusiastically that the text is a work of literature and
deserves analysis as such. But the text as Rosenberg supplied it to Bloom,
stripped of any non-J elements, as you said, isn't as simply constructed as
that makes it sound. I don't know how Rosenberg discriminated between J and
non-J, but I know that he went out on a limb to do it because all such
discriminations go out on a limb. I would be just as interested to learn
about Rosenberg's textual analysis as I would be to learn about Bloom's
literary analysis, as the latter relies overtly on the former and the former
is necessarily highly controversial. But from what I understand, the former
receives much less attention in the Book of J. All of the criticism I've
heard for the book that was not simply "Bloom says interesting but
unsupported things" was aimed at Rosenberg. Bloom's analysis, as I think I
said in response to Will's message, is of a theoretically constructed text
for whose construction Bloom can not very well argue. And that, I think,
must be its greatest weakness.
Jim said:
<< The documentary hypothesis, technically, has NO
physical evidence supporting it. The only texts we have are pretty much
of the whole books or fragments of the whole books. What is observed in
the text could just as well be the result of editorial impositions on a
text substantially written by a single author, esp. if that single
author drew from a number of source texts written in different languages
and by different people. It's a fascinating thesis and has great
explanatory power, but it's hardly "proven." >>
The birth of the hypothesis, I think, must have been in the first two
chapters of Genesis. Anyone who reads them with an open eye will be
puzzled, and this is the case to an extraordinarily greater degree in
Hebrew. Two vastly different creation stories are back to back, and in
Hebrew the difference in language is about as striking as the difference in
plot. God gets an extra name in the second story, God produces with a
different word (the second chapter is "yatsar" instead of "bar'a," which is
a more physical "form" or "fashion" rather than "create"), he blows life
into the fashioned dust rather than speaking it into existence from nothing,
he does it all in a different order, and rather than the first story's
simple and symmetrical parataxis (it reads like good Hemingway), the second
begins with a long and elaborate sentence spanning what is now divided into
three verses, and continues with complex subordinates. The two stories
could not be more stylistically different. Many have puzzled over the
literary value of the juxtaposition -- I wrote a bit about it in big and
important paper last semester -- but there aren't any very pat answers.
Taking the two to have been composed at different times, to be artfully
placed by a later redactor, makes a great deal of sense. And this logic can
then be applied further and further. Often too far, in my opinion.
I think that the work of a redactor in the Torah is like biological
evolution: somehow innately improvable, given to endless debate even if only
about the details amongst those who believe it to be true, but still
possessing some aspect of certainty that is hardly deniable to any
reasonable person.
Tim said:
<< I'm a terrible student of religion, and [this conversation] is wasted on
me. >>
Religion often has a tough follower in me, too -- but it's the old books,
the great ancient literature, that draws me in. A music teacher I had this
last year once thought he would become a rabbi. He discovered, though, that
the religion wasn't for him and it was only the books that held his
attention. Reading about Abraham and David, Job and Jesus, even Augustine
and Anselm, is endlessly fascinating to me. They have made me fantasize
about being a profoundly religious man, in fact, a rabbi or a priest. But
at the end of the day, the religion won't go down my throat, and I find that
I'm merely taken by a love for old books. If it was ever written on papyrus
or parchment in a language or dialect no longer or seldom spoken, it will
take me right in, and with ease.
-robbie
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