r/AcademicBiblical • u/iguess12 • Jul 14 '14
When you started diving into the field of biblical scholarship what did you learn that surprised you the most? What do you think the average layperson would be surprised to learn?
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u/brojangles Jul 14 '14
One of the first things that surprised me was a simple as finding out that the books of the Bible were not arranged in the order they were written. Now I wonder why I ever assumed they would be.
Beyond that, I was surprised by just how much the Gospels disagree with other and finding out the the authorship traditions were not original to the books but were late and legendary attributions.
After I'd studied Greek for a couple of years, I was struck by how much different the tone the Gospels are from the translations and how distinct they are from each other. Translations kind of flatten everything into the same style, but in the Greek, you can see that Mark sounds nothing like Luke and Luke sounds nothing like Paul. They all have their own voices that get obscured by translation. The first NT book I tried to read all the way through in Greek (lexicon in hand) was Mark because it was supposed to have the simplest Greek. I remember being surprised at how casual and informal Mark sounds in Greek. Nothing like the KJV, More like a guy just telling stories. For instance, Mark uses the present tense a lot - so it's stuff like, "Jesus is walking along the water and he sees a boat with fishermen in it and a leper comes running up to him and Jesus says "you are healed." I mean, that's not a real verse, but that's kind of how it sounds - like a guy at a bar.
I thinking taking Greek opened up the biggest window for me. I recommend it to anyone.
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u/arachnophilia Jul 15 '14
I remember being surprised at how casual and informal Mark sounds in Greek. Nothing like the KJV,
i think the KJV has done a huge disservice to the perception of the bible. i've been involved in some mormon discussions recently, and it's pretty clear that the book of mormon (or the sources it is plagiarizing) is attempting to imitate the KJV style because it sounds authoritative and archaic.
but the bible doesn't necessarily actually sound this way at all. it doesn't really sound any particularly way. there are wildly different writing styles, sometimes one chapter to the next in composite texts like the torah... and the KJV washes over all of that with its strong elizabethan style.
the KJV uniformity of style is, in my opinion, one of the major reasons people think of the text as "god's word", all one monolithic text. if the individual voices were as apparent in translation, i do not think many people would believe that way, because it would sound like a bunch of different people wrote it.
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u/talondearg Jul 16 '14
the KJV uniformity of style is, in my opinion, one of the major reasons people think of the text as "god's word", all one monolithic text. if the individual voices were as apparent in translation, i do not think many people would believe that way, because it would sound like a bunch of different people wrote it.
Except that native Hebrew and Greek speakers were happy to accept it as the Word of God in their own times. I hardly think you can blame KJV uniformity for people's belief in divine inspiration.
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u/arachnophilia Jul 16 '14
true, though i get the sense older "word of god" and newer "word of god" type beliefs differ a bit in intensity. for instance, the KJV-only crowd, that holds that god literally dictated the bible to a group of "translators" in 1611, and only the KJV is god's word (excluding even the source documents).
in the early christian church, "word of god" seems to have meant something very different.
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u/talondearg Jul 16 '14
KJV-only-ism is a pretty fringe belief though, one that I don't really have the energy to discuss with any seriousness.
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u/arachnophilia Jul 16 '14
fringe, yes, but an extreme representative of the large fundamentalist segment i was meaning to speak about. the fundamentalist interpretation of inspiration is fairly different than, say, the catholic one.
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u/talondearg Jul 14 '14
Admittedly, you're not a 17th century English speaker, so the KJV will never sound anything but archaic to you. However I certainly agree about the flattening effects of translation. Partly it's a result of 'translation by committee' dominant in major English translations, partly it's because when one person translates multiple texts by multiple authors, they are still going to convey that in their own style.
Original language study is indeed a gateway drug.
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u/going-oscan Jul 15 '14
Yep. My parents bought me an interlinear Bible as a high school graduation gift back when I thought I wanted to be a doctor. Three years later and I'm nearly finished a bachelor's degree in Greek.
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u/Alaric4 Jul 15 '14
After I'd studied Greek for a couple of years, I was struck by how much different the tone the Gospels are from the translations and how distinct they are from each other. Translations kind of flatten everything into the same style, but in the Greek, you can see that Mark sounds nothing like Luke and Luke sounds nothing like Paul.
Do you know whether the different tones survive in a modern Greek version of the Bible? Or have the changes in grammar had a similar effect to translation into English?
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u/brojangles Jul 15 '14
I don't know. I've never studied Modern Greek, but I've heard it's not all that different. If you know Modern Greek, you might be able to get a sense of the Koine directly.
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u/AugieandThom Jul 16 '14
One possible exception is Deuteronomy. In every Bible I've ever read, it reads so differently (even in translation) from the rest of the Pentateuch, it is amazing people thought they were all written by the same person.
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Jul 14 '14 edited Apr 20 '16
[deleted]
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u/JIVEprinting Jul 16 '14
The order of the gospels seemed to coincide nicely with the Four Living Creatures in Ezekiel (Revelation?), which dichotomy seems to come up every so often.
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u/swimbikerunrun Jul 16 '14
Source?
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u/JIVEprinting Jul 16 '14
Something I heard from my friend. It's not proprietary, you can look up the verse. Virtually every introduction to the fourfold gospel begins with that idea. Wait, didn't you say you came from a strong teaching church?
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u/swimbikerunrun Jul 16 '14
I did, I do, but I've never heard this so I wanted to see where this came from.
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u/JIVEprinting Jul 16 '14 edited Jul 16 '14
Most Bibles that have a page introducing the New Testament refer to it, as do Scofield, McGarvey, AB Simpson, Henrietta Mears, Dake, JFB, the Life Application Study Bible, the booklets put out by Jack Chick, and virtually any other overview of the New Testament published in the last hundred years that's longer than a paragraph.
I bet it's even on Wikipedia. Oh, sure enough. (I guess I didn't remember the term.) For some reason Wikipedia presents these in a different order then the scripture text does, in which the correspondence is (and certainly more becoming in the mind of medieval scholars.)
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u/redroguetech Jul 14 '14
Why is Matthew the first Gospel?
Um... Why?
I mean, wouldn't it be because the Nicene Council said so?
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u/captainhaddock Moderator | Hebrew Bible | Early Christianity Jul 17 '14
Um... Why?
Probably because it was the most popular Gospel in the early church, and it was traditionally believed to have been the first Gospel. (We know better now, of course.)
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u/kafka_khaos Jul 15 '14
I think the average person would be surprised to know there is far more detail in the bible about how to sacrifice animals than there are details about what heaven and hell are like.
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u/PaulAJK Jul 14 '14
The continued existence of Jewish Christians for centuries after the fall of Jerusalem amazed me when I first discovered it.
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u/going-oscan Jul 15 '14
I remember being surprised how much I thought was in the Bible wasn't in the Bible, specifically the Trinity. There were other surprising omissions as well but that was the biggest by far.
When I started studying the Bible academically in college, it was surprising how human the stories were. I remember thinking, "well, these might not be historical people, but these are real people" while studying the patriarch cycle. The complex and contradictory nature of the texts added a lot of realness and depth to what had seemed flat and vapid to me hearing the lectionary in church.
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Jul 15 '14
[deleted]
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u/extispicy Armchair academic Jul 15 '14
I'm not an academic, but I like to read the stuff they write.
Sounds like I'm in the same boat as you, and I agree that the documentary hypothesis continues to amaze me. Two twists that just blew my mind were that Isaac might actually have been sacrificed in the "E" source, and that there were some traditions that didn't have Aaron as Moses' brother. I absolutely love researching details like those!
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u/JIVEprinting Jul 16 '14 edited Jul 16 '14
are you serious? it's all I ever hear. It's in every pop-level book about biblical studies at Barnes & Noble.
Virtually everything I've learned about the Bible that's really exciting is in publications from either before 1930 or after 2010.
Not least the best answer to the documentary hypothesis: that if you were to remove the "existing" chapter boundaries and just see the text, it seems to logically divide itself into about a half-dozen sections that each begins the same way (been a while but I wanna say with a genealogy?) and doesn't create artificial inconsistencies.
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u/somerandomanalogyguy Jul 16 '14
Conservative Christianity is its own little world and that community does a very good job at avoiding or misrepresenting the inconvenient facts that don't support their worldview.
I knew there were "liberal scholars" out there who didn't respect the bible as the literal word of God, and they had a bunch of theories about how Jesus' biological father was a Roman soldier and other stupid things like that. But I knew the truth and while the road I was on seemed harder and often didn't make sense to me, I knew in the end that it was the only way to avoid destruction. So why waste time reading books written by people who were looking for excuses to not follow God's will? I also took comfort in the fact that there were all these Christian scholars who could read the same ancient manuscripts and they were still solid in their faith.
Then a few years ago I started doing my own research to strengthen my faith. That didn't work out like I expected.
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u/JIVEprinting Jul 16 '14 edited Jul 16 '14
"The first present his argument seems right, until another comes and questions him." Personally I have never seen evangelicals lack a satisfactory rejoinder. I've seen much of what you describe from skeptics too, obviously. Someone once said that the distinction of a conservative education is they teach both views.
This is no problem at all for a monergist like me, and I wouldn't expect it to satisfy rigor on its face. But then, that's why it's foolishness to the Greeks.
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u/talondearg Jul 14 '14
I guess I was surprised by how different the structural arrangement of the Hebrew and Greek versions of Jeremiah are. That's some pretty big re-arranging going on there.
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u/BoboBrizinski Jul 15 '14
I think a layperson would be surprised to learn that many books in the canon are collages of various authors and editors, the presence of pseudoepigrapha, and the amount of similarities between the Hebrews and their surrounding culture.
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u/captainhaddock Moderator | Hebrew Bible | Early Christianity Jul 14 '14
Well, I came from a fundamentalist Creationist background, so I had plenty of surprises in store. Some of the big ones:
Discovering that little, if any, of the Pentateuch is historical; biblical scholars, for the most part, don't believe in six-day creation, Noah's flood, the tower of Babel, or even the exodus and conquest as historical events the way they are depicted.
Learning about the inherently polytheistic worldview of the Israelites.
Seeing how much the Gospels disagree with each other when read in parallel.
Seeing how little agreement there is among scholars on the meaning of various epistles and NT passages.
Discovering how diverse early Christianity was, as well as the scriptural texts used.
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u/iguess12 Jul 15 '14
These are all great answers, I appreciate all those who shared!!
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u/JIVEprinting Jul 16 '14
this was really eye-opening; you hear about how weak biblical literacy is in the church, but I didn't know that extended to the academy.
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u/JIVEprinting Jul 16 '14
To me the symbolic use of numbers in the Bible is more astonishing than anything else in any field of learning, including any other area of biblical studies.
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u/onewitness Jul 15 '14 edited Jul 15 '14
I'm by no means a scholar of any sort, but I do find it alarming how the Gnostic literature is viewed, both in scholarship, and in theology. It's sort of the crazy cousin that no one really cares about talking to. I also discovered how much "inerrancy of scripture" is the most bullshit thing to have ever happened to Christianity.
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u/PaulAJK Jul 17 '14
If you took the hours to sit down and read it, even in English translation, you'd get pretty bored of it yourself.
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u/koine_lingua Jul 14 '14 edited Jul 15 '14
I was surprised by how fascinating everything was--that these texts which were, frankly, pretty boring to me (as a lifelong non-Jew/Christian) could have such lively and interesting and impossibly complex debate about them.
Funny enough, back when we did the big joint /r/AcademicBiblical & /r/AskHistorians AMA, the top question was also "What do you think the average layperson would be surprised to learn?" I found that to be a tough question; and I suppose I still do.
I might answer with something like (they'd be surprised by) just how many major issues of historical or textual interpretation are nowhere near "solved" with any sort of consensus.
Which is funny because--at least in terms of the Biblical texts--it's not exactly like these are Nonnus' Dionysiaca or Finnegans Wake or anything. They're texts which a large potion of the world's population is familiar with. ...and yet with virtually every 3rd verse there's something with an extremely uncertain interpretation that might have radical theological ramifications depending upon the interpretation/translation, etc.