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April 11, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: In the Bible, God — and humans — are in the details

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — Awhile back, a reader left a voice mail telling me how much that day’s column “sickens me,” and how, in general, “I usually disagree with your writings. I don’t care for your style or your opinions and, quite honestly, I usually skip over your column.”

As ammunition against what my column had advocated — a national organization, Parents, Families and Friends of Gays and Lesbians — the caller said that people might be able to change their ideas about such things, “but the Bible doesn’t change.”

I’ve been thinking about that declaration ever since, most acutely on two occasions during this just-completed Lenten season.

The first was as I leafed through the now-battered Bible that was given to me as a child after I had completed the appropriate studies at the Methodist Temple — when the church and our family were located on the edges of Farrington’s Grove.

In a painstaking, four-page preface, the publishers of the Revised Standard Version Bible explained the historical and etymological journey of this particular edition. “Translated from the original tongues,” of Hebrew and Greek, it was first printed in 1611 and revised 1882-1885, revised again in 1901, then “compared with the most ancient authorities” and revised again in 1952.

The hero of this evolution, according to the preface, was William Tyndale, who produced and printed the “first English version of the Scriptures made by direct translation from the original Hebrew and Greek,” from about 1524 to 1536.

Many current sources cite Tyndale’s translations as pivotal to the mighty King James Version of the Bible. He is credited with introducing the English phrases, “Let there be light,” “the salt of the earth” and “my brother’s keeper.”

Tyndale also is recognized as the person who substituted the word “love” for the previously translated “charity” — as in 1 Corinthians, 13:13: “So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Other sources do not hold Tyndale in such high regard. In a history of English-translation Bibles, the online Catholic Encyclopedia gives Tyndale short shrift — 16 lines. By comparison, John Wyclifte (or Wyclif), who produced a 14th-century English translation of the Bible, garnered 53 lines.

In Tyndale’s own lifetime?

For all his impassioned effort to make the Scriptures accessible to everyone, even “a boy that driveth the plough,” Tyndale was arrested, publicly strangled and burned at the stake for heresy.

The second occasion on which I contemplated the statement “the Bible doesn’t change” was at the start of Holy Week.

As a Roman Catholic convert, I used “The Little Black Book,” a daily Lenten guide, to help me prepare for Easter. A product of the Diocese of Saginaw, Mich., the book is based on writings by the late Bishop Ken Untener, author of a gorgeous prayer that is often credited to the slain archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero.

Each day the guide tends to teach biblical or church history on one page, then quotes Scripture on the other page. Questions are posed to help readers engage more deeply in a Lenten journey.

The Holy Week passage I mentioned explores the story of the woman who anointed Jesus with expensive oil. As the Little Black Book explains:

“All four Gospels tell the story of a woman who enters a house where Jesus is a dinner guest and anoints his feet with precious oil. But there are major differences in the details of their stories.”

The guide reviews the dissimilarities. In Matthew and Mark, a woman anoints Jesus’ head, and she is not identified as a sinner. In Luke, the woman is labeled as sinful. She encounters Jesus, weeps upon his feet, wipes them with her hair then kisses and anoints them.

In John, the woman has a name. More, she is a personal friend of Jesus, Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. Mary anoints Christ’s feet and wipes them with her hair.

The Lenten guide explains that biblical scholars “believe that, as the stories were passed on in oral tradition [before the Gospels were written], two different events were mixed together.”

Before the Gospels were written. I am so often tempted to raise that point when another Christian (usually an angry Christian) refers to the Bible as “God’s word,” as if every syllable was dictated by the Lord — in American English — directly to a specific person with pen and papyrus in hand.

Biblical scholars through the ages have discovered much about the four Gospels, but as the behemoth reference book “The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought” humbly acknowledges, “it is impossible to ascertain when, where and by whom the gospels were written.”

Of the anointing woman, the Little Black Book explains that in “popular thought,” Luke’s sinful woman was “mistakenly thought to be Mary Magdalene,” probably because Luke previously described seven demons being cast out of Magdalene by Christ.

“This was a standard way of speaking of someone cured of sickness,” the Lenten guide says, “but some misunderstood it to mean sinfulness.”

Some still do. Mary Magdalene, who may have been afflicted with anything from migraines to fibromyalgia, remains a repentant prostitute in the minds, art and literature of many Christians — even though no evidence exists of such a life for her.

Speaking of Magdalene, she is named in three of the four Gospels as one of the women who accompanied Jesus and witnessed his crucifixion. Luke speaks only of “the women who had followed him from Galilee.”

Matthew, Mark and Luke all place the women at a distance or “afar,” but John has them “standing by the cross.” John’s is also the only account that identifies Jesus’ mother and his aunt among those faithful, heartbroken witnesses.

In the hours of research I’ve done while thinking about “the Bible doesn’t change,” I have read scores of arguments and theories about what various words and passages really mean. I’ve learned that the discovery of ancient texts in an Egyptian dump in 1885 blew away previous interpretations of some Greek terms.

So, too, I’ve discovered there are hundreds of translations of the Bible, at least 75 different versions here in North America. There are five main schools of thought as to why the King James Version is still supposedly the only genuine and true rendering of the word of God.

Does all of this — and the mandatory Old Testament death penalties for faking virginity, swearing at your parents and having sex with your wife during her menstrual period — make me want to chuck the Bible?

Not at all. While Christians believe the Bible is divinely inspired and that it’s “truth” is for all time, the book is inarguably the work of human beings. The Bible is language, and language — if is to remain alive and relevant — changes. To me, that’s the good news.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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