For more than five hundred years, the Bible has been referred to as the Word of God. Yet, even before the Bible was written, there was a Living Word-spoken through prophets and through Jesus of Nazareth - that ultimately echoes through the centuries. Pastor Toivonen relies on his nearly thirty years of preaching as well as studying and interpreting the Bible to inspire others to contemplate how God speaks in the contemporary world and whether God prefers flesh and blood to ink and paper. While sharing his careful examination of how the Bible came to be the Word of God through a very human process and why the Word of God is intended to be living and breathing as opposed to a book, Toivonen offers intriguing insights and commentary that encourages spiritual seekers to embark on a personal journey to answer their own questions about the Bible, its authority, and its trustworthiness. Reading Jesus offers encouragement to anyone ready to consider a deeper and more meaningful relationship with Jesus of Nazareth and apply the Word of God to truly live God's way-today.
READING JESUS
Meeting the Word of GodBy Vance L. ToivoneniUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Vance L. Toivonen
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4759-0799-5Contents
Preface.........................................................................viiIntroduction....................................................................xiChapter One The Bible and How We Got It (or didn't get it)......................1Chapter Two The Word is the Word................................................15Chapter Three A Good Jewish Boy from Nazareth...................................32Chapter Four Give Me that Old Time Murder.......................................45Chapter Five What Are You Looking at?...........................................54Chapter Six D-I-V-O-R-C-E.......................................................64Chapter Seven Promises, Promises................................................74Chapter Eight An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind.....................85Chapter Nine Who Loves You, Baby?...............................................95Chapter Ten The Last Word.......................................................106Appendix—On Scrumptious Scriptures........................................115Bibliography....................................................................119
Chapter One
The Bible and how we Got it (or didn't Get it)
The Bible is the number one best-seller of all time. Walk into any bookstore and you will be confronted with a number of different translations, perhaps as many as two or three dozen. Globally the Bible is translated into hundreds of different languages. What a privilege it is to have so many choices. Prior to the sixteenth century people did not have such choices. The Reformation really began in earnest when Martin Luther defied Church authority by translating the Bible into German, the language of his people. Before that, the common people were dependent upon the interpretation of the priests and bishops who read the Bible only in Latin. But, did the translation of the Bible into common language make it any more widely read?
This German Bible (this is not praise for myself but the work praises itself) is so good and precious that it's better than all other versions, Greek and Latin, and one can find more in it than in all commentaries, for we are removing impediments and difficulties so that other people may read in it without hindrance. I'm only concerned that there won't be much reading in the Bible, for people are very tired of it and nobody clamors for it any more.
The Bible is undoubtedly a bestseller because, like other books I have on my shelves, it is primarily a book we intend to read; or feel we should read. Before I take my last earthly breath I am certain that I will not have read every book that is currently cluttering up my home and office. Some I have read parts of, because sometimes parts are just as good as the whole thing. Some I think I should read, but probably never will. And some I have read and may read again.
A key thing about sacred scriptures is that at one time or another they existed in oral form. Stories like the two creation stories in Genesis were passed on to many generations before they were ever written down in some form or another. There are, then, a lot of changes that go into these stories and histories and poetries and letters before anyone ever gets to read them. It is not unlike the telephone game we play as children, whispering something into ear after ear until we finally hear the result on the other end of the line. Rarely do the two versions match.
A search on Amazon for history books about Abraham Lincoln resulted in 3,742 results. There must be some differences between these histories, otherwise there would be fewer to be sure. I am not a history buff, per se, but I would imagine that, if I were, I would read several of these histories and biographies of Lincoln and decide which one fits my particular slant on Lincoln. I would wish to make a case that Lincoln had something to say in the present, and therefore would lean toward the biography that best supported my bias.
Every author of written scripture ultimately used this same, very human method of decision-making. They wanted to make a point, to get their bias across to the reader. There are four gospels in the New Testament, each with their own agenda. There are two creation stories in Genesis (Genesis 1:1-2:4 and Genesis 2:5-2:25), each with their own emphasis. The rest of the Bible is interpreted history, and artistic expression of the experiences of a people, experiences of a people with their God, or, to again use Crossan's reference, their experiences with "God in sandals."
So we tend to read the Bible in a way that supports our point of view. This is a perfectly natural tendency. In the Introduction to his very helpful book How the Bible Became the Bible, Donald L. O'Dell writes,
Most of us don't read the Bible. If we do, it's a verse here, three verses there. The Bible is not in a language we easily understand. It's dull and seems irrelevant. Besides, every time we've tried to read the Bible, we were confronted with all sorts of emotional baggage associated with Bible/church/religion that muddles the issue ... So we don't read the Bible.
Perhaps you have felt this way. Perhaps this is the reason why you couldn't find a Bible in your house even if your life depended upon it. If you did find one, you might use it to stamp out a stove fire, or to squash a poisonous insect, or to knock out an intruder in your home. One of the things that might help in our approach to The Bible is to understand what it is; what it was meant to be in the first place. O'Dell continues.
I believe if we understand what the people of the Bible are trying to communicate, we can begin to see beyond their words, cultures, or history. When we've done that, we can see ourselves in them or, conversely, them in us. Then they become very real people and their experiences can relate to our experiences.
I had an experience with this right in the middle of a worship service. I had written my sermon on the gospel lesson from Luke chapter 6. I had given the first lesson a passing glance and the second lesson hardly a glance at all. But I totally ignored the Psalm, which we read responsively. It was Psalm 149, a coronation or kingly psalm, which began innocently enough.
Praise the LORD! Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise in the assembly of the faithful.
Let Israel be glad in its Maker; let the children of Zion rejoice in their King.
Let them praise his name with dancing, making melody to him with tambourine and lyre.
For the LORD takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with victory.
Let the faithful exult in glory; let them sing for joy on their couches.
Those first five verses sounded like a party with music and dancing and perhaps a little wine and ale. Those first five verses sounded like something people could understand, like an evening at a wedding dance. The king is the centerpiece of this celebration, which we might need to translate into with those first five verses. I was all happiness and joy. But then, suddenly, there came the rest of the verses like a 20 mega-ton bomb.
Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands, to execute vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples, to bind their kings with fetters and their nobles with chains of iron, to execute on them the judgment decreed. This is glory for all his faithful ones. Praise the LORD!
I sat there painfully aware that we were advocating for violence; that the "two-edged sword" was real; that the "punishment" and the "vengeance" were real; that the overthrow of other nations and their leaders was real. This was a celebration on the eve of going to war and executing judgment in the name of God. I was about to get up in the pulpit and preach about a Jesus who said "love your enemies" not "smote your enemies with a sword." There was no romanticizing of the text in that moment. The tension it created was real for me. How could I hold the Bible together without holding it in tension? How could I listen to the Bible without realizing that two very different agendas were being propagated this Sunday, and both of them in the Bible?
The Bible that we Christian folks hold in our hands has its genesis at the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E. The earliest author of the Old Testament is someone who has come to be referred to as "J" because this author referred to God as JHWH (also YHWH) which, when you add vowels, becomes Jawheh, or Yahweh.
Next we have the author "E" who referred to God as Elohim, writing around the beginning of the second quarter of the first millennium. Then comes "D," the Deuternomist (around 625 B.C.E.), who primarily authored what we now call the book of Deuteronomy, where most of the laws and rules and regulations are; the legal code of the Old Testament. Finally there is "P," the Priestly author (around 400 B.C.E). The Priestly author has as a central focus the establishment of the Temple, and the cultic life of Israel.
Throw in the Prophets (Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, et al), the Wisdom literature (Psalms, Proverbs, Job, et al), and the Apocalyptic literature (Daniel) and you have the Old Testament written over the course of the first millennium B.C.E. That's a thousand years, or about fifteen or more lifetimes by the human standards of that time. We already have a mixed bag of literature here, and a variety of different authors and agendas. This is not a collection of literature intended to be monolithic. The Biblical literalist will insist this is just more evidence of the miraculous, that God could take such a diverse anthology and unify it in some way. Even the Jewish scholars and leaders could not ultimately do this. They decided to divide what we call the Old Testament into three different collections of literature—The Torah (first five books), the Prophets, and the Writings.
The miracle, if there is one, is that we can somehow wade through this voluminous compilation and come to any kind of agreement about what in the world God seems to be doing, or wishes to do. The intentions of the authors may or may not jive with the objectives of the God of the Universe. Who can know such intentions with any certainty anyway? And yet somehow, sometimes we stumble upon a shred of light in the darkness. That is the Old Testament.
There are, by the way, inter-testamental books, sometimes called the Old Testament Apocrypha. Roman Catholics have some of these books in their canon. These too are divided up into different kinds of literature—historical books (1 Esdras, 2 Esdras (4 Ezra), Tobit, Judith, Judith Gets A Head of Holophernes, The Rest of Esther, 1 Maccabees), poetic books (The Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Sirach, The Song Of The Three (Prayer of Azariah), Prayer of Manasseh), books of prophecy (Baruch, Daniel, Bell and the Dragon, Daniel and Susanna, Letter of Jeremiah), and other stuff (3 Maccabees, Maccabees, Psalm 151, Testament of Job). All of these books were at some point canonized in the West, and all were composed in the later centuries of the first millennium, closer to the time Jesus walked the earth. There are many other books written during this period that were not chosen to be included in The Bible.
Canonization is the process whereby church leaders eventually determined that what you now hold in your hands and call The Bible is indeed The Bible. When it comes to the New Testament we have the same kind of sorting out to do. We have the four gospels, Acts, the Pauline letters (including the ones scholars do not agree on as having originated with Paul), the Pastoral epistles, the Catholic epistles, the Johannine letters, James and last but not least, Revelation. The earliest writers of the New Testament material were Paul, and an author referred to simply as `Q;' but by far the very closest material to the actual, living, breathing Jesus of Nazareth was the material of the community that produced `Q.'
Burton Mack has written an excellent book on the formation of the New Testament. If you read his book and O'Dell's book you will have some pretty helpful information about the creation of the Bible. I am particularly interested in Mack's overview of the early Jesus movements. Before there was anything called Christianity there were Jesus movements. Mack tells us one of those Jesus movements was the Community of Q. Of this community he writes,
Q will put us in touch with the earliest followers of Jesus. It is the earliest written record we have from the Jesus movement, and it is a precious text indeed ... Q puts us as close to the historical Jesus as we will ever be.
Matthew and Luke used the earliest gospel (Mark) as their source, but also drew from Q (Q comes from the German Quella, meaning source). Mark was written around 80 C.E., Matthew around 90 C.E., and Luke and John's gospels at the turn of the century or later. Scholars vary in their dating of the gospels, but by any stretch these books were written after many decades of distance from the actual presence of Jesus on the planet. And remember, Paul's original letters predate the writing of the gospels.
What I am trying to do is provide you with a cursory overview of this material. The New Testament is pieced together from fragments, portions culled from over a century of writing. There are literal fragments, too; manuscripts that vary in their content, even down to specific passages that vary from one manuscript to another. Translating this material is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with more pieces than will actually fit in the puzzle; the translator has to choose one piece over another.
Canonization does not occur until much later, after Christianity is firmly institutionalized and the Church has become a socio-political organization. The canonization of the Bible occurs in this crucible of religion and politics, finally giving birth to what we now call The Bible in the very late fourth century. Four centuries of negotiation, of "should we put this in or should we leave this out" lapsed before the Bible became one singular book—fourteen hundred years in the making. The Bible you hold in your hands is a collection that, for various reasons, people who called themselves Christian in the Fourth century thought we needed to have in our dossier.
There are other books too, the New Testament Apocrypha written concurrent with the material we find in the canonical New Testament, a complete list of which may be found here. This is all material about Jesus, and all stuff that sounds biblical. One of my favorites is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Once Jesus developed into a God-man in the later gospels, it is only natural to wonder what he might have been like as a kid. Here is the third story from the second Greek version of this infancy narrative.
And Jesus made of that clay twelve sparrows, and it was the Sabbath. And a child ran and told Joseph, saying: Behold, thy child is playing about the stream, and of the clay he has made sparrows, which is not lawful. And when he heard this, he went, and said to the child: Why dost thou do this, profaning the Sabbath? But Jesus gave him no answer, but looked upon the sparrows, and said: Go away, fly, and live, and remember me. And at this word they flew, and went up into the air. And when Joseph saw it, he wondered.
I also need to include the Gospel of Thomas, here (not to be confused with the Infancy Gospel of Thomas). The Gospel of Thomas comes from one of those earliest of Jesus movements, called the True Disciples. The Gospel of Thomas, like Q, is a series of Jesus sayings, with no narrative to speak of. The Gospel of Thomas was discovered among the Nag Hammadi library buried in a sealed jar and found by a peasant named Muhammad Ali Samman near the town of Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. In his introduction to Stevan Davies' translation of the Gospel of Thomas, Andrew Harvey writes, "The Gospel of Thomas is, I believe, the clearest guide we have to the vision of the world's supreme mystical revolutionary, the teacher known as Jesus."
The Gospel of Thomas (along with Q), writes Robert W. Funk, "permit us to reconstruct, to a limited extent, what the religion of Jesus must have been—as distinguished from the religion about Jesus, conceived by his first followers and amplified by Paul." All of this is to say that whether we are reading within the canon (The Bible) or outside the canon (extra-biblical literature) we must make choices about what to pay attention to and how to interpret everything else. Canon or no canon we have a whole lot of material to wade through. How do we read that material? How do we even begin to figure out how the texts we consume interact with our everyday lives? With our culture? With our world? With our politics? With ourselves?
We can go to church and listen to preacher after preacher, but they are only processing the texts from their points of view. What about your point of view? The only reason, it seems, to tackle this material at all is to make adjustments to our points of view. It is certainly not just to find supporting material for our existing points of view. That is material that is culturally available for us 24/7 on cable news, talk radio, or your favorite religious programming. No, as the author of 2 Timothy set out, this material, whatever we happen to call our scriptures, or holy books, is intended for the purpose of showing us truth, exposing our rebellion, correcting our mistakes, and training us to live God's way.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from READING JESUSby Vance L. Toivonen Copyright © 2012 by Vance L. Toivonen. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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