A Most Peculiar Book: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible by Kristin Swenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dangerous Love

The Bible is a literary object that, perhaps above all others, allows, often demands, interpretation. It is in fact a record of its own interpretive history in its distinctive styles, evolving narratives and changing historical concerns. It is consequently not surprising that the Bible has generated so many distinct, often mutually hostile, interpretive communities. The fact that each of these communities attempts to stop the process of interpretation is a negation of the primary message of the book itself.

Kristin Swenson unashamedly “loves the Bible.” And she does an outstanding job of introducing the literary complexity of the Bible’s contents (and its concomitant religious and theological density). Her approach is appreciative rather than critical, which gives her exposition a lightness I haven’t encountered anywhere else in such an ambitious overview. She does what she says on the tin: “This book looks squarely at what’s so weird, difficult, and disconcerting both about and in the Bible, and in the process shows how those qualities can actually enrich one’s relationship, religious or not, to the text.”

Yet Swenson’s exposition of the ‘openness’ of biblical meaning raises a rather significant point that she documents repeatedly but declines to address. The progressive editions and emendations of scriptural material are not random, nor are they the correction of past texts by some inspired scribe who had a better channel of communication to the Divine. These changes are always purposeful and their consistent purpose is to explain the unexpected events of contemporary recent history. In other words the Bible is a series of cumulative rationalisations of how we find ourselves in our present circumstances given that we are meant to be protected by a caring and merciful divinity.

So, when the residents of the kingdom of Judah were dispossessed in the 6th century BCE and carried off to Babylon, the sharp reduction in their standard of living had to be explained. Clearly an all-powerful God like YHWH would not allow such trauma without reason. A new interpretation of their religious tradition was necessary. And the reason was discovered after sufficient prayer and discussion. The Judahites had become lax in their divine observance and therefore their temple had been destroyed, and they expelled from their homeland.

But the re-interpretation of history went even further. The Babylonia exile was just the latest of a series of misfortunes for those committed to YHWH. Some might find this discouraging in their current condition of exile. It was necessary, then, to provide comfort that the world, creation itself, was not against them, something that had been rumoured in religious cults from the East. This is a rather fundamental issue and the result is a new introduction to all the other collected scriptures. We know this result as the first chapter of the Book of Genesis in which the Judahites are assured of the essential goodness of the world and thereby given renewed hope for the future.

The emerging Jewish sect of Jesus followers pursued the same tradition of ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ as their forebears. This was few centuries after Hebrew religious authorities had closed the book, as it were, on further interpretations of the Tanach or Jewish Bible. But the Christians found their feet in the literary genre surprisingly quickly. If anything the series of Christian rationalisations of events was even more dramatic than that of their Hebrew predecessors.

For example, the first gospel which was written down (but not the first Christian writing which was produced by Paul of Tarsus who had no personal knowledge of Jesus at all) is that of Mark. The earliest versions of Mark tell a story of Jesus’s life that ends rather abruptly with the deposit of his body in a stone tomb after his crucifixion for sedition. The tone of disappointment and sadness is unmistakable. Only later versions include any mention of a resurrection or subsequent earthly activities.

But by the time of the writing of the last gospel, that of John about 30 or so years later, Jesus has become the Word of God who has always existed and will continue to do so for eternity. And with the writing of the ‘final’ book of the Christian Bible, The Apocalypse, this same Jesus, the one who advocated meekness and mercy somewhat earlier in the biblical progression, is a divine figure of judgment and wrath on those who do not accept him as Lord of Creation. The ‘good news’ of universal salvation is now diluted to a small ‘remnant’ of humanity. Thus devotees were given hope that the failure of predictions by Jesus (and the ever-influential Paul) about the imminent Second Coming were not serious, a mere error in interpretation perhaps. Jesus would eventually return as promised with an extreme violence that the unbelievers will suffer in revenge for their unbelief regardless of the way they had lived their lives.

So, pacé Swenson, while the inexhaustibility of the Bible’s message is something that she would like fundamentalists as well as interested literate readers to appreciate, there is a danger, an element of evil, she appears to discount. The Bible can rationalise anything. It was constructed precisely by doing so and inherently encourages the practice among its committed readers. This is why it is so easy for otherwise illiterate but ambitious preachers and untold numbers of amateur moral experts to rationalise their rather unbiblical prejudices from slavery and misogyny to homo- and xenophobia. The prediction of the imminent end of the world put forward by various Christian sects have clearly been ill-founded. But rather than threaten the sects’ dissolution, failure has always generated a new interpretive analysis and ever greater enthusiasm for spreading the new interpretation abroad.*

These people aren’t necessarily stupid (although many undoubtedly are). They may not even been consciously ill-willed. Evil people rarely are; their greed, lust for power, violence, and other nasty behaviour is always rationalised as just and necessary. They know the Bible is open to interpretation. But more important they know from biblical history that they can use it to rationalise absolutely any view they care to put forward. When they can’t rationalise, they excise as with Luther’s rejection of the Epistle of James, Jesus’s brother, because it offended Luther’s Pauline interpretation of Christianity. The ruse is performed without shame, often with popular approval.

So, for example, the Catholic Church has employed biblical references to rationalise not just its policies but its authority to make such (sometimes murderous) policies against women leaders, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists, colonial subjects, as well as its own dissenting members. Protestant sects have used it to simultaneously demand personal freedom while denying personal freedom to enslaved people, intuitive women (witches), pregnant women, gay people, and sex workers as well as other Christians. Totalitarian regimes use it to justify their excesses of power including torture, murder, and large-scale repression. Conservatives in democratic regimes use it to combat almost all progressive policies in education, racial equality, social welfare, military spending, and the judicial system.

The Bible is, then, a sort of training ground for the worst kind of human hypocrisy. It demonstrates what is possible through the re-writing of history, the deconstruction and inversion of concepts, and the invention of spin. In this sense the Bible does indeed show the relativity of not just history but all of human experience. But that is not what readers of the Bible have been taught to expect. Implicitly they already know that the Bible is a tool for enforcing and verifying conformity to some tribal or party-line. It can be quoted abundantly to attract power and to cause strife simply because it is so indefinite, so contradictory, so rich in meaning. And its status as ‘sacred’ means that it will be listened to, taken as gospel.

So I would love to love Swenson’s book as much as she loves the Bible. But I can’t because I don’t want yet more harm does in its name. As long as this collection of myths, legends, fragmentary histories, and religious insights carries the reputation of ‘sacred,’ it is a dangerous weapon to humanity… and beyond. Swenson’s book, therefore, might just be the vehicle for spreading the malaise.

* How can one resist the comparison between such biblical rationalisations and predictions and those of the present Republican Party in America? The My Pillow guy apparently has not lost any credibility among the Party faithful in light of either his fact-free conference or his several failed predictions of Trump triumphant. I don’t think it is at all an exaggeration to suggest that the Religion of the Book has been a how-to guide to this sort of insanity. And the audience doesn’t even need a warm-up; they’re primed from childhood.

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