[Review: John Barton (2020). A History of the Bible. London: Penguin.]
With friends like John Barton, who needs the New Atheists?
The most effective opponents of Christian spirituality today are not its overt detractors but its academic analysts, who don’t so much deny God as paint all things theological in so much grey in grey, as Hegel might have said. It is above all a sad book, freighted down by the sadness of spiritlessness, effectively diminishing the spiritual core that makes the Christian take on the Bible so attractive in the first place. We care for the Bible not because it is a complex patchwork of sources and genres, but because it vibrates with divine energy. Buried beneath a morass of textual criticism, whither belief in the risen Christ? Where is the sense of Immanuel, “God with us,” that has drawn and continues to draw millions into a christocentric existence?
In the chapter on the Psalms, to take but one example, we find nothing about the spiritually uplifting, salutary effects of their reading, their potential role in an individual believer’s prayer life, only an attempt to situate, contextualize, historicize; but nothing at all about how one might read them prayerfully, and so come to commune with the Lord. The fact that such sentiments now seem faintly ridiculous from the vantagepoint of the academy is a testament to the damage that much academic theology has done to the very notion of a spiritual life, which is of course not this book’s doing alone. But it is a Lord-less reading of the Bible so characteristic of aspiritual, if not outright antispiritual, academic theology. There is something unattractively antiseptic about theological aspirituality. It is the objectivizing, analytical approach to the Bible that misses the very ineffable Thing that makes it so potentially inviting and agreeable in the first place.
Barton’s great finding is that the Bible does not “map” cleanly onto Judaism and Christianity as they have come to be practiced. But this is hardly news. It ought to ruffle no feathers. The Catholic Church expressly teaches the twin validity and efficacy of Scripture and Tradition, the latter indicating the two-millennia-long institutional unfolding of practice in historico-social time. Perhaps this is news to Protestantism, which is so often a kind of Christianity minus historical consciousness. Expecting a liturgical or ecclesial paradigm to jump straight off the pages of Scripture, unmediated by historical development and the social accretions resulting in a particular mode of institutional life, is surely vain. Notice that for those who hold that the Spirit guides human action and intervenes in social time, this ineluctably socio-historical dimension of the faith-life is utterly unconcerning—as unconcerning as Darwin’s principle of natural selection, which is so obviously compatible with the notion of Spirit’s march through history—the evolutionary principle being merely the concrete expression of the divine will at a glacial pace—that one cannot but be genuinely puzzled by the fact that so much has been made of the supposed opposition between science and faith. Barton’s core thesis is, in short, underwhelming.
In places he is strangely irreverent, as when he writes that “the dating of the New Testament books has been described as like a line of drunks, propping each other up, with no fixed wall to lean on” (p. 162). It’s a simile, harmless enough, but one that still betrays a certain failure to stand in awe of the text. If one were to say that Oxford professors of theology are like a line of drunks propping each other up, each confirming the other’s authority by mutual support, one could rightly be accused of a certain juvenile malevolence. Some of this same silliness is at work when Barton speculates freely about whether Matthew and Luke might not have “made any of it up themselves” (p. 196).
The notion, moreover, that it is a mark of the “conservative” to emphasize the Bible’s divine inspiration, while liberals are happy to date the books of the New Testament to a later date (p. 163), presumably because they do not believe in anything quite so unempirical as divine inspiration, is surely flawed. To use one of Barton’s favorite terms, the divine/human binary doesn’t “map” onto the conservative/liberal divide. It is perfectly possibly to espouse a left-wing, radical Christianity and still afirm the essential role of the Spirit’s guidance in the formation of ta biblia.
At one point, Barton avows, “Despite centuries of research [the Synoptic Gospels] remain an enigma, and those who revere them should be aware of how much we do not know about their composition” (p. 199). But couldn’t this admonition just as well be turned on its head? That those who would “scientifically” criticize these writings are ultimately confounded by the scantiness of evidence upon which to adjudicate between their various hypotheses and so left in a state of indecision or forced to decide the truth by mere fiat? What is striking about the Gospels is how clearly they throw us back on our own faith; they refuse to do anything quite so vulgar as yield to the seizing, grasping quality of much philological theology. There are an outsize number of “presumablies” and “possiblies” in this field.
Far more significant is Barton’s key take on the Gospels, which is that they “circulated by word of mouth for a generation before the Gosepl writers began their work” (p. 174). While this is of course quite a popular position, it makes too much of the folkishness of the gospels. The idea of a “generation” interceding between the crucifixion and the first gospel’s production muddles the distinction between a “generation” as a temporal marker (roughly 30 years) and generation understood as a distinctive subgroup in the population; while 30 years may indeed have passed between the crucifixion and Mark’s gospel, this does not mean that there was a wholly different subset of individuals around the gospel writer from Jesus’ own lifetime. It is conceivable that many of the original eyewitnesses to the life, ministry, death, and resurrection were available as primary sources to the gospel writers—certainly to Mark. Barton’s claim that Mark was “at some distance from the events he narrated” (p. 189) is therefore quite unmoving. If I were to write a book about the collapse of the Berlin Wall, I could still find hundreds if not thousands of people who were actually there at the tearing down of the wall. The story of the Berlin Wall’s collapse has indeed circulated verbally for decades, but that doesn’t meant that this oral, folkloric dimension is our only or even primary evidentiary base should we wish to delve further into the matter; we can also talk to the people who were really there. Mark’s remove at some decades from the events is unworrying in the measure that one believes in the basic possibility of post-factum journalistic reportage.
But Barton remains unswayed by the idea that the Gospels might be eyewitness accounts (p. 189). He levels against them the disqualifying charge that “only two of them are even ascribed to members of the twelve apostles.” This is surely a weak argument against their possible eyewitness status—not first-hand but second-hand eyewitness reporting, filtered through a reporter, of course; neither Mark nor Luke claim to have seen Jesus with their own eyes, so this cannot be what is meant by “eyewitness” in these instances. A very obvious method for bolstering their credibility would have been to ascribe all Gospels to one or other of Jesus’ disciples. The very fact that Mark and Luke weren’t disciples is, if anything, a greater reason for the credibility of their accounts. We might have had greater cause for suspicion if they were instead the Gospels of, say, Bartholomew or Simon the Zealot. (And indeed the later Gnostic imposition of the Gospel of Thomas makes use precisely of this strategy.) One could object that a very clever forger would know that this would be a little too neatly packaged, and therefore cause for suspicion, and so decided to “throw in” a couple of odd ducks, but this verges on the conspiratorial.
In places there is a certain naïvete about mobility in the Mediterranean world. Barton seems impressed by the fact that a papyrus of John’s Gospel “that turned up in Egypt can be dated to the early second century, not long after the Gospel’s composition, probably in Asia Minor, which ‘attests to the remarkably rapid and wide circulation of the text,’” as he writes, citing Richard Bauckham (p. 202). But this is only surprising if we are ignorant of the fact that Mediterranean peoples could travel very quickly by ship. The Mediterranean was, at least to a select segment of the population, a strangely mobile place. Pliny the Elder recounts that a voyage from Messina (outside Rome) to Alexandria in Egypt only took six days, with favorable winds. Messina is considerably farther away from Alexandria than Asia Minor. They didn’t go the long way around. And scrolls didn’t take up much room on ample-sized shipping vessels. Indeed, much about the history of the New Testament begins to make more sense once we realize that people and goods could move around the region quite quickly. Diodorus Siculus records a typical voyage with favorable winds from Rhodes to Alexandria taking no more than three-and-a-half days. The notion of an isolated Johannine, Lukan, Marcan etc. community (p. 201) falters once we recognize the reality of Mediterranean mobility. Ours is not the only “liquid society,” to use Zygmunt Bauman’s term. In all the Gospels, what is the one thing Jesus seems to do a lot of in all of them? He moves around constantly. What is the one thing Paul seems to do a lot of in Acts? He moves around constantly. The New Testament is the story of the Word on the go.
Barton meanwhile thinks the Gospels could not possibly have been written in Palestine because they are in Greek, and the first communities of Jesus-followers there “would more likely have written in Aramaic” (p. 200). Scholars have questioned this assumption under the rubric of what is called “the Greek hypothesis,” the idea that “Greek was the lingua franca and an everyday language of the people in ancient Palestine, particularly, in Roman Galilee” (Ong 2017: 218). Greek was what tied the Roman Empire together, as Barton himself admits at one point, and much of the Mediterranean besides; why must we assume that it hadn’t made significant headway in Palestine as well? This would also give short shrift to the assumption that Matthew (a tax collector, and so a member of the professional class) and Luke (believed to have been a doctor) couldn’t possibly have written their Gospels themselves in the Greek. All of this matters because Barton clings to the notion that these are collective enterprises (p. 200: “the various Gentile churches...as the source for the Gospels”), rather than what they set out to be, namely the work of one author—though, naturally, relying upon multiple sources, as Luke himself makes clear in his introduction.
Barton’s claim that the New Testament lacks textual support for the idea of the Trinity is similarly weak. “References to God as Trinity are largely missing from the New Testament,” he claims (p. 327). But this trope is growing stale. In so doing, he discounts entirely Matthew 3:16-17, where the Spirit of God (the third entity of the Trinity) descends on Jesus “like a dove,” and “a voice from heaven”—distinctive now from the Spirit/dove—declares him to be the “beloved Son.” Here we have all three persons of the Trinity in one compressed moment. The episode is also recounted in Luke 3:21-22 and Mark 1:10-11. What is crucial to notice is the presence of Spirit, Son, and a distinctive third actor, a “voice [that] came from heaven” (Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22). Barton seems to measure the trinitarianism of the New Testament by whether it makes “explicit reference to God as Trinity” (p. 327), but so much of the pleasure of the New Testament resides in the interpretive demands it makes on its readers. We cannot expect these things to be laid out cleanly, like a Wikipedia page in Simple English.
The limits of a nonspiritual academic approach are only emphasized in the claim that the evangelists jealously guarded their work as the sole fount of evangelic truth. “When we continue to read Mark, we are in a way contradicting what both Matthew and Luke intended: they wanted us to read only their version of the Gospel, and to leave Mark behind” (p. 201). This claim is downright bizarre; we have absolutely no evidence that this is how Matthew or Luke thought about Mark. If I were to write a book about the Second World War, I wouldn’t particularly mind that there were a number of other books purporting to tell the same story; in fact I’d welcome this multiplicity of voices for what fresh light it might throw upon the events. With the generosity of spirit evident in all the evangelists, we certainly have more reason to expect this attitude than the sort of covetous protectiveness that Barton implies of them on this point. More spiritually, we might say that that their intentions matter little given that the workings of the Spirit has ensured the survival of all four gospels: they are meant to be read in tandem, in conjunction; one of the core socio-theoretical message of the Gospels is precisely this multiplicity and polyphony, which gives rise to what we might call the imperative of interpretation: We are duty-bound to employ our reason, our logos, to grasp He who was the Logos in the beginning.
Of course, polite academic theology can’t bring itself to say such things, because it can’t say that the Spirit does anything, only that some people say or believe the Spirit does so. There is, on the whole, a productive distinction to be made between a dead-letter theology and a living-spirit theology. The latter is meditative, spiritual, contemplative, the kind of writing that readily invites a lectio divina. This latter form of theology is much to be preferred to the former, but is so seldom in evidence today. It is, on the whole, peculiar that theology, the logos of the theos who is the fount of life, should so often feel so lifeless. Lifelessness is clearly not a straightforwardly objective literary condition; it is a condition that must be argued. But I claim that even a brief survey of much that is written on theological matters in the academy today is narrow, thin, dry, spiritless—lifeless. How came this to pass? Probably some feature of university discourse, some procedure of faculty training, recruitment, and reproduction, some insidious divide between faith and reason, which has wiggled its way even into the halls of scholarship on the divine.
Much is also made by Barton of a supposed inconsistency in Paul’s life as it is portrayed in his own letters contra Acts, conventionally assumed to have been written by Luke. Barton writes, “From 2 Corinthians 11:23-9 we learn that Paul had often been in prison, as well as punished by flogging, shipwrecked, and subject to all kinds of other hardships and calamities, something we would not guess from Acts, where only one single night in prison is reported (Acts 16:19-40) before Paul’s final arrest in Jerusalem” (p. 176; emphasis added). One is tempted to ask: How long does Barton want Paul to be in jail? The Jerusalem-Rome detention must have lasted long enough. But Acts is filled to the brim with Pauline suffering. The only way we can make sense of this statement is if we permit Barton to slip from the wider point about Paul’s suffering, indicated by Barton’s statement pertaining to “all kinds of other hardships and calamities,” to a narrower focus on Paul’s incarceration.
But Acts is full of stories where Paul could very plausibly have been detained at length. Remember that imprisonment in the ancient world was mainly a means to further (corporal) punishment and not, broadly speaking, a form of punishment in its own right; there were many more occasions for being jailed than to (anachronistically) serve a sentence, which is chiefly a modern invention. Thus, when Paul and Barnabas are “sent for” by the proconsul of Paphos in Acts 13:7, they might very well have been detained in some way, possibly at length, though to modern readers it might read like a polite dinner invitation. Similarly, when the crowd “began to contradict” and “heaped abuse” on Paul in Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:44), this may have involved some form of physical detainment: “They stirred up persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them from their region” (Acts 13:50). Again, we moderns might tend to imagine this scene as one of Paul and Barnabas somehow running for their lives, with the crowd at their heels, or fleeing in the night, but might it not have been more akin to the arrest of a foreign dissident followed by their expulsion by an authoritarian regime, usually involving some form of close confinement?
The examples could be multiplied, but the point is that there are definite passages in Acts that suggest the plausible possibility of Paul’s confinement beyond that of Acts 21:27-30. The conflict between Acts and Paul’s epistles is largely a figment of the modern mind. But beyond this, why should we assume that Acts is an exhaustive biography of Paul’s life? It probably isn’t, and clearly involves temporal compression and cutaways to focus not on Paul’s biographical details but on the pentecostal story. Acts is about the concrete movements of the Spirit across time and space in the post-Ascension age; to the extent that Paul’s biographical details are of relevance to this wider story, they are included, albeit in piecemeal fashion. One has the feeling that Barton, for all his learning, has not really penetrated to the core of this text, and this is just one example of a strange lack of analytic acuity, perhaps stemming from a desire to score points against a pious fundamentalism perceived to be at odds with enlightened critical historicism.
A good spiritual book—which might very well be the aspiration of any work of theology—should feel at least a bit like a warm bath for the soul. A History of the Bible is more like a tub of astringent. Its chambers are an antiseptic operating room, leaving this reader on the whole decidedly cold. Hemmed in by a narrow method called “critical,” we lose sight of the spiritual dimension at the core of Christianity. Now one might say this is making a simple category mistake or error of genre; that this is a work of history. But it is not the history-telling that rubs this reader wrong, but precisely all the strictly theological asides, the sweeping claims, the dismissive attitude toward millennia-long piety.
“Faith is the ability to go beyond our own human, intramundane and personal ‘truth’ and apprehend the absolute truth of the God,” wrote Hans Urs von Balthasar (1986: 33-34), “who unveils and offers himself to us, acknowledging it to be the greater truth, allowing it to be the decisive factor in our lives. The person who has faith and describes himself as a believer is actually saying that he has the ability to hear God’s word.” Perhaps this is what is missing from this book: a sense that faith, not just studiousness, is needed to penetrate the book said to contain this word. Without faith, the Bible will remain “so much straw,” to quote Aquinas. And without an imbrication of analysis with faith, this analysis will remain straw-like.
Actually, pure philology, if such a thing were possible, can be highly enjoyable, with all of its deliciously technical rigor and carefully circumscribed statements of fact—or as near to fact as is possible. What is troubling about this book is not its philologicity, as it were, but its asides, its over-reach, its snark, its desire to construct an ideological figment known as conservatism, which feel like unnecessary admissions to secularity. Certainly there are conservative Christians, but are they identical to what Barton seems to think of as scriptural conservatives? I wonder whether this book, like so many works of history, shouldn’t have thought more carefully and explicitly about its theoretical categories, of which “liberal” and “conservative” seem to do be doing a lot of the heavy lifting, though mostly in the background. Most historians prefer to bury their theory in detail. Bring it to light instead.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t much to be learned from this book in terms of technical details, events, concepts, key figures, and so on. There are the occasional factual mistakes, unavoidable in a work of this length: Augustine speaks of Ambrose’s recommendation that he read Isaiah in Book 9, chapter 5 of his Confessions, not Book 5, chapter 9, as Barton claims (p. 90, footnote 5). More to the point: What is missing from this work of theological history is a spiritual core, a standing-in-awe before the object of study. Without this spiritual dimension, without this standing-in-awe before the cathedral of the Book, the Bible will necessarily remain closed to even the most studious of scholars and readers. It will remain one book among many—impressive, certainly, but not essentially suffused with Spirit.
References
von Balthasar, H. U. (1987) Prayer. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
Ong, H. T. (2017) The use of Greek in first-century Palestine: An issue of method in dialogue with Scott D. Charlesworth. In: The Language and Literature of the New Testament: Essays in Honor of Stanley E. Porter’s 60th Birthday. Leiden: Brill, pp. 218-236.