The Corruption of Biblical Studies

Yes, really excellent - thanks for posting it, Fausto! A great reminder that we are to 'do righteousness and justice' and to 'walk humbly with our God' even from within the ideological messiness of professional Biblical Studies and Bible Translation. Much to pray about here ...

Sadly, the opposite bias to what Berman rightly describes in biblical studies has been firmly in place in evangelical churches (and many other church traditions as well) for a very long time (almost certainly from the beginning of modern critical scholarship). In churches I attended as a child you never heard anyone speak of of "conservative" scholars, only "Bible-believing Christians" vs. "modern liberal scholars." One of the things I have learned from my recent interest in neuroscience is that motivated thinking is the only kind we do as humans, and our emotions are an integrated part of our higher "critical" faculties. Worse, while we can readily see this bias in others, we rarely see it or admit it in ourselves. Berman tries to shine a light on certain biases within Biblical scholarship, and those of us in various church traditions must do it for our communities as well.

An important point Berman makes about biblical scholarship is also true of the other side in this cultural divide-a misunderstanding of "science" as the final arbiter of truth. First of all, science is a process, not a destination. Thus all truly scientific "facts" are provisional-merely the best we have until we have a better version. Yet conservatives and liberals alike want to annihilate their opponents' arguments with "data" and "facts" "proving" their own positions. But often it is easier to say what is less likely than to "prove" what really happened in the creation and transmission of the traditions that ended up in our Bible. I feel confident that Abraham did not lie about his wife twice to two different rulers and then that Issac also joined him in lying to one of the same rulers. I cannot prove it, but it looks like one story ("The endangerment of the ancestress of Israel") told three different ways. Certainly we would agree to this interpretation if we found such narratives in any other literature. But which one gave rise to the others? While we might go about surmising this from a close comparison of these texts, it is likely to be a highly speculative endeavour, and I am not sure what difference it would make in the end. In any case, no matter what was found out (or surmised), we would have to admit that we are more sure about the original presumption of one original narrative leading to three than we are about any of the conjectured relationships between the three versions we now have.

You are right: the opposite is true, but being a pastor and a scholar I find out that the Church doesn't really know about Bible Field, so a certain level of education have to take place in churches about what is happening in the world of Biblical Studies. That is what I am doing and to my surprise: even though at the beginning was difficult people actually are showing interest in the subject. And, it is also true that pastors and clergies that are well informed about Biblical Field work very hard to demonize the field and the subject.

Note Marc Brettler's reply to Joshua Berman's article, which can be found here: http://thetorah.com/biblical-studies-no-more-corrupt-than-any-other-discipline/