Committed Critic

Virtually any movie about a leader facing a crisis––whether the movie is fictional or historical––includes a scene where the boss/king/president/warlord gives a speech to the beleaguered troops that inspires them to face the challenge at hand. As it turns out, history writers in the ancient world often used the same kind of dramatic scenes when they told the stories of real wars.

I want to look here at two renditions of one speech in the mouth of an ancient Jewish warlord, and what implications they may have for how we read the Bible.

Speeches outside the canon: Judas “the Hammer” addressing his men

This speech is set during the Maccabean revolt, which began in 167 B.C., and which amounted to a family of Jewish priests/warlords rising up in response to religious persecution under a Syrian king. 1 Maccabees 3:58-60 (NRSV) says that Judas, leading a small revolutionary army against a more powerful army of Syrians, gave this speech to encourage his men:

“Arm yourselves and be courageous. Be ready early in the morning to fight with these Gentiles who have assembled against us to destroy us and our sanctuary [the Temple]. It is better for us to die in battle than to see the misfortunes of our nation and of the sanctuary. But as his will in heaven may be, so shall he do.”

This is neither the first nor the best speech that Judas gives in the book, but it is a solid (if brief) piece of rhetoric.

Next, I want to consider the account of the same event by Josephus, whose Jewish Antiquities paraphrases huge portions 1 Maccabees. In fact, for much of this story, it appears that Josephus (writing around A.D. 90) used 1 Maccabees (written around 100 B.C.) as virtually his only source. (You can see how the two texts line up on this page.) Here’s how Josephus relates this same speech (adapted from Whiston’s edition):

When Judas had thus disposed his soldiers, he encouraged them to fight by the following speech, which he made to them:

“O my fellow soldiers, there is no time more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight bravely, you may recover your liberty, which, though it is a desirable to all people, is much more desirable for us, since it gives us the liberty to worship God. So, since you are in the present circumstances, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living (which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country), or submit to the most opprobrious sufferings.

No seed of your nation will remain if you lose this battle; so fight bravely, assuming that you must die even if you do not fight. Keep in mind, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, and of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory. Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning.”

And this was the speech which Judas made to encourage them. (Josephus, Ant 7.3)

It doesn’t require very careful attention to notice that Josephus’ version is several times longer than the same speech in 1 Maccabees.

There are two really important reasons why this matters for our interpretation of ancient historiography:

• Josephus introduces his book by insisting that he will “accurately describe what is contained in [Jewish] records…without adding anything to what is therein contained, or taking away anything therefrom” (Ant Preface, 3).

• Josephus is writing well over 200 years after the events he describes, and this speech occurs in a passage where he is completely dependent on 1 Maccabees; there is no reason to think Josephus had access to any other transcript of Judas’ speech.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Josephus invented almost the entirety of Judas’ speech, and then wrote, bluntly, that “this was the speech which Judas made to encourage them.”

Some people’s first reaction might be to say that Josephus was being dishonest, but it turns out that composing speeches for figures within historical works was standard practice in antiquity, and Josephus probably thought he was being a good historian by doing it. No one seems to have expected a word-by-word transcript in a book like this (and in any case no such transcript was available to Josephus), yet it obviously was important to these historians to include these speeches to add drama to their stories and help the reader interpret what was happening. In all probability, the author of 1 Maccabees had made up the original version of Judas’ speech in the first place.

Speeches within the canon: Major figures

This has enormous implications for how we read the Bible, because we find speeches throughout Scripture, often at the most climactic events in Israelite and Christian history:

• Moses’ last words to Joshua as Israel begins the conquest (Deut 31–34);
• Joshua’s exhortation to the tribes as they settle in the promised land (Josh 23:2–16);
• Samuel’s announcement of the transition from the rule of judges to the rule of kings (1 Sam 12);
• David’s prayer upon receiving the covenant of eternal kingship (2 Sam 7:18–29);
• Solomon’s dedication of the Temple (1 Kgs 8:14–61);
• Daniel’s prayer of confession in exile (Dan 9:1-19);
• Ezra’s prayer of confession when the people return from exile (Neh 9:6–37);
• Jesus’ announcement of the ethics of the kingdom of God (Matt 5–7);
• Peter’s presentation of the Gospel to the people of Jerusalem (Acts 2:14-36);
• Stephen’s explanation of how Jerusalem has rejected Jesus just like they rejected the prophets (Acts 7:1-53);
• Paul’s presentation of the Gospel to Jews and Gentiles living outside of Judea (Acts 13:16-41).

What we learn from Josephus (and others) is that there’s really no reason to think that any of these Scriptural speeches reflects anything like a transcript of what was said on a particular occasion. That kind of literal accuracy simply wasn’t expected, and I don’t know of anything in the way the Bible was written to suggest that its authors operated by a different standard.

The one exception to this would be Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which probably does reflect Jesus’ actual teachings, perhaps in many cases even word-for-word. But Jesus was a unique figure, whose particular teachings were very important to his followers and were written down within a generation or two of when he spoke them. And in any event, many of the teachings of the Sermon are found scattered throughout Luke, so it appears that Matthew is the one who gathered them here into a single “sermon.”

The rest of the biblical speeches I listed, however, make a lot more sense as compositions of later writers, perhaps with some scattered traditions to build on. The goal was not to give a transcript but to (1) engage their readers with dramatic speeches at climactic points in the story, and (2) teach their readers how to theologically interpret what had happened in their nation’s history. That’s what 1 Maccabees did, that’s what Josephus did, and that’s what it looks like the authors of Scripture have done as well.

Implications for reading the Bible

Part of the purpose of this post is to try to disabuse people of the idea that the speeches in the Bible were spoken word-for-word by the people they are attributed to. But my point isn’t just to be critical: understanding how these texts were composed is important for understanding what they mean.

As I have tried to argue here often, a literalist reading of Scripture sometimes manages to distract people from what a passage of Scripture is actually trying to say. It doesn’t do to fixate on something Paul says in Acts as a key to interpreting, say, Romans, when the speech in Acts probably represents simply the kind of thing that Luke thought Paul would have said.

Since Luke appears to have been a pretty good historian, the speeches in Acts probably really do reflect the kinds of things that were taught in the early church; we just need to understand that some of those teachings in the mouths of Peter and Paul might have actually been introduced only later, around the time Luke wrote. We probably have very little idea what Peter actually said in his first sermons.

We should still read the speeches as intended for our edification, and it’s useful to imagine Peter actually giving the sermon at the feast of Pentecost –– that’s what Luke wanted us to imagine, after all. But as careful readers of Scripture, we should also read the speeches as part of a theological argument that Luke is making about who Jesus was and what it meant (and means) for the church. This may end up being at odds with, for example, what the real Paul thought, and that’s an important point to remember if we want to understand Christian origins.

While I have my own biases and agendas like anyone else, one of my goals with this blog is to avoid promoting an overly narrow ideology or being stereotypically conservative or liberal on theological issues.

Two words, reflected in this site’s name, describe my approach to Scripture:

(1) Critical: In college, I badly wanted reassurance that every word in the Bible was literally true; I’m not looking for that anymore. Though I wish the case were different, close study of Scripture consistently suggests that it is written by humans with different ideas (some of them contradictory) about God and Christ.

(2) Committed: many people that I talk to are looking for excuses to discredit scripture so they can set aside the passages they don’t like; to my mind, that is no way to find the truth about God. The Bible has basically always been the church’s book throughout Christian history, and I am convinced that such consistency is due to God’s will.

Overall, I’m writing based on a sort of two-pronged paradox: On the one hand I’m making logical arguments, so I clearly affirm human reason; but I also deeply distrust the human mind. On the other hand, I affirm that Scripture is in some sense the Word of God, but I also understand it as, in other ways, a product of human thought.

Sometimes I think I’m foolish to hold to both of these commitments, but as the expression goes (though I think I’m slightly misusing it), the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I can’t entirely defend why I think this makes sense, but my experience of Scripture is that God speaks through it, and my experience of its depiction and interpretations of Jesus is that he is God Incarnate.

One of the beauties of this method of reading Scripture is that the different books of the Bible are allowed to have different opinions about who God is and what God does. This is disconcerting (or even devastating) to consider at first, but in the end I’ve found it to be both beautiful and exhiliarating. Mark makes some powerful and important claims about Jesus, and John makes others, many of which are quite different. The truth, presumably, is somewhere in the intersection.

Many, no doubt, will feel that this kind of interpretation (which, incidentally, is pretty common within critical biblical studies circles) denies the Truth of God’s word. I’ll respond by stating the conviction that ultimately guides all my interpretations: God can reveal Godself in whatever way God wants.

But this, again, cuts both ways. We are free to kick and scream that God should have given us a set of scriptures that are utterly consistent and accurate, or that God should have given us teachings better suited to the sensibilities of our modern liberal society. But it seems God is difficult to order about.

What we do have are one enormous mess of a world––largely of our own making––and a book of powerful stories and teachings which seem to me to reveal a God who is capable of lifting us above (and perhaps even correcting) the mess just mentioned.

One of my housemates told me recently that she had a prof who talked about Dead Poets Society, one of my favorite movies, as a great example of moral ambiguity in film. I was watching it this week, so I read an essay on it in the library and thought I’d raise a question for discussion if anyone’s interested. (If you haven’t seen the movie, watch it before you read––it’s a warm and real portrayal of friendship among guys, and it’s kind of inspiring too.)

My question is, should Mr. Keating be viewed as the movie’s hero or its villain?

If you need a quick review of the plot, the movie stars Robin Williams as Mr. Keating, an English teacher at a boys’ prep school in the 1950’s who labors to inspire his students to seize the day, eschewing societal conformity to make their lives extraordinary. In line with this, they organize a club called the Dead Poets Society, whose activities include sneaking out to read poetry together and encouraging each other to “suck the marrow out of life”. Personally, I think that “seize the day” would be a tiresome slogan if it didn’t reflect such an important truth. The fact is, it’s easy to miss out on what we really want because we’re too complacent to take a risk or work hard at something.

So Neil, one of the students, decides he wants to be an actor, even though his unyielding father forbids him to do anything that distracts from getting into Harvard so he can get into medical school. Mr. Keating says otherwise: Neil must convince his father to let him pursue his passion for the stage.

Defying his father instead of reasoning with him, Neil performs in the community theatre anyway, after which his father decides to send him to military school. Neil shoots himself that night.

THE MORAL QUESTION

The final act of the movie is the part where blame gets apportioned. The school’s headmaster (Mr. Nolan), at the request of Neil’s father, conducts a “thorough inquiry” which, not surpisingly, blames Mr. Keating for Neil’s death and gets him dismissed from the school. For director Peter Weir, this is a gross injustice, as Mr. Nolan forces Neil’s fellow students to sign a statement blaming Mr. Keating. In the film’s final scene, several of the students show their gratitude and respect to Mr. Keating though one last defiant, and fairly moving, gesture.

Now, there are four possible culprits for Neil’s suicide: Neil himself, Mr. Keating, Neil’s father, and Mr. Nolan the headmaster.

The movie addresses each in turn:

• Neil is portrayed not as guilty but rather as heroic, for killing himself lest his passion for life be stifled.
• Mr. Keating cannot be guilty because he is the movie’s voice of truth; surely seizing the day must be the right thing to do, so the man who embodies that mantra must be exonerated.
• Neil’s father probably comes off as most at fault for the suicide; his treatment of Neil is stifling throughout the movie, and just before the suicide he goes so far as to mock Neil’s passion with a deep scorn that is difficult to watch.
• And finally, Mr. Nolan receives some implicit blame as the representative of an establishment that demands conformity and affirms people like Neil’s father; mostly though, we hate him for how he treats Mr. Keating after the suicide.

In all this, the movie tries to declare most emphatically that Mr. Keating is not at fault. And it might succeed, except for a key scene that reveals that Mr. Keating knows Neil is lying to his father. Neil tells him that he has spoken to his father, as Mr. Keating suggested, and that his father has agreed to let him perform in the play. But we don’t believe Neil, and neither does Mr. Keating––we can see it in his eyes.

As much as we want Neil to be in the play, I think most grown-ups would agree that it’s irresponsible for a teacher to stand aside and let a 17-year-old defy his father like that, especially when Mr. Keating knows Neil tried out for the play largely as a result of his own influence. That doesn’t make Mr. Keating the one who shot Neil, but it does make him negligent and irresponsible in using his position as teacher. Neil was a minor, and his father’s opinion really did mean more than Mr. Keating’s.

So, to return to my question: granting that all four parties bear some guilt, should Mr. Keating be viewed as the hero or the villain of the movie?

More specifically, I’ll quote the charges that the two villians of the movie level against him. The first is Cameron, the student who rats out Mr. Keating to the administration. One of the other students asks him who the administration is holding responsible for Neil’s death:

Well, Mr. Keating, of course! The “captain” himself! You guys didn’t really think he could avoid responsibility, did you? . . . Mr. Keating put us up to all this crap, didn’t he? If it wasn’t for Mr. Keating, Neil would be cozied up in his room right now, studying his chemistry and dreaming of being called “doctor”.

The second quote is from Mr. Nolan, describing to one of the boys the contents of the statement he is expected to sign incriminating Mr. Keating:

I have here a detailed description of what occured at your meetings. It describes how your teacher, Mr. Keating, encouraged you boys to organize this club, and he used it as a source of inspiration for reckless and self-indulgent behavior. It describes how Mr. Keating, from both in and out of the classroom, encouraged Neil Perry to follow his obsession with acting, when he knew all along it was against the explicit orders of Neil’s parents. It was Mr. Keating’s blatant abuse of his position as teacher that led directly to Neil Perry’s death.

So, even though as moviegoers we hate to admit it, aren’t they basically right?

My departmental seminar this week asked us each to describe in one page how we approach theology (personally and professionally) from our different fields, so I thought I’d share mine here, hopefully to provoke discussion. (Incidentally, if you’ve never tried to write something in exactly one page before, it’s a great exercise in saying what you mean and omitting what is beside the point.)

Theology can aim to describe at least three different things: what is true of God, what a certain person or groups believes of God, or what is helpful to believe of God.

I feel called to theology primarily to learn to say what is true (as far as possible) concerning God. Claiming to know truth can lead to blind dogmatism, of course, but one’s attitude (rather than one’s aim) is the deciding factor in that risk. If we worship a real God, at least some theologians must dedicate their work to finding who that God really is.

The latter two approaches, secondary in my mind, are useful but more limited. Studying a particular theology can help us understand better our own theology, understand people of other faiths, or just explore interesting ways to think about God; but it also can lead us to ignore who God is in favor of pet topics or abstract ideals. Determining which beliefs about God most benefit (or harm) people’s lives can call our attention to points at which we should take special care; but it also can give us license to create the God we want in a vain effort to make religion safe.

I pursue theology first through the study of the Scriptures because Scripture provides the strongest available corrective against simply saying whatever we please. But because my study requires analysis of the individual theologies within Scripture, determining what Scripture says requires a sort of dialogue even within the text itself. Grounded in Scripture’s web of ideas, theology also must then take into account the reality of our lives. The Bible itself provides countless examples of God’s people trying to make sense of their faith: Job’s discourses on God’s justice; the prophets’ declaration of what God really wants; Jesus’ insistence that some parts of the Torah hang on others; Paul’s application of the theology of the cross to evangelism and baptism and imprisonment and church and sickness. A biblical theologian presumes to follow in this line.

Note: Since writing this post, I’ve gone on to do an entire blog on the Dallas Mavericks.

I think I’m finally at peace about the Dallas Mavericks’ season.

If you don’t follow the NBA, you should know that my team made it to the Finals for the first time in its history, won the first two games emphatically, and then lost four in a row (and the series) to Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat.

However, even though I probably won’t lose any more sleep over this (and I have lost sleep since June 20), I want to make a simple request, that anyone out there who enjoys NBA basketball watch 5 youtube clips before we put the 2005-2006 season to bed.

Let me explain.

Ordinarily, only Losers make excuses. But I truly feel that the referees, for two games of the NBA Finals, made enough unfair calls in favor of Miami’s Dwyane Wade that the Mavericks did not get a fair shot at winning the series. Clearly, they could have (and, frankly, should have) overcome the bad officiating, but I feel justified in my complaints because I don’t think Miami could have beat Dallas without it.

Let me give an excerpt from a column by Bill Simmons, a sports writer for espn.com who’s a Celtics fan but likes the way Dallas plays:

In my Finals preview, I wrote that “No team depends on the refs quite like the Heat. When the refs are calling all the bumps on Shaq and protecting Wade on every drive, they’re unstoppable. When they’re calling everything fairly, they’re eminently beatable. If they’re not getting any calls, they’re just about hopeless. I could see the refs swinging two games in Miami’s favor during this series, possibly three. In fact, I’m already depressed about it and the series hasn’t even started yet.” Well, we had our two games — Game 3 (the last five minutes were just obscene) and Game 5 (again, a top-five debacle). And the series isn’t over yet.

[Note: I looked over the play-by-play of game 3, and Simmons must be mistaken. There’s only one foul call in Wade’s favor in that stretch. But game 5 was pretty bad.]

Simmons made those comments after game 5, an overtime thriller featuring 3 lead changes in the last 30 seconds. The last lead change, in favor of Miami, came on two Dwyane Wade free throws due to a questionable foul call against the Mavs’ Dirk Nowitzki after Wade drove, out of control, into the lane and missed a wild shot with 1.9 seconds left and the Mavs leading by 1. The referee who made the call was out of position, and is known for making highly questionable calls in favor of the home team in big games (Miami was at home). If there’s no foul call, the buzzer sounds (barring a miracle) and the Mavs win.

This was an exceedingly frustrating loss for Dallas, and Miami took a 3-2 series lead.

But game 6 was probably worse.

OK, just watch these 5 clips of the Mavericks supposedly fouling Dwyane Wade, and decide if the Mavericks were give a reasonable opportunity to win the game. Whatever you decide, I’ll be satisfied knowing that people saw what really happened.

1: Wade flops on a jump shot

2: Wade throws his shoulder into Devin Harris

3: Marquis Daniels doesn’t even touch Wade

4: Does Daniels push Wade that hard?

5: Wade thows a hard elbow into Dirk

While the third clip is the most blatantly bad foul call, it’s the last clip that’s the most painful. The Mavericks were down by a point with less than 30 seconds left, and the Heat had the ball. Not an enviable position for Dallas. But this happens to good teams all the time. The test is whether they can get a defensive stop and get the ball back with a chance to win.

I don’t think Dallas was given a fair opportunity to defend Wade on that crucial play.

He threw a hard elbow into Dirk’s gut, which should have been an offensive foul against Wade. That would have sent Dirk to the line with 26 seconds left and a chance to hit two free throws and give Dallas the lead. Instead, they called the foul against Dirk, and Wade went to the line for his 18th and 19th free throw attempts of the game. The Heat went on to win the game by 3, which gave them the championship and Wade the MVP trophy.

It often gets said in sports that a true champion will find a way to win, will hit the big shot when it counts. My complaint about the finals is, the Heat didn’t make these big plays any better than the Mavericks did, at least not in games 5 and 6. Both teams hit and missed on big plays. But Wade, in each of these clips from throughout the game, was given free throws that the Mavericks didn’t receive.

Considering three of the Heat wins were decided by 1, 2, and 3 points, I would argue that that matters. It makes me sad that the Mavericks couldn’t pull off the victory anyway. But what made me angry is that I don’t think the Heat could have pulled off the victory either, without the favorable calls.

When you’ve invested a lot in a team, that’s tough to swallow.