Okay, @many-sparrows asked me to write about Bathsheba as a prop in the story of David. Everything I'm going to say is primarily influenced by Diane L. Jacobson's article "And Then There Were His Women," and if you'd like a pdf copy I can get you one.
Looking at the literary construction of David's story, Jacobson lays out the ways that Bathsheba contrasts with other women. She is contrasted against David's other wife, Abigail, who is sort of the Ideal Woman, and he has a gentlemanly first meeting with her and an above board marriage. Bathsheba on the other hand, is first seen in possible an illicit setting and summoned to David for sex with absolutely no indication of her willingness. Jacobson writes, "In the second story the nearly silent Bathsheba is the instrument of illicit sex and the spilling of innocent blood."
Jacobson observes that we might be drawn to compare Abigail and Bathsheba, but also points out that her story is also juxtaposed against that of Tamar, David's violated daughter, for whom he provides no justice. Is Bathsheba another victim, like Tamar?
The text sure doesn't say. Israeli scholar Meir Sternberg observes that the narrative of 2 Kings requires an active reader-- we have to draw our own conclusions. We don't know what characters are thinking and there's very little moral commentary on the story.
Ultimately, Bathsheba isn't the point of the story. As Jacobson says, she's an instrument. In the continuity, she appears after the peak of David's power and popularity, in a point of his reign that Jacobson describes as him grasping for more power and seeking to expand his empire. In fact, Jacobson compares all of his wives to his position as king:
I think this literary view is probably the most fruitful way of viewing the story of David, and makes sense if we put it in the continuity of both Samuel and Kings. In 1 Samuel 8:10-18, Samuel tells the people of Israel what the king will claim if they name a king over themselves. Saul's kingship is an abject failure, and then we come to David, from whom messianic hope will spring. And David's reign starts off promising, but as you can see the trajectory with his wives, declines.
David dies at the end of 2 Samuel with is kingdom in shambles and his family irreparably damaged. The fact that there's no justice for Tamar is not normal, this is a narrative sin that rips David's kingdom apart. David dies and we turn to 1 & 2 Kings, where Israel declines so far that it is given to the hands of Babylon. I would argue that that decline begins with David, possibly begins the moment Israel asks for a king. This is all finalized after Babylonian captivity, to understand the exile, and I don't think we can remove that context from our understanding of the story. (However much my Old Testament professor would like to.)
To bring it back to Bathsheba, she was never so much a character in this as she was an instrument, a representation of David's decline. Even in the narrative she's property; Nathan makes her a lamb in his parable. This is a story about David, a story that asks us to decide how a man who committed such wrongs could be God's chosen king. But Bathsheba doesn't factor into that question. We can't absolve David by making Bathsheba wicked and his crime was evil enough without adding charges that the text doesn't give us. Whoever she was, we have to wrestle with David alone.
Hey, this is going to be long and wordy but I’m kinda desperate. Lately I’ve been having doubts about whether Jesus actually said what’s recorded in the gospels and whether those accounts are true, and the uncertainty there scares me, especially since I know the gospel writers almost certainly had their own agendas and that’s why accounts of the same event can sound different, why the birth narrative was skipped over or not, etc. On top of that I’ve seen posts from Jewish users outlining why Judaism typically doesn’t accept Jesus as Messiah/why you can’t be Jewish if you believe that, and their arguments seem pretty sound. So it all boils down to this big scary question of “What if this whole Jesus-as-Messiah thing was just the result of projection onto some random guy who seemed to be the real deal because the writers were so desperate to be rescued from the Roman occupation?” It sucks cuz I’ve been enjoying my renewed interest in church (for the most part) and while I’ve tried my best to learn not to take the Bible literally all the time (yay for growing up in an inerrantist doctrinal tradition 🙄), I still want to take it seriously and I still want to believe in Jesus as savior/Lord/etc. I don’t want to just be like, “Yeah I don’t buy the whole Messiah thing but I can still follow his example!” I want there to be meat behind why I follow, if that makes sense. So inasmuch as this could be my OCD being bored and trying to take hold of whatever it thinks would bug me the most (wouldn’t be the first time!), I would really appreciate any advice you have. I know there may not be any certainty or reassurance to be found here, but I still want to hear from someone who’s been there before so I can chart a path forward, and I think this is an important question to wrestle with. Plus I remember from one of your posts you said you have seminary notes on this exact topic so I’m curious lol.
"Gospel Truth": how do we know what Jesus really said and did?
Hey again! Sorry for the long delay on this one but I wanted to do some research before responding! You're right that these are important questions, and you're absolutely not the only one to feel doubt and anxiety over them. You're also right that I can't offer you certainty, but I do hope you'll find encouragement here, and places to go as you continue your journey.
This got super long (as always lol), so let's start with aTL;DR:
In this post, you'll find that there's a lot that we can surmise is very probable about Jesus' life story, but that ultimately we can't know much for certain — and that's okay. In Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions), Rachel Held Evans gets to the heart of the matter:
"I don’t know which Bible stories ought to be treated as historically accurate, scientifically provable accounts of facts and which stories are meant to be metaphorical. I don’t know if it really matters so long as those stories transform my life."
This is a time where scholarship & faith go hand-in-hand: using the minds God gifted us, we study and learn what we can; and we cultivate faith in the things we can't — a faith that doesn't deny doubt, but makes room for it, and calls us into community so that we can wrestle out meaning together.
A couple other notes before we kick off:
Please know that you don't Have To Study All The Things if you decide it's healthier for you not to go chasing those rabbit holes. You don't need to be an expert in Biblical studies to be a "good Christian" or to take scripture seriously or to get to know God deeply.
I trust you know yourself and how your OCD works better than I could. So I'm going to share the information I have, and leave it to you to determine for yourself how much information you need in order to feel reassured, without giving your mind new problems to ruminate over.
So here's a link to a Google doc that has A Lot of information — like, too much lol. But save it for after you read this post; I'm putting the most relevant & important info here! If you finish this post and feel satisfied, you never even have to look in the doc.
However deep you go, if you find yourself getting overwhelmed, know that whatever you are feeling is valid and probably pretty common, and take a break! Do a calming meditation or an activity you enjoy to help regulate your mind and body. If possible, have someone you can unpack this stuff with — or have a notebook ready to journal in. <3
Okay, all that outta the way, let's dig in!
Who wrote the Gospels?
Tradition goes that the authors of the four canonical Gospels are three of Jesus' closest disciples — Matthew, Mark, and John — plus a disciple of Paul — Luke. But academics have determine that this tradition is very improbable; it's much more likely that none of the four authors knew Jesus personally, and that the earliest of them (Mark) wasn't recorded till the 60s — decades after Jesus lived and died!
When people learn this, it often leads to something of a crisis of faith. If these writers didn't even know Jesus firsthand, where the heck did they get their information?? And come to think of it, why do their accounts differ? Is some of it made up? Is all of it made up??
The anxiety and fear that wells up is normal, and it's healthy to acknowledge that you're feeling it. But once that first shock abates, it's possible to discover a sort of freedom in the knowledge that the Gospel writers (and all the authors of the biblical texts) were human, with human biases and specific goals fitting their unique context; and that they didn't have all the answers!
This realization can free us to approach scripture without certain expectations (that it's all inerrant and prescriptive, etc.), and allows us to bring our doubts to the table with us. If something in the text seems questionable — particularly if it seems to promote bigotry and injustice rather than God's love — we can consider whether something in its author's cultural context might be responsible for that part of scripture.
So taking some time to learn the unique contexts of each writer can be quite enriching to how we engage the Gospels. For a chart that sums up the Gospel writers' unique contexts, audiences, and priorities, see this post.
For even more, you'll want a book that digs into that stuff — I recommend Raymond Brown's An Introduction to the New Testament (the abridged version!!). As you learn about the Gospel writers, I hope several things become evident:
First, that they weren't just making things up whole cloth, or relying on a game of "he said she said" telephone for their information! Each one drew from different primary or secondary sources, eyewitness testimonies or written texts (many of which no longer exist, but scholars have pieced together evidence of, like the famous "Q source" that both Matthew and Luke drew from).
Yes, each author does have an agenda in writing about Jesus, and in how they tell his story. But that's not a nefarious thing; it's true of any text, whether biography, poetry, novel, song — you don't take the time to write something without a purpose in mind! With variation between their specific goals, overall each Gospel writer's agenda was to persuade their audience that Jesus is worth following, and/or to offer encouragement to those who already believed.
Another thing that modern readers sometimes interpret as intentionally deceptive is that, yeah, the Gospels contain things that aren't strictly factual, and that the writers knew weren't strictly factual. This is because ancient ideas about history & biography are very different from our own. When we read a biography, we expect it to be all facts, with citations proving those facts. But the ancients were much less concerned with making sure every detail was accurate; instead, they were focused on making their specific point about whatever thing or person they were writing/reading about. So yes, they might embellish one detail or leave out another in order to fortify their desired message. They cared more about the Truth as they interpreted it than a purely factual account.
On a similar note, each Gospel writer understands Jesus and the meaning behind his story a little differently — hence why they all tell things in slightly different orders, and characterize Jesus differently, etc. This is also understandable — we all interpret stories differently; we all come to different conclusions even when we have the same or similar information. See the section in the google doc titled "each Gospel's essence" to learn more about the different ways each writer characterizes Jesus, and why they may have interpreted him the way they did.
On that topic, let's get to your question about...
Jesus — Messiah, or no?
If you read the Gospel of Matthew and take it as pure fact, you'll determine that Jesus is the Messiah his people were waiting for — that he did indeed fulfill various scriptures. But if you read Mark, you won't find that argument at all! To the author of Mark, Jesus clearly did not match the stipulations of the awaited-for Messiah — and for Mark, that's kinda the point: that Jesus is something new and surprising, unlike anything human beings expected, upturning our ideas of power and salvation.
...So how did they come to these vastly different views??
Well, Matthew was a Jew writing to persuade his fellow Jews that the Jesus movement was worth joining; to do so, he felt he had to "prove" that it fit into Jewish tradition. So he prioritizes showing how Jesus is a righteous Jew who abides by Torah, and that he is indeed the Messiah they've been waiting for.
(It's also worth noting that when Matthew writes, over and over, about Jesus "fulfilling" various bits of Hebrew scripture, that verb "fulfilling" doesn't mean what it might sound like to us — that a given text was always and only about Jesus, with the prophet having Jesus in mind when they wrote it. Rather, to Matthew "fulfilling" the text meant "filling it up" with more meaning — adding to its meaning, not replacing the old meaning. More on that, with citations, in the Google doc.)
Meanwhile, Mark's author was a Jew writing mostly to gentile members of the early Jesus movement. He knew they wouldn't care whether or not Jesus fit the Jewish expectations for a Messiah! (In fact, giving Jesus a bit more of a "Greek" flair would appeal to them more.) So Mark doesn't perform the mental and rhetorical gymnastics that Matthew does to try to make Jesus fit the Messiah requirements.
So which Gospel got it right?
For many matters of scripture, I say "it's open to interpretation!" or "Maybe both are right in different ways, conveying different truths!" But for this particular case, it is very important as Christians to accept that Jesus absolutely does not fit the Jewish requirements for their Messiah. To argue otherwise is antisemitic — it's supersessionist, meaning it claims that Christianity supersedes or replaces Judaism.
We might understand, as the author of Mark did, Jesus to be a messiah — which just means "anointed one" in Hebrew (the Greek counterpart is "Christ") — without making antisemitic claims that Jews "failed to recognize their own Messiah."
(In fact, there are multiple messiahs in scripture, e.g. in Isaiah 45, the foreign king Cyrus is referred to as God's messiah; though later scriptures like Daniel do start talking about a specific Messiah who will usher in redemption & a new age for the Jewish people.)
We can understand why some of the biblical authors, like Matthew, interpreted Jesus as this specific Messiah as a result of their own specific context, without agreeing with their view.
See this post about “Anti-Jewish Content in the New Testament: Why it’s there and what we should do about it” for more on this important topic.
(You can also find even further resources on supersessionism in this post.)
...Okay, so we've looked at the authors of the Gospels a good bit. We've learned that their idea of a "biography" is very different from ours — that they didn't consider it bad to rearrange, leave out, or embellish accounts — but what does that leave us with when it comes to knowing who Jesus "really" was?
What can we know for sure about Jesus?
Let's look at the facts. The first one is: we don't have any. Not any 100% certain ones, anyway. The guy lived before audio recorders and cameras; we're relying on written and oral accounts, which can be fabricated.
However, there are points about the Jesus story that are regarded as almost certainly historical by the vast majority of historians today, so let's look at those first:
Jesus almost 100% certainly existed. There is enough historical evidence (both inside and outside the Bible) to confirm this — even non-Christian historians almost unanimously agree that there was a historical Jesus. (Phew, am I right?)
Almost all historians also agree that several parts of Jesus' story almost definitely happened:
that he was baptized in the Jordan;
that he traveled around teaching and offering miracles (whether or not they agree he actually had the power to perform real miracles, of course);
and that he was arrested and crucified by the occupying Roman Empire.
Some of these almost-irrefutable claims lend plausibility to others: if he traveled around teaching, what was he teaching? Why not the sermons, the parables recorded in the Gospels?
And if he was crucified — the death of a criminal, an insurrectionist — what did he do to get himself crucified? He must have done something to cause Rome to see him as a threat to their Empire — why not some of the sayings and actions that are recorded in the Gospels, like his claim to be "Son of God" (a title used for Caesar); his protest march into Jerusalem satirizing Caesar; and his disruption at the Temple?
The attempt to determine which parts of scripture are "authentic," i.e. things that really happened / things Jesus really said," is often called "The Quest for the Historical Jesus."
Over the decades, scholars interested in this pursuit have developed various "criteria of authenticity," which they use to try to determine how probable any given bit of the Gospels is. In the google doc, I summarize the history of this "quest" and describe some of the most popular criteria. But what's important to understand is that these criteria have major limitations — they're often applied somewhat arbitrarily, for one thing, and ultimately they can't "prove" for sure whether something in the text is definitely historical or definitely not. So honestly, this is not a field of study that I recommend everyone go immerse themselves in! When I do, I have fun for a while, then kinda end up more overwhelmed by how much we can't know.
Still, sometimes these criteria of authenticity do yield some interesting points. For instance, the "Criteria of Embarrassment" (yes, that's what it's called lol) asserts that anything in the text that would have been embarrassing to its author is more likely to be historical fact — because why would the author have made something up that puts them in an unflattering light, or might be used to argue against their message?
For example, a lot of Gospel stories depict Jesus' disciples being kinda clueless, or saying petty things, or failing miserably (e.g. the denial of Peter). Why would the Gospel authors have wanted to make these earliest believers, who are meant to be role models for their audience, look so bad? This criterion says that wouldn't — that they must include those stories because they really happened, rather than being things the author made up to make their point.
Or take the Criterion of Multiple Attestation, which determines how many sources include a certain saying or event. The more sources contain a specific story, the more plausibly "authentic" that story is, since it means that different unconnected communities knew that story. Logical enough.
So yes, there are ways to consider the historicity of the Gospels — but not definitively. So the question becomes: is the historical knowledge we do have enough for me to feel some level of, I don't know, peace? stability in my faith?
And, at the end of the day, how important to me is it that every single thing the Gospels say is completely factual?
Back to what matters: the Good News
Facts are great — God gifted us our minds, and various scripture stories show God encourages us to wrestle with the text! — but we are called to faith as well.
Furthermore, taking the Bible seriously means accepting it for what it is — a collection of ancient texts compiled by humans, even if guided by Divinity — rather than insisting it be what it is not. For the Gospels, that means accepting that they are not biography, but story, and prioritize Truth over fact.
My pastor friend Roger puts it like this:
“For me, it isn’t about deciding which things Jesus really said or didn’t say. That’s a road that goes nowhere. As a pastoral response, I take scripture at face value and work to empathize with the people in and behind the text. Through that empathy, I can find some meaning that connects with what we’re facing here and now.”
When we acknowledge that the Bible includes human interpretations of the Divine, and that we bring our own human interpretations to our reading of it, where does that leave us?
It leaves us in need of conversation, of an expansion of our perspectives by talking through scripture in community. We do that conversing with friends, or attending Bible studies at church, or reading a variety of theological texts — getting as many unique understandings of Jesus as we can, joining our ideas together to get an ever broader glimpse of the Divine.
There's a reason Jesus taught in parables: he didn't want there to be one definitive answer to matters of life and faith! He wanted to ignite conversation, to draw us into community — because it's in community that we are the image of God, the Body of Christ.
So keep on wrestling, wondering, talking it through (taking time to rest when needed — there's no rush!). We discover scripture's meaning for us in our own place and time through the wrestling, together.
Making a quick post with some of the texts I read during seminary on biblical criticism. These are very much academic texts; if you haven't been trained in reading academia they'll be very hard to get through.
If anyone knows of more accessible resources on the topic of biblical criticism, I'd love to know them!
Engaging Biblical Authority: Perspectives on the Bible as Scripture by William P. Brown, which offers 16 points of view on how to view the Bible (including one Jewish perspective and a variety of liberationist perspectives);
Biblical Interpretation: A Roadmap by Frederick C. Tiffany and Sharon H. Ringe, which introduces you to understanding the how your context impacts your reading, how various texual and historical contexts impact any given Bible passage, some stuff about critical analysis, etc.
Elements of Biblical Exegesis by Michael J. Gorman — this one gets really into biblical criticism and hermeneutics; it's dense but there are a lot of concrete examples that are nice
The Art of Theological Reflection by Patricia O'Connell Killen and John de Beer, for connecting our personal experiences to Christian tradition.
"Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of the humankind."
-- Baruch Spinoza
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza
Baruch (de) Spinoza (24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, born in Amsterdam. One of the foremost exponents of 17th-century Rationalism and one of the early and seminal thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, he came to be considered "one of the most important philosophers—and certainly the most radical—of the early modern period."
Bart Ehrman was once quoted as saying: “If Jesus did not exist, you would think his brother would know it.” This is an amusing anecdote that I’d like to use as a springboard for this short essay to try to show that it’s impossible to separate literary characters from the literature in which they are found. For example, when Ehrman says, “If Jesus did not exist, you would think his brother would know it,” his comment presupposes that James is a real historical figure. But how can we affirm the historicity of a literary character offhand when the so-called “history” of this character is solely based on, and intimately intertwined with, the literary New Testament structures? And if these literary structures are not historical, what then? The fact that the gospels were written anonymously, and that there were no eyewitnesses and no firsthand accounts, and that the events in Jesus’ life were, for the most part, borrowed from the Old Testament, seems to suggest that they were written in the literary genre known as theological fiction. After all, the gospels read like Broadway plays!
Let me give you an analogy. Dan Brown writes novels. All his novels, just like the gospels, contain some historical places, figures, and events. But the stories, in and of themselves, are completely fictional. So, Ehrman’s strawman argument is tantamount to saying that if we want to examine the historicity of Professor Robert Langdon——who is supposedly a Harvard University professor of history of art and symbology——we’ll have to focus on his relationship with Sophie Neveu, a cryptologist with the French Judicial Police, and the female protagonist of the book. Ehrman’s earlier anecdote would be akin to saying: “if Robert Langdon did not exist, you would think Sophie would know it.”
But we wouldn’t know about Robert Langdon if it wasn’t for The Da Vinci Code. You can’t separate the character Robert Langdon from The Da Vinci Code and present him independently of it because he’s a character within that book. Therefore, his historicity or lack thereof depends entirely on how we view The Da Vinci Code. If The Da Vinci Code turns out to be a novel (which in fact it is), then how can we possibly ask historians to give us their professional opinions about him? It’s like asking historians to give us a historical assessment of bugs bunny? Was he real? So, as you can see, it’s all based on the literary structure of The Da Vinci Code, which turns out to be a novel!
By comparison, the historicity of Jesus depends entirely on how we view the literary structure of the gospel literature. Although modern critical scholars view the gospels as theological documents, they, nevertheless, believe that they contain a historic core or nucleus. They also think that we have evidence of an oral tradition. We do not! There are no eyewitnesses and no firsthand accounts. All we have about the life and times of Jesus are the gospel narratives, which were composed approximately 40 to 70 years after the purported events by anonymous Greek authors who never met Jesus. And they seem to be works of theological fiction. So where is the historical evidence that these events actually happened? We have to believe they happened because the gospel characters tell us so? It’s tantamount to saying that the events in The Da Vinci Code actually happened because Robert Langdon says so. But if the story is theological, so are its characters. Thus, the motto of the story is: don’t get caught up in the characters. The message is much more important! As for those who look to Josephus’ Antiquities for confirmation, unfortunately——due to the obvious interpolations——it cannot be considered authentic. Not to mention that Josephus presumably would have been acquainted with the gospel stories, most of which were disseminated decades earlier.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to downplay the seriousness of the gospel message. I’m simply trying to clarify it. The gospels are inspired, but they were never meant to be taken literally. I’m also a believer and I have a high view of scripture. The message of Christ is real. But when will the Jesus-story play out is not something the gospels can address. Only the epistles give us the real Jesus!
The recent debates about homosexuality in the ELCA often failed to recognize how culturally conditioned the few biblical passages dealing with this subject are and how notions like sexual orientation, which many of us take for granted, was totally unknown by the biblical authors.
Ralph W. Klein, “Reading the Bible as “Lutherans” in the Twenty-First Century” in Subject to None, Servant of All, 191.
The idea that God errs in any way, in any place, or in any endeavor is repugnant to the mind as well as the soul. Here, biblical criticism reaches the nadir of biblical vandalism.
