1. SCRIPTURE – KEY TO THE FUTURE

Chapter 2 Credibility in Scripture

The message of the previous chapter was that the Hebrew and Apostolic Testimonies are crucial: to the survival and transformation of global humanity in the face of the gathering crises of this century. How credible is such a claim? So far as the world outside is concerned it is no answer to assert that its credibility is because it is somehow ‘god’s Word’. As faith in traditional nostrums crumbles in the face of overwhelming catastrophe, such assertion becomes less and less credible.

1.2.1 The anchor of the Testaments

The anchor of credibility rests not in assertion of divine authority but in the very existence of the Christian and Jewish communities today. This of course would be extended logically to apply to Islam and other religions but the point of relevance about Christianity and Judaism is that both communities are rooted in events that initially appeared to wipe out both their faith and their existence. What they testify to is both a fundamental trust in grace in the face of everything that appears to deny grace and to a process – or rather, a complex of processes – that enables that trust to take toot and flourish.

It is important at this point to distinguish between two dimensions of credibility attaching to scripture, identifying that this chapter is focused on only one of the two. The one dimension, the focus of this chapter, is the credibility of the scriptural witness to the whole human community as bearing the key that can bring ‘salvation' to the global community in terms of human survival and social transformation. The other dimension, not the focus of this chapter, is the credibility the scriptures have within the community of faith, a credibility expressed by the liturgical response, ‘Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church’. This latter credibility is rooted in a life lived ‘in the Spirit and open to grace and to such a life the scriptures speak with a credibility that is quite different to that which we are at this moment pursuing.

The question then is what credibility does or can the Hebrew and apostolic testimonies have to a world in crisis and threatened to its very existence? The answer, first, is the credibility of historical experience and, second, to their enduring experience, including the manner in which the one built upon the other and in doing so, confirmed its essential authenticity.

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1.2.2 The problem of lack of credibility

The problem both testaments have is the way they were shaped and expressed over the centuries obscured their foundational experience and therefore what they were testifying to. It is one of the greatest gifts of the spirit in the contemporary world that, through archaeology and scholarship we have been enabled to get behind the obscuring overlays and rediscover the core experience and testimony.

The other problem is that this obscuring tradition, as its own credibility crumbled over the last two centuries, the entire scriptural enterprise lost credibility so that now, as we endeavour to make the saving message clear once more, we meet an almost insuperable barrier of incredulity, especially in relation to the Hebrew writings.

The conservative and fundamentalist reactions of the 20th century has only compounded the problem of credulity. In the first place, the message that scripture holds the key to human salvation runs into the barrier of popular thinking that such a measure means buying into the literalists and their seven-day creation, literal interpretations of legal statements and the like. The other is that the strident voices of the fundamentalist establishment come out in flat contradiction and, since they tend to be more media-savvy than the rest of the church, they dominate the discourse.

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1.2.3 The problem of unfamiliarity

Most Christians and people in Western countries have at least a familiarity with the core event of the Christian experience – the crucifixion of Jesus. I will return to this. The central problem of the credibility of the Hebrew Testament is that very few people indeed are aware of its core experience and most, including most Jews, of pushed to articulate it from any knowledge base, would identify it as the exodus from Egypt. This is because Judaism itself identifies this as its core experience, leading to the covenant on Mount Sinai. Until recently even Christianity accepted this without question.

Today, however, we can now be virtually sure that the entire Egyptian / Sinai story is fictional: that as fiction it was a component, and vitally important component of the process whereby the Hebrew community dealt with its core experience. It is the story qua story that is important, not its occurrence in history, which is fictional.

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1.2.4 The Core Hebrew experience

The core Hebrew experience occurred at the end of the seventh century BC and into the sixth century, a critical period of 100 years from the kingship of Josiah and the emergence of the reform element in the last quarter of the seventh century, through the capture and destruction of Jerusalem and its temple down to the return of the exiles in the last quarter of the sixth century. It would not be an oversimplification of the evidence to say that the entire corpus of Hebrew writing relates directly or indirectly to the events of this century. Therefore, in consequence, the entire corpus of apostolic writings related indirectly to this period of time.

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1.2.4.1 Establishing the history

Thus the first task of re-establishing the credibility of the scriptures is to bring to light as clearly as we are able from sources inside and external to the bible the events of these years and do so on a piece of physical history. I stress the ‘physical history’ in the light of the prime objective of this chapter. There is another story of these years, an inner story, but its credibility can only be found within the community of faith.

The bare bones of the core Hebrew experience of this 100 year period begins with the emergence at some point in the latter third of the seventh century of a reformist party within traditional Yahwism, and this party had a radical agenda. The Yahwist cult to this point would have been indistinguishable from all the other cults the people followed polytheisticly. Jerusalem was a new city, recently grown out of a small village occupying a defensible hill in the mountain region of Judea. Even that village was of relatively recent origin. Before the late eighth century the archaeological evidence shows that the hill of Jerusalem had been uninhabited.

In that eighth century, though there was no political cohesion in the wild country of Judea. There was a kingdom to the north, the kingdom of Samaria. This had been overthrown in 721BC by the Assyrian empire and destroyed, the bulk of its population dispersed throughout the Assyrian empire. However, a significant number of refugees fled south into Judea and there founded a new kingdom of Judea and built a well-defended city on the Jerusalem mountain. The temple erected in this city housed a multiplicity of cults, the cult of Yahweh being only one among the many practiced there. Yahweh was the local god of the Palestinian people whose responsibility was their defence and protection. The people, as common in polytheistic cultures, looked to other gods such as Baal and Asteroth to provide for other areas of their life. All the gods asked in return was the maintenance of their ritual cult. The cult was necessary to the gods but apart from the ritual observance the gods had no interest in the people and their doings and certainly no ethical interest. The gods themselves, Yahweh included, had no ethical side to their nature.

All this we can reconstruct from the archaeological evidence and in the light of that evidence, from the Hebrew texts themselves. It is, of course, a radically different story to that which the texts purport to portray but that is part of the story itself. The key archaeological evidence is for the absence of habitation in Jerusalem prior to the eighth century. There was no ‘city of Jerusalem’ as the city of David and Solomon, indeed probably even of Isaiah.

Yahwism indeed would have been a mere footnote in the history books if it was remembered at all, if it hadn’t been for the fact that sometime in the seventh century BC a group of people, probably priests of the cult, were captured by a radically new concept. I want here to re-iterate that I am writing this chapter as tracing a physical story, not an account that locates the impulse for what happened in acts of grace. The radical concept was that the divine was ethical. The likelihood is that the origin of this impulse came from India where there was taking place a vast orientation of religion towards ethics. If this is true then we have to recognise that our entire Hebrew / Christian tradition is rooted in Indian religion – which is a radical thought in itself.

By the last two decades of the seventh century BC this reform movement in Yahwism had developed dramatic new ideas about ethics, about the cult, and about the claim of Yahweh to be the god of the Palestinian people to the exclusion of all other gods, whose roles were to be subsumed into that of Yahweh. There had even been developed a statement of the agenda of this radical party embodied in what we now call the Book of the Covenant enshrined in Deuteronomy chapters 12 to 26. Furthermore, there had emerged at least the beginnings of a ‘rewriting’ of the history of the Hebrew people that projected the people of Palestine as a people uniquely of Yahweh, the concept being extended to embrace the old occupants of the kingdom of Samaria as a natural extension because the population of Jerusalem would have been largely of Samarian origin. The story was that the kingdom of Samaria, recast as ‘Israel’, was destroyed because it was unfaithful to the reformers ethical and cultic vision.

By the penultimate decade of the seventh century, the reformist movement had gained sufficient strength to have gained the adherence of the reigning monarch, Josiah, and the attachment of the most powerful and influential prophet of the generation, Jeremiah.  That said, however, it is clear that the reform movement was universally rejected by the ordinary people and by the bulk of the leadership, political and religious. Worship in the temple continued polytheisticly and without reform, the ordinary people continued to practice the cult of Baal and all the other gods and nobody had any time for these new ideas about religion demanding an ethical life, individually or socially. When King Josiah as killed by Pharaoh Neco in 609BC that spelled the end of support by the ruler for the reformist movement.

Alongside the reformist movement, however, there was developing a dangerous political situation for this small, independent kingdom of Judah. The geographical situation of Palestine means that it was the only pathway between the two power centres of the ancient world in pre-Roman times: to the north lay Mesopotamia and Asia Minor: to the south, Egypt. As these two regions perpetually struggled for universal dominance, the land of Palestine and control of its routes was of critical strategic importance. For several centuries prior to the eighth there had been a time when both sides in this struggle were weak and conflict between them minimal. In this political environment, independent kingdoms sprang up in the Palestinian and Syrian region. This was the era not only of Samaria but also of the Phoenician kingdoms of Tyre and Sidon with their great maritime fleets that traded as far away as the coast of Cornwall.

All of this changed in the eighth century with the rise of the brutal militaristic empire of Assyria based in Mesopotamia and with designs on dominating Egypt. Egypt itself was recovering strength and the ensuring struggle caused all the independent kingdoms of Palestine to be crushed, including the Phoenicians. As long as the mountain regions of Judea were weak and unorganised they were no threat to Assyria, but with the emergence of Jerusalem as a strongly fortified citadel the subjugation of Judea became an imperative for the empire.

Thus it was that, in at least the second to last decade of the seventh century, fear of Assyria began to dominate Judean thinking and this is reflected in the early preaching of the prophet Jeremiah.

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1.2.4.2 The prophets

Jeremiah should be accorded the station as the key creative figure in the whole of the Hebraic experience. Jeremiah stands as a lonely figure throughout his ministry,  hated and reviled. He was also an incredibly gifted poet. Totally captured by the reformist vision of an ethical Yahweh who demanded an ethical life from ‘his people’. Jeremiah interpreted the Assyrian (and later the Babylonian) threat and eventual action as a judgement upon the people for failing to hear and respond to the reformist message; a failure to reform their ethics, a failure to abandon their other cults; a failure to reform the cult. Thus Jeremiah proclaims a message of doom for the nation, a terrible act of judgement.

However, there is also another dimension to Jeremiah’s message, one that was strong in his early preaching and became significant for his successor, Ezekiel. Jeremiah’s early preaching was built upon the idea that Samaria, destroyed a century earlier, had been part of ‘Yahweh’s people’ and in these early years Jeremiah proclaimed a prophetic hope that Yahweh would restore this kingdom and bring back the scattered people of Samaria (“Israel”). This population, by now absorbed indistinguishably into the people and cultures of the various parts of the Assyrian empire, would be restored by a miracle of Yahweh’s power and Samaria/Israel and Judea would be re-created as one kingdom.

At a socio-political level the hope was illusory and never materialised. What Jeremiah did achieve was that he sowed the seed of hope, a hope that was to germinate during the long and terrible years of the exile that the population of Judea was destined to have to undergo in the next century.

In 612BC Assyria was conquered by Babylon and there was a brief flurry of hope that this would put an end to the threat to Judea. The book of the prophet Naham in the Hebrew Testament was written in this excitement, an example of how religion can generate false expectations. It quickly became apparent, however, that Babylon, taking over the Assyrian empire, was an even greater threat to Judea. In the early sixth century that empire finally captured Jerusalem and, after a second siege in 587BC, destroyed the city, levelled the temple and exported the population into captivity in Babylon.

It is at this point that we need to recognise that the Yahwist cult, in both its priestly and popular forms, was all about Yahweh as the protector of the Palestinian people. Jerusalem was supposed to be impregnable, (see Psalm 46) not just because of its physical fortifications and position on a hill but because it was the site of the cult of Yahweh. Yahweh was the all-powerful commander of the Judean army and, as god, could not be defeated by a human enemy. When Babylon captured Jerusalem and destroyed the temple this could have only one meaning religiously: Yahweh was a beaten, defeated and powerless god, humiliated now and subject to the much more powerful Babylonian gods. Faith had been destroyed and this not just for the general polytheistic population but perhaps even more especially for the reformers for whom Yahweh was the only god. Not only this, but in the concept of the time, Yahweh’s presence and power, broken or unbroken, was limited to the soil of Palestine. In Babylon there could be no presence of Yahweh at all, so the exiles were separated not just from their country but also from their god. In the context of every political expectation there would be no return for the people. Their destiny, like the Samarians before them, would be to be absorbed into the local population and lose all connection, even memory, of their roots in Palestine. Yahwism was dead. Yahweh no longer counted for anything. That was the end of the story of the people of Yahweh.

Except that it wasn’t. By the remarkable power of Jeremiah’s insight into judgement, followed by Ezekiel’s extraordinary life, faith in Yahweh was transformed and the people in exile began to grasp a totally new vision of their god.

After Jeremiah, the next figure is Ezekiel, another lonely and reviled person. As a young man in Jerusalem before the first capture, Ezekiel was training for the Yahwist priesthood. He was among the first group of deportees after 597BC, exiled to Babylon, spelling the end of his expectation of priesthood and his connection with Yahweh. Five years into the exile, however, the impossible happened. Ezekiel, in a transcendent experience – in Babylon – encountered Yahweh and heard the word of Yahweh. In a sense, the entire Hebrew experience pivots around Ezekiel chapter 1. From that point, though meeting intense resistance, the impetus for reform transferred to the exiled community which, over the next seventy years, developed an utterly transformed concept of their god that was to culminate in the dramatic and unique monotheism of the unidentified prophet we know only as Deutero-Isaiah, whose writings are to be found in Isaiah chapters 40 to 55.

Even this transformation may have proved simply a brief and insubstantial illusion except that in the late sixth century Babylon was in turn destroyed by the rising power of Persia and with them came a different approach to political power, a different style of governing that was not built upon coercion and brutal suppression. The impact of the reformist movement upon the exiled Palestinians meant that they had retained a clear identity over against the Babylonian people and kept themselves together as a community. In the liberal regime now governing the empire, the exiles were able to return to Palestine bringing with them their revolutionary understanding of God and of God’s requirements of the people, a transformed faith and a new ethical perspective. Out of the rebuilding process came the new religion of Judaism.

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1.2.4.3 The revision of history and the creation of myth

The prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah were not the only creative influences that effected this transformation. Three other forces were powerfully at work during the exile and two further forces in the generations subsequent to the exile. The first of these forces had been already apparent in the last years of the seventh century: the revision of history. During the exile this development of a history for the people as Yahweh’s people from the beginning took definitive shape. The second force interrelated with this revision of history: this was the mythological development of the concept that the Yahweh had given the land of Palestine tot eh Hebrew people in perpetuity. The myth was encapsulated in a story about a set of patriarchs, the myth incorporating not just the land of Judah but also all the land that used to encompass the kingdom of Samaria. As the mythological and ‘historical’ stories fused so a narrative emerged that began with creation itself (enshrining the cultic reform of Sabbath observance into the very act of creation), moving into a line of patriarchs starting with Abraham and moving through until it emerges into genuine historical light with King Josiah. Along the way it described a sojourn in Egypt and a miraculous escape, leading to the supreme moment for the reformist vision, the provision of its ethical and cultic agenda as the authoritative word of Yahweh given in an eternal covenant on the mountain of God. The story moved on to climax in the model king, David, held up as the exemplar for all future rulers of the people as the ideal. Then, to account for the reality the people knew, the story traced a decline though a succession of kings and an abandonment of the way of Yahweh by the people and their leaders, resulting in the terrible judgement of their destruction.

This entire story, at a level of factual history, all the way down to Josiah, was fiction. We must not, however, therefore dismiss it as of no account and value. On the contrary this was, literally, ‘salvation history’. Without it the Hebrew people would not have survived. Without it there would be no Christianity today. Powerful as the prophetic message was, it could not have taken root in the mind and heart of the people if it had not been embodied in a narrative. This story literally saved the community and saved their faith.

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1.2.4.4 Development of spirituality

The fourth force to make itself felt in the exile was the development of an intensely personal spirituality, finding expression in the psalms and in personal religion. The traditional cult of the gods was purely external: it was something done to meet a demand, in return for which the gods performed their part, whatever that was.

What grew up in the exile was what we now call ‘spirituality’, that deeply personal, intimate relationship with God that is so very different from cultic religion. Even in this, Jeremiah may have been the essential pioneer for his poetry contains an extraordinary sense of intimacy with God that must have seemed shocking to his contemporaries if they were in any way aware of it. This fourth force was just as critical as the previous three. Had it not developed it remains doubtful the other forces could have taken root in the heart of the people in the exile and would have withered away. However, this spirituality could not have emerged had the other three, all of them, been present in power.

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1.2.4.5 Transhistory and disillusionment

The Hebrew Testament of the exilic transformation thus consists of four elements – the prophetic, the narrative, the mythological and the spiritual and cover the historical and most of the prophetic books and the psalms. The ‘spiritual’ testament was to be supplemented over coming centuries by the Wisdom writings. There are two further elements in the Hebrew testimony that need mention, however. The first of these was the transhistorical concept expressed in the book of Daniel and elaborated in intertestamental literature, playing a significant part in the development of the apostolic interpretation: and the experience of profound disillusionment and criticism embodied in the books Ecclesiastes, Job and Jonah. These two elements, though not part of the initial transformation process, were essential elements in the total process. What they achieved was the destabilisation of the ‘answer’ the Hebrews achieved by calling it into question. In effect they highlighted the ambiguity and the contingent nature of the faith the Hebrews came to and so created the openness to the future that became so important and creative when the next major crisis occurred around the figure of Jesus.

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1.2.5 Jesus and the Apostolic Testament

By the time of Jesus of Nazareth it was clear that the faith answer developed in response to the sixth century crisis was no longer working in that it required an intense concentration on being religious and even then the effort brought only a sense of defeat. For the ordinary people of the land it was no longer an answer at all. At the same time the nation was once again occupied by a foreign power and the expectation had arisen out of the transhistorical element that God would raise up a messiah to deliver them from the hands of Rome and restore their power in the way the Davidic kingdom dominated the world in their narrative of their past.

In the man Jesus his followers were convinced they had found the expected messiah. Life and encounter with him brought brought an extraordinary sense of freedom and power, a dynamic newness of life beyond all previous experience. Then this Jesus was arrested and crucified – the unthinkable had happened and all hope was crushed. The Apostolic Testament, arising principally in the second half of the first century, witnesses to how this apostolic community found new faith, survived and became a totally transformed community, transcending completely the Hebrew faith-answer yet totally embedded in that answer.

So the heart and power of the Apostolic Testament is to the way a community faced what threatened to annihilate its faith and destroy it and was able to emerge transformed and stronger than it could ever have imagined. Not only did it draw on the answer developed by the Hebrews it also drew on the process developed by the Hebrews so that in the Apostolic Testament we see all six of the processes, directly or indirectly, that the Hebrews employed to find their answer and transformation.

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1.2.6 Disillusionment in our own day

In the last two centuries we see a process of criticism and disillusionment arsing within the Christian tradition that parallels the similar rise in the Hebrew tradition. This is effecting the same destabilisation of certainty and awareness of contingency that the Hebrew community experienced, opening up the way for humanity today to face and deal with the next great faith and community-threatening crisis, that which faces global humanity in the 21st century.

It is perhaps the paradox that credibility of the witness of both the Hebrew and Apostolic Testaments rests strongly upon a recognition that there is a difference between what they witness to and what they claim to witness to and that it is precisely the element of disillusionment and critique that gives them their unique power to provide the key to the future.

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Chapter 3 A Theology of Good News

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