THE OLD FEAST DAY OF ADAM AND EVE on the 24th of December is something I think should be revived, not as the first human couple's day but as a feast day of the Creation as it is and continues to be as it is always becoming what it is and then that becomes the future. The Christian conception of Jesus as the decisive event in not only the history of human beings but to all of the Creation, the presence of God made flesh in the various nuanced and conflicting ways that that is asserted, both God and flesh is one of the most shocking and difficult of the things which, if they wanted to make things easier on themselves, the earliest Jesus movement and the Christianity that came out of it would not have made up.
The Virgin Birth was another of those highly disadvantageous features of Christianity that no inventive fabulists wanting to be taken as telling the truth would have likely claimed. Up till this morning I hadn't planned on addressing it but I feel like I should now.
I think those are such disadvantageous and difficult and scandalous features of the claims of Christianity that those who first asserted and adopted them must have really believed them to be literally true. I don't believe that the story of the Virgin Birth was an attempt by the early Christians to comment on or hijack the story of the divine fatherhood of Augustus when his mother fell asleep in a pagan temple getting raped in her sleep by a god - as at least one influential scholar asserts - I think the sources of Luke and Matthew and each of the writers of those books actually believed that it happened pretty much the way it comes down to us. I was, up till a few years ago, much influenced by that scholar, not so much these days on much of his "historical Jesus" research. Though I still admire much of his historical background research and everything he claims about the authentic text is worth considering but subjecting to skeptical analysis, as all such scholarship needs.
I am agnostic on the question these days. I don't know how anyone can come up with any more to say about it. The brawl about the line in Isaiah that is translated as asserting a virgin will give birth taken from the Septuagint but which, in the Masoretic text of the Old Testament means a "young woman" is about as unknowable as the Christian doctrine, itself. The scholars who translated the Hebrew text into Greek may have been making an accurate translation of the manuscripts available to them at the time, there may have been variant versions of it as, in fact, there are for a number of the books of the Hebrew Bible. I would expect that the scholars of that time would have been at least as knowledgeable of both the Hebrew of the texts and the Greek they were translating it into as modern scholars are, certainly they would have known the Greek they spoke as their everyday language better than any modern scholar is likely to know it and they were probably among the foremost of the available scholars of the Hebrew text, too. To assert that later scholars were better is incoherent as the texts those later scholars depended on had to have passed through the hands of the generations of scholars who produced the variant versions of the texts, the various ones in Hebrew, those the Samaritans used and, I guess, use, the ones translated into Greek and Syriac. Their decisions couldn't be any better than those texts which were products of the earlier generations.
Some of the online chatter about this asserts that the Masoretic Text is authoritative because some very old fragments of some of the Torah are very close to the standard text of that version. And, who knows, if they find a complete scroll of very ancient provenance they might be able to make an overwhelming case for that. I do, though, wonder if there are serious differences in the character of the Prophetic books, those books by the protest singers, the outlaw, uncredentialed commentators on the political-economic-religious establishment and the society that fell away from the radical egalitarian social, political and, most relevant to those who need it, economic justice that was the heart of and the decisive difference in the Hebrew identity.
It wouldn't surprise me if those uncredentialed, unauthorized, possibly long orally transmitted Prophets survived, at times or always in alternative readings. I'm inclined to believe that, given the radicalism of what was tamed into written form, that the original version or versions might have been far more outrageous. even if the transmission of The Law code may have been more uniform and orthodox. I wouldn't be at all surprised if whoever wrote the imagined "original text" of Isaiah may have wanted to make it seem a bit more persuasively less outrageous at least some of the times. I don't know the believed or documented or recorded lore as to how the Masoretic text came into being, we know that it was well into the first millennium of the Christian period when it was done. I can well imagine the committee that made that editorial decision between a "virgin" and a "young girl" would have been inclined to choose the less "Christian" reading of the text. And maybe they were absolutely right to do that. Or maybe they weren't. I can certainly sympathize with their choice given that they may have already felt themselves in danger of assimilation by the growing Christian population, including, by that time, a majority of gentiles without the connection to Judaism that the first Christians certainly had. Even the earliest gentiles who Paul and others converted had that connection to Judaism because the earliest Christians we know of were all, also Jews with the fewest named exceptions.
And along with that celebration of the Creation should come a celebration of diversity, diversity in life forms, in human forms, in human cultures and languages and colors and diversity in religions. One thing which did not change in the Christian adoption of, first, the Septuagint and, in some form they had available to them, something closer to the Masoretic text* is that God declares his covenant with the Children of Israel to be eternal. It is one of the longer enduring sins of Christians that they ignored that text even as they violated it as certainly as the Assyrians and Antiochus did. To do that those Christians had to violate the text of the Hebrew Bible they adopted as divinely given Scripture and the Gospel of Jesus and, despite some unfortunately worded passages, the text we have of that Gospel and the some of the Epistles. I think Abraham Joshua Heschel said one of the most sensible things about the Scriptures, the written version of it we have is not the inspired word itself but a commentary on it, just as every single modernly available text of all of it is a reflection of that original divine inspired text as the Prophets, including the great ones like Moses got when he first set up his radically egalitarian just Law, the thing that the Virgin Mary sings in the Magnificat as Luke gives it to us.
* I read sometime this week something I hadn't heard before, that when Jerome was translating the Scriptures into Latin, he favored the Hebrew texts he had available to him over the Greek translation. Since he made some serious mistakes in translating the Greek of the books of the New Testament, in places, it's probably good that he may have not used them as much. I'd like to know more about that, especially in light of the inclusion of texts present in the Septuagint but not found in the Masoretic edition of the Hebrew Scriptures. Such a huge subject, so little time to try to figure it out. It's one of the very few reasons I ever wish I was young again.
No comments:
Post a Comment