Why is the Bible so confusing, so filled with inner contradictions? Because it was written by committee. In fact, it was written, rewritten, edited, reordered, selected, expunged and reworked by many committees over a very long time.
It is a hodgepodge of many different kinds of documents, from prehistoric myths to tribal purity rules to prophetic visions to national histories to doctrinal letters and, in the case of the Song of Songs, erotic poetry.
Karen Armstrong’s ‘biography” of the Bible is not just the story of how it came to be written, edited and selected into a canon, but also, more especially, the history of how it has been read and re-read, interpreted and reinterpreted. The great strength of The Bible: The Biography (Atlantic) is the way it shows how the continuous and ongoing process of re-reading and reinterpreting the Bible is part of its essential being. As one rabbinical school had it, if you get nothing fresh out of the Bible you’re not reading it right. It must generate new meaning constantly.
The first real assemblage of the Torah (later, in the Christian tradition, called the Pentateuch) took place during the exile of the Jews between the seventh and fifth centuries BC; older texts or oral traditions were merged with new texts, which inevitably meant a reordering of the old within the frame of the new. Different strands in the evolving conception of God (Elohim, Yahweh) were combined and absorbed into a new monotheism as a priestly caste became responsible for a new religious and social identity, one forged in the space of exile — which was also home to the prophetic work of writers such as Isaiah.
Likewise the construction of the New Testament in the first century AD (and its final selection in the fourth century) entailed a radical re-reading of the Old Testament to revision it as prophetic of Christ’s mission. And this process happens within the gospel stories, too: the latest, John’s gospel, is a reworking of the older gospels with a new emphasis. This time the Jesus story is retold to show that he was divine, which is not a message in Mark, Matthew or Luke.
And so the tale goes on, with the Bible constantly being reinterpreted as it is reread by new generations and adapted to their needs. Changes in church doctrine of course entailed yet more reinterpretation and the Reformation beginning in the 1500s brought a renewed interest in the minutiae of the text itself and a revolution in the way the Bible was read. The growth of biblical scholarship in the 18th and 19th centuries, leading to what was called the Higher Criticism, had its backlash in the literalist movement of the later 1800s — a position to which contemporary fundamentalists still adhere.
Armstrong shows how recent, and in a way how aberrant, a move this was; it’s a long way from the early church fathers who felt the Bible had to be read simultaneously in three ways: literal, allegorical and as moral instruction. Against the literalist view that the Bible always was a transcendent, unitary and unchanging text, with a very limited set of possible interpretations, Armstrong shows how it has always been volatile, unstable and open to endless reinterpretation.
She also shows how long it took for the Bible to be regarded as a sacred text in the way some see it today. It was only after the final destruction of the Temple in 70AD that the Shekhinah or divine presence, which no longer had a home in the Temple, came to be seen to inhere in the very textuality of the Torah. Unlike the Qur’an, believed to have been dictated to Muhammad over 23 years by the angel Gabriel, the Bible was not really thought to have come directly to its authors from God’s mouth, as it were, until relatively recently.
The Bible: The Biography is a very lucid and readable (and short) study of the evolution of this troublesome text, with much fascinating information on its development and how it came to be foundational for Western civilisation. Armstrong is a generous and open-minded critic, aware always that, as the rabbis said, the text was made for man and not man for the text. It makes a superb companion volume to her must-read bestseller, A History of God.
Like the story of the Bible told by Armstrong, the esoteric tradition referred to in The Secret History of the World (Quercus) is a story of interpretation. Unlike readings of the Bible, though, esoteric ideas have not been contained by the limits of public and official discourse, so any reinterpretation of this multifarious and disparate body of work can take wing and fly off wherever it likes. Also, given that it is ‘secret”, no one can question its origins or sources.
Author Jonathan Black gives a bibliography but no specific references, and admits that he draws heavily on the Austrian mystagogue Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who abjured references altogether, preferring mystic revelation. So, unless you take Steiner as gospel, Black’s work can’t be read as serious scholarship.
The kinds of traditions Black draws upon are indeed fascinating and a thorough investigation of what they actually propounded would make engrossing reading. But Black does not distinguish between the original notions and his interpretations of them, so this book has no use as textual study. Rather he muddles everything into a vast story of everything in which nothing is as it seems and usually all he can say to support his narrative is ‘esoteric tradition teaches —” Even his infrequent statements of simple ‘exoteric” fact are often questionable.
Like The Da Vinci Code, to which he refers, Black would like to present his work as a great revelation of occult mysteries ‘for the first time”, whereas much of his source material has been in the public domain for hundreds of years, even millennia. This is the ’emanation” theory of the cosmos, familiar to any student of ancient Greek or Indian cosmologies and identified with Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus. (It’s probably all in JH Brennan’s 1976 Occult History of the World, too.)
The Secret History of the World is a clumsily written frenzy of over-interpretation. In the rarified world of symbols where all is ‘encoded”, links can be made between almost anything and Black is working with what are already wildly unstable polysemic signs. Contradictory material is simply left out when it can’t be rationalised as ‘paradox”. Once you take on board the idea that everything has a hidden meaning, you can say (as Black does) that the seven seals of Revelation refer to the seven chakras, that Adam was really a vast vegetable life-form or that Mary Poppins was a Sufi mystic (no joke). He can leap instantly from outright speculation to a statement of fact; facts, here, are simply correspondences based on resemblances or symbolic echoes.
Basically, he argues that a secret tradition, going back to the ancients and later espoused by Kabbalists, alchemists, Rosicrucians, Freemasons and many famous figures who were of course all secret initiates, gives an alternative history of the universe (plus the inevitable prophecies about the future). He adduces a vast amount of mythological storytelling to make this point, but also loses the thread of his argument as he chases after various ethereal thought-beings, reincarnated avatars and the like. Coherent this book is not.
Moreover, apart from constantly appealing to the reader’s ‘imagination” to make all this acceptable, Black can’t in fact make his case. If so many people have believed all this for so long, why is it still secret? How did it get suppressed and forgotten (if it was)? One minor questionable anecdote about the ‘Illuminati” infiltrating the Rosicrucians hardly deals with the matter. But then his case is fundamentally flawed. Unless you’re bewildered into believing this by the rush of esoteric linkages, you will find his story incomplete and unsatisfying.
Black says that contemporary science is wanting in that it cannot answer ‘why?” questions like ‘why are we here?” but doesn’t see that he can’t either. His over-arching idea is that all matter in the universe emanates from the pre-existing Cosmic Mind and that this ‘Mind of God” generated all this so that it would be able to contemplate itself; the purpose was that evolution through the vegetable, mineral and animal stages towards consciousness would allow such being(s) to reconnect with the Cosmic Mind. Still one asks: why? Why go through this rigmarole from pure mind to matter and back to mind? Like the God explanation, the answer is more of a mystery than the question.
If he were a ‘materialist” and not an ‘idealist”, Black might have found some guidance in Steven Pinker’s new book, The Stuff of Thought (Penguin), which examines the inner workings of language to show what they tell us about human nature. One of Pinker’s key concepts is that our thought is fundamentally metaphorical: our notions of causality, space and intention are (sometimes mutually contradictory) metaphors we have developed over the millennia to explain the world to ourselves. ‘If all abstract thought is metaphorical, and all metaphors are assembled out of biologically basic concepts,” he writes, ‘then we would have an explanation for the evolution of human intelligence.” A small number of basic conceptual metaphors can be combined, varied and recombined to generate the vast panoply of human thought and language.
Pinker makes his case very convincingly, presenting detailed analyses of all sorts of language problems, from the very specific ways different verbs demand to be used to the extraordinary way that profanities not only break social taboos but violate the rules of language itself (one speaks of a ‘fucking car”, say, without imagining that the car is actually fucking anything). There is almost too much information to take in and I suspect that the core of Pinker’s argument about the innate human qualities hereby illuminated is to be found in his previous books, The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate.
Still, for all its density, The Stuff of Thought is an engrossing read for anyone interested in language and/or ‘human nature”; in fact, it gives that old phrase new meaning. Pinker is able to present his argument and his examples in a lucid and often very entertaining way, though any book dealing in detail with language can become somewhat mind-bending.
It’s the weirdness of human consciousness trying to contemplate itself and its own workings — the effect is naturally vertiginous. A short break between chapters, however, and soon one is eagerly picking up the book again to resume this absorbing and necessary task.