I’m posting something I wrote in an email.
i) Which is more likely–that Scripture is wrong, or that we misconstrue Scripture? Too often, people question Scripture rather than their interpretation of Scripture.
ii) Apropos (i), if I could step into the time machine and travel back to historical scenes described in, say, Gen 1-11 or the Exodus or the Gospel of John, what should I expect to see?
It wouldn't be surprising or disillusioning to me if there's somewhat less direct resemblance between the original event and the literary description. That would simply mean the literary description was more stylized.
If the event is not quite what I envision when I read the account, that means I had a mistaken expectation of how two were intended to match up. Because all we have is the account, since we lack direct access to the event, we can't compare the two. So it's actually quite easy for us to either overinterpret or underinterpret the account. That's all we have to go by. That's our only frame of reference.
It shouldn't shake our faith if we discovered that the literary description isn't just like what we'd see and hear if we went back in time to the original event. For the Bible writer may not have intended the correspondence to be that transparent.
For instance, Bible writers will often use stock imagery to describe an event. The purpose is to evoke associations with earlier (or later), similar events in Scripture through the use of allusive, shared imagery and terminology.
In that respect, the description will be less exact, but that will be deliberate. For it's really describing two events rather than one. A montage. Historical narratives aren't purely descriptive.
I think some people lose their faith in Scripture because they bring unrealistic, unexamined assumptions to the text.
We might consider this from another angle. When, say, John wrote the Fourth Gospel, he was, to some degree, transcribing his memories. He saw in his mind's eye what he was writing. He had a mental image of being there. That's what he writes down.
(Of course, that oversimplifies. He's selective. He also chooses words and phrases with OT connotations.)
So the direction of the process is from mental pictures (and remembered speech) to a text.
The reader reverses the process. In reading the scene, he visualizes what he reads. He goes from the text to mental imagery.
However, there's an obvious difference between a mental picture which we reconstruct from a textual description, and the mental picture which the narrator had in mind when he committed that mental picture to writing. My mental image and John's mental image won't be the same. To that extent you can't retroengineer the process. John's pictorial recollection of what happened will be more exact, more detailed, than what I can infer from the text. Than what the text conjures up in my mind.
Suppose John was at the wedding in Cana. He can mentally see where the water pots were in relation to Jesus and Mary and so on. He can see the spatial relations. The physical proximity of one thing to another.
When I read the account, I may imagine the room, but clearly what I imagine isn't going to be identical at any point to what John visualizes.
Good thoughts, Steve.
ReplyDeleteAlso:
We might consider this from another angle. When, say, John wrote the Fourth Gospel, he was, to some degree, transcribing his memories. He saw in his mind's eye what he was writing. He had a mental image of being there. That's what he writes down.
(Of course, that oversimplifies. He's selective. He also chooses words and phrases with OT connotations.)
He was also under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, so perhaps we can trust the author to be honest and potentially more accurate than another human being attempting similar memory recall.