Can We Read the Bible?

Years ago, during the first spring season after the tragedy of 9/11, I participated in a week long seminar with colleagues at the college where I taught. The text we had come together to study was the Qur'an, in translation. I understood that this meant we were reading what the Islamic world would consider a "commentary," not a translation--certainly not the Qur'an itself.

I should admit up front that I am an English teacher and not a theologian. So as I began to read this complex, rich, and deeply spiritual work in preparation for our seminar, I experienced some confusion, I began to realize that I had brought my own expectations about what I was going to find to my reading. I expected, for example, that a great deal would be made about the importance of Abraham's son, Ishmael. And yes, I expected to read passages that supported Jihad.

What I found, however, was very different. I had to let go of those expectations. Once I did, I found myself immersed in a work--a commentary, of course--that was concerned first with the Deity's greatness and holiness. Primary in this work was a continual refrain of praise and prayer to Allah in the form of beautifully written Surahs, which at times resembled Old Testament Psalms. At least that was my main reference point for them. Like the Psalms, these Surahs occasionally would vere over into the retelling of histories I was familiar with from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.

Here I found many stories I knew, of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and figures in the New Testament as well. A general acknowledgement of the importance of these stories was underscored with the point that the Jewish community and the Christian community had once had the truth, but they each in their turn had fallen from it, corrupted it. Only in Islam was the true religion rediscovered.

What I read, as I've noted, did not confirm the prejudices I initially brought to my reading. Ishmael is hardly mentioned. And while many passages confirm the need to defend the community of the faithful, nothing in my reading could be construed to support or even define the concept of Jihad.

I should have expected this. As an English major, I have made a life of reading texts that subverted or contradicted my expectations. At a very superficial level, approaching the Qur'an for the first time was not unlike approaching the Old and New Testaments for the first time. In both cases, I found that I had all sorts of cultural baggage that I was bringing with me to my reading. But both are ancient texts, written in a time and place far outside of our own. As I picked up our family Bible to read for the first time in the eighth grade, with my training in Catholic Catechism, I expected lessons in being good and rules against drinking alcohol. (People I know who read it for the first time in the 1980s expected to read passages condemning abortion.)

What I found myself reading instead was an account of a creative, loving God, and Humanity's fall and failures to understand or desire God. Even the most respected "holy" men of the Old Testament--David, Sampson, Israel--were screw ups at some point.

As I reflected on this difference between my expectations and these ancient texts, I began to think about how they are appropriated culturally. I began to think about how just in the last thirty to forty years, there have been many "leaders" who have placed emphasis on certain verses over others and created a version of the Christian faith that might have little connection to historical Christian traditions. I can't speak with any authority about leaders in Islam. The media have all tended to focus on the most militant.

There has been a lot written around the Bible, and there is a translation of it for every conceivable American interest and identity. I suppose that in some ways, this could be acceptable. Any time I am encouraged to love my neighbor in specific ways instead of just practicing rote rituals, I am getting closer to what is actually found in the Bible, though many have been the strange teachings "found" in the Bible: Southerners once read the Bible as supporting slavery. Northerners read it the other way. Some have used it to decry war, arguing on the basis of the apparent pacifism of Jesus. Some often see it as a text that supports capitalism, or worse, is a textbook for getting wealthy, healthy, and famous. Forty years ago, I remember someone writing a book of end-time prophecies--none of them happened. Some see in the Bible a call to get busy and do good works. Others hear only a call to rest in grace.

Is everyone wrong? Is everyone right? If the Bible has been read in these different, conflicting ways, is everyone just hallucinating when they read it? Can we even get at what the Bible, or the Qur'an, is really saying? Is meaning possible?

Cultural appropriations seem a given, one of the first strong tendencies we have when we open any text. My job, as a Christian, as I read the Bible from day to day, is complicated, but it is important that I first try to recognise that not everything in my own time and culture is going to be reflected back to me in my reading of passages from another time and place. If I am finding that my own prejudices and values are not quite reflected there, I might be getting closer to what it is saying.