The New Testament is a fascinating collection of ancient literature. It could be said that no other text has had such a lasting and transformative impact on Western culture (keeping in mind that itself was also heavily influenced by the context in which it was written). Given its popularity, it appeals to all sorts of people, including believers and non-believers. What I hope to do here is to share considerations that I feel are important when reading the New Testament in order to better understand it. I want to make clear at the outset that I do not approach the New Testament (nor the whole Bible by extension) as some ‘divinely inspired’ body of text, and I do not hold to any views of Biblical inerrancy as others do. I approach the Bible as literature, so keep that in mind, along with the following:
- The New Testament Was Not Written To Us
- The New Testament Contains Claims, Not Sources
- 1st Century Palestine
- Legend In The Making
- Telling Their Own Stories
The New Testament Was Not Written To Us
Such a simple observation, yet so easy to ignore. The writings of the New Testament were written to a specific group of people at specific points in time. In fact, some parts of it, like the letters of Paul, were explicitly written to groups of early Christians (usually churches that he founded) in very specific areas of the Ancient Near East. Yes, one can read the New Testament and try to pick out ‘universal’ or ‘ultimate’ truths from it and attempt to appropriate them, but one would be doing a disservice to the text if this approach was applied to its entirety or thought of as all-encompassing. Instead, in my opinion, the most charitable reading of the text, and the one that would be showing it respect as ancient literature, would be one where we begin with the understanding that it is not talking directly to us, despite parts of its message coinciding with what we now accept as ‘universal’ truths. We need to recognize that the biblical text was produced in a world radically different from ours, and in a sense, it is an alien text to us. I recognize that this is usually not how the text is used in a confessional setting, and that’s fine, but, we need to keep in mind that a confessional reading is just one type of reading, and it need not be prescriptive. After all, the biblical texts (both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament) are best understood as cultural artifacts of humanity, useful in aiding our understanding of the ancient world, the development of Western societies, and the development of human thought (at least in the West), and not just for dogmatic theology or theistic reflection.
The New Testament Contains Claims, Not Sources
Another point that is easily glossed over when one reads the New Testament to support a conclusion already arrived at is that its writings are not first-person accounts to the events they describe. The Gospels themselves were most likely not written by the people whose name they bear. When reading about Jesus in the Gospels, if we want to be faithful to the text, one has to ask questions such as: Did Jesus really say this? Is it possible that these words were “put” in Jesus’ mouth by the writers? Is this being imported from different sources and attributed to Jesus? Understanding that when we read the Gospels we are not reading the words of Jesus directly since he himself did not write these down, nor did he speak the language in which he is presented, will have the effect of allowing us to consider the text from the “outside” so to say. What we are reading are claims that Jesus said or did something (including being raised from the dead), written down by people disconnected from Jesus by an entire generation, and possibly even more. The writers of the Gospels and the New Testament itself were people who like all authors had a goal, an agenda, an interest in mind when writing these things down, and in this case, the goal was to persuade people to the nascent Christian movement of its time. In other words, the writings of the New Testament are religious propaganda, nothing less, nothing more, despite containing possible historical facts.
1st Century Palestine
I find the New Testament that much more exciting and valuable when you read it understanding the historical context that gave birth to it. The culture of 1st Century Palestine was itself an exciting mix of differing views: Judaism (and its variety of interpretations), Greco-Roman culture, paganism, etc. In fact, when one understands the cultural context of the time, it all makes sense! It was the perfect, fertile landscape that one would expect to give birth to something like Christianity, with its initial germination within 2nd Temple Judaism and subsequent embrace of Hellenistic thought. Christianity, in my opinion, is a prime example of what we would expect to come out around that time, at that exact point in history, and at that exact place geographically speaking. This in no way detracts from the value of the New Testament, it just makes it easier to understand, and while no belief in divine inspiration is required, the New Testament is up there with all the great ancient literature of the time. Once we explore the context in which the New Testament was born, we understand that there isn’t much unique about Jesus’ story, and the New Testament by extension. Virgin birth? Check. Divine beings coming down from heaven and taking human form? Check. Human beings being exalted to divine status by being adopted by the gods as their ‘son/daughter’? Check. That is not to say that there isn’t anything unique about Jesus or the New Testament writings, it’s to say that Jesus, and the religion that later formed around him, fit in perfectly with the cultures and social structures of the time.
Legend In The Making
Consider the fact that the earliest writings of the New Testament are attributed to Paul, who wrote around two decades after Jesus was on earth. Consider also the fact that Paul was not a disciple of Jesus, and never actually interacted with the living Jesus, he only claims to have met the ‘resurrected’ Jesus through visions. In other words, our earliest writings come from someone disconnected to the actual events by about two decades who never actually witnessed any of the events nor ever interacted with the central figure of the New Testament. What Paul writes about Jesus is something he received through ‘visions and revelations’, and possibly by hearing others tell the stories that were circulating. Most of what is known of Jesus was being passed on orally for almost 3-4 decades after his life. While we do find traces of oral traditions that most scholars date to a time shortly after Jesus’ life (e.g. 1 Cor. 15), the bulk of the material is either theological reflection on the significance of Jesus within a larger redemptive framework or embellished story-telling typical for the time. All these conditions lend themselves to the claim that the stories being told about Jesus went through a legendary and mythological development prior to and during the time that they were written down. Recognizing that this is a fact is only a problem if you’ve decided that such literary devices are problematic when telling stories about our most important figures to begin with (they are not since pretty much any historical figure went through similar processes).
Telling Their Own Stories
Except for the writer(s) of Luke/Acts, none of the authors of the New Testament wrote with the intention of one day becoming part of a “canon” or volume of literature. Even the writer(s) of Luke/Acts only intended for his/her two works to be seen as a continuation of each other, not part of a larger collection of stories and letters. The very nature of a letter goes against this later ideological imposition, that bibles only have value when seen as one homogenous body of work. Letters tend to be personal, and directed at specific individuals or groups of people. Internal evidence suggests that even the Gospel writers were writing to specific communities, and wanted to tell their version of the Jesus story in contrast to others that may or may not have been circulating around. We know, for example, that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source but decided to ultimately edit, correct, polish, modify, and revise his story to tell their own. A clearer suggestion that these writers wrote intentionally as individuals could not be found. Understanding that bibles contain writings from different authors each with their own agenda, perspective, and style frees the text from an alien imposition to make it “fit” into what we already believe about bibles by way of indoctrination. It allows each author to speak for him or herself (I leave the possibility that women may have had a hand in the writings of the New Testament since it cannot be ruled out) and it allows us to respect each author and not mold them to fit our preconceived ideas of what “sacred” scripture should be like. The text is ambiguous, hard to understand, full of contradictions and contrarieties; this need not be seen as a negative that detracts from the beauty of the text, it should be seen as part of what makes it beautiful and still very much exciting.
Conclusion
Much more could be said about the nature and value of the New Testament, and the entire biblical text, but I hope that taking the above into consideration both believers and non-believers can come to the realization that the text can be appreciated and enjoyed divorced from any theological or religious commitments. After all, it is literature, and like all great literature, we don’t need to subscribe to dogmatic traditions in order to engage with it.
