Thoughts on Biblical Scholarship

Something I'd like to say about biblical scholarship. I grew up reading the Bible my whole life (well, ever since I could read), and pretty much reading it every day. (The Protestant canon.) I had entire chapters memorized in some cases, and many other passages as well. I grew up in an extremely devout family, and we were in church all the time. Multiple times a week, usually. I was involved with worship teams from a young age, then again in my 20's....and was also on the leadership team of a church through the latter part of my 20's. I thought I knew the Bible, is my point. I thought I knew it inside and out. (In the context of those circles, I did.) If someone had come to me and said, hey, you really should check out some biblical scholarship, I would have shrugged it off. I knew the Bible inside and out, or so I thought. I'd heard thousands of sermons my whole life. No need for me to study biblical scholarship. I already know it, I already know what I believe about it. Done and done.

Then somehow I stumbled across some real scholarship around 2016, I believe. I was 33 by this point. It threw me for a loop. It was like being presented with an entirely new language....but on a topic that I thought I was already fluent in. It sparked my curiosity and I started studying more...and then more. The more I learned, the more I realized how ignorant I had been my whole life. It was incredibly humbling.

The evangelical world (esp the fundamentalist world) pushed out real biblical scholarship, and real science, over a hundred years ago. So they are not connected, at all. Pastors don't know scholarship either. Not in that culture. Evangelical Bible schools don't teach it. Some in the more mainline circles are familiar with some basic scholarship, which is more than most people. But they usually don't go super deep into it. The focus is more on theology and/or ministry. You have to go to a University where they teach Biblical Studies to be presented with it. Or now, with all the resources at our fingertips, you can learn about it from your phone.

Biblical scholarship and theology are different. Theologians and scholars are different. Not the same thing. But people confuse this all the time. The best example I have is that you see a painting or mural on a wall. A theologian says, what is the message that mural is telling us? What's the message for us? They might even ask what the message meant to the original audience, but then extrapolate it out to us also. Biblical scholars ask completely different questions. Where did the wall come from that contains the mural? Who built it? When did they build it? Where and how did they get the materials? Where did they get the paint? What was going on at the time when the wall was built and the mural was painted? Did those happen at the same time, or in different times (the wall vs the painting)? What was happening in the surrounding cultures or communities? Are there other murals painted on walls that contain similar images, text, messages? Or very different, almost opposite? Or nothing at all? When are those dated? Is there a connection? And so on.

Scholars ask much more foundational questions. Where did this come from and how did we get it? (That one right there can keep you studying for years, all by itself.) What was the historical and cultural context at the time? Of that community, but also surrounding cultures and communities? Scholars have to be able to read several different ancient languages, and have PhD's in the related cultures. Theologians don't. An Old Testament scholar, for example, must be able to read at least 6 or 7 ancient near eastern languages, and they spend years studying the ancient near eastern cultures. New Testament scholars are the same for the Greco-Roman world, Second Temple Judaism, Palestine, early Christianity, etc. A scholar can read something from the Hebrew or Greek text, and first of all, the language specialists in particular can tell roughly what type of Hebrew or Greek and when it would have been written. Languages change over time, if you haven't noticed, and that's true for ALL of them. Is it an older or newer form of Hebrew or Greek? They immediately have an idea when they see it. They can tell if it's written sloppily, or with great elegance. They also immediately see connections to other cultural writings of the surrounding area - things the rest of us don't see. And.... they also see things like humor, rhymes (in that language), patterns, writing style, poems, polemic, political propaganda, mythology, riddles, irony, etc. (Those things all exist in the biblical text, btw. Most Americans just take everything plain and literal.)

My point is that we really have no idea what we're reading. And it took until I was 33 to even begin to realize it. If you haven't ventured into any scholarship yet, please give it a chance. -Aaron