As promised, I wanted to take the time to respond in part to the Chronicle of Higher Education article by Jacques Berlinerbau on “What’s Wrong With the Society of Biblical Literature?” I won’t be addressing the article in full, but I did want to touch on some of the issues he raises.
One of the supposed problems he points to is the fact that very few of the books on the Bible that make it into the popular consciousness are written by biblical scholars. Instead, he says, they are written by professors of English and comparative literature. He gives as an example Harold Bloom’s new book Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine.
But the reason for this, I suspect, has little to do with the relevancy of biblical scholarship. It has to do with the fact that solid biblical scholarship is usually (but certainly not always) not controversial. When you have been studying a text for two thousand years, it is not like there are that many new discoveries to be made, at least not many that are going to be so ground breaking that they will appeal to the general public. Often we have such discoveries in archaeology, but in the field of philology they are rare. Berlinerbau is upset that biblical scholars are not edgy and controversial.
But controversial things are what get the most media attention. Does anyone think The Da Vinci Code was so popular because it was solid scholarship? Or take Harold Bloom’s work, which Berlinerbau mentions. When Bloom writes on mundane topics in English (such as his work on Shakespeare) it doesn’t get much media coverage. But when he writes controversial books on the Bible, it makes the news and he sells a lot of books. Take, for instance, his work The Book of J in which he claimed J was a woman. That sold, but not because it was solid biblical scholarship. It was because it made a startling claim.
By the way, I worked for Bloom as a research assistant right when The Book of J came out. To be fair, Bloom does not think that J was a woman. His point was merely that when biblical scholars talk about J as an author, they are inventing a literary fiction. His point was that he can make up literary fictions too, but that does not mean they are accurate. Obviously, that nuance did not come through in the media that dealt with his book, so it sounded more controversial than it was. But, Bloom loves to be controversial, so he didn’t mind a bit.
Which brings me to another aspect of Berlinerbau’s article, which is that he is surprised the SBL does not have the same cachet as other academic institutions. We should be the “go to” people whenever biblical issues come up in the news.
One of the reasons we are not, however, has nothing to do with the SBL. Rather, it is based on our topic of study. We are experts in the Bible. But because of the strong Protestant ethos in America, the study of the Bible has been democratized. Because of the fact that many Protestant churches teach that anyone and everyone can read and understand the Bible, we as biblical scholars have no special place. In fact, we are often suspect, a point that Samuel Thomas makes in his article “Bible Scholar on an Airplane” in this month’s SBL Forum. When everyone we sit next to on an airplane already has a strongly held opinion on the Bible, biblical scholars become only one more voice, and that voice is often seen as too liberal, too conservative, out of touch, too intellectual, etc. Whether any of those adjectives are accurate or not is beside the point. The perception becomes the reality, so we are not seen as authorities. The egalitarianism that is so strong in American religion works against us.
I still remember when I was doing biblical studies as a Baptist. Religious scholars were seen as highly suspect and biblical scholars were often not respected, which is ironic considering Baptists place such emphasis on the Bible. That last person you would ask if you had a question about the Bible was a biblical scholar.
On a final note, if any of you have not read Thomas article “Bible Scholar on an Airplane”, I would highly recommend it. When I mentioned the title to my wife, she wanted to know if biblical scholars would be dropping out of overhead compartments and biting people the way they did in “Snakes on a Plane.” But I think most of us who are scholars can identify with what he has to say. And I must admit that after reading his article, I am somewhat dreading the six flights that it will take me to get to and from the SBL next week. My only comfort is that the first leg of the flight will be entirely in Europe, where people are much more reluctant to talk about religion in public with strangers.
