Episode 329: Jared Byas - 10 Aha Moments in Biblical Scholarship: Part 1
In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Jared takes listeners on a tour through the history of modern biblical scholarship, tracing key “aha moments” that changed how scholars understand the Bible. From source criticism and the Documentary Hypothesis to oral tradition and the rise of fundamentalism, he explores how new questions about the Bible’s origins reshaped both academia and the church. Together, these developments invite listeners to see the Bible not as a static text dropped from heaven, but as a deeply human collection of traditions formed over time.
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Pete: You're listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.
Well, as you all know, or at least should know by now, it's the 10th anniversary of this podcast, and as is the case anytime we celebrate a milestone, I've been reflecting. And one of the things I've been reflecting on is the history of biblical studies. We've been talking for hundreds of episodes about scholarly approaches to the Bible, but I don't think we've ever walked you through some of the history of the field.
What were the key insights that led to the current scholarly approach to the Bible? So today, I bring you part one of a two-part series that I'm calling “10 Aha Moments in Biblical Studies.”
Instead of imagining someone sitting down and writing Genesis from scratch, you imagine generations of people telling stories which eventually got written down and collected. This is a completely different way of imagining how the Bible came to be, and within that change, it allows for a lot more messiness. Instead of a formal process of putting these discrete sources together in some puzzle, we get a more organic evolution over hundreds of years.
Let's dive into part one of the “10 Aha Moments in Biblical Studies.” And just as my evangelical youth pastor warned me about, the story of modern biblical scholarship begins with sexually transmitted disease. It's France in the mid-1700s before the French Revolution, and a professor of medicine, of all things, was busy writing the first great treatise on sexually transmitted diseases.
But he was also a son of a minister, so he was intrigued by the Bible. His name was Jean Astruc, and in 1753, he published an anonymous book that is often considered the launch of modern biblical scholarship. That's right. He was proud to attach his name to a book about syphilis, but when it came to a book about the Bible, he was like, "Nah, I'm good."
This initial shift in how people saw the Bible, or our first aha, came down to a really simple question, or, or we might say two different questions. The first one is, what does this unexpected feature in the Bible teach us about God or the world? And the second one is, what does this unexpected feature tell us about how this text was composed?
You have to listen carefully because those sound like the same question, but they're not. And that shift from the first to the second is basically the birth of what we call critical biblical scholarship. To understand Jean Astruc's insight, let's go back even further to the beginning, like the beginning of creation.
If we open up to Genesis 1, the very first pages of the Bible, you're gonna be confronted with an unexpected feature, two distinct creation stories. Genesis 1 is clean and orderly, very structured. God speaks things into a very symmetrical existence. Day one, there is morning and evening. Day two, there is morning and evening, and on it goes.
Genesis 2, though, is less structured and less abstract. It's more earthy, more human. God doesn't speak things into existence. God forms Adam from dust, plants a garden, walks around. In Genesis 1, God creates plants and animals first, and then humans as the crowning achievement. In Genesis 2, God creates man, then plants and animals, then woman.
If you read them back to back, which isn't hard to do since they come right after each other in your Bible, you'll probably notice this stuff. The order is different. The style is different. Importantly, even the name for God is different. Genesis 1 uses the name Elohim, and Genesis 2 uses the phrase Yahweh Elohim.
And if you keep reading, there are more of these, quote, "unexpected features." So flip over a few chapters to the flood story in Genesis 6-9. Here we're gonna find a couple of these unexpected features. You have two different lengths for the flood. In 7:17, we're told it lasts 40 days, but just a few verses later in 7:24, we're told that it lasts 150 days.
We also have two different instructions to Noah. In chapter 6:19-20, he's instructed to bring one pair of all living creatures, one male and one female. It's pretty straightforward. But if we look ahead a few verses, we get a different packing list for the ark. We have seven pair of clean animals in 7:2.
The first list says one pair of every kind of bird, 6:20, and the second list says seven pair of every bird, 7:3. We also see what seems like two variations on the story of Abraham passing off his wife as his sister. We have these distinct covenants with Abraham in Genesis chapter 15 and in Genesis chapter 17.
If you read close, it's actually not that hard to see these oddities in the story, and these oddities are what I'm gonna call in this series an unexpected feature. When we're reading a story, we wouldn't expect to see God portrayed as a distant, orderly, omniscient God in one part, and then, without warning, switch to a very hands-on God who takes walks in the garden and has to ask the man, "Where are you?"
We just wouldn't expect it. And because we don't expect it, people have noticed these things for a very long time, as in thousands of years. And this is really important because sometimes we tell the story like only modern Western people in the Enlightenment started noticing all this stuff, and that's just not true.
So take Genesis Rabbah, an early Jewish commentary on Genesis that goes back to about the fourth or fifth century CE. And there's a famous line in that text where the rabbis say, "At first, God wanted to create the world with justice, Elohim, but saw it wouldn't work, so God added mercy, Yahweh." That's so incredibly insightful for a text 1,700 years old.
They're noticing the exact same thing. Different names for God, different patterns in the text. For them, that abstract and orderly God of Genesis 1 referred to as Elohim, they associate with the God of justice, and that relatable messy God of Genesis 2, referred to as Yahweh Elohim, they associate with a God of mercy.
It turns out God is both. It's a brilliant observation. But it's important to notice what they do with that observation. When they see the two different names and two different patterns of behavior, they ask, "What does this teach us about God and the world?" And the answer is, God is both just and merciful, and the world needs both.
That's a theological reading asking this important question: what does this unexpected feature teach us about God or the world? You see the same thing in the medieval period with medieval Jewish commentators like Rashi who lived in the 1000s, about 1,000 years ago. He wrote in his commentary on Genesis, "Elohim represents the attribute of justice. Yahweh represents the attribute of mercy."
Rashi explains that God initially created the world with ultimate justice, but the world couldn't live up to those expectations, so God united justice with mercy. This is Rashi's reading of Genesis 1 and 2. Same data, same observations, same question. What does this unexpected feature teach us about God or the world?
Now, let's jump back to the 1700s. Astruc is reading Genesis, and he notices, well, the exact same stuff that had been noticed in the Jewish tradition for 1,000 years. The divine names cluster together. The stories repeat. The style shifts. Nothing new so far, but here's what changes. And again, it's oversimplifying to think that Astruc came up with this out, out of thin air.
His question comes after a few centuries of learning from people like Erasmus, Spinoza, and a lot of other people. But instead of asking, "What does this unexpected feature teach us about God or the world?" Astruc asks, "What does this unexpected feature tell us about how this particular text was composed?"
That's the move. That's the birth of modern critical scholarship. It was a move away from only asking questions about God and the world to asking questions about the text itself, investigating the origins of that text, how it was composed. Not just how will this book teach us about God, but where did this book come from?
The book Astruc wrote in 1753 was very mysteriously called Conjectures on the Original Documents That Moses Appears to Have Used to Compose the Book of Genesis. It's hard to even recognize what that paper was about with a title like that. Let me decipher it for you. It was about the original documents that Moses appears to have used to compose the book of Genesis.
That is, Astruc asked the question, what if Moses didn't write Genesis as one continuous thing? What if Moses had sources and acted more like an editor than an author? What if there was one document that had used Elohim, one document that used Yahweh, and then Moses came along and combined them in a way where not everything got smoothed out?
What if, as scholars eventually called them, there are still seams where you can see that these two documents were put together? Again, the data was the same, observations were the same, but what changed was the question. So let me put it as simply as I can in this first aha moment. In the rabbinic tradition, differences in the text are meaningful features to interpret.
For Astruc and generations of biblical scholars after him, differences in the text are clues to how the text was actually constructed. So when we read Genesis 1-2 through the eyes of the ancient rabbis, and we notice these unexpected features of two creation stories, we assume it's because they have something to teach us about God and humanity.
But when we read Genesis 1-2 through the eyes of Astruc, and we notice these unexpected features of two creation stories, we start to wonder if it's because they have something to teach us about how our Bibles were created. And I would add for us today, maybe these aren't mutually exclusive, but that's for later.
Now, the irony is that Astruc wasn't out to discredit the Bible. He wasn't a godless atheist. In his mind, he was defending biblical tradition. In the world of the Enlightenment, Astruc was trying to show that Moses was a good historian who used reliable sources in a very reasonable way. He was trying to show that Moses was actually a good Enlightenment thinker using reasonable Enlightenment methods.
But just like generations of pastor's kids after him, he couldn't help but make a mess of things. It turns out once you start pulling that thread, it's hard to stop. Astruc changed the goal of biblical interpretation. The question that dominated the academy quickly became, how did this text come to be instead of, what does this text mean?
And once you focus on that first question, you open up the door to everything that comes after. Modern biblical criticism in all of its forms, from meaning to method, from theology to history, all this from an anonymous book by a pastor's kid and STD specialist. And that brings us to the next aha moment of biblical scholarship, also brought to us by a pastor's kid. Notice a pattern.
Astruc asks, what does this unexpected feature tell us about how this text was composed? And his answer is, it tells us that the text was composed of different sources. Our next scholar takes one step further and asks. What does this unexpected feature tell us about when and why this text was composed?
And just like with Astruc, this scholar was reading his Bible closely and noticed something. This time it wasn't Genesis, but 2 Kings. 2 Kings 22-23 to be specific. So to understand this second aha moment, we need to go back in history to the seventh century BCE. So let's do a quick history refresher. It's before the Babylonian exile of the South, but it's after the Assyrian exile of the North in 722 BCE or so.
We're in that sliver of time between the two major exiles, and King Josiah is on the throne in the South, what we call the Southern Kingdom of Judah. He's been King of Judah since he was eight years old, but now he's an adult, and the temple is under repair, and during the renovations, something surprising happens.
They find a mysterious book. In Kings, it's called The Book of the Law. No one's been using it. No one, including the high priest, seems to know what it says. So they bring it to Josiah, and it's read aloud, and his reaction is intense, and it's immediate. He tears his clothes. Holy smokes, we've not been practicing our religion the right way for God knows how long.
2 Kings 22:13 has Josiah saying this: "Great is the Lord's anger that burns against us because those who have gone before us have not obeyed the words of this book. They have not acted in accordance with all that is written there concerning us." Then we move to the next chapter, 2 Kings 23, where Josiah doesn't just say, "Thanks so much. Good reminder."
He doesn't wait for Congress. He just puts out that executive order, and he gets to work. He enacts sweeping reform. Of course, that's a joke, guys. There's no Congress. There's no executive order. He's king. He just does whatever he wants. Anyway, he shuts down worship sites outside Jerusalem. He destroys altars and shrines.
He removes priests who were operating locally, regionally, centralizes everything in one place and reinstitutes Passover in this big national way. So far, so good. But what happens if we take the book of Deuteronomy and we lay it next to the story in 2 Kings 23? This is what our next scholar, Wilhelm de Wette, did, and this is what he saw.
On the one side, you have Deuteronomy. On the other side, you have Josiah's actions in 2 Kings 23. In Deuteronomy, there's instructed to be one place of worship. So what happens for Josiah? Shuts down all other shrines. In Deuteronomy, you're supposed to destroy the altars and Asherah. So what does Josiah do?
Destroys all the high places and the Asherah. What about child sacrifice? Well, in Deuteronomy, it's supposed to be banned along with magic, and in Josiah's day, in the reform of Josiah, he ends child sacrifice and removes the mediums. You're also supposed to, in Deuteronomy, centralize the priesthood. What does Josiah do?
Reorganizes the priests, centralizes the priesthood. In Deuteronomy 29, the people need to make sure that there is public covenant renewal, and what do we have in Josiah but public covenant renewal? There's also supposed to be a centralized Passover celebration, and again, Josiah reinstitutes the national Passover celebration in Jerusalem.
So before Wilhelm de Wette, the connection was understood like this. Moses wrote Deuteronomy way back a long time ago in the wilderness. Fast-forward hundreds of years, Josiah finds it and says, "Oh, wow, we've really drifted. Let's get back on track." So the logic is finding Deuteronomy led to Josiah's reform.
That makes sense because that's how it's written in 2 Kings 22 and 23. The law comes first, the reform follows. But here's where things get interesting because de Wette had a different thought. The overlap between Deuteronomy and 2 Kings 22 and 23 felt too clean, too neat. It was a little suspicious, not because he discovered some new manuscript or uncovered some ancient hidden scroll.
He just noticed the overlap and started asking a new question. Given this overlap between 2 Kings and the book of Deuteronomy, what would make the most sense about when and why Deuteronomy was written? So if you were Josiah and you wanted to push reform, what kind of text would you write? And what would be the best way to legitimize your policies?
That is, what if Deuteronomy was written during Josiah's reign to legitimize his reform policies? This flips the script in the history of biblical scholarship. So the old logic was finding Deuteronomy led to Josiah's reform. The law comes first, then reform follows. But de Wette suggests a new logic.
Josiah's desire for reform prompted the compiling of Deuteronomy. The reform comes first, then the law follows. Of course, I'm oversimplifying here. We have to let go of our understanding of how a book is written today. One author just sits down, writes a book, cites their sources, uses quotation marks so we know what's original to the author and what ideas or words she's borrowing from other authors of the past.
But that's not how anything was written in the ancient world. So scholars today, of course, recognize it's a lot messier than that. There were parts, passages, oral traditions, different pieces of writings that were around long before Deuteronomy, uh, that we have today, you know, and ended up with. But that actually furthers the point.
It wasn't as simple as what you have in our Bible now. Book was written, book was found, reform follows. No. Now with de Wette, we have a new logic. Josiah's desire for reform prompted the compiling of Deuteronomy. The reform comes first, then the law follows. So our OG friend Astruc said there might be layers or sources that make up the text, but de Wette says those layers or sources might come from different historical moments with real-world concerns.
That is, these sources might have a purpose other than just becoming part of the Bible. There might have been, and here's our key word in biblical studies, there might have been a context that was made up of real-world concerns, political, economic, religious, happening at a particular time and place that impacts the Bible we now have.
So now we're not just talking about sources, you know, documents, these seams. We're talking about kings, reforms, historical pressures. De Wette isn't just asking how the text was formed. He's asking, "Why did it take this shape at this moment?" And that opens up a whole new way of reading the Bible. But before de Wette, and again, I'm oversimplifying, the Bible describes history.
After, the Bible actually becomes ever so slightly part of history. And once you see that, new questions open up. What else in the Bible reflects specific moments? Maybe it's not just Josiah's reform and Deuteronomy reflecting that reform in 2 Kings 23. What issues are driving different laws or stories?
How does theology develop over time? This is the foundation for tracing development across the Pentateuch, understanding editorial layers, seeing theology as something that evolves in conversation with history. So again, Astruc taught people to ask, "How is this text put together?" De Wette teaches us to ask, "When and why was it put together?"
It's the same Bible, it's the same stories, but now people are starting to read with a new lens. Not just what does it mean, but what was happening that made someone write it in this way?
In 1819, de Wette was actually fired from his position and banished from his country, from Prussia, for sending condolences to the mother of a man who was executed for a politically motivated murder. In exile, he later became a popular preacher. But let's recap this aha. We have the beginning of modern biblical scholarship being represented by Jean Astruc, who represented a time in the 1700s when people started asking, "How is this text put together?"
And Astruc asked, are there sources that Moses, again, for Jean Astruc, it's still Moses who's using these sources, to create the early part of our Bible? And the answer seemed to be yes, there are sources. Fast-forward about 100 years to the 1800s, where we have this second important aha of biblical scholarship represented by Wilhelm de Wette, who moved from how is this text put together to when and why was it put together this way, as he looked at 2 Kings 22 and 23 and asked about its relationship to the Book of Deuteronomy.
That added a layer of complexity. The Bible isn't just composed of sources, but those sources had their own context, politically, socially, economically. Now we're gonna fast-forward 60 or 70 years to the late 1800s to our third important aha in the history of biblical scholarship. At this stage, we get to a really important figure who kind of pulls everything together and then pushes it even further.
Astruc asked, how is it put together? De Wette asked, when and why was it put together? And now we get to Julius Wellhausen, someone you might have actually heard of because he developed the famous documentary hypothesis. His question is basically this: What if the sources tell us a story about how Israel's religion actually developed over time?
Wellhausen was, you might have guessed it, the son of a pastor. Of course, Wellhausen is building off the scholarship before him, Astruc's idea that the text has multiple sources and de Wette's idea that those sources are tied to historical moments. He asks, "Do we see a pattern or development if we look at those sources and we look at those historical moments that they came from?"
It turns out he did. Here's his big aha. The Pentateuch, the first five books of our Bible, isn't just layered with sources. Those layers reflect the historical evolution of Israel's religion. If we look closely enough, we can actually trace through history how Israel's religion evolved over time. It's not just about documents or dates.
Now we're talking about evolution, trajectory, development. You might get a hint here why the church is starting to get nervous around this time. If we can trace this development, then this book starts to look less like what we'd come to expect from a book dropped from heaven by God to tell us facts about the universe and a lot more human.
But I'm getting ahead of myself again. Back to Wellhausen. His famous framework, which you might have heard of before, is four letters long, J-E-D-P. Even in the early 2000s when I was in the School of Religion at Liberty University, where I went to college, those four letters sent fear into the hearts of us students, and it sent anger into the hearts of the professors.
Wellhausen was like Voldemort. It was he who shall not be named, unless it's in the context of talking about how godless and wrong he was. JEDP stands for the four sources that make up the first five books of our Bible called the Pentateuch. These four sources are the J source, what's called the Yahwist, because in German, the Y sound is a J, so Yahweh is spelled with a J.
The E source, the Eloist, Elohim, Eloist. The D source, the Deuteronomist, and the P source, or the Priestly source. Now, here's the key point Wellhausen was trying to make. These aren't just different voices. They represent different stages in history, and in that order. So let's walk through it briefly. Stage one, the early narratives, which are made up of the J and E sources according to Wellhausen.
So let's think about Genesis and parts of Exodus. You see Abraham building altars wherever he goes, not really paying attention to the location. Jacob's encountering God just out in the open. No single central place of worship. The religion seems flexible and local. It's not really tightly controlled in these early narratives.
Then we get to stage two, Deuteronomy. When we jump over to Deuteronomy, we'll see something different. Well, if you were listening to the part about Devet just a little while ago, you'll pass this test. There's one place of worship. There's a strong emphasis on covenant. There's exclusive loyalty to Yahweh.
And remember what we talked about with Josiah in 2 Kings 23. That lines up with a specific historical moment between those two big exiles. Then we get to stage three, the priestly material. So stage one, J source and E source. Stage two, D source. Stage three is the priestly material, or the P source. So let's think about Leviticus, or the detailed instructions for the tabernacle in Exodus.
In those texts, you get very precise rituals, structured systems, genealogies, clear roles for priests. This is organized. It's formal. It's institutional. It's also why it makes Leviticus really hard reading if you're trying to read through your Bible in a year. Maybe Israel's religion developed in this same way, and if we can find those sources that belong to each stage, we could actually reconstruct the development of Israel's religion.
You'll notice a theme here. Wellhausen read the text closely alongside of the insights of those before him, and he noticed these things. He looks at all of it and he says, "This doesn't seem random." And it doesn't make sense chronologically if you're just reading from Genesis on through. It looks like these parts of the Bible represent a movement from a decentralized religious structure to a centralized religious organization, from informal to structured, from simple to complex.
In other words, Israel's religion developed over time, and the Bible preserves that development, not on the surface, not in chronological order. But if you look close, you'll see it in those unexpected features. This is a bombshell, if true, because think about it. Absolute, objective, static, universal truth doesn't, quote, "develop over time."
It's the same, we might say, yesterday, today, and forever. If Israel's religion developed over time from decentralized worship to centralized worship, from informal worship practices to structured worship practices, from simple instructions to complex instructions, what does this mean for the Bible that we're reading?
I'm getting ahead of myself again. I can't help it. Let's go back. Astruc said there are multiple sources in the text. Wellhausen says yes, and we can map them, we can define them, we can reconstruct them systematically. He takes that initial observation, and he turns it into a full model. de Wette said Deuteronomy reflects a specific historical moment, right?
Josiah's reform. Wellhausen says exactly, but that's just one stage in a much bigger story. So instead of focusing on one book, Wellhausen will zoom out and say, "Let's look at the entire Pentateuch. Maybe there are more things like Deuteronomy that reflect other historical moments in Israel's past." So alongside the D source or Deuteronomy, if we can identify the J and E sources, we can look back into history and see a religion that's more flexible, local, less centralized, less controlled.
Then again, if we can identify that D source, we can see, particularly in the time of Josiah, a real transformation of the Israelite religion into something more controlled, more centralized, less flexible. And then, moving further, if we can identify the P source, we can see that cherry on top, a transformation to an organized, institutional religion.
From J and E to D to P. Astruc describes how the text might be composed. de Wette connects it to history, and then Wellhausen builds this big-picture theory that religion evolves from early practices to centralized reform to the full-blown priestly system. Wellhausen isn't just studying the Bible anymore.
He's using the Bible to reconstruct the history of Israel's religion. He's now using the Bible as a tool to reconstruct a history behind and underneath the text itself. That's a different level. Again, it flipped the long-standing assumption that went something like, you know, Moses gives the commands, then Israel tries to live them out.
Wellhausen says people were practicing their religion, and out of that messy practice comes more formal and institutional laws. It's not a top-down approach but a bottom-up approach. Practices come first, then the law develops later, especially when it comes to priestly laws. Instead of being the starting point, they're the result of a long process.
Or to oversimplify, in Genesis, people worship in multiple places. In Deuteronomy, the worship becomes centralized. In Leviticus, that centralized worship becomes highly regulated and systematized. Before Wellhausen's time, people assumed that these were happening at the same time and came from the same historical moment.
Instead, Wellhausen suggests that these reflect different stages in a long development. Or to explain it in terms of our unexpected features, before Astruc, the text has unexpected features that are full of meaning and tell us about God and the world. For Astruc, those unexpected features or seams reveal different sources.
de Wette says those sources reflect historical moments, and then Wellhausen says those moments form a story of religious development. And this is why Wellhausen matters so much. Scholars still debate the exact sources, the timeline, the details, but they don't really debate his core idea. You can read the Bible as a window into how the Israelite religious tradition grew and changed over time.
And once you see that, you're not just reading a finished product anymore. You're watching a tradition unfold layer by layer, generation by generation, right there in the text. All right, quick nerdy side note before we move on. Uh, for some of you, if you need a bathroom break, this is the time, and it's a little bit of foreshadowing for where we'll go later.
But there has been an update to this fundamental framework in the past fifty years or so from scholars like van Seters with what's called the supplementary hypothesis, which is a move away from the JEDP as four independent sources to thinking of them less as full written sources and more traditions that were compiled later in history.
So rather than JEDP, these days it's more the Deuteronomist or the D tradition, then the Yahwist or that J tradition being an addition in the exile, and then the Priestly or P tradition being an addition in the post-exilic period, with the E source being dropped completely. The Deuteronomist tradition was perhaps the older compilation written in the six hundreds BCE, which influenced the composition of the Deuteronomistic history from the Book of Joshua to 2 Kings in the early phase of the Babylonian captivity.
Then the Yahwist source, the J source, was probably added in the later part of the Babylonian exile around 450 BCE, influencing the stories from creation to the death of Moses, Exodus, and Numbers. Then the Priestly source, P, was likely added last in around 400 BCE in the Second Temple period, which influenced the final composition of Leviticus.
But more on this momentarily. Again, it's a nerdy aside, a little foreshadowing, and of course it gets messier and it's a little bit oversimplified. Back to the main story. I have a lot of compassion for Wellhausen. He was demonized for decades because seminaries are littered with the disillusioned dropouts after hearing his theories and discoveries.
But that was never his intention. He wasn't out to dismantle the faith of future pastors and ministers. In fact, Wellhausen, of all people, had tremendous integrity. He actually resigned from his position in 1882 because of the effect that his theories were having on future ministers.
He says this in his letter of resignation, "I became a theologian because the scientific treatment of the Bible interested me. Only gradually did I come to understand that a professor of theology also has the practical task of preparing the students for service in the Protestant church, and that I am not adequate to this practical task, but that instead, despite all caution on my own part, I make my hearers unfit for their office. Since then, my theological professorship has been weighing heavily on my conscience."
Wellhausen, son of a pastor, resigned from his position as a theology professor precisely because he could tell that his more scientific, critical approach to the Bible was making his students unfit for their office, meaning it was making it hard for students to be good pastors.
I mention this because it'll come up later. These developments were happening with scholars, but churches and pastors weren't really sure what to do with the results. So lots of respect to Wellhausen for that decision. Okay, let's come up for air and a little recap. Aha number one, Jean Astruc in the 1700s.
How was this text put together? Are there sources that Moses used to create the early part of our Bible? Seems like yes. Aha number two, Wilhelm de Wette, early 1800s. When and why was it put together this way? Was an early version of Deuteronomy composed during Josiah's reign to legitimize his reforms?
The answer seemed to be yes. And now aha number three, Julius Wellhausen in the late 1800s. Do the sources tell historical stories not reflected in the text itself? The answer seems to be yes. On the heels of Julius Wellhausen was Hermann Gunkel. You're not gonna believe this, but he's also the son of a pastor.
He is in some ways a contemporary of Wellhausen, though most of Wellhausen's writing had already been published by the time Gunkel took the helm in the early 1900s. And Gunkel looks at all of these developments and says, "Hey guys, this is a good start, but we've all been making an assumption that needs to be questioned."
And that assumption has led to previous scholars starting too late in the process. If we really wanna get behind the text, we have to actually go one layer deeper. So Gunkel, at the turn of the 20th century, looks at the Bible and says, "Before any of this was even written down, before JEDP, these were actually stories.
These were prayers. These were sayings that people were using in real life." These sources we keep talking about, you guys are talking about written documents, but the true sources were before the books, before the documents. They were living speech. They were oral tradition. So before Gunkel, critical biblical scholarship was a literary endeavor, thinking of documents and texts.
Gunkel moved it off the page and into the ancient context. It turns out the history of our Bible is even messier than what Astruc, de Wette, and even Wellhausen originally thought. All right, let's get into this a little bit. Let's go back to Genesis again, a book that seems to be the gift that keeps on giving.
Up to this point, someone like Wellhausen would say Genesis 1 comes from one source, Genesis 2 comes from another. That's helpful. But Gunkel asks a different kind of question. He would ask, "What kinds of stories are these?" Going back to the earlier observations we talked about in Genesis, you see in Genesis 1 structured repetition, right?
Let there be, let there be, and God said, and God said, and there was evening, and there was morning, over and over again. So there's this repetition. There's also a structured framework. We have the first three days, seem to go together, the second three days seem to go together, and then there's this climactic, you know, seventh or Sabbath day.
Gunkel would say this feels like something used in a communal, maybe even liturgical setting, something rhythmic, ordered, probably recited. Now, compare that to Genesis 2. God forms a human from dust, plants a garden, walks around in it, interacts closely with people. It lacks the repetition. It lacks that formal structure.
And Gunkel says this feels like a folk story about human origins. It's something that you would tell around the campfire and pass to your kids. It doesn't feel like something you'd formally recite in the same way. So instead of just saying these are two sources, Gunkel says these are two different kinds of speech that are coming from different life settings.
Gunkel then introduces two influential terms here. These different types of speech he calls Gattung, or genre or type, and he calls these settings in life the Sitz im Leben. I say this because if you're around biblical studies for any length of time, you're gonna hear scholars talk about two things pretty constantly, genre or type and context, Gattung and Sitz im Leben.
Well, it's not exactly a one-on-one overlap, but it does help scholarship begin to focus on genre and context. There are different genres that make up our Bible, and these different genres or types of writings point to different contexts and life settings. This is the beginning of what's called form criticism, and Gunkel's basic idea is this: You can group parts of the Bible into types, and each type comes from a real-life situation.
So instead of reading the Bible as one continuous book, you break it into smaller pieces and ask, "What kind of thing is this? Where would it have been used originally?" The Psalms are a great example where Gunkel's form criticism really shines. So let's flip over there. If you open your Bible to the Psalms, you're gonna notice something right away.
They don't all sound the same. They don't look the same. Let's look at a few examples. Psalm 13 contains this famous phrase, "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" You can feel this one. It's not abstract theology. This is someone in distress, feeling abandoned, pleading for help, asking God to act.
Gunkel calls this type a lament. And then he asks, where does that come from? Unsurprisingly, he's like, a moment of personal crisis, maybe a prayer you might overhear at the temple or some other sanctuary. But then let's flip over to Psalm 100, unless you're driving, don't do that. Wait. But in Psalm 100 we have this, "Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness."
It seems obvious to us now that these are different. There's no distress. It's not a personal request. It's just a celebration. And the setting, what kind of situation produced this joyful noise? Gunkel says celebration, communal worship, gathered people praising God. And so Gunkel puts that in a bucket of a hymn.
That's the type of thing this poetry is. All right, one more example because it really highlights Gunkel's point. Let's look at Psalm 2, which has this phrase, "I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill. You are my son. Today I have begotten you." This one definitely feels different than the other ones we looked at.
It's not a personal prayer. It's not a worship song. The language about being a son and Zion points to kingship and authority. It looks like it's about God installing a political ruler. Gunkel makes an insightful observation. This is probably from a public ceremony, maybe a coronation of a king or a ruler in Israel.
It's what Gunkel would call a royal or coronation psalm. So while we might not agree with Gunkel's buckets and things have evolved past a more basic understanding of form criticism, this is a critical aha in biblical scholarship. Before Gunkel, there wasn't a lot of emphasis put on the humanity behind the text.
Gunkel helped to see that it's not just lifeless documents that an editor puts together to make our Bible, but a bottom-up collection of real human experiences. And it's worth mentioning, as with the other ahas, that this work wasn't in a vacuum. Gunkel was building on other scholarly traditions. For example, scholars who were experts in Homeric literature, which is just to say studied, you know, The Odyssey and The Iliad in Greek literature, were already doing some of this work.
It just hadn't been applied to the Bible. We had kind of thought the Bible was this special thing. But Gunkel said maybe we can apply these methodologies to the Bible. Even the Grimm brothers who were collecting German folktales were doing some of this work outside the Bible. Instead of imagining someone sitting down and writing Genesis from scratch, you imagine generations of people telling stories which eventually got written down and collected.
This is a completely different way of imagining how the Bible came to be, and within that change it allows for a lot more messiness. Instead of a formal process of putting these discrete sources together in some puzzle, we get a more organic evolution over hundreds of years. Wellhausen focused on big written sources, but Gunkel points out that those big written sources are actually the end of the process.
There's a critical layer under and before those, these stories, these prayers, these sayings, these things that are circulating in, in real communities. Gunkel moves the field from thinking in terms of written documents to smaller units of oral tradition. He moved the field from abstract categories with clear boundaries of development to this messy evolution that emerges from all these lived experiences over hundreds of years.
But when we're looking at origins, he moves the field of biblical scholarship from the simpler question of where did this come from to a more sophisticated question: how did this function? So let's put all this together. Earlier scholars said the Bible's made up of sources. Gunkel says those sources are actually made up of traditions, and those traditions come from real moments with real people in real situations.
The Bible is not this flat thing, but is teeming with generations of real life under the surface. We start to read the Bible as a collection of voices that are actually echoes of real life, preserved, shaped, passed down over time.
Before we get to our next aha, I wanna zoom out. Our fifth aha is less of a development in biblical studies, so I'm cheating a little bit. It's more of a detour to give a little history and context for where we find ourselves now because up to this point, we've been able to tell a pretty clean story. You know, Jean Astruc asks, "How was the text put together?"
Wilhelm de Wette asks, "When and why was it put together?" Wellhausen says, "These layers reflect the development of Israel's religion over time." Gunkel says, "Everybody, you guys are starting too late. What about all this oral stuff, all the oral traditions behind it all?" Inside scholarship, that story's gonna keep going, and that's what we're gonna get to in part two.
The questions get deeper, more nuanced, more historically grounded. Meanwhile, though, as the academy keeps trucking along, there's this pressure building behind the scenes throughout the 1800s, which you saw in some of the things that we talked about, especially Wellhausen. Some of that pressure is coming from inside the academy itself, but it's definitely coming from outside of it, especially in the United States in the early 20th century.
In 1907, a California oil exec was forced by doctors to take a six-month sabbatical. I told you this is a detour, so follow me here. During that break, he went to a Bible conference. It was actually at Moody in Chicago. He'd been feeling this pressure and felt like scholarship had been taken captive by something other than traditional Christian beliefs.
It seemed like some, some sinister force, and he went looking for answers. At this Bible conference, he had an idea, and I quote from him. He had this idea of sending some kind of warning and testimony to English-speaking ministers, theological teachers and students, English-speaking missionaries of the world, which would put them on their guard and bring them into right lines again.
This man's name was Lyman Stewart, and he and his brother Milton proceeded to anonymously fund a guerrilla publishing effort to bypass more liberal universities and put traditional Christian teaching directly into the hands of pastors and church leaders. This guerrilla publishing effort is called The Fundamentals.
It's 90 essays published between 1910 and 1915 by well-known scholars like R.A. Torrey and B.B. Warfield. Apparently, to be a well-known scholar in those days, you had to go by two initials. And these scholars defend against evolution, rejection of traditional doctrines, and the sort of developments in biblical studies that we've been talking about so far.
But here's the genius of their plan. They were funded with California oil money, so they didn't need traditional publishing, and they didn't need to sell these essays. They mailed them directly to churches, pastors, and sympathetic professors for free. And we're not talking about a few copies, not a limited run. Millions of copies.
By the time the project wraps up, around three million copies have been distributed to pastors, missionaries, church workers across the country, and it turned out a lot of people were feeling the same way as Lyman Stewart and his brother. These essays galvanized a movement, what would be called the fundamentalist movement.
So now you've got this interesting dynamic. On the one side, you have scholars continuing to ask questions about how the Bible developed, how texts were shaped, edited, passed down. On the other side, you have this massive effort making its way through churches, reinforcing a different instinct. Let's hold onto the core.
Let's be cautious about new approaches. Let's make sure people have resources to respond to these things that are coming out of the academy. Part of the reason I wanted to take this detour and tell this story was because this, in a lot of ways, is the origin story of The Bible for Normal People. Without this fundamentalist-modernist rupture of the 1910s and '20s, there isn't much of a need for what we do, or at least there's much less of a need.
The split between biblical scholarship as a mainstream discipline and pastoral ministry was amplified in this cultural moment. Of course, it led to the American evangelical movement. But even mainline church pastors often felt stuck, not always sure what to do with the insights that were coming out of the academy.
So by the early 1900s, over a century ago, all the stuff we've been talking about is out there. The Bible looks composite, comes from sources. It reflects historical development. It contains different voices. It's shaped by these real-life situations. At the same time, you've got evolutionary science gaining traction.
You've got theology itself shifting toward ethics and away from supernatural claims. For a lot of Christians, that just felt like too much change. So these fundamentals came at just the right time for where a lot of more conservative Christians were. Defend the core beliefs of Christianity. But importantly, it's not just what they defended, it's the posture that they were taking.
So instead of asking, "How do we explore these new scholarly insights?" The tone becomes more about, "How do we defend the Bible against people in the academy out to destroy our faith?" Let's connect this directly to what we've talked about so far. You know, scholars are asking, "How was the text composed? When and why did it develop? What are the social settings that produce these traditions?"
But in this time, in response, a different set of questions begin to dominate. How do we defend the unity of the Bible? How do we explain away the contradictions? How do we preserve its authority? That was a critical question. It's a different starting point.
So we have these essays coming out in 1910 to 1915, and then 10 years later in 1925, we have the famous Scopes Monkey trial, where a man named John Scopes was accused of violating the Tennessee Butler Act, it's a real thing, which made it illegal to teach evolution in public school. This trial takes the growing divide between this modern Christianity and traditional Christianity mainstream.
It put the debate onto the national stage and asked people to take a side. All the momentum that had been building from this fundamentalist coalition over the past 10 years was getting a public spotlight. While Scopes was technically found guilty of teaching evolution, the court of public opinion fell hard towards Scopes's attorney, Clarence Darrow.
National media outlets portrayed the conservative position as anti-intellectual and ignorant, and that's important because this marked a turning point. Instead of trying to engage and change the mainstream universities and challenge the scholarship we've been talking about, this coalition began to withdraw, and instead they just created their own parallel private universities.
After this period, many conservative Protestants kinda take their ball and go home. They don't double down and try to engage the academic scholarship, trying to take those, uh, institutions back over. Instead, they start building independent Bible colleges and seminaries. They start openly preaching a distrust of universities in these critical methods.
They create a parallel intellectual world. And because of that, this gap between academic biblical scholarship and fundamentalist biblical scholarship really starts to widen so that by the mid-20th century, you've got really two conversations happening at the same time. In the academy, the scholars are continuing to ask those same questions.
How did the text develop? What are the historical pressures that shape them? What are the oral traditions that lie behind them? But in a lot of churches, the focus becomes defending biblical authority, harmonizing difficult passages, maintaining doctrinal certainty. Of course, these aren't just different answers, they're different questions entirely, and that's why we talk a lot here about questions.
What questions we're asking matter, not just the answers. Out of this gap, a whole new industry springs up. We called it the apologetics industry, which is publishing materials and lectures that defend those fundamentals against the claims that are coming out of biblical scholarship, out of science, or anything that challenges the idea that the Bible is historically, scientifically, and ethically perfect.
The apologetics industry becomes organized, more systematic, more central to the faith of a Christian. Part of what it meant for me to be a Christian as a kid was to guard myself against the mainstream experts in science and biblical studies, and the tools I had to guard myself were produced by this apologetics industry.
This matters, and it's why I included it here in this podcast as the fifth aha of biblical scholarship, because it's at this point that biblical scholarship continues to evolve, but large segments of the religious public and large segments of pastors and church leaders are starting to engage the Bible with a different set of tools.
Where biblical studies goes from here is largely ignored by evangelicals, and when they do respond, it's not with context and history of the field of biblical studies, but from a very defensive posture. So when someone hears there are multiple sources in the Pentateuch, they're not just hearing a historical claim.
They're hearing a challenge, something that's already been framed as needing defense, right? Before this moment, the dominant question in scholarship was, how do we understand this text more deeply? After this moment, in a lot of contexts, the dominant question becomes, how do we protect what we believe about this text?
All right, folks, that's the end of part one. We've made it through the first five ahas. Yes, I'm including our detour into the beginning of the fundamentalist movement as an aha. And we'll pick it up next time with the other five ahas throughout the 20th century.
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Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of The Bible for Normal People.
Don't forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team.
