Episode 331: Jared Byas - 10 Aha Moments in Biblical Scholarship: Part 2
In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Jared continues his tour through the history of modern biblical scholarship, exploring five (or six) more “aha moments” that transformed how scholars understand the Bible. From Rudolf Bultmann’s challenge to interpret ancient texts in a modern world and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, to new insights about editorial shaping, literary criticism, and the role of readers themselves, he traces how scholarship increasingly revealed the Bible as a dynamic, evolving tradition. Along the way, Jared highlights the rise of feminist, liberationist, and postmodern approaches, as well as the New Perspective on Paul, showing how fresh historical evidence and diverse voices have reshaped long-held assumptions about scripture, interpretation, and faith. Together, these developments invite listeners to approach the Bible with greater historical awareness, intellectual humility, and curiosity about the communities that produced, preserved, and continue to interpret these sacred texts.
Mentioned in This Episode
Class: “Is the Bible Authoritative?” with Cameron B. R. Howard
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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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. And I'm Jared Byas.
Jared: As our views on the Bible shift, we are often asked, "Now that I don't think the Bible is inerrant, how can it still be authoritative?"
Pete: It's a good question, so we've invited our friend Cameron B.R. Howard, professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary, to teach our June class on just this topic. So mark your calendars for June 22nd from 8:00 to 9:30 PM Eastern Time.
Jared: If there isn't a single author, which is where the word authority comes from, what does authority mean? And how can it be authoritative when it's clear that readers of the Bible can't even agree on what it means? This is where Cameron comes in. She's gonna cover topics like how the Bible is different from other books and how it isn't, why historical context matters for interpretation and why it doesn't.
Pete: Whether the Bible's authority rests on what it is, what it says, what it does, or something else entirely, and how to be a Bible-believing Christian without believing the Bible is inerrant or infallible.
Jared: Again, the class is taking place Monday, June 22nd from 8:00 to 9:30 PM Eastern Time. Go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/authority to sign up today.
As always, the class is recorded so you can watch it back later if you can't make it to the live session. The cost is pay what you can, $1, $5, $10, $15, or $25 until the class ends. Or even better, join our online community, the Society of Normal People, for $12 a month to get all of our classes at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
Welcome back, everyone, to part two of my series on 10 aha moments in biblical studies. These are moments that change the trajectory of biblical studies, the key insights that led to the current scholarly approach to the Bible. Thoughtful engagement with the Bible requires understanding how we got here.
Otherwise, we often end up defending assumptions we don't realize are assumptions, or we mistake inherited interpretations for timeless truths, or we imagine our way of reading is simply what the Bible says without recognizing the centuries of interpretation sitting underneath. Biblical scholarship at its best helps create this humility, but it also creates curiosity about how these texts developed, why communities preserved them, and why they still matter.
We talked in part one about aha moments one to five, and today we're gonna tackle ahas six to 10. So buckle up. It's gonna be a long episode. Would it have been much better to break this into three shorter episodes instead of one long episode and one really long episode? Yes, but it turns out that trying to summarize 200 years of scholarship on the Bible without oversimplifying is harder than I first assumed.
And when I came to this horrifying realization, we'd already published part one, so it was too late, and now we all just have to deal. Unfortunately, part two doesn't start as salaciously as part one since it doesn't involve sexually transmitted disease, so we'll have to make do with the Nazis. Our sixth aha moment is represented by scholar Rudolf Bultmann.
And if you're playing along at home since part one, he is also the son of a pastor. We're batting 1,000 so far on the pastor's kids here. Bultmann studied under Hermann Gunkel, who we talked about as aha moment number four. Personally, Bultmann was critical of Nazism during the 1940s, a time when it was dangerous to oppose Hitler and his government.
So good for him. One of the tensions we talked about in the last episode is this growing gap between what scholars were discovering about the text and what many people in the pews were hearing from their pastors. By the early 1900s, biblical scholarship is claiming the Bible wasn't dropped from Heaven, but it's made up of these several sources that are stitched together.
These sources contain different voices from different time periods that seem to reflect a development in religious thinking over centuries. Within these sources, there are smaller units that seem to have come from very human, real-life situations. And at the same time, you've got evolutionary science claiming that humans evolved from other animals.
You have geological science coming to a consensus that the Earth is billions of years old. Biblical scholarship and science in general was moving forward at lightning speed, and a lot of people felt like it was too much change. It was threatening too much too quickly. As historical critical scholarship developed through figures like Astruc, de Wet, Wellhausen, and Gunkel, many churches, especially in the emerging fundamentalist spaces, responded by dismissing the liberal methods of Bible reading as anti-Christian.
Instead of trying to integrate these biblical and scientific findings into their theology, they withdrew from the conversation and created institutions meant to protect that good old-time religion. Well, this is where Professor Rudolf Bultmann comes in. He had a very different response to the church crisis.
Bultmann believed that theology formulated in the old days before the rise of historical criticism and scientific advancement could not simply be preserved by ignoring what scholarship had uncovered about the Bible's composition, about the Bible's development, and historical setting. He thought that strategy would eventually collapse under its own weight.
Only if he could see us now. Leading thoughtful people not only to reject theology, but to become alienated from the Christian tradition altogether. Essentially, he saw that if we don't figure out how to integrate our faith with the modern worldview, people would eventually stop finding the Christian faith credible or compelling.
The data suggests, by the way, that Bultmann and his contemporaries were right. If the modern world, with its newfangled science, changed the way people understood history, science, and themselves, then theology had to grapple with those realities directly. The task was not to abandon Christianity, but to ask whether the Christian message could still speak meaningfully in a world shaped by modern scholarship and modern consciousness.
Please note that in the last few minutes, we have moved from biblical scholarship to theology, which again, are not the same [00:06:00] thing. Bultmann had his foundational training in biblical scholarship, but quickly realized that the theological implications of that scholarship needed to be addressed. And that's what makes Bultmann our sixth aha, and such an important and controversial figure. So let's situate this aha in the story that we've been telling so far.
So Astruc, if you remember, noticed that there were these layers in the text. de Wette connected those layers to historical moments. Wellhausen saw those layers as a development across Israel's religion. Gunkel pushed behind the written text into these oral traditions and community life. And of course, Bultmann inherits all of that.
He's actually a student of Gunkel's. And if you remember, Gunkel had argued that biblical texts are made up of these smaller oral traditions, stories, sayings, prayers that circulated in communities before they were written down. And if you remember, most of the examples we used for Gunkel were from the Old Testament because that's where Gunkel lived.
That was his specialty. Well, Bultmann comes along and takes that insight to the Gospels in the New Testament. When we're looking at the origin of our Bible, Gunkel moved the field from the simpler question of where did this come from to a more sophisticated question, how did this function in these communities?
And Bultmann applies that question to the New Testament and sees the Gospels as community-shaped traditions. Traditionally, many Christians approach the Gospels like biographies. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are telling you what happened in a pretty linear way. Bultmann complicates this and breaks down the Gospels into smaller units, collections of miracle stories, sayings, teachings, parables, conflict stories, he called them.
And he thinks these smaller units circulated orally in early Christian communities before they became the written texts of the Gospels. So when Bultmann reads a Gospel story, he's asking, "What function did this story serve in the life of the early church?" Let's look at an example. The story in Mark 4 when Jesus calms the storm.
The disciples panic and wake up Jesus. Jesus speaks, and the sea becomes calm. Bultmann would ask, why would early Christians keep telling this story? Why is it still around? Why did it eventually get written down? Maybe the answer is because communities facing persecution and uncertainty saw themselves in that storm because the story communicated trust in Christ amid fear and chaos.
The point isn't for Bultmann to say this didn't happen, but to point out that the tradition has been shaped and preserved in this way because of what it meant to people. A traditional reading might focus mostly on, you know, did this happen exactly in this way? But Bultmann asks, why did this story matter enough to preserve it and repeat it?
It's important to pick up on the difference between this and a report about the past, so we need to ask is it accurate, and we know these stories were useful because they were repeated enough to be preserved, so we need to ask what were they useful for? It's a move from focusing on the Bible as recorded history and seeing it as something shaped by the needs and priorities of a community.
That was the foundational Bultmann, but what makes this moment an aha is where he takes these observations. Sure, he's interested in oral traditions and forms and ancient community development, but then he sees this as a big problem in the Christian tradition more broadly. This text comes from an ancient worldview.
If you read the Bible through the lens of an ancient audience, you will see a world filled with demons, miracles, heavens that are physically above us, and underworlds that are physically below us. Supernatural intervention is everywhere. He calls this a mythological worldview, and his concern is this.
Modern people don't naturally inhabit that world anymore. Scholars today would likely argue that Bultmann drew this line too sharply and that ancient people were more open to supernatural events, but they weren't gullible or constantly expecting miracles maybe the way Bultmann thought. But the point still stands.
You can't simply ask someone shaped by modern science and modern consciousness to step back into a first-century worldview without there being some tension. And this is the aha. What humans have learned through the sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen hundreds makes it hard to relate to the first-century worldview.
A lot of us might relate to this. Our understanding of the world developed at a very rapid pace, and our theology had not caught up. That's the aha. That's what Bultmann realizes. This leads to Bultmann's most famous concept for biblical studies, a term called demythologizing. People, especially conservative evangelicals, will oversimplify this idea of demythologizing as though it was just about getting rid of the supernatural, but it's actually deeper than that.
Bultmann's question is, how do we interpret the mythological language of the New Testament in a way that still speaks meaningfully to modern people? If theology refuses to engage modern knowledge honestly, eventually people are just going to stop trusting theology altogether. Now how he does this is up for debate.
He was heavily indebted to the philosophy of existentialism for how he thinks we need to engage modern people meaningfully. For him, of course, that's his context. That's the people in the middle of the 20th century where existential philosophy is growing and gaining a lot of momentum. But let's look at an example of how he demythologizes the New Testament.
Think about demon possession stories in the New Testament. Bultmann is less interested in whether those stories actually happened, whether every illness should be literally attributed to demons, and is more interested in what these stories communicate, the meaning behind them about bondage, alienation, fear, liberation.
The fact that these stories were preserved was likely because they touched on these deep human themes and emotions, not just because the people thought it actually happened and wanted a record of the extraordinary. Or let's take a simple example, like, hmm, the resurrection. Those on the more conservative side of the divide focused on proving what physically happened, the historical evidence, the apologetic arguments, defending the resurrection as a likely historical event.
And Bultmann doesn't outright reject the historicity of the resurrection. He's doing a different project. He simply acknowledges that historical research can't deliver certainty about supernatural claims and decides to focus on something more practical. What does resurrection mean for human existence now?
This is the major shift Bultmann introduces. You know, Wellhausen focused on reconstructing the religious development historically. Gunkel focused on reconstructing the life setting of the traditions. And then Bultmann asks, what do these traditions mean for human existence today? And again, if you read Bultmann, you can feel the influence of existential philosophy just by the words that he uses to talk about the present-day meaning of the New Testament: anxiety, freedom, authenticity, mortality, meaning.
He turns these into theological terms and finds in the New Testament, once we demythologize and see behind the text, deep meaning for those in the West in the 20th century. Just like those scholars before him that we've talked about, Bultmann was not trying to destroy Christianity. He was trying to preserve it.
He believed that if Christianity ignored modern scholarship, historical criticism, modern consciousness, then thoughtful people would increasingly see faith as intellectually dishonest, and eventually people would just stop being Christians altogether. Can the Christian message still confront and transform modern people without requiring them to pretend that they lived in the ancient world?
This was a great question that we need to be asking today, regardless of whether or not we agree with his answers. So let's zoom out one more time. I struck the text very focused on these layers. de Wet, the layers reflect historical moments. Wellhausen, these moments show religious development historically.
Gunkel, those traditions emerged actually from a lived community and lived community settings. And Bultmann's saying, now we have to ask how modern people can meaningfully hear these ancient traditions at all. After Bultmann, a lot of biblical scholarship stops being only about reconstructing those past texts, and it becomes a conversation about whether ancient faith can still speak honestly and meaningfully in the world.
So that's our sixth aha moment in the history of biblical studies. Rudolf Bultmann was wrestling with how modern people could engage the Bible honestly in light of everything that historical critical scholarship had uncovered. If we put all these together, we see that the Bible wasn't appearing to scholars anymore as a single flat document dropped from heaven fully formed.
With figures like Astroc and de Wet, Wellhausen, Gunkel, scholars were increasingly seeing layers in the text, development over time, oral traditions, competing theological emphases. And then as we get to the middle of the twentieth century, things get real. All of those conversations that biblical scholars had been having for centuries all of a sudden became much more concrete.
I mean, think about it. Up until now, what we've been talking about were theories. These thinkers were simply reading their Bibles closely and noticing these unexpected features, if you remember from part one, and coming up with hypotheses that helped explain why the text might have looked this way. But all of that changed in 1947, which is actually the year my dad was born, so we're not talking that long ago.
Ironically enough, the story starts when a shepherd left his flock of sheep and goats to search for the one that was lost. He was in the cliffs around the Dead Sea near a place called Qumran, and while looking for his lost goat, he found a cave, and so the story goes. He was intrigued by the cave, but before he went exploring, he threw a rock into the cave for safety and was startled when he heard what sounded like broken pottery.
Between 1947 and 1956, they found 11 caves with thousands of scroll fragments coming from over nine hundred manuscripts that turned out to be the earliest written records of parts of what would eventually become our Bible. These nine hundred manuscripts come from the third century BCE, that's three hundred years before Christ, up through about the first century CE.
This is about three hundred to six hundred years before the most complete manuscripts we had before 1947, and they were composed about a thousand years before the manuscripts we had previously used for our Old Testament. So this, the Dead Sea Scrolls, as they are commonly called, is our seventh aha moment.
Our firsthand knowledge of the biblical tradition and the Second Temple context exploded over this timeframe between 1947 and 1956. They find in their biblical texts commentaries, hymns, community rules, apocalyptic writings. A lot of people assumed, and frankly a lot of Christians still assume, there has basically always been one stable biblical text.
Maybe copied with small mistakes here and there, but essentially fixed and uniform. The Dead Sea Scrolls complicated that picture immediately. But we have to make sure we don't overstate the discovery. Some scrolls were remarkably close to the manuscripts that were used to create our modern Bibles. For example, portions of Isaiah are incredibly similar despite that thousand-year gap.
And for many people, that was reassuring. It confirmed that ancient scribes often preserve texts with extraordinary care. But that's only half the story because they also found different versions of biblical books circulating at the same time. And this is where things get really important for scholarship.
Take the book of Jeremiah, for example. Before the scrolls, scholars already knew there were differences between the Hebrew version of Jeremiah and the Greek version of Jeremiah, called the Septuagint. The Greek version is significantly shorter than the Hebrew version, so there was a debate among scholars.
Was the Greek translator paraphrasing, or did the Greek version reflect a different, earlier Hebrew version? It turns out the answer was neither. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain manuscripts that had the longer version of Jeremiah and the shorter version of Jeremiah. It turns out there were multiple versions of Jeremiah circulating at the same time.
In other words, around the time of Jesus, there wasn't a fixed book of Jeremiah, but different traditions and different written versions were being used simultaneously. The tradition was still in development. They hadn't landed yet on a single Jeremiah. Or take a look at the book of Psalms. When the dust settled, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain additional psalms that's not found in later Hebrew Bibles and a different order of those psalms.
Again, this suggests that the Psalms weren't fully fixed yet by the time we get to Jesus or just before. For many people, the Bible feels like it has always existed in exactly the form we have now. The other ahas that we've had so far hypothesize that it was far more dynamic than that based on the text itself.
And the scrolls confirm that behind the Bible we have now were communities preserving and shaping collections over time. And it's not just Jeremiah and the Psalms. Other manuscripts show differences in books like Exodus and Samuel. Sometimes these versions align more closely with the Greek Septuagint or some other Samaritan traditions.
Uh, but again, it shows that multiple textual traditions existed side by side. And again, I wanna be careful not to overstate things here. The Dead Sea Scrolls did not show random chaos, complete instability, or people just making stuff up, inventing scripture freely. That's not what scholars concluded after studying these manuscripts over years and decades.
But they did show that the biblical text was not fully standardized during this period, and that challenged a more traditional picture where one perfectly fixed text moves unchanged through history. Instead, scholars increasingly saw a living textual tradition with multiple streams developing over time.
But before we move on, I wanna mention two other important implications of the Dead Sea Scrolls here. One, it revealed that Judaism wasn't as unified as we originally thought. A lot of the manuscripts revealed that there were different sects and different practices that had different beliefs about purity, separation, and apocalyptic expectations.
The second is that the Dead Sea Scrolls also finally gave us a context for the New Testament. All of a sudden, the New Testament started making a lot more sense historically. Some of the things we thought were unique to the New Testament showed up again and again in the Dead Sea Scrolls, things like apocalyptic battles and urgent day of the Lord thinking, messianic expectations, strong themes of light and darkness.
These didn't just come out of nowhere, but reflect the context of what's called the Second Temple period, the time before and during Jesus's life. It turns out that the New Testament was written against the backdrop of the world in which it was written. Who would've thought? Something we now take for granted, but without the Dead Sea Scrolls, we didn't know much at all about that Second Temple world.
This is why the Dead Sea Scrolls mattered so much. They gave scholars direct historical evidence, which is incredibly important. Wellhausen had argued that Israel's religion developed over time. The scrolls showed diversity, competing interpretations, textual development within ancient Judaism itself.
Gunkel had emphasized communities shaping traditions. The scrolls revealed an actual community preserving texts, writing commentaries, composing hymns, and interpreting scripture together. Bultmann emphasized the Jewish world behind the New Testament, and the Dead Sea Scrolls gave scholars a much clearer picture of that world.
And this brings us back to Bultmann because discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls made it increasingly difficult to maintain simplistic ideas about where the Bible came from, how it developed, how fixed it always was. The evidence was becoming more visible and harder to ignore, which meant that gap between scholarship and popular assumptions about the Bible could potentially grow even wider.
That's why Bultmann's concern about intellectual honesty mattered so much to him. He believed theology had to grapple honestly with discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls rather than pretend they didn't exist. So let's put the contribution of the Dead Sea Scrolls as simply as possible. Before the scrolls, a lot of discussions about textual development were largely theoretical reconstructions.
After the scrolls, scholars could actually see textual diversity and development in ancient manuscripts themselves, and that changed biblical scholarship ever since. They revealed with concrete evidence that the Bible has a history, a real, dynamic, complicated history.
All right. So by this point in the story, biblical scholarship has already gone through several major shifts. Astruc notices these sources behind the text. De Wet connects those sources to these historical moments. Wellhausen sees this development across Israel's religion. Gunkel pushes behind the written text into oral traditions and community life.
Then Bultmann takes Gunkel's insights into the New Testament and asks how modern people can meaningfully hear these ancient traditions at all. And then the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls gives scholars concrete evidence of this diversity and development. And at this point, scholars aren't really debating whether biblical traditions developed over time.
That's largely assumed. The question now becomes, how did all these traditions get woven together into the theological story we now have? So given all these insights we've been gaining for the past 200 years, why does our Bible look this particular way? We've learned that the Bible is made up of all these puzzle pieces, but why did the editors put the puzzle pieces together like this?
Why does this puzzle look this way? So our eighth aha comes from the one-two combo of two folks, Martin Noth and Gerhard von Rad, who asked this very question. But before we get there, I wanna make sure we're oriented a little bit here. I wanna make sure we don't get lost. And so to make sure, I wanna remind you that the history of how our Bible got put together does not coincide with the chronology of our Bible.
When I was growing up, I assumed that Genesis was written down first because it describes the beginning of the world, and it's the beginning of a story. And then it was written in basically chronological order. The events of Exodus happened, and then someone wrote them down. Then Leviticus, then Numbers, then Deuteronomy, Joshua, and so on.
And of course, a lot of what we've been talking about in this series makes you realize that's not how it was. But if this sounds basic to some of you, I just want you to be patient because I think this is new to a lot of our listeners, or at least it's helpful to be reminded. If we go back, some of these scholars we've been talking about are the ones who really started to recognize that that common sense way I was taught was not at all how our Bibles were put together.
There were different sources that produced different stories at different times, and it was later editors who started to put those stories together into a bigger, more coherent story. Imagine you wanted to write the definitive history of your family, a history that not only told all the important historical moments, but that also gave people a sense of what your family's all about.
You wouldn't make it up out of thin air. You would probably start to collect the stories from your family members. You might have entries from old journals. You might record a conversation with your mom on your phone where she tells you a lot of old stories. In fact, you might hear the same stories from different people, and then you'd have to decide which one to include and how to include it.
When all is said and done, the sources you've used probably range from your dad's journal from 1978 all the way through your mom telling you that same story, but from her perspective maybe a few months ago. But a person reading your book wouldn't know that because you have weaved those sources into a single story.
In other words, there's an important section of our Bible that used a lot of different sources from hundreds of years to tell a pretty unified story, and it's Martin Noth who recognized it. But he was building on the work of our old friend de Wette. For those of you who listened to part one, do you remember de Wette's contribution?
I'll give you a hint. It had to do with the book of Deuteronomy. He was the one who noticed that Josiah's reform in 2 Kings looked a lot like Deuteronomy, such that maybe the reform actually came first, and then Deuteronomy was written or edited as a way to legitimize the reform. Well, Noth comes along and says, "Wait a minute, de Wette”.
You've only scratched the surface. If we read closely, it looks like several books, not just that one chapter in 2 Kings, not just the story of Josiah's reform, reflect Deuteronomy." Noth's most famous contribution is something called the Deuteronomistic history, something we talked about in a recent episode of the podcast.
It sounds technical, and just wait, it's harder to pronounce than you think. So if you wanna impress your friends, make sure you practice in the mirror several times before you try to whip it out in conversation. But behind the tongue twister, the concept is actually pretty simple. Noth noticed that several of the books of the Bible keep repeating the same themes and seem connected in a deep way.
And the books where he noticed this connection were Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings. Those books seem to have a lot in common, and it's not just because they come one after another in our Bibles, though that does make it convenient for us in this conversation. No, they seem connected because they sound like they're telling Israel's history through the same theological lens.
And we know this because we also have the lens itself in our Bible, the Book of Deuteronomy. It turns out that it's not just the story of Josiah's reform in 2 Kings that follows the themes of Deuteronomy. It's an entire section of our Bible. Deuteronomy is a critical key to understanding the entire Hebrew Bible.
Take the book of Judges, for example. If you read through it in one sitting, you'll recognize this cycle over and over. Israel disobeys, foreign oppression comes as a judgment from God, the people cry out, God raises up a deliverer, peace returns, then Israel falls again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Note says that's not accidental, and it's not even just for rhetorical effect.
No, it reflects exactly what we would expect if we read Israel's history through the lens of what we find in the Book of Deuteronomy. In other words, that cycle reflects the theology of Deuteronomy in very simple terms, probably overly simple. If you obey God, you will be blessed. Obedience brings blessing.
If you disobey God, you will be cursed. Disobedience brings judgment. Now flip over to Kings. What happens almost every time a king is evaluated? The text asks questions like, did this king remove the high places? Did this king centralize worship? Were they faithful to Yahweh alone? And if you've been following this series, you should recognize those questions immediately.
That's de Wette's territory. That's Deuteronomy's theology extending across Israel's entire historical narrative. The writer of Kings is evaluating the kings of Israel based on whether or not they followed the instructions of Deuteronomy. So Note argues these books were shaped together into one large theological history, not just random historical records sitting side by side.
An editor, or maybe a school of editors, took these older traditions and arranged them into a coherent story that explains Israel's history. This history, which we have in the books of Deuteronomy through 2 Kings, is what is called the Deuteronomistic history. And this coherent story had a purpose. It wasn't just recording the facts, but was put together specifically as a way to understand why the exile happened, why the kingdom failed, why judgment came.
Those books were edited to tell a coherent history through the theological lens of Deuteronomy. If you want to compare the Deuteronomistic history with something else, read 1 and 2 Kings, and then read 1 and 2 Chronicles, which actually retells the same history, but this time without the Deuteronomic lens.
It's a fascinating exercise to see how the same stories are told differently. What Noth observed is an important shift in scholarship. Early scholars focused heavily on sources, oral traditions, and historical layers. Noth says, let's pay attention to the editors. All those sources and oral traditions are puzzle pieces, but it's really important to understand why the editors put those puzzle pieces together in just this way.
They had a perspective on God that made them construct the story, the puzzle pieces, in this particular way. That is, the context for these books is not just what's happening politically or socially, but our Bible reflects the theology of the time that it was edited together. How they think God interacts with Israel is reflected in how they tell their story.
The editors who put these traditions together are shaping it according to their theology. Enter our second scholar for aha number eight, Gerhard von Rad. Von Rad is important for a number of reasons, not least of which is he is our very first aha scholar whose dad was not a pastor, but also for his work building on Noth.
Von Rad notices and becomes very interested in how Israel keeps retelling its traditions across generations. Von Rad noticed that our Bible seems to keep telling the same core story with the same themes over and over again, what he called tradition history. It's not limited actually just to the Deuteronomistic history.
Certain ideas, stories, and confessions keep showing up all over the Bible, but each time they seem to be adapted to a new situation. Von Rad argues that Israel's faith wasn't built first around abstract doctrines. It was built around a shared memory of these acts of God, and Israel keeps retelling those acts.
They retell them in worship, in preaching, in national crisis, in exile, and in new political realities. Let's take an example 'cause this can be kind of abstract. He notices the Exodus tradition, right? We have that in capital letters, Exodus tradition, showing up over and over in different parts of our Bible.
The Exodus becomes this foundational theme, not just an event, but a theme that gets repeated over and over again. When we read about the Exodus in Deuteronomy chapter twenty-six verses five to nine, it's almost like a creedal summary. "My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous.
But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, subjecting us to harsh labor." And on it goes, almost like a formula. There's an introduction, then Egypt, oppression, deliverance, promised land. Von Rad sees this summary as something Israel might recite in worship, like we recite the Lord's Prayer. It's short, compressed, almost formulaic.
Now, we see the same theme, though, pop up in Psalm seventy-eight, but now it's longer. It's poetic. It adds some flavor. In Psalm seventy-eight, the emphasis of the Exodus is actually now on how Israel keeps forgetting and rebelling. So it's the same tradition, but it gets stretched. It's pointing to the same event, but it has a different purpose.
We see it again in the prophets. Take Hosea eleven, for example, which says that famous line that the New Testament uses, "Out of Egypt I have called my son." Now, the same Exodus theme becomes a prophetic metaphor for God's continued relationship with Israel. The tradition keeps evolving. We could go through the same kind of evolution with the [00:34:00] covenant theme, where we end with Jeremiah thirty-one talking about a new covenant.
It's the covenant tradition now being reinterpreted in the context of exile, failure, hope for restoration. Now we need a new covenant, but that's not made up whole cloth. That's taking this old tradition and making it new again. Or we could talk about the land traditions and how von Rad notices how the land promise keeps changing shape.
But this is the heart of Von Rad's contribution. Israel's traditions survive because they are continually reinterpreted for new situations. The stories are not frozen in time, but they're alive as communities keep asking over and over again, what does Exodus mean now, though? What does covenant mean now?
What does promise mean now? Earlier scholarship often focused on separating sources and reconstructing origins, but Von Rad starts to pay attention to the theological creativity that's happening inside the tradition itself, which we find in our Bibles. The Bible is not just preserving old material. It is actively within the Bible itself, reflecting on old material, adapting old material, and reapplying that old material into new generations.
From this time on, biblical scholarship begins to see the Bible less as a static deposit of information and more as this teeming, ongoing conversation within a community trying to make sense of its relationship with God across changing historical realities. Sound familiar? This should be relatable since that's also the history of the church.
That's the history of Judaism. The Bible itself is participating in the very thing the church has been doing the past two thousand years. Wellhausen showed that Israel's religion developed historically. Noth and von Rad say, and we can trace how later communities interpreted that history through this editorial shaping and retelling within the Bible itself.
Now, Gunkel focused on these small oral units and community settings. Noth and von Rad zoom back out and say, how were all those traditions woven into this larger theological framework in the Bible we now have? Or to put it even more simply, and again, probably too simply, earlier scholarship often had the effect of breaking texts apart into smaller and smaller pieces.
Noth and von Rad become interested in how those pieces were actually brought back together by the editors into meaningful narratives. Now, those unexpected features aren't just there to answer how this text was composed, but also what theological story is being told through this particular arrangement of all those traditions.
This question pushed scholars to start focusing more deeply on the theology of the editors, the narrative shaping, and interpretation across generations. The Bible isn't just a collection of traditions like random papers put into a binder, but a history of communities interpreting their own history through those traditions.
All right, let's zoom out one more time. Astruc Tells us, you know, these texts, they have-- they're made up of sources, actually. De Wet, n- those sources actually reflect some particular historical moments. Wellhausen would say those moments show religious development over time. And Gunkel says traditions emerged from lived communities that then get written down.
Noth would then say editors shaped those traditions into theological histories. And von Rad would say, "And communities continually reinterpret those traditions for new generations," and all of that is contained within our Bible. By the time we get to our ninth aha moment, biblical scholarship had already spent generations asking how the Bible came together.
Scholars like Martin Noth and Gerhard von Rad had pushed that conversation even further. They weren't just asking about sources anymore. They were asking how traditions were edited, reshaped, and reinterpreted across history. Why does Judges repeat those covenant cycles? Why does the Exodus story keep showing up in different forms throughout the Bible?
Their focus was still largely on the historical and theological processes behind the final text, how communities developed and reshaped traditions over time. That's important because our ninth aha moment in biblical scholarship is represented by the scholar Brevard Childs, who tried to swing the pendulum in a different direction.
In looking behind the text for two hundred years, Childs felt like something important was getting lost along the way. He taught at Yale from 1958 all the way up until 1999, so now we're heading into present-day territory. Although now that I'm saying that out loud, 1999 was almost thirty years ago. Oh, that's rough.
Anyway, eventually Childs thought you can spend so much time reconstructing what's behind the text that you actually stop paying attention to the text that we actually have. So Childs asks a different question: Why does the final form of the biblical text matter? Not just where the traditions came from or how they developed into the Bible we have, but why does this particular shape matter to us?
Biblical scholarship has spent well over a century really focused on taking the Bible apart, seeing what's under the hood, so to speak. And I don't mean that negatively. I just mean that's where the energy had been focused. By this point, scholars had become extraordinarily skilled at reconstructing the sources, oral traditions, historical development, editorial seams within the text.
But eventually, some scholars started asking, "Have we let the text itself disappear under all this analysis?" Importantly, Childs did not reject historical criticism. He just felt something was getting lost. At the end of the day, ancient and modern communities weren't reading hypothetical source documents or reconstructed oral traditions.
They were reading, say, the Book of Genesis as we actually have it right now, the actual text as it had been received and preserved. So Childs asks a deceptively simple question: Why does the final form of the biblical text matter? And when we ask that, we start to see our ninth aha, which we'll call the literary turn.
When we see two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis, we can now parse out the different styles and different traditions. Now, Child asks, "But why were these stories preserved together? Why didn't later editors smooth them out? Why keep both?" And now the contradictions stop being only a problem to solve.
They become part of the shape of the canon itself. In some ways, we've come full circle back to those ancient Jewish interpreters we talked about in our first aha. Maybe Israel preserved both because each tells a part of a complicated story about God and the world. The first creation story emphasizes cosmic order, transcendence, creation as structured and good.
The second emphasizes intimacy, human experience, relationship, vulnerability. But this time, now in the middle of the 20th century, there's a field called literary criticism that we can use to understand the Bible we have. We've spent so much time dissecting what's behind the text. Now maybe we can critically read the text in its final literary form.
Scholars increasingly begin treating biblical texts as carefully shaped literature with narratives, stories, characters, not just these historical fragments to analyze. Take the Abraham origin story in Genesis. Earlier scholarship might focus on the sources behind the text, you know, which verses belong to the J source or to the P source.
Literary scholars start asking, "How is suspense created in this text? How are characters developed? How does repetition shape the meaning? What emotional effect does the narrative create?" And you see the same thing in New Testament studies. Earlier scholarship focused heavily on sources or sayings behind the gospels.
But this literary turn started having scholars asking, "How does Mark work as a story?" And suddenly, details start standing out. The disciples constantly misunderstanding Jesus, this motif in the Gospel of Mark around secrecy, the pacing of the story toward Jerusalem and the cross. Again, Childs is not saying that historical criticism was wrong.
He accepts all the major developments we've been talking about so far: source criticism, these layers, tradition history. But he feels the study of the Bible is incomplete when they are treated as the only way to study the text. Yes, the text has a history, but the final form of the text matters, too. The literary turn helped reopen the question, how do communities actually read scripture after historical criticism?
That became enormously important academically, but, and this is an important note to make, it did start to help bridge that gap between historical criticism, theology, modern criticism, and the everyday pastor and the Christian in the pew. It helped pastors know that they could dive into the scholarship and then move through the scholarship toward reading the Bible meaningfully again.
One of the things we've seen over and over in this series is that biblical scholarship keeps expanding the circle of what it's willing to examine. At first, scholars examined the text itself. Then the sources behind the text, the historical settings behind the text, and the oral traditions behind the text.
Then the editors shaping the text. Then the literary turn was the literary form of the text that was being studied and examined. Eventually, scholarship reaches a point where another question starts to emerge. What about the interpreters themselves? They start to examine the field of biblical studies itself.
And honestly, Rudolf Bultmann, from aha number six fame, becomes a really interesting transitional figure here. You know, Bultmann was a serious historical scholar. His form criticism shaped New Testament scholarship for years and decades. His insights about oral tradition, community shaping, and the limits of historical reconstruction were very influential.
But many later scholars would say that Bultmann also became an example of how even brilliant scholars interpret through the assumptions of their own time. Bultmann correctly recognized that ancient people inhabited different cultural worlds. Modern readers bring modern assumptions, and that theology has to grapple honestly with this modern consciousness.
But many later scholars recognized he was less aware than he thought of how specifically his own framework reflected early 20th century European existentialism. For example, a lot of his modern interpretation used words right out of the white male playbook of European existentialism: anxiety, authenticity, individuality, existential decision.
And for him, they seemed to function almost like universal human categories, not local priorities based on his place in the world. And later scholars asked, "Why should existentialism become the privileged lens through which Christianity gets interpreted for today? Why is that the meaningful thing we should take today?"
And that question opens the door to our tenth and final aha moment in biblical scholarship, which I will call the it turns out we've only been looking at this thing from a rich white European dude's perspective and calling it absolute truth turn But that's long, so maybe let's call it the rise of postmodern and ideological criticism in biblical studies.
Historical criticism had already taught scholars that biblical texts are historically situated. When we read the book of Deuteronomy, we need to understand that the editors who put that book together had a context. They had an agenda. They had a perspective based on when and where they lived. Postmodern and ideological criticism extends that insight one step further.
It turns out modern interpreters are historically situated, too, not just ancient interpreters. These modern-day scholars are also coming from a particular place in a particular time. Nobody, it turns out, reads from nowhere. This is where our slogan that we use at the Bible for Normal People comes from. All theology has an adjective.
It turns out that the past 200 years we've talked about here in this series wasn't just biblical studies but was white, male, North American, and European biblical studies. Most of these scholars would have assumed they had objectivity, that they were outside of history and weren't influenced by their own context.
But turns out they were. We need to make an important nuance here. The rise of this movement didn't mean that historical research stopped mattering, right? The Dead Sea Scrolls still exist. Textual variants still exist. Those doublets, those unexpected features in the text that we talk about still exist.
The tradition history is really there. So evidence still constrains interpretation. You know, most scholars didn't suddenly conclude, "Well, I guess everything's subjective now." But what changed was the growing awareness that interpreters, which includes scholars, bring assumptions. They bring their own experiences, their social locations, their own power structures into their readings, and that certain privileged people have excluded other people from even being part of the conversation.
And suddenly, scholars start examining not only the Bible's history, but the history of interpretation itself, and that's important. Any academic or scientific enterprise, if it hopes to be objective, has to understand its own history. And one of the most important developments here is feminist criticism in the 1960s and forward.
You know, early feminist scholars like Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Phyllis Trible pointed out that biblical scholarship had overwhelmingly been shaped by male interpreters for centuries, and that shaped which questions got asked, which stories mattered, and which perspectives became, quote, "normal."
Take interpretations on the biblical character of Eve, for example. Traditional interpretation often portrayed Eve as a temptress, the source of sin, the reason humanity fell. Feminist scholars asked, "Why has blame been placed so heavily on Eve in the history of interpretation?" That question is not primarily about changing the text or discoveries about sources.
It's about exposing assumptions in the interpretive tradition that are rooted in who gets to ask the questions and who gets to create the theories. Phyllis Trible was especially keen on pointing out how male-centric the biblical text itself is, something male scholars never seem to notice or care that much about.
You know, take, for example, her take on Hagar in Genesis. Traditional readings often centered Abraham and covenant lineage. She asked, "What happens if we just paid attention to Hagar's experience?" Now, themes emerge like exploitation, vulnerability, survival, powerlessness. It's the same text, but it's a different perspective.
From there, womanist scholars emerge, Black female scholars who recognize that even feminist scholarship often overlooked race and class and the Black experience. So early womanist scholars like Delores Williams and Renita Weems started to emphasize intersectionality, oppression, resilience, survival, and frankly, just the lived experience of Black women.
So if we take Hagar again, it's important to consider her experience as an enslaved person, a marginalized person, someone displaced. The story from the experience of a different modern person starts looking less like a secondary subplot in Abraham's story and more like a story about survival under systems of power.
Around the same time, liberation theology emerges, especially in Latin American contexts, where those scholars and theologians began asking, "How does the Bible sound when we read it from the perspective of the poor?" Exodus becomes a central story with themes of oppression, liberation, empire, freedom.
Liberation theologians emphasize God siding with the oppressed, resistance to injustice, the social and political dimensions of faith, these things that were in the text all along but just weren't noticed. Then post-colonial scholars begin examining how empire and colonization shaped both the biblical texts and later interpretations.
They ask, "How are biblical texts used to justify colonialism? What happens when colonized people read these stories? How should conquest narratives be interpreted after imperial history?" In all of this explosion of interpretive diversity in the middle and late 20th century, the historical questions still matter for historical research, but now scholars are paying closer attention to whose perspective shapes how interpretation is formed out of that historical text.
It turns out having lots of different people from lots of different lived experiences is important to getting the full story of the Bible. At the same time that we're recognizing who's been excluded from the conversation and how valuable their perspective is to a robust understanding of the Bible, postmodern literary critics also start to influence the field of biblical studies.
They start questioning single authoritative readings, tidy harmonizations, and these claims of total objectivity. Once we realize that everybody comes from their own location, it's gonna be hard to claim total objectivity. So instead, they emphasize ambiguity, tension, competing voices, unresolved questions.
So postmodern approaches increasingly asked, "What if the tension itself matters? What if the Bible is intentionally preserving competing perspective? What if the goal isn't to unify but to honor the diversity?" That was a lot, so let's take a deep breath. The central issue that emerges during this time is power.
Earlier scholarship focused heavily on sources, history, the composition of the text, but postmodern and ideological criticism increasingly focused on power in the history of interpretation. Question like, who benefits from this interpretation? Who gets centered? Which voices have been historically marginalized?
Why were some interpretations treated as universal when they're not? These questions become central, an incredibly important correction from centuries of abuse of power that were of course incredibly harmful to countless people. But it's also a correction for biblical scholarship. The field thought it was giving us objective facts, but it was really just looking through a keyhole and calling that absolute truth.
This is one of the lasting contributions of this movement. Diversity in scholarship around the Bible is not only about representation, but it changes interpretation itself. Lived experience shapes perception. Social location shapes the questions. Marginalized communities often notice dynamics that dominant groups overlook.
All right, let's zoom out one more time. Astruc tells us the text has sources. De Wette, the sources reflect these historical moments. Wellhausen, those moments show religious development. Gunkel, traditions emerge from lived communities. Bultmann, modern interpreters bring modern assumptions. And then postmodern and ideological criticism say all interpreters, including scholars themselves, read from historically and socially situated perspectives.
That realization has changed biblical scholarship permanently, which is what makes it our tenth and final aha moment in biblical scholarship Just kidding. It's not our final aha moment. Just like philosopher Nigel Tufnel explained in the brilliant documentary This Is Spinal Tap, we have customized this episode so that we can turn it up to 11.
Again, would it have been better to make these three episodes and just say up front that that we're 11 instead of 10? Absolutely. Did I think of that in time to not make it awkward? Absolutely not. I've already lost a lot of sleep about it, so let's just let it go and be happy that there's a surprise bonus aha moment.
I mean, you didn't think we could talk about key moments in biblical scholarship that shifted the entire conversation among scholars and not include the new perspective on Paul, did you? We've talked a lot about the Old Testament in this series. That's primarily because that is where most of these ahas came from.
But we need to end this series talking about probably the most influential person in the history of Christianity, Paul. And for a lot of Protestant Christians, that means touching on some of the deepest assumptions we've held about salvation, grace, faith, and Christianity itself. For centuries, especially after the Protestant Reformation back in the 1500s, so we're talking a long time, Paul was commonly understood in a pretty specific way.
The story often sounded something like this: Judaism is legalistic, rule-focused, and based on trying to earn salvation through works. That's exactly how I was raised to think. And then Jesus comes on the scene, and Paul preaches a break from that legalistic religion, grace and faith. Paul became the hero who breaks away from Judaism and discovers salvation by grace instead of works, and this becomes Christianity.
Think about passages like Galatians chapter 2 verse 16. "We know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ." Or Romans 3:28. "A person is justified by faith apart from works of the law." For centuries, scholars interpreted this to mean that Paul is telling people to stop trying to earn salvation through good behavior.
I mean, that interpretation became almost the core doctrine of Protestant Christianity. Even today, the Romans Road and most of evangelicalism's methods to convert people are based on that story. Human-made religion is about trying to earn God's favor by being good and doing good works, but it will never work.
It will just leave you exhausted. You just need to trust that God has saved you through Jesus. But in the 20th century, scholars increasingly started noticing a problem. The historical evidence for ancient Judaism didn't really match the stereotype that Paul was supposedly opposing. Remember the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, those 900 manuscripts?
They gave scholars unprecedented access to what Judaism was actually like around the time of Jesus, and guess what? Turns out they're not nearly as legalistic as Protestants assumed for 500 years. As scholars began studying the Dead Sea Scrolls and the context of Second Temple Judaism, which is the religion being practiced around the time of Jesus, scholars began asking, "Was Judaism actually a religion where people thought they could earn salvation through moral perfection?"
And the answer was, mm, no, not really. Enter the person who best represents our 11th bonus aha moment, a scholar named E.P. Sanders, and his book in 1977, Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Sanders is one of these scholars studying all of this Jewish literature from around the time of Jesus, and he concludes that Jews at the time were not trying to earn salvation through good works.
Instead, Jews believed they entered the covenant through God's grace alone Torah obedience was in place to make sure Jews could have a covenant relationship with a holy God. The law wasn't primarily a ladder for earning salvation. Sanders calls this approach covenantal nomism because, of course, we like to invent big words to sound smart.
It sounds technical, but the basic idea is simple. Grace came first. Obedience followed covenant membership. You don't do good things to get in, bottom line. That's God's grace. Sanders argues that many Christian readings had accidentally projected later Protestant debates back onto Paul. In other words, Martin Luther's fight with Catholicism back in the 1500s largely shaped how Protestants imagined Judaism.
Christianity's theology had formed in reaction to Martin Luther using Paul to fight Catholicism, not based on the original practices of Second Temple Judaism. Minds were blown. Okay. So what if Paul wasn't criticizing Judaism for legalism in the way Christians assumed? This is where our next scholar, James Dunn, comes in and coins the phrase the new perspective on Paul.
Dunn builds on Sanders' initial insight and says, "Works of the law may not primarily mean moral effort in general." Instead, Paul's often talking about Jewish boundary markers. Things like circumcision, dietary laws, Sabbath observance weren't seen by ancient Jews as a way to earn favor with God. They were practices that distinguished them from Gentiles.
It was a way to set them apart. And if that's true, then entire books like Galatians look different. Traditionally, Christians often read Galatians as Paul arguing against trying to earn salvation through good works. The new perspective says the central issue may actually be whether Gentiles must become Jews in order to belong to God's covenant people, and Paul's answer to that is decidedly no.
Gentiles do not need to become Jews in order to become God's covenant people. Paul gets especially intense around circumcision. Why is that? I mean, traditionally, scholars argued for centuries it's because those ancient Jews were trying to earn salvation, and Paul saw that as dead wrong. But the new perspective on Paul would say no, it's because requiring circumcision would mean Gentiles must fully take on Jewish identity markers to belong to God's family, and that muddies the whole project Paul thinks God is taking on, which is to welcome everyone in the world into the family of God.
So the debate Paul is having in the New Testament isn't grace versus works, but who gets to belong in God's covenant family? What kinds of people [00:59:00] get to belong This is where a scholar you might have heard of, N.T. Wright, enters the picture. He popularizes a lot of these ideas for a broader audience.
Throughout the '90s and 2000s, he takes the new perspective out of the academy and brings it to churches, pastors, and everyday people. Wright emphasizes something that should have been obvious. Paul must be understood inside the larger story of Israel. The problem was we didn't really have direct access to the world of Judaism around the time of Jesus.
But with the Dead Sea Scrolls and other discoveries, now we did, and it changed how we interpreted the rest of our Bible. This even impacts how scholars interpret what Paul meant by salvation. Instead of the question being, how can I as an individual get saved, the new perspective shifts emphasis toward who belongs to the covenant family God is creating through the Messiah.
The tense relationship between Jews and Gentiles sharing covenant membership, that becomes the central issue. And then just in the past 20 years, some scholars have pushed things even further into what's called the Paul-within-Judaism movement, or the radical new perspective. These scholars argue that Paul actually never stopped being Jewish at all.
Anything Paul has to criticize about his fellow practitioners is from within his own Judaism. He never stopped being Jewish culturally, religiously, or theologically. Calling Paul Christian or outside of Judaism is an anachronism that would have made no sense to Paul Traditional Christianity often imagined that Paul converted from one religion to another religion.
But Paul-within-Judaism scholars point out Christianity as a separate religion didn't exist. Paul was still operating within Jewish categories, Jewish debates, within Jewish hopes about Israel and the nations. Take circumcision again. Paul argues Gentiles shouldn't be circumcised, but notice something important.
Paul never tells Jews to stop being Jews. He never says Torah is bad, Jewish identity should disappear, Jews should abandon covenant practices. The issue is specifically must Gentiles become Jews in order to participate in God's covenant promises? It's never Jews should stop being Jews. Once scholars began taking Second Temple Judaism seriously on its own terms, Paul started looking less like the founder of a new religion against Judaism and more like a Jewish thinker wrestling with one of the biggest questions of his time.
How can Gentiles become part of God's people without becoming Jews? The overall new perspective on Paul has enormous implications, again, not just academically, but ethically and historically. Scholars began recognizing how often the field of Christian biblical studies had caricatured Judaism unfairly, and those caricatures had stoked very real, very harmful antisemitism over centuries.
This movement fits perfectly into the broader trajectory we've been tracing. Historical criticism had already taught scholars that texts emerge from historical settings. The Dead Sea Scrolls revealed Judaism in this period was diverse and dynamic. Postmodern and ideological criticism highlighted that interpreters bring assumptions into the text, too.
And now Pauline scholarship starts asking, have Protestant assumptions shaped how we've been reading all along? And the answer has been a resounding yes. All right. As we wrap up this series, I think one of the most important things to recognize is that biblical scholarship did not emerge because scholars wanted to destroy the Bible.
That's often how this story gets told. But when you actually trace the history from Astruc all the way to the new perspective on Paul, you realize something very different was happening. Scholars were just paying attention. They kept noticing things in the text that previous generations either couldn't see or didn't have the tools to explain.
Now, Astruc noticed that Genesis seemed to have these layers and repetitions. De Wette noticed Deuteronomy sounded connected to later historical reforms. Wellhausen noticed Israel's religion appeared to develop over time. Gunkel noticed traditions circulated orally before becoming written texts. The Dead Sea Scrolls allowed scholars to notice that multiple versions of biblical books existed side by side in the ancient world.
Noth and von Rad noticed communities kept reshaping and retelling traditions across generations. Childs noticed the importance of continuing to look at the text we have, since that is what shapes current communities. Postmodern and ideological critics noticed that interpreters themselves are historically situated.
And the new perspective on Paul noticed that the reality of ancient Judaism was not aligned with centuries of Christian assumptions, and that those assumptions distorted how Paul and Judaism were understood for hundreds of years. At every stage, the field kept becoming more historically conscious, not less faithful, not less serious, more aware.
More aware that texts have histories, that traditions develop, that interpretation is shaped by culture, and human beings, including scholars and theologians, are never standing outside history looking down at it objectively. And honestly, I think that's one of the biggest lessons of this entire journey we've been on, because whether people realize it or not, everyone already interprets the Bible through frameworks.
Theological frameworks, cultural frameworks, political frameworks, denominational frameworks, personal experiences, assumptions inherited from churches and traditions. The question is not will we interpret, the question is will we become more aware of how we're interpreting? And that's where biblical scholarship matters so much.
Not because it gives us certainty about everything. Honestly, it usually complicates it. Sometimes it destabilizes assumptions. Sometimes it forces us to rethink ideas that we've inherited very confidently. But that's also part of intellectual honesty. And I think one of the dangers in the modern church is when people assume that serious biblical scholarship is optional if you want to engage scripture faithfully.
Because the reality is we are all already downstream from these conversations, whether we know it or not. The way modern Christians think about Genesis, Moses, prophecy, Paul, the Gospels, Judaism, salvation, what the Bible even is, it's already been shaped by these debates. As we saw in the section on fundamentalism, even resistance to biblical scholarship has been shaped by these debates.
And now, here in the 21st century, I honestly don't think Christians can afford to ignore this history anymore. It's not because everyone needs to get a PhD, not because scholarship should become the center of our faith, but because thoughtful engagement with the Bible requires understanding how we got here.
Otherwise, we often end up defending assumptions we don't realize are assumptions, or we mistake inherited interpretations for timeless truths, or we imagine our way of reading is simply what the Bible says without recognizing the centuries of interpretation sitting underneath it. And I think biblical scholarship at its best helps create this humility, but it also creates curiosity about how these texts developed, why communities preserve them, how they've been interpreted, and why they still matter.
Because despite all the complexity we've talked about in this series, people are still reading these texts. Politicians are still basing policy decisions on them. People are making important life decisions based on them. It's still part of our faith, and for some of us, our faith is still an important part of our lives.
Thanks everybody for going on this journey with me. We'll see you next time.
Jared: All right, one last thing. If you made it this far, you're clearly the kind of person who thinks about this stuff more than is probably necessary.
Pete: We say that with love, but you're not alone. We are also those people.
Jared: Community for us folks who do a lot of extra thinking, it's called the Society of Normal People, which, yes, we know is a little ironic given what we just said.
But it's a good group, smart and weird in the right ways, and not trying to convince anyone of anything.
Pete: Come be weird with us. The link is in the show notes, or go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com. Front slash join. I forgot to put
Jared: In the books where he noticed this connection... I keep hitting this dang microphone. Joel's gonna kill me. I'm sorry. I'm so excited. I just talk with my hands. Uh, it's just animation. The Bible isn't just a collection [01:07:00] of traditions like paper... I hit this microphone one more time
Pete: Come be weird with us. Link us in the show notes or go to- Don't
Jared: link us.
Link is in the show notes. Link us.
Pete: Link is in the show notes. I thought I was saying something really new and catchy. Yeah, I know. Link us. Okay, I'll do that again.
