Introducing the Bible
to the
21st Century Reader
Dieter Tieman
Introducing the Bible
to the 21st Century Reader
by Dieter Tieman,
COPACABANA NSW 2251
Copyright © Dieter Tieman, 2005
This is an edited version of a series of lectures
given at
during the first half of 2004.
ISBN 0-9579940-1-X
Tieman Publishing 2005
CONTENTS
Page
Foreword 7
Preface 9
Part One Introducing the Old Testament 11
1. Who is this Hebrew God? 13
2. The Bible 17
Interpretation
Authority of the Bible
3. Introduction to the Oral Period 21
Dating and
Authorship of the Old Testament
The Four Sources
theory for the whole Pentateuch
Genesis after its
final edition
4. Historical Books or
“The Lesser Prophets” 30
History in the Biblical sense
Joshua
Judges
Samuel, and the rise of the Prophetic Movement
Kings
5. Prophets from the Pre-Exile
period 36
Introduction to
Prophetic Movement
Nathan
Elijah
Elisha
Amos
Hosea
Isaiah 1
Micah
Zephaniah
Nahum
Habakkuk
Summary on
Pre-Exile Prophets
6. Prophets from the Exile
period and after 44
Jeremiah (627-586? bce.)
Lamentations
Habakkuk
(contemporary of Jeremiah)
Ezekiel
Obadiah,
(servant of YHWH)
Isaiah
2 or Deutero Isaiah (chapters 40-55) - still in Exile
Isaiah
3 (chapters
56-66) - After Exile, back in
Haggai (probably born
in exile)
Zechariah,
(a contemporary of Haggai),
Malachi (name means:
"My Messenger")
Chronicles
Ezra,
Nehemiah,
Joel (The name means
"Yahweh is God")
Daniel (The latest
book of the O.T.)
Summary
of the Prophetic movement:
7. Poetry and Wisdom Literature 52
Psalms,
Proverbs,
Ecclesiastes,
Song
of Songs,
Esther,
Summary of Wisdom Literature.
The Protesters (so called
by Spong p.64) 54
Job,
Ruth,
Jonah
Canon
of Scripture
Summary
of the O.T. course
Part Two Introducing the New Testament 58
8. Introduction to the New Testament 59
A new
approach to Interpreting the N.T.
Three
Stages in the Formation of the N.T.
The Foundation of the
Christian Faith
Christology
Introduction to the
Gospels
9. Paul’s Writings 69
Introduction
Interpreting Paul’s
Writings
1 and 2 Thessalonians
1 and 2 Corinthians
Galatians
Romans
Philippians
Philemon and Colossians
10. Mark’s Gospel 76
Spong’s Lectionary
Theory
11. Matthew’s Gospel 82
Introduction to Matthew
Comparing Matthew with
Mark
Theological Development
in Matthew
Writing the Gospel as
Lectionary Material
12. Luke-Acts 90
Luke-Acts - About the
Author
The story of Jesus told
against the Order of Torah
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus and
Deuteronomy
13. The Book of Acts 99
The Book of Acts
Jesus and Peter
paralleled
Jesus and Paul Paralleled
14. John’s
Gospel 104
15. Other
Letters and Writings in the New Testament 110
Ephesians
1 + 2 Timothy; Titus
Hebrews
James; 1 + 2 Peter; Jude;
1, 2 + 3 John
Revelation
History of The
New Testament Canon
Summary
Bibliography 118
Appendix 120
Mark’s
Easter Vigil
Jewish
Pentecost Vigil
Mathew’s
Pentecost Vigil
Comments
of Jewish Feasts
Chart: The Jewish Calendar
and the Liturgical Year 123
Foreword
What
are we to make of the many and diverse stories and writings contained in that
library of thought called the Bible?
Many
church folk have grown up with the belief that this is God’s book, and the
events noted therein, really happened.
Others are not that sure, but still feel it is an important book with
equally important messages about God in the world, but need interpretation. Still others claim it is not God’s word but a
valuable collection of stories and recollections by various people who share a
common search for meaning and spirituality.
With
these and other opinions, Dieter Tieman has put together a series of group studies,
expanded them, and now offers them as a resource to others who are ‘on a
journey of discovery’.
He
weaves some of the suggestions of the leading progressive theological thinkers
of our day with his own, to present a thorough and honest book. To use the current in-phrase - he has done
his deconstruction well! But he doesn¹t
just leave it there. He invites his
readers to also share in the process of reconstruction. And that is a very important invitation.
There
is much in the biblical accounts with which we can no longer relate. Our world views are very different in
important ways. But there is also much
wisdom and re-imagining.
So
I hope this book will be a helpful guide to all those who wish to continue
their journey from a pre-critical belief to a 21st century ‘thinking’ and
‘living’ faith. Because
thinking theologically means more than just interpreting our given ‘orthodox’
biblical tradition and creedal statements. It also means being willing to think
differently now, than we have in the past.
Rex A E Hunt
Director
The Centre for
Progressive Religious Thought
Easter
2005.
Preface
I wish to express my
gratitude to all participants of the course at
I am not an expert on the Bible, in particular with reference to the Old
Testament. I did not study Hebrew.
A Chinese pastor once said:
'Reading the Old Testament is like eating a large crab; it turns out to be
mostly shell with very little meat in it'.
(Davidson p.11). Is this how you see it? I like crabs, even if it is mostly
shell! I hope that you too will like and
value the Old Testament as much as the New, for we must remember,
if we didn't have the Old Testament, there would be no New. In fact, if we don’t understand the Old
Testament, we won’t be able to fully understand the New, let alone be able to
follow Spong and other modern theologians who are trying to make sense of the
Bible for us in the 21st century.
Spong said, after he had
published his book Living in Sin:
"Sex drove me to the Bible." (p.1) In a strange way
this applies also to us, particularly in the
Meanwhile, our
"It
is time for the church to move on beyond the present impasse towards fresh ways
of valuing, using and interpreting the Bible. While scholars have a role to
play in this process, such a breakthrough must grow organically over many years
from within the life of a church reclaiming and befriending the Scriptures as a
life-giving, transformative and faith building gift of God to the Church"
(Task Group 4.2.7).
Let us keep the last sentence as our motto for this booklet:
"To reclaim and befriend the Bible as a life-giving,
transformative and faith building gift of God to us."
Copacabana, April
2005
D.T.
Part One
Introducing the Old Testament
Chapter One
Who is this Hebrew God?
Quoting from the Task Group Report
we said the Bible is "God's gift to us." Before we look at the gift, let us look at the giver. The name theology
really means ‘God Talk’. If we look at
all the different types of theologies, we may discover that people have talked
about God in so many different ways, that some people are confused. “Which is the right way to talk about
God”? they may ask.
Let me say from the outset, there is no right way, not one person
has all the answers, but many people had a profound spiritual insight, or experience
of God, which they shared with others.
In the course of human history, we may be able to observe, what we might
call an evolution of thought about God over the centuries or millennia. Each theologian built on the foundation of
others, and new theologies evolved, almost like the evolution of the
species. This evolution is never
finished. It must also be said that God
should never be taken for granted, neither by the church, nor by
individuals. Only if and when we’ve
become aware of the spiritual side of life, which may have given us a new
direction or a new purpose in life, can we really speak about God. Such speaking comes from those who are not
impartial observers, but convinced participants. This prompted Schofield to write: "The
whole Bible is propaganda", (p.9) and the purpose of this 'propaganda' in
the Old Testament is, to tell us something about this Hebrew "God".
Who is this Hebrew God? We may need to let our imagination help us
first to answer the question, how did the idea of "God" start in the
first place? When homo sapiens still lived in caves, we
could imagine that the ‘awareness of the divine' may have dawned on them, like
the following story illustrates:
A
group of homo sapiens have found shelter in a cave,
when a fierce storm approached. They
were terrified by the lightening and thunder outside. Although they didn’t know what it was, they
thought that there was someone who wanted to kill them with fire, and that
terrible noise was caused by that someone’s footsteps. Who could that someone be? They all huddle together and the most
experienced among them said: “It can’t be someone like us. It must be someone much, much bigger, with a
terrible power. It could be his voice
and his fire. And they may have called
that power Thor (the Scandinavian god of thunder). When they experienced earthquakes, they found
another name for it. Eventually they had
a name for many terrifying experiences in their life. When they started to till the land, they gave
names for the one who sent the rain, who gave them good harvests, for the sun
and moon. So not only the powers they
feared were so named, but also those that were beneficial to them.
All these were life experiences they
could not understand. To early humans
these were caused by powers from beyond.
They called these powers gods.
When things went wrong for them, like the harvest washed away, or there
was no crop because of a drought, they would say: "the gods are
angry". They might then try to
‘bribe’ them to make them change their mind.
So they gave them something they themselves valued, and called it sacrifice.
Eventually, a cult grew around these gods. They developed elaborate worship. The worthy among them were appointed priests
to officiate at these sacrifices and functions.
(Here ends our imagined story).
Turning now to the question:
“who is this Hebrew God”? we might get some answers
from ancient History:
One of the earliest cults
developed in
The king later
changed his name to Akhenaten as it was believed that
one’s name described the person's being.
Amenhotep meant ‘Amon
is content’, i.e. his allegiance was to Amon, whereas
Akhenaten
meant ‘It pleases Aten’ i.e. a subject of Aten. His wife was Nefertete.
He built the city of
After only 17 years on the
throne, the king died, with no male to succeed him. One of his daughters married Tut-ankh-Amon, who became king.
As his name tells us, he returned to the worship of Amon,
and there is evidence that the priests of Aten were
persecuted. Is it possible that a
remnant of the followers of Aten survived and under
the leadership of Moses fled during these persecutions? We don’t know, but we do know that Moses
promoted a monotheistic God (there is only one god). He could have been influenced by Akhenaten. Mose means
'child' in Egyptian, and we believe that he was brought up in the royal
household, as described in chapter two of Exodus, and later became the leader
of the refugees.
In the
For the next two to three
hundred years, these stories about Moses, the time in
"Most
of his religious ideas can be linked with the dawning universalism of a most
unusual Pharaoh ... Akhenaten. Yet some of the ideas attributed to Moses are
anything but universal, caught as they are in tribal patterns. Were there really two persons who have been
subsumed under the name of Moses in the memory of
.....Was the original Moses killed in the wilderness in one of the many
rebellions against this leader that the biblical narrative speaks of? And was he replaced with a Hebrew whose
warlike tribal experience reflected a God who was conceived of as a warlike
tribal deity? In time, were these two
figures merged into a single person with a continuous, although not always
compatible, narrative in the folklore around the camp fires?"
Whatever it was, the story of
the Exodus has become the history of the formation of
“O
God, when you led your people, when you marched across the desert, the earth
shook, and the sky poured down rain, because of the coming of the God of
Sinai” (Ps.68:7-8).
This story had become for the
people, God's guidance for any event in the future. And so it was passed on from mouth to mouth,
from one generation to the next, in the form that God had initiated the Exodus,
and that God had acted decisively. This
story became the cult of
To put this against a modern theologian, let me quote a couple of paragraphs from Spong's book: "Beyond Moralism". They are important for us to consider:
"God
can be experienced but not explained.
Words can point to God, but they cannot contain God. Creeds tell true stories of faith, but creeds
can never exhaust the ongoing stories.
God is beyond and more than any human system of thought. Countless times we have fallen into heresy by
forging our small and partial truths into religious clubs to beat into
submission anyone who did not agree - and always in the name of God.
There are those who seem to be convinced that God is a member of their worship tradition. God is not a Baptist, Anglican, Roman Catholic, [or Uniting] .... God does not prefer the King James Bible or the Book of Common Prayer, but we trust, all participate in and point to who God is, but God cannot be adequately described by those human constructions.
No nation or race captures the whole truth of God. God is not American (etc) ... God is not white, black or oriental. God is not a he. Yet each of these ways of describing God does share in the divine truth. We are simply limited by language, imagination, and finitude.
No faith system can claim identity with God. God is not a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, or a Buddhist. Until we accept the partiality of all religious systems, our religious arrogance will violate God's word against bearing false witness"- (e.g. the Ninth Commandment, Ex.20:16)
Christians are not settlers, but pilgrims. Settlers circle their wagons and prepare to guard their turf against the enemy. But as pilgrims, Christians are always moving, always widening their circle of experience to gather new acquaintances who tell God-bearing tales of lives lived differently from their own. Unchanging conviction stops pilgrims in their tracks and puts an end to story-telling and therefore an end to living faith." (Beyond Moralism, p.128)
These are challenging words indeed!
How would we describe “God” at
this point? What is your own concept of
God, or what does "God" mean to you?
Each person has, of course, a valid answer for him- or her-self at a
given time. My own version is at this
moment:
"God
is a universal energy that enables each person to respond with awe and
admiration to the universe, and so reach out to others to share all that which
is good, loving and life affirming".
In
this chapter we looked at the Giver. Our next one will be dealing with God’s gift, the Bible.
Chapter Two
The Bible
Referring again to the Task Group
Report, this section will deal with God’s gift,
the Bible, or often referred to as ‘The Word of God’.
As far as the Old Testament is concerned, there are actually two versions of it:
1. The Protestant Old Testament canon, or
rule, of Jamnia (now Jabneh,
south of Tel Aviv), written in Hebrew and agreed to at the end of the first
century ce.
2. The Catholic Old Testament, which
includes the Apocrypha, meaning that which is hidden, written in Greek, dating
from about 300 bce. This is known as the Septuagint. It was used in Jesus' days
in Greek speaking Synagogues.
The Old Testament contains a collection of many books. The earliest written material comes probably
from
As mentioned earlier, many
stories go back to oral tradition, especially the Torah, as the first
five books of the Bible are also called.
As in the evolution of the species, where many species became extinct,
so in the evolution of the Bible too, many stories were forgotten, but those
that sustained the people as a community, which were necessary for life, those
were remembered and eventually written down.
How the Old
Testament came about to be written is, of course, obscure. No one knows for certain. But most scholars would agree today, that the
theory originally proposed by the 19th century German theologians Graf and Wellhausen, is by and large still valid today. Their theory
is called ‘the four-document theory’, which will be dealt with in chapter
three.
Since there is such a long gap
between the events and the written record, and since the Bible is ‘propaganda’
(see p.13), and the aim has always been to tell us something about this Hebrew
God, we need to interpret the text: not only from the original text to modern
English (translation), but also from an ancient world view (a three-decker
universe) to our days of space travel, from ancient concepts like demon
possession and exorcism to present day insights of psychiatry etc. Jews and Christians have always looked for a
deeper meaning than the literal one.
Therefore, both consider most of these stories as being inspired. The Jews call this interpretation midrash. Our next task then is, to look at what is
involved when we interpret the Bible.
Interpretation
As the originals were written in Hebrew or Greek, (only few in Aramaic, the
language Jesus spoke), they had to be made accessible by scholars through
translations. There are many versions,
like the King James translation, RSV, Good News and many others. The stories are told in a thought form which
is far removed from ours. We need to
consult, therefore, history, archaeology, anthropology and other
disciplines. We need to know something
about the cult, religion and customs of ancient times, and about the
development of science, and to be informed about our present world view.
It was mentioned earlier, that
God in the Bible is described in many different ways: on the one hand the writers thought that
there were many gods (Poly-theism), then that God was like an absolute king or
despot, but also God was seen like a shepherd. Some saw him as a powerful universal creator,
whereas Spong sees God as Love, Life, and Being.
A debate on Compass (a religious
programme on the ABC) not long ago showed two atheists or rationalists, (Philip
Adams was one of them), and two people who claimed to be spiritual (‘they
claimed to have faith’). Geraldine Dougue did her very best to keep both sides in opposition
for the sake of the debate, I guess. On
the one side you had ‘reason’, on the other ‘faith’. This seemed absurd to me, as I have always
understood that faith goes together with reason or understanding. For me it is not rationalism versus
spiritualism, as it was presented!
Firstly, as God has given us all
a mind with which to think, a blind faith would not be satisfying for most of
us. Spong has a famous saying: He doesn't want to leave his brains at the
church door! Secondly, we need to
nurture our faith with understanding. In
other words, our faith needs to make sense.
St.Anselm of
Because we are all made
differently, not only in looks, but understanding, education, back-ground etc.,
there are many different approaches to the Bible. You will find representatives from the whole
spectrum of theology; from those who believe that the Bible was dictated by God
and that every word of the Bible is literally true, to those who think the Old
Testament has been superseded by the New and is therefore no longer needed. (see: "Diverse Approaches to the Bible" in Task
Group, 4:3) Most of us would find
themselves somewhere in the middle between these two extremes.