#198 – Peter Enns: How we got the Old Testament
Recovering Evangelicals
What Christians can learn from Jewish interpretive practice
Boyd asks about Jewish approaches; Enns highlights rabbinic debate, midrash, and plural readings as healthy models for engaging scripture.
Divine dictation of fully-formed books, or a gradual evolution of texts at the hands of authors, editors, interpreters, redactors, copyists, collectors, ……?
This will be the first of several episodes we’re hauling out of our Podcast Archive that are related to how we came to have this collection of books we call the Bible. This week, Dr. Peter Enns gets us started with a look at the origin … and evolution! …. of the Jewish Bible, our “Old Testament”. We’re guessing that many of our listeners will be hearing this perspective for the first time. But hearing this, from a world-class expert, might help you over some serious speedbumps in your faith journey. It certainly did that for me.
We’ll hear that the Bible was not dropped out of heaven or whispered into the ears of individual authors (you probably knew that already … but did you have a coherent alternative explanation of where/how it did come?). Instead, it was written, and re-written, and revised, and re-revised by teams of authors over the course of many, many centuries. Yes: re-written and re-revised. And not just by the individual authors, but by multiple teams of editors who worked on the texts centuries after the authors had died. Those later editorial teams took the liberty of not just changing words, but even deleting whole sections, and inserting entirely new ones. Sometimes in response to things they’d learned from other cultures. A perfect example of this would be their understanding of the human soul and the afterlife, which we talked about previously in episodes #6, #7, and #8. Those editors could be just as divinely inspired in what they did, as the authors writing the first drafts of the text. And the life experiences which shaped those authors and editors — as well as the cultural zeitgeists which informed their thinking — would also be part of that divine inspiration process.
Learning about these things over the past couple decades has given me a new understanding of the Bible. I no longer see it like the “User’s Manual” for a car, written by the Manufacturer [God] to the User [us] to help them [us] know how to use the Product [us]. Instead, I now see it more like a diary or a notebook, written by humans who captured their thoughts, experiences, the lessons they’d learned, and their personal growth on a subject that was incredibly important to them: God.
As always, tell us what you think …
For more about Dr. Pete Enns, go to The Bible for Normal People podcast, or listen to our other recent interview with Pete, asking him to tell the story of his own faith deconstruction and the response to that from the Evangelical world.
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like our episode on the origin of the New Testament (episode #81), or on Divine Inspiration (episode #101), or a deep-dive into an Old Testament story of “a Divine command” given to the Israelites to slaughter their own brothers (episode #98).
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