1. Cross-Eyed

In my experience, Christian leaders usually laud that the simple solution to weak faith is to read the Bible and pray more. Ironically, it was precisely these two things that have led me to abandon all organized religion. I have almost universally found Christians to be poor readers of scripture and many of them don’t even seem to enjoy reading their precious leather-bound book. This is not the fault of these individuals, this is Christianity.

In case it isn’t obvious, I have not left the faith because I refused to take the Bible seriously. I have faced the scriptures with as much seriousness and courage as I could muster. I’ve allowed them to address me, I’ve listened patiently to their demands and how they’d have me live. I love the Bible and I’ve found it to be much more interesting, challenging and mysterious when read honestly, without putting it in God’s mouth or tying it into knots to make Jesus look good.

 

 

cross-eyed

Was it the death of God,

we saw when Jesus died?

Is he YHWH or a fraud?

How could he be One prophesied?

The price God pays for creation,

Did Isaiah, did David envision him crucified?

Does he really bring us salvation?

Was it him that Zechariah had in mind?

To see it like this, one must be cross-eyed.

 

When early Christians began developing a canon, they chose to organize the Old Testament differently than the Jews had organized their Hebrew Bible. Christians wanted to demonstrate continuity with with the Hebrew scriptures, something that was not by any means readily apparent to the Jews. So, they reconfigured it in the way that seemed to make best sense of Jesus–effectively inventing the Old Testament– and included it as the preface for their new canon.

In doing so, they were acting in the same spirit as the New Testament writers, who felt the creative freedom to write Jesus into specific Hebrew images –most notably, the suffering servant in Isaiah 53 and the abandoned pathos of Psalm 22, but we also get images like the donkey-rider of Zechariah 9, and various allusions to passover. I don’t doubt that they genuinely saw Jesus as the messianic fulfillment of God’s promise to Israel but it definitely took some interpretive revisioning to make a Savior out of Jesus.

2. Endings

I think a quick look at the basic interpretive differences between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible will illuminate the thesis of this post well. The primary move I want to highlight is the eventually unanimous Christian decision to defy chronology and move the prophets to the end of the Old Testament. The major effect this achieves can be clarified through a quick juxtaposition of endings:

The Hebrew Bible ends with a remarkable finale. The Persians defeat the Babylonians and free the Jews from the dark night of their exile. Cyrus, the King of Persia, issues what seems to be the thematic element throughout: “…whoever is among you of all [God’s] people, may the Lord his God be with him. Let him go up.”

Let him go up.

The thrust of the Jewish scriptures is not theological or even religious. Rather, we might think of it as an existential challenge. God charges that all God’s people are called to dignity, to liberation, to reject all forms of slavery. Moses’ call is not to a religious conformity but a call to becoming, to make something of ourselves. No other religion seems to so radically affirm the potential of the individual human being, even across boundaries of ethnicity and religion.

The Christian formulation of the Bible does not have the same effect. The international, suprareligious humanistic streak of the Hebrews is hushed against the development of a new religious technology, Hell. By relegating the prophets to the end, they are stripped of their centrality and power for the Jewish experience. Instead, Christians set them up as a sort of transition from the Old to the New, a type of wind up to the New Testament. Often, a picture is painted of an “intertestamental silence,” when really the Jewish literature from this period is exceptional–the sheer number of messiahs, sects and revolutions reveal it to have been a uniquely fertile spiritual era.

The Hebrew Bible ends with a blessing, the Christian Old Testament ends with a curse.

We usually only tell the meaning of any story from how it ends. An end means a new lens, it means we see everything that happens from the beginning as colored by the ending. Christians knew that Jesus was the answer but they still had to formulate the question. In other words, Christians reworked their literary inheritance to present a problem to which Jesus would be the solution. While the motif of Jewish scriptures might be labeled something like liberation, that of Christian scriptures would have to be something like personal security. Jesus and Paul are by far the most concerned about people knowing the importance of rewards in the afterlife. Things like justice, adventure, romance, parenthood are relativized to otherwordly rewards; it is the damned state of our soul and our likelihood of an eternity spent in Hell that matters. Our actual lives are mere quibbles, a chance to shrewdly stock up trophies in Heaven.

A Christian reading of the Old Testament is necessarily determined by the New Testament, which by its very nature suggests that it supersedes what is old. Contemporary theologians play all sorts of word games in attempt to vindicate Christianity from the charge of supersession, a charge of which the great theologians of history have been far less afraid. The New Testament changes everything. It supposes itself to be the fulfillment of the old Hebrew religion.

And it’s not just the OT that Christianity makes us subordinate to this process of making Jesus look good. Rather, if we are good Christians, we are supposed to see everything through the perspective of Christ’s death and resurrection. In doing so, we become “cross-eyed”, the blood of Christ pervades our field of vision. As if we had wrapped our heads Christ’s blood-soaked garment, expecting that it should offer clarity rather than obscured vision.

This was how I read the Bible. That is, until a blessed (or cursed) little seminary professor challenged me to read the Hebrew Bible on its own, that I might better understand the scriptures Jesus inherited in his time. Little did either of us know that this would be the bomb that blew me out of belief.

I found in the Hebrew Bible a tiny cosmos of wild and explosive literature. There is nothing in the New Testament that holds a candle to its literary brilliance, and indeed almost nothing in all of Christian literature that rivals its boldness and originality. The New Testament is effectively a hermeneutical cage for the savage prophets of its Old Testament. Christians are taught to read them only in light of a prior commitment to  Jesus, which leads us to miss the prophets at their most profound and radical.