Undeception

Joel Watts has a really good post up today about the relative values of mythology and history.

I tried to get [my children] to understand that stories are shared by people, and sometimes, we take stories from others to explain something important to us. I didn’t get to the point of the new creation story in Noah’s narrative, as I didn’t think they could handle the massive amount of information already.

But, why is it that we can so easily suggest Gilgamesh is a myth but take Noah as literal fact? Why? Because we have a fuzzy understanding of how stories work, and we are wholly anti-Semitic when it comes to reading the Jewish Scriptures. We insist these authors are modern day white male historians trained at Harvard, and not Jews in Babylon building the Jewish identity.

My kids and I ran into this discussion just last week when reading from an American folklore book. We were reading about John Henry, the steel-drivin’ man who died with a hammer in his hand…and apparently managed to do so despite the inconvenient paucity of his own historicity.

To my delight, my children understood intuitively that even though stories like this, Johnny Appleseed, or the Paul Bunyan tall tales might not have happened per se, they remain with us because they so capably express the mindsets of the people of the time. They tell us much about values that their heroes held, especially (in the case of American folklore) the values of hard work, dedication, and ambition to excel.

I didn’t bring this over into the area of biblical folklore/mythology at the time; I expect it’ll sink in when the time comes. But now I can at least imagine that my seven-year-old son, who offered concerned pushback against the notion that the Bible could contain stories that didn’t actually happen when it was first pitched to him several months back, will be able to see the high benefit of stories that convey values and meaning. This time he was able to identify the way people behave, the things they believe in and try to live up to, as the “important stuff”. Bingo.

These ahistorical stories, based as they often are in historical settings, have two great virtues that are often (if not usually) overlooked when reading “straight history” written to conform to our modern historiographical ideals.

1) They focus on the most essential facts about what made the characters tick. Whether Johnny Appleseed planted just so many trees and could talk to animals, we at least know that people thought of him as a kind man dedicated to caring for nature, plying his life’s mission selflessly and without regard for convention. We’re left examining the ways that people who knew the historical figure John Chapman thought of him, written up in terms larger than life to accentuate the aspects of character and temperament that he especially seemed to embody.

2) They communicate information about the values of those who created and adopted the stories. This is even bigger, because even when there is a historical figure behind the stories, the impressions of those figures reflected in their associated stories are not at all dependent on the accuracy of those impressions. The historical John Chapman might have been a kitten-kicking jerkface who simply got famous off of fooling everyone; in the case of Paul Bunyan, there was never such a person to begin with. But there is something more important we can still know: these stories were passed on in no small part because those who did so thought that the aspects of those characters depicted in the stories were valuable and worth passing on.

So there is something invaluable in reading legend/folklore/mythology as a history lesson–not about the events in the stories, but about the people generating and receiving the stories. We are then left to engage with those ideals, confronting them in reference to our best, retrospectively informed understanding of what is truly right and good. Just because we see that the Israelites believed God needed to wipe out all flesh because of sin doesn’t mean we need draw the identical conclusions about what God is like, but we can certainly take serious their belief that sin is intolerable.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying as an assertion that we should just discard everything believed by the authors of biblical folklore, judging them against what we happen to believe in our exalted modern state. No, as a rule I think we should seek out continuity between their ideals and ours and be willing to allow their contextually expressed values into our own value systems–mutatis mutandis, of course. In actuality, I find the trajectory of basic values of goodness, love, and ethically based righteousness from early Judaism through Christianity to be a consistent slope that continues far upward into humanity’s future. I want my children to view our faith neither as blindly traditionalistic nor as fundamentally iconoclastic, but as painstakingly cumulative.

When reading Scripture this way, as a history lesson about its authors and audiences, we are finally learning useful truth rather than trivial data from our forebears in the faith. Adam and Eve? The massacre of the Canaanites? Incidental but contextually understandable misunderstandings. We can, as Jesus did, focus on doing the “important stuff”: acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God.

I realize this is a week old, which in the blogosophere can make something quite stale, but I had some thoughts on James K. A. Smith’s surprisingly negative review of Peter Enns’ recent The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins.

Smith’s criticism focuses on Enns’ methodology, which is based on the reasonable belief that we can’t decide what God may have meant by a passage until we know the immediate, contextual meaning of that passage.

On the contrary, says Smith, “The church has always staked its reading of the Bible on the conviction that Scripture’s meaning exceeds what the original human authors could have intended.” Smith expects the Church to derive the most appropriate and relevant interpretations of Scripture by basing our interpretation in “worship”, whatever that means, “which will generate meanings…that could never have been intended by [the] human authors,” meanings that are “intended as meanings to be unfolded ‘in front of the text’ by the divine Author.”

The notion that there may be meaning in Scripture above and beyond the original meaning may be a conceivably defensible position (a position I once espoused on this site), but he doesn’t stop there: Smith insists that Enns is wrong to try to recover the meaning of the authors for the original audiences because of the danger of it hindering us from extracting a more appropriate, divinely intended meaning for us. So in reading Genesis, Enns should not expend so much effort in recovering the Ancient Near Eastern context, including relevant literary and archaeological backgrounding. That sort of research is well and good, Smith allows, but it doesn’t tell us what the Bible really means now, because it doesn’t take into account the meaning intended for us as contextualized within the Christian canon:

First of all, the Christian church is not a recipient of the book of Genesis as a discrete unit; we receive the book of Genesis within the Bible and that Bible is received as a whole—as a “canon” of Scripture.  Second, internal to the canon is the conviction that meanings God intends are not constrained by what human authors intended.

Although he puts his preferred hermeneutic in terms of “recontextualizing” Scripture, in essence Smith is wanting to theologize the text before situating it in history, because we are apparently not allowed to come to any conclusions by examining individual texts like Genesis and Romans that make it hard for this recontextualization (which in practice looks like front-loading) to occur.

Because Jamie Smith is no fundamentalist, or even a Chicago style inerrantist, he concedes, “Enns is exactly right to push back on ‘conservative’ or ‘literal’ readings of the Bible that anachronistically impose a ‘journalistic’ sense of ‘history’ on ancient texts.” But in this review specifically he seems uncomfortable with Enns’ claim that Paul and the author Genesis might not have intended the same meaning in their passages on Adam and Eve: “In fact, if it becomes a contest between ‘the authors of Genesis’ [note the scare quotes, presumably to flag Enns' avoidance of "Moses"] and Paul, Enns sides with ‘the original meaning’ of Genesis as the determinative meaning.” Not having read the book but broadly being aware of Enns’ perspective, I doubt that Enns would actually say either is determinative to the subjugation of the other; instead, it is Smith who wants to subjugate the intended message of both “Moses” and Paul to the meaning of the “divine Author”…whatever that might be. (I presume by Smith’s objection to letting Genesis carry its own meaning that he expects that God’s intended meaning happens to correspond more closely to Paul’s.)

But what of Smith’s “divine Author”? Should we put so much energy into finding the original meaning that we miss the message God intended for the Church to receive? My understanding is that Enns would affirm divine authorship in some capacity, although he rightly cautions us to avoid the “priority of the divine” that Smith here advocates.

To put it bluntly, I am no longer of the opinion that Scripture is layered with a special coating of “what God meant” sauce; neither do I believe that the Bible is composed of the flesh of human words attached to a divinely crafted backbone. Nor am I enamored with Peter Enns’ incarnational model of Scripture as I understand it, which is built off of the belief that divine and human authorship overlaps. In short, I have seen no compelling, non-circular reason to maintain the belief that God should in any meaningful sense be considered the author of the Bible. To believe in God’s providential intentions for the Church in the production and canonization of the Bible is one thing; I can affirm as much myself. To credit Him as the publisher might even work. I have sometimes drawn the analogy of God’s purposing of Scripture to that of King James commissioning the translation of the Bible. It occurs to me now that my view of Scripture as the response of humans to divine revelation and inspiration strikes me as fairly well analogous to a Festschrift. But God as author? Hardly. And the contention that He was the kind of author who overlaid the glaringly human text with some esoteric meaning recoverable independently of the meaning it had to the original audiences and available only to subsequent theologians reminds me quite a lot of the infamous “Bible Codes” from a couple years back. It sounds even more like Gnosticism.

But even if God did ordain a higher meaning upon the text, surely we can only hope to find it by first contextualizing and resituating each passage back in its original habitat and going from there. Otherwise the original meaning becomes completely incidental, despite the fact that something much closer to the original meaning than Smith’s canonical reading was the only one actually available to those who canonized it! They canonized the texts for what they were, not for some divine meaning that would override what they were after their canonization.

For these reasons, Jamie Smith’s canonical approach falls far short, and Enns’ approach – by no means uniquely his – of putting the effort into letting the original authors speak for themselves so that we can attempt to interact with each of them on a case-by-case basis handily continues to carry the day.

(Updated)

Recently on the [ad hoc] Christianity podcast we linked to a few articles around the blogosphere discussing Khirbet Qeiyafa and its implications for minimalists, i.e. those historians who expect that the historicity of the Bible’s stories is minimal at best. Khirbet Qeiyafa is a site on the border of ancient Israel and Philistine territory that many say problematizes the claims that no Israelite kingdom of any appreciable size existed during the time of David.

Image via Wikipedia

A podcast I enjoy, and this despite frequently disagreeing with it vociferously, is The Christian Humanist Podcast. Well, this week‘s discussion is on archaeology, particularly as it relates to the Bible. I am much more of a minimalist than anyone on this show, but fortunately a significant block of time was given to discussion of the Khirbet Qeiyafa dig, due to guest Luke Chandler, an archaeologist an ancient historian who’s been working at the site for the last few years (who blogs here).

Among the discussions of this show were the ancient name of the site, whether the language of the inscriptions is an early form of Hebrew, whether evidence actually suggests that the inhabitants were keeping kosher(!), and a conservative yet appreciably circumspect view of the limits of biblical archaeology for determining the Bible’s reliability. Chandler also takes some time to discuss the recent trend of fraudulent claims made by some who may justifiably be known as “naked archaeologists” in that they have been entirely denuded of credibility.

Just a minute more to plug the Christian Humanist podcast again: as I said, they are theologically quite a bit more conservative than I, but if you would enjoy some unusually erudite and interesting discussions of literature, history, and culture involving likable personalities, I suggest that you subscribe (iTunes link here).

(Update) The guest is not an archaeologist but an ancient historian working with the archaeologists at Khirbet Qeiyafa.

Parchment and Pen has a post up that seeks to classify  the different Christian views on origins. C. Michael Patton is usually pretty good at describing different points of view sympathetically, and things were going along pretty uncontroversially as he described different types of special creation, that is, views of creation that envisage miraculous intervention of one sort or another. Then he gets to “Deistic Evolution”, whose advocates, he asserts…

Believe, as Darwinian Evolutionists, that God created the universe over billions of years, using naturalistic evolutionary processes to create humanity without intervention.

Wait…that sounds a lot like “theistic evolution” (or  ”evolutionary creation”), doesn’t it?

I call this ”deistic evolution” due to the “hands-off” approach God takes to the development of man in the evolutionary process. Darwinian evolution, through the process of natural selection, is accepted. While there is across the board agreement that God did not/does not intervene in the process of evolution, DEers are divided as to whether God directly caused the first life to begin or whether he let life come into being naturalistically (abiogenisis).

Among those he describes as “Deistic Evolutionists” who apparently believe that God was “hands off” in creation, he cites Pete Enns, who just happens to be a Reformed Christian who has recently posted part 13 of a series that outlines the relationship between evolution and God’s sovereignty from a Calvinistic perspective. For any Calvinist, the notion that God would be laissez faire about such a thing as the creation of the universe is unthinkable; deism is a four-letter word among the Reformed. Patton, a Calvinist, knows this, which I take to be an obvious backhand. It’s not as though that were the only adjective he could possibly find (I would argue that no adjective is needed for “evolutionist”), and that particularly adjective is laden with a view of God’s nature that is eschewed by most Christians, including most who accept the findings of mainstream science. I must say that this choice was unbecoming of him and his reputation as a straight-shooter.

The fact is, God can be at work in and through creation whether or not He feels the need to tweak this or that during its development. My favorite analogy is of a competent software engineer who is able to develop a program that, once executed, will perform her desired goals without requiring her intermittent input. She is no less responsible or “hands on” about how it performs, since she wrote every piece of code responsible for how it operates; in fact, the more of an expert she is, the less of her interference in its execution is necessary. This analogy is of course limited, and I’ve heard others who modified it to say that God in a sense wrote Himself into the code (which I quite like the sound of, even if I don’t fully understand all of its implications).

The last category in Patton’s list is Intelligent Design (ID). He notes that one can be both an ID advocate and a special creationist of any sort: it simply requires acknowledging that the possible influence of miracles must not be excluded from one’s laboratory research. What’s interesting here is that he subcategorizes “Deistic Evolution” and evolution-friendly Intelligent Design alike under a category called “Theistic Evolution” (TE)! Although most ID advocates (at higher levels, not so much in churches) acknowledge significant evolutionary activity, sometimes including universal common descent, the views of TE and ID have usually been placed in contradistinction to one another.

As I said above, I don’t think accepters of mainstream science need a special label, whether they’re believers or not. But for the purposes of lists like this in which the theological component is a criterion for classification, I usually prefer “theistic evolutionist” – with no ID, thankyouverymuch – (not so keen on “evolutionary creationist”).

I would suggest, however, that as long as we’re classifying these origins positions by theological commitment, perhaps my own position is best characterized not specifically by the origins component, but by the hermeneutical component responsible for it. My hermeneutic is characterized by a firm conviction that the Bible is first and foremost a literary work and a product of the times in which its constituent content was written. Further, I am convinced that an examination of the genre of early Genesis will confirm it as a work of ANE literature and that consequently we need bring no expectations of a theological nature to the table when asking questions about origins. Almost incidentally, since I do not expect Genesis to answer the question of how the heavens and the earth and all that are in them originated (its authors seemed to be more interested in why), I look to mainstream science to answer that question — as most Christians do unquestioningly for questions of weather, embryology, etc. regardless of their view on origins. Perhaps this doesn’t give me a neat, tidy two-word descriptor, unless you like (as I confess I do) a term I coined a few years back: literary-genericist.

I would be remiss in not pointing out and appreciating Patton’s fair-minded ecumenicism on the origins issue:

I believe that one can be a legitimate Christian and hold to any one of these views….While I believe that this is an issue that we should continue to discuss with excitement and hope, this is not an issue, in my opinion, that should fracture Christian fellowship.

Thom Stark has just published an extensive critical review of Paul Copan’s recent book, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God.

And I do mean “extensive”: by page count, the review is actually longer than the original book. But most messes take longer to clean up than they do to make, don’t they?

As messes go, Copan’s book is certainly a doozie. An apologist par excellence, Copan pulls out all the stops to argue that God as pictured in the Old Testament is not in conflict with the God most Christians worship as the foundation of absolute morality. With Copan’s guide in hand, you’ll be more than equipped to do battle with non-inerrantists and other atheists who raise objections about the morality of the Old Testament:

• Q: Why did God tell the Israelites to slaughter people groups wholesale?
  A: He didn’t! Unless He did, or commanded something marginally less unconscionable, in which case it was unfortunate but necessary.
• Q: Wasn’t Torah misogynistic, responsible for the institutionalization of slavery, and the product of benighted ethnocentrism?
  A: Au contraire, the laws of Torah were wonderfully enlightened! Except when they weren’t, in which case they were the best thing going at the time.

And much, much more!

I’m trying to be light-hearted, but it’s probably coming off as snark. It’s just that I get a little annoyed whenever I talk about apologetics tactics: they’re characteristically shoddy, and do a lot better job keeping people from answering the good questions raised by outsiders than they do answering those questions for the outsiders’ benefit as advertised. It’s a pep talk for the choir and little else, yet apologists are lauded as the evangelical Christian version of real life intellectuals — which I guess kind of works in the same way that the Left Behind movie is the Christian version of a real movie.

I don’t want to uncharitably smear the motives of the leading apologists with too broad a brush; there’s far too much of that going around these days on all sides. But when you read some of Copan’s arguments it’s clear at least that even the well-intentioned occasionally let the need to make an argument get the better of their desire to make sure the argument is actually valid, whether by the requisite research or mere common sense.

Thankfully, contrary to popular opinion, apologetics and the inerrantist presuppositions they are formulated to prop up are not the only things standing between the faithful and godlessness. Our faith is only ever justified when placed in a God worth serving, a God who can indeed be found within Scripture but who would surely rather the whole thing be burned than to have people making careers out of passing off slick and ingenious (or not) justifications for every misconception about Him recorded in its pages. Further, I’d be willing to stake real money on my guess that apologetics are a more significant factor in both 1) the deconversion of people tired of pat answers and clever dismissals of hard facts and 2) the hostility toward Christianity as a system of irrational belief.

Thom’s review is more than a take-down of Copan’s book: it’s devastating for apologetics as an industry (I almost said “discipline”). Thankfully, we have all been provided easy access to the antidote:

This review may be freely distributed, reposted on your personal blogs and websites, printed off, emailed to friends and enemies, or completely ignored. If you do post it online or quote from it, please link back here or cite the source.

So once again, here’s the source: Is God a Moral Compromiser? A Critical Review of Paul Copan’s “Is God a Moral Monster?” via Religion at the Margins.

When Justin Brierley, host of the UK radio show Unbelievable?, told us of an upcoming show that would pit the author of Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan, against atheist humanist Norman Bacrac on the subject of Copan’s book, I fired off an email in protest. I was afraid that, if one non-ANE scholar claiming to speak authoritatively on ANE matters was going to be challenged by another non-ANE scholar, the discussion would consist of Copan’s claims about how moral and wonderful the OT picture of God actually is and Norman Bacrac being put in the position of merely weighing in on whether he thought those claims were moral/ethical enough, when in fact there are hosts of possible guests who would hold Copan’s feet to the fire and challenge his claims about what the OT and ANE history actually say.

There are times when being right is a bummer. This was one of those times, and Bacrac was placed in the odd position of having to assume Copan had presented the ANE and biblical evidence correctly and critiquing the more marginal of Copan’s points.

Yet one interesting point Bacrac made early on is as follows:

The interesting thing is that what Paul Copan has done is…given a kind of commentary, but that is exactly the tradition which in fact is two thousand years old, commentaries on the Bible. You can even look at the later prophets in the Old Testament, how they . . . sometimes contradicted earlier statements; then Talmud, Mishna, the rabbis living at the same time as Jesus, they all made commentary on it, and [Copan has] done [his] commentary on it. And then in Islam, you’ve got the traditions there.

His point?

“So what it seems to me to mean is that you need human beings to comment on all these allegedly divine instructions and commands, and soften them down and reinterpret them.”

Don’t let them tell you otherwise: inerrantists make judgments about what Scripture ought to say no less than those of us who affirm its thoroughgoing human provenance. When they come across biblical texts that they decide cannot mean what they seem to say, they contrive clever apologetics to defend God from being charged as a moral monster. They are using their own moral sense to evaluate and find the plain readings of Scripture wanting each time they determine that, “If God did that, it would be wicked, so God must not have done it,” which they follow up by taking into account their presupposition of inerrancy, hence, “…so that text only appears to reinforce that wicked thing.” This is the best that can be done given the faulty assumption of inerrancy; even Bacrac allows, “This is a perfectly valid humanistic thing” to do.

How Copan and the likeminded would answer the question, “Is God a moral monster?” would be to say, “Yes, if He did the things you think He did — we just don’t think He did.” I agree with them, but differ especially when they say that the Bible doesn’t say He did those things: it does.

But things get worse, I’m afraid. Copan’s book is not merely content to reinterpret texts to redeem them from bad charges, but he argues against all hope as well as reason that some of those same passages are actually meant to affirm something quite good, including the idea that the Israelites’ displacement and subjugation of non-Israelite people groups was necessary to prepare people several hundred years in the future for Messiah.

Copan’s main position is that genocide of men, women, and children did not happen as such, but that the texts use this hyperbolic speech to describe a military/political takeover of the indigenous population — to save them, of course. Says he, “…God is primarily concerned about disabling the moral and religious structures of the Canaanites.” Then, without any apparent recognition of irony, Copan continues, “For example, in Deuteronomy chapter 7, it uses the language of ‘wiping them out,’ of ‘destroying them,’ and so forth, but then it says, ‘Do not intermarry with them’ in the next verse.” Was such hyperbolic, violent rhetoric itself not a problematic moral structure, an effective strategy for dehumanizing the people whose land they were being commanded to steal? This language was not only left unproblematized but was actually perpetuated for posterity in the text of inspired Scripture. Intermarriage was a big no-no, but the language of eradication, of not showing mercy even to infants…that was ok. That would have been too hard to revise. It was much easier for God to have Israel dispossess people at swordpoint and destroy their culture and religious institutions than to reform His own people’s ideas of what constituted acceptable rhetoric, rhetoric that cannot be denied to have belied the brutal ancient morality and value systems that formed it.

Translation: God used rhetoric worthy of Hilter to describe a course of action more convincingly justified as humane by George W. Bush’s speechwriters. Israel was the ancient world’s police force, it appears, speaking loudly but carrying a little stick.

But the unnoticed irony doesn’t stop there: in defending his belief that God’s wrathful judgment such as he believes was brought upon the Canaanites via the Israelites, Copan quotes Miroslav Volf (as he does in his book), who wrote of the seminal event that changed Volf’s mind about whether God could be angry and be a loving God. I sympathize with Volf, and recognize the power of what he is saying, but amazingly, I don’t think Paul Copan has realized how much this undermines the very operation he thinks God commissioned the Israelites to perform:

My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, a region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed, and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them?

If Volf is correct, God might not be too happy about the same sort of forcible upheaval perpetrated by the Israelites, or pleased with Copan and his kissing cousins, the divine command theorists, who do their best to find excuses for it.

Critics of source criticism will inevitably be directed to stories such as the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 or the story of a patriarch’s attempt to pass off his wife as his sister when passing through a powerful man’s territory. These types of scenarios are referred to as doublets, which are said to be evidence of multiple traditions combined into one.

The argument for multiple sources based upon doublets used to strike me as a little odd: why would whoever edited the sources together leave information so blatantly contradictory, or at very least in tension? Is it just that people nowadays are finally smart enough to notice?  Apparently, the redactors were either too stupid to notice the tensions, which no one seems to want to suggest outright, or the tensions are based on a misunderstanding of one or more of the texts in question.

In a recent post at Religion at the Margins, Thom Stark explains why there is a good alternative for explaining doublets (and triplets, etc.):

Redactors compiled source materials not as a modern would, in order to weave a seamless, consistent narrative, but rather to bring together various traditions into one body. Their reasons for doing this were often political. As one people with one set of traditions came together with another people with another set of traditions, redactors would combine the traditions so that the new unity of the two peoples is reflected in the new unity of their various traditions. This political motivation is seen especially in the combination of traditions from the Yahwist and the Elohist, reflecting the period after the fall of the Northern Kingdom when many Israelites migrated south to live among their Judean kinsmen.

As a case in point, Thom singles out the conflicts in the Flood narratives and the way scholars have tried to extract the two traditions that were integrated into the one story we have: he gives links to the composite version and a side-by-side comparison that scholars have come up with to make the best sense of the elements in friction, such as the number of animals taken on board, the names by which God is referred to, and others.

Now, as is clear from the reading, if the redactor of these two traditions thought the texts weren’t contradictory, then he really must have been stupid! But source critics don’t think the redactor was stupid. The redactor’s purpose was not to combine the sources into a coherent, internally consistent narrative, but rather to combine the narratives in a way that allows them to maintain their distinctiveness while at the same time uniting them. Redactors cared about their source material, not because they thought it was “inerrant,” but because the source material reflected the traditions of the peoples. When the post-exilic redactor compiled these two flood narratives, he was doing so on behalf of two traditions both of which continued to be represented by the inhabitants of a post-exilic Judea.

This is something Thom talked about in Human Faces: that our expectations of inerrancy are not nearly as old as the texts themselves. The Jewish religious authorities long before Christ accepted both Kings and Chronicles, both Ezra and Jonah, apparently without being too bothered by the contradictions in history and theology within them.

Deane Galbraith chimes in with his own reflections on Thom’s post, helpfully quoting a 1981 article by Jack Miles:

It is the [modern] critics’ inability to imagine an aesthetic of disorder, or of deliberately mingled order and disorder, that may separate them most sharply from the ancient writers and editors they study. As they acquire this ability, perhaps by relinquishing what in modern times has been their quasi-religious vocation, they may find that they have less taste for the harmony and smoothness that historical scholarship would impose on the text.

Obsessing over purity can be hazardous to one's health.

I’m afraid that this contention that the ancients could live with more tension and uncertainty about historical details than we nowadays prefer will not make enough inroads among modern Christians who have swallowed modernism hook, line, and sinker. They have vilified post-modernism so much that they won’t recognize in it the cure for the disease they are trying through desperate apologetics to overcome: no, we don’t have all the facts, can’t look at everything as objectively as we’d like, undoubtedly get even key points of our theology wrong, and our sources of knowledge are likely screwed up even in important areas — but that’s ok. We live with the tension by making the best we can of what is available to us, and as Christians, we trust God with the rest.