How I read the Bible 4: Was Jesus a Fundamentalist?

A court case took place in 1925 in the state of Tennessee USA when William Jennings Bryan, a local politician. accused a school teacher. J.T. Scopes, of the horrendous crime of teaching the children of the town of Dayton the wicked idea of biological evolution. This case was a sign of the growing strength of a new movement among Protestant Churches called Fundamentalism. It has of course been repeated many times since then and remains an issue for many Christians.

Fundamentalism is now a familiar phrase bringing to mind especially a certain view of the Bible, that its statements are literally true. This approach to the Bible is often presented as maintaining a traditional faithfulness to Bible teaching against modem compromise and liberalism. In fact, far from being a traditional view it is a newcomer. The Scopes case took place after the First World War and in response to the advances of scientific understanding. Faced with this a wave of conservative religious movements developed - among Protestant Christians, and also in Islamic communities. Here too the reaction to modern approaches led to the emergence of the kind of fundamentalist Islam represented by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Both the scientific liberal approach and the literal fundamentalist approach to the text of the Bible are based on the same understanding of truth - that it is to do with the way things actually are and can be discovered by experiment or deduction. It is observable and verifiable. Just as a scientist conducts an experiment or a historian investigates what took place or a journalist tries to be objective - so the reader of the Bible can be confident that he is given a presentation of what is factually the case. Once this truth is grasped then any other account is false. There is no alternative.

I want to try to go back behind both these approaches and try to get a sense of an older way of reading the Scriptures and even to ask if we can sense how Jesus himself might have understood the Bible - for him of course it would have been the Old Testament. This might help us to be more open to God's word as addressed to us, and to guide us to be more constructive in our own search for truth.

Jesus was a Jew - he came from a Semitic culture - and thought and reacted from within that culture and way of thinking. The Church quickly moved out of this Semitic culture into a Greek and then later a Latin culture, and the gospel was presented in these terms - as is recounted in the book of Acts.

But Semitic theology survived, and still survives. The Aramaic spoken by Jesus is one of a cluster of

dialects of Syriac. a language still used by the Syrian Orthodox Church. Pilgrims to Jerusalem used - in more peaceful days - to visit one of the traditional sites of the Last Supper - now a Syrian Orthodox Church - and a Syrian priest would read the words of institution at the Lord's Supper in Turoyo Syriac -and we would be able to hear the words as they would have been heard on that momentous night in around 30 CE. The great centres of Syriac theology in the early centuries were Edessa and Nisibis (modern Urfa and Nuseybin). By 400 Greek writing was extending its influence but until then there remained a distinctive Syrial Semitic tradition, which was I suggest as close as we can get to the understanding the mindset of Jesus. The writings of two great theologians from that period survuve -Aphrahat the Persian Sage and Ephrem the Syrian. I would like to look at how Ephrem read the Bible and suggest that just possibly his approach was closer to that of a first century Jew than that of either a fundamentalist or a liberal of the 21st Century.

Ephrem was born in the early years of the 4th century. 306 is the date usually given for no particular reason. He lived and taught in Nisibis until it was captured by the Persians in 363 at which point he moved a hundred miles or so to the west to Edessa where he lived for the last ten years of his life. He has left a large body of writing. The largest and most famous part were his hymns - or madrashe. Here I suggest is a key point. Scripture is not something for analysis and research - it is something for singing, worship and wonder.

God himself is unknowable, and beyond our understanding. There is no way that we can reach him with our minds. So Ephrem is deeply suspicious of any kind of philosophical approach to theology. Any definitions or intellectual discussion of God's nature is bound to be at best misleading and at worst blasphemous.

However all is not lost - because God has chosen to come towards us and to make himself known. He does this in various ways, one of which is through words, and in the names and metaphors which are to be read in the Scriptures. He talks on several occasions of God clothing himself inhuman language, or 'putting on names'. We can see the words of Scripture as God's clothes.

Let us give thanks to God who clothed himself in the names of the body's various parts,

Scripture refers to his 'ears' to teach us that he listens to us:

It speaks of his eyes. to show that He sees us.

It was just the names of such things that he put on,

And although in His true being there is not wrath or regret.

Yet he put on these names too, because of our weakness.

Refrain: Blessed is He who has appeared to our human race under so many metaphors.

We should realise that, had He not put on the names,

Of such things, it would not have been possible for Him,

To speak with us humans. By means of what belongs to us did He draw close to us,

He clothed himself in our language, so that he might clothe us

In his mode of life. He asked for our form and put this on,

And then as a father with His children, He spoke with our childish state.

Words are there for God to make himself known to us who he has come to. It follows that the purpose of this process of making himself known to not to set out some final and ultimate truth but to communicate. Each word holds an infinity of meanings, and however much we meditate on each phrase there is still more meaning for be discerned.

If there only existed a single sense for the words of Scripture, then the first commentator who came along would discover it, and other hearers would experience neither the labour of searching, nor the joy finding. Rather each word of our Lord has its own form, and each form has its own members, and each member has its own character. Each individual understands according to his capacity and interprets as it is granted to him.

Here are several verses of one of Ephrem' s most famous hymns, from his long series on Faith. It reflects on the Pearl. He begins with the image of the kingdom of God as a Pearl of Great Price, then goes on to think about its clarity and luminosity, its satisfaction of the sense, and then goes on to describe the apostles as pearl fishers, stripping of the clothing of their human nature to dig deep into the mysteries of God's love to find this great gift and show it to others. We should imagine these poems sung during worship by a cantor, with the congregation responding. It becomes a shared communal meditation on Scripture. These hymns are still used in Syrian Orthodox Churches, and the lengthy singing and responding are a part of the daily rhythm of worship.

One day, my brethren, I took a pearl in my hands:

In it I beheld symbols which told of the kingdom,

Images and figures of God's majesty,

It became a fountain from which I drank the mysteries of the Son.

In the luminosity of the pearl I saw the luminous one

Who cannot be perturbed; in its purity

Is a wonderful symbol - the Body of the Lord,

Wholly unsullied.

Like the manna which of its own sufficed

To fill the people, in place of other foods,

Thanks to its tastiness, so too has the pearl

Filled me, replacing books

And reading and commenting on them.

Men stripped bare dived down and drew you up.

O pearl. It was not kings

Who first presented you to humankind

But men stripped, symbols of the apostles, poor Galilean fishermen.

They could not approach you with their bodies clothed

So they came stripped, like little children;

They buried their bodies and descended to you,

You eagerly met them and you take refuge in them

Because they loved you so.

The tongues of these poor men, the apostles,

Proclaimed glad tidings of you before they opened their bosoms

And brought out their new wealth to show it

Amidst the merchants, placing you

In people's hands as the Medicine of Life.

In reading and listening to the hymns of St Ephrem, we may seem to be a long way both from the world of the carpenter's son form Nazareth, and also from the modern church with its passionate debates on topics such as medical ethics or human sexuality. I return to the question of whether Ephrem can help us understand both of these worlds.

I suggest that he can help us gain a sense of how Jesus thought and how he approached Scripture. His teaching is full of images and objects which show us something of God's nature. He called them parables. Ephrem called them metaphors. But they have the same character of taking an example of everyday objects and experience and then reflecting on them to get a glimpse of something of God's nature and action. Verses of Scripture are also used in a similar way in the Gospels. They do not become definitions or binding laws, but are used to help the listener to reach out towards God. Take familiar words from St Matthew's account of the Sermon on the Mount. People used to say 'thou shalt not kill' - here is the text of Scripture - but I say to you - and in contrast Jesus invites his hearers to think further and in new ways of total generosity of God and of how we must be constantly going further avoiding even angry words and thoughts. Parables and teachings - all are used to help us reach out towards the God who has reached out to embrace us.

I also think that Ephrem's use of Scripture provides a salutary reminder to us. Today we are in the midst of a bitter debate about homosexuality. It is easy to take a few verses to act as a support for whatever position - conservative or liberal - which we are sympathetic with, and to use these texts as an unanswerable proof. Ephrem's hymns show us another way. Scripture is not there as a resource for us to use to defend any view which we might hold - rather it is there to constantly question, challenge, excite and transform us. Scripture also should not be use to divide us one form another but to evoke our wonder at the richness and variety of Christian experience. It doesn't give definitions or answers. Rather it helps us worship and enjoy the wonder of the presence of the God who meets us in his world, his words and the person of Christ.

Note: the translations of the poems of Ephrem are taken from a study by Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye (Kalmnazoo Michigan 1985).