Kicking Sacred Cows

Kicking Sacred Cows:
The Christian Bible is probably one of the most studied and interpreted texts in literary history, and Biblical interpretation has had significant impact on political and cultural events for the last two thousand years (hello, Crusades!). Beyond its role in inflaming armed conflicts, the Bible has been a cornerstone of (Foucault-style) epistemological development in several European societies, and indirectly shaped the development of science, medicine, literature, technology, and art across the world. Biblical exegesis has shifted with historical developments and varied among cultures (further influencing Biblical interpretations), though many contemporary audiences forget the text's mutability of form and meaning through translation, editing, and other alterations. Luckily "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years" by Diarmaid MacCulloch can tell us all about it, or lazy people like me can catch the highlights in the New York Times' review of MacCulloch's book, conveniently written from the perspective of a New Historicist.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/books/review/Meacham-t.html

New York Times writer Jon Meacham leads a fascinating discussion of the development of Christian doctrine in MacCullock's book, and points out the significance of certain New Testament highlights to the Bible's earliest audiences. "For Christians, the answer to Pilate’s question about truth is the death and Resurrection of Jesus and what those events came to represent for believers. “Came to” is a key point, for the truth as Peter and the apostles saw it on that dark Friday was not the truth as 21st--century Christians see it. The work of discerning — or, depending on your point of view, assigning — meaning to the Passion and the story of the empty tomb was a historical as well as a theological process, as was the construction of the faith." The review then describes the process Jesus' disciples followed in interpreting the events of Jesus' life and teachings as they tried to reconcile his death and subsequent events with their Jewish messianic beliefs. These Jewish beliefs were unfamiliar to me, and I had heard very little about the active construction of Christian faith before the 4th century AD; the teachers of Christianity I've met have presented the Bible as a received text and events of the life of Jesus Christ as hardly questionable. Like a good New Historicist critic, Meacham then asks: "To what extent should holy books be read and interpreted critically and with a sense of the context in which they were written, rather than taken literally? His answer that "Christianity cannot be seen as a force beyond history, for it was conceived and is practiced according to historical bounds and within human limitations" could have come out of Bressler. Meacham's final message that religion is fluid and that historians have a role in determining belief and doctrine seems very relevant to New Historicism, and hints that the technique may still have a role in contemporary literary criticism.