Bible and culture 4: The Multiperspectival Bible

The transcultural nature of the Bible (see the previous post in this series) is reflected and instantiated in the biblical documents themselves in at least four ways. Each of these ways shows how the Bible crosses multiple perspectives in a way that neither homogenises them into undifferentiated unity nor fragments them into irreconcilable incoherence.

First of all, the Bible is composed of plural genres. The books of the Old and New Testaments contain a rich array of different literary genres, ranging through narrative, proverb, law, poetry psalm and prophecy, gospel, epistle and apocalyptic. And yet it has been the constant witness of the church that this generic plurality provides a series of complementary perspectives on God and his creatures that cannot be reduced to any one generic expression. There is no ground zero genre of the Bible, no baseline from which all other genres are deviations and departures. Each genre brings a set of conventions and assumptions, and reveals a set of features, attitudes and perspectives that cannot be exhaustively replicated in any other generic approach. If this radical generic diversity is not unique among major religious texts, it is certainly unusual.

Secondly, the Bible was written in, and represents life in, plural epochs and social structures, from the nomadic to the enslaved to the prosperous to the exiled and the occupied, from the extended family to the tribe, nation, exiles and remnant, and from the second millennium BC to the first decades of the first millennium AD. It is, in this sense, an “old book” as C. S. Lewis uses the term: a book that does not share our contemporary assumptions or blindspots, and that was not written for our particular culture. More than that, it is a library of old books, illuminating our blindspots and assaulting our prejudices from a kaleidoscope of angles simultaneously. Indeed, the Bible cannot be contained by any one epoch or in any one cultural mode—least of all the angst-ridden opulence of late capitalism—in part because it is not itself contained by any particular social or cultural structure. Once again, this sets the Bible apart from most other foundational religious texts, both of the major world religions and of more recent religious groups.

Thirdly, the Bible contains plural languages. It is not just that Christians at some point in history (notably Jerome with his Vulgate translation) decided that it was appropriate to read the Bible in translation. The biblical documents themselves validate translation:

• Jesus spoke Aramaic, but from the first New Testament manuscripts onwards, his words were recorded in Greek.
• The New Testament quotes the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament), rather than the “original” Hebrew.
• As Lesslie Newbigin rightly points out, the incarnation is itself the ultimate paradigm of translation, so the Christian faith has at its very heart a validation of divine culture-crossing.

The biblical texts themselves are multilingual:

• the vast majority of the Old Testament is in Hebrew, but chapters 2:4-7:28 of Daniel are in Aramaic, the international trading language of the day, along with Ezra 4:8 to 6:18 and 7:12–26, and Jeremiah 10:11.
• The New Testament is written in a different language to the Old, koine Greek or the Greek of ordinary people.
• Jesus himself, however, would have not addressed crowds in Greek but in Aramaic, so his words are recorded in translation.
• The New Testament itself contains translations of some Aramaic terms:
  • Talitha qumi (“little girl, get up!”) Mark 5:41
  • Ephphatha (“Be opened”) Mark 7:34
  • Eli, Eli, lema sebaqtani (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) Mark 15:34, Matthew 27:46
  • Abba (“Father”) Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6
  • Maranatha (“Lord, come!”) 1 Corinthians 16:22

One implication of the multilingual text of the Bible is that God is not locked into, constrained or confined to revealing himself in one language alone. Of course not: he is God. In terms of the dynamic that Calvin labelled “divine accommodation”, God makes it his problem to communicate adequately in different languages, and it is not too great a task for him to do so. This provides the church with a mandate and an impetus to translate the Bible into all the languages of the globe, for the gospel is transcultural and can be embodied and lived out in any and all cultures, challenging them at some points and affirming them at others (as we shall explore in a future post).

Fourthly, the Bible repeatedly represents plural perspectives.

• The very first two chapters of the Bible contain two accounts of creation, highlighting different aspects of the same events.
• The books of Samuel/Kings and Chronicles relate overlapping historical events, emphasising different perspectives, taking a different focus, and writing in a different genre.
• The books of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs provide two very different perspectives on how to live wisely under the sun, Proverbs outlining the predictable and reasonable way in which life usually works out, and Ecclesiastes the utterly unpredictable and perverse way in which life often seems to work out.
• The Bible contains no fewer than four accounts of the gospel, three of which contain substantially similar but not identically presented material.
• We have epistles from multiple authors Paul, Peter, James, John, and the author of the letter to the Hebrews, each with their own emphases and literary styles.

Were this perspectival plurality to happen but once in the biblical documents then it could be accounted for as a minor canonical curiosity, but its persistent reoccurrence strongly suggests that there is something systematically deliberate about this biblical recourse to offering plural perspectives of the same events or realities.

It is necessary but not sufficient, however, to claim that the Bible contains plural genres, epochs, languages and perspectives; we must go further than claim that it is trans-generic, trans-epochal, trans-linguistic and trans-perspectival. The prefix trans- in these cases implies not only a plurality but an organic unity among the plural perspectives, modelled on the Trinitarian “equal ultimacy” of the one and the many that marks another distinctive of Christian thought. In other words, there is no contradiction between the plural perspectives. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, for example, are two important perspectives on the way of the world, irreducibly different, superficially contradictory at times, and yet indispensible to each other for a complete and complex approach to wisdom.

This stubbornly multiperspectival quality of the Bible offers a sturdy, four-stranded rope lending strength claims that the gospel can find its home in radically different cultures without either denaturing or simply affirming any individual human society. In the next post in this series I will consider biblical and late modern models for conjuring with cultural diversity.