The Bible is built around two great narratives...
The Bible is built around two great narratives:
• The Moses-centered epic (Genesis-Kings, “the Primary History”) that speaks of human origins and ancient Israel, especially Judea, an epic that extends across 3,500 years from creation to the fall of Jerusalem.
• The four-fold account of Jesus (the four gospels), often echoing the epic, and including his death in Jerusalem.
Both narratives have extensions. Genesis-Kings is repeated and extended in several books (Chronicles to Maccabees); and the gospel narrative is echoed and extended in the Acts of the Apostles. Both extensions move far beyond Jerusalem, and even involve Rome (1 Maccabees 14-15; Acts 28).
The two great narratives are among the most influential writings in world, yet it is not clear how to define them. Are they fact or fiction, story or symbol?
Bishop Ussher used the Primary History (Genesis-Kings) to calculate the age of the universe and he set creation at about 4,000 BC. But science and geology proved otherwise—some rocks were clearly millions of years old—and gradually the two great narratives have been thoroughly reassessed. What does one say, for instance, about the creation account, the Deluge, the fall of the walls of Jericho, David and Goliath, Solomon’s temple? Archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon went to Jericho to seek light on the walls. Albert Schweitzer, reviewing the investigation of Jesus, produced a classic: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906). Others brought the investigations further. Opinions vary:
(1) The narratives are more or less factual (“historical”)—the best written records.
(2) No, they consist of historiography—an ancient form of narrative that gave priority to features such as instruction rather than to recounting individual events.
(3) Rather, they are complex; they synthesize diverse forms of writing, including historiography, old-style biography, and prophecy. The debate continues.
Two problems often plague the quest for history:
• Impatience with preliminary literary questions. Much historical research occurs in a literary vacuum. Investigators are so eager to establish important issues of history that the role of literature is bypassed—the role, for instance, of Homer and Virgil, and of ancient artistic processes of reworking sources and giving texts structure and depth. Profound narratives are reduced to a facile question: true or false? Facile literary analysis leads to facile history.
• Overvaluing reconstructed history. The splendor of the two great narratives is often replaced by narrow purposes or narrow histories. Reconstructed histories of an elusive ancient Israel are used for or against the modern state of Israel. And reconstructed histories of Jesus often replace the role of Jesus as the voice of God. In some ways, history has become an idol.
Countering these problems is one of the purposes of Thomas Brodie’s books: The Gospel According to John; The Quest for the Origin of John’s Gospel; The Crucial Bridge. The Elijah-Elisha Narrative; Genesis as Dialogue; The Birthing of the New Testament.