Top English teachers see value of teaching Bible as literature

http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20050501-123837-2837r.htm

 

There seems to be an incredibly misguided idea (even among public school principals) that one cannot teach the Bible in the public schools. True, one cannot use the Bible (or any other religious text) to force one particular religion down the throats of one's student victims. However, it has always been legal to use the Bible for a class in the Bible as History or the Bible as Literature. It also escapes me how anyone can expect to be truly culturally literate in today's society without a knowledge of the Bible. - Ted.

 

I don't think that anyone seriously denies that the Bible should be included in the scope of university literature classes. My impression is that most American literature programs include it.

I just did a Google search for "bible as literature" site:.edu, and got more than 18,000 hits. Just scrolling down through the first few, I saw many familiar secular-private and state universities.

Cal State Hayw... oops, East Bay's undergraduate catalog listings includes

4710 Bible for Students of Literature (4)
Major events, characters, themes, and phases of the authorized (King James) version of the Bible and the influence of these upon the literature and language of the English-speaking peoples.

Of course, it also includes things like:

4720 Mythology (4)
Cosmologies and cosmogonies: readings from literatures of the Orient, the Near East, the Mediterranean, and Europe. Prerequisites: ENGL 1001 and junior standing. (Y)

4742 The Fairy Tale (4)
Literary and oral traditional fairy tales, from the "classics" of children's literature to contemporary revisions. Prerequisites: ENGL 1001 and junior standing.
_

 

Yes, but since a substantial number of people never go to college, the question becomes: How prevalent are Bible as History and Bible as Literature courses at the high school level?

 

Yeah... that's what I was thinking, too. I'm a pinko, punko, commie, lefty (at least as far as the right wing zealots in these forums probably think), and I certainly don't see a problem with the bible being taught as literature...

...right along side the Koran (or Qur'an, or however one wants to spell it), and the Talmud, and all kinds of other religious writings. What's the problem with that?

I think Charles really thought he was breaking some ground, here. Burying one's nose in the good-for-nothing Washington Times and posting articles from it here, as if it were really news, will do that to a person.

There ya' go!

No surprise there!

See, there ya' go again, takin' a mile when you were only given an inch. No one's talking about teaching the bible as history. Except maybe in a course entitled "Is the Bible Historically Accurate?" in which the historical accuracy of its passages are either proved or disproved in secular ways; or are at least treated as suspect until they can be proved, the bible should never be treated as a "historical" text in secular education. What unaccredited private schools do; or what accredited private schools do, as long as they do nothing to violate the terms of their accreditation, is entirely their business. But what is taught in public, secular schools is my business -- is every citizens' business. And teaching the bible as history in such places should never happen...

...nor should some psycho, right-winged, religious zealot be allowed to sneak it in somehow.

 

Typical. Here we have another DesElms waste of bandwidth. He writes such long posts without contributing a single thing to the conversation. All this from an individual who signs every single post with a link to a moon bat partisan attack website.

The Washington Times article makes no mention of other sacred texts. I was surprised to learn that Massachusetts requires selections from the Bible to be taught as part of high school English classes. Again there is not even a hint of the other sacred texts being taught along side of the Bible. Why not other sacred texts? Could it be that they are not as relevant to the literature of Western civilization as the Bible?

 

DesElms:

(1) Taking a mile when I was given but an inch? Hardly! The Bible can be taught in public secondary schools in any context other than as a device whereby to shove one particular religious truth down the throats of one's captive audience.

(2) I am. We are talking about teaching the Bible in the public secondary schools. The Bible is (in addition to being a religious text) a work of literature and history. In addition to being the Jewish people's record of their own history (and hence one of the primary source documents of the history of ancient Israel), the Bible is also very important in Western civilization as a source of the history of ideas, as many of the great reform movements in the history of Western civilization were religious in origin. The Bible is also a source of much that was and is great in the history of art, literature, and music in the Western world. And nobody ever suggested excluding secondary works on such archaeological digs as may confirm/deny the accounts of Biblical history.

(3) Indeed.

(4) Indeed. It would, however, be nice if those determining the education of our young actually would actually possess some degree of cultural and historical literacy.

(5) I certainly hope that you were neither saying, implying, nor hoping that your readers would infer that I am a "psycho right-wing religious zealot": for you see, my good man, I am a manic left-wing historical zealot. And I hope that in your next waste of bandwidth here that you remember what your Terms of Service agreement says about ad hominem.

 

I wouldn't offer the Bible as any sort of textbook or source of authority. Period.

However, the King James version has had a powerful influence on the English language and culture. I think that a full understanding of English literature requires a decent familiarity with the Bible.

I also don't see how anyone can claim to understand the history of Western, and after about 1800, WORLD history without a solid knowledge of the genesis, growth, and eventual triumph of the Christian Church as a secular power. Church history makes no sense without a basic knowledge of Christian belief and practice.

NONE of this requires the student to accept any Christian doctrine for himself.

 

I would. New archeological finds continue to reinforce the Bible as a solid historical reference. Not one archeological find has EVER conclusively proven anything in the Bible to be untrue.

 

I would. But mind you I never said that the Bible would be the only text or even the main text. Perhaps I failed to state this explicitly, but my vision of a high school course in the Bible as history would have as texts both the Bible and one (or more) book(s) on Biblical history as supported by Holy Land archaeology and such records of surrounding kingdoms as the Ammonites, Babylonians, Canaanites, Edomites, Egyptians, Greeks, Hittites, Ishmaelites, Midianites, Moabites, Persians, Philistines, Phoenicians, Romans, Sumerians, and Syrians (and forgive me if I've forgotten anybody), to the extent that the records of any of the peoples' contacts with the ancient Jews exist/can be found.

It always puzzles me when people think that the Jews' account of their own history cannot by itself be reliable. When was the last time that you heard someone say, "Herodutus, Thucydides, and Xenophon are unreliable as sources of Greek history because they're just a bunch of old Greek dudes"? Or when was the last time you heard someone say, "Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius can't possibly be reliable sources of Roman history because they're just a bunch of old Roman dudes"?

True. It would be nice to have comparative accounts of Jewish history from their neighbors (and we do, at least from some of them) in order to verify or supplement (or maybe sometimes contradict) the Biblical account. But has anyone ever suggested that anything that we know about Greek history is false until we hear from the Egyptians, Indians, Jews, Persians, Romans, Syrians, and Trojans? Is Roman history false unless and until we are given permission to believe same by the Arabs, Britons, Carthaginians, Egyptians, Etruscans, Gauls, Germans, Greeks, Iberians, Jews, Persians, and Syrians?

My point is this: if you wish to believe that all of history is but a lie agreed upon, then, okay, believe it. But don't discriminate against one small slice of history by calling that a lie agreed upon while calling all the rest of history the truth.

 

Archeology? Well, yes, by golly, I suppose that's right. I was, as you will have divined, thinking in terms of historical "facts" such as Moses receiving God's words directly on Mt. Sinai or the sun standing still over the battlefield.

However, even when the Bible recites non supernatural history, I recommend caution, especially since proving something NOT to have happened is much harder logically than proving that it DID.

For instance: you may well discover that the story of the exodus is mostly myth with a slight infusion of fact.

 

And just how would I "discover" this? No one has ever presented a valid reason for me to think that the Exodus from Egypt is anything but fact other than their belief in the pseudo-science of evolution. The "from goo-to-you-via-the-zoo" theory is scientifically weak and does nothing to sway my faith.

 

...and since I'm on that topic anyway, I want to add that there are MANY in the scientific community who see evolution for what it is: junk science.

Consider the following open letter submitted to Dr. Steve Abrams, Chair of Kansas State Board of Education, by Professor Philip S. Skell, member of the National Academy of Sciences and Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, at Penn State University.6

For those scientists who take it seriously, Darwinian evolution has functioned more as a philosophical belief system than as a testable scientific hypothesis. This quasi-religious function of the theory is, I think, what lies behind many of the extreme statements that you have doubtless encountered from some scientists opposing any criticism of neo-Darwinism in the classroom. It is also why many scientists make public statements about the theory that they would not defend privately to other scientists like me.

In my judgment, this state of affairs has persisted mainly because too many scientists were afraid to challenge what had become a philosophical orthodoxy among their colleagues. Fortunately, that is changing as many scientists are now beginning to examine the evidence for neo-Darwinism more openly and critically in scientific journals.

Intellectual freedom is fundamental to the scientific method. Learning to think creatively, logically and critically is the most important training that young scientists can receive. Encouraging students to carefully examine the evidence for and against neo-Darwinism, therefore, will help prepare students not only to understand current scientific arguments, but also to do good scientific research.

I commend you for your efforts to ensure that students are more fully informed about current debates over neo-Darwinism in the scientific community.

 

I will not attempt to defend the scientific method to someone who simply refuses to learn it.

I will only say that the Church has fought a scientific approach to learning about the physical world for about a thousand years. The Church has been proven wrong over and over and over.

Creationism and intellegent design are not science. They may be perfectly true or perfectly false, but they are not science.

 

This would be a valid argument for someone with a completely closed mind; however, as someone who is very interested in the origins of life, I promise you that I have spent a considerable amount of time exploring the theory of evolution, probably more so than most. The science simply isn't there. Never has been really. I'm actually quite glad that you mentioned the scientific method. It is typically not found in any evolution research. Evolution is nothing more than a philosophy than a real science.

 

(1) Ah, yesh, indeed! Biblical History with the miracles or without them? I was thinking in terms of "proving the Bible" along the same lines as Schliemann "proved the Iliad." In Mycenaean Archaeology, not even such romantic types as Heinrich Schliemann nor his acolyte Carl Blegen would have dared to proclaim, "I have proven by my excavations at Troy and Mycenae the literal truth of every word of Homer!"

As to the Sun standing still on the battlefield (which, by the way, happened for Hezekiah in 700 BC [?] as well as for Joshua in 1400 BC [?]), there is a Biblical scholar in Seattle with degrees in geology and theology who wrote a book entitled _Catastrophism in the Old Testament_ in which he claims that in ancient times Mars had such an eccentric orbit that it crossed Earth's orbit (much as Pluto's orbit crosses Neptune's today) which resulted in near-collisions every 700 years and the gravitational effects thereof may have caused the Sun to stand still on those two occasions.

(2) It is, of course, true that it is more difficult to prove that something DID NOT happen than it is to prove that something DID happen. This is why, thank God, in our jurisprudential system, the government is required to prove someone GUILTY rather than the defendant being required to prove himself INNOCENT.

There has been a paradigm shift within the discipline of Biblical Archaeology wherein late nineteenth century and early twentieth century scholars assumed that the Biblical account is TRUE UNLESS DISPROVEN while late twentieth and early twenty-first century scholars assume that the Biblical account is FALSE UNTIL PROVEN CORRECT. No doubt this trend was accelerated by the romanticized tendency of early Biblical archaeologists to assume that the finding of one Biblical archaeological artefact that would verify one event in Biblical history would "prove the literal truth of every word of the Bible" as opposed to the more limited (and more proper) claim that such a discovery proves the truth of just that one event of Biblical history.

On the other hand, failure to find evidence of one particular Biblical history event in a Biblical archaeology dig hardly constitutes evidence that the entire Bible, or even that one event, is one big lie. To take an example from another activity that involves digging up the earth - mineral exploration (though my World of the Old Testament colleagues from Faith Evangelical Lutheran Seminary didn't exactly appreciate this comparison) - the chap who originally owned the Comstock property stopped digging and sold his claim as if it were near worthless only to find that had he dug another ten or fifteen feet further he would have found the treasure he was looking for. And archaeological artefacts are treasures, whether they be golden idols or mere humble pottery sherds.

(3) Indeed. Ian Wilson holds that the story of the Exodus and the ten plagues can be taken as a folk memory within Egypt of the natural disasters that followed upon the explosion of the Santorini (Thera) volcano and a particular group that refused to partake in sacrifices to the god that controlled said volcano.

 

It seems to me that if an explanation is going to be successful, the explanatory account needs to be better understood than what it's being called upon to explain. In other words, we explain the more mysterious in terms of what's less mysterious.

If our explanation is more mysterious than what it's being called upon to explain, then we don't really have an explanation at all. What we have instead is an example of mystification.

That creates obvious problems for explanations that require the intervention of miraculous powers and divine entities.

 

Thank you gentlemen, for rescuing me from a post that was, in truth, much snottier than I have any right to be.

Anyway, I assure you all that, as a Jew, I consider the haftarah to be as much a history book of my people as any fundamentalist Christian or Orthodox Jew could do. But I DO keep in mind that history is written by the victorious in the context of their culture.

As for the miracles retold in B'reshit and b'midbar, well, these are as much folk tales as Geo. Washington and the cherry tree or (probably) Franklin and his key and kite.

Scientists postulate an idea that is subject to experimental or observational proof. Religion does not. That is why I say that religious expressions such as creationism have no place in science. I am most emphatically NOT SAYING that religion has no place in human life! In another thread, I hope I made that quite clear!

 

Oh my Gawd! I can't believe I forgot the mean nasty Assyrians! Oy vey! And the Shebans, too!

 

AV8R,

It is possible to have faith in the Bible and faith in modern science as well. The great theological writer and sometime scientist Isaac Newton had faith in both. It is possible to compare the orders of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 with the order of evolution in modern science. It is also possible to believe that the seven days of creation need not necessarily be literal 24-hour days, especially since a day is as 1,000 years with the Lord. So conceivably God could have created things and let them evolve in their own direction. Couldn't He? Just like He created man and left him with the free will to rush pell mell straight to Hell if he so chooses. Eh? - Theo.