Intertextuality and dialogue

Abstract

The Bible, both Jewish and Christian, is a dialogical literature. It is a compilation of many different human expressions of and responses to divine revelations over fifteen hundred years from the Bronze Age to the Greco-Roman. The Bible is also very intertextual; it is full of itself. From the earliest literary forms to the latest, earlier traditions and texts, national and international, are interwoven developing new meanings out of old ideas. Critically trained rabbis and pastors in all the major seminaries know these things about the Bible but do not always share them with their parishioners. Intense interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls has brought such critical issues out into the open, even as serious study of the Scrolls has confirmed critical readings of the Bible. How can the Scriptures of Early Judaism give rise to two such distinct religions as Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity? The Bible, one testament or two, in effect mandates dialogue between the two similar but disparate faiths if either is interested in a valid, postmodern search for truth.

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There have been remarkable, even revolutionary developments in the study of Early Jewish and Christian origins as a result of fifty years of study of the Judean Desert (so-called Dead Sea) Scrolls. The intense interest on the part of the general public in the Scrolls derives from the fact that most of them come from the period just before the birth of Early Christianity and the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism. Many discoveries from other periods important to biblical study have not yet been published, but there has been nowhere near the clamor calling for open access to those. None of those, however, touches so directly on existential questions of spiritual identity in the public at large.

The Scrolls and Religious Identity

Many Jews and Christians feel personally involved in the information the Scrolls contain about the origins of these two major faiths; theirs is an existential interest. There is the fear as well as the hope that the Scrolls are going to prove or disprove their faith, or major tenets in it. One who is asked to lecture to lay and pastoral groups around the country is steadily barraged with questions about Jesus, or James his brother, or John the Baptist, because of theories about the Scrolls that get into the popular media; and most such theories are either unfounded or dubious because of the multivalent nature of the languages of the Scrolls (Sanders 1985: 167-84). The very nature of the Scrolls demands careful and scrupulous discussion by scholars fully aware of the multivalency of unpointed Hebrew texts (Fragments 1992). Along with open access, which almost everyone is for, has gone, unfortunately, a less than scholarly rush to the popular press with unfounded or poorly based theories that feed the hopes and fears of layfolk.

One's religion is the essence of one's identity, even in the Western world, which emphasizes individual worth, merit, and responsibility. Confession of faith is a confession of identity. Some lay folk have suspected for some time that their faith was not as historically well founded as they had once thought. Scepticism among lay Jews and Christians has been building during the course of the twentieth century, and they come to lectures on the Scrolls hoping to hear confirmation either of their scepticism or of their faith, their fear, or their hope. Some have already decided to leave synagogue or church and want the decision bolstered; some have left the mainline religions and sought refuge in fundamentalist groups that traffic in simplistic views of biblical authority; and some are in the throes of deciding just what they should think.

That is a heavy burden to place on the Scrolls or on any other archaeological find. In the 1950s, as the Scrolls were first coming to light, they appeared on a scene in which there was already intense discussion of whether archaeology could in some way verify or falsify historically founded faiths like Judaism and Christianity (Davis; Charlesworth & Weaver). This was especially the case in this country, where archaeology has been somewhat overvalued and even romanticized, in part because of the massive influence of William F. Albright, who with immense expertise and imagination combined the fields of archaeology and philology to address the basic question of how to span the time gap between historical event and biblical record. His tendency was to date biblical sources earlier than other scholars and thus reduce the gap, apparently increasing the level of credibility of the biblical accounts over what source and form criticism, developed and refined in German scholarship, had determined were their later dates in antiquity. Today the one position is called "maximalist," while the other is called "minimalist." Albright developed an organismic view of history, which seemed to support conservative views of the historical reliability of the biblical record. It was considered fairly safe to study the Bible in the Albright mode, and administrators and trustees of conservative seminaries felt it prudent to hire such scholars on their faculties; it was a mode that brought focus to the question of the relation of history and faith (Albright: 128-29).