Zampanò

Dear Reader,

Over the last couple years, I've finally sat down to make some attempts at reading Scripture. Like with most things I do, I've started and stopped repeatedly over that time, and not come close to actually finishing. But this hasn't meant that no thoughts or insights have been forthcoming.

First, some background. I grew up in a religious but non-practicing household. We talked about God and our spirituality a fair amount, but only went to an actual church service a handful of times. Then as a teenager, through my mom and a friend of hers I discovered Quakers, and that became my home. In many ways it still is, even if I'm not a regular attender of a meeting for worship.

Meanwhile, Scripture was not a significant part of my spiritual upbringing. I think I may have had pieces of the Bible read to me as a kid, but I think what I got was mostly just general cultural osmosis. I just never felt especially compelled to read it or to live my life by it, even if I could appreciate its prose and its influence. But eventually, by which I mean sometime in my early 30s, I thought I should give it a shot. My background was fortunate in a way, in that I was coming to the New Testament (the first piece I decided to read) without the baggage of institutional interpretations.

My next decision was that I wouldn't rely on a translation, but would instead read it in Greek. I had some background in Classical Greek, so thankfully it didn't take me a ton of time to familiarize myself with Koine, the dialect of the New Testament (and the Roman Empire generally of that time period). I have sought out commentaries, however.

So with all that done, it was off to the races. I decided to begin with the Gospel of Mark for two reasons. First, it is now believed to have been the first of the Synoptic Gospels (meaning Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) to be written. There are a host of reasons for this, and I won't bore you with the specifics; if you're curious, Wikipedia has a decent overview. Second, and this was just me getting lucky, is that Mark's Greek prose is the simplest, which made it ideal for someone just starting out.

Since beginning, I've gotten through approximately chapter 7. So I still have a ways to go. But I have noticed something about this first half that I found interesting, so thought I'd share it here. It also touches on a frustration of mine with a lot of Christian teachings, even in more “liberal” denominations. Namely, that faith is not supposed to be blind.

Mark doesn't introduce any of Jesus' teachings until chapter 2, and that a brief bit on fasting (saying his disciples don't need to do it while he's still there) followed by what I see as a more important discussion on rules. This is the bit where Jesus says that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. What both these teachings have in common is that they show Jesus wanted people to think why they should or shouldn't do a thing, and whether it makes sense in a given situation. He is consistently critical throughout Scripture of blind obedience to blanket rules. Meanwhile, more regular teachings don't begin until chapter 4.

Instead, what we get is scene after scene showing Jesus' power. He's constantly drawing massive crowds, healing the sick, calling people to him, and casting out demons. When he calls disciples to him, he does so just by telling the person to follow him, and they do. There's no convincing, there's no demonstration of his power. Instead, the fact that he does this is the demonstration.

Now I need to make a brief interlude into Greek. Throughout Mark, a single Greek word is used to mean faith: πίστις (“pistis”). Like most words in the New Testament, it's an old one by the time of its usage there. What I find interesting, though, is what else it means: credit. The same word was used in financial contexts to refer to someone's creditworthiness. More generally, it could mean good faith, trustworthiness, honesty, confidence in a thing, or indeed faith. (See its entry in the Lidell-Scott Lexicon for the full range of meanings.)

Now this could still cover a lot of semantic ground, so we have to look at some other things. First is, again, the fact that Mark spends the first while (i.e. most of the first four chapters) showing that Jesus was powerful: he could heal the sick and unclean, he had power over demonic spirits, and he could draw people to him en masse. In other words, Mark wants to take the time to show his listeners (since Scripture was probably read out to congregations more often due to a lack of literacy) why they should care about this Jesus guy to begin with. Another detail supports this: Mark was probably writing for a non-Jewish audience, a conclusion based on the fact that he takes the time to explain various Jewish customs.

There's one more thing that supports my interpretation as well. Jesus only ever gets angry at someone's lack of faith once, and that's at his disciples. This is after he calms the storm they're caught in at sea. The disciples are freaking out, thinking they're going to die, and after Jesus dismisses the storm, he turns on them and asks how it is they still have no faith. In other words, the people who have consistently seen him perform miracles should trust him. But he never criticizes random people for not believing in him. The most we get is a later case where he's “amazed/wonder[ing]/marvel[ing]” (depending on translation) at people's lack of faith when he returns to Nazareth (Mark 6:6).

To be clear, I don't feel myself to be bound by Scripture in any serious way. For me it's advisory. But I will say there's a lot less to object to here than I expected when I first began reading. This also jives with a lot of what I've kinda believed anyway: that faith is a matter of experience more than just blindly believing. My own religious beliefs are based on experiences I've had for which they are the best, even most logical, interpretation. But no religious view (and I include atheism here) can possibly encompass everything, and so there has to be room for people to see things differently and still be correct. I'm not even convinced we're all supposed to converge towards one Ur-belief system; in other words, different people may be led in very different directions, or sometimes pushed that way (thinking about people with horrific experiences at the hands of faith “leaders”).

This is not to say there's no room for doubt. Indeed, faith requires doubt, since without doubt we just have knowledge. This is also why I really like Søren Kierkegaard's interpretation of the Binding of Isaac. If you don't remember, this is an Old Testament story about Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son Isaac. He almost goes through with it, only for God to tell him to stop at the last minute. I was uncomfortable with this story for a long time; why would God need that kind of demonstration of faith? It seemed horrible. But after a professor's recommendation, I read Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, in which he discusses this story. His view, or at least the view he espouses (he wrote under a pseudonym) is that Abraham believed that he wouldn't lose Isaac. Not just in the sense of seeing Isaac again in the afterlife, but that he literally would not lose his son even if he went through the sacrifice. Somehow, some way.

It's a take that makes way more sense, and gets into the inherent absurdity of faith: believing something impossible, irrational, illogical, but believing it nonetheless.
As with so many things, then, I see the correct place as being somewhere in between. We have to acknowledge doubt, even entertain it, but also don't over-correct the other way and simply let Jesus take the wheel. As a Russian proverb puts it, Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore.

Meanwhile, I still differ from mainstream Christianity in a lot of ways. I don't believe Jesus was divine in some way beyond what we all are (“that of God in everyone,” to quote George Fox, the founder of Quakerism). Mainly because there's no evidence beyond Scripture, but it's not clear to me that Jesus was really intended to be some special level of divine. After all, Mark quotes God as saying that Jesus was chosen, which suggests a different thing than the mainstream Christian view.

Nonetheless, I don't actually think this is important. Whether Jesus was divine (in the Christian sense) or not doesn't change whether he should be listened to. If he was right, he was right, human or not. And in fact, I worry that seeing Jesus as divine gives us a way to avoid living up to his standards (not that I could anyway, to be clear), since it's easy to see them as unattainable except by the mortal embodiment of God.