by Timothy Beal
3. Biblical Values
On the Bible in magazine form see Angie Kiesling, “Tuning In to the Teen Soul,” Publishers Weekly, March 11, 2002; and Ann Rodgers, “iPod Bibles, Bible-Zines? You Name It, They’ve Got It,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 8, 2007, which reports that Nelson had sold 2 million Biblezines. Thomas Nelson has also developed program tie-ins that are turning some Biblezines into the centerpieces of larger cultural movements. The biggest one to date is the Revolve Tour, a national stadium tour of musicians and inspirational speakers geared toward teen and tween girls created by Women of Faith, Inc. In 2005 and 2006, the Revolve Tour attracted more than 120,000 attendees. Fourteen tour dates were scheduled for the 2007–2008 school year. Women of Faith, by the way, is a for-profit division of Nelson, which purchased it in 2000.
The edition of Refuel cited is subtitled Old Testament Epic War Battles (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2005).
Information on Nelson’s “felt needs” research comes from a personal interview with Wayne Hastings on October 7, 2008. Hastings oversaw this research program at Thomas Nelson and has been the primary spokesperson for its results. The quotation from Hastings on buying as an emotional decision is from “Consumers Have Needs,” http://waynehastings.blogs.com, June 11, 2007. See also How to Sell Bibles: Basics of Great Retail (Nashville, TN: Nelson Bibles, n.d.; available online at www.thomasnelson.com).
Nelson is promoting a new way of organizing Bible displays in stores according to its categories of felt needs (rather than according to translations). This approach is less appealing to Zondervan, whose NIV has huge brand recognition as the all-time best-selling modern Bible translation. Nelson’s interest in promoting its new system is driven not only by consumer needs but also by its own felt need for a competitive advantage.
Customer reviews of Becoming, Explore, Refuel, and Real Biblezines were taken from Amazon.com.
Data on the total number of editions of the Bible sold in 2004 and 2005 is from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.
On niche Bibles, specifically those marketed to African Americans, see Carrie Mason-Draffen, “Word! The Good Book Finds New Niches,” Black Issues Book Review, March-April 2005.
It perhaps goes without saying in today’s consumer world that most niche Bibles are gendered. I half-expect bookstores to start organizing their Bibles like Toys “R” Us organizes its toys, into pink and blue rows. The not-so-subtle message is that the Bible has something different to say to women than it does to men.
The story of David, Bathsheba, and Uriah is found in 2 Samuel 11–12. On Samson, see esp. my teacher and colleague David M. Gunn’s brilliant essay, “Samson of Sorrows: An Isaianic Gloss on Judges 13–16,” in Danna Nolan Fewell, ed., Reading Between Texts: Intertextuality in the Hebrew Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), 225–53, which sees Samson as caught in a drama of “divine control and human freedom,” as were King Saul and the Pharaoh of the Exodus narrative, and which ultimately highlights potential Christological dimensions in his character and story.
A clear and useful introduction to the range of modern translations and the approaches behind them is David Dewey’s A User’s Guide to Bible Translations: Making the Most of Different Versions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004). Dewey’s introduction is more pastoral and less critical of functional-equivalence translations.
“Now let me alone . . .” Exodus 32:10, New Revised Standard Version. Unless otherwise noted, the NRSV is the translation used in quoting Bible passages throughout this book.
The Hebrew expression mashtin beqir, “one that pees against a wall,” appears in 1 Samuel 25:22, 34; 1 Kings 14:10, 16:11, 21:21, and 2 Kings 9:8. Interestingly, mashtin, “one who pees,” also sounds very like mishteh, which is a drinking party (related to the verb shatah, “drink”).
Kenneth Taylor is quoted in Harold Myra, “Ken Taylor: God’s Voice in the Vernacular,” Christianity Today, October 5, 1979; other Taylor quotes are from a biographical video at www.kennethtaylor.com.
On biblical translation as an “over-living” of an original, see esp. Tod Linafelt’s brilliant study of the translational history of Lamentations in Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
On mangas, see the exhibit by the Kyoto International Manga Museum (www.kyotomm.com). Sales data is from Calvin Reid, “New Report Finds Manga Sales Up; Anime DVD Down in ’07,” Publishers Weekly, December 7, 2007. Reid’s figures are from research by Milton Griepp, president of ICv2. In recent conferences, Griepp has noted that manga sales doubled from $100 million to $200 million between 2003 and 2006. Manga serials are collected and bound into larger books called tankōbon, which would be best translated by our term “graphic novels.” In American publishing, manga refers to what Japanese would call tankōbon.
NEXT and Tyndale plan to release four more biblical mangas like Manga Messiah. Each will focus on a different corpus of biblical narrative. At the bottom of each page in these biblical mangas are references to the specific verses that the artists are representing. This not only works as a kind of citation system, indicating that the artists want to be accountable for their creative interpretations; it also encourages readers to go and read the actual passages. With respect to Tyndale’s more conservative approach to this format, as compared with that of Zondervan and Nelson, one has to wonder if it and NEXT’s not-for-profit approach to Bible publishing is the distinguishing factor.
Volume 1 of Zondervan’s Manga Bible, cited here, is Names, Games, and the Long Road Trip (Genesis-Exodus), written by Young Shin Lee, created by Brett Burner, and illustrated by Jung Sun Hwang (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007).
The British-Nigerian graphic artist Siku’s The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation, published by Galilee Trade, a Christian inspirational division of Doubleday, appeals to teenage and young-adult audiences with somewhat darker, edgier graphics and themes (war and apocalypse, for example). Although this manga Bible purports to cover the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, it is by no means comprehensive. It does not include any biblical text in translation, and it is very selective in what parts of the biblical canon to include. It really is Siku’s own graphic canon within the canon, connecting a number of biblical themes and stories together in order to tell a grand, overarching narrative of the history of the world, from creation to apocalypse.
On Bibles that attempt to tap more liberal, progressive markets see Priests for Equality, The Inclusive Bible (Plymouth, U.K.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Another popular example, to which I myself was a contributor (on the book of Esther), is Harper’s Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible, ed. Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, and one of my mentors, Walter Brueggemann (republished by HarperOne in 2009 as The Life with God Bible). It includes notes and essays by a range of scholars and pastors and aims to foster biblical study that crosses conservative-liberal lines. Its central theme is what Foster calls “the with-God life,” which sees the whole of the Christian canon of Scripture as “the unfolding story of God’s plan for our loving relationship with our Creator.” I find the book of Esther as a challenge, even a contradiction, to such an understanding of the biblical canon, insofar as the presence of God in its story is entirely uncertain. Indeed, the book of Esther can be read as a story about the “without- God life.” I wrote my introduction and notes to Esther with this challenge in mind. To their credit, the editors allowed my perspective on Esther as a countervoice to faith in the with-God life to stand (albeit alongside more with-God-affirming reflections from other contributors).
Paul Caminiti is quoted in Stephanie Simon, “Selling the Good Book by Its Cover,” Los Angeles Times, December 25, 2007.
4. Twilight of the Idol
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 7–21. It is interesting to note that McLuhan himself converted to Catholicism in his early twentie
s. We may wonder whether the more religious aesthetic orientation of his own liturgical and devotional practices within that tradition influenced his understanding of the inseparability of meaning and its material embodiment. Kenneth A. Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1989), sees the evangelical impulse to adopt and adapt to popular culture as a woeful disregarding of McLuhan’s famous dictum.
Stories behind the development of The Way are from correspondence with former editors of Campus Life who participated in the project. They did not ask for or receive credit for their work.
Brian Scharp is quoted in Stephanie Simon, “Selling the Good Book by Its Cover,” Los Angeles Times, December 25, 2007.
Customer reviews of Biblezines were quoted from Amazon.com, accessed October 3, 2008.
On different forms of social and cultural capital, see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” trans. Richard Nice, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986), 241–58. My concept of sacred capital is not reducible to Bourdieu’s cultural capital, or to his later concept of symbolic capital, as it does not necessarily or at least exclusively relate to one’s relative social status or power.
For more on the digital revolution as the larger setting for biblical brand dilution see Timothy Beal, “The Rise of the Information Society,” Religion in America: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 93–99.
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982), 129–32.
On Internet-based reading and writing, it’s interesting to note that, according to the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts report Reading at Risk, the decline in traditional literary book reading does not correlate with a decline in creative writing. In fact, according to the report, the number of people doing creative writing grew by 30 percent between 1982 and 2002, even as literary reading declined. If the report had been able to survey Internet-based activities, especially among younger people, in greater detail, I suspect it would have found that writing activities in that context were increasing dramatically. Indeed, in the context of the emerging network society, reading and writing are becoming harder to distinguish from one another. They often take place simultaneously.
Timothy Beal, Biblical Literacy: The Essential Bible Stories Everyone Needs to Know (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009).
Bible Illuminated: The Book, New Testament (Sweden: Förlaget Illuminated, 2008). Publishing details are taken from “Your questions answered in this FAQ,” October 28, 2008, at www.illuminatedworld.com. The Good News Translation used in the English edition is a 1992 revision (using more inclusive language) of the American Bible Society’s translation, Today’s English Version. Given the intentionally provocative approach of Illuminated World, it’s interesting to note that this translation has attracted criticism from some fundamentalists on account of one of its chief translators, Robert Bratcher, who, in 1981, said that only willful ignorance or intellectual dishonesty could account for the doctrine of inerrancy. I suspect that this background was seen as a plus by Söderberg and company
Though less provocative than the Bible Illuminated, I commend The Voice New Testament translation (Thomas Nelson, 2008; whole Protestant Bible forthcoming) as another project of defamiliarization with “the Word as we know it.” Done collaboratively by a diverse group of scholars, ministers, and creative writers, this text often presents dramatically new rewritings of the biblical text, based on work with the original languages, that can be evocative of multiple meanings. Unlike the typical disambiguating, depoeticizing approach of most functional-equivalence translations, its effect is often to estrange the reader from traditional biblical language. Despite the claim from Nelson marketers that The Voice has “captured the mood and voice of the original New Testament writers,” I recommend it as an experiment in creative translation as a form of poetic biblical interpretation.
5. What Would Jesus Read?
For a fuller discussion of the social worlds of reading and writing in early Christianity and Judaism in the context of Greco-Roman literary culture, see esp. Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), on which much of my discussions in this and the next chapter depend. See also James L. Kugel and Rowan A. Greer, Early Biblical Interpretation: Two Studies of Exegetical Origins (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1986).
Although it is highly unlikely that Jesus or his disciples ever saw Jewish Scripture or any other literature in codex form, it is possible that they were familiar with the use of codices as notebooks for keeping records and even writing down the words of teachers. Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Literary Transmission, Beliefs, and Manners of Palestine in the I Century BCE-IV Century CE (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1962), argues that, despite later rabbinical requirements that Scriptures be put only on scrolls, codices may actually have been a Jewish innovation that was then picked up by Christians. Perhaps Jesus’s own disciples used simple codex notebooks as a customary way to record their rabbi’s teachings.
On scroll making, see Pliny the Elder, Natural History, chap. 13; Bruce M. Metzger, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Paleography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 14–18; and Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, 44–48. Later rabbinical law requires that Torah scrolls be made of parchment from kosher animals, etc. One must use caution, however, in projecting those later regulations onto first-century Jewish scriptural culture in all its diversity, especially in the Diaspora.
On the scroll of Isaiah, see Francolino J. Gonçalves, “Isaiah Scroll,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, 470–72; D. Barthélemy and J. T. Milik, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, I: Qumran Cave 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955).
James Kugel, “Early Interpretation: The Common Background of Late Forms of Biblical Exegesis,” in Kugel and Greer, Early Biblical Interpretation, traces the emergence of Judaism as a scriptural-interpretive culture. By the early first century, he argues, studying Scripture was the “fundamental religious activity” of Judaism.
Most archaeological data on the architecture of early synagogues comes from the third and fourth centuries and cannot be applied reliably to first- or even second-century Judaism. During that time, we have only general references to the Jewish proseuche (Greek for “place of prayer”) and synagoge (Greek “gathering place”) with no specific information about space, architecture, etc. See James F. Strange, “Synagogues, Ancient Times” in The Encyclopedia of Judaism, ed. Jacob Neusner, Alan J. Avery-Peck, and William Scott Green (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
In addition to the passage in Luke, other early Jewish references to synagogue services include Josephus, Against Apion, Book 2, and Philo, On Dreams, Book 2, both of which describe only two activities during weekly meetings: reading and explicating Scripture. Some argue that these were the exclusive activities of synagogue meetings, at least in Palestine. See the discussion and assessment of scholarship on the issue in Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, 208–11 and 322–23.
With respect to the order of events in an early Christian service, in chapter 67 of his First Apology (c. 150 CE), Justin Martyr describes his community gathering on Sunday to read together “the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets . . . for as long as time permits,” followed by interpretative discussion and Communion.
On oral cantillation of Scripture in early Christian culture, see the discussion in Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, 225–27, and the extensive references in his notes. The Talmud passage is from Tractate Megillah 32a. “Tunefulness” is a translation of n’ymh. Nehemiah 8:8 describes the leaders reading the scripture of the law “with interpretation,” which may mean not that they read and then commented on it but that they chanted it in a way that i
nterpreted its meaning for the hearers. On the origins of biblical chant, see James Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 109–16.
Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, 25, quotes Barnabas Lindars’s study of quotation practices in early Christian writings as an “active and ingenious enterprise.”
With respect to early Christian scriptural collections, although the earliest known Christian testimonia manuscripts date to the third century, it is probable that they were used much earlier. See esp. Martin C. Albl, And Scripture Cannot Be Broken: The Form and Function of the Early Christian Testimonia Collections (Leiden: Brill, 1999). Albl argues that quotations from Scripture in the Gospels may well have been taken from authoritative testimonia collections.
Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmission of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), shows that Christians in the second and third centuries did not hire professional copyists but used “private networks” of scribes, including women, who were not only producing the texts but also using them. This system was in contrast to the larger Greco-Roman literary culture, in which scribal work was seen as a menial task for a lower professional class to carry out. Within early Christian scribal culture, therefore, literacy and power were closely related. Scribes influenced the development of Christian orthodoxy and the canon. They were, as Haines-Eitzen puts it, “theologically invested” (16–18). See also Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), which shows how the scholarly Christian culture of the third and fourth centuries (thanks especially to Origen and Eusebius) contributed to the development of the library and the rise of the book.
