The sixth post in Peter Enns' invited series of posts from Biblical scholars from a fundamentalist or evangelical background recounting the moment when their detailed study of the Bible showed the problems with fundamentalist exegesis comes from Christopher Skinner, who is currently Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Mount Olive in North Carolina. Skinner describes not only one of his problems (the contradictory genealogies of Christ in Matthew and Luke) but the facile, glib response of some of those to whom he turned for support.
Skinner relates a moment in his third year at seminary during a class on gospel narrative exegesis where he found that the 'baseline assumption' that the gospels could be harmonised contrasted with his background reading in NT narrative criticism. The genealogies of Matthew and Luke caused him no little problem:
From Abraham to Jesus, Matthew lists only 41 names while Luke lists 57. At the time I thought Matthew’s omission of names must be some kind of rhetorical device. However, more problematic for me was the realization that of the 41 names Matthew and Luke should have had in common, they agree on only 17.
How could this be? Surely this level of disagreement was something more than a rhetorical device?
Whenever I raised this question, one solution that evangelical friends and commentators alike continued to affirm was that one genealogy recounts the line of Mary while the other recounts the line of Joseph. However, this solution was immediately unacceptable to me since both texts clearly indicate that the lineage is being traced through Joseph (if you doubt this, please see Matt 1:16 and Luke 3:23).
I also spent considerable time researching the history of scholarship on this issue only to realize that it was not just a problem for my 21st century historiographical sensibilities. As early as Julius Africanus in 225 CE, this contradiction had been a serious problem for commentators on the Gospels.
I wasn’t the only one who saw this problem for what it was—a REAL problem—and I cannot tell you the relief that realization was. I had been wracked with guilt and confusion this whole time. (Emphasis in the original)
In any community blighted by fundamentalism, those who do find problems such as this and have the courage to raise them often are given a glib answer, or told not to worry about the problem. Skinner's experience was not dissimilar:
Finally, I decided to approach the Synoptic specialist in the class—an individual I greatly respect, who is both a brilliant scholar and a man of tremendous Christian conviction. When I told him my concern, he replied that the best solution was to regard one genealogy as Mary’s and the other as Joseph’s.
I objected to this facile solution by pointing to the details of actual text. His response was simple: “We need to trust the Bible even when we don’t understand, even when it seems to be contradicting itself.” Not only did this seem to me like an easy answer, it smacked of the same sort of intellectual dishonesty I had been taught to avoid at all costs.
This was a travesty. I had been taught to ferret out every exegetical nugget, to mine every nook and cranny for insights into the text. I had spent hours and hours learning Greek, textual criticism, and numerous other exegetical skills, only to be told to abandon them when I ran into a problem that contradicted my overarching approach to the Bible.
This was the beginning of the end of my rigid reading of the Bible.
What motivates such intellectual dishonesty in a community? Why are honest doubts hastily brushed away with a command to 'shut up and just believe'? Personally, I believe that the problem comes when preserving institutions - both credal and ecclesiastical - becomes far more important than following Christ. Skinner's comments surely apply to more than just his own faith tradition:
I have come to think that defending the Bible as inerrant is more about maintaining an identity than it is about searching for truth. I like to tell my students that one of my goals is to help them “eschew the culture of easy-answerism.” One of the best ways to do this is to study Scripture together without flinching and let them know that they have nothing to fear.
