God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism Review

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God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism ReviewIn order to appreciate David Katz's "God's Last Words," it is important to recognize what it isn't. It is not a history of the bible's influence on the English people over the past five centuries. It is not a history of the role the bible played in English politics, English philosophy or even Anglican theology. It is not a history of how people slowly developed a more critical attitude towards the Bible. There are aspects of all three things in this book, but there are also important things missing. For a start, this is not a book that looks at how Milton, Dryden, Bunyan, Blake or many others used biblical material for their art. Nor is it a history of how the English population reacted to the vernacular bible.
Instead Katz starts by discussing the growth of a proper biblical criticism in the Renaissance. For centuries the Bible in the Western World was the Latin Vulgate, translated more than a millenium earlier by Saint Jerome. There were a number of problems with this. For a start, in the many copyings over the past thousands years errors had accumulated, and there was a natural desire to use a more authentic text. Second, and much more importantly, the bible was never actually written in Latin. The Jewish bible is written in Hebrew (with the exception of parts of Daniel and Ezra, which are written in Aramaic) while the New Testament is written entirely in Greek. And so scholars sought to find a proper Greek testament. Erasmus was a leading figure here, though Katz points out that when he didn't have proper Greek documents, he simply translated the Vulgate into Greek. This sort of undermined the whole point of the exercise, but absolute accuracy was not that important a goal. (Katz also reminds us that the very first translation of the New Testament into Hebrew occurred in the 16th century.)
After discussing Tyndale, Katz bascially skips a century, with only a brief discussion of the writing of the King James Bible and starts a somewhat meandering tone that the book continues to the end. There is a discussion of sabbatarianism (Katz quotes a scholar who suggests this is the only English contribution to Christian theology) and the ubiquity of millenialism in Cromwell's England. Then we go on to Newton and Locke, and how Newton worked on a proper chronology for biblical events, teasing out speculations from the contradictory statements in the Old Testament. We get discussions of such strange documents as the Sybilline Oracles, the Samaritan Penateuch, and the Islamic forgery "The Gospel of Barnabas." We learn about 18th century scholars who emphasized the aesthetic values of scriptures. We also meet the Hutchinsonians, at the time an influential group of scholars who worked with the fact that the Hebrew scripture originally had no vowels. This led them to the crackpot idea that one could manipulate the consonants into saying whatever mystical ideas came into their heads. The last third of the book deals with the long nineteenth century. We get discussions of Milman's controversial description of Abraham as a shiek, controversies over "Essays and Reviews" and Bishop Colonso in the 1860s and James Frazier's "The Golden Bough."
It is important to recognize what we do not get here. We do not get a full history of the rise of biblical criticism. We get a discussion of the various impossibilities of the Biblical exodus. But we do not get a discussion of such major issues as the authorship of the Gospels, the Q hypothesis, or the historical Jesus. Indeed, the criticism of the New Testament in largely ignored, while such questions as the origins of Daniel or the structure of Isaiah get short shift as well. There is some discussion of Hobbes, but Spinoza is only mentioned because Matthew Arnold finds him interesting, while the rest of the Enlightenment goes unmentioned (there is no real discussion of Paine's 'The Age of Reason'). Granted that much biblical scholarship occurred in Germany, we get only a brief discussion of Wellhausen, while less important Germans get more attention. The book concludes with a brief discussion of Fundamentalism that does not really clarify its relation to other Protestants or to the traditions of conservative biblical scholarship. The book is certainly well-documented, but the reader may well wonder what the point is.God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism OverviewThis wide-ranging book is an intellectual history of how informed readers read their Bibles over the past four hundred years, from the first translations in the sixteenth century to the emergence of fundamentalism in the twentieth century. In an astonishing display of erudition, David Katz recreates the response of readers from different eras by examining the "horizon of expectations" that provided the lens through which they read. In the Renaissance, says Katz, learned men rushed to apply the tools of textual analysis to the Testaments, fully confident that God's Word would open up and reveal shades of further truth. During the English Civil War, there was a symbiotic relationship between politics and religion, as the practical application of the biblical message was hammered out. Science - Newtonian and Darwinian, as well as the emerging disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, and geology - also had a great impact on how the Bible was received. The rise of the novel and the development of a concept of authorial copyright were other factors that altered readers' experience.Katz discusses all of these and more, concluding with the growth of fundamentalism in America, which brought biblical interpretation back to the Lutheran certainty of a demonstrable authority.

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