![]() ![]() I still don’t understand Don McLean’s classic song “American Pie,” but it moves me every time I hear it. Anyone who has been to a Catholic Mass or a Pentecostal service, or experienced the recitation of the Quran or a Tibetan Buddhist chant, knows that they couldn’t fully be captured by a transcript any more than a song can be by its lyrics. It’s like complaining about Shakespeare bending history, or protesting that a great song isn’t factual. I’ve also been puzzled that the Bible can have multiple versions of the Ten Commandments, or provide conflicting accounts of how Judas died or on which night the Last Supper occurred.Īrmstrong argues that this approach misunderstands how Scripture works. ![]() ![]() Among the Gospels, I’ve put the most weight on the Gospel of Mark, because it was the first written, and have skeptically pestered pastors about why Mark doesn’t mention the Virgin Birth or describe the Resurrection. Believers and skeptics alike came to read Scripture as if they were poring over Thucydides or Plutarch. With the rise of literacy and science, Scriptures were printed and scrutinized, then examined as if they were historical documents. Scripture was usually sung, chanted or declaimed in a way that separated it from mundane speech, so that words - a product of the brain’s left hemisphere - were fused with the more indefinable emotions of the right.” “Indeed, in some traditions, the sound of the inspired words would always be more important than their semantic meaning. ![]() “Our English word ‘Scripture’ implies a written text, but most Scriptures began as texts that were composed and transmitted orally,” she writes. She argues that Scripture is flexible, evolving, contextual and more like performance art than a book. “Because its creation myths do not concur with recent scientific discoveries, militant atheists have condemned the Bible as a pack of lies, while Christian fundamentalists have developed a ‘Creation science’ claiming that the Book of Genesis is scientifically sound.Not surprisingly, all this has given Scripture a bad name.”Ī British writer and former nun, Armstrong argues in her magisterial new book, “The Lost Art of Scripture,” that Scripture shouldn’t be interpreted literally or rigidly from a pulpit or in a library. “Too many believers and nonbelievers alike now read these sacred texts in a doggedly literal manner that is quite different from the more inventive and mystical approach of premodern spirituality,” Armstrong writes. Karen Armstrong wades into these debates and says that both sides are wrong. Both secular liberals and fundamentalists see Scripture as words to be taken literally, the former to ridicule and the latter to embrace. Similar points can be made of many Scriptures from around the world. Or take militant passages from the Quran like this one: “Kill them wherever you encounter them.” Early Muslims considered this obsolete because it applied narrowly to enemies in a particular conflict more recently, Muslim extremists have interpreted such passages to justify murder, while Islamophobes cite them to excuse religious bigotry. Paul, but such sexist passages are sometimes used by conservative Christians to justify the subjugation of women - and by secular liberals to portray the Bible as outdated and misogynistic. Paul declares: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man she must be quiet.” Scholars suspect that this was actually written by some grump other than St. THE LOST ART OF SCRIPTURE Rescuing the Sacred Texts By Karen Armstrong ![]()
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