Jonah and Muhammed

Today’s readings, my Catholic and liturgical-Protestant readers, will recall, included a passage from Jonah.

Who doesn’t know the story of Jonah and the whale?  Jonah rejects God’s call to preach to the people of Ninevah and runs away on a ship headed in the opposite direction, but a great storm comes up, he fesses up to the ship’s captain that the storm was sent by God due to his disobedience, and is thrown overboard, only to be swallowed by a whale (or, rather, a “large fish”).  The end to the story is generally left out of the children’s Bibles:  after he indeed turns back to preach to Ninevah and the people repent, he gets really pissed, because, in his view, they didn’t deserve to receive forgiveness.

Anyway, I grew up in a denomination in which we were taught that every word in the Bible was literally true and literally historical, including the creation story and the book of Jonah, and it was only much later, in reading The Catholic Study Bible (that is, an edition of the New American Bible translation with commentary and an extended introduction with historical and theological context), that I learned that this is now generally viewed as more like a parable:  “Nothing could be more remote from the spirit of the story than to believe that this actually happened,” the Reading Guide section says, and the point of the story — God’s forgiveness, offered even for the worst sinners (the Guide compares the idea of God forgiving the Assyrians to forgiveness of Nazis) — is not diminished by understanding this as story, as parable, rather than historical fact.

Here’s the So That’s Why Bible, from Thomas Nelson Publishers (which I think has plenty of evangelical cred), which attempts to put the Bible in chronological order and provide context and explanations:

Certain details of the Book of Jonah have troubled historians.  Leaving aside Jonah’s extraordinary encounter with the great fish, scholars have noted that Assyrian records do not mention a mass repentence in Ninevah at this time.  Also the title “king of Nineveh” (Jon. 3:6) seems rather small for the ruler of an empire.  For these reasons, many have treated the book as an extended parable, not intended to be read as history.  Others though, not troubled by accounts of God doing miracles, find no reason to doubt the book’s facticity.

What’s the point of this?  It gets back to my point, from last weekend, that “Islam Needs a ‘Jewish Enlightenment’” — that is, a way to understand its scriptures as something other than the literal Word of God as dictated to Muhammed and preserved inerrently, which, really, if you get down to it, fundamentally stands in the way of a flourishing “modernized” Islam capable of bringing light, rather than darkness, to its followers.