Today in my class on the Bible we’re up to the Book of Isaiah. Academic study of Isaiah cannot avoid discussion of its apparent composite authorship. Scholarly theories about there being more than one author result from a careful reading of the text, and observation of important details such as the overlap with 2 Kings, followed by a radical change of style, message and implied context (the Babylonian exile is assumed in the present-tense).
I remember well from my undergraduate days joining in with the broader conservative Evangelical sentiment of feeling threatened by, and desiring to oppose with determination, such notions as Deutero-Isaiah. Looking back, I have a very strong sense that I now understand what motivated those earlier sentiments, and what was wrong in my thinking back then. Like many others, I would have emphatically asserted that for me, the Bible is “not just a book”. But the truth of the matter is that I was treating the Bible as if it wasn’t even a book, or more precisely, a collection of books and other types of literature.
Asking about overlaps with other literature, asking about changes of style and setting, all the questions, in short, that led scholars to come up with the notion of multiple authorship of the Book of Isaiah in the first place, all result from asking questions that it is normal to ask when reading books and paying close attention to their contents. Of course, such questions may not come up when reading Harry Potter. But they are normal questions when reading ancient literature, which the Bible of course is. And even if they do not naturally come to mind to modern readers of modern literature, they often occur even to novice readers of ancient literature who pay attention to details such as style, coherence, narrative flow, and in general focus their reading carefully and throughtfully on the text before them.
Back when I sought to oppose such ideas as multiple authorship of Isaiah, I thought I was defending the Bible. But what I was fighting against was evidence within the Bible itself. I now see that I was defending a certain doctrine about the nature of the Bible. The irony is that I was claiming to be a “Bible-believing Christian” and would criticize others for being “unbiblical” and for allowing extrabiblical and postbiblical doctrines and dogmas to override and supplant Scripture, and yet all the while I was defending my conservative doctrine of Scripture from the Bible itself.
Is the Bible “not just a book” or “not even a book” for you? Do you read the Bible with the careful attention you would give to any other book, and then expect even more from it? Or do you try to careful shield and defend your beliefs about what the Bible “ought” to be (uniform, coherent, without error or contradiction, etc. etc.) from evidence, even when that evidence comes from within the Bible itself?
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