When I hear a friend tell a story of something we experienced together – even if it only occurred a moment before the telling – I often have the eerie impression that I am part of the audience instead of an actor. There’s an odd gap between the experience and the story, between the event and the word. It becomes clear that anyone hearing the story is not being connected to the event itself in any real way, but rather is having a new experience, that of hearing the story.
Which interpretation of a text is the “true” one? There are as many “meanings” to a text as there are readings of it. It’s a trick of language that allows you to believe that you can read the same text twice; maybe the arrangement of words on the page doesn’t change from one reading to the next, but YOU do – five minutes from now you will be five minutes older than you are now and the conceptual structure into which you assimilate new patterns will be five minutes more complex, etc. St. Augustine (?) said, “You can never stand in the same river twice.” A text in translation is so many steps further from the original intentions of its author, being an interpretation of an interpretation, from which we extrapolate our own interpretations colored by personal prejudices…
I don’t think it’s possible to know what “really happened” based on a book. You kinda have to be there to know. For this reason I try not to have opinions about things that happened before I was born (people I’ve never met, foods I’ve never tried, etc).
So far as the Bible is concerned, Jack Miles has noted that it is ruthlessly economical, allowing no space for idle mood-setting or character development: if information is included, it is as if it were in a spotlight. One must assume that everything included is important, and nothing necessary has been excluded. Reading the bible does seem at times a bit like reading a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story, with magical non-sequiturs in abundance.
I think it is an error to separate the reading of it from the moment – to fail to connect “the past” with “the present” at the locus of consciousness; also to think that the “final Amen” at the end of Revelations happens at the point in time at which you read it.
Is the Bible true? There’s been a pointed debate over “the search for the historical Jesus” – which inspired the cognitive separation of the (objective) Jesus of history and the (personal) Christ of faith. Ultimately one is forced to admit that there is a gap between what we know and what we believe precisely because we have opinions on things none of us experienced (like the creation of the universe or the ministry of Jesus). One could legitimately question why we need to have these opinions: what difference does it make to you how the universe started? Here you are, and there it is.
I had wanted to tie all this into a nice neat ending, but instead I just keep writing more and more. I hope you have enjoyed this rambling monologue. The end.
Link to Staff Report, edited in by Dex: In the Bible, who were the giant sons of God?
[Edited by C K Dexter Haven on 11-27-2001 at 05:22 PM]