Interesting show last night (Thursday 30th) with an interview by Tony Nicholls with Peter Stokes of the Saltshakers.
Tony’s naïve and wide eyed – but cunning – charm worked it’s magic and Stokes was remarkably revealing. Some bizarre theology: when asked that old chestnut – if you obey the bible literally then do you eat shellfish and wear polycotton (if you don’t know the story, they’re some of things Leviticus calls abominations, along with men having sex together), Stokes said you had to know how to read your bible.
If a rule was only mentioned in the bible once – like the shellfish and the mixed fibres ones – then that rule was specific to the time and situation for which the passage was written. These two, he claimed, were for a specific time and place – when the Isrealites were wandering in the desert.
Leaving aside the question of where you find lobsters in a desert, he passed on to homosexuality. He claimed this prohibition, by contrast, was inherent throughout the bible, and thus remained valid.
He also said it was obvious that men and women were designed by God to fit together – tell that to a child with no sex education – whereas gay men used what he called “the sewerage system”.
Now that’s a curious one: all sex takes place in and around the sewerage system – unless I’ve been getting it wrong all my life and ought to have been peeing through my nose. And given all the above it’s obvious Stokes puts his arse to some unintended uses too, so to speak.
So far, so predictable.
Audience reaction: mixed. At first quite a lot of “why are you giving this guy airtime”, “get this shit off our station” and so forth. I took time out to explain the (biblical) notion of ‘know thine enemy’ – and his ilk are influential and their nonsense is believed even within our government.
A US journalist friend could not believe this audience reaction: he said on his radio station he always gave opponents more than 50% of the time, because unless you understand that they exist, how they think, expose their prejudices, how can you counter them? Beside, he said, journalism is about controversy: we’re not here to “blow sunshine and bubbles up the listeners skirts.” Amen and hallelujah to that!
Anyway, back to Stokesy.
I always have trouble with people who claim literal and absolute truth for the bible.
For a start, it isn’t A Book – it’s a limited selection of the available manuscripts on the subject of the Jewish, and later Christian, religion. There are many many more that didn’t make it into the collection. Early in the church’s history, a bunch of male bishops decided what to keep and what to toss, according to the political requirements of the day, the state of historical and theological scholarship etc.. So from the start the enterprise was fatally compromised.
Then there’s the question of the manuscripts themselves.
All the bible stories stem from oral tradition. That is, for hundreds if not thousands of years, they were not written down, only memorized and spoken. So over time, changes and distortions crept in. Mishearings, a desire to tell a better, more gripping story, embellishments to hold the audience’s interest. Over and over again, over hundreds and hundreds of years.
Then the stories started to be written down. No printing presses, so copies had to be made by hand. More errors and embellishments. Plus, of course, different tribes might have different versions, in different languages. Not all these versions have survived, so how can we vouch for the ‘authenticity’ of what we have? We can’t.
And all the way along, new stories were being written and circulated. Sometimes in places and societies very different to those that gave rise to previous stories, with different understandings of the meaning of things, the relations between men and women, for example, or the role of a leader.
That’s the reason why, if you search the bible diligently enough, you can find stories to support both sides of an argument, not just one.
It’s hard for the layperson to spot his stuff in the Old Testament, but it becomes glaringly obvious in the New – have you never noticed that the four gospels give different accounts? That’s because they were written at different times: all of them long after Jesus was dead.
Did you know that St Paul, on whose writings most of the Christian religion is founded, never met Jesus?
And if all that wasn’t enough to place the claim of literal truth in serious doubt, then consider this. None of the stuff you read in the bible was originally written in English.
Most of it has been translated many times through several different languages. A story in the bible may have first been written in, say Aramaic, then later translated into Hebrew, the Hebrew version translated into Greek, the Greek into Latin, the Latin into early English, then into Modern English. Even now, when we try to go back and reconstruct the ‘original’ version (which, if you remember what I was saying before about oral traditions, won’t be very original at all), we probably don’t have a copy of the Hebrew or Aramaic versions, only the Greek. Or only the Latin. Or perhaps a copy of the Latin version made by an Egyptian scribe . . . . . you see the difficulty?
We’ve only recently discovered, for example, that the famous phrase about passing a camel through the eye of a needle should in fact read, a rope through the eye of a needle. A bit of ink on a manuscript had faded, changing the meaning of a word. X-rays revealed what was originally there.
So it is quite literally impossible to say that what we read in our bible today bears a true resemblance to what the original writer intended. And that’s before we even start to contemplate cultural differences. Think of all the Australian phrases that have to be explained to other people. No other culture has furphys or dummy-spits. No-one else says ‘on the nose’. The word ‘ordinary’ just means ‘plain and unremarkable’ in anyone else’s English – and nothing else. So we can’t be sure what we read means what it sounds as if it means. Not ‘a sure guide to deeds’ at all.
I have digressed somewhat – back to the programme.
The latter half of the show – the only bit of it I now produce as well as present – is a panel discussion. I gathered two gay priests, the Rev Heather Creighton of the Metropolitan Community Church, and Rev Fr Greg Horn of the Ecumenical Catholic Church. And we had an excellent discussion in which we placed Stokes in his proper context and discussed some of the above, and much else besides. Audience reaction swung round as people understood what we were attempting to do.
This panel business is so different from what I used to do – the old show was tightly scripted and controlled, mostly pre-recorded. Now I’m learning to manage people in real time on air. Daunting at times but fun.
Off next week as the Young Australians take over. I shall listen with interest.
No comments:
Post a Comment