Intertextuality and dialogue.

Abstract

The Bible, both Jewish and Christian, is a dialogical literature. It is a compilation of many different human expressions of and responses to divine revelations over fifteen hundred years from the Bronze Age to the Greco-Roman. The Bible is also very intertextual; it is full of itself. From the earliest literary forms to the latest, earlier traditions and texts, national and international, are interwoven developing new meanings out of old ideas. Critically trained rabbis and pastors in all the major seminaries know these things about the Bible but do not always share them with their parishioners. Intense interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls has brought such critical issues out into the open, even as serious study of the Scrolls has confirmed critical readings of the Bible. How can the Scriptures of Early Judaism give rise to two such distinct religions as Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity? The Bible, one testament or two, in effect mandates dialogue between the two similar but disparate faiths if either is interested in a valid, postmodern search for truth.

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There have been remarkable, even revolutionary developments in the study of Early Jewish and Christian origins as a result of fifty years of study of the Judean Desert (so-called Dead Sea) Scrolls. The intense interest on the part of the general public in the Scrolls derives from the fact that most of them come from the period just before the birth of Early Christianity and the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism. Many discoveries from other periods important to biblical study have not yet been published, but there has been nowhere near the clamor calling for open access to those. None of those, however, touches so directly on existential questions of spiritual identity in the public at large.

The Scrolls and Religious Identity

Many Jews and Christians feel personally involved in the information the Scrolls contain about the origins of these two major faiths; theirs is an existential interest. There is the fear as well as the hope that the Scrolls are going to prove or disprove their faith, or major tenets in it. One who is asked to lecture to lay and pastoral groups around the country is steadily barraged with questions about Jesus, or James his brother, or John the Baptist, because of theories about the Scrolls that get into the popular media; and most such theories are either unfounded or dubious because of the multivalent nature of the languages of the Scrolls (Sanders 1985: 167-84). The very nature of the Scrolls demands careful and scrupulous discussion by scholars fully aware of the multivalency of unpointed Hebrew texts (Fragments 1992). Along with open access, which almost everyone is for, has gone, unfortunately, a less than scholarly rush to the popular press with unfounded or poorly based theories that feed the hopes and fears of layfolk.

One's religion is the essence of one's identity, even in the Western world, which emphasizes individual worth, merit, and responsibility. Confession of faith is a confession of identity. Some lay folk have suspected for some time that their faith was not as historically well founded as they had once thought. Scepticism among lay Jews and Christians has been building during the course of the twentieth century, and they come to lectures on the Scrolls hoping to hear confirmation either of their scepticism or of their faith, their fear, or their hope. Some have already decided to leave synagogue or church and want the decision bolstered; some have left the mainline religions and sought refuge in fundamentalist groups that traffic in simplistic views of biblical authority; and some are in the throes of deciding just what they should think.

That is a heavy burden to place on the Scrolls or on any other archaeological find. In the 1950s, as the Scrolls were first coming to light, they appeared on a scene in which there was already intense discussion of whether archaeology could in some way verify or falsify historically founded faiths like Judaism and Christianity (Davis; Charlesworth & Weaver). This was especially the case in this country, where archaeology has been somewhat overvalued and even romanticized, in part because of the massive influence of William F. Albright, who with immense expertise and imagination combined the fields of archaeology and philology to address the basic question of how to span the time gap between historical event and biblical record. His tendency was to date biblical sources earlier than other scholars and thus reduce the gap, apparently increasing the level of credibility of the biblical accounts over what source and form criticism, developed and refined in German scholarship, had determined were their later dates in antiquity. Today the one position is called "maximalist," while the other is called "minimalist." Albright developed an organismic view of history, which seemed to support conservative views of the historical reliability of the biblical record. It was considered fairly safe to study the Bible in the Albright mode, and administrators and trustees of conservative seminaries felt it prudent to hire such scholars on their faculties; it was a mode that brought focus to the question of the relation of history and faith (Albright: 128-29).

Earlier in the century the German pan-Babylonian school of biblical study had claimed that archaeological finds were showing how dependent the Bible was on extra-biblical Near Eastern sources. Paul Tillich once said that when he was a young theologian in Dresden in the late twenties he dreaded reading the paper each morning for fear he would have to take another step backward in his faith. Such an attitude indicates that archaeology can enhance or discourage faith by affirming or denying its historical origins, and hence archaeology became a force to contend with in decisions of personal faith by the beginning of this century.

Pulpit and Pew

Mainline seminaries in this country, Jewish and Christian, had by the middle of the century, when the Scrolls were discovered, already produced generations of critically trained pastors and rabbis. This meant that they had studied the Bible from a historical perspective; they were drilled in exegetical methods that stressed recovering "original" meanings of passages, often opposed to the meanings that Jewish and Christian traditions had come to assign to the text studied.

They had already learned to question major tenets of the two faiths, such as the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the Davidic authorship of the Psalter, and single authorship of prophetic books, as well as the historicity of the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. They had learned that the canonical Gospels were composed by others than apostles and were dependent on sources other than eyewitnesses, and that Paul had not written (or dictated) some of the traditionally designated Pauline Epistles, nor Peter or James the letters that early on had come to bear their names. By the middle of the century theological study of Scripture had begun to give way to "religious studies" approaches to Scripture such as is done in state and secular universities, where theology and religious identity itself are viewed as unscientific and unworthy of serious consideration. A different kind of religion, or view of reality, what Langdon Gilkey of the University of Chicago calls "academic fundamentalism," had come to replace the ones that had founded many of the private universities of the country. Some seminary professors find their religious identity almost exclusively in their academic guilds and do not attend church except to give lectures when invited; some seem to be running from their religious backgrounds, which brought them to the study of religion in the first place.

Such non-traditional views of Scripture and tenets of faith were already widespread in the ministries of synagogues and churches long before the Scrolls burst upon the scene of biblical study in the early 1950s. Pastors capable of reading the Scrolls in their historical context had already been trained in critical study of the Bible. Some have found ways to share the exciting results of critical study of the Bible with their congregations. For them the Scrolls do not address such issues but generally confirm the epistemology of positions already taken in critical study of the Bible.

Contrary to a few sensational and ill founded theories about them advanced in the 1950s, and now again in the 1990s, it is not the Scrolls that have raised the crucial questions; it was critical study of the Bible, wrought by the Renaissance and Reformation, and increasingly by the so-called scientific views of reality, which had already raised and for the most part settled those questions within a rather narrow range of debate. Renaissance and Enlightenment epistemology began to influence Jewish thinkers during the Judische Wissenschaft movement in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century (S. Heschel), and became an official part of Catholic Scripture study beginning with the promulgation of DIVINO AFFLANTE SPIRITU in 1943. In the professional guilds of biblical study such issues are seldom in fact discussed; what is discussed goes beyond those questions and focuses largely on questions of method and conceptuality (Hartigan). And the members of those guilds are for the most part the faculties in mainline seminaries and college and university departments of religious studies. The most extreme reactions to critical study of the Bible are probably the purging of the faculties of Southern Baptist seminaries in the past twenty years largely by lay leaders, and the reaction among traditionalist Catholics against the implementation of DIVINO AFFLANTE SPIRITU (Sanders 1998d). But these reactions have been to the results of work, not on the Scrolls, but on Enlightenment study of the Bible, which began in the seventeenth century (Sanders 1995, 1998a).

In other words, the gap between pulpit and pew in the Western countries, in both Judaism and Christianity, began in Protestantism over three centuries ago where it has now widened to almost an abyss--principally because pastors are also CEOs with budgets to raise from the faithful whom they do not for the most part teach what they have been taught (Smart). The most that the Scrolls have done in this regard is cause some heated discussions generated by the fact that they date to the crucial period of origins of the present forms of the two faiths. The Scrolls have basically confirmed critical study of the Bible and enhanced it.

Interfaith Dialogue

In April 1989 there was an international conference at Notre Dame University titled "Hebrew Bible or Old Testament." Jewish and Christian scholars gave papers and responses (Brooks & Collins: 109-45; 167-90). While the Christian scholars generally expressed the need and importance of the Jewish-Christian dialogue, James Kugel and Jon Levenson, both of Harvard, insisted that there was no real basis for such dialogue because when we think we agree on something it is on procedural or trivial matters based on common Western-cultural academic permises, and not on identities as Jews and Christians.

Both sides in the discussion fully recognized the common ground of the critical study of religion (all were professors in academic institutions), but Kugel and Levenson denied that that was a sound base on which to have a truly inter-faith dialogue because it was not a genuine identity stance but a learned one common to all in attendance. Social location undoubtedly played a role in the positions taken. Kugel and Levenson brought the perspective of the minority to the discussion; the Christians expressed the openness facilitated by cultural dominance. There was no pretense finally at arriving at a resolution; each person stated her or his position, each hoping to be the one to break the impasse--to no avail.

A similar impasse had occurred in New York not long after the Six-Day War, when Abraham Heschel and I invited professors from Union Theological Seminary, where he had been Fosdick Visiting Professor the year (1965-66) I went on the Union faculty, and from Jewish Theological Seminary across the street, to engage in dialogue about Jewish-Christian relations. Some internationally visible folk gathered for the first and only meeting. It did not work. While the Christians were generally willing to agree with Reinhold Niebuhr's earlier statement that there should be no special mission to the Jews, Heschel drove so hard for a common statement from the group of support of the State of Israel, that the Christians simply fell silent. They had not thought they would be asked to sign, as some later put it, a political document about Near Eastern foreign policy.

Jacob Neusner has more recently put it very well. "The fusion of the ethnic, the religious, the cultural, and the political [in Judaism], to Christians presents woeful confusion" (Neusner: 36). Heschel had thought he was asking for common theological support for God's fulfillment of promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (A. Heschel). The two sides talked past one another, and the group dissipated. There seemed no common ground on which to continue even to explore why they thought they had different goals. I in my innocence had thought that Heschel's theology of God's incarnation in the Jewish people would bring needed correctives to some formulations of Christian incarnational theology. I later reiterated the hope in Jerusalem on the occasion of Heschel's sheloshim (memorial) service in January 1973 (Sanders 1973), and in a review of Michael Fishbane's GARMENTS OF TORAH (Sanders 1991).

Though he had earlier written and spoken in the same discouraging ways as Kugel and Levenson, Jacob Neusner has suggested a way out of the impasse.

      My answer commences with a necessary recognition, which is that, after
   all, we really do worship one God, who is the same God, and who is the only
   God, we and the Muslims with us. Dialogue is required [emphasis his] among
   the three faiths that claim to worship one and the same God, the only God.
   Within that common ground of being, a human task emerges. It is to see in
   the religious experience of the other, the stranger and outsider, that with
   which we, within our own world, can identify.

The human task that our common belief in One God necessitates, as Neusner perceives it, is "to feel and so understand what the othe feels and affirms in the world of that other. So the critical challenge ... begins not with the negotiation of theological differences, or with intellectual tasks, but with the pathos of alien feeling.... What moves me ... is the story the other person tells ... then ... I can find among my stories a story that matches the story of the other." He rightly notes that the concepts of Israel and Christ, so central to Judaism and Christianity, are each quite alien to the other. For there to be dialogue, he contends, each side must begin by trying to understand the alien concept in its own terms. He asks, finally,

   Can Christians tell our story in their way, so that they may find sympathy
   for us? Clearly they can, and many do. That is why I do not doubt that
   Christians can find in the story of Christ resources for telling
   themselves, also, the story of Israel in our times [Neusner: 35-38]

Scripture and Intertextuality

Is there a way out of the impasse? Can there be a genuine interfaith dialogue between these two religions, which have so much in common, on the one hand, and are apparently so alien at their centers, Israel and Christ? One of the ways in which the Scrolls have illuminated Early Jewish literature, including the Second Testament, is in their Scriptural intertextuality.

There are three principal ways in which the term intertextuality is used in the literature currently. It is used, first, to focus on the chemistry between two contiguous blocks of literature, large or small. A prime example here is the interrelationship between the two quite disparate accounts of creation in Genesis chapters one and two. In the one, God is majestic, awesome, and transcendent, while in the second, God is presented as making a pastoral call on his first parishioners in Eden's bower. The two, however, stand side by side, each making its own valid theological point; God is both transcendent and immanent, creator and redeemer, not one or the other. Nor should one harmonize or collapse the two into one statement speaking of a redemptive creator God, or a creative redeemer God. They relate intertextually in a powerful hermeneutic statement by which to read all that follows. Many other examples within the Bible could be offered between quite distinct bodies of literature, including the two testaments. This is largely what is meant by the canonical context of biblical literature (Sanders 1987: 153-74).

A second way in which the term is used is recognition that all literature is made up of previous literature and reflects the earlier through citation, allusion, use of phrases and paraphrases of older to create newer literature, references to earlier literary episodes, even echoes of earlier familiar literature in the construction of the later. "The texts cited (alluded to) are the generating force behind the elaboration of narrative or other types of textual expansion" (Boyarin: 22). "Every text is absorption and transformation of other texts" (Kristeva: 146).

The third common way the term is used is recognition that the reader is also a text and that reading is in essence an encounter between texts. The reader is a bundle of hermeneutics, as it were, engaging a text that is itself a bundle of hermeneutics.

The Scrolls and Intertextuality

Aside from the strange copper Scroll from Cave 3, there are three basic types of literature from the Qumran caves: traditional canonical, deutero-canonical or apocryphal, and previously unknown literature. About a quarter of the Scrolls are biblical, as will be clearly seen when all the Scrolls have been published; so far, every book of the Jewish canon is represented, at least by a fragment or two, except Esther (Ulrich; Scanlin: 141-68). Of the deutero-canonical or apocryphal books known heretofore only in ancient Christian translated First Testaments (Greek, Latin, Ethiopic, Slavonic, etc.), a number are found in the Scrolls for the first time in their original languages, Hebrew or Aramaic.

The third type of Qumran literature, previously unknown in any form, is varied and rich. This category includes Qumran sectarian literature as well as Early Jewish literature preserved in the caves we simply never had before. It is this third type of previously totally unknown literature that takes painstaking skill to reconstruct, when, as in the case of the massive Cave 4, they survive only in fragments, many of which do not even join. This has been the principal reason for the slow pace of publication of the Qumran materials.

The reasons it is even possible to reconstruct from such small fragments this third type of totally unknown ancient Jewish literature are two. First, seasoned experts learn to recognize scribal handwriting as distinct to a single scribe so that it is possible to execute triage of the some ten thousand fragments from Cave 4, and get all the fragments belonging to one ancient document on one table under glass according to the handwriting to which each fragment belongs. It takes experience to recognize distinctive scripts of ancient scribes. The other reason it is possible to piece fragments belonging to the same document in proper positioning under glass is that Early Jewish literature was largely written Scripturally--that is, intertextually in the second sense noted above. The scholar doing the triage necessary for putting the Cave 4 fragments together must first discern the Scripture passage(s) upon which the later writing was building in order to reconstruct the work being reassembled.

The observation that all Early Jewish literature was written more or less Scripturally has always been operative in the study of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, as well as Philo, Josephus, and the Second Testament. But the Scrolls have enhanced the observation in ways that make it one of the major factors in the study of all Early Jewish literature. Again, it takes years of reading and knowing the whole of the Hebrew Bible, and its early Aramaic and Greek translations, to recognize the Scriptural forms, phrases, and paraphrases with which most Early Jewish literature was largely composed. It underscores the fact that one cannot study Early Jewish literature, including the Second Testament, without knowing the First Testament, including its ancient translations, quite thoroughly indeed. So much of the Jewish literature of the period is composed of phrases and paraphrases of Scripture that the seasoned scholar is able to piece together scattered fragments having the same handwriting, by discerning what Scripture passages the writer had in mind while composing the new material. The scholar truly immersed in the Hebrew Scriptures can usually discern what is going on in a fragmented but heretofore unknown document and thus juxtapose unjoined fragments under glass for photography and study. Without absorption in Scripture one is reduced to constantly checking concordances of the Bible to see what passage or passages the ancient author had in mind while writing. My teacher, Samuel Sandmel, often remarked that Judaism is Torah, and Torah is Judaism. By Torah he meant the broad meaning of Scripture generally, including the traditions that flowed from it. Professor Lou Silberman stresses the point that a Tana, an early Jewish teacher, was like a computer full of Scripture and its derivatives (Sanders 1997).

And the observation is generally true for all Early Jewish literature whether composed of Hebrew biblical phrases and paraphrases or of their translated Greek forms in the case of original composition in Greek. The same was true for literature written in Aramaic. In some instances, as with the Second Testament, one should know both the Tanak and the Septuagint, since Matthew, Mark, John, and Paul show knowledge (at one level or another) of both; for Luke and the Epistle to the Hebrews one must know early Greek translations of Jewish Scripture. Why? While the Second Testament is not in fragments needing triage like most of the Scrolls, it often resembles a montage or collage of Scriptural fragments, rhythms, and cadences.

Comparative Midrash

Recognizing the intertextual nature of the Second Testament, and pursuing what that means not only in terms of composition but also in terms of meaning, provides many largely unexplored lodes of meaning in the Second Testament. Most Second Testament scholarship focuses on early Christian sectarian sources in the formation of Gospels and Epistles and rarely mines the fuller richness of their intertextual nature as Scripture. There has rather been a tendency to regret the amount of earlier Scripture woven into the literary formation of the Second Testament, and also largely to dismiss it as prooftexting. Studying all Early Jewish literature intertextually leads in quite other directions.

The subdiscipline of comparative midrash permits one to discern the intertextual function of earlier literature in the later by focusing on the receptor hermeneutics by which the later writers caused Scripture to function for them. It also affords a perspective on the range of hermeneutics used in Early Jewish literature, and on the multivalency of Scripture.

The term midrash, like the term intertextuality, is used in different senses. It is traditionally used to refer to a mass of literature from the formative and classical periods of Judaism as a recognizable literary genre, the tannaitic and rabbinic midrashim. But it is also used in a broader, more basic sense to mean, not a literary genre, but the function of searching Scripture to seek light on new problems, as the verb in Hebrew, darash ("search" or "seek"), indicates (Bloch). In other words, it may be used to indicate a literary form, or to indicate a literary function. The midrashic function of drashing Scripture goes far back into biblical times before the canon was closed (Sanders 1972; Fishbane). Its earliest uses in Scripture had to do with seeking an oracle or instruction (a torah) from a prophet, priest, or other ancient oracle. Upon the demise of prophecy or revelation, as believed in Pharisaic/rabbinic Judaism, in the fifth century BCE, and the introduction of the Pentateuch as Torah, edited by Ezra in Babylonia and brought to Jerusalem somewhere around 445 BCE, one then began to drash the Torah, instead of spiritual leaders, to seek light on and guidance for new and ever-changing situations and circumstances(Sanders 1987: 9-39; 125-51). One finds ancient traditions in some of the earliest biblical compositions as well as in later Jewish literature. One also finds international wisdom absorbed and adapted into biblical literature from the earliest Scriptural compositions through to the last. One also attempts to discern the reader's or receptor's hermeneutic (view of reality) by which the later writer caused the earlier Scripture to function in the newer composition.

Comparative midrash is the exercise by which one can probe the depths of intertextuality and its significance for Scriptural and other Jewish literature. One first does exegesis of the passage cited or echoed in its primary location at inception in the Hebrew Bible, noting carefully the earlier traditions and wisdom thinking borrowed and structured into the cited passage in the first place. One then traces the Nachleben or pilgrimage of that passage throughout Early Jewish literature, within the Tanak, through the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Judean Desert Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, and the Second Testament--attempting always to determine the receptor hermeneutics used by the various tradents all along the path. One can pursue the exercise not only with discrete passages but also with episodes and figures. Lot, for instance, functioned in Early Jewish literature both as a "good guy" and as a "bad guy," with shades of appreciation or vilification in between.

At every instance along the pilgrimage of the earlier passage pursued one can listen in on dialogues within each later text studied by not letting the later tradent overwhelm the passage cited or echoed, but by keeping in mind the earlier meaings and modes of function, including its "original" meanings at inception in the Hebrew Bible. One might think of a round table with the cited or echoed passage from the Tanak in the middle, and all the tradents who used it in the literature of Early Judaism seated around the table in imaginary dialogue about the significance of the Scripture traced, even debating what hermeneutics were appropriate in what circumstances in re-applying the passage along its pilgrimage (Sanders 1966).

Reading the Second Testament itself as a part of Early Jewish literature in such a manner issues in veins of wealth of intra-canonical dialogue unavailable otehrwise (see, e.g., Sanders 1959; Hays). A crucial point to keep in mind is that most early Christian communities were a part of diversified Early Judaism until after the Bar Kochba Revolt (Sanders 1997, 1998c). In other words, not only were Jesus and the apostles, including Paul, Jews, but Christian synagogues/churches viewed themselves as part of Judaism, including the Gentileconverts to this sect of Judaism, until well into the Second Century CE. Viewing the Gospels and Paul in the light of their all being Jewish, albeit of the hellenized forms of Early pluriform Judaism, throws quite a different light on how to read the challenges and criticisms in the Gospels and Epistles. The strictures attributed to Jesus of the Jewish leaders of his time are similar to but pale in comparison with the many challenges and criticisms the prophets leveled against the leaders of their times centuries earlier.

The Double Testament Bible

One of the remarkable traits of the Bible as a whole is its self-critical component (Sanders 1992). There is no other body of literature quite like it.And it is not just an occasional trait; it is characteristic of large portions of the Bible. Most prophetic literature and the Gospels are records of intramural Jewish disputes. Not only so, the Bible as a whole is so diverse in points of view of what belief in one God meant, that there is hardly any affirmation in the Bible that is not challenged by some other passage. This is a large part of the genius of the Bible and surely one of the reasons it has lasted well over 2000 years; hardly any position in it is without challenge from another part of Scripture (Brueggemann: 317-399; Sanders 1999). Understanding Jesus' criticisms of his fellow Jews in the light of similar prophetic criticisms in earlier times puts them in a far different light from reading his strictures about Scribes and Pharisees and other Jewish leaders as though Jesus were somehow Gentile, a visiting foreigner, or not even human. Most Christians have read the Gospels in that way and thus totally misread them as anti-Jewish or antisemitic.

To read the expression the Jews, which occurs often in Acts and especially John, as though the term referred to a totally different identity group, which will be the case by the middle of the second century of the common era for most Christian synagogues but not in the first century, is to misread them entirely (Sanders 1998b). Those early Christians who were called Judaizers were those who held out for a basic Jewish identity distinct from a Rabbinic Jewish identity, but not separation from the mother faith. Paul insisted that he was a Jew, but had become a Christian Jew. There were many hellenized forms of Judaism in the first century, and Christian Judaism was viewed as one such form until it became so heavily influenced by the great influx of Gentiles that they no longer understood by the second half of the second century, that they were converting to a Jewish denomination. Reading the Second Testament within its canonical dimension can prevent misunderstanding it as an anti-Jewish polemic. Even when the churches finally broke away from any form of Judaism, or from being part of the hellenized branches of Judaism, they still insisted against Marcion that the Christian sectarian literature belonged in the Jewish Bible. A usefully corrective attitude here would be to view the Christian communities in the first century as adding the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles to the Jewish Bible, and then viewing them as arguing later in the second century to keep the "Old Covenant" in a double-testament Christian Bible.

By the time of Marcion in the middle of the second century it was possible to think of whether to keep the First Testament in the Christian Bible, but up to that point the argument had been the other way around: that the new witnesses to what God had just done in the first century, in Christ and the Early Church, should be viewed as the climax of the continuing story of God's revelations that had begun in Genesis. That was hutzpah enough, so to speak, adding to the Bible, but other Jewish denominations of the period, notably the Qumran community, apparently viewed some of their own literature with the same respect as some of the Writings. It has been argued, furthermore, that the large Torah Scroll from Cave 11 was thought as authoritative as the Mosaic Torah (Yadin: 390-92, esp. n. 8). Apparently no form of Judaism had a rigidly closed canon in the first century (Carr). Efforts at closure would come as Judaism became more narrowly understood to be fairly unified into rabbinic forms of Judaism only, while the various hellenized forms of Judaism merged with the separating Christian churches, or assimilated to other religions in the dominant Greco-Roman culture (Sanders 1998c).

Whatever the reasons, the churches came to view the particularly Christian literature as forming a Second Testament within the Greek Jewish Bible. Or to put it in mid-second-century terms, they all kept the Greek First Testament as canonical. Eastern churches kept more Early Jewish literature than others in their canons, the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, which Rabbinic synagogues sloughed off, as they indeed did the "Christian" sectarian literature. The key was the Pharisaic/Rabbinic belief that prophecy or revelation had ceased at the time of Ezra-Nehemiah; Qumran and Christianity obviously did not believe in such a restriction.

Keeping the First Testament, in whatever form, meant that Christians would continue to understand what God did in the first century in Christ and the Early Church in the light of what God had been doing since Genesis. The Septuagint provided a textbook for the increasingly Gentile church to continue to learn what it meant to believe in one God, so contrary to everything in the culture of the time. It also provided a textbook for how to live in the gap between God's promises and their projected fulfillment, a gap during which that fulfillment was apparently doomed to failure. The hope for the Second Coming was comparable to the Jewish continuing hope for the Messiah yet to come. The First Testament provided a textbook to understand that God is the God of fallings as well as risings, death as well as life, of what humans call failure as well as of what they call success, of what humans call evil as well as of what they call good. It also provided a paradigm for how to live in the gap between the divine promises and their projected fulfillment.

And it ought to have prevented what gradually came to be the way the churches read their Bible: namely, by a christocentric instead of a theocentric hermeneutic. But it did not. Christians also began to fail to heed the first three commandments, which prohibit polytheism, idolatry, and co-opting God's name for one point of view (whether in court or in theology). Whereas the trinitarian formula was intended to be a guard against polytheizing with its emphasis on the triune God, it has consciously or unconsciously been understood with a polytheizing hermeneutic. Even beyond that, Christianity has had a penchant for making an idol of Christ, thinking of Christ as Christian, and as a god in himself, even though the church has officially denounced both idolatry and docetism throughout the centuries. Falsehood threatens when it is forgotten that God is Creator of all, as well as Redeemer in Israel or in Christ; idolatry threatens when it is forgotten that God is Deus absconditus as well as Deus revelatus, both transcendent and immanent, whether known through Scripture or through Christ. To believe that any human understanding of Christ has totally revealed God is idolatry in the extreme, and there is clearly no common understanding of Scripture or of Christ and never has been. The wisdom of the early churches in keeping the four Gospels and rejecting Tatian's reductionist and harmonizing Diatessaron underscores the point.

Keeping the First Testament in the Christian Bible supported the growing Christian conviction in the second century that Christianity had succeeded Judaism as God's true Israel; and this was the case for Judaizers as well as Hellenizers in the churches. The question we must ask is whether it is exegetically legitimate to re-read the whole of the double-testament Christian Bible with a theocentric hermeneutic, admitting that the First Testament in its multivalency and pluralism does not lead inevitably to the Second, but may also lead to Mishnah, Talmud, and Responsa, and even in another direction to the Qur'an. The issue for our time, in retaining the double-testament Christian Bible, is reading the whole by a thoroughly theocentric hermeneutic, thereby rejecting supersessionism even though that was apparently the reason for keeping it against Marcion (Sanders 1992).

Dialogue within Scripture

Reading the Second Testament intertextually, listening in on the dialogue that occurs every time a First Testament passage is woven into the fabric of the Second, might possibly save Christianity from its perennial flirtation with polytheism and idolatry. If Christians could remember in reading the Gospels and Epistles that they speak of God's Christ, of God's work in and through Christ, and never of "our Christ" or of a Christian Christ, and thus refuse in reading them to identify with Christ but rather with those around him, namely our fellow Early Jews, they would begin to hear the Christian Bible in ways quite different from the way most Christians read the Bible, and have read it for nearly two thousand years.

A first step would be to take the hermeneutic stance that the Second Testament is largely about Jews in the first century searching Scripture to try to understand what was happening to them in their experience of the Christ in their lives, and what God was doing through Christ and themselves. This would be to read it as literature mainly written and addressed by Jews to Jews, albeit Jews of a particular sect of Judaism.

The next step would be to take the further hermeneutic stance that the bible is not canonically, that is, not ultimately about Jews and non-Jews. Historically, to be sure, it is about pharaohs and patriarchs, Canaanites and Israelites, Philistines and Judahites, Romans and Jews, etc. But canonically and ultimately it is about God and human beings. It is a paradigm of the divine-human encounter; it is a gallery of mirrors in which humans can continue today to see themselves in all their foibles and follies, strengths and weaknesses, being confronted with questions about truth, falsehood, justice, grace, obedience, and righteousness (Sanders 1987: 61-73).

An integral part of interfaith dialogue between Jews and Christians would be reading Scripture, and each other's traditions about it, together. And even if not physically together, there should be a pledge on the part of all who join the dialogue, whenever Scripture is read, to imagine that the other is overhearing what is said, and thinking about what is read. Falsehood threatens when it is forgotten that the redeemer God is also the Creator of all (Sanders 1987: 61-105). Falsehood also threatens when dialogue is limited to those who have the same religious identity. Can those of us who think the Jewish-Christian dialogue is important to our humanity at least pretend that there is but one God, and read Scripture as though our minds were bugged--by God (Sanders in Brooks & Collins: 41-68). One might even hope that the dialogue would be in a trilateral mode with Islam.

But the trilateral mode should not dilute the Jewish-Christian dialogue, which warrants special attention because of the origins of Christianity within Judaism and the shared First Testament. Taking a cue from Jacob Neusner's idea of the "pathos of alien feeling," which belief in one God requires of us, finding and sharing stories should begin with a dialogical reading of Scripture, the book of so many shared stories that each faith tends nonetheless to read quite differently from the other. Reading Scripture together dialogically would then be supplemented by reading one another's stories in the extended canons, the Second Christian Testament, Mishnah, Midrash, the Fathers, and on beyond.

Reading Scripture dialogically through intertextuality provides rich lodes within Scripture rarely explored. Since Scripture is intertextual in nature, it has depths that can reach into the very essence of the human experience. One should read Scripture intertextually, keeping in mind contributions to any given text from international wisdom as well as from Israel's and Early Judaism's traditions, written and oral. The Bible as a whole comes from five culture eras in antiquity, from the Bronze Age through to the Greco-Roman, semitic and non-semitic, and includes riches untold from all of them. Each partner in the dialogue should then consciously read the shared text both critically and faithfully--in the light of the results of the historical and analytical work on the history of formation of the text of the past three centuries, and in the light of each faith's traditioning process.

Reading Critically and Faithfully

If, as I firmly believe, the Enlightenment was a gift of God in due season, then we must read the Bible critically--that is, historically and not only through the lens of the traditioning processes. But if, as I also just as firmly believe, faith itself is a gift of God, then each partner should also remain basically faithful to his or her faith-identity traditioning process while doing so (Sanders 1987: 75-86; Carr). Otherwise Kugel and Levenson are right. The critical reading often challenges the understanding of a text we each learned from our different faith communities, and that is a form of dialogue in itself, in the third understanding of intertextuality noted above.

In critical or historical reading wherever an earlier text functions in a later text, in the second meaning of intertextuality, whether it was homegrown within Israel or international in scope, the dialogue should be pursued critically and faithfully, that is, with both suspicion and consent. In this way the understanding of a passage indicated by one's tradition would be in dialogue both with the critical reading and with the other's traditions deriving from the same passage. In this way Paul's and Akiba's understandings of a given passage, as well as critical understandings of its earliest meanings, would be honored and studied, compared and analyzed historically and hermeneutically. The earlier word must still have a voice about the round table; it has not been superseded, and critical scholarship keeps it alive by constantly striving to reconstruct original settings and meanings, as well as each of the subsequent recitations and echoes of a passage in its pilgrimage through Early Judaism into Formative Judaism and Christianity. A feast of meaning derived from single passages can then be savored while the hermeneutic range by which each passage continued to speak to ever-changing situations is gauged in the canonical process.

Neusner's idea then of learning about each other by sharing stories, because there is but one God and Jews and Christians both believe in that same God, can be focused on shared Scripture traditioned in two quite different ways, with careful attention to shared or conflicting hermeneutics. If it is commonplace now to affirm that the observer is part of the observed, and that objectivity is but subjectivity under effective constraint, then genuine listening and dialogue between two conflicting hermeneutics is the only sure constraint available to those desiring to do research that purports to press the frontiers of truth.

Works Cited

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James A. Sanders, Ph.D. (Hebrew Union College), Litt. D. (Acadia University), S.T.D. (Glasgow University), is President of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center for Preservation and Research and Professor Emeritus of Intertestamental and Biblical Studies at the Claremont School of Theology, 1325 N. College Avenue, Claremont CA 91711 (e-mail: [e-mail]). He has served as President of the Society of Biblical Literature and is the only American member of the United Bible Society's Hebrew Old Testament Text Critical Project.