I didn’t notice until now that James Kugel’s
lecture at ISBL Rome this July is available on the SBL website here (the printed
copy is not identical to that actually delivered, but very close). In
celebration of the centenary of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, the lecture
is full of lovely anecdotes, and beyond that, makes at least two controversial
points, to wit:
(1) Orthodox Judaism and the Roman Catholic
Church have in common a history of antipathy to modern biblical scholarship. The
antipathy has largely disappeared within the Catholic Church, not least of all,
thanks to a century of commitment to scholarship of the highest quality at the
Pontifical Biblical Institute. According to Kugel, the antipathy remains in
Orthodox Judaism (I quote):
Orthodox Jews also have a history of antipathy to modern biblical
scholarship; indeed, some of the problems we now face [we Orthodox Jews;
italics mine] are similar to those that confronted the PBI back in 1909. I
doubt that, if we were to found our own sort of Biblical Institute today, it
would follow quite the same course as the PBI; still, such an institution might
well provide a lively meeting place for informed and honest Orthodox biblical
scholars.
Pius X hoped that the PBI would serve, as
Kugel notes, to “promot[e] biblical scholarship as the Church understands it”
and “to defend, publish, and promote sound exegesis according to the norms of
the Holy See, especially against some recent ‘false, erroneous, rash, heretical
opinions’” (from a letter of Pius X, Scripturae sacrae, provided by Maurice
Gilbert, L’Institut Biblique Pontifical: Un siècle d’histoire (1909–2009); ET trans. Leo Arnold; The Pontifical Biblical Institute: A
Century of History (1909–2009) [Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 2009]
23).1
(2) Without returning to a premodern mindset, as if that were even possible, it is about time that modern scholars came to have a higher appreciation of premodern exegesis:
For, in the light of what we know today, that way of reading the text [the
Church’s so-called premodern approach to Scripture] — along with its
contemporary and close cousin, the rabbinic way — ought rightly to be seen as
the last stage of the Bible’s own emergence within the biblical period. In
other words, the old sensus spiritualis is not an embarrassing little
thing that happened after there was a Bible; rather, it was the culmination, or
a culmination, of a process that really made the Bible the Bible . . . one
piece of text was joined to another, editors reorganized snippets of writing
and sometimes inserted their own additions, and this work in general was hardly
an insignificant part of the Bible’s creation. In a real sense, it is this last
stage that made the Bible, putting onto these texts the particular spin that
was to be such a big part of what the Bible has been ever after. That “spin”
may be isolated in a particular set of assumptions about what the Bible is and
how it is to be read. Those assumptions were embodied in the great corpus of
ancient biblical interpretation that was well on its way by the third and
second centuries B.C.E., and (this is really my point) it was these assumptions,
and the forms of biblical interpretation that they generated, that ultimately
came to be adopted by the early church as the Bible’s sensus spiritualis.
I should think that an interest in precisely these processes would be nowhere
more at home than at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. Perhaps indeed that is
something to look forward to in its second century of existence.
For Maurice Gilbert’s ISBL lecture, go here. For Kent Richards’ fine evocation of ISBL-Rome 2009, with links to Paul Achtemeier and Lawrence Boadt’s ISBL lectures, go here. For an unjustly forgotten episode in the history of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, one that cannot fail to cheer the soul, go here.
1 I would add that the promotion of biblical scholarship “as the Church understands it” indeed took place, though not in the way Pius X imagined at the time. Contrary to the Pope’s expectations, in the last 100 years, as the Church discovered that it could learn from, co-opt, and assimilate modernist elements into its own culture, the PBI turned out to be an excellent conveyor belt of said discoveries.
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