The Savage Text: The Use and Abuse of the Bible by Adrian Thatcher
Wiley-Blackwell, £14.99
When Neil Kinnock was reforming the Labour Party, he got hung up on equality; not as a concept, but as a word. It had too many echoes of the old socialist agenda for the middle England voters he wanted Labour to attract.
Equality was a word which belonged to the era of the red flag. So he changed it to fairness to go with a red rose, and New Labour had its semantic beginnings. This willingness to move on would be instructive for the Church of England where Rowan Williams faces a tougher job of achieving unity than Kinnock ever did.
To keep the Anglican communion together, Williams and the C of E must march 20 years behind the country it is religiously meant to represent. Gay partnerships raise barely a secular eyebrow now, but there is no fairness for practising homosexuals who want to be priests.
Neither is there equality in the church workplace for women who can rise no further than archdeacon. How can a woman be a bishop, goes the argument, when all the apostles were men? The discipleship of Mary Magdalene is my answer to that. But all this misery over gender and sexual orientation is because of the Bible.
Yet the Bible was never meant to be taken literally, nor was it until fundamentalist and evangelical Christians began doing so in the 19th century. Take the bit about “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. This is not a call for bloodthirsty revenge as the hang ‘em and flog ’em brigade like to claim, but a plea for proportionate response.
Leviticus would have homosexuals put to death, but we do not take this injunction literally, nor do we execute kids who are rude to their parents or ban prawn sandwiches just because this Old Testament law book says we should.
It is this kind of language, argues Exeter University theologian Adrian Thatcher, which turns the Bible into The Savage Text and makes hatred holy. “The savage text is implicated in the moral case against Christianity,” he writes. “Who wants to defend a faith that customises hatred?”
He looks at what the Bible says about racism and slavery and women and children and how the literalists have mangled and misinterpreted the message by failing to see it as allegory. But best of all he makes mischief.
How did John, for instance, come to be singled out as the disciple Jesus loved? Jesus loved all his disciples so what, Thatcher wonders, was the particular love John was singled out for? Is the male youth in Mark’s gospel who fled naked from the garden of Gethsemane having shed his loin cloth pederastic symbolism?
And was the centurion’s lad that Jesus healed in Matthew and Luke just the Roman officer’s servant, or did they enjoy a more intimate relationship which the Son of God implicitly condoned?
This book is primarily aimed at theology students, but Thatcher also hopes it will attract a general readership. I doubt that. But it is certainly a valuable – and sane – addition to modern Biblical scholarship.
Nigel Nelson
