faith and doubt and scholarship

At our homegroup last week, we watched a lecture about the Old Testament, by a Dr Amy-Jill Levine.  This was the introduction to a long series - which we may or may not watch - so she was setting out her whole perspective.  This involved discussing the various kinds of literature in the OT, and briefly touching on their literary influences and historical/archaeological evidence.

In one sense, it was unremarkable stuff.  A little dated in places, but nothing you wouldn't hear in a run-of-the-mill theological college.  Even though she advanced her own opinion that King David didn't necessarily exist as a real historical figure, I'd say that her perspective wasn't really more radical than you'd hear even in a fairly evangelical school (but I may be wrong, because I don't tend to hang out in theological colleges).

But those are things you don't hear from the pulpit in an evangelical church.  Describing the early chapters of Genesis as 'myth' is a bit of a red rag to people accustomed to thinking that believing the bible is God's word means believing that everything which seems like it might be history is ... well, a forensic account worthy of Simon Schama, or Lord Dacre, or whoever your favourite historian might be.  Suggesting that it might not have been written down until the time of the Exile, that as a result its account of events a thousand or more years earlier might be patchy, is liable to evince harrumphs and bristly responses.   Suggesting that the early chapters of Genesis have material in common with the myths of Babylon, and the former might have been written in knowledge of the latter, is tantamount to some awful crime.

Where did it all go wrong?  How did receiving the bible as God's word come to mean leaving hold of our critical faculties?  If there's scant extra-biblical evidence for the Exodus, does it really destroy our faith to say so?  Can you really read the book of Judges as if it were written according to the literary conventions of enlightenment Europe?  Would it be so bad to fess up and say that Job and Jonah have more in common (in terms of historicity) with Falstaff or King Arthur than Queen Victoria or Winston Churchill?

Is that kind of doubt destructive?  I don't think so.  In fact, I think it's essential.   Creation versus evolution has become the totemic issue for scholarship versus 'literal' biblical interpretation, but the same kind of issues arise over and over again.  That's not to say that the scholarship should be accepted uncritically  - a lack of archaeological evidence is not at all the same thing as a 'proof that it never happened'.  But if Christian piety remains detached - and divergent - from the best high-quality thinking about its own core text, then it can only be impoverished, naive, and irrelevant.  Can't it?