Out with the Old (Testament) and in with the New (Testament)

With the passage of some weeks the History Channel’s miniseries “The Bible” begins to fade from the public eye and embark perhaps on a gentle migration (as so many fleetingly popular titles do) to the bargain price video bin at Walmart. I have already delved into some of those aspects of the series that catches the eye of this feisty non-Christian (focusing on Genesis, the Samson Tale and the Exodus), and will conclude with the transition the story took from Old to New Testaments.

Dramatically this phase of the story occupied about half the whole running length, and has some stronger performances than earlier installments. Daniel’s travails in Babylon are fairly well done, and the Jesus story naturally gets richer coverage (I say naturally, because given the number of reverent Jesus movies in the repertoire, if they fail to deliver at least some powerful moments on these topics then they should be fired for incompetence).

The introduction of the apostles stumbled for a time, appearing a rather drab bunch to begin with (only Matthew’s tax collector tearfully breaking down at Jesus’ invitation had much punch for me) but as the trajectory from Calvary to early church got into gear they managed better emotional treatments, culminating in the intense (and a bit creepy) depiction of the transformation of the rabid ideologue Saul into the Christian evangelist Paul.

But big Spoiler Alert! This is a story of the Christian version of the Bible, which by its very nature has to somehow funnel the reams of Jewish history and religious text through the perspective of New Testament post facto exegesis, and thus throwing under the bus (metaphorically sometimes, but alas sometimes more literally) those centuries of devout Jews who somehow never spotted how their prophesied Messiah was supposed to be that one. Nowhere is that split more explicit than in the treatment of the Jewish establishment reacting to Jesus as a heretic. Unfortunately for the scholar there is absolutely no independent reporting of the “Jesus episode” from any other than the later redactions represented by the Gospels.

Given how earlier episodes were covered, it hardly comes as a surprise to see the Downey/Burnett treatment tracking the traditional Christmas pageant approach to Jesus, gingerly bounding past a host of scholarly minefields along the way.

Take that Daniel story that acts as intro. It enjoys a place as the prophetic mother load for modern End Times eschatology, hampered only by the minor caveat that regular biblical scholars are reasonably confident that the text (bristling with terminological anachronisms) cannot possibly date from the era it claims to and so rendering its “prophecies” so much after the fact window dressing, which in turn raises the prospect that the miraculous events described (fireproof and lion-proof prophets) might likewise be merely later dramatic license.

And, speaking of the Apocalypse, it was very interesting indeed that Downey/Burnett managed to reduce that to a scribbling aside at the end of the show. I really was looking forward to seeing some nifty digital graphics of carnage and destruction, as well as a close peek at that giant golden residential palace described in Revelation (where evidently Donald Trump got the decorating contract, overflowing with precious pearl and silver and such, reflecting an Almighty possessed of a bigger budget than taste).

The Downey/Burnett production kept on rolling in exactly that mode of “not too much detail if its going to be a trouble” when it encounters Jesus’ nativity. Thus the Jewish Messiah (who must turn out to be Jesus and no other) shall be “born of a virgin” per Isaiah 7:14 because that’s how subsequent Christian doctrine came to see it.  Never mind that there is a Hebrew term for a virgin, bethulah, which occurs elsewhere in the Old Testament—but not in Isaiah, where the Hebrew almah was used, denoting only a “young woman.”  To what extent this theological imperative stemmed from a translation flub (the early Septuagint Greek text translated almah as parthenos, the Greek for “virgin”) has been a bone of contention among “conservative” and “liberal” scholars to this day.

This reminded me of a comparable, albeit sillier, example from the nooks and crannies of Christian apologetics: the late D. James Kennedy and the creationist physicist Donald DeYoung, acting like so many occult pseudoscientists by deciding that the stars in the constellations of the Zodiac were designed to function as a celestial cartoon show to depict the Christian story in the heavens. So it is that Aries the Ram denoted “sacrifice,” riffing off the sacrificial lamb aspect of Old Testament Jewish tradition whereby the Isaac story is deemed to presage the death of Jesus. The irony here is that the only reason why Aries is a ram is because of another of those Greek translation glitches: the Babylonians called that constellation the “Hired Farm worker,” but the cuneiform abbreviation for that was later confused with the term for sheep and rams. It would be as if one were drawing on the iconography of the Pleiades (which is suburu in Japanese) to conclude that anything associated with it possessed the ruggedness of four-wheel drive.

These elements of omission in “The Bible” show continued to pile up as the drama pressed on. As Bible scholars are well aware, there are but two not very similar accounts of Jesus’ birth in the Gospels, ones routinely mushed together in presentations, and the Downey/Burnett show is no exception. Only in Matthew are there “wise men from the East” following the Star of Bethlehem in search of the future king of Israel, fueling the paranoid ire of the tyrannical King Herod, who ordered a slaughter of infants to do away with this potential threat to his tottering throne. An angel intervened to warn Joseph to flee with the family to Egypt, sounding all too similar to what is supposed to have happened to Moses long before, set adrift to escape Pharaoh’s similar command, and thus raising the possibility that Matthew (or whoever wrote “Matthew”) might have cribbed a bit from that earlier story for dramatic effect (much as Kennedy and DeYoung have expropriated Aries the Ram in our own time).

Move over to Luke and no Star and no Herod, instead Joseph and Mary end up at the manger because of a census ordered by Emperor Augustus. Now a feather in the cap of Luke’s reputation as a historian comes from the fact that such a census had indeed taken place, specifically when a certain Quirinius was governor of Syria. The cruelty of Herod’s dynasty and his equally disagreeable successors had led to a serious agrarian revolt prompting the Romans to dispense with the fiction of a separate Israeli client state and formally annex the territory as a province, which in the manner of the bureaucratic Romans occasioned a thorough accounting of who and what. The snag for incorporating the Matthew Wise Men story (or trying to hunt for a physical source for any Herod-era Star of Bethlehem) is that this annexation that brought on the Quirinius-era census took place around CE 6, about a decade after 4 BCE, when the nasty old Herod of the Matthew account had died. Oops!

The upshot for skeptics like myself when viewing shows like the Downey/Burnett The Bible is that, however dramatically powerful the Crucifixion and Resurrection stories may be (and whether treated reverentially or not) in the back of our minds is the recognition that the story itself is compiled from what are plainly conflicting if not outright problematic accounts. Trying to gloss over those problems may be OK if it is deemed merely mythological fiction (like the Greek god tales in Jason and the Argonauts) but raises hackles if it is being treated as though these were straightforward events of history, like Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

Knowing of the reality series roots of Mark Burnett, The Bible he and his wife produced for the History Channel looms as a theological version of The Biggest Loser: trimming line by line all manner of inconvenient Bible text (from Genesis to Judges to the Nativity) to leave the leaner, tidier finished product beaming at the end in all its High Definition anorexia.

Maybe I need to wait for the musical?

Editor's Note: Spokane Faith & Values has a new feature called “Ask An Atheist” where readers are invited to submit question to our atheist writers. Click here if you'd like to submit a question.