To call “Scripture” a virtue is, I admit, a bit of a stretch of the grammatical structure that these casual arguments—now spanning religion, pluralism, and humanity—have hitherto followed in their nomenclature. “Scripture,” strictly speaking, is a noun: the word simply means “writing” (scribo, scribere), though of course it has come to signify literature of a very particular, sacred sort in common English. By “Scripture,” we typically mean texts valued by religious communities, and specifically living religious communities: the Bible (in any of its varieties), the Vedas, the Upanisads, the Avesta, the Dhammapada, any of the four principal Nikayas, the Ramayana, the Bhagavadgita, the Devimahatmya, the Quran, the Adi Granth, and so forth. Without displacing these and related texts, which are rightly central in any definition of “Scripture,” I would posit three related points by way of expansion; two I expect to be uncontroversial, the third perhaps a bit newer. First, any exclusivist doctrine of Scripture falls short precisely by its inattention to the character of Scripture as literature with a human history; second, the intertextual connections between Scripture and what we typically think of as “secular” literature break down the two categories, such that we must treat Scripture as human literature but therefore all human literature, conversely, as potentially Scripture; third, across the rubble of that broken divider, the divinity of Scripture actually spills out into all human texts, oral and literary, even as all Scripture qua Scripture partakes in the complexity of its authors’ humanity. Or alternatively: for any Scripture to be divinely “inspired” (not the terminology for Scripture’s divinity in every tradition, we might point out) requires that all Scripture is inspired to some degree, such that the “virtue” of Scripture is cultivated insofar as one is able to discern the divine-human symphony (or cacophony) of voices in any particular text.
Humans have used pictorial inscription and painting since our very early history, as early human cave art depicts, but the use of writing, consisting of glyphs or symbols representing syllables which stand for distinct lexemes, is much younger, at least according to our current evidence. Older scholarship suggested that the first writing arose from bureaucratic needs of early states like accounting, but newer studies suggest instead that writing emerged from other sources of human experience, including “religious” ones like the need to record dreams and shamanic experiences. In any event, sacred and secular purposes are rarely so distinct. Myths and court histories possessed their own sacred functions, of course, and many of the earliest still extant texts were “scriptural” in their context though we no longer think of them as such. Take, for instance, the Epic of Gilgamesh, which makes liturgical references and was probably recited, perhaps even performed, in liturgical contexts in ancient Sumer:1 in its own context, these tablets were “Scripture,” not so much in the sense of something to be privately read or extensively commented on as to be audiovisually displayed and experienced. Or take Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. These texts, born from the oral culture of the archaic Greek world throughout Hellas and Ionia where they were performed by rhapsodes and sung by itinerant bards (sometimes with and sometimes without musical accompaniment), purport to describe the events of a war and a homecoming (nostos) some five centuries prior to the lifetime of the authors.2 The royal and wealthy feasts where these songs were first performed—distant ancestors to the later symposia of the classical and Hellenistic eras and Roman convivia—may have had a sacred character, as their banqueting afterlives frequently did; but more to the point, Homer may as well have been Scripture in the minds of educated Greeks afterwards, since it was from Homer that all the fundamental knowledge of the gods and the early history of the present age was thought to reside (even when that knowledge was considered contestable or wrong). Sweeping epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata—South and Southeast Asia’s equivalents to Homer—depict tales of mythic, legendary figures and wars of the distant past; much of their text either promulgates no explicit doctrine or offers an ambiguous perspective on certain inherited wisdom. And yet both have functioned as mainstream Scripture among Hindus ever since: Ramayana constitutes a fundamental source of bhakti to Vishnu as Rama, as Mahabharata does for Vishnu as Krishna; the latter’s cultural importance is largely concentrated in the philosophy of Bhagavadgita. In the cases of Gilgamesh and Homer, what once had sacred value are now deemed impressive and valuable literary feats of the ancient world appreciated both on their own merit and for the way they illumine other texts more central to our own culture that emerge from the same wider milieu; in the case of Ramayana and Mahabharata, the sacred uses of these texts depend on one’s own social and religious location. For many Hindus, the epics are central sources of important religious knowledge. But for Buddhists in, say, Thailand, a text like Ramayana has profound cultural importance but is not the basis for a thoroughgoing devotional worship of Vishnu qua Rama (Buddhists frequently worship brahmanic devas, contra the Buddha’s own teaching, in Southeast Asia, but generally do so as a religious technology with pragmatic purpose rather than to unite with ultimate reality).3 The sacred and the secular character of literature is perspectival.
This is also true for the fluid set of texts and traditions that we typically refer to as “the Bible.” The title itself evokes today a sense of literature which is especially “Scripture,” but just as “Scripture” simply means “writing,” so to biblion simply means “book”: ta biblia are “the books” of the Jewish and Christian archive, specifically those that survived antiquity and rose to prominence in Jewish and Christian communities. As any contemporary scholar would rightly point out, that this happened is an accident of the historical process rather than a given. The texts of the Hebrew Bible—what Jews call the Tanakh, and what Christians typically call the Old Testament, composed in Hebrew and Aramaic, existing in the traditions of the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, surviving texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls—were compiled, composed, and redacted by late preexilic Judahites and Early Jews in the exilic and postexilic periods. The purposes of these texts were originally secular: as Richard Elliott Friedman has argued, there is good reason to think that J, the earliest source of the Torah, and the Court History of 1 and 2 Samuel were written by the same Yahwist author to provide a shared national narrative of origins to Judah. While these texts touched on sacred topics, in a world where relatively few people could read and where religion consisted of various ritual, sacrificial, and euchological protocols that had nothing to do with the reading of texts, their purposes could only be to map the legitimacy of the Judahite state and the Davidic monarchy. These secular purposes were pluriform: from the competing legislations of the Covenant Code, the Priestly author, the Holiness Code, and the Deuteronomist, to the longer, edited form of the Deuteronomistic History offering apologetics for the decline of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah with reference to the cultic concerns of late, aniconic Yahwism, to the political machinations and prognostications of the Hebrew Prophets, to the redacted form of the Torah forwarded as the constitution of Persian Yehud, the Hebrew Bible reflects the changing sociocultural, economic, and political circumstances of a specific group of people over a vast amount of time. The secular layers are interwoven with the holy, of course: the various legal corpora of the Torah govern “religious” life as well as ethical and judicial norms, and the rhetorical point of the Former and Latter Prophets (nevi’im) as compiled by Early Jews was to justify the particular form of their religion that survived the Babylonian Exile, which increasingly saw YHWH as a summodeistic or even monotheistic God, unable to be depicted by iconography or idolatry, boasting plenipotentiary power over the universe, rather than a viceroyal or supreme king of the gods as he had been in earlier stages of Israelite and Judahite religion. The Writings (kethuvim) are philosophical, poetic, and narrative compositions from the Persian and Hellenistic periods which address various Jewish concerns elicited by life under foreign rule: everything from the moral status of non-Jews to the possibility of an afterlife.
This canon was not, at any point in the period scholars call “Ancient” or “Early” or “Second Temple” Judaism (586 BCE - 70 CE), fixed. Virtually all Jewish groups shared a pentateuchal Torah, in whatever language they could read it, and most Jews shared the Prophets; both were probably read in the majority of ancient synagogues either in the Land or in the Diaspora. But the two were not then and are not now seen as equally sacred by Jews. In antiquity, Jews could look to the Torah as divinely inspired or given comparably to the way that other ancient ethnic groups saw their own ancestral legislation: handed down by their national gods to their deified lawgivers (in this case, Moses, whom many ancient Jews thought to have been glorified at or after death). The Torah was the Judean politeia, or constitution, and was sacred insofar as all political norms and institutions of the ancient world were sacred, even if Jews also felt that theirs was an especially divine law. Whether the Prophets were repositories of truly divine oracles, and whether they were best interpreted by reference to history, contemporary events, or philosophy, was as much a point of dispute among Early Jews and Christians then as now. The Writings, as the most recent compositions and the least dependent on appeals to divine revelation, represented traditional and novel responses to existential issues for Jews under Persian, Hellenic, and Roman dominion, and so did not claim universal assent or respect: famously, Song of Songs was almost too sexy for the rabbis, while Esther does not appear in the Library of Qumran.
Nor were the texts that were ultimately canonized the only or even primary compositions in use by Early Jews. The historical, pseudepigraphal, apocalyptic, sapiential, commentary, fabulous, and poetic compositions of Early Jews, in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, sometimes surviving in the various languages of the Christian monks that preserved them (Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, Old Church Slavonic, Latin, and so forth) were primary ciphers to the meaning of the texts deemed mainstream Scripture for many Jews. Some Jews considered apocalyptic texts like 1 Enoch and Jubilees to provide an insider’s expanded knowledge which qualified the mainstream Scripture written for outsiders. Some used texts like Tobit to urge endogamy and almsgiving, while others appealed to Ruth to justify intermarriage and Joseph and Aseneth for the possibility of conversion. Texts like 1 and 2 Maccabees crafted narratives of profound heroism at the heart of a newly independent Judea and sense of panregional “Judaism” (Ioudaismos), while those like Daniel depicted a triumphant end to history for God, his “one like a Son of Man” (Dan 7:9-14), and the wise. The New Testament—composed in Greek, though possibly with an Aramaic record of Jesus’ teachings (and perhaps some of his deeds) that stands behind the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, whether as an independent document or as an early version of Matthew—is another such corpus of Early Jewish literature expanding upon and interpreting older Jewish sources, this time through the focusing lens of the person, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Its own canonization has also never been standardized in the history of Christianity, though most Christians share the same twenty-seven documents through the osmosis of their antiquity, (alleged) apostolicity, ubiquity, and orthodoxy, the last criterion generally serving as a synonym for patriarchal and imperial pressure emanating from the great Christian sees of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, and later Constantinople and Jerusalem. For the Byzantines, the canonization of the New Testament was animated by a matter of fundamental political importance: unity of cult and doctrine, by which the dominant ancient religious logic insisted, the imperium would be preserved.
Scriptural uniformity—again, never fully accomplished, and something of a moot point in a society where roughly 15% of the population could read and write or had the wealth and leisure to own and read books, anyway—was of course insufficient to guarantee doctrinal conformity, as the Arian and then Christological controversies demonstrated. The latter of these effectively destroyed the unity of the Eastern churches (creating the Assyrian Church of the East, the communion of the various Miaphysite churches, and the imperial, Chalcedonian Orthodox/Catholic church) and precipitated both changing fortunes in the Persian Wars and the eventual rise of Islam. But the point is to see that even as the canons of Scripture came to be regarded as “holy,” as divinely inspired, by Christians, the appropriate way to read it was pursued for very worldly purposes. The rabbis, for their part, advanced their canon—only denominated as the Tanakh in the middle ages—as an oppressed minority in Christian Rome and as one among several religious minorities in the Persian Empire; in the former case, control over Scripture, its interpretation and expansion, was one of several issues relevant to Jewish survival and flourishing, but in the latter case, where Jews enjoyed relative prosperity, creative and compelling engagement with Scripture became the norm of Jewish study (hence the general superiority of the Bavli to the Yerushalmi in rabbinic thought). Christians and Muslims both engaged in canon formation with the fragility of their respective hegemonies ever in mind.
Social, economic, and political concerns are therefore very much at the heart of how Scripture becomes or ceases to be Scripture. Texts like Daniel 7:9-14, 1 Enoch (especially the Parables; 1 En. 37-71), and others that generated the so-called “Two Powers” heresy are of great interest and potential sanctity for Jews who live in a position of relative peerage with their Christian neighbors; too much attention to them was an existential threat for Jews living under intolerant Christian rulers. Christians living outside of Justinian’s empire were generally in a safer position to read Origen’s De Principiis than those living within it (hence the relative dearth of his surviving corpus compared to the thousands of texts he is alleged to have composed). The text of the Quran as we now have it was probably finally compiled and decided upon by the Abbasids sometime in the ninth century—roughly two centuries after Muhammad’s own lifetime, and to the mortal threat of alternative textual traditions. And worldly circumstances continue to dictate what and how Scripture is read and interacted with by people today. The freedom that I have, for example, to read, compare, contrast, and critically, sympathetically engage with a full range of Jewish and Christian texts, in conversation and convergence with texts from other religious traditions, is a consequence of my own spatiotemporal locus in the postmodern liberal West. Eclecticism and cosmopolitanism are always privileges of a relatively liberal society, which are difficult to use as metrics by which to judge our forbears in the reading and interpretation of Scripture, who lived through periods where what was read and for what purpose could be an issue of life or death. When modern scholars recognize, for instance, what the ancients generally did not about Genesis 1-11—that it is an ancient Israelite and Judahite remix of common myths of origin from Southwest Asia, represented by texts like Gilgamesh, Atrahasis, Enuma Elish, and the like—it is not because we are smarter or better readers than they were: we simply enjoy different resources appropriate to our different circumstances. When modern Jews and Christians engage with one another’s hermeneutical standards, they do so from a vantage of unprecedented freedom in the Western world to employ critical thinking about core religious viewpoints that previously formed the basis for persecution, suffering, and death, memories of which still profoundly linger in the worldwide Jewish community. We cannot arbitrarily separate what is “holy” about Scripture from what is homely, the sacred from the secular, without at the same time denying both the instrumental means by which the scriptural sacred came into view within history and the hermeneutical means by which the sacred is acknowledged and understood by scriptural communities.
If we are to view Scripture—any Scripture—as divine, then these observations might amount to a theandric doctrine of Scripture’s inspiration: just as Christ is the Word made flesh, God made human, so Scripture is the Word made text. I am not the first to make this kind of argument—Pete Enns was my first exposure to the idea in high school—but I would offer a corollary that I do not believe I have seen elsewhere: if Scripture is divine to the extent that it is human, and no less human than it is divine, then in some sense there is no division between “sacred” and “secular” literature at all, and all text assumes something of a sacred quality qua text. To put this a bit more clearly: as all human literature stands in a web of intertextual relationships to other works, some more intimate, some more distant to the circumstances of the text’s own origin, curation, and reception, and as all literature as such is inevitably shaped by the specifics of human experience and life, it is thus the case that no firm distinction can be drawn between some texts as completely inspired and other texts as completely uninspired without reifying the false division between sacred and secular. Allow me to return to my example in Genesis 1-11: that the Priestly creation story (Gen 1:1-2:3) reuses images, terms, and ideas from the Babylonian theomachy of Enuma Elish does not equivocate the two texts, but it does require that the divine inspiration we see in the work of the Priestly author is present at least potentially (and perhaps actually) already in his literary model or precedents. Otherwise, the allusions made would depreciate the value of the text we deem scriptural: and so, too, the logic holds for the Yahwist creation story (Gen 2:4-3:24) and the myths of Adapa and Atrahasis, so too for the flood myths of Genesis 6-9 and the latter tablets of Gilgamesh, so too for Psalm 104 and the Hymn to Aten, etc. Indeed, the deep parallelism, literary interrelationships, and cultural osmosis characterizing the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in their ancient Southwest Asian/Near Eastern and Mediterranean, Greco-Roman contexts require us to see the divinity of Scripture as concentrated in our texts of choice rather than wholly novel, for the authors that produced them are so humanly shaped by their cultural environments that there is no isolated literary space for the divine presence to alight upon where some “pagan” influence cannot be found. And insofar as those “pagan” influences themselves constitute middling interlocutors between the biblical corpus and the other primary texts of the great Central, South, and East Asian religious traditions—Zoroastrian (though this may have directly influenced at least some biblical authors), Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist literatures, and then later the Islamicate literary culture that served as a novel bridge between these and the biblical traditions that birthed it—the only logical conclusion that a Jew or Christian might come to is that their own Scriptures simply congregate streams of divinity that run through all such other texts as well, indeed, through text qua text.
Here, then, is a theological argument for the ancient perspective that literature itself is a divine-human product, of the indwelling Muse, or the aspiring enthusiast. For Scripture only has meaning as a text to the extent that we can read it through the lens of other texts and experiences, such that if it is divine, its divinity is interlaced with its humanity. There are obvious ways that this expansive theory might offend through misapplication, of course: surely one does not have to believe that Patanjaliyogasastra is no more or less divine than the horrendous evils of Mein Kampf or The Art of the Deal. If there are devas, angels, and kindly spirits that can inspire, there are also certainly asuras and devils that can as well. But just as the Divine Spirit, the wild God, gives being and life even to the violent things of the world, without per se directly intending the world’s violence, so we might understand poiesis as a power of access to divine inspiration that humans might well abuse in the service of their own prejudices and evil. Evil itself is the monstrum of its own nothingness, such that even in completely dissolute literature something of the character of reality is revealed, even by way of contrast; perhaps this is why Scripture itself sometimes contains injunctions or narratives whose moral character is deficient. Jews and Christians have historically recognized that the line between what is worthy of God and what is unworthy of God runs straight through the biblical canon itself, such that to read portions of Scripture purely ad litteram as though they spoke authoritatively of God would be to attribute grievous immorality to the Godhead (no differently, it must be added, than Hellenistic scholars and philosophers felt about literal readings of Homer, Hesiod, and traditional myths for real knowledge about the gods, or theologia). And they have been willing to acknowledge differing degrees of inspiration in the texts they canonize; God is not flatly but diversely present in biblical texts. Often this is only obvious when one attends to the ritual context in which Scripture is read: the synagogue liturgy easily clarifies that for the observant Jew nothing is as holy as the Torah, the etz chayim whose didactic fruit is that of immortality and brought as though honey to the lips of the minyan, while one need only attend an Anglican, Catholic, or Orthodox liturgy to realize that the Book of the Gospels itself is the textual holy of holies for Christians. Even then, Deuteronomy arguably exercises a kind of interpretive control over how Jews traditionally read the Torah, while Christians defer to John to illumine their understanding of the Synoptics. For Jews, the megillot of the Writings play special roles at certain festivals—Esther at Purim, Qoheleth at Sukkot—but this testified to their seasonal authority, where the Torah is read each week, and the haftarah used to illuminate the Torah: there is here no egalitarianism of sacrality in what otherwise looks on a shelf like a complete canon of Scripture. Likewise, Christians have not historically relied on all canonized texts to provide equally authoritative sources of belief: obviously, they disagree with Job, Ecclesiastes, and Ben Sirach on the non-existence of the afterlife and the possibility of resurrection, yet all three remain in the canon and serve illustrative purposes on other topics. Yet even in the holiest of texts, Jews and Christians alike either reinterpret or simply reject problematic narratives and instructions that seem indignum Deo: commands to genocide, relegation of women to property status, and provocations to violence in the Torah; language that, if not originally intended this way, is easily misappropriated as antisemitic in the Gospel of John and the letters of Paul. Muslims typically explain away traces of polytheism in the Quran as products of momentarily Satanic inspiration of the Prophet Muhammad. This is precisely Scripture’s virtue: not that it is a monophysite literary corpus, whose divinity appears suddenly and abruptly in the course of history, such that we ought to be bibliolaters, nor speaking from an abstract vacuum with uniform authority to all times and places as an infantilizing moral arbiter, a pedagogue from whom we cannot graduate (Gal 3:24-26). Instead, Scripture’s virtue is in the way that it teaches us to cooperate with the indwelling God, both by providing for us the record of those who have sought previously to commit such experiences to text as well as by providing us with the instrumental exercises of observing the divine and the human in the multipersonal event of Scripture. For, indeed, it is only by first learning that virtue that we will be able to do the same with Christ himself (Jn 5:39).
See especially the new translation and essays by Sophus Helle, Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).
I take the view of M.L. West and Peter Green, outlined by the latter in the introductions to his translations, that Iliad and Odyssey each owe themselves to a singular poet, but not to the same poet. See M.L. West, The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey, trans. Peter Green (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).
On this, see Justin McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
Reminds me of that line from Leonard Cohen:
There's a blaze of light in every word,
And it doesn't matter which your heard,
The holy or the broken hallelujah.
I recently found an amazing book comparing Buddhism with Orthodox Christianity; Buddhist-Christian Dialogue as Theological Exchange: An Orthodox Contribution to Comparative Theology by Ernest M. Valea (2021). The book talks about how to do pluralism without giving up one’s own beliefs to engage.