Parts of the Bible Are Missing. What Does that Mean for Christians?

Third in a series of posts on Biblical interpretation. Read the previous entry in the series, or start at the beginning.

Detail of the War Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Wikimedia

It's Easter, and we're in Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary's three-year cycle: the year of Mark. This means that this week’s gospel reading is the resurrection story in the gospel of Mark—or, as much as we have of that story, anyway. Let me explain:

The ending of Mark's gospel is very abrupt: Jesus' friends find his tomb empty, a man in white tells them Jesus is raised from the dead, and they run away frightened without telling anyone what they saw:

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:1-8, NRSV)

Many Bible scholars and literary critics think that the abruptness, the darkness, and the ambiguity of this ending are intentional. Here's Anglican priest and author John Drury on the subject, in The Literary Guide to the Bible (pg 410): "The end of Mark's story is outside his text; hence one of its most extraordinary features, the abruptness of the ending, which is neither happy nor resolved...[this] incomplete ending, impressively fortissimo, [is] poised toward an ending—the ending—which is beyond the text."

"The Empty Tomb," Robert Smirke. Wikimedia

But there's strong reasons to believe that Mark wrote a longer ending, and it is now lost.

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Mark was probably the first gospel of the four in the New Testament to have been written. It's the shortest of the gospels, and written in the simplest language. But that doesn't mean it's a simple book: Mark is recognized by Bible scholars and literary critics alike as a rich, complex piece of literature. In particular, Mark does a very good job of laying out moments of foreshadowing or prediction early in the book and then following up with them by the end.¹ Some examples:

• 1:7 - someone will come who is “more powerful” than John the Baptist (see 1:21-28)
• 1:11 - a voice from heaven declares that Jesus is God’s beloved Son (comes back in the transfiguration, 9:7; and through the centurion at the crucifixion, 15:39)
• 1:14 - “after John was arrested” (arrest is narrated at 6:14-27)
• 2:20 - “the bridegroom will be taken away” (see the Passion narrative, 14:43-16:3)
• 3:6 - Pharisees and Herodians plot to destroy Jesus (see 8:15, 12:13)
• 14:17-21 - Jesus foretells his betrayal by Judas (see 14:10-11, 14:43-50)
• 14:26-31 - Jesus foretells the disciples’ desertion and Peter’s denial (see 14:50-52, 66-72)²

Jesus also predicts his coming death at the hands of the authorities (8:31, 9:31, 10:32-33), but each time he does so, he includes his resurrection in the prediction. And it's pretty strange that Mark doesn't actually deliver on the resurrection bit: we have an announcement at the tomb but no delivery—we never see Jesus actually show up and make his prediction a fact. 

There are a few other missing items that look like they would have been in Mark's original ending. John predicts that the one who will come after him will "baptize you with the Holy Spirit" (1:8), which never happens. Jesus tells the disciples at the Last Supper that he won't drink wine again, until he drinks it in the kingdom of God (that is, after his resurrection); this doesn't take place. And there is the man-in-white's own direction to tell the disciples that Jesus will meet them in Galilee, with no actual follow-up in Galilee. 

NT Wright points out many other such clues in the Mark chapter of The Resurrection of the Son of God,³ but in particular, it's worth paying attention to his point that Mark would have originally been written on a scroll, rather than a codex.⁴  Things written on scrolls often lose their beginnings and/or endings, as those parts wear out or get damaged much easier than the middle of the scroll.

So we have good reason to believe we are missing something at the end of Mark: an appearance of Jesus to his disciples in Galilee, where, perhaps, he drinks some wine with them,  and baptizes them with the Holy Spirit, and (if Wright is correct in his other proposals), where he also commissions the disciples to go out into the world to tell the good news, and explicitly forgives Peter for denying he knew Jesus when Jesus was on trial. (All of this sounds a lot like the endings of the other gospels [see, e.g., Jesus eating to show he’s not a ghost in Luke 24:41-43, imparting the Holy Spirit in John 20:22, commissioning the disciples in Matthew 26:16-20, and Jesus forgiving Peter in John 21:15-19], a compelling point in its favor—after all, Mark was source material for at least two of them.)⁵

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Mark isn't the only place where we're missing the authors' original words in our Bibles. At least two other books, Job and Samuel, bear signs of poor textual transmission down through the years.⁶

The issues with Samuel are mostly issues of poor copying by scribes, so the text is scrambled and incomprehensible in a number of places, rather than missing obvious chunks. One notable counter-example: Saul's kingship is introduced in 1 Samuel 13:1 as "Saul was . . . years old when he began to reign; and he reigned . . . and two years over Israel" (NRSV)—the years of Saul's age and length of reign have somehow gone missing in that sentence.

Samuel fragment from a Dead Sea Scroll. BAR

The case of Job is even clearer: not only are many portions badly scrambled textually, there is at least one clear—and large—textual gap in chapters 26 and 27.⁷

Other books pose similar problems to modern interpreters: Isaiah, for example, is full of hapax legomena, or terms that occur only in that book, and whose translations can only be guessed from context.

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All this textual uncertainty generates serious questions for the interpreter who reads the Bible as an infallible text. For example:

• Were the now-missing portions infallible?
• Were they "deleted" by God in some way, and if so, why were they there in the first place?
• What if a missing word or sentence completely reversed the meaning of a key passage—which meaning is infallibly true, the original meaning, or the meaning without the missing portion?
• What if a hapax legomenon means something completely different from its usual interpretation? What if it's crucial to the meaning of the text? 
• If God is transmitting infallible truths to humans through the medium of the Bible, why is God not also ensuring the accurate and complete transmission of Biblical texts?

I don't think these questions are checkmates for scriptural infallibility by any means. I'm sure answers could be had with enough thought and work.

The point is, rather, that these are irrelevant questions to ask about the Bible. They would be great questions to ask, for example, if there were missing portions of the Book of Mormon, or the Qu'ran, which are scriptures that adherents believe God communicated to humans directly through a single intermediary (Joseph Smith and Mohammed, respectively).⁸ The Qu'ran in particular holds an extremely crucial place in Islam, as it is the connecting point between God and humans—the only uncorrupted divine revelation to people—so questions about its transmission and fallibility would be highly relevant; if transmission has not occurred accurately, the link between God and humans might be broken.

But Christians are not united with God through the Bible. We are not baptized into the Bible. Christianity is older than the Bible—there were Christians long before there was a New Testament. Most Christians throughout history have not read the Bible, since neither Bibles nor literacy were common before the printing press, and the Bible was not widely translated into most Christians' native languages before the Protestant Revolution.

"Harrowing of Hades," fresco in the Chora Church, Istanbul. Wikimedia

Jesus is the center of Christian faith. It is Jesus who came to earth to show us the way back to God, not the Bible. Jesus is infallible; the Bible is not. Errors or gaps in transmission of the Bible do not matter. The Bible is good and useful and important, but it is not Jesus. Jesus is the lens of scripture; not vice versa. The Bible tells us good and important things about Jesus, but these are also communicated to us through the traditions of the church—which is how they were first communicated, and will continue to be communicated should the church somehow ever lose the Bible.

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1. There are some instances where Mark alludes to future events that do not then take place within the text, but these are distant-future events, like the death of James and John (10:35-40) and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (13:1-26).^↩
2. I lifted these examples pretty much directly from The Gospel according to Mark: Literary Features & Thematic Emphases, by Felix Just, S.J., Ph.D.^↩
3. I really recommend reading his whole argument, which is where I got most of my ideas for the "missing ending of Mark" portion of this post; most notably, he thinks Peter is being set up for a redemption after he denies Jesus, and the disciples will get a commission to spread the good news. Check out his argument on Google Books for free right here; once you've clicked on the link, click on the pull-down navigation menu on the top right (it should say "Front Cover"), and scroll down to "Mark," where the second section (after the introduction to the chapter) is all about the missing ending of Mark. It's great stuff.^↩
4. That is, on a single long sheet of material rolled up (a scroll), rather than a bunch of single sheets bound together (a codex, aka A BOOK).^↩
5. Interestingly, the lack of an ending in Mark seems to have prompted at least two ancient readers to create their own endings. The shorter ending is basically "the women told the disciples what they'd seen, and then later Jesus sent the disciples into the world." The longer ending is pretty clearly a mashup of other New Testament stories: first the appearance to Mary Magdalene from John (Mark 16:9-11), then Luke's road to Emmaus story (Mark 16:11-12), then Jesus' appearance to the disciples in John (Mark 16:14-16), then what looks like a description of some of the disciples' activities in the book of Acts, and finally Jesus' ascension from Luke (Mark 16:19-20).^↩
6. Samuel probably got transmitted poorly because most of the material in the book also appears in the book of Chronicles, which seems to have been more popular in ancient times, perhaps because it makes King David, (the founder of the royal dynasty) look like less of a dick (to name just one example: in Samuel, he kills a guy and takes his wife, and he doesn't do that in Chronicles). Since there were fewer copies floating around, it was harder to cross-check for errors, and so problems that entered the manuscript tradition tended to stay there. (Remember: this is just dudes copying from one sheet onto another with their eyes and hands, so errors tend to creep in gradually over time, and tend to stay in once they're there.) Job is harder to pin down—it may also have been unpopular during ancient times for its radically dissenting theology of the origins and nature of evil, or it might just have been that a very early copy was damaged, and everything we have after that was copied from the damaged edition.^↩
7. The book of Job has a very clear structure: Job speaks for a set length of time (about how miserable he is, and his innocence of any crime or sin), and then each of his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, responds at roughly equal length (about how Job is surely wrong); this pattern repeats three times. Except the last time, Zophar's speech is cut off right at the beginning, and what few words he does say are actually assigned to Job in the texts we have, even though it's clear from context that Zohar is speaking. Given the immense skill of the author of Job (widely agreed to be some of the very finest Biblical poetry, even in spite of its sometimes very garbled state and lexically difficulty), it's virtually certain that this is a transmission problem and not the author's original intent.^↩
8. Technically, through an angel and a prophet (Moroni/Joseph Smith and Gabriel/Mohammed).^↩

If Jesus is the Lens of Scripture, What is the Old Testament?

  Torah scroll  |  Photo credit: Lawrie Cate

In my previous post, I began sketching a Christian program of reading the Bible, designed to avoid the pitfalls of modern evangelical readings of scripture. I wrote that a proper Christian reading of scripture will use Jesus as a lens; the meaning and importance of all scripture must be filtered through him.

As I pointed out, one practical way we can do this is to allow Jesus to resolve explicit contradictions in scripture, like the conflict between loving your neighbor as yourself and the commandment that priests shouldn't go near corpses, by observing Jesus' own commandments as having the highest priority.

What about the rest? There is, after all, a great deal of material in the Bible that doesn't directly conflict with anything else. What are we to do with it all, if Jesus is the lens we're reading with? 

In particular, what are we to do with the Old Testament (OT)? Of the Bible's sections, its relationship to Jesus is the most tenuous. Is it merely a road to Christ, with no inherent value of its own? Is it a collection of Jewish traditions, vaguely related to but not vital for our own faith? Is it a mostly outdated book of laws?* 

As I've noted before, one of the primary reasons I value the Old Testament is that it was Jesus' Bible. Whatever else we may say about it, the OT was crucial to Jesus. He had a unique, radical reading of it—one that combined the figures of the Anointed, the Son of Man, and the return of God as King, in a way no one else had done before—that made others question his sanity and morality, but Jesus' thought, ministry, and life do not exist apart from the OT.

A depiction of Jesus' sermon on the mount, one of many episodes
in the gospels where Jesus explicitly engages with the Old Testament | Source

One of the implications of this is that Christians should seek to read the Old Testament as Jesus read it. Where does he place the most emphasis? What material does he draw from? What does he avoid using or referencing altogether? And, perhaps most importantly, what is he doing with the words of the OT?

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I'll give some answers to those questions in the next post, but before I do, let me get out in front of one potential concern. I'm not saying here that any part of the Old Testament that Jesus doesn't quote, interpret, or reference is worthless, or even that it is worth less than any other part of the OT. This is because of what the OT is—and is not. The OT, like the Bible itself, is not a list of rules or a roadmap for living your life. If it were, we might be able to say "rules C through J don't count because Jesus didn't mention them" or "the southwest quadrant of the map should be ignored because Jesus never references it."

For Christians, the Old Testament is a story.
Better yet: it is the beginning of a story.
Better still: it's the beginning of the Story.

The outline of the Story is familiar, yet endlessly surprising:

• God makes all of Creation, and it is good. 
• Sin enters Creation through humans, which is bad. 
• God chooses a special group of humans, Israel, through whom Creation will be redeemed and restored. 
• Israel keeps messing up, though, so God promises to come and fix things Godself, though still through the medium of God's promised people, Israel. 
• Then, in the person of Jesus, God fulfills that promise, by living and teaching restoration, and by dying and thereby defeating sin.
• Afterwards, Jesus' followers spread this good news, and they begin building communities of people who will participate in and look forward to the completion of God's promised redemption and restoration of Creation.

The Old Testament is a vital part of that Story; its details are all valuable, and none of them is worth less because it is not directly referenced when Jesus, the climactic figure of the Story, shows up.

"Christ Stills the Storm," by Philip Medhurst | Source

What Jesus does is point out the key elements of the Story so far. For Christians, Jesus is the lens that brings the crucial elements of the Old Testament into focus, and without him, it becomes blurry and hard for us to read. Unless we keep in mind that the climax, the focus, the point of the book is Jesus, the Old Testament can start to look like a list of (often conflicting) rules, or a rather poorly drawn map.

Note that "Is it infallible?" and "Is it inerrant?" are not the kinds of questions that one can ask of a story, any more than one can ask of an algorithm, "Is it green?" or of a piece of music, "Is it pointy?" The category of the thing does not bear that kind of description, and it is fruitless to argue about it. A philosophical statement can be infallible; a record of facts can be inerrant; a story can only be true—or not.

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The great blessing of this view of the Old Testament is that it makes the OT indispensable. Every story has to begin somewhere, and without a beginning, a story makes no sense.** The Story begins with the OT, and without it, Jesus is completely incomprehensible. Without the OT, we know nothing of a Creator or a Christ, and the Cross can only confound us. Crucially, the OT is the reason we can answer the puzzle of why God chose to come when God did, and in the person of Jesus.

Because the Old Testament is the Equation to which Jesus is the Solution.
It is the Crescendo of which Jesus is the Loudest Note.
And it is the beginning of the grand Story in which Jesus is the turning point, after which nothing can ever be the same again. 

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*Thanks to my friend Bailey for prompting this line of thought.↩
**I'm aware that in medias res is a thing, but stories told starting in the middle still have a beginning, whether they actually are communicated that way or not.↩

If the Bible is Not God's Infallible Word, How Should We Read It?

Jesus and a Pharisee. Source

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40, NRSV)

Recently, I led a conversation at a house church that my wife and I attend, in which the group discussed the nature of scripture. It was a startling discussion, because I rapidly discovered that I had the highest view of scripture of anyone in the room. To those gathered, the Bible was merely inspirational material for them on a personal level, or a record of religious tradition. To some at house church that evening, it had been wielded like a weapon against them or their loved ones, with such violence that they could no longer even really relate to or enjoy the Bible at all. There was a general skepticism in the room about any kind of presence of God or direct relation to God in scripture. Needless to say, most of my preparation as discussion leader quickly flew out the window. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating conversation.

A little while later, the Bible study that often meets in our home had its own discussion of the nature of scripture, in which I turned out to be the person with the lowest view of scripture in the room. I was the only person who thought that the Bible was not the infallible Word of God. I didn't really have time to get into a discussion of biblicism and its logical problems, so I merely gestured at some of the issues with this line of thinking by pointing out that, if the Bible is the infallible Word of God, we have to wonder what it means that parts of it are missing (the ending of Mark, e.g.) or textually scrambled (Job and Samuel both have this problem in places).

I've spilt a fair amount of pixels on this blog in painting a picture the problems with the typical American evangelical view of scripture. Today I want to move in a positive direction, and briefly sketch a more honest, fruitful, robust way of reading the Bible—without going so far as my more heterodox friends at house church.

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I'm nearsighted, so I can't read a chalkboard or street signs without glasses. They focus the light so I can see and learn the important stuff in class, or get where I'm going out on the road. Without glasses, I can misread the board and accidentally learn something the teacher didn't intend, or mistake the numbers on a highway marker and take a road I wasn't meant to go down.

For Christians, Jesus is the lens of scripture. Like glasses, Jesus helps us focus on what is truly important in scripture, and on what it is actually saying. Without Jesus, scripture can get blurry and out of focus, and it can get hard to determine which of the overlapping or muddled things on the page is supposed to draw our attention.

Pictured: Jesus, yo. Jesus. 

One of the ways that Jesus does this is by resolving conflicts in scripture for us.

The Pharisees of Jesus' day paid very scrupulous attention to scripture, especially the Torah, which is full of commandments from God. Sometimes, though, there are situations where two commandments come into conflict with one another, and you can't obey both at the same time. In those cases, the Pharisees wondered, what was a pious Jew to do? Which commandments take precedence over the others? In essence, one needed a ranked list of commandments. When the Pharisees ask Jesus in Matthew 22 (at the top of this post) "What is the greatest commandment," what they're doing is asking him, "What's at the top of your list?" And he has a clear answer for them: Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (aka "the Shema," which was already the key commandment in most forms of Judaism in Jesus' day) and then Leviticus 19:18.

That prioritizing question is the same thing that's going on in this famous story, found in Luke. In it, Jesus asks a man what his most important commandments are, and he gives the same two Jesus lists in Matthew 22. The twist is, the man wants to know how they should work in practice, and he gets a radical answer from Jesus:

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them.

"The Good Samaritan," Francisziek Sobiepan. Source

Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25-37, NRSV)

This parable is Jesus' demonstration of what can happen if your scriptural priorities are out of whack. The priest and the Levite both belonged to groups whose job it was to serve in the Temple, where ritual purity was extremely important. In avoiding what looked like a dead body, both men were keeping themselves in a state of ritual purity, which they had a scriptural mandate to do. Without ritual purity, they couldn't do their jobs, which were absolutely essential to the life of their nation.

The problem is not that they obeyed the commandment not to touch a (probable) corpse, but that when that commandment conflicted with the command to "love your neighbor as yourself," it was the former that they prioritized.* (Jesus then radically extends the boundaries of who this commandment is meant for: not just Jews, but non-Jews also, even their bitter enemies, the Samaritans.)

So when we interpret scripture, our guide is Jesus. Our model for doing theology should not be picking a position and then finding arbitrary prooftexts until we convince people we're right. ("OK, well, you have 37 verses to back up your point of view while the other side only has 23, so you win the Bible!” said no one, ever.) It should be investigating thoroughly what Jesus had to say, and what he did (Jesus' message is delivered as much through action as through words, if not more so) and using that to read the rest of the Bible—and the world.

For example: how should Christians relate to the poor? We often point to things like Proverbs, which has plenty to say about poverty and laziness, and Paul, who tells the Thessalonians that anyone unwilling to work should not eat. But our lens for these passages is Jesus, who preaches a radical ethic of giving and special concern for the poor. So whatever those other things mean, we need to read them with that in mind.

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I'll develop this way of reading scripture more fully in a future post, but I wanted to quickly point out some of its implications.

One of the important things about this way of reading the Bible is that it allows the Bible to be what it obviously is: a diverse collection of writings by people with different, sometimes conflicting ideas about God. Having a tool to resolve scriptural conflicts makes it easier to acknowledge that those conflicts exist and need to be wrestled with.

What this reading does not do is deny the inspiration of the Bible. It is possible, and indeed vital, to affirm that the authors of the Bible were inspired by God to write. God-as-Jesus' constant use of and engagement with scripture is next to impossible to explain otherwise.

Perhaps the best thing about this view of scripture is that it places the focus where it should have been all along: on Jesus. When we promote the Bible to an infallible book, the "Word of God," we risk forgetting that what Christian tradition and the Bible itself calls the Word of God is not a book, but a person: Jesus, God's logos, spoken into the world to rescue and restore it. Remembering that Jesus is the lens of scripture can help us to restore him to the absolutely primary place he ought to have in our faith.

Read the next post in the series here.

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*This is a point at which the Pharisaic tradition actually agreed with Jesus. Rabbi Hillel, who lived around the time of Jesus, was known to have summed up the law in a strikingly similar way:

"On another occasion it happened that a certain heathen came before [Hilliel] and said, 'Make me a proselyte, on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot"... [And] he said to him, 'What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbour: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is the commentary thereof; go and learn it.'" Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sabbath: Folio 31a ↩

ESV Reader's Bible Review, with Notes on the Translation

A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine alerted me to a Kickstarter she thought I would want to see, for a project called Bibliotheca. (See the video below—for real, see it, it's a great video).

The idea behind the project is that, because of the format in which it's usually published, the Bible is actually really hard to just sit down and read at length the way you would, say, a novel or a book of poetry (just two of the many genres which it contains).

I watched this video and was overcome by profound booklust, but at the end of the day I wasn't quite willing to part with $70 for this particular item—I wasn't sure I'd like the translation, and backing on Kickstarter is not quite the same as buying something outright. But the same friend who pointed me to Bibliotheca told me about the Bible Design Blog, a lovely site where I learned about the ESV Reader's Bible, a volume with a similar aim at a more affordable price. I tried to avoid buying the thing, but I eventually lost all resistance and shelled out $20 for a copy.

This was a problem, because my wife had already been pointing out, ever since we got married and moved in together, that we genuinely own too, too many Bibles as it is:

Above: the reasons I should probably not be buying more Bibles

Fortunately for me, when my ESV Reader's Bible arrived and I told Anna about it, rather than scold me, she merely lamented that she couldn't really be mad, since it was, after all, a Bible. I was relieved.

The Book:

The ESV Reader's Bible comes in two formats, a hardcover version (cloth over board), which also comes with a lovely slipcase, and a softcover, leather-bound edition. I opted for the former, mostly because I associate the soft, leather-bound book feeling with Bible-y-ness, and I was trying to get as far as possible from that feeling in my reading experience with this volume.

Bible in its slipcase, a lovely feature in and of itself

This Bible doesn't really feel like a Bible. Held in the hand or the lap, it feels much more like a thick hardcover novel, the kind you take to the beach for a long afternoon: it fits comfortably in one hand, its cover pleasantly rough against the skin, like any really good hardcover without its dustjacket. The cover and binding are of high quality and lovely both to look at and touch.

The ESV Reader's Bible, fitting pleasantly into my hand(s) as I sit in my library/office at home

Like Bibliotheca, the Reader's Bible aims to improve the ease of reading through the Bible by stripping away the apparatus that normally clutters up the text when we we pick up a Bible from a pew or hotel drawer. Verse numbers, section headings, footnotes, cross-references, and double columns are nowhere to be found. Instead, each Biblical book looks like a long chapter in a novel, with the title at the beginning, words broken into paragraphs, and small section breaks between chapters:

The poetry sections are similarly uncluttered, though they don't reserve a single page for each poem the way most volumes of poetry do:

Just for comparison's sake, take a look at the Reader's Bible next to my mom's old Thompson Chain Reference Bible, which is designed for doing pretty much exactly the opposite of extended, pure reading. Here, both volumes are open to the first chapter of Mark. See how the Reader's Bible lets the text breathe without distraction for the eye, where the Chain Reference squeezes the text into tiny columns and loads up the margins with cross-references that pull the eye away from the story:

Top: ESV Reader's Bible; bottom: my mom's old NIV Thompson Chain Reference Bible

The Bible it most resembles in my collection is probably Robert Alter's translation with commentary, which also uses a single-column format and no verse numbers, but which does include a great many footnotes that draw the eye:

Both open to 2 Samuel; note the majority of text in the Alter volume below the footnote line

So the Reader's Bible feels more like a novel than any Bible I've ever encountered. The feeling would be complete if not for the Bible-thin paper that's used in the book. If you look at Genesis and the Psalms above, you can see that there's a fair amount of text on other pages "ghosting" through to the page it's open to; this seems like a product of the thinness of the paper. The paper also warps and wrinkles easily under pressure from your fingers, like most Bible paper does.

Of course, the Reader's Bible is packing a ton of text into a regular hardcover novel-sized codex; to get a sense of how thin the paper needed to be to do this reasonably, I compared the thickest books in my library to the Reader's Bible:

Some of my thickest books, ordered by width

All of these were thicker than the Reader's Bible, and yet none of them had even half as many pages! Don Quixote comes close, but it's nearly half again as thick as the Reader's Bible.

So the book design is just a bit of a compromise. Bibliotheca deals with this problem by splitting the Bible into four volumes, but if you want to pack the whole Bible into a single volume, even stripped of everything but the bare text itself, thin paper is apparently the only way to make it happen without creating a monster brick.

We're looking at you, Neal Stephenson, with yer Cryptonomicons and yer Anathems. (Source)

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The Experience: 

The Bible study I'm a part of, a group of residents from Anna's hospital and their spouses, is currently studying Mark. In the absence of any reason to read anything else, I settled on that as my text to read as a test run with this volume. I also ended up reading Galatians, Colossians, and Ruth later on because of the pervasive joy I feel when I pick this thing up.

But let's start with Mark. Mark is the shortest gospel, and the gospels are easier to get through than a non-narrative text like a letter or a poem, but it's still usually a bit of a challenge for me to sit and read Mark all the way through without my mind wandering. This volume's presentation of the text without numbers, columns, headers, or section breaks, though, really drew me into the reading—it made the book actually hard to put down! I got wrapped up in the story and, maybe for the first time, really felt like I understood the flow of it, how each element of the story leads to the next: Jesus' incredible healings gather crowds; he teaches them about the kingdom of God that's just about to break through in an unexpected way; his explosive message angers varying groups in turn—the Pharisees, the scribes, the Herodians, the Sadducees, the priests—who, though they are each other's enemies, conspire to trap him; he angrily drives out the money changers at the Temple, which is enough for his opponents to arrest him; finally, he's executed and rises again.

That narrative sequence has never fully come through for me before. Normally it's easy to read Mark in little fragments and analyze what Jesus is teaching or doing here or there, because the textual apparatus is set up for that kind of thing, especially in Bibles with section headings announcing what's about to happen and breaking up the text. But absorbing the story as a whole is another task entirely, and this is the first Bible I've encountered that facilitates that task at all.

It also made some more local narrative elements come through in a different way. Mark is an efficient, plain, effective storyteller, very much an inheritor of the Hebrew Bible's starkly economical and bare narrative style. His dramatic, fast-paced style really came through to me, and I was drawn into the text in a way I haven't been before. I've read a lot about the Bible, so I know some important literary devices in Mark from an intellectual level—things like the suspense involved in putting the hemorrhaging woman story in the middle of the story about Jairus's dying/dead/resurrected daughter, and the big turning point at the center of the book when the disciples finally get who Jesus is and then he's transfigured before their eyes—but reading the book this way helped me experience them viscerally, as not just as ideas but as feelings, connections, for the first time.

Galatians and Colossians, both letters of Paul (a biblical genre I have particular difficulty getting into) were both a breeze, and like Mark, I found myself grasping what they were each actually about, as a whole, much more than I usually do.

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The Translation:

The English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible is entirely new to me. I'd literally seen the name of the translation before, but until I purchased this volume, that was pretty much the extent of my exposure. By curious coincidence, at our most recent Bible study, which is a group that leans pretty heavily toward the evangelical wing of the Church, someone brought out an ESV and several others commented that it was their favorite, the best translation, the most accurate, etc.

So I did some digging, talked to my dad, searched Wikipedia, and so forth, to figure out what is the what of the ESV. Turns out it's a revision of the Revised Standard Version (RSV). We already have one of those, of course; it's called the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), which is a great though by no means perfect translation. (The NRSV is what I typically cite and link to on this blog, and it's the translation I'm most used to.) The ESV, though, is a conservative revision of the RSV. In more ways than one, actually: all the sources I've seen say that a mere 6% of the text has been changed in any way. But what I really mean by "conservative" here is that the ESV was translated for and by conservative Christians.

I don't have a real problem with Christians of a certain ideological bent creating a translation that reflects their views; after all, I bought the Inclusive Bible for my wife, a translation that explicitly eschews gendered language for God, even though the original text frequently refers to God in male terms. She loves it. My issue with the ESV is more specific: there's a tension between the translators' biblicism and the actual features of the original texts themselves, and this causes them to do some slightly wacky things.

Biblicism is a subject that I've discussed before in detail, but it's basically a set of beliefs structured around on the idea that the Bible is the inerrant/infallible word of God. I think it's a silly and ultimately unworkable way of reading scripture, but the point here is that it seems to be the ESV translators' view of scripture. The problem with scripture is that it's messy—confusingly messy, if you think it's the "very words of God speaking to us," as the translators put it in their introduction. Why is the order of creation different in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2? Why does Judges tell us Moses' father-in-law was Hobab, but Exodus calls him Jethro or Reuel? Why does 2 Samuel say Elhanan killed Goliath, when 1 Samuel tells us it was David? And so on.

This is a problem the translators of the NIV (the favorite translation for evangelicals while I was growing up) also ran into. Their solution, notoriously, was to alter the text to make it both internally consistent and consistent with their theology. Their insistence that the Bible was infallible, "God's Word in written form," was directly at odds with their translation practice, which is that the Bible needs to be altered so it does not contradict either itself or evangelical Christianity.

I checked to see if the ESV would do the same thing, and it does, though to a lesser extent. (The list I found of mistranslations in the NIV had 125 instances; 41 of those showed up in the ESV, too.) The ESV harmonizes some different versions of names in the texts and does some Christianizing (most egregiously in Isaiah 7:14, where it deliberately mistranslates "young woman" as "virgin" to match the citation in Matthew, where it's used to predict the virgin birth of Jesus). It's also been criticized for being clunkily literal, unidiomatic, and tone deaf,* and to my personal distaste it has an overtly conservative translation in some of the "clobber passages" for homosexuality.

I will say, however, that in reading the ESV Reader's Bible, my experience was never impinged upon by the translation. It's an "essentially literal" translation, but not so much so that it's unreadable as English or anything. (Young's Literal Translation this ain't, and I'm told it's easier to read than the also very literal New American Standard Bible.) There were many times where I quite liked what I was reading, so please take these criticisms with a large grain of salt.

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Wrapping Up:

If you watched the video at the top of the post and can't bear the thought of not owning a Bibliotheca, the bad news is that the Kickstarter is done and you can't back it anymore, but you can actually still preorder it at bibliotheca.co any time up until the creator, Adam Lewis Greene, actually places an order with the printer. So get on that!

I'm really hoping (1) that the popularity of the Bibliotheca project will not cause so much hassle for Greene—who originally envisioned making 500 volumes but is now going to need to figure out how to make thousands—that he gives up and doesn't deliver, (2) that its success will spur him or someone to make Bibliotheca more broadly commercially available, and (3) that it'll eventually appear in a translation I already trust. At all events, I'd love to see one in person sometime...

The good news is that, however great Bibliotheca is, I'm satisfied that the ESV Reader's Bible is a great substitute, or at least a very strong second place. It's also currently available at an astoundingly good price for a book of such high quality over at the Westminster Bookstore (you can also get the leather bound edition in brown and black there for good prices, though not the fabulous $14.99 the hardcover is going for).

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*Favorite example: Jesus' perhaps inadvertently sexual assertion in Luke 17:35 that "There will be two women grinding together."

Camel Bones, Confirmation Bias, and American Evangelical Biblicism

by James Davisson

"When I see things like this I like to think about how the Hittites were said to have been a creation of the Bible authors, until they found them. David didn't really exist, until they found proof that he did. Pilate wasn't a real person, except that he was. Coelacanth, Wolemi pine, et al were extinct millions of years ago, until they were discovered alive and well. Countless attempts have been made to show the Bible as inaccurate and it tends to be vindicated in time, so I'm not worried about it."

If you're unfamiliar with the idea of confirmation bias, the quote above is a pretty great example. Confirmation bias is an incredibly common way of processing information among people of all walks of life; most importantly, it's one of the main reasons it's next to impossible to change peoples' minds about subjects they already have strong opinions on. To quote the Wikipedia entry: confirmation bias is "the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs." This "tendency" is so common that I'd call it nearly universal. If you have strong opinions about guns, gay marriage, abortion, the environment, or, as in today's case, the Bible, you will tend to believe without question anything you hear that confirms your opinion, and you will tend to heavily scrutinize (or outright reject) anything that contradicts your opinion—unless you train yourself and force yourself to do otherwise. And not just you, dear reader—I regularly delude myself with confirmation bias, too.

We've posted a couple times recently about frustrations and struggles with many Christians' inability to accept the theory of evolution—last week, an anonymous guest described his experience with a fundamentalist Christian colleague at a secular university, and before that, I talked about my own confusion and metamorphosing opinion on the subject as I grew up—and I'd like to build on this problem to discuss a deeper and more intractable problem for American evangelicals: their view of scripture.

Let's back up slightly, first. If you didn't click the link in the quote (here it is again), it's referring to evidence that one small detail among many in the Hebrew Bible is probably wrong: while the stories of the patriarch Abraham in the book of Genesis are usually dated to roughly the 20th century BCE, there is no evidence of camels in the region he lived in until nearly a thousand years later. (Specifically: if camels were a part of human life in the region, we would expect to find their bones in the trash heaps of settlements dated to the 20th century BCE. Bones of other livestock known to have been raised in this period are present and widely attested, so the absence of camels is pretty glaring.) Given that Abraham is depicted as owning camels, this information poses a problem for some folks, like our commenter in the quote above. Fortunately for them, confirmation bias can take care of things like this pretty easily: after all, a lack of evidence isn't the same as proof that there weren't camels in Palestine in the ~2000s BCE, right? Why even scrutinize this further—if it contradicts your worldview, it's easy enough to reject.

Fortunately for us, though, this quote reveals a major issue within American Christianity that's worth talking about. A detail this small (is what kind of livestock Abraham owned really all that important to...anything?) bothers this person enough for them to draw comparisons, not only to other claims about Biblical historicity, but also to coelacanths, in order to help them ignore this data, which means that something bigger and more interesting than camel bones is at stake here.

Coelacanths rule, BTW. Did you know a mature coelacanth is the size of a person?

What's at the root of all this is a way of reading the Bible that I'll refer to as biblicism. In his book, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicicsm Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, the evangelical sociologist and thinker Christian Smith defines biblicism as a set of widely held beliefs about the Bible in American evangelical Christianity that includes a range of interlocking ideas. The relevant ones for our purposes are the following (though see a full, and very interesting, list of them here):

• Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God's very own words written in human language.
• Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text. 
• Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts.
• Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear "biblical" truths that it teaches. 
• Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, politics, and romance. (The Bible Made Impossible, pgs. 4-5)

If you look carefully, you can see how the earlier items in the list logically seem to lead to the later ones: if the Bible is God's direct, inerrant, written word to people (divine writing), it should be easily understood by anyone who wants to know what God has to say (democratic perspicuity); if something is to be easily understood, it should have only one, plain, surface meaning (commonsense hermeneutics); if God's inerrant word is easily understandable and to be taken at face value, then it can serve as a source of clear, consistent, truths—not just in faith, but in all elements of life (inductive method and handbook model).

If any detail in the Bible were proved, without any doubt, to be wrong, this schema unravels; the Bible can't be God's very own words if parts of it are wrong (because God does not lie), and if any details of the words are wrong, they are all suspect and cannot therefore form the basis of Christian faith and life. This is why even the issue of camel bones can make someone resort to the questionably relevant coelacanths for support; it's too important to risk leaving out awesome ancient fish if that will help bolster the argument!

Buying into biblicism is really great; it allows believers a sense of incredible security and certainty in their faith. Also, it allows them access to a whole world of books and teaching on an incredibly wide range of subjects, all backed up with direct quotes from scripture and all completely "biblical." Take a look at Smith's list of titles:

This is one of several pages in the list.

Biblicism was definitely part of my church culture growing up. I read and was profoundly impacted by books like The Purpose-Driven Life and I Kissed Dating Goodbye, self-help books based heavily on key Bible verses. I wore a shirt as a teenager that said "Lost? Need Directions? Read the Map" above a picture of an open Bible—God's map/handbook for human existence. I saw and heard evidence of these ideas everywhere in my experience of Christianity, from the Christian book store to church camp and beyond.

There are quite a number of problems with these ideas; we've talked elsewhere on the blog about changing our minds on the specific issue of inerrancy (or "divine writing" in Christian Smith's terms above), but I'd like to point out a big problem with the larger, interlocking schema of biblicism as a whole. It's a problem Christian Smith calls "pervasive interpretive pluralism," but which might better be labeled "Christians can't agree on anything."

If it's true that (1) the Bible is God's direct, inerrant word, (2) that it's accessible to anyone of reasonable intelligence, and (3) it means exactly what its "plain sense" says it means, then logically it follows that all reasonably intelligent Christians can read and agree on the meaning of the Bible. And anyone who has met more than one Christian will know that this is, like, laughably the opposite of true. Christians can't agree on issues as diverse as free will/predestination, gender equality, wealth and poverty, charismatic gifts, and atonement and justification. Heck, we can't even agree on which issues are the central issues of the faith:

It will not suffice to respond simply by reciting the mantra: "In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity," because many of these matters that sustain multiple "biblical" views that cause division are essentials—particularly as viewed by many biblicists. There simply is not unity on many essentials. Furthermore, this response assumes more fundamentally that evangelicals at least agree on what the essentials are, which they do not. For certain kinds of Reformed believers, the sovereignty of God understood in a certain way and double predestination are clearly essentials of the faith—while for others they are not. For Bible-centered Anabaptist Christians, biblical pacifism and nonviolence are central to the gospel—while others serve in the US military with clean consciences. For some biblicists, the penal satisfaction theory of atonement expresses the pure essence of salvation—but for others it is an unbiblical and misguided doctrine. So not only are Christians divided about essential matters of doctrine and faithful practice; they are also sometimes divided on what even counts as essential. (pgs. 24-25, bolded emphasis and links added)

Smith's proposal for a better, "more evangelical" reading of scripture is an elegant and worthy one, neither liberal nor conservative, but simply Christian: read the Bible as, above all else, a book about Jesus. Smith challenges biblicists, and all Christians, to remember that Christ is the "real purpose, center, and interpretive key" to the Bible. If we read the Bible this way, our focus is not on what a Bible verse can tell about us "biblical" dieting or romance or the origins of the universe, but instead on how it relates to our understanding of Jesus Christ. In Smith's words, "We do not then read scripture devotionally to try to find tidbits there that are 'meaningful to' or that 'speak to' us, wherever we are in our personal subjective spiritual experiences. We do not read scripture as detached historians trying to judge its technical accuracy in recounting events. We do not read scripture as a vast collection of infallible propositions whose meanings and implications can be understood on their own particular terms. We only, always, and everywhere read scripture in view of its real subject matter: Jesus Christ."

In the middle of that quote is a sentence that strikes me at least as hard as it does any biblicist; too often I can be a "detached historian" when reading scripture, allowing myself to revel in the literary details of the text without thinking even for a moment how it enriches the picture of Christ, points to an idea about Christ, or relates in any way to Christ and Christian faith. I am as guilty as anyone of misreading the Bible for my own ends, of bending it so that it says what I want it to say rather than coming to it and asking what it says, and particularly what it says about the fact that God came to earth as Jesus, and in the process, taught us, led us, and saved us for God's own better, fuller purposes.

If you are a Christian, and this is not how you have been reading scripture, I challenge you: why not? In the face of evidence that the Bible is not for communicating dating advice or exact knowledge about ancient Palestinian ungulates, would you not rather believe that it is God's written word, sent to tell us about and remind us of God's lived Word in the world, Jesus Christ? It's something to consider, friends.

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Photo sources:
1. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/manojvasanth/4119668254
2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marjorie_Courtenay-Latimer_and_Coelacanth.jpg
3. The Bible Made Impossible, pg. 9

Becoming an Evolutionist

"One might say that whereas the Stoic and Josephus reason like contemporary advocates of Intelligent Design, inferring a supranatural power from the symmetries (or, in Josephus's case, the asymmetries) in nature, Jubilees and Philo speak of a self-revealing God who controls nature but is not readily or fully inferable from nature alone. If nothing else, this issues a caution about scientific arguments developed for or against the existence of God. For the God therewith affirmed or denied may not be the God of Abraham."

Inheriting Abraham, Jon D. Levenson, pg. 131 (emphasis added)

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A few weeks ago, I got a Facebook message from a conservative Christian friend who wanted to pick my brain on some religious issues we disagree about. As I skimmed the message before preparing to dig in and prepare my arguments, I noticed that there, nestled down in the middle of it, was a word I hadn't seen in a long time, a word my friend was applying to me: "evolutionist." As in, the opposite of a "creationist." And seeing the word gave me pause. Am I an evolutionist? And if so, how did I become one?

As a kid, I was never all that invested in a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. My parents were pastors (and not fundamentalist ones) so I heard too much exegesis and application of the Bible to really think that all of it could be understood from its plain sense alone. In particular, I never learned to think of the six days of creation in Genesis as a literal fact. For one thing, it seemed to conflict with what I knew from my books about dinosaurs and outer space; for another, I was well aware that there were people who thought of it and the rest of Genesis in non-literal terms.

I was, however, very invested in the idea of Creation, that God was the creator of the universe, of life, and especially of humanity. So I was open to persuasion on the matter of just how Genesis was to be interpreted. I remember being around eight years old and picking up a creation science book in my church's nursery/playroom, which was devoted almost entirely to providing evidence that people and dinosaurs co-existed. As a huge dinosaur fan I was, of course, totally blown away.  Thanks in no small part to a dearth of critical thinking skills, I remained convinced for years that ancient legends about dragons were describing real encounters with dinosaurs. (Also, that the T. rex had sharp teeth for eating pineapples, not meat, because creation science.)

Wouldn't this be great? This would totally be great.

While this conviction wore off eventually, a new one sprang up in its place. Sometime during my teenage years, I encountered Darwin's Black Box, a book by Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe. In the book, Behe lays out a case against the evolutionary origins of certain biological structures on the grounds of irreducible complexity; in essence, he argues that no one has been able to explain how these things arose by evolution, therefore, they didn't. Today I tend to think of this as the creationist version of Bill O'Reilly claiming that You Can't Explain how tides work,* but at the time I was enormously engaged by the idea that there was a real, live scientist (Behe is a biochemist) who had found physical proof of Creation.

Three things eventually changed my mind. The first was, of all things, Catholicism. As a student at a Catholic high school, I was subjected to various classes under the heading of "religion" (barf, amirite?), including a class on the Bible.** I learned in class that the position of the Catholic church was, surprisingly, that evolution is pretty legit. While I remained unconvinced, I was intrigued that Catholics took a less conservative position on the matter than many American Protestants.

The second thing was college. Not so much listening to professors extoll the virtues of evolutionary theory (though that played a small part), but having a chance to discuss my ideas with a friend who actually studied biology. I brought up irreducible complexity to her, wondering what her perspective would be, and she told me that it was not considered legitimate science! In fact, she had major issues with the way the arguments about it had been advanced, and thought that the whole Intelligent Design movement stood on extremely shaky ground.

I was shocked. I started researching Intelligent Design and Michael Behe in the college library, and I discovered that my friend was correct: irreducible complexity had been rejected and discredited as mainstream scientific theory. I was all set to do what humans normally do when confronted with evidence that contradicts a strongly held belief, namely, do everything I could to strengthen said belief. What stopped me was the third thing: another conversation.

I had started to dig in to defend my position on Intelligent Design, checking out library books and brooding about the issues at stake, when I happened into a conversation on the subject with one of my mentors at church. "What do you think about evolution?" I asked, preparing to hear him affirm my stance on the subject, or something like it. "It doesn't matter," he said. My mentor explained that he was a Christian, he believed in God, in Christ, in salvation and freedom from sin and death. The exact terms of how the world came to be were irrelevant to those beliefs; no theory of biology was going to do anything to confirm or refute his belief in a loving God, because that God stood outside of such things.

Thankfully, this broke my resolve, and I did not spend months, years, or a lifetime trying to use science to prove that God, or Creation, is a thing. What's more, today I can pursue any interest I may have in evolutionary biology or related fields, as I would not have been otherwise. Because of two conversations and a high school class, I can read Stephen Jay Gould or Steven Pinker with delight instead of tension or anger. Because a few people took the time to speak gently to me, I can get excited about new research into genetics or paleontology. Because I became an "evolutionist," I was set free.

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Like most liberal Christians, I love the Bible. I really love it. I spent all of last year reading it, and now I love it even more. But loving the Bible means taking it seriously; and taking it seriously means trying to read it as honestly as I can.

An honest reading of the Bible can reveal the truth of Creation and God's care for it, without insisting that the Bible has all the historical details of Creation. For me, an honest reading of the Bible includes research about the cultures it was written in and the historical events that took place during its composition. It includes hard thinking, praying, and discernment about what needs to be taken in its plain sense, at the literal level, and what has value on other levels. And that discernment should be based not on my instincts about what is right, but on external principles that can guide me and other Christians.

One of these principles is this: when interpreting the Bible, take into account what humans learn about our world through careful study. This includes not only the careful study of the natural world, which has yielded the theory of evolution, but also the study of human history, which has shown that some parts of the Bible record historical details accurately, and that others seem to have been written not to convey exact history, but messages about historical events or instructive stories about certain historical periods.

At the heart of this principle is Genesis 1, in which God creates the land and the sea, the sun and the moon, the plants and the animals—all of which God declares to be "good"—and last of all, God creates human beings, declaring the Creation that has been completed with them to be "very good." Creation is good, and humankind is good, and studying ourselves and Creation should also be good, because such study can tell us more about their origins in the ultimate Good. If we learn new facts from studying ourselves and our world, this principle implies, should they not be read as a complement to, rather than a contradiction of, the truths found in our Bibles?

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*Okay, I confess that I actually think it's the creationist version of Insane Clown Posse asking F@#&ing Magnets, How Do They Work?, but I was uncomfortable saying so in the body of this post. Now you know, O footnote reader.
**This was actually a pretty good class, at least in terms of shaping my views of scripture going into adulthood: it was also the first place I encountered the documentary hypothesis and other historical criticism of the Bible.  

Photos:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Huxley_-_Mans_Place_in_Nature.jpg
2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Largesttheropods_2.svg 
3. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/vinothchandar/7696925948/
4. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/tfjensen/8056427807/