In an interview with the magazine Foma, biblical scholar and translator Andrey Desnitsky explained why a conscientious reading of the Bible often leads to a distorted understanding of the text. According to him, the problem is not a lack of education or ill will, but peculiarities of thinking that prevent one from perceiving Scripture as sacred history.
Cinema and the Bible: How Plot Is Replaced by Schema
Desnitsky compared reading the Bible to the film adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia: episodes and characters may be preserved, but the story becomes something else. In the film, he said, the journey to find the seven lords became a story of the struggle between Good and Evil with the collection of artifacts. Likewise, a reader who correctly remembers the plot and ideas may turn the biblical text into something completely different.
As an example, he cited the Puritans in America, who, in his assessment, saw in the Book of Joshua a prescription to destroy indigenous peoples. “If a believing people came to a land where unbelievers live, then it must kill all these bad people, and then it will live well and happily,” Desnitsky conveyed the logic of such a reading. According to him, where the conquistadors went, there are still many Indians, but where the Puritans went, almost none remain.
Not an Instruction, but Sacred History
Responding to the question of whether medieval Catholics who forbade laypeople to read the Bible were wrong, Desnitsky said there is no unambiguous answer: there are dark passages that no one fully understands, but they mostly concern secondary matters. As an example, he cited the words of the Apostle Paul from the Epistle to the Romans that “in him all sinned,” which theologians interpret differently.
At the same time, according to him, one cannot read just anything into the Bible: the main ideas are clear even without a philological education. The error lies in global generalizations. “You cannot generalize this and draw conclusions in the spirit of ‘if it was allowed for the Israelites, it is allowed for us,’” he said about the Book of Joshua, explaining that what was said was addressed to a specific people in a specific situation.
Desnitsky called the approach to the Bible as an instruction or user manual incorrect. According to him, the Bible is first and foremost sacred history, and its text is placed in a historical context.
“Techies” and “Humanities” at the Biblical Text
Desnitsky linked errors of reading to a cast of mind. People with a technical mindset, he said, get used to operating with abstractions and transfer this approach to history and text. As an extreme example, he cited the mathematician Fomenko with his “new chronology,” who, according to colleagues, is talented but sees history as merely a series of numbers.
In Bible reading, this manifests itself in snatching individual quotations and building constructions from them. Desnitsky recalled that the Apostle Paul wrote letters to specific communities and argued with specific opponents, so his rhetorical phrases cannot be turned into terms. He also cited the polemic of Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa with the Eunomians, who considered the word “birth” an exhaustive term. In his assessment, these saints, long before modern literary criticism, created a theory of biblical metaphors.
The humanities approach, according to Desnitsky, is also fraught with dangers: it often degenerates into reasoning of the “it seems to me” kind instead of posing a concrete problem.
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