on reading scripture with an agenda

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I grew up in a faith tradition that put a huge amount of emphasis on the King James Version of the Bible. It was only four years ago (in the early phases of my faith transition), that I deliberately picked up another translation to read instead. Even then, I picked a relatively “safe” transition to venture into: Thomas Wayment’s The New Testament: A Translation for Latter-day Saints. Since it was co-published by Deseret Book and BYU, it had some tacit approval from Latter-day Saint institutions, even if The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself still identifies the KJV as its official English language text.

Given the quasi-official encouragement for the book, I was (pleasantly!) surprised by how risk-taking Wayment’s translation was. For example, it often drew attention to how Latter-day Saint understandings of scripture are dependent on the King James Version translation—and how that translation doesn’t always hold up in a way that supports those understandings. It was also through Wayment that I really learned about differences and discrepancies between early Biblical manuscripts; despite the Latter-day Saint teaching that there is some textual corruption in the Bible, it had never really occurred to me that there were more than one Biblical manuscript floating around, with some textual differences between them.

I came to terms with this idea pretty quickly, but I was also somewhat taken aback to learn that Luke 23:34—which Wayment renders “But Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’"—is not present in all ancient biblical manuscripts. Like Wayment, the NRSV (my go-to translation these days) sets this passage apart in brackets, indicating that it may not be original to the text. In my mind, this was one of the most exemplary stories of Jesus in the Christian canon, and it was somewhat mindblowing to think that it may have been a later addition to the text rather than original to the story. Of course, as I’ve written before, this is further complicated by a number of chronological, linguistic, and other gaps between the historical Jesus’s ministry and what we have in the New Testament, so maybe this feeling of being taken aback was due to a naïve (or at least oversimple) assumption that “the four gospels = what Jesus taught.” Yet, even if we set aside those concerns for a moment and operate on the basis that Christianity has canonized the four gospels as an authoritative record of Christ’s teaching, these pesky brackets in Wayment’s translation and the NRSV raise the problem all over again. Was this inspiring story a scribal addition rather than an actual part of our canon?

I’ve been thinking of this while reading Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu’s The Book of Forgiving for the Peace and Justice class I’m currently taking through the Graceland University Center for Innovation in Minstry and Mission. I’m only three chapters (plus an introduction) into the book, but the Tutus have already invoked this story of Jesus forgiving his executioners twice, pointing to it as an example of a Christian obligation to forgive. Does that Christian obligation to forgive crumble if we consider that this story may not be original to the New Testament text?

This brings me to the point I want to make here—the one I’ve alluded to in the title. I think that critical Bible scholarship is tremendously important for faith communities, even when it challenges what we want to understand from scripture. That said, I also think that we can’t let critical Bible scholarship be our sole authority for how we understand scripture or what we put our faith in. Ultimately, I want to believe in a Jesus who forgives his executioners—that’s the kind of Jesus that I think is worth worshipping and patterning my life after. Even if that story were originally absent from Luke 34, I would want to continue to live my life according to the ideal that it holds up.

A few months into my exploration of Wayment’s translation of the New Testament, I read Rachel Held Evans’s A Year of Biblical Womanhood and appreciated this passage:

For those who count the Bible as sacred, interpretation is not a matter of whether to pick and choose, but how to pick and choose. We are all selective. We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible to our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: Are we reading with the prejudice of love or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed?

If you are looking for Bible verses with which to support slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to abolish slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to liberate and honor women, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to wage war, you will find them. If you are looking reasons to promote peace, you will find them. If you are looking for an outdated and irrelevant ancient text, you will find it. If you are looking for truth, believe me, you will find it.

This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not, what does it say? but what am I looking for? I suspect Jesus knew this when he said, “ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”

If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.

During this period of my life, I choose to read the Bible through a lens of peace and justice. I don’t think that means that I can ignore critical Biblical scholarship, but as far as I’m concerned, Luke 23:34 is part of my Biblical canon. Sure, that’s reading the Bible with an agenda, but everyone reads the Bible with an agenda, and I think I might as well read it with this one.

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