Bible Scholars and Historians and Really Bad Satire

A Facebook friend recommended this blog post, in which Eric Sammons rather hamfistedly caricatures biblical scholars.

The target is (this will shock you) biblical higher criticism, and the satire depends on certain bizarre claims about American history resembling certain bizarre claims by Bible scholars. 

Unfortunately, the satire fails because the resemblance is so slight.

For instance, a biblical / history scholar remarks, "Well, of course nothing really happened on July 4th, 1776 – it is just a date the early American community later chose to represent their feelings of tolerance towards others."

The supposed analogy is to Easter and some biblical scholars' belief that the Resurrection was in some way symbolic. 

Superficially, the resemblance catches the eye, but the trouble is that Sammons has already oversimplified the history of the Gospels: as objective history, they fail simply because the four gospels differ in their accounts of the Resurrection.  To state (as some biblical scholars do) that the Resurrection was metaphorical in some way is a response to the actual materials, the four gospels: by no means the only response, but certainly one logical response to the imprecision of agreement in them.

To make this analogy, you'd have to suppose that all the accounts of the Fourth of July, 1776, differed in important details, which they do not.

Indeed, the events of July 4th are certainly subject to revisionism, but that revisionism itself is answerable to historical facts.  And what are the "facts"?  Disinterested documents, for starters, a luxury that Bible scholars are not blessed with, because there aren't any, or hardly any.  Certainly none for the Resurrection.

Then too, consider this from Sammons' historian:

The Declaration of Independence was formed in an ancient culture, so of course it contains all the biases and antiquated notions of that ancient culture. For example, it talks about “truths” being “self-evident”, which we all today know is simply not true. Truths are based on our perceptions, and what is true for you might not be true for me, except of course the truth of the statement I just made, which is always true.

The target is biblical criticism's interest in the culture of origin, itself a response to the work of some brilliant minds on how we generate texts and respond to them.  That's to say, a writer who shares a set of assumptions about truth with his audience will find himself misunderstood in a culture where those assumptions do not obtain. 

It's a pretty simple idea, and profoundly accurate, but Sammons here confuses it with gross relativism of the sort that makes sweeping generalizations about truth.  As it happens, what was true for Moses might well NOT be true for Sammons (or me), unless Sammons holds that poisoning a woman to test her for adultery (Numbers 5:11-31) is a great idea.  I presume not: but it was certainly a great idea for the writer of Numbers.

Doubtless Sammons has his responses to such an idea (he's a scholar himself and presumably knows a thing or two about biblical studies!), but if things like "logic" and "consistency" have any value, he depends on  biblical criticism to at least help him make any sense of them for his faith, beginning with giving him accurate texts and translations (if he uses them).

Bad satire is really an ugly thing: I've written some myself, and I know.

But it shouldn't be allowed to go pretending to any depth just because I suck at it. 

I wrote on Facebook therefore that straw men make easy targets: setting up a biblical critic that doesn't precisely exist makes it easy to knock him down.  But the Facebooker who pointed me at Sammons' blog responded to my objection with this cartoon, and the implication that Trudeau is also setting up a straw man:

I replied: 

Unfortunately, Trudeau actually caricatures accurately. Eric Sammons does not. The Creationism movement actually does advocate the position he describes. Sammons by contrast is setting up a false analogy between "higher" textual criticism and bad historical methods. If it's true that biblical scholars sometimes think that the historical context matters, so do reputable constitutional scholars. They aren't wiping away the constitution (or the biblical text)... they're seeking to understand it in its contexts, and Sammons caricatures that truth about the discipline out of existence instead of using satire to highlight something that people actually argue, as Trudeau does.