A. J. Jacobs is the author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. He gave a great talk at TED.

Jacobs had some great things to say on a range of subjects but there’s one I really wanted to zero in on and look at today, because – as long time readers will know – it is something I’ve been preoccupied with for a really long time. Specifically, when evaluating the Bible as a religious text, how do you negiotate which things are most imperative and which are dispensable?

I always think of that line Ned Flanders delivers in The Simpsons:

I’ve followed everything it says in the bible – even those bits that contradict the other bits.

A. J. Jacobs:

And finally I learned that thou shall pick and choose. And this one I learned because I tried to follow everything in the Bible. And I failed miserably. Because you can’t. You have to pick and choose, and anyone who follows the Bible is going to be picking and choosing. The key is to pick and choose the right parts. There’s the phrase called cafeteria religion, and the fundamentalists will use it in a denigrating way, and they’ll say, “Oh, it’s just cafeteria religion. You’re just picking and choosing.” But my argument is, “What’s wrong with cafeterias?” I’ve had some great meals at cafeterias. I’ve also had some meals that make me want to dry heave. So, it’s about choosing the parts of the Bible about compassion, about tolerance, about loving your neighbor, as opposed to the parts about homosexuality is a sin, or intolerance, or violence, which are very much in the Bible as well. So if we are to find any meaning in this book, then we have to really engage it, and wrestle with it.

In the talk Jacobs compares the Bible to Wikipedia, in the sense that it has “all of these authors and editors over hundreds of years. And it’s sort of evolved. It’s not a book that was written and came down from on high.” He notes too the approach of the Red Letter Christians, those who emphasise the words apparently spoken by Jesus Christ over the contribution of those other authors and editors.

So how do you wrestle with a religious text if you can’t take it literally? And what’s so great about literal interpretations anyway? Can you practice a religion without adhering to the traditional norms and practice of that religion?

Mona Eltahawy, speaking to Rachael Kohn on The Spirit Of Things, explored the perceived relationship between conservatism and authencity.

Mona Eltahawy:

I think also at the heart of this argument is this idea that conservative equals authentic, and that the more conservative you are, the better of whatever religion you are. And I oppose this idea vigorously because I’m a liberal Muslim and I’m also an authentic Muslim. But the kind of Muslim you see in the media is always the conservative Muslim who wants to speak for me. So it’s always the man who has a long beard and very, very severe and very strict, and the more covered up the woman is, the more authentic she must be. Well I am not covered up and I am a Muslim, and I demand to be taken seriously as a Muslim.

Something to think about. So how do you pick and choose?

Happy Sunday.

Meaning is a funny thing.

A boy, when asked to draw something that reminded him of Christmas, draws a stick figure character (apparently) of Jesus Christ. The boy is promptly sent home and sent off for psychological evaluation. It was a reaction that had even some of my atheist friends crying “overkill.” Was this political correctness gone mad? An extreme action to enforce some sort of separation between church and state? An appropriate response from a concerned teacher (in a nation with a particular history of school shootings)?

Who knows… Infact the more you dig into the story, the more confusing it becomes. But what interests me here is religion and it’s symbols. It is one thing to associate Jesus with Christmas, but why the crucifix? I mean, don’t misunderstand me; the cross is an important part of the Jesus story. It is symbolic of the sacrifice God made obtensibly on behalf of all of humanity. But it is the domain of the Easter story. Christmas is more concerned with baby Jesus, the immaculate virgin birth.

Or is it?

Clay Nelson on Christmas, Theologies and Billboards:

To make the news at Christmas it seems a priest just has to question the ‘literal-ness’ of a virgin giving birth. Many in society mistakenly think that to challenge literalism is to challenge the norms of Christianity. What progressive interpretations try to do, however, is to remove the supernatural fluff and delve into the deeper spiritual truth of this festival. Christian fundamentalism believes a supernatural male God who lived above sent his sperm into the womb of the virgin Mary. Although there were a series of miraculous events surrounding Jesus’ birth – like wandering stars and angelic choirs – the real miracle was his death and ressurrection 33 years later.

In the Fortean Times 1993 Diary, compiled by Paul Sieveking and Val Stevenson, there is an interesting note on the 21st January (incidentally my own birthday). It reads:

The day of St. Agnes, patron saint of sheep. She is probably the Roman-Jewish version of Agna, an incarnation of the Ewe goddess Rachel. Like the Virgin Mary, she came from ‘immaculate’ parents. In spite of being pre-Christian, not to mention closely connected with sacred prostitutes, her relics are preserved in Rome and constantly adored by the faithful. Unfortunately for her credibility, Agnes is said to have been martyred in the reign of Constantine – when Christians were not persecuted.

Two thoughts occur to me. Just how rare were ‘immaculate’ births; and how problematic such tales must be if we cannot confirm the circumstances of a person’s death (what with dying – unlike immaculate conception – being an observed and documented phenomena)?

Of course these things are just the tip of a much more problematic iceberg. It is the kind of iceberg that Clay Nelson alludes to. It is this underlying conflict between literalism and non-literal readings of texts within the same traditions. Even listening to Nelson’s sermon for the first time I wondered why some sections were (as he puts it) “supernatural fluff” and others were “miraculous.”

Increasingly I encounter religious proponents who stress the importance of not taking religious texts so literally. Take for example Brian McLaren’s take on the Book of Relevation:

My background, before becoming a pastor, I was a college English teacher, so my background was literature, and that’s been something of an advantage to me in approaching the Biblical text because when you study literature, one of the first questions you ask is ‘What’s the genre of this piece of literature’ and the Book of Revelation is in the genre of Jewish apocalyptic literature. We had dozens of examples of this genre from about the 2nd century BC to the 1st and 2nd century AD, and when you put the Book of Revelation back into that genre, just like putting Jesus back in a setting, you put that document back in a setting, you read it completely differently. It stops being a prediction about the end of the world and it becomes a way to talk about what was going on at that moment.

Now there are two theories about the Book of Revelation. One is that it was written in the 60s and the other in the 90s, but either way it was written under a period of intense persecution of Christians by the Roman Emperor, and they were being killed and brutally persecuted and blamed for all kinds of things. And under that regime, the Book of Revelation says ‘Don’t give up hope, don’t give up your faith, in the end it will triumph.’ But it uses subversive language to do that, and what’s happened is, without being aware of the rules of the genre, people have interpreted it to say all kinds of outrageous things.

Genre and historical context should help with understanding religious texts, but I suspect where these things aren’t known to the reader, the meaning becomes a very open ended thing. This is what it says, and this is what it means.

I am reminded of a musician and composer I once worked for. She had released an album of mostly improvised piano pieces. She was set to play one on live television. “Is that how long it goes for?” a segment producer asked. She answered the question with yet another question. “How long do you want it to be?”

Merry Christmas!