Why the church and synagoge interpret text as they do, and why it has not changed

I began evolving my hypothesis about bar Cochba and about the wrongful interpretations imposed on text while I was in seminary. I used a friend and classmate as a sounding board.   She (a Presbyterisn) asked me why it had not been taught to her in Sunday School.  She thought the history must have been a Vatican secret that was kept from the Protestant world. 

She, like much of the Protestant world, seemed to think that all Irish are in a telepathic conference call with the Vatican, and since I’m Irish…

I pointed out to her that all of the texts, including the history of bar Cochba’s revolt, what little is known of it, is easily available.  The only requirement is knowing where to look.

The problem is not that any of this is secret.  The problem is that acknowledging it creates polity problems for “religious” administration.  People in the non-religious world have the misimpression that the “religious” world is harmonious, that it is in agreement (except, of course, for the minorities on the right and left fringes who like making trouble for everyone), and that there is a particular requirement of “holiness” to be involved in this.

It is commonly assumed that, the Catholic church aside, “religious” bodies are rather freely organized, that ordination is a simple matter, the only requirement is “faith,” and that the ordained are free to say what they want.  The reality is that, with a very few exceptions, “religious” bodies have their own governance, which includes meeting requirements concerning understanding of and agreement to polity of the “religious” body that will confer the ordination.  To that end, those who are ordained, even if they disagree with the polity into which they were ordained, are expected to conform to that polity.  This also means that the ordained will conform to the accepted reading and interpretation of text.  This even includes Unitarians.

The reality:  in most Christian denominations, “true believers” do not last long in “religious” training.  Seminary training is a lot of studying theology evolved by other people, and writing papers and taking exams to ensure that the candidate is able to accurately repeat ideas someone else came up with, which the Church has decided are acceptable reflections of what it has already decided (those decisions go back to the earliest Church Councils and debates of the 3-5^th centuries CE).

Usually, seminarians who are “true believers,” find out their most dearly cherished Sunday School theologies are not “truth” but were doctrinal positions that evolved over a period of years, in which other, more plausible theologies were dismissed because of internal political divisions.  On making this discovery, those seminarians usually find something else they would like to study.

That accounts for why both the Church (Catholic and Protestant) and the synagogue continue to insist that Lev 18:22 and 20:13 prohibit homosexuality, why they choose to read Ruth as a girl-bonding narrative, why they prefer reading David/Jonathan as a platonic (if homoerotic) friendship:  Because reading the text as accepting of homosexuality means revising the understanding of the text itself, and coming to terms with how and when and why the readings were changed.

In the case of the synagogue, the interpretation of the texts were revised after the bar Cochba revolt.  Contrary to Dorf’s claim that it was intended to prohibit “alternate” practices enjoyed by Canaanites (or whoever), the reading of the text was changed because an Emperor who had a male lover nearly obliterated the Judean people.  The synagogue changed the interpretation of the text to say, simply, that man was an abomination.  Since he nearly obliterated an entire population, it is difficult to disagree with that opinion.  However, since it was impolitic (and unsafe) to redact the text so it referred to one individual, so the interpretation was applied to a type rather than to a specific (in an inversion of the Talmudic logical structure of qal v chomer).

The Church (both Catholic and Protestant) had a different issue to contend with.  In order to assume ownership of Judean documents, they had to construct a theory by which their ownership could be claimed and they had to disown the original owners of the text.  Initially, the attempt was made by constructing the “heirs of the free woman” theology.  The problem with that theology was that free/slave did not ensure certain ownership, and did not disown the “heir of the slave.”  The theology was revised to a theology of adoption into Judean heritage, retrojecting that adoption back to a pre-Moses era, so the specifics of the law (including the prohibition of disowning oneself from one’s heritage and disowning another from the other’s heritage) could not be invoked.  Having made the claim of adoption, and having asserted ownership of the documents, the problem of interpretation of the pertinent verses still existed.  The easy, if inaccurate answer, was to claim that they prohibited a specific of sexual activity.  This prohibition would not cause a threat to Christian ownership of the text.

Should that sound far-fetched, I would direct you to a brilliant, fascinating and out-of-print book on the evolution of Magdalen mythology called “Mary Magdalen, myth and metaphor” by an art historian named Susan Haskins.  Haskins was fascinated by the tragic Magdalen narrative and by its presentation artistically throughout the ages.  She began an investigation into the narrative.  She discovered that Mary Magdalen, the penitent prostitute, etc, was a conflation of texts and that the secondary narrative created by that textual conflation took on its own life (much as the nativity narrative, conflating kings and shepherds and stars and animals has taken on a life of its own).