Holy Writ

To summarize the daring and illuminating ideas at the heart of “Surpassing Wonder” is to risk offending true believers in Judaism and Christianity. But Donald Harman Akenson’s book provides a refreshing experience for “everyone of good spirit,” as the author puts it, who is willing to approach the sacred texts “with an open mind and a desire to learn.”

The Bible, as suggests Akenson, is actually a patchwork of writings that were not regarded as the word of God by their original and thoroughly human authors and editors. Only by an accident of history--the destruction of the Second Temple at Jerusalem in AD 70--did the faith of ancient Israel as expressed in those writings split into two separate and divergent branches, one that became what we know as “rabbinic” Judaism, the other that became Christianity. And, crucially, both of them “invented radically new precepts and new holy texts”--the Talmud in Judaism, the New Testament in Christianity--and so “neither one can legitimately share a single label with its ancient predecessor.”

Akenson invites us to cast our imaginations back to the astonishingly rich period of history when the writings that we now call the Bible and various “extra-biblical” and “para-biblical’656408578writings were composed, a sustained effort by various nameless authors and editors that began during the Babylonian Exile of the 6th century BC and continued for centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple. The “vocabulary of scriptural invention,” as Akenson puts it, “was increasing at an exponential rate, decade after decade.” Only by chance, he argues, did some of these writings come to be canonized and others did not, an insight that sets us free to see all of them in new and enlightening ways.

“Taken collectively, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, are a vast set of historical investigations, wonderful in their quality, surprising in their character,” explains the author by way of emphasizing the very human authorship of the texts and the sometimes subversive meanings that he teases out of them. “The scriptures implicitly tell us to be critical of the scriptures, and the Talmuds tell us to argue, to think critically about the issues they raise.”

Akenson insists that his book is “belief-neutral,” but nearly every insight offered in “Surpassing Wonder” will be taken as fighting words by someone, including fundamentalist Christians, ultra-Orthodox Jews and any number of tendentious Bible scholars. The fact is that Akenson approaches the Bible with his own distinct belief system--the secular values of a revisionist who takes pleasure in undercutting not only religious dogma but also the conventional wisdom of his fellow Bible scholars. Akenson is a cheerful iconoclast, and “Surpassing Wonder” is wonderfully precise because he slaughters so many sacred cows.

Akenson suggests, for example, some of the most familiar and cherished elements of Jewish and Christian theology--the Messiah, resurrection and judgment, heaven and hell, the adversarial relationship of God and Satan--were innovations of late coinage that cannot be traced back to the Hebrew Bible with any degree of clarity or certainty.

Above all, he dares us to imagine the flesh-and-blood human beings who came up with the writings that we are taught to regard as Divine Writ. Rather than a committee of faceless scribes whose work is known in conventional scholarship--”R” for the Redactor--Akenson conjures up a Bible-era literary genius whom he credits with compiling and composing the core of the Hebrew Bible during the Babylonian Exile. And he insists that the same bold and deeply creative impulse can be traced through the writing of the New Testament and the Talmud, both in its Babylonian and Palestinian versions, and much else besides.

“The young scholar--he would in later times have been called a saint, a great rabbi, a sage--made one of those leaps of faith and of human will that bend forever time’s arrow in a certain direction,” writes Akenson of the imagined author-editor of the first nine books of the Bible--the so-called Five Books of Moses as well as Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. “In collecting the central traditions of the Chosen People, in editing them so that they fit together rather better than they otherwise would, in writing down ancient oral tales and fitting them into his text, and in adding touches of his own, the young man was inventing a great religion.”

Akenson goes on to suggest that what was left out of the Bible is no less worthy of our attention, and no less crucial to the development of Judaism and Christianity, than what was included. The “invention” of the Bible, as Akenson provocatively puts it, was a process that lasted centuries, and all of the texts “that whirled around during the later Second Temple period were themselves potential scriptures.” Thus, the very same audacity and energy that animated the author-editor of the core of the Hebrew Bible was at work in those who created the books that did not make the canonical cut.

For example, Akenson rereads the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls and comes up with credible evidence that a febrile apocalyptic reverie such as the Book of Enoch, a “historical treasure that the Jewish and Christian worlds long possessed, but did everything possible to lose,” may have been no less important and influential in ancient Israel than the Five Books of Moses. The only extra-biblical work found in greater profusion among the Dead Sea Scrolls was the Book of Jubilees--”another long-suppressed volume” that was excluded from the Hebrew Bible precisely because its apocalyptic imagery was too hot for the ancient rabbinical authorities to handle.

To his credit, Akenson mostly avoids the coded language, scholarly conceits and academic bickering that characterize the work of professional Bible scholars, and he approaches the subject with common sense, good cheer and a wry sense of humor that bubbles up now and then into sheer playfulness. “Hardly anyone seems to be having any fun,” writes Akenson of the bulk of contemporary biblical scholarship, “and if they are, they do a good job of keeping their pleasure well hidden behind stone faces and dirge-like prose.” No one can say the same of Akenson, who is plainly having lots of fun and warmly invites us into the game.

Of course, the effervescent Akenson permits himself a few conceits of his own. He insists that the “Second Temple” is a term that ought to be reserved for the structure that replaced the Temple of Solomon, and he points out that the one built by Herod is really the third Temple, a distinction that betrays his own pedantic tendencies.

He carefully distinguishes between the charismatic preacher whom he calls “Yeshua of Nazareth” and the transcendent figure who emerged from Christian invention as “Jesus the Christ.” And he pointedly uses the coined term “Judahism” to identify the faith of the people of ancient Judah as a way of distinguishing it from Judaism because Akenson insists that “Judahism” was distinct from either of its daughter religions, Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, the notion of “Judahism” as something different from and discontinuous with Judaism and Christianity may be the single most inflammatory idea in “Surpassing Wonder,” a book that flashes and sparkles with startling and sometimes shocking notions.

The utter destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in AD 70, Akenson suggests, was a crisis of faith and politics that prompted the invention of both Judaism and Christianity. Both faiths adopted the same “grammar of religious invention” that had characterized the religious writings since distant antiquity. But the end products--the New Testament in Christian tradition, the Talmud in Jewish tradition--were starkly different in theology and tragically at odds with each other, and those differences resulted not only in scholarly disputation but in anti-Semitic violence.

The road on which Akenson marches in such high spirits in “Surpassing Wonder”--the road toward clarity and candor in Bible scholarship--has been straightened by several recent authors who came before him, including Jack Miles (“God: A Biography”), Karen Armstrong (“A History of God”), Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg (“The Book of J”) and Richard Elliott Friedman (“Who Wrote the Bible?”). “Surpassing Wonder” belongs on the same shelf with these worthy predecessors--Akenson, like them, allows us to see the fundamental literature of the Western civilization in an entirely new light.

What makes “Surpassing Wonder” so wonderful is the sheer good humor with which the author approaches even the weightiest scholarly and theological concerns. Akenson himself exemplifies what he calls “the joy that should invariably emanate from any serious encounter with the scriptures and the great historical puzzles they enhull.” And he works out those vexing puzzles with such wit and ingenuity that I sometimes broke out into a smile, a rare experience indeed for readers of the literature of biblical exegesis.