The American Library Association has revealed that the Bible is amongst the most challenged books in their collections.
They say that users object “to its presence in libraries and schools over its ‘religious viewpoint’”. The text has not previously appeared in the ALA’s annual citation of challenged titles.
So, are we to assume the objection is to religion per se? In that case is the Tao Te being challenged? The Analetics? The Upanishads? I doubt it.
It goes along with the fact that this has “not previously” happened?
It is part of the current anti-Christian movement.
Don’t believe there is such a movement? Read this.
I could multiply examples so that this post would look like link confetti.
Get it out of our culture. That seems to be the message.
At the same time I read this morning that a Caravaggio painting was found in the attic of a house in Toulouse. The couple were inspecting the attic space for a leaking roof problem. As the article says, “a leaky roof has proved to be as good as a lottery jackpot.” Everybody’s dream.
What was the painting? It is described as a “bloody biblical scene,” of a woman cutting off a man’s head.
It is, of course, portraying the great Jewish heroine Judith killing the despotic murderer Holofernes.
Two points:
the Bible is fine if it ignites creativity from which I can make a bucket load of money; it has value.
the Bible is not fine if it espouses a “religious viewpoint;” it has no value.
Judith’s assassination of Holfernes [not the painting, but the painting and the act] is at the intersection point of these two utterances and reveals their shallowness and the shallowness of the “religious viewpoint” it wants to object to.
But wait, you may be thinking, how is this “biblical?” That story is totally unknown to me. It’s not in my Bible.
A word of explanation:
One of the consequences of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Holy Land, after the Battle of Actium in 333 BCE, was that many Jews left Jerusalem and the Holy Land altogether, foreshadowing the Diaspora which would occur after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE.
One place large numbers of these displaced Jews settled was in Alexandria in Egypt. By the end of the period of the prophets [300 – 250 BCE] they numbered in the tens of thousands. By this time the normal language “on the street” was Greek. And yet, the rabbis insisted on still using Hebrew in synagogue, for praise, prayers, and for reading the Scriptures.
The Jews in Alexandria went to their rabbis complaining that they did not understand their worship language, that they all spoke Greek, and they asked for a Greek translation of their Holy Scriptures. After resisting for some time, the rabbis agreed to produce a Greek translation. [Alternatively, one legend says that the Greek ruler of Alexandria, Ptolemy II, asked for a Greek copy for the famous library of Alexandria.]
The translation was produced and given the title in Greek kata tous ebdomekonta meaning “according to the seventy.” This echoes the legend that the translation was produced by 72 [!!, I know??] rabbis. This phrase is translated into Latin as Septuagentia which becomes in English The Septuagint often abbreviated in writing as LXX.
Thus:
- In translating the books the rabbis had to decide which books to include because in addition to the books of the Law and the Prophets there were others which the people loved, regularly used, and revered as holy, most, but not all of which, of which existed only in Greek. The rabbis took all these books and added them to their translation. In doing so they changed the order of some of the books, placing Ruth, to give but one example, in order of its historical context right after Judges. Because the LXX went through many redactions it is hard to give a list of its original books, but amongst those not found in the Hebrew Scriptures are: Baruch, Wisdom of Solomon, Ben Sirach, Susanna, Tobit, others, and Judith.
- By the way, this accounts for the differences in what Christians refer to as the Bible. The LXX was the Bible of the early church and is what is quoted in the New Testament. Roman Catholics include the LXX books in their Old Testament, Orthodox Christians included the same with even some others, while the Protestants follow the later, rabbinic Jewish standard, adopted at Jamnia [another story] and accept only the Hebrew Scriptures.
I labor this point so that the shallowness of what I have written about earlier in this post will be thrown into even sharper focus. Lack of knowledge and information is always fuel for prejudice.
clamjamfrey 