The Nowhere Bible

Frauke Uhlenbruch

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110414271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The Bible contains passages that allow both scholars and believers to project their hopes and fears onto ever-changing empirical realities. By reading specific biblical passages as utopia and dystopia, this volume raises questions about reconstructing the past, the impact of wishful imagination on reality, and the hermeneutic implications of dealing with utopia – "good place" yet "no place" – as a method and a concept in biblical studies.
A believer like William Bradford might approach a biblical passage as utopia by reading it as instructions for bringing about a significantly changed society in reality, even at the cost of becoming an oppressor. A contemporary biblical scholar might approach the same passage with the ambition of locating the historical reality behind it – finding the places it describes on a map, or arriving at a conclusion about the social reality experienced by a historical community of redactors. These utopian goals are projected onto a utopian text.
This volume advocates an honest hermeneutical approach to the question of how reliably a past reality can be reconstructed from a biblical passage, and it aims to provide an example of disclosing – not obscuring – pre-suppositions brought to the text.

1 Fragmented Allusions

There is a recent documentary called Jodorowsky’s Dune.¹ In it, the creators of a substantial book that contains the complete storyboard and designs for a film that was never made speak about its creation. Younger directors and film critics – too young to have been involved but aware of its legend – go completely overboard praising this unrealised project as the world’s most perfect film, a film that would have changed the world, that was a prophetic vision, that would have changed culture and the way we think about absolutely everything (no hyperbole too hyper for them). But: Hollywood did not buy, the world remains unchanged, the perfect film was not made, only a book exists that testifies to its planning. Many of the ideas by the collaborators (1970’s science fiction fantasy football: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Moebius [Jean Giraud], Mick Jagger, Pink Floyd, H.R. Giger, Dan O’Bannon, Chris Foss) appear in aspects of other visual culture: Giger’s designs for the Alien series and Prometheus, ideas used in Star Wars, the comic book L’Incal, costumes used in Masters of the Universe, panning galaxy shots used in Contact, cyborg vision used in Terminator, and many others.

The film was never made, but aspects of it permeate filmic culture. Its original creators as well as younger enthusiasts attribute this film with world-changing properties, yet it has not changed the world. The idea of the film is a utopia: in its creators’ and in the film critics’ minds it is the most mind-blowing film that could have ever been made. Realistically, though, while it may have changed what we think of as science fiction film canon, it would have been another wacky 1970’s science fiction movie and we would wearily type out yet another post-gender, post-race analysis of it.

The best thing to happen to this utopian project is probably that it does not exist, because existence is the end of utopia. The most impressive scene in the documentary to me was the montage of sequences from other films which reference it. By these small existing allusions, brought into a definite relationship with the non-existent utopian original, we can glimpse just how great the non-existent piece could have, would have, should have been.

Then David Lynch made Dune and in the documentary Jodorowsky speaks about how happy he was that it turned out to be so awful and one wonders why it was awful; Jodorowsky calls Lynch an artist with great vision, and generally, Lynch’s work is all but awful. Maybe it was awful because it was too big, too perfect an idea – a utopian idea that collapses when realised.

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There is an intuitive link between reading the Bible as utopia or science fiction and this tangible example of the potential of a utopian idea, contained in a (n ancient) book, never realised, but endlessly fascinating, aspects of which continue to inspire and impact actually existing culture.

What happens in what follows is this: I attempt to construct and externalise a method of reading the Bible, which is utopia. I have mentioned Jodorowsky’s Dune to show that in this method, the Bible, the concept of utopia, and seemingly unrelated other cultural or artistic objects must be taken into account together. “Reading as utopia” is so modern, constructed, abstracted, and theoretical that it should be clear at all times that it is just one method out of many possible ones. It shows distinctly how method influences result and thus, unfortunately, it is pessimistic about making definitive claims about an ancient culture. However, I choose a biblical case study and play through some reception historical moments in its after-life, looking at how the bringing into reality of a biblical idea affects its utopian potential (hint: adversely) and how this is often chosen to be ignored. I discuss whether everyone should read as utopia more often, especially when it seems too dangerous to advocate an uncritical translation of an ambitious but estranged and ancient idea into a real geographical or social space.

As with Jodorowsky’s Dune I do not think that utopian non-existence is a tragic loss. The potential for everyone to dream up their own utopia allows it to remain benevolent and accessible for everyone, not just for the powerful few makers who would get to translate it into actual reality. (E.g., Jodorowsky’s Dune: no women were among the creators, women do not make an appearance, it seems, other than as a birthing agent for the main character; had this been made, I would probably complain about it not passing the Bechdel Test and so on, but as it is, it is open to my imagining a powerful female role model that surely would have been in it to make it my ideal film, too.)

For the Bible we do not have a talking heads documentary in which its makers tell us all about how great a project it was, so all we have is the equivalent of the hyperbolic youngsters from the documentary: enthusiasts speaking about how it will definitely change the world and others who are a little more wary that maybe it is just an idea that seemed really great at the time. What neither can deny is that its fragments permeate culture, no matter whether it was an eternally great idea or just a great idea at the time.

What the utopian reading enables is a synchronous vision of suppositions brought to biblical texts and those drawn from it. Some Bible readers – scholars and believers alike – may understand a biblical passage as telling a true history. They read its characters as real living persons in the real environment of ancient Palestine or Egypt and assume that by reading the Bible closely, it is possible to reconstruct an accurate image of this past.

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Other readers see the biblical texts as remnants of an ancient community’s utopian power fantasy, in which the characters are fictional protagonists in a fictional story about negotiating one’s minority identity in a past situation of cultural non-dominance. Neither of these perspectives excludes the possibility that both of them contain some truth. The conflicting extreme viewpoints about the Bible have a lot to do with whether or not the Bible is thought of as understandable to a modern reader.

Reading a biblical passage as a utopia opens up a number of avenues of enquiry, as if opening a maintenance hatch to glance at one small section of the inner-workings of a complicated machine. The cog of “utopia” can only be gauged by considering how it links in with other concepts and questions: how does a utopia relate to its author’s reality and what are the societal issues the author sought to critique by describing a fictional world significantly better than her or his own? Is a utopia merely wishful thinking or is it its intention to call its readers to take action? If it is a call to action, who is called to action by it: its primary, intended audience or any audience at any time? There are no simple answers in this interlinked and unpredictable machine of texts, times, and readers. If a Bible reader understands the Bible to be an accurate historical account, would a utopian reading be impossible for such a reader? If a Bible reader believes in achieving the utopia of a Promised Land or heavenly paradise in their reality, does that add utopian potential to the Bible? If this reader pursues their idea of establishing a biblically inspired Promised Land in reality with oppressive fervour, does it become a dystopia to those who would rather not live in a biblically inspired reality?

While a utopian reading of a biblical passage cuts it loose from common definitions and categories, it is still a part of an imaginary machine of links and influences and does not leave it floating in relativistic space in which it simply is whatever one happens to decide it is. I am going to propose a contemporary utopian reading of it as science fiction which concludes that the Bible can be read as a message from a far removed time and space, supposedly transmitted by a non-human entity. Its continued existence in today’s world is a social fact one has to come to terms with. The Bible contains the possibility of bringing about positive consequences in reality, as well as the possibility of bringing about confusion and conflict, because in the absence of a talking heads documentary of creators, its intended “actual” meaning remains subject to interpretation. There is no original creator to authoritatively call another’s interpretation awful (no Jodorowsky to call Lynch’s Dune awful).

Setting into motion one cog in a machine of which we only see one small part, can have unforeseeable consequences. The Bible is different from a garden variety utopia and very different from Jodorowsky’s Dune. Because it is understood as eternally relevant or as telling truthfully a history of a chosen people (not just rendering visually a Frank Herbert novel), there is a danger of confusing biblical utopia with reality. Biblical scholars who insist on reading the Bible as a faithful historical account add to this confusion. Utopian scholars have observed the inevitable dissolution of utopian communities and concluded long ago that utopias are not implementable in reality, but that there is a constructive utopian impulse, which drives innovation and change. Biblical studies could look to utopian studies to let go of the urge to prove the literal accuracy of a text and deal with the impulse behind a text instead, while acknowledging that the story that generates the impulse is not implementable in reality and may not even refer to a reality directly.

This book is an interdisciplinary endeavour: I draw on a number of theorists and theories in sociology, cultural studies, and literary disciplines, as well as on utopian and non-utopian primary and secondary literature. There are important dialogues taking place across these texts that should not be inhibited by disciplinary boundaries. However, looking outside of one’s home discipline may invite statements about not being a sociologist/biblical scholar/science fiction scholar/utopian scholar. Maybe surrendering disciplinary canons to others who look at them anew and for the first time induces fear, because it makes a canon open to re-evaluation by an outsider. In the spirit of open source, I try to explain my approach overtly and accessibly, and invite fixes and re-writes.

There are resemblances and intersections and this book operates consciously between – not within – such approaches. It is an intertextual approach which does not understand influences as one-directional, and does not understand a response to a biblical passage as passively receptive, but rather as actively manipulating and changing our perception of the source text. While I am dealing with biblical reception when reading biblical scholars’ responses to the case study biblical passage, rabbinic interpretation of it, or William Bradford’s and Cotton Mather’s responses to it, the main aim is not to compile each instance in which reference was made to the passage, but rather to show how even just a few of these examples of biblical reception leave the biblical text a changed text.

Multi-directional anachronistic readings, which I would call “Pierre-Menard readings” following Borges and Suvin, have recently received attention in biblical studies, for example in the session “The Bible in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges”, which was part of the Reading, Theory, and the Bible unit at the SBL’s Annual Meeting 2013. While the title of this unit seemed to imply a reception history approach – the use of the Bible in a specific author’s work – the papers presented in the panel were concerned with the possibility of using ideas and images found in one or more modern works to propose and encourage “serious play” with associative intertextual readings.

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To map the territory, so to say, I prefix a reference section to introduce key points of specific works, and some flagship pieces from utopia and science fiction canons that are of use to the argument presented. I advocate approaching the definitions that already exist about the Bible, literature, literary genres, utopias and dystopias, by using an ideal type, rather than strict categories and definitions. This means looking at and for family resemblances between individual phenomena rather than seeking to combine them within the same strict definition.

The biblical case study passage is Numbers 13 – because it exhibits a family resemblance to a classically structured utopia: travellers exploring a land, and returning to report about it to a home community. This passage is used to play through concrete examples, e. g., its reception in Bradford and Mather against a background of a quasi-utopian idea of New England as a “New Canaan”. It is then used to explore biblical ideal maps of the Promised Land, asking whether the passage may actually be a utopia in addition to resembling one. A striking feature of Numbers 13 is its ambiguity: it is a passage about ten characters essentially saying that utopia is unachievable who are punished for voicing this opinion, and two characters who lead the conquest of utopia and who are not punished. Such ambiguity is a known element of utopia and dystopia: utopia tends to want to avoid dystopia, but dystopia is often the outcome of passionately enforced utopia.

Numbers 13 also contains fantastic elements – are they or are they not fantasy literature? Do they reflect literal beliefs in giants or do they use ciphers to discuss the possibility of contact scenarios? As such, later descendants of Numbers 13 exist in science fiction literature.

The reading as science fiction implies a wider perspective on the Bible, biblical scholarship, and its potential in today’s world. The Bible is not a fictional message from the future or from outer space but a tangible artefact from a similarly mysterious dimension of the past and a far removed culture. Just like the message received in Carl Sagan’s Contact, which unites humanity in working towards a common goal, the Bible in today’s world may contain positive potential. However, like the message received in Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice or the strange objects found in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, which cause confusion, disillusionment, and conflict, the Bible can contain negative potential. Its message and its historicity may remain obscure, and analysing and interpreting its contents and contexts will not bring us any closer to history or deity, but – just like in Lem’s science fiction – it will show a mirror vision of our own practices of interpretation and analysis.

2 Texts and Concepts

One methodological and epistemological contribution I hope to make is to show the value of working at sometimes constructed intersections of different fields or genres. There is a certain vulnerability in interdisciplinary approaches – there may not be the space or the time to explore a borrowed concept exhaustively and one might be accused of being intentionally obscure by one discipline on the one hand, or not nuanced enough by another discipline on the other hand. In this chapter I try to provide an introductory field guide to the approaches and concepts brought into dialogue throughout later chapters. In general terms the roads that converge are biblical studies, utopian studies, sociology, and literature.

2.1 Utopia, dystopia, science fiction

The biblical Garden of Eden, the Promised Land, descriptions of the coming of the Messiah, the New Jerusalem, or the Kingdom of God are ideas that can be linked to ...

Table of contents

• The Nowhere Bible
• Studies of the Bible and Its Reception
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• 1 Fragmented Allusions
• 2 Texts and Concepts
• 3 Utopia as an Ideal Type
• 4 Utopia and Reality
• 5 Numbers 13 and Its Reception Read as Utopia and Dystopia
• 6 Utopia and Dystopia
• 7 Science Fiction and the Bible
• 8 Afterthoughts
• Bibliography
• Index