Is the Bible a window or a mirror?
Does the Bible give us a view into a world, offering us the chance to see the way ancient people thought and acted? Or does it show us ourselves, reflecting back what we already think and reinforcing the things we already know?
That is a false dichotomy of course. (Perhaps the Bible is one of those fancy windows that can change into a mirror, or a window that acts as a mirror when the light hits it just right like the image above, or one of those sneaky two-way mirrors that can be seen through from one side). The Bible is neither a window nor a mirror, exactly. But I ask the question this way because we often act as if the Bible is a window, letting us see into a world we don’t live in and understand people and actions and cultures we don’t know. But in reality, I think, it’s something closer to a mirror, showing us ourselves.
This week in the lectionary for the second Sunday of Easter, four texts about community jump off the page. One of them is from Acts 4, and it’s a description of the community of Jesus-followers in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Acts 4 is an idyllic vision, a description of an almost-communal lifestyle in which things are shared in common and everyone shared the same mind. Another of the passages is the prologue from 1 John, which speaks movingly of a “we” in which the author participates—a “we” built on common experiences and shared understandings. The third passage comes from the Gospel of John, the 20th chapter, which describes the community of Jesus’ followers immediately following the resurrection—an intensely inwardly-turned community running on trauma, fear, and adrenaline. And the fourth text is Psalm 133, which praises the goodness of community and the way it feels right to be together—even if it does employ a strange metaphor, borrowed from Israelite anointing rites, of oil flowing down someone’s head and beard.
These four texts are collected together in the lectionary this week because they share this concern for community. They all emphasize in one way or another the beauty of collective belonging—the way it can feel good to be together. One of my favorite old-timey theorists of religion, the late-19th-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim, thought that this was the wellspring of all religion—the energizing feeling that we get from being together in groups and sharing a common purpose. For Durkheim, collective religion feels good for the same reason it feels good to cheer for a sports team in a crowded stadium, attend a rock concert where everyone knows all the words, or watch your preferred candidate win an election: because the collective effervescence of human togetherness acts as a powerful drug on the human consciousness. Like most European intellectuals of the 19th century, there are lots of critiques that can be made of Durkheim, but he was onto something when he said that belonging is the fuel of religion.
The four passages in the lectionary this week all point to this. Psalm 133 simply says it out loud: it feels great to be together. The Acts 4 text, too, lays it on pretty heavy—so heavy that scholars tend to treat this passage less as a historical report and more as an aspirational description of a community that might or might not have ever actually looked that harmonious. (When I read this part of Acts—the early part set in Jerusalem, before the story switches over to Paul—I always have visions of that “I want to buy the world a Coke” commercial, and its hippie-love aesthetic). But the other two texts, the John 20 passage and the 1 John 1 passage, are a little more complicated, and I want to spend a little bit of time with each of them, and I want to do it by exploring that question of whether the Bible is a window or a mirror.
First, a bit of background. Both the Gospel of John and 1 John (along with 2 John, 3 John, and the book of Revelation) belong to a collection of texts that scholars call the Johannine literature, named after the central figure associated with the collection, John. Sometimes the connection between these texts and John is direct, as in Revelation when the book claims to have been written by John (though the author does not specify which John), and other times the connections are circumstantial, established by shared themes and vocabulary. But beginning especially with the work of Raymond Brown, a Roman Catholic priest and biblical scholar who reached his peak of productivity in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars have spoken about a “community of the Beloved Disciple,” pointing to the putative community that might have surrounded the “Beloved Disciple,” which is the special name that the Gospel of John has for one of Jesus’ disciples. Brown’s theory—which has been widely but not universally accepted—is that one of the early groups of Jesus-followers coalesced around this Beloved Disciple, who is often (but not always) understood to have been John, and that the Johannine literature all comes from that community. Brown even hypothesized an elaborate history for this community, drawing clues out of the texts of the gospels and the letters to reconstruct their story. This community, Brown thought, had gathered around the Beloved Disciple, and quickly found itself on the outside of normative Judaism—which is why the Gospel of John describes such an antagonistic relationship with what it generically calls “the Jews.” To make a long story short, Brown thought that in the context of the run-up to the Jewish War of 66-70, the war itself, and its aftermath, the community of the Beloved Disciple moved ideologically away from normative Judaism and geographically north away from Judea. This is why, in contrast to the other gospels, John does not really speak of Jewish factions like the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but instead paints with a broad brush in speaking of “the Jews,” and it is why the gospel includes stories like the Samaritan woman at the well—as a way of explaining to itself why it is legitimate for them to move beyond the bounds of Judaism (because Jesus did it first). This reconstructed social history of the community has them increasingly isolated, increasingly inwardly turned, and intensely focused on their own traditions and stories. That’s why the Gospel of John is so different from the other gospels, and that’s why it tells its story in such black-and-white terms, literally, using light/dark metaphors and describing Jesus’ opponents in uncharitable terms.
I find this reconstruction very exciting. But why? Why do I like it so much? One answer is that I might think that I am looking through a window, when I am actually looking in a mirror. Not all scholars think that Raymond Brown was correct about the community of the Beloved Disciple, or at least they question whether the evidence really supports it. Judith Lieu, for example, has pointed out quite judiciously that the arguments for such a community really can be circular and self-reinforcing. The letters, for example, refer to community only obliquely, in things like that communal “we” in 1 John 1 and polemical references to insiders and outsiders, while the gospel is obviously focused very strongly on Jesus’ life and death, not on the community that might have sprung up around one of his followers in the decades following. In one recent book chapter, Lieu makes the argument for “the mirror” pretty well, writing that “that community is a construct, a production of scholarly imagination upon the texts,” and that we should always bear in mind that it is a construct when we talk about it.
Which leads me back to these lectionary texts. Why do we get excited about the community we encounter in John and 1 John, and also in Psalms and Acts? Why do we lift these passages from far-flung corners of the Bible and collect them together in the lectionary? Is it because we are taking snapshots through a window and assembling them into an album, collecting the evidence for ancient Christian (and Israelite) community in one place? Or is it because all four of these passages are like looking in the mirror, seeing ourselves in ancient texts—or at least idealized versions of ourselves, the way we would like to be? Do we get excited about the desperate gathering of Jesus’ followers in John 20 because it’s some authentic view into the past, or do we get excited about it because we want to understand ourselves as similarly devoted, besieged, and united? Do we like the communalism of Acts 4 because it’s the way things actually were, or because it’s describing us the way we wish we actually were?
You can probably tell that I think it’s the latter. Biblical texts are always sites of desire, or what a psychotherapist might call projection. They are places where we do the “production” of “imagination upon the texts,” as Lieu puts it, dressing ancient people like paper dolls to fit our notions of ourselves in the present and the notions of the past that can serve us today. When we see community in these texts, and lift them out and collect them together, we are serving ourselves, crafting a story that we ourselves need to hear, and admiring ourselves (or the self we would like to be) in the mirror.
This is fine. Really, it’s ok. It might sound like I think this is a bad thing, but I think it’s what religious texts are for, and it’s what they do. (It’s also what a lot of other texts do too—they create the world rather than simply reflect it. Think, for example of legal texts, which often describe the world as it ought to be, not as it is, or think of romance novels, which describe relationships in a way that not very many relationships look in real life). It’s fine for religious people to read sacred texts in order to know and construct themselves in the present. But we should also pay attention to that, and notice that we are doing it, and not confuse our projection onto the past for the past itself. It’s ok to look in the mirror, but we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking it’s a window.
Christians often treat the Bible as a window to the past, and they treat the biblical past like an easy analog to the present. We look for models in the Bible as we are constructing our own communities (or critiquing them) in the present, and passages like Acts 4 are perfect for the role. If you think your modern Christian community ought to be pious, you’ll see the piety in that text. If you think your modern Christian community ought to be just, you’ll see the justice. If you go looking for unity, you’ll find it there, and you can lift it out and drop into the present. The same thing happens for the Gospel of John and 1 John passages, too. One of Judith Lieu’s critiques of the way scholars talk about the Johannine literature is that scholars are constructing a “community” where there isn’t evidence for one, because otherwise there isn’t anything for us to study. It’s the same move that Christians make, mistaking the mirror for a window.
So, this isn’t an argument for getting rid of the mirrors, and it’s not an argument for continuing to insist that the mirrors are windows. Instead, I would advocate that we treat the Bible as what it is: a thing in which we can see ourselves reflected, and off of which we can bounce our own identities and anxieties and questions. Switching and mixing metaphors, we should avoid treating the Bible as if it were a time machine that can transport us back in time, because the Bible is most useful to us in the present anyway, when it is helping us see ourselves in our own time and place. After all, everyone needs a good mirror.