By Fr Sean Fernandez
When senior Church leaders describe figures and events in the Bible as myths, it does not mean they have stopped believing in Scripture, writes Fr Sean Fernandez. It is really all to do with the developments of modern Catholic biblical scholarship.
During the course of a discussion on a recent episode of ABC TV’s Q&A program, Cardinal George Pell of Sydney referred to the story of Adam and Eve as a myth.
When I heard this, I knew that I was going to hear from some unhappy people in the course of the next few days and indeed I did. Some told me that, as a result, they did not know what to believe anymore.
But the insight was not original to the Cardinal, nor did it just magically appear. Catholics, alas, have not been generally exposed to the insights of modern Scripture scholarship, one lasting effect of the theological drama of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century.
The story of modern Scripture studies goes back at least three hundred years, but let us begin with the great discoveries of the nineteenth century.
When the Rosetta Stone, an ancient Egyptian stele, was translated by Jean-François Champollion in Paris in 1822 and the Bisitun stones in Iran over the next two decades, much of the literature of the ancient worlds of Egypt and Babylon were dramatically opened to scholars.
These discoveries were to have a profound impact on the study of the Bible as scholars began to compare it with other literature of the Ancient Near East. Scholarly study of the biblical text developed as the tools of literary and historical criticism were applied to the texts; broadly what we call the historical-critical method.
In recent years, the Pontifical Biblical Commission has set out the principles of the method in its 1993 document, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.
This method studies the significance of texts from a historical point of view and the complex processes which led to their current form; it seeks to discover the various communities to which the texts were addressed at different points in time and uses scientific criteria in its studies, commenting on them as human constructs.
All this is meant to allow the exegete to gain a better grasp of the content of divine revelation.
Catholic scholars however had become wary of the new critical approaches from the end of the eighteenth century.
Under the influence of the comparative history of religions, such as it then was, or on the basis of certain philosophical ideas, some exegetes expressed highly negative judgments against the Bible.
Pope Leo XIII recognised that scholars had to deal with the results of the new scholarship and gave a fillip to Catholic biblical scholarship with his 1893 encyclical, Providentissimus Deus. But this encouragement was not to last.
The newly-created Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC) issued 18 documents between 1905 and 1933 dealing with the some of the results of the historical-critical approach to Scripture.
These documents consisted of detailed questions on such topics as the historical nature of the first three chapters of Genesis and the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, with very short responses, usually in the negative.
These responses upheld what was perceived to be Catholic orthodoxy with regard to biblical texts.
Though the responses of the PBC were not infallible, Catholic biblical scholars were bound by the decisions of the Commission and the atmosphere became extremely repressive.
Among the results were an impoverished catechesis about the bible and the enduring suspicion among some Catholics about biblical scholarship.
Fortunately, change was to come. A 1941 PBC letter Un opuscolo anonimo denigratorio (An anonymous, denigrative brochure) was seen as opening the door to the use of the historical-critical method in Catholic biblical scholarship once again.
More importantly, in 1943 Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical letter, Divino Afflante Spiritu, which not only encouraged biblical scholars but led to an enrichment of theology.
The PBC recognised the changing reality and in a 1948 letter to Cardinal Suhard, Des sources du Pentateuque et de l’historicité de Genèse 1-11 (Of the sources of the Pentateuch and the historicity of Genesis 1-11), its secretary, Fr Vosté, wrote that the previous “responses are not in any way opposed to a further, truly scientific study of these problems as a result of the knowledge acquired in the last forty years.”
The impetus for renewal reached its apogee with the Second Vatican Council.
In the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, the Council teaches that “since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words … The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture.”
Today, Catholic biblical scholarship has moved on a great deal since the repression of the early twentieth century and we are reaping the benefits of its vigorous and critical development.
The texts which make up our Bible have their origin in different periods of time and circumstances.
When we read a text, we need to place it in its time and try to discover what the text is saying.
Sometimes this is easy. We know, for example, where and when Amos carried out his prophetic ministry; the Book of Amos starts with this information: “in the days of King Uzziah of Judah and in the days of King Jeroboam son of Joash of Israel, two years before the earthquake.”
In the Bible we find mythical stories, history, prayer, poetry and many other forms of writing.
When we hear someone assert that something ‘is a myth’, we can immediately think that the person is saying that it is not true.
But that is clearly not what Cardinal Pell meant in using the word.
Myths are stories using familiar imagery which can express very profound ideas about ourselves, our place in the world and our relationship with the Creator.
Not all myths are so revealing; some expose us to the wisdom of ancient peoples, such as the Greek myth of Narcissus, while others are forgotten with the passage of time.
But the Bible is not just a book of human wisdom. And while Biblical scholars have varying theories about the time when the story of Adam and Eve was conceived, these theories help open our eyes to the richness of the text, the meaning the composers or writers were conveying and help us appreciate what they say to us now.
The narrative of Adam and Eve not only assists us in understanding the rest of the Bible, it helps us interpret common human experience. It is not a scientific treatise answering questions beyond the ken of those who composed it.
It expresses faith-filled insights into profound questions of meaning: Why is the world the way it is? Why do we experience brokenness? Is this brokenness intended by God? What is the place of man and woman in the world? – and so on.
The account of Adam and Eve, together with the sweep of the biblical narrative, helps us interpret our experience of sin, estrangement and futility.
It tells us, amongst other things, that evil does not originate with God, that God’s will for his creation is benign and gracious, that evil is a mystery and that we experience its effects in estrangement from God, from one another, from ourselves and from creation.
We can appreciate the beauty of the creation account in Genesis even more when we compare it with a Babylonian myth, the Enuma Elish.
In this pagan text, one of the gods, Marduk, speaks of his intention in making man: “I will take blood and fashion bone. I will establish a savage, ‘man’ shall be his name. Truly, savage-man I will create.
He shall be charged with the service of the gods. That they might be at ease!” It’s not a comforting view.
In contrast, the Genesis Creation myth expresses a faith in the goodness of God and creation and the benign place of humanity within this creation. Personally, I am unsure as to the scientific evidence for a first man and woman.
‘Mitochondrial Eve’ is not the Eve of Genesis; Nick Lane writing in Nature, one of the world’s most respected interdisciplinary scientific journals, explains it this way: “Mitochondrial Eve did not live alone, so why has all humanity inherited her mitochondrial DNA? The standard answer invokes a bottleneck that reduced the number of humans down to a few thousand individuals, whose descendants took over the world.”
Whatever the sciences may tell us about the processes, the Adam and Eve myth will continue to speak truly to us of the meaningfulness of our existence in God’s creation.
Fr Sean Fernandez is Parish Priest of Attadale and a lecturer in Theology at Notre Dame University in Fremantle.