Is the Common English Bible influenced by Biblical Minimalism?

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a strong and meaningful relationship with God, biblical minimalism, CEB, Common English Bible, John Van Seters, minimalism

The Common English Bible (CEB) markets itself as a Bible for Christians, and by this they mean proper Christians, like the kind you find in the Southern United States. According to its website, the Common English Bible “is a bold new translation designed to meet the needs of Christians as they work to build a strong and meaningful relationship with God through Jesus Christ.”

But is it really?

The Dunedin School has uncovered a link between the Common English Bible and biblical minimalism – that shadowy cartel of biblical scholars who deny that the Patriarchs ever existed, dispute that David was king of everything from Egypt to Mesopotamia, and date the writing of most of the Bible to the Persian Period if not the Hellenistic era! One of these minimalists is John Van Seters, author of such works as Abraham in History and Tradition, In Search of History, The Life of Moses, and The Edited Bible.

What does the Common English Bible have to do with John Van Seters and biblical minimalism? The evidence speaks for itself:

John Van Seters - The Biblical Saga of King David (2009)

The Common English Bible (2011)

And that’s only as far as the cover of the Common English Bible! What else does this minimalist-copying Bible translation hide within its pages? If we look at the Table of Contents in the Common English Bible, will we find that Deuteronomy comes before Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers? Are the first five books in the Common English Bible attributed to Moses or to “J”? Well, no – but it is all very suspicious.

Postmodernism vs. Historical Critical Scholarship – George Aichele & Friends vs. John Van Seters

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Brevard Childs, elephant in the room, George Aichele, John Barton, John Van Seters, Peter Miscall, postmodernism, Richard Walsh

It’s all on! The Summer 2009 issue of the Society of Biblical Literature’s flagship journal, The Journal of Biblical Literature, published an article which presented the unpresentable in Biblical Studies – the entrenched division between those biblical scholars who practice what may be called postmodern biblical criticism and those who practice historical criticism: George Aichele, Peter Miscall, and Richard Walsh, “An Elephant in the Room: Historical-Critical and Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible”JBL 128.2: 383-404. As the title of the article states, this fundamental division in biblical scholarship has long been unacknowledged. Everybody knows about it, everybody talks about “us” and “them”, but with a few notable exceptions (like Heikki Räisänen’s collection, Reading the Bible in the global village: Helsinki) it has lacked significant critical dialogue.

Now, John Van Seters has responded with an article in The Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 9.26 (2009), “A Response to G. Aichele, P. Miscall and R. Walsh, ‘An Elephant in the Room: Historical-Critical and the Postmodern Interpretations of the Bible.” For Van Seters, the attempt in the JBL article to identify a mythic dimension to the various historical critical theories is “disingenuous”, because it has been precisely the subsequent history of historical criticism which has identified these myths. Van Seters also criticises the postmodernists for using Brevard Childs as an example of myth within historical criticism. Because Child’s own myth – that of a divine canon – is precisely that which historical critical method seeks to eradicate. This is what makes Child’s approach “antithetical to” historical criticism, claims Van Seters, and in fact makes Child’s approach closer to postmodern approaches. Van Seters also notes the more “ludicrous… caricatures” which the postmodernists made of historical criticism – particularly the reduction of all historical criticism to a nineteenth-century-style Romantic quest for mythic origins. Van Seters goes on, later in his rejoinder, to criticise “the endless generalizations about historical critics”, upon which much of the postmodernists’ article was based. (The same generalizations have previously been countered in John Barton’s Inaugural Lecture to the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1993), and similarly in his introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (1998).)

One of the most interesting points made by Van Seters is that postmodernism provides no alternative method to historical criticism, and indeed itself appears to rely on historical critical method (although, it does so, often, in denial of its reliance). Van Seters even states, “There is no post-scientific / wissenschaftlich or post-historic era, and we engage in such fantasies at our peril.”

Will there be dialogue? Or is this a repeat (with the decades-long delay which is typical of Biblical Studies) of the Derrida-Searle debate, in which each party continually restated their own positions and largely mispresented the other’s? At least there will be fireworks.