Ned McCann.
Culture and textuality.

The Bible and its Peculiar People.

On January 30th 1993, four peculiar people, Ralph Vollmer, 55,Mathew Nuske, 23, David Klingner, 28, and Leanne Reichenbach, 31 met in the name of Jesus at Vollmer’s farmhouse in the hamlet of Antwerp in the county of Wimmera in the State of Victoria. Their object in meeting was to exorcise seven demons they believed had taken up residence in the body of Vollmer’s wife, Joan, 49. To evict these demons, the exorcists resorted to prayer and that cultural artefact, the Bible.
The exorcists prayed continuously for seven days and eight nights and during those seven days and eight nights used the bible, literally as a battering ram, to access those demons. The operation was a complete success, the demons were expelled. Unfortunately the bible bashed patient died. ‘Departed in the spirit’, as the exorcists put it.
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The word, bible, is an old word. From the greek,’ biblos’- papyrus bark, it evolved to ‘biblia’- books.
The bible began as a series of books compiled by Jewish scribes and scholars under the direction of priests, who administered spiritual and temporal governance over those tribes who gave form to the nation of Israel.
It is in two parts, the Old Testament, which, probably pre dating writing, had its beginning in oral tradition, and the New Testament which was written fifty years into what is called the Christian era.
The Old Testament purports to give an account of God’s covenant with his chosen people, the Jews. It records the genealogy of those aforementioned tribes and promulgates the laws for their governance. The second part, the New Testament, consists of the religious doctrine of Jesus and his apostles, and a record of that Christ’s life and ministry. The cornerstone of two major religions, Judaism and Christianity, the Bible is generally accepted by the followers of these religions to be the word of God; and, as the word of God, every word to be part of a literal truth.
God’s prophet, Mohamed, peace be with him, gave to the book his complete approbation and magnanimously accorded Jesus equal status to himself as a prophet of God.
As well as being a cultural artefact, in its physicality, the Bible, the study of its content, the acceptance of its content as truth, has become a culture unto itself. A culture held in common by an estimated 800.000.000 people-depending on which statistics are consulted. A commonality of many races and many sub cultures that call themselves Christians; practising and proclaiming that faith. A communion of believers that the Bible is the word of God, and that Jesus the Christ was the son of that God; albeit self-proclaimed. For an ethnographer, one who makes a scientific study of races, their relationships to one and other and their characteristics, a rich seam to be mined.
The doctrines and teachings of Jesus the Christ, that make up the New Testament, began to appear in written form about fifty years after Jesus’ supposed death. They are as appealing now, as they must have been, to some, then. For Jesus was a reformer with the intent of reforming the old church. From the start, he threw in his lot with what that old church called the ‘unclean’.
In the Jewish mission, the unclean were Gentiles: any man not of Jewish race who was not circumcised and did not keep Jewish ritual law. They were, legally, the equivalent of women, and of the mentally deficient. An orthodox Jew thanked God every day that he had not been born a woman, pagan, or fool. (Thiering)
The double whammy was that of eternal life to even the world’s lispers. He that believeth in me shall never die. (John). 11.26. Sorry about that; not quite academic protocol, I know.
By the 2nd century of the Christian era, Roman authors began to take notice of the movement, commenting:
There is a group, hated for their abominations, called Christians by the people. Christus, from whom the name comes, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our officials, Pontius Pilate, (Tacitus)
The Christians are a class of men given to a new and wicked superstition. (Suetonius)
They worship to an inordinate degree this man who appeared recently. They are like frogs round a swamp, debating which of them are most sinful. (Celsus)
The poor wretches have been able to convince themselves that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, by worshipping that crucified sophist and living under his laws. Therefore, they despise the things of this world, and consider them common property. They receive these doctrines by tradition, without any definite evidence. (Lucian)
It is their habit, on a fixed day, to assemble before daylight and to recite by turns a form of words to Christ as god. The contagion of this perverse and extravagant superstition has penetrated not the cities only, but the villages and the country. Yet it seems possible to stop it and set it right. (Pliny the Younger)
How wrong young Pliny was. Some years later, when the fires which had consumed the Christian martyrs were still a flicker in the race memory, St Clement, the 3rd Pope after Peter, secure now on the papal throne, had occasion to remark that, "God chose our Lord, Jesus Christ, and us through him to be a peculiar people."(Gascoine)
Over the next eighteen hundred years, those peculiar people evangelised most of the world, except for that area where the followers of the Prophet, Mohamed, peace be with him, held stubborn and intransigent resistance.
Carrying before them, not one, but two cultural artefacts- the Bible and the cross- they trekked over icy wastes, sun blasted deserts and disease infested jungles, bringing salvation to the World.
Mindful of the biblical injunction to; Go thee forth. Be fruitful and multiply upon the Earth. (Genesis) 9:1.