Neo-Farmer

At last, Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker's Politicizing the Bible has entered the LOCKDOWN List. That is: I have finished it. Admittedly I was more cursory over the Toland chapter and the Conclusion.

The whole book was an exercise in doubting the findings of biblical scholarship by impugning the motives of those who founded the discipline. As this book gets closer to our time, the body of Western exegetic work becomes more and more scientodic - the Biblical text becoming testable: against Semitic studies, against archaeology, against contemporary record, against other Biblical editions (Samaritan Torah, Qumran...). Some hunches made over the course of centuries are now vindicated; others, not so much. Wiker and Hahn are able to point the guesses all as, at the time, guesses. But since we know now many guesses were correct...

A good example is the hunch about Marcan Priority, pointed at in the conclusion. This hunch came from Darwin's general rule of less complex organisms gaining fitness as later generations attach new tools, thus becoming more complex. The rule was only general even for Darwin; "devolution" being also possible and, in fact, feared as the Eugenics spread through universities. In like manner Mark, as simpler than Matthew, was proposed as earlier than Matthew, but first as a mere hunch. Hahn and Wiker cite William Farmer on the hunch's history. It was Farmer's overall project to prove the Church Tradition correct about Matthean Priority, so the counter-hunch wrong. But we are not just going by a hunch anymore when we argue for Marcan Priority.

Likewise, just because all of the philosophers noted in Wiker and Hahn had political motives, and some were even horrible as people; does not invalidate the philosophers' hunches. Above all it does not invalidate their assumption, at least for the best of them like William of Ockham, that the Biblical text cannot be argued for unless you start out from the outside assuming the worst of it.

Politicizing the Bible may well be the best-written and best-argued ad hominem case against the modern exegetes. I certainly learnt an incredible amount about the progress of West European philosophy; I will be keeping it on my shelf for reference in future. This book is, unfortunately, still ad hominem.