By Ken Camp
Before characterizing Islam as inherently violent based on selected passages in the Quran, Christians should consider violent verses in the Holy Bible, historian Philip Jenkins told a recent gathering at Baylor University.
Philip Jenkins of Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion.
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“Most religions have somewhat bloody scriptures, and the worst thing we can do is forget they are there,” said Jenkins, who recently joined Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion while jointly serving as a professor at Penn State University.
Jenkins, author of books including Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses, said Christians who view violent texts in the Old Testament as irrelevant to modern faith need to “exorcise the spirit of Marcion,” a second-century heretic who believed that Jesus Christ is savior but rejected the wrathful Hebrew God of the Old Testament.
Jenkins said Christians throughout history have handled passages like God’s blessing of genocide against Canaanites in the Promised Land in the Book of Joshua in different ways. Violent passages have been used to justify actions from the Crusades to the modern Christian Identity movement. Other Christians, he said, censor them by never talking about them in sermons or Sunday school lessons.
Some theologians soften the stories by spiritualizing them, turning them into parables or extended allegories. That approach, Jenkins quipped, allows readers to imagine, “No actual Canaanites were harmed in the making of these Holy Scriptures.”
Jenkins said modern readers of the Bible should take stories of violence seriously, reading the Bible as it stands and trying to understand why the writers presented the stories as they did. Israelite enmity toward Midianites, Amalekites or Canaanites should be read not just as historical accounts, he said, but also within the context of time and situation in which they were written.
Jenkins said Joshua, for example, most likely was written during a period when Hebrew prophets called on the Jewish people to embrace justice and honor their covenant with God or suffer the consequences of disobedience. “The threat was meant to apply not to foreign people but to the Hebrews themselves,” he said.
When it comes to violent Scripture passages, Jenkins said Christians should “absorb them” — study them within historical context, view them with humility and interpret them in light of the revelation of God in Christ — “but never forget them.”