Chapter 1: Student

David Blake was worried that his near-sightedness was getting worse. His solution was to make his eyes work more by wearing glasses less often. He needed them for riding his bike, let alone for driving his car. But he tried to teach his courses without them. It wasn’t a totally successful experiment. He was still wearing the glasses when he followed two students into the seminary one Monday in the fall of 1980. He thought he recognized their voices.

“We know so much more, now,” said the guy whose voice sounded like Craig’s. The words sounded like Craig’s, too. He was always sure he knew more than someone else.

“Yeah,” said the guy who sounded like Ben. “They had Mary riding a donkey in the last days of her pregnancy.”

“Those guys who wrote the Bible never knew what we know now,” Craig agreed. David had been right; they were turning together into his classroom. This was more important than strengthening his eyes. It was even more important than his syllabus. These characters were students in Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, for God’s sake. Or for somebody’s sake; God didn’t seem to have much to do with it for some of them. A Sunday-school class should know better!

“Let’s spend a minute on the gospel stories before talking about Corinthians,” he began. “What Gospel contains the story of Mary’s riding the donkey to Bethlehem?” A few kids started scrabbling with their Bibles. “Come on! There are four Gospels in all. Which ones had Christmas stories.”

“I can recite the Christmas story from John,” Barbara said. She looked as competent as she usually sounded, although that claim was total hogwash. Barbara was an older woman on a second career. She’d been president of a district UMW when most of her classmates were in high school.

“I’d like to hear it.”

“And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Okay. David wouldn’t call that a Christmas story, but Barbara sounded competent again.

“I’ll buy that. Who here can quote the Christmas story in Mark?” There was a dead silence. Maybe the folks riffling through their Bibles thought that there wasn’t any Christmas story in Mark -- that was the most charitable interpretation. David waited for a few heartbeats. “Well, you are all correct.” For the first, and probably last, time. “There is no Christmas story in Mark. He begins with John preaching in the wilderness and Jesus going to him to be baptized. That leaves two Gospels. Not to draw this out, Matthew has Mary and Joseph already living in Bethany. So, pregnant Mary travels to Bethany in only one gospel. How does she travel?” There was a silence.

“How many people know that Luke reports that she traveled there on a donkey?” A couple of hands went up. “How many of you can find the mention of that donkey in the book of Luke?” Given permission, a few more people looked in their Bibles. David let them look until enough blank faces were turned to him.

“It isn’t there,” a beautiful girl said. The voice was Jen’s.

“It isn’t there,” he echoed. “The picture of pregnant Mary riding on a donkey is on many Christmas cards, but it isn’t in the Gospels.

“Now, I won’t embarrass anybody by mentioning names, but I heard two members of this class discussing how much more we knew than the biblical authors knew because they had a heavily-pregnant Mary riding a donkey. We are supposed to know much more now. And, it is understood that some people know more about some things today than anybody in the first century did. Quantum mechanics is only one example. Any of you know quantum mechanics?” There was another dead silence.

“So ‘we know more than they did’ is better phrased as ‘some people today know more than they did about some things.’ How many of you have ridden a donkey?” A few hands went up. “How many of you have ridden donkeys for miles and miles for days and days?” Nobody put their hands up.

“It’s quite likely that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had all taken trips on donkey-back. Maybe not. Certainly, they knew people who had. Now a few of you have experienced pregnancy, all of you have known others who have. But -- really -- there is less pregnancy today than there was in the first century.

“So, rather than knowing more than they did about pregnant women riding donkeys, we know a damn-sight less. Instead of bragging about how much we know because we live in the twentieth century along with people who do know some things, things we haven’t studied, we might respect what the Gospel writers knew. And one thing they knew was the scriptures of their time. Maybe, just maybe, we would look a little less asinine if we knew the scriptures available to us today. And, while the Gospels are important, today’s assignment was on Corinthians.”

And he got through most of his intended material, if rather superficially. Later, though, he thought he’d been too supercilious. Not in suggesting that Craig was an asshole; he definitely was. But, if these guys were attending seminary with less knowledge of the Gospels than he thought should qualify them for a Sunday-school certificate, was he all that much better? He was teaching New Testament; the writers of the New Testament were steeped in the Old. Was he steeped in the Old Testament? Hardly. There were parts of it he hadn’t even read. He decided to read the Old Testament straight through.

His other decision was to cancel his experiment of life without glasses. He needed to see his students. He needed to see Craig; he wanted to see Jen. She had a pretty face, beautiful, long, hair, and what looked like a pretty shape. Sitting down and wearing a sweatshirt, she didn’t reveal the shape. Well, with glasses he could see her between classes. She’d be walking then. Whatever hints the sweatshirt gave about the shape of her upper body it wouldn’t give to his blurry vision. Maybe he could find some other time to ditch his glasses, housework? meals? He started reading Genesis in his Greek Bible that night. Paul had read Greek. He hoped Paul hadn’t read scripture in Hebrew outside the synagogue; David’s Greek was rusty enough. His Hebrew was non-existent.

That Wednesday, he got to the classroom early. It wasn’t used the hour before. His view of Jen going to her seat was obscured by the other students coming in at the beginning of the hour. Friday, he stood in the doorway. He saw a hint of Jen’s shape through the sweatshirt when she was coming towards him, enough to guess that she was wearing a bra. That was too bad, but radical feminism wasn’t her style. The view going away was much more satisfactory, even though she wore a backpack. He was happy about his glasses decision; her backpack obscured his sight of her bottom until she was six feet away. She had nice thighs, though, and the tight jeans showed them off. And the sexy hair over the backpack almost compensated for the view the backpack hid.

He was beginning to obsess on that one student, which wasn’t healthy. He belonged to a group protesting Nestle’s contribution to the infant-formula crisis. The meetings of Chicago INFACT drew more women than men, and the organizers were female. Most of those females were taken, but he’d enjoyed their company at every meeting. He found himself comparing their looks unfavorably to Jen’s. This was neither fair nor productive. Girls, women if he were to speak aloud, whose looks and company he’d enjoyed now pleased him less.

During actual classes, he kept his mind on his lectures. Sometimes, he despaired that he made any difference. They learned so little, forgot so much of that after the test, and -- many of them -- cared not a whit about what Paul wrote. Some of them, like Craig, since they were certain that they knew more than Paul did. Others, like Pete, didn’t need to read what Paul had written because they had already learned what he had meant. David had long suspected that people who claimed -- proclaimed -- that they believed in the inerrancy of Scripture really believed in the inerrancy of their interpretation of scripture. He tried to show Pete the difference.

“That’s what you think he meant. What did Paul say?”

“He said that every bit of scripture was inspired by God,” Pete replied.

“Let’s look at that. Read me verses fifteen and sixteen.”

“‘And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.’”

“Now there are two things here. Notice that Timothy knew the scriptures from childhood. What scriptures? The Septuagint. That’s what Jews outside Palestine read. Our Old Testament and our Apocrypha. The second thing is that scripture is inspired by God. Paul doesn’t say that it is dictated by God, and Paul damn-well knew about dictation, he did it himself. Now you may think that he really meant that the Old Testament and the New Testament were dictated by God. But that isn’t what he said. And there is something paradoxical in claiming that Paul is telling us that the Epistle to Timothy was dictated by God, but Paul used the wrong term by mistake.”

Pete fell back on “direct verbal inspiration,” which used the word that Paul had used -- or that the translators had used for Paul’s word -- with the meaning that Pete, and other fundies wanted to read into it.

Well, he wasn’t hired to break these kids from their irrationalities. He was hired to have them learn a few of the passages of the New Testament. He tried to earn his salary. And, he tried to earn the extra enjoyment that he got from the Pauline-Epistles class where he could see Jen by working a little harder on that class.

If his students weren’t turning from opinionated blatherers into theologians, some theologians were turning into opinionated blatherers. Just ‘cause Albert Schweitzer had shown how fatuous the Historical-Jesus movement was at the beginning of the century, didn’t mean that it had been abandoned. Indeed, a group calling itself “The Jesus Seminar” had decided to pool their guesses. That was supposed to establish certainty.

He decided to try to insulate his current classes, at least, against this newest idea. He typed up some passages to let the students guess where The Jesus Seminar would come down on the basis of the teaching of liberal theology. All he typed were the chapter and verse. The students needed the practice of looking these up for themselves; and they needed the opportunity to see them in context, although he doubted whether many would take that opportunity.

“You might have heard,” he began in each class, “the story about the man whom the police arrested for bank robbery. ‘You might as well confess,’ the cops said. ‘We have an eyewitness who can identify you positively.’ ‘What does he know,’ said the man. ‘I was wearing a mask.’

“Well, back in the nineteenth century, there was a serious theological movement called ‘The Historical Jesus.’ Writers could tell you what Jesus really taught, as opposed to what the first-century Gospel writers thought he had taught. Since the nineteenth century was the acme of science and human understanding, they could strip away the encrustations and reveal the real teachings.

“Then a theologian named Albert Schweitzer wrote a book analyzing their teachings. You’ve heard of him as a medical missionary, but he was a concert-level organist and a major theologian as well. What he did was to compare what the historical-Jesus writers had said about questions on their own with what they said Jesus had taught. Guess what? In every case, although what Smith attributed to Jesus might be different from what Jones attributed to Jesus, it was identical to what Smith taught on his own. They hadn’t stripped away the encrustations added by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; they had stripped away the teachings that offended them. They’d added a few encrustations of their own, as well.

“Now, today, there are still people doing nineteenth-century theology. But they’ve decided to wear masks. The group calling itself ‘The Jesus Seminar’ are voting on what Gospel teachings they want to call into question. You won’t get Smith’s votes to compare with Smith’s positions. You’ll only get the majority opinion. But I figure that I know what the majority of these theologians teach. I figure that most of you have some idea, too. So, I’ve taken a few passages from each of the four Gospels. I want each of you to vote on them. Not on whether Jesus actually said them; on whether the Jesus Seminar people will vote them in or out.”

He couldn’t grade on their responses, not even on whether they responded or not. Most of them did respond, however. They’d gone through high school, college, and anywhere from a half to three-and-a-half quarters of seminary by then. When a teacher gave you an assignment, you turned it in. You probably didn’t think, but you turned it in. He handed back the average of the class guesses on the Jesus-Seminar guesses. Ted, a fellow teacher with a more traditional stance than most of Garrett’s faculty had, stopped him in the hall one day.

“I hear that you are planning to rewrite scripture.”

“The ecumenical council of David Blake. It has a certain ring, but I wasn’t really planning on calling it. What leads to this idea?”

“A four-page sheet of chapter-and-verse citations with a choice in or out.”

“The Schweitzer game? I carefully wrote on each sheet the question of whether the student thought the Jesus Seminar would approve of the scripture or disapprove of it. Did you really not read the question?”

“I read it. One of your students didn’t. He thought he was being asked whether to take the passage out of scripture or not.”

“Ted, you and I disagree on a good many points, but we’re both professors at an institution of higher learning. Criticize me for what I say, not for what some idiot hears.”

“I’m not criticizing you. I’m teasing you.”

“And getting a good rise out of me, too. Sorry. I’ve been dealing with idiots too long, didn’t mean to count you among them.” And, whichever student had run to Ted to complain, several had returned the sheet with every “in” circled.

The only good things about this quarter were that his book on Philemon was accepted and that he could still see Jen in one of his classes.

Then even this reward was cut. Really, Jen’s hair was cut. It looked like a beauty shop cut as opposed to a take-out-the-shears-and-to-hell-with-it cut. She was probably moving slowly towards looking more professional. Well, she could have started with wearing blouses instead of sweatshirts. She was still pretty in short hair, but the long tresses had been one of the few bright spots in his week.

He kept his opinions about that to himself most times, even though keeping his opinions to himself wasn’t one of his strong suits. Once he slipped. Sally was expressing her opinions just as if she’d formed them herself rather than picking them up second hand. They were on Colossians, the last book they would read before Romans.

“Well,” she said, “Paul was a sexist. We shouldn’t try to follow his teachings about women.”

“I think you’re reading him anachronistically,” he replied. “The people who claim that Paul was transcribing what God dictated for the twentieth century are consistent -- I don’t agree with them, but they are consistent. On the other hand, saying that Paul wrote on his own authority, but he was wrong about the position of women in the twentieth century shows a little confusion.

“Now, as I emphasized in our study of Philemon, Paul is always ready to say that believing might add obligations; he never teaches that it removes any. A woman who believes has all the obligations that she would have as an unbeliever, and a first-century Greek woman had the obligation to obey her husband. Were the husband also a believer, that put some obligations on him; it removed none from her.”

“I’m here to clarify what is my theology,” Sally changed the subject. “And I must say that you aren’t helping.”

“Good! Well, really, I should be indifferent rather than favorable. There is no reason that I should care why you are in class, so long as you aren’t here to disrupt it. I’m here to teach what Paul wrote. Barbara might be here to polish her shorthand skills for all I care. If you go out of this class knowing what Paul wrote, I’ve fulfilled my obligation to the seminary.”

“And your obligations to us?”

“None. Oh, I’ve the same obligations that I owe you on the street as a Christian and as a citizen. But my obligation as a teacher is to the seminary. Their obligation to you is to give you the preparation to be a preacher of Christian doctrine, of Methodist doctrine in particular. I must have overlooked the place where they promised to help you work out your private theology. Just to satisfy my curiosity, and not part of the course work, what do you plan to do with that theology when you have determined it?”

“I’m going to be a pastor, of course. How could I do that without working out my own theology?”

“Well, it’s none of my business. As I said, I hired on to teach Christian theology. But I should think you would have a hard time making a living as the founder of The Church of Sally.”

“It’s not The Church of Sally. I’m going to be a Christian pastor. It’s just that I have to decide what my theology is. Then I’ll preach that.”

“I don’t see why you expect some congregation to pay you for that. They are more likely to expect you to preach the theology of the church. Now, look at Jen. Plenty of parishioners would like to look at her. Even if she grew her hair back out, though, I doubt that many people would pay to hear her opinions. They want to hear the Gospel. For that matter, I have a D. Min. just like you’ll have; I studied years after that. You don’t seem terribly anxious to hear my opinions.”

When he’d said “Now, look at Jen,” he naturally had. (He looked at Jen often without such a good excuse. He wished she’d participate more, both as a teacher and as a man who could use the excuse to look at her. Instead, Sally did a lot more talking.) Jen had not been pleased with his comments. Quite likely, the other students had sensed his interest. Most of the male students probably agreed with him about her hair -- about looking at her, for that matter.

He started the very next session of that class with more of the issue. It was, after all, the context of the entire course. “Catholic moral theologians make a formal distinction among Jesus’ precepts. Some of them are ‘monastic counsels,’ going the extra mile beyond what is required of ordinary believers. I don’t know of any Protestant system of Christian ethics which makes quite that overt a distinction. Still, many Protestants make some sort of distinction between the rules that you’re expected to follow and the rules it would be nice if you followed once in a while. That distinction might always be invidious, but it is particularly invidious when it is made about quite parallel passages in Paul.

“There have been people, men, claiming that ‘Wives should obey their husbands’ is an absolute, and that ‘Husbands should treat their wives gently’ is good advice except in special circumstances. (Which, too often, comes to mean these circumstances.) Aside from the viciousness which this excuses, it is intellectually dishonest. I don’t for a minute oppose feminists’ objection to this. Where I think they go astray is in blaming Paul for the ideas that idiots read into his clear writing.” This discourse didn’t seem to make any impression. Neither the feminists nor the fundies seemed convinced.

Well, that was his last excursion from the syllabus. The test was coming up, and the final paper.

He gave Jen a B for the course, a grade she’d clearly earned, even without much class participation. He Xeroxed her final paper. He had no excuse for asking for a photo, even one after the haircut. Unfortunately, she didn’t sign up for another course of his the next quarter. He mentally shook himself. He’d been spending too much time on daydreams and too little time on publishable scholarship.

For Philemon, he’d dealt not only with the -- quite skimpy -- book itself; he’d dealt with everything Paul had written about slavery (or everything which had come down to us). Paul had written much more about marriage. Maybe he should analyze that without hanging the argument on a single book.

And his experiment in reading the Old Testament in Greek was a failure. All that hard work had yielded only the experience of having struggled with Greek. He went back to Genesis, but in English. He used the New English Bible translation. His copy included the Apocrypha, which Paul had obviously had available to him.

His sights of Jen were rarer. They were, however, sights of Jen walking. That got him a better view of her flexing hips than he’d had while she sat in his class three days a week. One Spring day, he found himself trailing her through the halls. when she turned into a classroom, he went past. Then he shook himself and turned around. He got to his classroom late, but the class didn’t mind. Few of them actually wanted to learn about The Letter to the Hebrews.

He tried to keep himself under control. It was natural for a man of his years to desire a beautiful young woman. The problems were (1) that she was his student, and (2) that it was totally unnatural for a young woman to desire a man of his years, especially a bookish man with little machismo. An actor, a politician, a TV personality would have a chance; a theology professor would not. So, he should stop dreaming of what he couldn’t do and start working on what he could. Paul’s view of marriage really required some background. What was the view of marriage in the first-century Jewish community? What was the view in the larger Graeco-Roman world?