In the beginning, God created skies and
earth.
Welcome back. I hope your Sunday has been restful and fulfilling.
I have been writing about how texts are transformed by
interpretation.
The primary text I wrote about last time was Forrest Gump by Winston Groom.
In my first daily post today, I mentioned how the movie transformed the
book. In fact, I could argue that it
created a different Gump tradition.
In the book, which I recommend to one and all if you love to read
comedy that will make you laugh, Forrest does not run home to see his mother
after he is discharged from the army.
Now, it’s been a long time since I read the book. I am going from memory here, specifically
what struck me as so “other” from the movie.
So, back to Mrs. Gump. In
the book, Forrest gets a telegram or a phone call or something that tells him
she had passed away.
In the book, Forrest is in a production of, I think, Hamlet at a
theater. He is holding a torch while on
stage. He accidently sets the theater on
fire.
This gets him in trouble with the law. The judge gives him a choice. He can go to prison or join an experimental
NASA program that will launch him into outer space with a gorilla and Major
Sue.
He opts to launch into space.
While in outer space, the gorilla keeps trying to grab Major Sue who
apparently arouses him. Somehow this
causes the module to crash onto an island inhabited by cannibals. Among the cannibals is a Harvard educated man
who loves to play chess. I believe he
was the chief.
In the book, Gump may or may not be good at ping pong. I don’t remember exactly. But he is great at chess. He realizes that
the chief will eat him, the gorilla, and Major Sue if he lets him win.
Incidentally, Gump is also terrific at playing the harmonica. He and Jenny are in a band at the beginning
of the book. She leaves him when she
finds him in an alley with adoring female fans sitting on his lap.
I hope I can demonstrate two things here. I tried to recount a story that I read long
ago. I tried to recount some of the main
events in my memory that show how the text has been transformed by the movie.
If I never read the book again, and I never saw the movie again, I
might easily blend both traditions in some way in my head decades from now.
Some scholars believe the writer of John’s gospel may have read
Mark and composed his gospel based on his memory of that reading. Imagine someone reading the gospel of Mark
one time or hearing about it one time. That could very well be likely since there were
no printing presses in the first century.
Someone, say a writer who composed John’s Jesus tradition, called
the Johannine School in modern biblical scholarship, might have remembered
enough of Mark to follow his passion story, but then recalled little else. John’s is a unique Jesus tradition in a way similar
to how Forrest Gump the movie is a
different Gump tradition than the one in the text.
What I have not mentioned is how stories circulated about Jesus
orally before they were written down.
This is not unusual. Stories about
Troy and Hector circulated orally before Homer wrote them down. Stories about Adam, Abraham, and Moses were
told before someone fixed them into a text.
In fact, in the Jewish Bible, the Torah is something like a quilt
sewn together with four different cloths.
The genius of the redactor, that is the one who combined the sources, is
his unique preservation of ancient diversity.
He fixed it into singular a text for scribes to copy.
Now, I know all this. It
means the Bible is a very human book. Yet,
it does not make me believe I can’t be a God person because there are one or
one billion errors in the Bible. It
would be silly to hold any book anywhere to a false standard of inerrancy. That is idolatrous.
No, I have the relationship with God before I come to the Bible. I read the Bible to understand that
relationship. I am never leaving God
because the written language that expresses faith is so human.
In truth, I am thrilled by that.
It makes me humble. I am not as
likely to be a pious Bible thumper when I know that the Bible is fallible. I am fallible as an interpreter.
But Jesus is the light of truth I find in the Bible.
Thanks for visiting. I hope to see you here next time. Blessings…
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