Baker Academic

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Should Bible 101 be a Thing?

I have probably taught over fifty classes related to the Bible in the past ten years. This doesn't include a few other classes that were a bit less Hollywood. Forty or so of these Bible classes have had no prerequisites. This is to say that most of my students were not required to take any previous classes before they started studying the Bible with me. I'm talking about "Introduction to Bible," "Introduction to Paul and Stuff," "How to Read the Bible without Becoming a Complete Tool" etc. 

At my present place of employment, it is not uncommon for students to take "Intro to the New Testament (I or II)" as their very first graduate-level class. At my previous place of employment, no previous university classes in religion, literature, or art were required for "Portraits of Jesus" class. At another university, "Introduction to Bible" was standard for first-year undergraduates. I'd like to think that I've gotten better at anticipating the abecedarian, but every semester I end up wondering.

Here is what I wonder: why do we continue to teach Bible as an introductory class? It increasingly difficult to assume that students have had a great literature class, a poetry class, an introduction to religions class, an introduction to the humanities class, or a "how to write an essay" class. I often wish beyond hope that my students will at least have taken Hebrew Bible/OT before they enter my NT classes. But this wish is simply passing the buck. My guess is that (almost) all professors who assign The Art of Biblical Narrative privately wish that their students had already read this book before walking in the door. Don't we need students to understand how narratives work, how poetry works, how anthropologists think, how religious experience functions, etc. before they can study the Bible at an academic level? In short, I'm suggesting that we ought to make Bible a topic for upper-level students.

Thoughts? I am wide open on this one and fishing for better ways to think about the problem.

-anthony

9 comments:

  1. Anthony, I am a 59 year old Jewish male just completing his first "Introduction to the Hebrew Bible" class, and the experience you've described as a teacher is pretty much what I experienced as a student. I wish I could take the class over again, knowing what I know now. It's not that I've never experienced the Hebrew Bible before. Just not like this.

    I don't know what kind of preparation one would need to understand this material. Yes: I felt thoroughly unworthy of this class, given my inadequate knowledge and appreciation of poetry. My ignorance of ancient Near East history (in particular, Mesopotamia and Egypt) also became appalling to me as I proceeded. You mean, the Samaritans had their own Torah? And they STILL have it? I had to learn what "vorlage" means. What the hell ARE hermeneutics anyway? When my teacher corrected me, saying that the targums are not "extra-canonical," my head started to spin. Is there a difference between the apocryphal and the deutero-canonical?

    Thank goodness the class was 99% free of Hebrew!

    I don't know. I think I'm a smarter person for this experience. I'm certainly more confused.

    So, Anthony, good luck with this project of yours! Gei gezunt. And be grateful you don't have any books that switch languages on you in mid-sentence and stick with the switched language for chapters. Really, Daniel? You couldn't just give us a few beasts with horns and be done with it? Did you think that 2000+ years later (and please don't ask me plus how much), some poor slob like me would have to write his final paper on you? That's the problem: you didn't think, did you?

    But I digress.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, Larry. You are an atypical learner as your wife is a poet and you've already read widely in NT studies. So I'm not sure how well you'll represent the demographical that concerns me. But I do appreciate what you've said about having some familiarity with the HB but "not like this" - studying at the graduate level is (or should be) an altogether different animal (insert your favorite Daniel joke here).

      -anthony

      Delete
  2. Oh boy. The reason I teach all my courses (even upper division courses that require more research) without any pre-reqs is simple: I would have no students otherwise. Enrollments, enrollments, enrollments. I imagine the situation is different at a seminary or another undergrad college with more of a Humanities-oriented student body.
    You do lead me to wonder, though: why don't we require the English Dept's basic lit class for our major? Or certain history classes? If not as prerequisites then as major requirements? Physics requires students to take math; Bio requires Chemistry; social sciences require statistics courses. Etc.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Carrie, I've often wondered why Pacific doesn't make "Bible as Literature" an upper-level elective.

      -anthony

      Delete
  3. I think in the end it's about having students in the class. But yes, it's absurd to try to teach students biblical studies if they haven't had a basic course. People should experiment with it. For all we know, a very basic Introduction to the Bible class might be popular.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I teach a Bible intro (no pre-requisite) at a secular university as part of a Religious Studies Dept. I'm really thinking it should be dropped from the curriculum, but not for lack of interest (I have 35 registered this term). From the point of view of a comparative religion perspective it is the odd one out. One does not usually take a course in the Quran before a course on Islam, or the Vedas before a course on Hinduism. And yet, it seems normal to treat the Bible as something separate from a community of religiously motivated readers. I'm thinking it should be replaced with courses on "Ancient Israelite and Judean Religion", and "Early Christianity", but that would probably really kill enrolment.

    ReplyDelete
  5. There are lots of good comments already here and on Facebook, but I'll go ahead and add a few thoughts. Mainly I agree completely with Caroline's point about enrollment: I've taught Intro Bible (101) as a required 1st-year gen ed course at two schools now, but before that I taught separate Intro OT & Intro NT as 200-level electives but with no prerequisites. Without the gen ed requirement (and God forbid with prereqs), enrollment can be low; without sufficient enrollment, faculty positions can disappear--which actually happened at the first school after I left.

    Pedagogically, teaching Intro Bible has been the best thing for me. Earlier I tried to cram too much information into a one Testament per semester course; you just can't do that if you're covering the whole Bible, so I've had to become much more intentional about, and attentive to, what students can comprehend with no background knowledge (the majority of my students have always self-identified as Christian, but fewer and fewer of them have read much of the Bible before taking my course). Sometimes the class covers methodology, sometimes it's a close reading of the text, at other times it's reception history...basically I like having the freedom to do something different every day because anything we cover is more than they knew beforehand. Without 100-level Intro Bible courses, there wouldn't be as many biblical studies jobs, and I don't think I would be as good a teacher without this experience.

    Finally, I think English lit classes are a good analogy to my approach. Their canon is contested, and nobody can cover an entire anthology in on semester, but it is still possible for students to become much more knowledgeable and much better readers and writers. And even upper-level English courses have to cover plenty of material (as well as basic reading and writing skills) that students either would remember or would have learned from their intro class.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I took Intro to NT at a Christian college, Intro to Hebrew Bible at a state university, and now have one whole quarter of graduate work in religion under my belt. From my experiences so far as a student in a Religion department, the more it seems like categories like OT, NT, and even Religion itself are stretched too thin between the disciplines of history, classics, literature, theology, etc. The fact that we all agree that the New Testament is a thing worthy of study on its own merits seems to be the only thing holding this together.

    Maybe you're right that Bible-centric courses should be limited to upper-level classes. Could there also then be "The Bible and [other discipline]" or "The Bible according to [Religious Tradition]" courses for novices, which would at least give them competency in one area before moving on to a deeper survey?

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm interested in the "How to Read the Bible without Becoming a Complete Tool" class! As a homeschooling parent, I want my teenaged kids to appreciate the archetypal stories and ideas of the Bible that have become so embedded in our culture and history, but as a former fundamentalist educating agnostics who have become phobic of the Bible from my own past and the hyper-religious community in which we live. My children have no experience with anyone who reads the Bible without being consumed by indoctrinated zeal.

    ReplyDelete