c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Elie Wiesel heard the words “biblical criticism” uttered with disdain in the small Jewish village where he grew up in Romania.

“Biblical criticism _ how dare you?” was the mantra. So when an elderly man discovered the 11-year-old reading a critical biblical commentary the boy had found hidden behind other books in the synagogue library, “he gave me a slap on my face,” Wiesel remembered.

Christine Schenk of Cleveland went to Georgetown University in the 1960s, a time when “science was everything,” and she, like many of her peers, would ask the questions raised by the famous Time magazine cover: Is God dead, and if God was not, did it matter?

Wiesel became a Nobel laureate and a renowned spiritual writer after surviving the Holocaust with a remarkable faith. Schenk’s journey led her to devote her life to God as a nun. Neither gave up a commitment to biblical scholarship.

And despite the jeremiads of the right that modern biblical criticism threatens faith or the boasts of the secular left that it could disprove the Bible, Wiesel and Schenk have found inspiration in studying the archaeological, historical and literary evidence from biblical times.

They are not alone.

The questions that once seemed to matter so much _ were Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac real people? Is the Exodus a historical event? Did Jesus rise from the dead? _ no longer are deal breakers in the relationship between science and religion.

Instead, a broad-based scholarship is emerging as each side concedes there are issues of faith that can never be definitively proved or disproved. The scholarship is reaching people in the pews.

For example, feminist scholarship unearthing the contributions and influence of women in biblical times is engaging large numbers of people in ways from the addition of Miriam’s Cups on Passover tables to nationwide celebrations this month of Mary of Magdala, a close disciple of Jesus who somehow over time acquired the highly questionable reputation of once being a prostitute.

And remarkable advances in Jewish-Christian relations in recent decades are in significant part due to extensive research making clear to believers the Jewish roots of Christianity and the role of Roman injustice in the death of Jesus.

The past century was often not a time when biblical insights could be shared widely. The Scopes trial and the fundamentalist-modernist controversy early in the century tended to divide much scholarship into competing camps preoccupied with the question of whether every account in the Bible was literally true. Up to the 1960s, some scholars on the left were dismissing Scripture as any kind of independent historical record.

But several changes have occurred in recent decades, from the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s encouraging Catholics to engage in critical scholarship to the willingness of many evangelical and secular researchers to work alongside one another.

Today, it is not unusual for a Lutheran, a Jew, a Catholic priest or an atheist to chair a committee of the Society of Biblical Literature.

“We argue on the basis of evidence and archaeological facts,” said Hershel Shanks, editor of Bible Review and Biblical Archaeology Review magazines. In the end, he said, there is also a general understanding that many parts of the Bible, such as the Exodus and Resurrection accounts, are matters of faith.

Wiesel and renowned biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross of Harvard share a respect for each other’s work in an article titled “Contrasting Insights of Biblical Giants” in the July-August issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. They do this even though they approach biblical texts from different perspectives: Cross works from an academic and scientific discipline; Wiesel as an interpreter who starts with the idea that “if the text was good enough for my father and grandfather, it must be good enough for me.”

Through the history of interpretation and archaeological and historical evidence, each sees the other contributing a piece of the puzzle to a biblical text individuals must finally understand on their own terms.

What they share, Wiesel says toward the end of their conversation, is a love of the text, “and that is what makes the whole adventure of reading and studying and sharing worthwhile.”

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Many scholars would agree.

“I find myself approaching the text as a believer. I don’t see that that’s incompatible with issues of modern biblical scholarship,” said the Rev. George Smiga, who teaches at St. Mary Seminary in Wickliffe, Ohio.

He said the Catholic position is not that the Bible is only God’s word or only human words. “It’s not either-or. It’s both-and.”

David Ariel, president of Siegal College of Judaic Studies in Beachwood, Ohio, said many Jewish people are comfortable with having two truths _ the “truth” of the sacred and the “truth” of history and archaeology.

Retired Bishop Arthur Williams Jr. of the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio said when he teaches a course on Scripture, he introduces students to a broad range of scholarship.

But he will also convey his belief that the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event that is foundational to the Christian faith. He said his faith has been enhanced _ not threatened _ by gaining a greater understanding of the biblical world.

Schenk has experienced a similar deepening of faith. When she began her biblical scholarship, she approached it scientifically “because that is how my mind was trained,” said the executive director of FutureChurch, an independent Catholic group based in Cleveland that began the Mary of Magdala celebrations.

What she has found has not shaken her deep belief in the resurrection of Jesus, she said, but rather it has helped make her faith more real by placing Jesus in a particular community at a particular time in history.

“This wasn’t some myth that was passed down from century to century,” Schenk said. “It really took Jesus from a mythical person to a real person.”

So, too, did the teaching of her faith that Jesus was both human and divine become more clear.

“The humanity of Jesus reveals to us the divinity of God,” she said.

DEA/MO/JL END BRIGGS