The Great Code

...But the paradisal (trees, water), pastoral (flocks, herds), agricultural (harvest, vintage), urban (Jerusalem, Temple) , and human (marriage) metaphorical clusters have both an ideal or apocalyptic aspect and an evil or demonic counterpart...

...Language I proposes the possibility of a "history of language," that is the trans-latable sense in words that cuts across the variety of tongues (languages) employed...

...But, of course, that inaugural question from Myth I (fact or fiction...

...Typology I notes the classic principle that the New Testament was concealed in the Old, while the Old was revealed in the New...

...But what if the Bible's heart is the combina- tion of religion and history and literature...

...It follows, then, that "it is the primary function of literature, more particularly of poetry, to keep re-creating the first or metaphorical phase of language during the domination of the later phases...

...Frye struggles boldly with that question but emerges slightly limping in the dawn...

...This entails the book's reversing itself not around some emphasized center but around a black hole, or better, a white page...

...Myth I then asks, "Granted that the narratives in the Bible are myths in the sense we have given the word, whether they are histories or fictions, are they histories or fictions...

...Frye asks programmatically, "Why does this huge, sprawling, tactless book sit there inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage like the 'great Boyg' or sphinx in Peer Gynt, frustrating all our efforts to walk around it...

...Redaction criticism presumed the use of sources and focused on how the final writer used those given materials...

...We can study the Bible and literature, and Frye has probably done it here as well as it can be done...

...The bias for the latter mode - which places us outside events - accounts in part for the difficulty in assimilating biblical meanings...

...The book's structure is chiastic but with an abcd/dcba rather than an abc/d/ cba construction...

...That whole vast research can be, and has been, used to isolate and venerate either the original or the final text, but it can also be used to contemplate the total hermeneutical process from original to final text, giving no ultimate honor to either product but to the developmental process itself...

...John Dominic Crossan THE CRITICAL study of the Christian Bible has operated since its inception within a predominately historical paradigm...

...Form criticism looked for the sociological setting from which such forms derived...

...But if these phases begin successively, for us they remain simultaneous modal options - with poetry lying closest to the creative sources of language...

...What remains thereafter as normative or at least provocative is a continuing and contemporary process rather than any text, original, intermediate, or final, as fixed and dated products...

...haunts the corridors of both small and large structures, and the larger the biblical structure the greater the haunting presence becomes...

...I fear, however, that the absence is more profound than that...

...On the one hand: "if anything historically true is in the Bible, it is there not because it is historically true but for different reasons...

...And to this latter group must now be added Northrop Frye, taking his title from Blake's claim that "The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art...

...From Theory to Practice (1978) and Robert Polzin's use of Russian formalism in Moses and the Deuteronomist (1980...

...Myth II surveys the individual or internal units which are modeled on the external or overarching construction of "the entire Bible, viewed as a 'divine comedy,' contained within a U-shaped story . . . in which man . . . loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation...

...Examples are Frank Kermode's theoretical and philosophical meditations in The Genesis of Secrecy (1979) and Robert Alter's detailed close readings in The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981...

...We can study the Bible as literature, and it has been done...

...Frye's own work is not structured by either the Bible's internal generic diversity or its external linear narrativity but is presented as a giant chiasm in which The Order of Words, subdivided as Language, Myth, Metaphor, Typology, reverses itself as The Order of Things, subdivided as Typology, Metaphor, Myth, Language...

...a pattern of commandments, aphorisms, epigrams, proverbs, parables, riddles, pericopes, parallel couplets, formulaic phrases, folktales, oracles, epiphanies, Gattungen, Logia, bits of occasional verse, marginal glosses, legends, snippets from historical documents, laws, letters, sermons, hymns, ecstatic visions, rituals, fables, genealogical lists, and so on almost indefinitely...

...Myth "means, first of all, mythos, plot, narrative, or in general the sequential ordering of words...

...This gives an historical dimension to biblical typology, and in Typology II Frye proposes "seven main phases: creation, revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse" which follow one another in succession,"each phase being a type of the one following it and an antitype of the one preceding it...

...In Metaphor II five different metaphorical structures are traced throughout the Bible...

...Examples are Daniel and Aline Patte's use of French structuralism in Structural Exegesis...

...There are, instead, two major reactions to the exclusivity of historical interests in biblical studies...

...I finished the book with an acute sense of disappointment, as of something missing that should have been there...

...If that is the triple challenge posed by the Christian Bible to any serious reader and not just to believer alone, then emphasizing only religion, or only history, or only literature, or even any two of those aspects, will not meet the Bible on its own terms as the great code of all three in combination, as the great round-dance of religion, history, and literature...

...It is this dialectical patterning that supports internally the somewhat external or canonical unity imposed on the disparate biblical materials from a later situation...

...The Bible is...

...What happens when religion appears as a frustratingly indistinguishable amalgam of all three phenomena in a book...

...That is one aspect of the biblical sprawl but the other is just as important: "Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that 'freezes' into a single metaphor cluster...

...It is interesting that the data so brilliantly illuminated by those methods could have been seen just as easily in terms of process as of product...

...On the other: "while reading Biblical myth poetically is a more liberal exercise than reading it as factual history, trying to reduce the Bible entirely to the hypothetical basis of poetry clearly will not do...

...One conies from within the ranks of scholars trained in the traditional methods of philology, archeology, and history...

...Is it possible that the Bible's constant frustration of our attempt to distinguish absolutely between history and theology, letter and metaphor, fact and fiction, teaches us something fundamental about that distinction itself, namely, that where the depth is deep enough or the fight is fierce enough we can never tell where the distinguishing line actually is...

...Source criticism emphasized the genetic relationship within and between texts...

...Language opens and closes the book...

...Such could be but is not yet how biblical study is taken...

...Typology is the book's hinge...

...Maybe this absence is no more than the promised second volume...

...The second reaction comes from scholars trained in literary criticism and deliberately invading a territory where even the religion and literature analyists have feared to tread...

...In Metaphor I the problem of distinguishing "literal" and "metaphorical" is solved by conflation: "the primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning...

...Even though the biblical idiom does not coincide with any single mode of language - and in fact represents a fourth option, the kerygmatic or revelatory mode (the theory of phases breaks down badly here) - still, notes Frye, metaphor "is not an accidental ornament of Biblical language, but one of its controlling modes of thought...

...This seems likely...

...This history - in effect, the story of emergent Western consciousness - moves from the "this is that" of hieroglyph and metaphor, through the "this for that" of abstract metonymic language, and into the demotic or descriptive ("just the facts please") mode that dominates modern discourse...