Is your primary interest to “read the Bible in a—let’s say…—serious and critical-thinking way” or to review how various philosophers have aprroached the Bible in order to select an approach for yourself?
If it’s the former, I might be able to help.
Theologico-Political Treatise by Spinoza
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Interesting sources. To my mind, analytic “philosophy of religion” is one of the places where the influence of certain strains of Protestantism that have been influential in the Anglophone world become most apparent, even (or maybe even particularly) in the hands of secular atheist critics of Christianity. But then these commitments subtly influence other areas of thought; plenty of fodder for the intellectual history crowd.
Hello @Javi - I note the resurrection of this discussion and a reply to one of my posts. So, thought I’d look again…
So, you’ve had a look and posters have given suggestions. How has this helped?
Quite a scope there, depending on the personal belief and focus, interest or academic obsession.
What do you consider are ‘intriguing comments’ - by academics, analysis and argumentation v a more practical approach?
So, you are accepting of the existence, life and nature of God, Jesus - there is no need to read the Bible for that. It is the word of God. It is divinely inspired.
It is not the only religious text that philosophers of religion might focus on, is it? What about the Islamic Quran?
Do we only read texts which we are already familiar with?
Why would philosophers focus on the Bible as a text? Simply to analyse and argue or to consider and practise?
What happened to your initial enthusiasm?
I understand apparent cognitive or psychological ‘attention-drift’ - or a natural shift in focus.
Even - or because of- genuine effort. But to do what? To read and understand - for yourself and not to look for what others think? Disengagement due to boredom…or a change in desire…
How far did you ‘wish’ to go?
What would you call ‘progress’?
What ‘intrigues’ you?
I had forgotten about my contribution in this discussion! So, your post has revived interest. Not sure if it is what @Javi was looking for…
Well, when it comes to reading the Bible, what comes to mind, in both philosophy and religion, is the preponderance of the Western, white male.
I am not alone in questioning this:
In addition to concerns about the overrepresentation of Christian theists in APR and cognitive biases, such as overconfidence and confirmation bias, others have expressed concerns about the relevance of APR to religion. For instance, Levine (Reference Levine2000, 89) argues that APR lacks ‘vitality, relevance, and “seriousness” ’. Likewise, Trakakis (Reference Trakakis2008, 115) writes that: ‘To many religious believers, particularly those belonging to non-Western religious traditions, analytic philosophy of religion would appear to be a philosophy of anything but religion’ (emphasis in original).
Trakakis (2000, 89) argues that there is ‘a disconnection in analytic philosophy of religion between the investigator and what they purport to be investigating’ because APR is disconnected from ‘the existential and lived dimension’ of religion. Given that most analytic philosophers of religion are Christian theists, as the aforementioned studies show, the concern is that APR is disconnected from the lived experiences of practitioners of religions other than Christianity. If analytic philosophy of religion is sick, can it be cured? | Religious Studies | Cambridge Core)
In that respect, APR lacks diversity and is not inclusive of religions other than Christianity. Assuming that ‘[d]iversity matters’ (Hershock (Reference Hershock2012), 1), the fact that APR is neither diverse nor inclusive of religions other than Christianity seems to be a problem.
I am not sure of contemporary views or what the ‘future’ might be of philosophy of religion…could it become more ‘vital’ or ‘pragmatic’?
The recommendations were pretty good, but it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. My research was more focused on the gospels rather than what philosophers or theologians have to say.
I understand that my interest is very subjective, because what I could consider “intriguing” may be boring or non-reliable to others. For example, although Kazantzakis is not a philosopher, I honestly think that his reviews and interpretation of the Bible are quite fascinating. I recommend you check out “Report to Greco” or “Christ Recrucified.” Magnificent works.
I think the “duty” of philosophers is to argue the Bible, while the duty of the theologians is to put it into practice.
Nothing. It is just that I’m bow busy on reading other works that are far from being religious.
I think it is very complex to go far. I just want to be knowledgeable and wise regarding the Bible. For example, I think that the book of Mark is good, but I miss many aspects because I don’t have a good theology or philosophy of religion background.
On the other hand, I finally understood Kierkegaard – or at least I feel I understand him better than the last time. I consider this progress. 
Perhaps I should try Hegel next time.
Perhaps.
Why?
Thanks for clarification of your project and its progress.
He is the most frequently cited philosopher in the books I have read. However, these authors primarily criticise his works. I think it would be a nice idea to know why reading Hegel too, but I don’t feel motivated right now.
The Bible is what it is. The Bible is steeped in metaphor, is widely open to interpretation and contains inconsistencies, discrepancies and outright contradictions. As such, there is no alternative to picking and choosing what parts to believe. Believers who claim that they do not pick and choose are disingenuous at best. In effect, they use the Bible to create God in their own image.
An important distinction that needs to be made is that the Pauline gospel (upon which Christianity is based) is very different from the gospel that Jesus preached. By the time the four gospels were written, the NT writers were heavily influenced by the Pauline gospel. They wrapped a mythology ABOUT Jesus in support of the Pauline gospel around quotations of the words of Jesus (the gospel Jesus preached) that were preserved and available at that time, e.g., oral tradition and the Q Source.
If you really want to understand the four gospels, you need to begin there.
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To understand the bible as something that is what it purports to be, is to treat the bible as revelation provided by God for the purpose of fostering a relationship between the person and God. That’s not philosophy though.
Some philosophy can be inferred from the bible, as Augustine and Aquinas did, and C.S. Lewis was a philosophy teacher, so philosophy pervades his works though they are not straight philosophy either.
But although there is philosophy, and history, and psychology/anthropology, and maybe even some highly general biology type science in it, the bible isn’t a philosophy or science or history book. We don’t wonder about the parting of the Red Sea to understand the physics of it, or prove it’s historicity to ourselves - we wonder about it to understand the message of our struggle from the physical bondage that is life towards the spiritual freedom that is God’s life and that can be our lives pursuing and following God. Nerding out on the history or anthropology in the bible seems fraught with error.
And the quote you have from Kant is disappointing. There is a ton of morality to gather from the bible, just not the type that puts reason above sacrifice or magnanimous gift-giving (sin isn’t just irrational although it may be, and goodness isn’t just a product of a prior mathematical perfection - there is the pure gift for no reason at all, and there is overabundance that cannot be accounted for as caused by anything prior, and miracle as necessary component of salvation. Kant was at times too full of his own mind to see morality.)
I think there are clear lines between philosophy (science, evidence based logical analysis), theology (treats revealed facts with the same philosophic rigor for the sake of understanding God), moral philosophy (which has been an attempt to turn practical action into science, and mostly a failure), religion (which treats the bible as a personal love letter to the reader, and in my view, the first and best use of the bible), and as a narrative/ancient story/myth/historical relic (which seems like just another topic that would take way too long to thoroughly develop with little general purpose other than to summarize it for some sort of anthropology student in a college elective course, or to analyze modern Christians as oddities)(This would seem odd given that Christianity is the most prevalent religion, and one practiced with really little coercion in most places - how could all these people see truly see nothing relevant about it, or be so deluded about the same book?)
A minor point, but no, he taught English and medieval literature. It’s been noted that, had he possessed a stronger background in philosophy, he might have been better able to defend his apologetics. The debate with Anscombe is interesting in that regard.
Also a minor point, but he had an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and I believe the first class he taught was a philosophy class. Philosophy and the Bible are woven into his works and analysis of human experience. He was an agnostic-type atheist for a while starting by the end of high school I believe. He lost his wife during the birth of what would have been their first child, who also died. Then, a few years later, he converted.
Ummm . . . I think very little of that is right, but perhaps someone who knows Lewis’s life better than I do will say. I’m positive that his conversion came long before he met Joy.
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Ok.
So his wife died of cancer four years after they were married, and they were married well after CS Lewis’ conversion. So yeah. (I somehow remembered him losing his mother when he was young as wife during childbirth. 
)
But Lewis studied classical philosophy undergrad, took his first teaching post filling in for a philosophy teacher at Oxford. He wanted to teach philosophy, and applied for various posts, but ended up taking a post in literature. But he continued to teach ethics classes as well, and his very first lecture was ethics and called “The Good: Its Position Among Values.”
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The Bible is foundational myth, and the belief system people have in myth varies. Some might look at it entirely as fiction, others as literal, some as metaphor, and some take a position in between all those, where some is true, some false, some useful, and some not.
Let me give you an example I came upon recently:
Exodus 31:3, “And I have filled him with the spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge, and with all manner of workmanship.”
This has been broken down as the spirit of God (Chochmah) being defined as a sudden spark or a moment of creativity that comes to you and then that is followed by understanding (Binah) which is the computation and working out the details of the Chochmah. If you believe that AI will take over your life, then you are stuck in Binah, not focusing upon your Chochmah.
The point being that if you start with the foundation that the words you are about to read are impregnated with great meaning, and you are willing to allow other’s interpretations to add to your own, then you will have created a foundational document that anchors meaning. To some, anchoring the document to God is critical to make things make sense. To others not.
What just happened there is the imposition of a hermeneutic, where you look at the text as something that generates meaning, but not just something that provides literal information. It also just took a several thousand year old document and applied it to modern day, answering how one ought navigate the onslaught of technical change that leads to a feeling of meaninglessness.
Nietzsche has a great take on the Bible imo.
He separates the Gospels from all the rest as it details a different style of psychology. Whereas the Christianity of the disciples is really just a “dysangelium” of Christ’s way of life through reifying the teachings of Christ through Judaism.
I shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic history of Christianity.—The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding—at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The “Gospels” died on the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called the “Gospels” was the very reverse of what he had lived: “bad tidings,” a Dysangelium. It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in “faith,” and particularly in faith in salvation through Christ, the distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the Christian way of life, the life lived by him who died on the cross, is Christian… To this day such a life is still possible, and for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will remain possible in all ages… Not faith, but acts; above all, an avoidance of acts, a different state of being … States of consciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as true…
In AC 32 and 33 we see Nietzsche detailing many traits he details of the “Noble Type” and attributing them to Jesus. The “Glad Tidings” being a style of Nietzsche’s “Amor Fati.” (Yes, I know Amor Fati was from before Nietzsche but there are some peculiarities with Nietzsche’s own rendition).
For example, in Matthew 16, Jesus tells his disciples that whatever they create on Earth will be in Heaven, thus allowing his disciples their own unique way into Heaven.
[ 18 ] And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. [ 19 ] And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.
There’s a whole different psychology to Christ than his followers and Nietzsche really digs into that aspect.
Of course, you probably already know the basics of what he says of the ressentiment that is common to the rest of the Bible.
Yes, that’s another issue. Although, “White” here seems to involve the use of categories that are more relevant for contemporary Western liberalism itself, and really, the United States with its history of a defacto racial caste system. The methodological objections coming from Hindu and Islamic thought are often mirrored by Eastern and traditionalist Catholics.
There is an interesting related issue here where any figure who is Christian comes to be coded as “Western” and through this as “white,” such that you have broad dismissals of areas of antique thought as simply involving “dead white males.” But with later Platonism, and even more with early Christianity, the key figures tend to be from modern day Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Turkey, etc. Recoding them as “Western” and “white” is, in an ironic way, allowing the West to deny its significant reliance on the East for its intellectual heritage, and the way in which the two regions tended to be far more interconnected prior to the Reformation.
More importantly, the modern West is in crucial respects
If you want a really good philosophical/literary analysis of the Bible, Leon Kass’ The Beginning of Wisdom on Genesis is excellent. It is broadly ecumenical and less strictly spiritual, but does pull mostly from Jewish scholarship it seems. His book on Exodus is quite good too.
Robert Alter’s translation/commentary and books on Hebrew narrative and poetry are also excellent for understanding the text itself. His translation only covers the Hebrew texts and excludes the Deuterocanonical texts however.
In terms of interesting Christian commentaries, Origen on Numbers, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux on the Song of Songs (at least the first few to see the style), Saint Gregory of Nyssa’s The Life of Moses, all of which should be fairly easy to find online. Saint Maximos on Jonah in Ad Thalassium 64 is a good example too (starts on page 145 here: https://agape-biblia.org/literatura/On-the-Cosmic-Mystery-of-Jesus-Christ_St-Maximus%20the-Confessor_Paul-M-Blowers_Robert-Louis-Wilken.pdf )
You can get a feel for later commentaries with Saint Thomas or Saint Bonaventure on the Gospel of John, but those are going to be very slow going if you aren’t looking for something specific, whereas the former are pretty engaging.
Edit: definitely give the Maximos or Origen a gander, because it’s worth noting how very different exegesis often was in prior epochs.
AFAIK the NT is a biography, detailing the life, the teachings, and death of a certain Jewish Rabbi, Yeshua, in 1^{st} century AD Palestine. There’s everyday routine activities a Rabbi would perform - sermons, dialog, wandering from place to place - in it, but there’s also records of miracles attributed to said Rabbi.
I believe there are 4 canonical gospels: [Matthew, Mark, Luke], and John. The brackets indicate the synoptic gospels.
It seems that the originals didn’t survive the ups and downs of life in the Levant. We only have copies of copies of copies of … Scribal errors and attempted corrections are evident in the texts.
Furthermore Jesus spoke Aramaic and the gospels are written in Greek and most read the Biblia Sacra in English. Scholars learn Greek and Hebrew to get to the real message in the gospels.
The 4 gospels provide 4 independent accounts of Rabbi Yeshua. It seems they both diverge and converge, depending on the topic. This is a point of contention - contradictions are not good for credibility.
You have to read them with a pinch of salt. 
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Hello Javi. This is a very interesting perspective to explore.
If we look at it strictly as metaphysicians, we can indeed see the Bible—and religions in general—as a primitive, early form of metaphysics. Their initial goal was exactly the same as ours: to seek a closure of Reality, to construct an explication that covers everything.
However, the religious system relies on only a single category: the psychic one. It is simply a projection of the human category onto the cosmos, hence the assumption that ultra-powerful, intentional entities created the Universe. It is a strictly mono-categorical framework.
In reaction to this rather naïve attempt to totalize Reality, classical Philosophy stepped in and added the obviously non-psychic category of Nature. From then on, we had a bi-categorical framework [Nature-Human]. As I am sure you have noticed, this framework has been endlessly declined into various dualisms (Mind-Matter, Things-Language, Sensible-Intelligible, Matter-Form, Substance-Attribute, etc.), usually depending on the desire of each new philosopher to leave his own trace in the history of ideas.
But we must ask ourselves a delicate question: did this bi-categorical thinking actually succeed?
I suggest that it structurally fails because Reality is actually composed of three distinct categories of things: [Matter - Life - Thought]. When you omit the biological middle category, you generate the classic aporias of philosophy. (This is exactly the dynamic resolved by the MCogito multi-categorical system).
Because classical philosophy operated on this defective bi-categorical engine, it could not maintain its position as the living frontier of human exploration. That is exactly why it was so easily eclipsed, and why Europe suffered a massive historical regression back to the mono-categorical psychic superstition of Biblical monotheism.
So, to answer your question: yes, we can read the Bible with a philosophical scope, but only as an archeological study of how early humans projected their own minds to fill the gaps in their understanding of the Universe.
I would be curious to know: when you analyze the Bible philosophically, do you not see this exact psychological projection mechanism at play?