It’s All About Context
I never was a JW - I was raised in the ‘Gospel Hall’ tradition (i.e. fundamentalist evangelical) where every male (not you, sisters) was encouraged to be their own bible scholar. Unsurprisingly, divisions over minor (to outsiders) matters of doctrine and theology led to splits and divisions and so on and so on. (This is was happened, of course, in the early days of the Millerites leading to the Bible Students, Adventists, Christadelphians, et al). Not surprising except when one is taught about divine inspiration, divine protection of doctrines, etc. How could a god be so careless that he preserved his holy writings for thousands of years and yet couldn’t make his message so clear that there were all these divisions?
But I digress. As a child, I accepted what I was told – just as I would have done of any religion depending where I had been born. I never questioned the painted ‘God is Love’ banner at the Gospel Hall even as I listened to the OT stories – you know what they say.
My paternal grandfather was a coal miner in a small Welsh village. In his youth he was bare-knuckle boxing champion of his valley. He was ‘converted’ in the mass ‘Revival’ in the early twentieth century and he and a couple of others built a small gospel hall (we called it the ‘tin tabernacle’). Much was forbidden, and some of my earliest memories are of visiting his house as a small child. He had a plaque (‘Christ is the unseen listener to every conversation’ etc.) and his (uneducated but sincere) faith was such that if the bible (always KJV) said that Jonah had swallowed a whale, he’d have believed it. There was also, of course, a confusion between Temperance and the Revival. He was keen to teach me ‘God is Love’ in Welsh.
As a young teenager I went to a very small pentecostal church (AOG) and then to a Welsh (tradition, not language) chapel. Rebelled as a teenager, but in my early 20s came back to it.
And that’s where it started. I was now an independent thinker, keen to learn more – and why wouldn’t you, if your faith was so important to you? So I started researching, wanting to learn more. No internet in those days, so it was a long process.
So to the subject of this piece. I quickly learned that context is all important. What was happening, what were the influences, the pressures, the background, when something was written?
(As an example, I moved to live in Cyprus 2005-2010. The best reliable recent history of that troubled and new bankrupt island is the ‘Contexts’ section of the Rough Guide. History as taught on the island depends on which side of the divide you are, and the autocepholous Greek Orthodox church is far from a reliable source.)
I was always interested in the history of the Roman empire and looked for mentions of this in the NT. After all, Palestine was a hot bed of unrst, revolution, religious mania, etc. To my surprise, any mentions are minimal and guarded. The Roman occupation was as brutal and overbearing (or more) as, for example, the Nazi occupation of Europe and yet, and yet ...
Minimal references to ‘tax collectors’, ‘carry his coat an extra mile’, ‘render unto Caesar’ and so on. And, of course, the execution. Quite clearly the responsibilty of the jews in the NT, while the reality was that it was an execution for sedition – just like so many others.
And then, of course, the reality that if the NT didn’t start to be written until after 70AD – after the sack of Jerusalem, after Masada, and if you were Paul/Saul essentially starting and promulgating a new ‘gnostic’ religion (‘I never met him but this is what he told me in a vision, it’s not about overthrowing worldy powers it’s about a kingdom in heaven’) within the Roman Empire – you wouldn’t want to base it on the person of someone who was executed for sedition.
Those were my thoughts, and to be honest the internet has made research so much easier.
Some people – committed JWs and others, and we should include devotees of all religions in this, from muslims, buddhists, sikhs et al – will never (and may never, on pain of death) question their religion and its teachings. Those of us who live in liberal democracies and CAN question these things are lucky, I think, and have a duty to do so.