Video Theology 1.1

So Friends,

In my awkward prologue to this strange thing, I did more ranting than explaining, leaving even the idea of "video-theology" dreadfully unclear, so my work is cut out for me now. I will start at the end. I claimed that inspired video-scripture was coming, that we would soon have to deal with the Divine Word in unprecedented forms and have to find new exigetical tools for playing with and living through (or even around) it. Not only will people start talking about movies, hypertexts, and videogames as Bible, but I think they already have, if in hushed tones. First I guess we should think about why, later we'll deal with how.

My professor in Hebrew Bible told us, with no little touch of irony, that it was amazing that when few enough Jews could read Hebrew, God decided to give them an authoritative and personally inspired Greek version. And when few enough could read Greek, God inspired the Aramaic targumim [translations]. We can follow this amazing tendency of God to accomodate illiteracy further still, through the Latin Vulgate [meaning, of course, in "common language"], past Luther's German translation, and right up to the KJV1611, which so many Evangelical Christians with their apparently forgivable monoliteracy maintain is the inerrant Word.

And, yes, I am being facetious and a little snide. I am personally not convinced that God does this, for all I know God is really sticking with the lost and perhaps irreconcilable tatters of what was later shuffled into scriptures. There is no reason to believe that God is necessarily accomodating on this one. Consider how the first set of Ten Commandments had been written by God personally [Exodus 32:16], but when Moses smashed them, though God said more would be divinely inscribed [34:1], Moses had to write the second copy himself anyway [34:28]. And these new Commandments, the only ones the Bible calls "the Ten Commandments," by the way, are neither like those God wrote personally, nor like those which Dr. Laura and certain judges think all of us should take very seriously. Go and look at the Commandments which the Bible actually calls the big 10, friends, you may be surprised. In any case, there is precedent for God deciding that when we ruin the inspired Word it is mostly our business to fix it up, and sometimes that involves shifts which hardly scream "inerrant."

But what matters here is not what God actually does, what matters is that many people who talk about Bible, perhaps even most people who have done that since the first century BC, have thought that God is quite willing to do inspire translations, and with serious theological consequences. Leaving aside specific issues of what should be translated as "young woman" and what should be translated as "virgin" for the moment, consider how many Christian groups, even those who read more contemporary translations, use a distinct register of speech for prayer liberally peppered with thees and thines. And it was with translation into English that the Bible was peopled with unicorns [Psalm 92:10, among others], though the Hebrew certainly had its own menagerie of monsters which sometimes became creatures as docile as goats through the miracle of translation [cf. Lev. 17:7]. Going back further, consider the fact that some Jews have drawn inspiration even from the shapes of the Hebrew letters, which are certainly not the first script in which the Torah was patched out. Translation matters. And it matters especially when it is scripture, because the accidents of translation can gain the status of the earlier text.

So what? The so what is that the issue is no longer what people read, but whether people read, and if they read, how they read. Movies and videogames, textmessages websites and billboards give us most of what we think we read, but maybe we read more cereal packages and t-shirts in a day than all of those things combined. The book is changing.

Which not to say that the good old codex [the bound book, the "biblion"] is totally outdated. We are making more books than we know how to think about, but that is part of why the Bible as Biblion is becoming a problem. With the present glut of books, the canon is falling apart. We can establish a common literature only where powerful institutions tell us what matters; at school we read Huck Finn and The Scarlet Letter, at Church we read hymnals and Bible, and they give us things to talk about, and a language to talk about them in, but these institutions are competing with modes of media distribution like nothing ever seen before. The tools behind Fox are not like early modern pampleteering, or even like modern propagandizing. Our common language is being forged in a sprawling arms-race between organizations that can strategically unveil new idioms at will all over the world. And the biblion is only the smallest part of what they are doing, so increaasingly it is only the smallest part of what WE are doing.

We, friends, cannot be disentangled from those organizations that are each fighting to teach us first what we already wanted to say we knew. Once enough of us want media, edible media, watchable media, wearable media, it begins to exist. And if we do not yet want media that seems to follow from our current wants, we are given it anyway to see what we think. So, whether God is listening and whether God will give a world of movie-quoters a movie-Bible is hardly the question. Unless God intervened to stop it, it was going to come. Whether God has tried to stop it is something to think about later, but once a few thousand people to started wanting their Bible to be as shiny as their movies, it began arriving.

Movies like The Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt are not quite the point, though. No large outcry pushed these movies towards canonical status so they were only on topic of Bible, not Bible proper. These are two totally distinct types of religious media, secondary and primary texts. Movies about the Bible are really only a matter of manuscript illumination, not really more interesting than The Precious Moments Bible (oh yeah, really), because the images cannot be unpacked for new scriptural data. Moses did not sing that song, but he is also not Charlton Heston, nor a doe-eyed Precious Moments hydrocephalus, and few if any are shocked or scandalized.

The first real sign which I can think of of the canonization of video is, strangely, The Last Temptation of Christ. When the movie was released in 1988 its depiction (though, everyone must remember, depiction of a dream) of Jesus having sex raised an uproar. It was driven out of several theatres for it, but most importantly Protesters (caps intentional, if a little unfair) marched around with signs that said "This movie lies!" Of course it lies! Jesus did not have that dream, like Moses looked nothing like Charlton Heston! The complaint is not interesting. The point is that somewhere around here, somewhere around the cable television boom, people began complaining about the lack of divine inspiration in movies. The complaint that this movie was not true, it seems, contains in it the notion that such questions are worth asking; that a True movie was thinkable. It took a few years, but of course it came. Of course.

We have no way of knowing whether the Pope really said "It is as it was" about the Passion of the Christ (though if he did we can only hope that the myth of him doing so in Latin is true too), but it cannot be denied that many Protestant churches did so. In groups that were talking about a "culture war" where the other side (yes, ALWAYS the other side. For now there is only one side in the culture-war, though maybe we should reconsider that too) was Jewish-inclusive and anti-Christian, the claims of antisemitism and anachronism actually bolstered the movie's truthiness to the point of Inspiration. It became scripture because it is shit. And it will happen again, because we still want it. Until the annunciation of Mary's surprising but less-than-mysterious pregnancy, it seemed that The Nativity Story was a real contender. Imagine if it had been canonized, friends. If not for teenage pregnancy, if it also had been "as it was," we would have to decide why the Temple service was in later Rabbinic idiom, why God spoke like a smug 30 year-old, and where all of that corn came from. The corn would have to be read as an unsung miracle. I say we should be ready with our shit-scraping tools close at hand.

So what? How did the translation change the text? How is pouring the old wine of scripture into the new skins of digital media changing that media? That is what I am trying to think about here, and what I am sharing as I think it. So, I guess there will be more later.

Cheers,
Vince(nt)