“I study dead people.”
With these words, spoken in the haunting, whispery voice of Haley Joel Osment’s character in The Sixth Sense, I occasionally introduce my two classes on biblical literature. Hopefully my students cut through the lame, dated cultural reference to catch the crucial point that the Bible is a repository of ancient literature, a collection of documents written in dead languages by foreign peoples from distant lands. The Bible, in other words, bears the strange scars of long-dead cultures and civilizations–from Bronze Age Egypt through the Iron Age Levant and Mesopotamia to the Greco-Roman Mediterranean.
These are the worlds of my specialization. My research probes not only the biblical text but also the complex social, political, and cultural contexts from which the biblical corpus emerges. I publish on ancient Judaism and early Christianity. I explore varied Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts of Greco-Roman antiquity. I examine the messy boundaries of “Jewish,” “Christian,” and “Pagan” identities, and the theoretical problems attached to each of those terms. And I try to expose my undergraduate students to glimpses of these endlessly fascinating worlds of the biblical tradition. Fun stuff!
But however dead the Bible may be, however deep beneath the grave its authors lie, there is a dimension of this corpus that remains an immanent, pervasive, familiar force in the present. Like a specter from the grave, the Bible continues to haunt the land of the living. And it’s precisely these ghostly apparitions of the Bible in our world that has currently captured my intellectual interests. How do the documents preserved in the biblical canon(s) continue to reappear in our contemporary contexts? What kind of work do these texts continue to perform within the variety of communities and cultures that have emerged long after the deaths of their authors? In technical terms, I speak here of the Nachleben of the biblical tradition, the long and fascinating reception history of the Bible.
And this is what I’m currently working on, with a specific focus on an American political context. My forthcoming project explores the use of the Bible in presidential discourse between 1933 and 1968, or from FDR through LBJ. In this study I examine how this ancient text works to reinforce the exertion of executive power. And the presidential Bible is remarkably flexible. Democrats love it. Republicans love it. It bolsters aggressive economic reforms. It supports opposition to those reforms. It espouses an interventionist foreign policy. It supports civil rights legislation while also endorsing war in the South Pacific. Stay tuned for the publication of this book, coming to a bookstore near you…hopefully shortly before we elect another president!