Philip Jenkins, Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 320 pp., $26.99.

[amazon 006199071X full]A DECADE after the national trauma of 9/11, a rude chorus swells in the homeland, calling for restrictions on American Muslims’ rights to free assembly and free speech. The controversy over the Islamic prayer center in Lower Manhattan—characterized as “the victory mosque” by Islamophobes, who labor under no abrogation of their First Amendment rights—is a notable but hardly isolated effort to deny Muslims access to public space. Anti-sharia measures, already the law in three states and being considered by a dozen more, serve as warnings to any Muslims who would dare advocate for legislation consistent with Islamic norms. Such morality-based, religiously inspired speech is, of course, as American as apple pie. But no matter: Muslims, whether natural-born or naturalized citizens, are today’s “traitors” of choice for the new McCarthyites.

The critics of Islam, whether secular conservatives, evangelical Christians or Zionist defenders of Israel, now inhabit not only the blogosphere and sensationalist media outlets but also some local churches, state assemblies and even the halls of Congress. How do they justify the bigotry evident in proposals and policies that deny (or would deny) full civil rights to some of their fellow Americans? By framing Islam as an inherently violent religion and portraying Muslims as closet jihadists harboring sympathy for al-Qaeda and other jihadist networks. This canard is reinforced by the claim that the Holy Koran is, in the final analysis, a terrorist manifesto.

From an unlikely source comes a powerful and provocative riposte. The prolific scholar and public intellectual Philip Jenkins is a Welsh Catholic turned Episcopalian who has written insightfully on topics ranging from designer drugs, child pornography and serial homicide to, more recently, global Christianity, internal church conflict and the revival of anti-Catholicism in the wake of the sexual-abuse crisis. In Laying Down the Sword, he has delivered a thoughtful and frequently penetrating analysis of the Bible’s own bloodthirsty passages—and how Christians have both enshrined and ignored them over the course of two millennia of church history.

At issue are the “Conquest texts” found in the Old Testament books of Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua and 1 Samuel, in which the Lord God of Israel commands the utter and merciless destruction (herem) of the Canaanites, the Midianites, the Amalekites and the people of Jericho. Compared to these apparently genocidal passages, Jenkins remarks, the Koranic verses (suras) that seem to legitimate deadly violence come off as relatively restrained. In his vengeful disdain for wayward tribes and people, Yahweh takes a backseat to no deity, not even Allah. “While many Qur’anic texts undoubtedly call for warfare or bloodshed, these are hedged around with more restrictions than their biblical equivalents, with more opportunities for the defeated to make peace and survive,” he writes. “Furthermore, any of the defenses that can be offered for biblical violence—for instance, that these passages are unrepresentative of the overall message of the text—apply equally to the Qur’an.”

Laying Down the Sword is not designed to please everyone, and it will infuriate many. The Islamophobes will recoil at Jenkins’s repeated assertion that when it comes to violent scriptures, the differences between Islam and Christianity are minimal: “If Christians or Jews needed biblical texts to justify deeds of terrorism or ethnic slaughter, their main problem would be an embarrassment of riches,” he notes wryly. Jenkins even provides a table categorizing “violent and disturbing scriptures” and finds that the Bible abounds with “extreme” texts—those that call for the annihilation of the enemy or direct violence against particular races and ethnic groups. By contrast, “the Qur’an has nothing strictly comparable.” Unlike the Bible, he reports, “no Qur’anic passage teaches that enemies in warfare should be exterminated.” Nor does the Koran “teach principles of war without mercy, or propose granting no quarter.”

Even more provocative is Jenkins’s expressed doubt that Islam surpasses Christianity in incidents of scripture-inspired violence. Those who despise Islam will not stand still for such heresy, responding (as Christian evangelist Franklin Graham put it) that whereas the Bible only reports violence that occurred in the distant past, the Koran “preaches violence” (my emphasis) in the here and now. Jenkins dismisses both claims as nonsense. He insists on using the term “Old Testament,” rather than the politically correct “Hebrew Bible,” as a way of reminding Christians that the Conquest texts are their sacred scriptures too; this part of the canon may be “old” and “Jewish,” but the church, following the example of Jesus himself, incorporated the Law and the Prophets and the Wisdom texts fully into its own identity and mission. In doing so, the early Christian bishops overcame the popularity of contrarians such as the eventually excommunicated Marcion, who simply jettisoned the Old Testament when he found it impossible to reconcile the genocidal tendencies of Yahweh with the compassionate and forgiving God revealed by the Jesus of the New Testament.

More to Jenkins’s point, the troubling passages of the Torah did not become dead letters once the pre-Christian eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth era had passed. Instead, they proved handy age after age: for Christian theologians and heresy hunters (Augustine, Calvin, Torquemada), conquerors and colonizers (Oliver Cromwell, Cotton Mather, Theodore Roosevelt), racialists and eugenicists (Jonathan Bayley, John W. Haley), and genocidaires (present-day Rwandan pastors). Nor was the political utility of the Conquest texts lost on subsequent Jewish leaders, Jenkins avers, not least the modern Zionists, up to and including the current prime minister of Israel and the religious nationalists and irredentists who keep him in power. If contemporary Muslim extremists retrieve violence-justifying suras and interpret them as timeless and timely injunctions to crush the presumed enemies of the faith, they are only upholding a long-standing Abrahamic family tradition.

Quite reasonably, Jenkins lays the blame for religious violence on its perpetrators alone. Scriptures do not justify terrorism; terrorists do.

YET JENKINS is concerned with more than poking self-righteous Christians in the eye or defending Muslims; he wants to understand the ways in which both Christianity and Islam and, by extension, other religious traditions have coped with their respective “problematic” sacred texts. Replete with passages congenial to slave traders, absolute monarchs, ethnic chauvinists, self-styled holy warriors and patriarchs of all stripes, these foundational scriptures have become more and more embarrassing to faith communities. After all, they have increasingly found it necessary (or at least honorable) to adapt the texts’ teachings and practices to modern, “enlightened” sensibilities. Conforming to the human-rights regime which now prevails across much of the world, at least in theory, and which was constructed over several generations by secular and religious thinkers alike, has not been a straightforward process for religions, even for the Jews and Christians who recognize this modern tradition as largely their own. The age-old temptation to coercion and violence is particularly hard to resist. Ever since the Protestant Reformation, Christians have largely ceded to the state the responsibility for large-scale killing on behalf of God. But this thinly veiled sacralization of state violence, accompanied by the relevant hymns and Bible passages, faces withering criticism from religious and secular humanists, whose putative creed is summarized elegantly in the lyrics of the folk singer John Prine: “Now Jesus don’t like killing / no matter what the reason’s for / and your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore.” With all this Jesus talk, and with Jesus portrayed as the original nonviolent champion of “universal human rights,” what’s a would-be Bible-thumping, empire-building Christian politician to do?

It would fill several volumes to survey the strategies of accommodation, resistance and adaptation to secular-religious humanism employed by the Christian churches alone, so Jenkins can be forgiven for confining himself to a handful of tactics for dealing with the Bible’s dark side, which he evaluates on the basis of how directly and frankly each tactic confronts the most disturbing passages and books. Thus the rejectionists (my term) are scorned for taking the easy way out. These Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment figures, outraged by what they consider the ethical bankruptcy of some or all of the Bible, cope by jettisoning the parts they do not like. For the radical American revolutionary Thomas Paine and the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, that means the story of Moses, Yahweh, and the chastened but triumphant Israel. (Jenkins quotes Buber: “Nothing can make me believe in a God who punishes Saul because he has not murdered his enemy.”) For the deists Matthew Tindal and John Toland, everything in the Bible that does not conform to reason and rational morality must go. For creative rewriters such as Thomas Jefferson, “coping” means starting with the New Testament and excising all references to supernaturalism and divine intervention. For the new atheists of our own day (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and the like), “dealing with the Bible” means dismantling the God business entirely (and then elevating secular humanism to the vacated perch in the heavens).

Jenkins notes, correctly, that most of the solutions proposed by the rejectionists put them outside the orbit of the Christian tradition. The vast majority of Christians, while accepting secular assumptions of science and technology, continue to practice their faith vitally and vividly—all the while ignoring the books of blood held in their churchgoing hands.

But it is easy to learn such forgetting when the unpalatable texts are seldom included in the lectionary or catechesis. Or, when they are, the offending passages are construed as if they were allegories or metaphors—a spiritualizing technique that renders the brutally vanquished enemies of God as symbols of sins that were overcome on the journey to the Promised Land. (“No actual Canaanites were harmed in the making of this scripture.”)

Jenkins, though, introduces his own contradictions. On the one hand, he urges his Christian readers to accept and acknowledge the violent scriptures “and to learn to live with them.” And he treats evasive maneuvers as if they are borderline pathological. (The pseudoscientific sidebar that “explains” this behavior by reference to “cognitive dissonance” and the brain’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or “Delete key,” is a bit much.) “A bloodless Bible offers cheap Grace,” he insists. And he seems to agree with St. Augustine that the Bible must be read whole, not selectively.

On the other hand, what Jenkins seems to admire in Augustine is precisely the fourth-century bishop’s skill in getting around the stumbling blocks by avoiding their literal meaning, ignoring their singular impact and burying them in layers of interpretation. Sounds pretty bloodless to me. In place of letting the troublesome texts stand on their own, Jenkins advocates “understanding why the various books were written, and appreciating the core message that each is trying to teach.” This seems a coping strategy of the highest order, not far removed from the collective amnesia he castigates elsewhere.

And what is wrong, after all, with coping? The vicious and genocidal texts are a scandal, and fidelity to “tradition” has always carried with it both connotations of the Latin root tradere—to bequeath (“hand down”) and to betray (“hand over”).

ARE CHRISTIANS and Jews really so different? Jenkins does not seem to think so—and this is a central weakness in his biblical road map. For him,

If we ask what Deuteronomy and Joshua are “really” about, their core theme is neither genocide nor warfare. Rather, the books represent the clearest declarations of two essential ideas in the Bible and in the Judeo-Christian worldview—namely, monotheism itself, and election or chosenness.

While this is certainly a reasonable assertion, I am unconvinced. Why these ideas and not others which are also, arguably, central to the Christian worldview? Part of the problem Jenkins has set for himself is encompassing both Christianity and Judaism within the same argument without sufficiently adjusting for the rather substantial differences between the two religions, not least the status and meaning of Jesus Christ. Thus Jenkins’s hermeneutic key seems to be the “prophetic faith,” which means the teachings of Amos, Isaiah, Micah and other prophets of the Old Testament, period. This approach might work well for Jews, and certainly Christians recognize, honor and frequently invoke the Prophets. It is less clear, however, that Christians would choose “monotheism . . . and election or chosenness” as the core themes of God’s revelation in the Bible rather than, say, “the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets in Jesus the Messiah,” or “the unconditional love and forgiveness God offers to all people in Jesus.”

Such distinctions have real-world consequences in the way various believers enact what they understand their scriptures to enjoin and, lest we forget, roughly one-third of the world’s population claims to be “governed,” spiritually at least, by the one Jewish Prophet his followers hold to be the Son of God. Are we really to believe that the branching off of one set of adherents away from Judaism, with its priority placed squarely on the Mosaic Law and vast commentaries, to Christianity, with its emphasis on divine grace and spirit-inspired acts, did not introduce a fundamentally new religious paradigm, including a new way of reading the sacred texts? Each of these religious traditions has developed its own interpretive strategies, the instincts and core values of which are embedded in, and have emerged from, its own distinctive experiences, memories, practices and authoritative extrascriptural teachings. (Take a simple example: for Christians, Jesus is the Passover lamb first prefigured in the book of Exodus, and he is slain for the salvation of all humankind, or at least all who believe in him—not only for those who keep the Jewish law.) For Christians, or at least for the subset who would accept Jenkins’s methods of biblical interpretation in the first place, the key to interpreting the Old Testament (as well as the New) is (once again) a person—the figure who embodies the fulfillment of the Old Testament Law and the Prophets. This, of course, is Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah anticipated by the very Prophets to whom Jenkins gives an odd priority. At least from a Christian standpoint, this privileging of the lesser over the greater is odd, a bit like focusing on the messenger who announces the arrival of the king rather than on the king himself.

The interesting question is therefore: Has the centrality of Jesus, “the Prince of Peace,” made a difference in the level of religiously inspired violence performed by Bible-believing Christians, regardless of their specific historical contexts, or even within those contexts?

HERE IS what Jenkins really cares about: the relationship between scripture and behavior, especially in the urgent matters of violence and warfare. “We talk about ‘religious violence,’” he laments, “but when exactly can we say that a religion or a scriptural tradition directly caused an act of crime or terrorism?”

Ay, there’s the rub. Note, however, that “a religion” and “a scriptural tradition” are conflated in this formulation of the problem of “religious violence.” Insufficient attention is given to the distinctions between the way a sacred text is read, who does the reading and how that reading is embedded in the life of an actual historical community.

Jenkins rightly emphasizes the difference between what the scriptures (whether the Old Testament, the New Testament or the Koran) themselves “say” on the one hand and particular acts of violence on the other:

However bloody texts may be, however explicit, their mere existence will not lead to actual violence unless and until particular circumstances arise. At that point, the texts can rise once again to the surface, to inspire and sacralize violence, to demonize opponents, and even to exalt the conflict to the level of cosmic war. But without those circumstances, without those particular conditions in state and society, the violence will not occur.

This statement is gratifying and surely accurate, but it is incomplete. As Jenkins well knows, the role, function and status of sacred scriptures varies within any particular religion, and from religion to religion, as does the degree of distance which each religious community has deemed permissible between “fidelity to the text” (whether it be actual or alleged fidelity) and the actual behavior (i.e., the operative beliefs and resulting practices) of the community, movement or individual in question. Over millennia, Judaism and Christianity have made their respective Bibles into virtual rubber bands, the interpretive options so multiple and elastic as to stretch the range of possibilities such that almost any proximity to the text is permissible.

Is this also to be said of Islam? Better put: Is the range of Koranic interpretive strategies that have developed over centuries, especially in the Golden Age of Islamic philosophy and learning from the mid-eight­h to thirteenth centuries, currently available to the global Muslim community? Jenkins makes short work of Islamic terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, demonstrating that they are profound distortions of what the vast majority of Muslims recognize as traditional or mainstream Islam. And who would doubt this judgment? Yet it is worth noting that much the same is said even of time-tested (if still controversial) scriptural methods such as those employed by the mystically inclined Sufi brotherhoods. To the interested and sympathetic outsider, the Koranic fundamentalists currently seem to have the upper hand.

One would therefore assume that Muslims, at least, would receive Laying Down the Sword with gratitude. But perhaps not. Part of Jenkins’s strategy in comparing the Bible and the Koran is to equate, or come close to equating, how the two texts function in their respective religious traditions. In this effort, though, he follows a decidedly Christian template. For Muslims, the Koran is just what the word means in Arabic—the “recitation” of the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad. It is the literal word of Allah. Most Muslims do not even allow for the idea of a filtering process through Muhammad’s seventh-century-CE Arabian sensibilities. The closest analogue among the varieties of Christianity is “plenary verbal inspiration,” the theory favored by fundamentalists and most evangelicals, according to which God inspired the various authors of the Bible even in their choice of words. However, this is not quite the same as the Islamic notion of the Koran’s “eternity.” Moreover, Christians disagree among themselves regarding theories of biblical inspiration, and Jenkins adopts an approach that contextualizes and “relativizes” certain books and passages in a way most Muslims would never think of applying to the suras of the Holy Koran.

Catholics and most Protestants will recognize Jenkins’s method as a version of historical criticism that emphasizes the specific times and “horizons of understanding” in which the various Books, Psalms, Gospels and Epistles were compiled and redacted (edited according to theological purposes). Yet—notwithstanding Jenkins’s assurances that “some Islamic scholars historicize the texts, making them relevant to a particular period in the time of Muhammad, but not applicable to later times”—only a tiny minority of contemporary Muslims, most of them scholars appointed to Western universities or think tanks, will accept the notion that earthly influences shaped the Koran or that the interpretive methods currently being applied to the Bible are even remotely appropriate for the Koran. Let us call this the challenge of Koranic exceptionalism.

Jenkins acknowledges this problem, but it may be a bigger obstacle than he realizes. I write this essay from Mindanao, the southernmost chain of islands of the Philippines, where Christians and Muslims encounter one another amid the second-longest-running conflict in history, dating back to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in 1521. The latest atrocity of the al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group Abu Sayyaf was the beheading of three Filipino marines on the island of Sulu. The government of the Republic of the Philippines based in Manila, some five hundred miles away, has just reopened negotiations with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a much-larger and more politically engaged movement with its own violent wing. My hosts here in Zamboanga are the Catholic archdiocese and Silsilah, an organization dedicated to Muslim-Christian dialogue and nonviolent peace building. Each group of Muslims involved in these three very different clusters—Abu Sayyaf, the MILF and Silsilah—claim strict fidelity to the literal word of God, which is the “whole” of the Holy Koran, without remainder. They draw radically different applications from it, however—a fact that infuriates the “fundamentalists” among them. (In this regard, they have much in common with the Jewish and Christian communities.)

THE ROAD to peace among Muslims, and between Islam and other religious and secular traditions, runs through the Koran. Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam is certainly more (and less) than its holy book; the much-discussed (and much-reviled, among Islamophobes) sharia is a body of religio-legal principles (rather than a set of actual laws) derived not only from the Koran but also from the Hadith, a compilation of the Prophet Muhammad’s own teachings and practices. But the Koran has a different level of authority within the (geographically and culturally diverse and plural) Islamic community today than does the Bible within the (also breathtakingly diverse) Christian community. If the admittedly complicated figure “Jesus Christ” is the hermeneutic key for Christians, and “the Law and the Prophets” the key for Jews, it is not yet obvious to (most) Jews and (most) Christians what (most) Muslims consider the hermeneutic key for reading the Koran as a guide to behavior. Nor is it obvious that the majority of Muslims would even accept or endorse the concept of an “interpretive strategy” for reading the Koran (notwithstanding the facts that such strategies are being deployed constantly in the Muslim world and that Muslims obviously recognize the existence of multiple and wildly varying constructions of Islam itself).

Whether or not faithful Muslims formally acknowledge the reality of options, they remain confronted by the need to determine and observe guidelines for their behavior in a globalizing, conflict-ridden world that is both secular and religious. In such a milieu they cannot long ignore the internal pluralism of Islam itself—the competing voices and subtraditions of interpretation that are increasingly available to more and more Muslims, as are the multiple “renegade,” do-it-yourself Islams placed on offer by Internet jihadists and would-be jurists like the engineer Osama bin Laden and the medical doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri. At its core, this matter of defining orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxis (right action) is a perennial task for all the global religions, but it is being hotly contested today within the ummah (worldwide Islamic community), and the competing alternatives are not easy to map or rank according to legitimacy (especially in the majority-Sunni world, where authority structures are not as far-reaching as they are for Christians, who have bishops and a pope to obey or disobey).

Jenkins argues forcefully that sacred scriptures are dependent variables, so to speak, in the etiology of violence and warfare. For social-justice revolutionaries (as in the mostly peaceful revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe in the wake of the Cold War) and violent extremists alike, the utility of certain texts waxes and wanes according to the situation. This assessment is accurate as far as it goes. But Jenkins also leaves dangling the impression that religions themselves behave solely according to what their specific social-political-cultural contexts allow—that is, according to “what in the passage applies to me, to us.” Is it possible, however, that religions possess the resources to resist their environments and to retrieve the scriptural passages that justify, and thus empower them in so doing?

History offers hope. In light of the exploding options within the Dar al-Islam and the rise of Koranic “authorities” of dubious lineage and training, the relative coherence of the mainstream religion, and the checks and balances it has evolved over generations for bringing the freelancers into the fold (or ejecting them), looks increasingly attractive. This authoritative and sometimes authoritarian version of Islam remains the religion of most American Muslims, as it is of their global counterparts. Other Americans, if they are savvy, will want them to continue their fidelity to, and gradual reform of, this Islam. They will hesitate before making Muslims uncomfortable in their own conservative, orthodox, law-abiding skin.

Laying Down the Sword offers a timely warning in precisely this direction. Concerning the culpability of the Koran for violent extremism, it proffers a much-needed exoneration. Concerning the relationship between sacred texts, religion and violence, it raises the right questions and sketches the contours of deeper ones. Central to these achievements is Philip Jenkins’s absorbing discussion of the formidable obstacles found within Jewish and Christian scriptures and histories to the nonviolent expression of biblical faith. That story, in all of its harrowing twists and turns over the centuries, should remind his fellow Christians to attend to the beams in their own eyes before scorning the motes in the eyes of American Muslims.

R. Scott Appleby is a professor of history and the director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Pullquote: Judaism and Christianity have made their respective Bibles into virtual rubber bands, the interpretive options so multiple and elastic as to stretch the range of possibilities such that almost any proximity to the text is permissible.Image: Essay Types: Book Review