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An interview with Presbyterian minister and author Kenneth Bailey
Ken BaileyPresbyterian minister and author Ken Bailey spent 40 years living and teaching in the Middle East. In retirement he remains active writing and speaking about the cultural background and literary forms of the New Testament. His latest book, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels, was released in November. Associate Editor John Sniffen interviewed Bailey in October while he was in Louisville for Mission Challenge ’07 and just before he left for Lebanon to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Near East School of Theology in Beirut.
You speak of the Arabic-speaking Christians as the “forgotten faithful.” Why?
There are more Arabic-speaking Christians in the Middle East than Jews in entire world. People from the West think “Arab” and immediately think Muslim. Many think the Middle East only has Jews and Arabs in it. If they hear Arabs are Christians, they think they must have a Muslim background. But they don’t. In Egypt, for example, there are Christians whose ancestors listened to the preaching of John Mark. Their church was founded in the first century. These are ancient churches, older than the church in Rome. They have great traditions, but we know almost know nothing about them.
Why is there this lack of knowledge?
There are four reasons. First, there’s the ethnic curtain. Luke and Paul went west so the book of Acts talks about expansion of the church to the West. It doesn’t talk about expansion of the church to the East. Second, after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 the Semitic churches of the Middle East went one way and the Greek and Latin churches went the other. Third, the Islamic conquest in the 7th century cut off contact with Middle Eastern Christians. And fourth, there’s the linguistic curtain. People doing doctoral studies in the West learn Hebrew, Latin, Greek and German. They don’t learn Coptic, Syriac or Arabic.
What are we missing?
Islamic contributions from the great centuries of Arab scholarship are known. What’s not known is similar high-quality work from Arabic Christian literature. I mentioned during a presentation the names of a half dozen major classic Arabic Christian voices I’ve discovered over the last 35 years, then a recently retired professor of medieval history at Cambridge came up afterward and said their period was his specialty and he had never heard of them.
What can the Arabic-speaking Christians teach us?
We are facing Islam, worrying about how are we going to deal with these people, where are they coming from, how do they view the Christian faith and what are the barriers between us. There is a thousand years of Arabic Christian literature that deals with this and we don’t even know it exists. It’s in unpublished in manuscripts and we don’t know where they are.
You have written several books on viewing Scripture through a Middle Eastern perspective. Please give us an example.
In the story of the prodigal son, the younger son asks for his inheritance while his father is still alive, which in effect means ‘Dad, why don’t you drop dead.’ The expected response [in the culture of the time] is for the father to take his left hand, hit the kid across the face and drive him out of the house. The older son is supposed to be the reconciler, talking to both sides and eventually bringing them together.
In Jesus’ parable, however, each character doesn’t do what’s expected. The boy tells his father to drop dead; the father, incredibly, accepts the agony of rejected love; and the older son stays quiet.
Knowing the bits of information [about the culture], you’ve got a new story.
How does adding the cultural viewpoint change the Scripture?
Say you’re at a beach. You see sand, waves and seagulls. Then somebody gives you a snorkel and mask, and says, “Look at the coral and fish under the water.” Seeing the beauty of the coral and fish in no way invalidates what you see on the surface, it’s all there and it’s all beautiful. It’s just adds a new dimension.
What is our main stumbling block regarding Arabic-speaking Christians?
The problem, especially with the war in Iraq, is that we tend to see all Arabs as the enemy. There’s an undercurrent of suspicion and anger and hatred toward all things Arab. And they feel it. |
