The author describes the drastic changes or revolutions that have occurred in the interpretation of the Bible during his own lifetime. The author uses his own experiences to describe these revolutions and to reflect on what consequences they have had for his own life-story. The first revolution was the introduction of the historical-critical approach. The Bible was interpreted as historical in a broad sense, not in all its details. In a Roman university the author later found that this broad historical verification of the Bible became more and more problematic. The second revolution is described as the Bible as Literature methodology. This approach puts aside his- tory and examines the Bible as a clever and subtle literary document which has controlled religious belief and practice but cannot be substantiated as historical fact. There was a third revolution. Within the secular university scene, the author became involved in the study of anthropology and sociology. Judaism and Christianity were seen as religions amongst other reli- gions; their sacred writings were seen as sacred writings alongside others. The new approach forces him to rethink the history of Israel, the relevance of the Hebrew Scriptures and Judaism itself; he also has to rethink the history of Jesus, the relevance of the Christian Scriptures and Christianity. This life journey should be of interest to those working in the fields of biblical and religion studies.

More about the book

Launch by Dr Bernadette Kiley

Adelaide Writers' Week, March 2012

Thank you, Robert and Hilary, for the invitation to launch The Three Revolutions.  I consider it a great honour.  This is a wonderful book.  It is firstly, as Terry Lovat suggests, an easy way to learn about the modern study of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.  In fact, its synthesis of biblical methodologies makes it an absolute gift for teachers and students who have in one accessible volume the major moments in contemporary biblical scholarship so clearly described.

But the book is so much more than this.  It is also about a scholar and a teacher, and his struggle to reconcile the truths of his new learning with the hard wiring of his Roman Catholic childhood and young adulthood.  Amid his ruminations on JEDP or the four-source theory of the gospels and his insistence on the futility of the historical quest for either ancient Israel or Jesus, Robert Crotty reflects on the impact of his very considerable scholarship on his personal, professional and faith life.  It is this that makes the book so compelling.

Interestingly, Robert’s life is pretty well aligned with the major movements in biblical scholarship as they occurred within the Roman Catholic Church.  Of course, he was only six years old when Pius X11 in his now-famous 1943 encyclical finally began the process of setting Catholic biblical scholars free to catch up with their counterparts in other Christian denominations.  (Mind you, no doubt the encyclical was on Robert’s Year One reading list but he was too humble to say so!)  But he was a young priest in Rome at the time of Vatican 11 and saw first-hand the work of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. His biblical study, both in Australia and abroad, was shaped by the publication first of the Dead Sea Scrolls and then of the Nag Hamadi texts.  Those of us who came to biblical studies somewhat later when some of the dust had settled can only imagine the excitement and the challenge that accompanied the revelations of these discoveries. 

I think that in many ways Robert led a charmed intellectual life: when Jerome Crowe was introducing Robert and his fellow students to the historical-critical method in 1957, for example, I was a young primary school student enjoying my own Illustrated Bible History at my convent school at North Glenelg.  My teachers(wonderful Dominican women) were, however, blissfully unaware that as they paraphrased and allegorized the stories for us with never a bible to be seen, there was a revolution going on at the Passionist house of studies only a short drive up Cross Road.  

Charmed though his intellectual life might’ve been, nothing in Robert Crotty’s intellectual armoury could be attributed to luck.  This book demonstrates not only his amazing grasp of the tools of biblical interpretation but also his creative use of them.  Whether or not the reader agrees with every conclusion Robert draws in his work on both First and Second Testament texts, and the status of these texts for Christians today, no reader can argue that such conclusions are not derived from a masterly grasp of the history, culture, languages and religious landscapes of the ancient world.  His work is thus deserving of the deepest respect.

Speaking as a Roman Catholic, I consider that in Robert’s decision to leave both the priesthood and the church, that church lost a biblical scholar almost without peer in this country at that time.  And it had only itself to blame.  Its leadership failed to understand where contemporary biblical scholarship should’ve been taking the church and it failed in that most basic courtesy – the invitation to dialogue and conversation.  Robert’s defence of his position is telling:

‘I did not set out to destroy commitments or to belabour beloved and entrenched beliefs with which I might’ve disagreed.  However, I considered it my duty as an educator to provide them with a new way of thinking, if that is what they wanted.  But I think I did it gently, and with consideration.’

Ironically, in The Three Revolutions, Robert states that as a young scholar and priest he firmly believed that the future flourishing of the church depended on its people(including its leadership) being able to understand and use the tools of contemporary biblical scholarship.  That hope was not realised in Robert’s time as Catholic priest, and it remains to this day an unfulfilled dream of many a Catholic biblical scholar and teacher.  Robert painstakingly shows in this book that for those for whom the texts are faith documents, the right question to be asked of a biblical text is not ‘did this event really happen?’ (the question the church has so often asked), but rather, ‘what does this story really mean?’  Not that the believer who is also a biblical scholar can set aside the study of any facet of the context out of which these ancient texts arose – (and I would’ve liked Robert to have made the point more strongly) that for him or her to neglect the rigorous socio-cultural, historical and linguistic study that is the interpreter’s hallmark, is to risk falling back into pious allegorical interpretations of the text that deny the text its proper function and use it instead to shore up outmoded practice or questionable beliefs. 

But once the quest becomes properly one of searching for religious meaning rather than seeking to prove that ‘our’ texts are historically true and ‘yours’ are therefore just myths or even lies, then Christians can concentrate properly on how the biblical text is life-giving for THEM (not for everyone), and Christianity can take its place around the table of world religions and be a credible dialogue partner.  What a contribution to lasting world peace this would make! And what life it would lend mybeleaguered church.

Thanks, Robert, for making us journey again into the heart of what the biblical text is designed to do – and thanks for being such an extraordinary travelling companion.  I declare The Three Revolutions launched – long may she sail!

(Bernadette Kiley)