“Estimates regarding the duration of the virtually universal acceptance of the historical character of the Book of Jonah range from 1800 years to “at least twenty-one centuries”.”
D. Hart-Davies
There is
indisputably a long enduring Jewish-Christian tradition according to which
the story of Jonah was a genuine historical account. According to D.
Hart-Davies, writing in 1925 (Jonah:
Prophet and Patriot): “Jewish
tradition, in one unbroken line, testifies to a belief in the historical
character of the book …”.
And:
“… the Christian Church, with remarkable unanimity has confirmed the Jewish
tradition …”.
By way of
contrast, Hart-Davies would then give the modern opinion:
Such, however,
is not the view which is generally held by modern theologians. The
allegorical interpretation is widely accepted. Many treat the narrative as
a fiction, with or without a very slight framework of history to rest
upon. By many the non-historical character of the book is regarded as
indisputable. A writer who ventures to maintain the opposite runs the risk
of meeting, in certain quarters, with ridicule or invective. Sir George
Adam Smith thus declaims: “How long, O Lord, must Thy poetry suffer from
those who can only treat it as prose? On whatever side they stand,
sceptical or orthodox, they are equally pedants, quenchers of the
spiritual, creators of unbelief” ….
But,
responded Hart-Davies, a fervent believer in the book’s historicity:
A strong
case, surely, does not require to be buttressed by the immoderate terms of
such an apostrophe. For it must not be forgotten that the great majority
of Hebraists and theologians of the Church Universal, from Jerome and
Augustine to Pusey and Perowne, are included in the compass of the distinguished
professor’s denunciation.
Estimates regarding
the duration of the virtually universal acceptance of the historical
character of the Book of Jonah range from 1800 years to “at least
twenty-one centuries”, wrote Hart-Davies. The matter really depends upon a
determination of its date of authorship, its terminus a quo.
We know
the approximate terminus ante quem, when what Hart-Davies called the
“unbroken” tradition, was broken.
It is,
as I (Damien Mackey) said at the start of this section, an extremely long tradition.
The antiquity of the tradition, and the force of ancient Christians’
enthusiasm for the story of Jonah, is borne out in this statement by
Hart-Davies:
The Catacombs
in Rome bear striking evidence of the belief of the early Christians. No
Biblical subject was more popular for mural and sarcophagi representation,
in those underground cemeteries of the disciples of Jesus, than that of
Jonah’s submergence and deliverance as a symbol of faith and hope in the
resurrection.
“The
history of Jonas [Jonah] having been put forward so emphatically by our
Lord Himself, as a type both of His own and of the general resurrection,
it is not to be wondered at that it should have held the first place
among all the subjects from the Old Testament represented in the
Catacombs. It was continually repeated in every kind of monument connected
with the ancient Christian cemeteries; in the frescoes on the walls, on
the bas-reliefs of the sarcophagi, on lamps and medals, and glasses, and
even on the ordinary gravestones. Christian artists, however, by no means
confined themselves to that one scene in the life of the prophet in which
he foreshadowed the resurrection, viz., his three days’ burial in the belly
of the fish, and his deliverance from it, as it were from the jaws of the
grave. The other incident of his life was painted quite as commonly, viz.,
his lying ‘under the shadow of the booth covered with ivy on the east side
of the city’ for refreshment and rest; or again, his misery and
discontent, as he lay in the same place, when the sun was beating upon his
head and the ivy had withered away”.
….
Jerome … wrote a commentary on it; and the sermons and writings of Irenaeus,
Augustine, Chrysostom, and other Fathers, abound in references which show
conclusively that their belief in the historicity of Jonah was
unquestioned. A long and bitter controversy was waged between Jerome and
Augustine as to the nature of the plant which overshadowed the prophet;
but, as to the historical character of the narrative itself, they were
absolutely agreed. ….
Hart-Davies appended
an interesting footnote to this section; one which demonstrates how well
instructed in Scripture were at least the early African Christians.
When the
bishop who read the lesson changed the word cucurbita (a gourd) into hedera (ivy),
“the whole congregation”, he wrote, “protested, and would not allow the
lection to proceed till the word to which they were accustomed was
adopted”.
Now, imagine
what might have been the reaction of these ancient Christians had they
heard from the pulpit, as I did have quite recently, that Jonah was a “didactic
fiction”, written in “C5th BC post-exilic times”, and that it is only
according to an appreciation of such a genre that one might be able
to formulate an answer to a schoolchild’s simple question: “Was Jonah
really in the belly of the whale?” It is all a matter of genre, we
are told.
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