从约克沃尔夫斯坦到皮特·赫格塞斯，虚假的《圣经》经文经常被政治化

How can Pete Hegseth, the United States defense secretary who claims to be a devout evangelical Christian, have placed Quentin Tarantino on the same footing as the word of God?

An example from the early 11th century explains how fake Bible passages can function smoothly in mergers of state and secular power.

Hegseth led a recent Pentagon prayer service with a fictitious Bible verse from Pulp Fiction. From outside the #MAGA ecosystem, this bold fabrication of a Biblical verse is confusing.

That’s because scripture is valued very highly by evangelical Protestants, and it may seem counter-intuitive or blasphemous for Hegseth, who has done so much to merge MAGA rule and militant Christianity, to proclaim Tarantino’s words as the word of God.

But he’s not the first Christian bureaucrat to write his own Biblical verse. In fact, the practice has a long tradition.

Wulfstan of York

An early example is Archbishop Wulfstan of York, who did something similar in a sermon called Be Godcundre Warnunge (God’s Threat to Sinning Israel).

Wulfstan, who died in 1023, was both a public intellectual and one of the most powerful churchmen in England when the kingdom was under attack, initially, by non-Christian Danish forces.

His generation of literate, high-ranking clerics had found an unusual symbiosis with their secular rulers, often serving them as bureaucrats. Wulfstan, for instance, not only supervised the church bureaucracy and lands; he also wrote laws in the names of successive secular kings.

These laws were vast and ambitious. Among many other things, they categorized clerical ranks and rights, regulated widow remarriage, expelled witches and gave a three-day respite to enslaved people (for fasting and praying).

The laws placed many previously local or unlegislated matters under kingly sovereignty and declared the co-equality of king and God (represented on Earth by archbishops). As such, they both empowered the increasingly centralized state and merged it with, even subsumed it under, church authority.

Chastised citizens

In some of Wulfstan’s sermons he used a prophetic voice, chastising and threatening in God’s name like the Biblical prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel.

This was not usual in his milieu, although there are some medieval examples: the 14-century Swedish/Roman abbess St. Birgitta, for instance, openly rebuked the Pope in the voice of Jesus Christ.

Wulfstan’s most famous speech, Sermo Lupi (The Wolf’s Sermon) in 1014, excoriates the English for their sins, saying they’d invited the Danish invasion, and stresses the importance of tithing, praying and respecting the Church.

The 1,000-year-old speech uses surprisingly modern tropes: victimized nationalism, claims of mass sexual vulnerability and an authoritative voice that speaks clearly for both religious and secular power. (The Danes Wulfstan reviles in this sermon did successfully conquer England for a time, and Wulfstan then served the newly Christian King Cnut as a lawmaker).

Translation and forgery

There was at this time no ban on Bible translation; learned churchmen like Wulfstan often translated scripture into the vernacular for pedagogical or pastoral reasons. In Western Europe, the Latin Vulgate, largely translated by St. Jerome in the fourth century from Hebrew and Greek, was the standard scriptural text.

Wulfstan’s later sermon, Be Godcundre Warnunge, quotes the book of Leviticus, Chapter 26, first in Latin and then old English, the language most listeners could actually understand. The passage describes God’s devastating potential vengeance if ancient Hebrews break the covenant; in Wulfstan’s loose and stylish translation, it is transparently about the present-day English at the time.

There is nothing odd about translating the Bible, especially the part called the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, into the vernacular in a way people can understand better.

What’s unusual is that while Wulfstan explicitly says that both passages are God’s words from the Bible, about half of the Latin is Wulfstan’s own composition: Leviticus 26:14-45 is summarized in his distinct barn-burning, hypnotically rhythmic style.

An example: In place of a more mundane verse about being overpowered by and fleeing enemies, Wulstan writes: “… et persequentur uos inimici uestri, et fugietis nullo persequente” (and you will be pursued by your enemies, and you will flee pursued by no one).

Enduring popularity

It’s likely other churchmen at the time noticed Wulfstan wrote these supposed Vulgate verses himself. But there’s no evidence anyone was bothered by it.

This vibrant Latin/English sermon was copied into other manuscripts and continued to be popular into the 12th century, even after the Norman Conquest had marginalized the English language in the church.

This was also not Wulfstan’s first “forgery.” As scholar Nicholas P. Schwartz, an expert in Anglo-Saxon history, notes, Wulfstan had earlier in his career authored The Laws of Edgar and Guthrum, which was presented as a 150-year-old political document.

On these occasions, as with Wulfstan’s ghost-written laws, he does not seem to have been trying particularly hard to cover his tracks. Wulfstan had in essence become the voice of God in England, authorized to interpret and convey God’s will. He had also been gifted with great creativity and inventiveness with which to do so. Attribution was clearly a minor detail.

The demands of Christian leadership

This merging of many forms of authority, both secular and religious (already so obvious in Donald Trump, who has imagined himself as Jesus ) may well explain Hegseth’s creative borrowing, as well as for its general acceptance by his political allies.

As with Wulfstan, Hegseth sees himself as responsible for conveying and implementing what he sees as God’s revealed will — in this case, apocalyptic racial violence — through a militant, theocratic state apparatus.

Borrowing and supplementing the divine voice is a traditional aspect of what Hegseth apparently regards as his job.

Mo Pareles is affiliated with the Jewish Faculty Network.