Recently on the Facebook group “Latin Teacher Idea Exchange” there has been a lively discussion about whether a public school teacher should teach passages from the Old and New Testaments. Opinions were diverse – one person said that a teacher in her school had to defend her teaching of passages of the Bible when a student claimed it was indoctrination (the teacher prevailed, by the way). Another said that they weren’t interested in teaching it because its syntax wasn’t classical. Another worried that for students for whom religion was an important part of their life, teaching the Bible as a literary work might seem disrespectful or improper. One person even said that when the subject had come up at a state classical conference, not a single teacher would consider teaching it. But on the other side, many said that they have taught it, or that colleagues have, without any issues – even that students enjoyed reading material that was a part of their lives.
I personally think there are several good arguments for teaching parts of the Bible in class. First and most important, it’s some of the easiest authentic Latin we have. That makes it great for students just moving beyond a textbook or for slipping in here and there in a lower-level class. It’s full of all sorts of grammar that Latin teachers love – the subjunctive, sequence of tenses, deponents, commands, conditionals, the future tense, participles, even a gerund here and there. Really the only grammatical feature conspicuously absent is the ablative absolute. The important bit, however, is that the sentence structure isn’t nearly as complicated as you’d get in Cicero, for example, and the vocabulary is simple too. This means that students can reasonably get up to reading a chapter a day, and that volume is certain to pay off later in terms of their ability to read a text at length.
Secondly, Christianity is a pillar of western civilization as much as pagan Roman culture is, perhaps more so. Its mythology is rich and deep, and finds its way into so much art, literature, and culture generally. We live in a world where people fill their daily speech and politics with Christian phrasing and ideology. It seems to me, thefore, that NOT to study the Bible would be a disservice to the students you teach, particularly for students who don’t come from Christian backgrounds and whose familiarity with its stories and tropes are based on hearsay and rumor rather than study. I’m personally often surprised by how little even practicing Christian students really know about their own faith and the traditions and mythology it has built up over 2,000 odd years.
The objections, however, are certainly worth considering! Some people worry that any discussion of a religious topic, but particularly primary source reading, can be considered proselytizing, and the last thing anyone wants is a student or parent complaining that you’re “forcing” a religious belief upon them. It’s also true that some people have hostile reactions to Christianity for all sorts of reasons, so it’s important to be careful about how you present these texts to any class you teach.
If you are interested in teaching passages from the Bible, there are two excellent resources you should consider. The first is William Carey’s (of Latin Library fame) excellent Gospel of Mark reader that includes notes, available as a free .pdf (). He also has formatted texts of the Credo and martyr stories from Lactantius (and don’t forget the Story of Daniel and Passio Sanctae Perpetuae readers available through CANEPress!). Focus Publishing (now an imprint of Hackett) offers the Epitome Sacrae Historiae as part of their Lingua Latina series, which includes over 200 selections from the Old Testament.
We welcome your comments and thoughts on this topic! Do you teach a unit on the New or Old Testament? Do you think it’s a bad idea?
