Dru Johnson (00:00)
What do we do with the fact that sometimes C.S. Lewis, yes, C.S. Lewis, got scripture wrong? Well, this week we’re gonna be talking to Dr. Leslie Baines, who’s actually a New Testament, well, Hellenistic Judaism scholar, and she wrote this book, ⁓ Between Interpretation and Imagination, on C.S. Lewis’s use of the Bible, both his positive use of the Bible and also the times that he…
messed up when he misquotes, when he invents scripture, believe it or not, when he cites passages that probably aren’t in the Gospels. ⁓ How do we deal with the fact that somebody who had such a prolific writing ability and communication ability, had a steel trap of a mind, would misremember ⁓ and misremember when it really mattered to his argument, not just in frivolous ways. So we talked through both…
Her love and adoration of C.S. Lewis and his work and his deep influence, especially amongst American evangelicals. ⁓ And then also when Clive Staples Lewis, Jack Lewis was naughty. And what do we do with that? If you appreciate what you’ve heard or seen here, you can like and subscribe. can rate us if you’re going to give us five stars. Otherwise, keep your fingers to yourself. And you can also give to us if you really, really appreciate recurring donors, obviously get a book in the book series.
That you can only get by being a recurring donor. Otherwise, if you want to give it’s at thebiblicalmind.org slash Give and now on to our show
⁓ one more thing. I was gonna say if you’ve ever taught a class on C.S. Lewis, you should read this book because she is gonna open your eyes to all kinds of things that you have never thought of before, including like who influenced Lewis on his view of Bible. It’s a handful of people that had a very strong influence. So you gotta read this book.
Leslie Baynes (01:56)
One of the things that I see as a difference between the real Lewis and the way that some Americans, particularly evangelicals, think of him is that to this
subgroup of evangelicals, Lewis has become something of a saint. People talk about Saint Jack, and I have actually seen even pseudo Eastern Orthodox icons of Lewis with a halo, know, an Eastern Orthodox style, and that has been one of the problems in C.S. Lewis studies for decades. And as I found out through the publication of my book, still is a problem. The idea being that any kind of criticism of Lewis
is taken not only as criticizing a saint but even as criticizing God. ⁓ Some evangelicals, as I have seen in a couple of reviews that I’ve gotten from very very conservative fundamentalist evangelicals, they think Lewis can’t be wrong and it’s just astonishing.
Dru Johnson (03:00)
Hmm. Yeah, I, even I, who, you know, I’ve read some of his fiction, I’ve read some of his nonfiction. I didn’t come into Christianity early in life, so I wasn’t injected with the virus that, ⁓ of St. Jack. ⁓ But that said, even I felt like, can we do this to Lewis? Can we speak so critically of him? Even though I’m perfectly on board with the project of like, let’s put him under the microscope and see.
how he researches. Honestly, a lot of the book, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, was very much, ⁓ I want to avoid the word liberating. It helped me feel like a human again, because I was like, ⁓ C.S. Lewis is just a human. he, yeah, he’s just a human scholar who misread sources sometimes and misunderstood some ideas and misquoted things.
Leslie Baynes (03:47)
Imagine that.
just as we all do.
Dru Johnson (03:56)
Yes, I do this all the time. So I’m sure he did it a lot less than I do, but ⁓ it was very freeing in some ways to think of like, okay, we’re just all people doing similar projects at different levels. He’s a scholar’s scholar and not everybody is there. ⁓ So I wonder, how do you deal, like just personally, how do you deal with it? Because I was telling you before, almost within a day of publication, maybe even immediately before publication, I was already seeing conservative
⁓ sources that were telling people not to read this book or if you do you should only read the second half not the first the second half because that’s where she praises Lewis yeah
Leslie Baynes (04:35)
Yes. Well,
actually, the book is broken down into thirds. The first third is about Lewis’s life with scripture, kind of descriptive, but I am happy in that I am doing all kinds of things that no one writing on Lewis in the Bible has done before. I’m looking at connections ⁓ with
the intellectual world of his time, biblical studies, and particularly I am looking at the books on the Bible and his own Bibles that he owned, and looking at the marginalia, the handwritten notes in his books. And I discovered all kinds of things that no one who has published on Lewis to date has done. By the way, just a little plug in here for some friends. A couple of people I’ve met through this process
two other biblical scholars have been working with Lewis’s marginalia in books with the Bible and their books are going to be out in the next couple of years. I just happened to get mine out first. ⁓ But now there’s a little cohort of academically trained biblical scholars who are interested in Lewis, who are accessing his own material library. So that first part of the book is very neutral. It’s just, you know, this is what Lewis does with scripture. This is how he developed over time.
Dru Johnson (05:36)
nice.
Leslie Baynes (05:57)
It’s the second third of the book that is more critical of Lewis and not even all of that. And then the third of the last third of the book, I am very positive about how Lewis works with the Bible and the Chronicles of Narnia. And the book is ⁓ just over 300 pages and the first part takes about a hundred pages. The second part takes about a hundred pages. The third part takes about a hundred pages. So it’s really only less than a third of the book that is critical.
of Lewis.
Dru Johnson (06:28)
And would you say it’s critical or would you just say it’s very descriptive of his research practices? then, I mean, I didn’t feel critical was the right word. I felt like you were just saying this, this is what he did. Like this is the evidence and this is kind of like all of us, how he made mistakes. And this is before internet and he could check every single quote and every word. It’s pretty impressive what he did, but there were these problems.
Leslie Baynes (06:37)
Okay.
Yeah!
You’re right. think I have internalized some of the criticism that I have gotten. ⁓ Though at points, I’m definitely saying Lewis was wrong. Lewis should have done better. Lewis misread this. Lewis misread that. So if that’s how you want to define critical, that is indeed what I’m doing.
Dru Johnson (06:56)
Hmm.
Yeah, I actually appreciated where your voice came in strong and he said, and he should have known better. Cause I’m like, yeah, he should have, I would have known better in that case, right? ⁓ Yeah, that’s really good. And then how, ⁓ I guess, how do you, do you have a way of kind of soft shoeing into this for people? I feel like you almost have to do like a little tap and dance before you can actually have the conversation you want to have.
Leslie Baynes (07:33)
Absolutely. So in the introduction, I brought up the fact that the very first public paper I gave on Lewis, I got a critical response that’s kind of ⁓ prophetic of the ways that a couple of conservative evangelical reviewers have treated the book. ⁓ And again, I’ve gotten other reviews that are very positive. For instance, Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity Today,
Dru Johnson (07:59)
Hmm.
Leslie Baynes (08:02)
at his year-end review of his top 10 books of 2025 put my book on that list. And there have been others who are much more conservative religiously than I am, who have been very, very positive about the book. So I don’t want to say that all of the conservative evangelical readers have taken it.
as being ⁓ a critique of Lewis. But anyway, so the first time I delivered a paper on Lewis in the Bible, I did get one kind of pointed response. And everybody knows who’s been in Lewis studies for any amount of time that when people try to say, Lewis wasn’t quite right about this, Lewis was wrong about that, there is a backlash. And ⁓ I was prepared for that.
And what’s very interesting is that Lewis himself was extremely critical of other people’s writing. Once he got popular, and the way that he got popular was actually through the screw tape letters, which was published in the early 1940s. ⁓ Once the Chronicles of Narnia came out in the mid 1950s, he started getting all kinds of letters from children.
Dru Johnson (09:13)
Mmm.
Leslie Baynes (09:23)
and children would send them their own poems and stories. And Lewis did not hesitate to say, this is not good writing. You need to something different here. ⁓ He was ferocious, ⁓ not with the children. He was actually rather kind to the children. He could be ferocious to fellow scholars. And everybody who ever encountered him in kind of a scholarly debate would say he just went after people. ⁓
Dru Johnson (09:33)
Ha ha ha.
Leslie Baynes (09:53)
vociferously. And he once said when someone ⁓ sent him a response to something that he had written, he said something like, ⁓ thank you for your response, and especially a criticism for praise without criticism is like an egg without salt. I loved that. So he was really into both giving it, dishing it out,
Dru Johnson (10:13)
Wow, okay. Yeah.
Leslie Baynes (10:22)
and receiving criticism back. So it’s doubly ironic that lovers of Lewis, some of them, some of them seem sometimes to have a hard time with any kind of critical, and I mean that in the academic sense, critical academic work on Lewis.
Dru Johnson (10:43)
This is such an issue that even I, preparing for this episode, I thought, should we just make up another name and just talk about this other named person and then at the end reveal, well, we’re actually talking about CS Lewis. So people won’t upfront put up their defenses and say, no, I don’t like this because they’re being critical. I mean, it’s that much of a cultural phenomenon, right? What’s your, yeah.
Leslie Baynes (10:57)
Yeah.
What a great idea. I love that.
Dru Johnson (11:10)
Well, maybe we could try that again for our non-script interview. ⁓
Leslie Baynes (11:10)
Surprise! The person you’re talking to is…
Dru Johnson (11:18)
What is your actual training and your expertise in?
Leslie Baynes (11:21)
Okay, as an undergrad, I majored in English, and when I was thinking about doing a master’s program, I was really torn between English literature and biblical studies, and obviously I decided to go into biblical studies. I got a master’s degree in theological studies from the University of Dayton, and that was a very general degree, but I focused on Bible and did my master’s thesis on ⁓ the New Testament.
No reason to go into that now. then decided to, yeah, master’s thesis, decided to get a PhD ⁓ and went into what’s called Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity at the University of Notre Dame.
Dru Johnson (11:53)
I understand.
Leslie Baynes (12:06)
And one of the fine things about that program, you can hear the breadth of it, Christianity and Judaism in antiquity. So I focused on New Testament and Second Temple Judaism, which is the period some people might say between the testaments, like around 300 to 200 BC up through the New Testament.
But I had to take courses and do work in everything from the Hebrew scriptures up through around the year 500 AD. But my main focus was New Testament and that Second Temple period.
Dru Johnson (12:41)
Yeah, that’s great. And you can see that training at work in your book and your scholarship at work there as well. It’s an extremely well-researched book. I felt like was reading a book that had been in the writing process for 15 years or so. ⁓ really? Okay. I was like, she did not crank this out in three years. This is way too good and too well-researched. Okay. Well, that makes me feel better as well.
Leslie Baynes (12:59)
That would be about right. No, I did not. Actually, was just about perfect.
Yeah, that first paper that I talked about with Lewis of the Bible, ⁓ I delivered that maybe 2010, 2012. I can’t remember exactly right now. And I turned in the book to the publisher in 2024.
Dru Johnson (13:23)
Okay. So. Right.
Leslie Baynes (13:24)
So of course I wasn’t working on it every minute of every day. There were
all kinds of other projects in between, not to mention the pandemic and life circumstances that were wild, but you know how goes.
Dru Johnson (13:35)
Yes,
and it felt like a percolated book, like one that had been bubbling for a long time and stewing. ⁓ You had mentioned there’s now a small cadre of you in biblical scholarship who are working on Lewis, so maybe you could explain why are biblical scholars, I mean, you could see this as kind of a hobby horse, but why are they actually giving critical attention to Lewis from the biblical side? Why pay attention?
Leslie Baynes (13:59)
That is such a great question. I would love to give like a definitive answer to why biblical scholars why now. So up until my book was published, I know of two books on Lewis and the Bible. One of them was by a man named Michael Christensen and his book was published in 1979. It was a reworking of his undergraduate honors thesis.
Dru Johnson (14:15)
Hmm.
Leslie Baynes (14:28)
And yeah, he now has a PhD in religion.
I’ve since become friends with him.
And we have had a lot of productive conversation back and forth. He is not a biblical scholar. So the next one is from my friend, Edith Humphrey. And yeah, so Edith and I met at one SBL and discovered that we were both biblical scholars who liked Lewis. And we started ⁓ working on our projects at essentially the same time. Now I had been working on mine before.
Dru Johnson (14:41)
Hmm.
yeah.
Leslie Baynes (15:01)
she was, but I really started concentrating on it ⁓ about the same time that she started writing hers, which is called Further Up and Further In, and it has a subtitle that I can’t remember. It is published by St. Vladimir’s ⁓ Seminary Theological Press.
and it’s a very different book from mine. She is looking at Lewis and the Bible through the lens of Eastern Orthodox theology and her own reflections and personal experience, whereas mine is more of a standard academic critical study. So that was all that I knew about until I started ⁓ publishing stuff here and there, doing blogs, etc.
where people knew what I was doing and could start contacting me. So I don’t think people will mind if I bring up their names. Jason Staples is, yeah. So he is ⁓ also working with Lewis’s marginalia and doing some fantastic work on Lewis in the Bible.
Dru Johnson (15:58)
yeah. Of course.
Leslie Baynes (16:08)
We’ve had wonderfully productive conversations together, both informally and on a couple of podcasts. And then there is a professor of Hebrew scripture. She specializes in Daniel at Wheaton College, Aubrey Buster. Yeah, so she’s doing amazing work as well. so Michael Christensen, ⁓ Edith, Jason Aubrey.
Dru Johnson (16:23)
yeah, of course, yeah.
Leslie Baynes (16:37)
and some others, ⁓ we’ve gotten together and we’re just having a grand time. But why now? I just can’t say. You know how sometimes you read about in history that there are people on other sides of the world who never knew each other working on the same thing? Something in the air? I don’t know.
Dru Johnson (16:59)
Yeah, yeah,
no, I have a handful of examples of that with students that I give students because it does happen where just independently came to very similar conclusions. ⁓ So it doesn’t surprise me. ⁓ I think. I mean, I hate to say this, but when you’re a biblical scholar and you talk to laypeople, you interact with the church or laypeople at all, you constantly run into people who have read.
CS Lewis and that is how they they interpret things, you know, Used to joke when I was in seminary I was like hey no more using Tolkien or Lewis References baldly like you need to say this is from Lewis which book because I didn’t read any of this stuff and I don’t know But it was so common for people to just to quote Lewis like well Lewis said this about love Well, Lewis said this about Theodicy or Lewis, you know, and he almost has become in a weird way
Leslie Baynes (17:44)
Yes.
Dru Johnson (17:55)
America’s systematic theologian. ⁓ And so I feel like I’m constantly having to, I shouldn’t say fight, I’m having to interact with things that I’m not sure what Lewis is doing with them, right?
Leslie Baynes (17:58)
Even though, yeah.
Yes, yes, that is so true. His writing is, or has been, ⁓ really fun and easy for people to grasp. I teach a course on Lewis every couple of years. I started teaching it in the aughts, and I found that ⁓ students and other people, their ability to grasp even what Lewis has written has really plummeted. ⁓
Dru Johnson (18:34)
Mmm.
Leslie Baynes (18:35)
you know, we could get into the literacy crisis and attention span and so on and so forth. But yes, ⁓ a lot of people are really familiar with Lewis and love Lewis’s writing. And for a lot of people still, it’s very accessible, though, again, becoming a bit less so in my experience that I have seen.
Dru Johnson (18:51)
Mm.
Leslie Baynes (18:55)
And Lewis himself always said, I am not a biblical scholar. I am not a theologian. He never had, as far as I can tell, any formal study whatsoever, not a single course in theology or related disciplines. But of course, he was a very, very gifted reader, read all the time. ⁓
Brilliant, no doubt, in so many ways. So I can see why people are attracted to him. And when you were talking about, know, Lewis said this on love, he has such wonderful things to say on love. ⁓ He wrote the book, The Four Loves, and he talks about love all the time and what love is and what love isn’t. ⁓ And I love what he says about so many things.
and I like a lot of the things that he says about the Bible. For instance, in his book Reflections on the Psalms, he does some good work there, and he will do some good work, and then he’ll just fall on his head, and he won’t know it. He won’t know that he’s fallen on his head, and then he’ll go on and say something again really profound, ⁓ and then slip again. ⁓ But you’re right, people who are not trained in biblical studies
generally don’t catch it.
Dru Johnson (20:18)
Yeah, I and I feel conflicted about this because in one sense I’m like well I’m glad you’re reading on something in the topic area and getting something out of it and you have something to hang your hat on but it was really when you talked about the the trilemma where I thought yeah this is this is where it can get dangerous because it really does it’s almost like Jack takes us on a journey with Jesus where we experience the same gloss and
and misunderstanding of Jesus that he is experiencing. ⁓ So maybe you could talk a little bit about ⁓ how the trilemma, this is Jesus’s liar, lunatic, or Lord, how that might cause, if we go along with him, to miss what’s actually going on in the gospels. And of course, I did my dissertation on the Torah and the gospel of Mark, so I was tuned in very tightly in this section. ⁓
understanding, having a deep appreciation for how different the gospels are and how differently they do the same thing, I should say. ⁓
Leslie Baynes (21:21)
yeah, I mean, we could talk for hours about this. There’s no doubt about it. And before I go into it, I just want to say that so many people are so deeply emotionally committed to thinking that this liar lunatic or Lord argument is true. ⁓ That’s where a lot of pushback has come from. And I’m not the first one to analyze the liar lunatic or Lord argument. It started in Lewis’s lifetime. ⁓
Dru Johnson (21:37)
Right.
Hmm.
Leslie Baynes (21:50)
And the people who want to hold on to this argument is true are just kind of plugging their ears and going, la la la la la. I’m not hearing anything you’re saying. And that is where the one review said, don’t read the middle of this book. Just don’t read it. It’s like, la la la la la la la. I’m not going to listen to anything that you have to say, because if this falls, I am so personally threatened that I don’t know how I’m going to go on.
Dru Johnson (22:09)
Yeah.
Before we go on, can I ask you just a brutally honest question? We can cut it if you don’t think it’s worth it. If you were, I want to say if you were a man, a male scholar, but I’ll just say if you were Michael Ward writing the exact same book, not that Michael Ward could write this book, but if you were, do you think people would praise it and say, ⁓ brilliant, he finally brings to surface these little things that bothered us for a long time or?
Is it a very like you’re on the outside, you’re a biblical scholar, maybe also you’re a woman that might factor into it as well in some circles? ⁓
Leslie Baynes (22:57)
There
are so many things to pick out there. And I know that when there is a woman’s name attached to something as opposed to a man’s, there’s data on how this is perceived. There’s no doubt about that. My name in England can go either way. Or ⁓ IE versus EY. Oftentimes, ⁓
Dru Johnson (23:12)
Right.
Right. Two S’s are one S, right? Yeah.
Leslie Baynes (23:25)
I’ve seen people correct it to EY, correct it, when they find out I’m a woman because that is how they think women spell it and IE is how men spell it. In the reviews that have come out so far, I have not picked up any kind of prejudice that way. Nobody has done that. But my many friends who have come to my support, ⁓ they have brought that up and said, you know, I wonder if there’s some misogyny going on here too. So that’s all I’m going to say about that.
⁓ Michael Ward and I are friends and have been friends for more than a decade and I have benefited greatly from his friendship, his support, and ⁓ with some corrections in the book, some minor things, like I got the name of ⁓ Lewis’s chair slightly wrong. ⁓ When Lewis’s chair at Cambridge, I had one word wrong and he’s given me some
some bibliography that helped make the book better and things like that. I adore Michael Ward. He’s amazing. ⁓ He is the consummate insider right now. You know, he’s the Dean of CS Lewis Studies. And I was intensely grateful for his endorsement of my book. And ⁓ one of the times when Michael Ward and I met many years ago, we were having dinner.
And he said something like, you know, do you think that we were talking about his book, The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis right after it came out? And he said something like, do you think the…
The introduction said, you know, we’ve got the CS Lewis industry brought up St. Jack and it’s like, no, we’re just going to go. We’re going to be critical here. We’re not going to do the hagiographical thing. And I said, I think that is absolutely fantastic. So Michael and I are on the same page, at least from my memory of the conversation at that particular time. You see how I’m hedging. I haven’t talked to Michael about this for a while. Maybe he’s changed his mind.
But I still, if I had to speculate, I would say that if Michael Ward, even as the Dean of CS Lewis studies, came out ⁓ as I did analyzing the liar lunatic or Lord argument, I think he might get something of the same reaction.
Dru Johnson (26:01)
Okay, so it’s that deeply buried. I think that helps. So let’s talk about your critique a little bit. ⁓ How it works, what’s the thrust of it, why you think it’s dangerous, not just incorrect, but it actually might be dangerous for our understanding of the Gospels.
Leslie Baynes (26:04)
I think it is. Yeah.
Well, there’s so much to work with here. To get to the end, the spoiler alert.
I think I could do no better than quote N.T. Wright as I did early on in this chapter in the book. Tom Wright says something like,
someone who relied on Lewis for their own understanding of Jesus would find themselves on shaky ground, not just with people who have improper skepticism about the Bible, but even those who have kind of a critical understanding of the Bible, because Lewis just doesn’t give them good enough material to work with.
Dru Johnson (27:01)
Hmm.
Leslie Baynes (27:02)
So that’s the bottom line. If you go with what Lewis says about Jesus, you are not looking at what the New Testament actually says about Jesus.
Dru Johnson (27:15)
Yeah, let’s talk about that for a second. Because I think the most jarring part for me was I could understand a lot of things. Okay, he clearly had a masterful memory he developed from childhood, it sounds like. He’s clearly read more than I’ve ever read 15 times over. ⁓ And he seems to rely very heavily on his memory, which I’d imagine that would be very natural for someone who has that level of literacy and memory combined and it’s in ⁓ acumen.
But this is where you say he kind of gets in trouble. I love that the fact that you pointed out that he seems to read the first half of some books and if he just kept reading he would have found a nuanced view that would have tapered his view. ⁓ But when you get to the issue of him, Jesus said, quote, in his writing and then he says something that Jesus doesn’t say. Now what he says after that, one of the instances you point out, I thought, well, who thinks that Jesus actually said that?
And then I thought, probably a lot of people would think that they would go like, yeah, that sounds like something Jesus said. Or, you know, like, I don’t know all the gospels that well. So yeah, probably Jesus said that. Can you give us an example of where he, for lack of a better word, he invents scripture or he inscripturates his own thinking or something? I don’t know how you would say it.
Leslie Baynes (28:18)
Yeah.
you
It’s,
It’s, I love that. So yes, so many people have talked about how wonderful Lewis’s memory is, and he could quote and quote and quote. The problem with that is, ⁓ if the person he is quoting to doesn’t know what the text is, they don’t know when he’s quoting rightly or wrongly. And ⁓
You know, it doesn’t really matter if somebody gets a word wrong here or there. So I gave a number of examples in the book where he misquotes, ⁓ where it doesn’t matter at all. And I’ll give a very small one that I put in the book here. He was writing a letter to children and ⁓ he was recommending two books by E Nesbitt, who was a favorite of his and really influenced him in
Dru Johnson (29:18)
Mm-hmm.
Leslie Baynes (29:32)
conceiving of the Narnia books. And he
he misquotes the title of both of the books. I think leaving out a word in the title in one of them and adding a word in another ⁓ one of the titles was the phoenix and the carpet and he said the phoenix and the wishing carpet and you know it just doesn’t matter at all right ⁓ but when he says that Jesus says something and he is using this as the very foundation
of his argument. Jesus never said anything even close to it. We get into a problem. ⁓ Lewis, of course, when he’s trying to say that Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord, he’s going to find some of his favorite passages in the Gospel of John, because that has the highest Christology in the places where Jesus comes closest to.
⁓ And depending on who you talk to, either does or does not claim to be God. And I think scholars can have really good legitimate arguments about what Jesus is saying here when he says certain things. But ⁓ Lewis quotes John 8 58 before Abraham was, I am. And that is really good. But
he adds to that something else that is not in the gospel of John at all.
In addition to saying that Jesus said, I am, which Jesus actually did say, this is what Lewis writes. Jesus says again, I am the begotten of the one God before Abraham was, I am. So before Abraham was, I am legitimate, perfect, wonderful. And that is a strong scriptural verse for Lewis. But
beginning of it that Jesus said and then he quotes, am the begotten of the one God. There is absolutely nothing like that anywhere in the Gospels and the Gospels are the only places we can go to even approximate what the historical Jesus might have said.
Dru Johnson (32:00)
Yeah. And as you point out quite rightly, the begotten language is actually, it’s conceptually not even within a century or two of Jesus. This is something that later councils are going to develop. It’s a long discussion in Greek ⁓ specifically and later Greek conceptuality. And so it’s actually reading them from a later lens. It’s kind of like when I’m reading ⁓ Genesis three in class and we talk about, you know, ⁓
⁓ Elohim created, you know, the beginning and say, okay, that’s interesting. This plural, let us make man. And students always go, is that the Trinity? ⁓ I don’t know if it is, but certainly they would not have had a concept of the Trinity. And because it takes a few hundred years to work that out. What’s interesting to me too is, sorry, go ahead.
Leslie Baynes (32:37)
Right.
Exactly.
⁓ yeah, I’m just thinking about how it’s so easy to read things in from your own perspective. And Lewis did it. I do it. You do it. Everybody does it. ⁓ But to make up a scriptural verse that doesn’t appear in scripture, at least Elohim is actually there in scripture.
Dru Johnson (33:10)
Right,
Yeah, and I think, and he’s not only making it up, but as you say, he’s laying it at the foundation of Jesus said this. And if he said that he is either a liar, a lunatic or the Lord, or he’s some version of that. I think what struck me blind almost as I was reading it is you discuss how he uses John 7 53 through 8 11, the adulterous woman.
Leslie Baynes (33:24)
Exactly.
Dru Johnson (33:40)
which is a renowned example of a text that is not in John that was placed there centuries after. I mean, we have manuscript evidence that’s very clear. We’ve had that for a long time. This is not even controversial. ⁓ I don’t know of any biblical scholars that think that that story is actually original to John, maybe in Luke or in margin. really? ⁓ I would love to see the actual exegetical argument on that. Yeah.
Leslie Baynes (33:51)
you
I actually do. I’ve gotten pushback on that from one biblical scholar. Yes. Uh-huh.
I would too. All
I’ve got is just her kind of indignant response. Yeah.
Dru Johnson (34:12)
Yeah, well, I mean, think
Richard Bauckham, who’s ⁓ a good New Testament scholar says like, look, it’s clearly an old story. It floated around in manuscripts and the marginality of some manuscripts. think in Luke, it was in the margins at some point. ⁓ It doesn’t seem to go against anything that we know about Jesus, but it would be an exceptional story, even if it were original to John, it would be an exceptional story. ⁓ But to hang your hat on that passage ⁓ sounds
Leslie Baynes (34:39)
Mm-hmm.
Dru Johnson (34:41)
almost ludicrous to me today, having the advantage of text criticism and having thought about it for many years and worked through it with students. What do you think, do you think, certainly his New Testament scholar friends would have pointed out to him that this is probably not original to John. This isn’t what you want to do. These are not the droids you’re looking for, as they say.
Leslie Baynes (35:01)
Yeah,
that is the thing. When he brings up this particular argument ⁓ and this particular story ⁓ of the woman caught in adultery, what he is trying to do with it ⁓ is most famously in his essay called Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism. It has an alternative title. ⁓ Walter Hooper, who was the literary executor of Lewis’s estate, gave it both titles.
When he first published it, he called it modern theology and biblical criticism. And then about a decade later, he renamed it Fernseed and Elephants. And I am saying this because ⁓ listeners here might have heard it in one title or the other. And I want to make sure that they know which essay I’m working with. ⁓ And in the minutia of Lewis studies, this is kind of a thing. Probably most listeners are not going to be that deep into it, but they might have heard it one way or the other.
Dru Johnson (35:42)
Okay, good to know.
Leslie Baynes (35:59)
So ⁓ I call it modern theology and biblical criticism because I think this is the most descriptive. Fern seed and elephants, what does that mean? Right? Yeah. So ⁓ what he is trying to do here in this essay, it was actually a lecture that he gave in 1959 and never published. ⁓ But he also employed it in another essay. So I
Dru Johnson (36:08)
Amen.
Leslie Baynes (36:27)
I am reading these two essays together and he is trying to prove that Jesus, what John says about Jesus is factually true. And he goes to the idea of Jesus kind of doodling around in the dirt while
woman is brought up before him and people are talking about her. Jesus is looking down. Lewis himself uses the word, he says, if I could dare say doodling, which I love, so I use doodling now. And Lewis says that
In the ancient world, people did not give small vivid details, pictorial details, ⁓ because that kind of realism hadn’t been invented until the 19th century novel. Therefore,
John wrote it down because he saw it. It had to have happened. And that means that John’s gospel is factually historically true. He calls it reportage. John’s gospel is reportage. And the thing is, Lewis is utterly wrong. And I am just stunned at this because his first degree, he took two degrees, one in something called greats, which we would call classics today.
⁓ So he read the Greco-Roman classics philosophy in the original languages, which you had to pass even before you got into Oxford back in his day. ⁓ He read those and then he got a second degree in English after he failed to get a job for a few years. He’s like many of us, you know, we kind of languished for a few years. how about another degree? Maybe that will make me more marketable. And that’s exactly what he did. ⁓ So.
Dru Johnson (38:18)
Right.
Leslie Baynes (38:26)
he not… this is what he had studied! Didn’t he read any Greco-Roman novels? ⁓ So he is saying, I trust that what John has written is reportage because of this detail. It’s impossible for this detail to be in and therefore… and it’s just bosh from beginning to end.
Dru Johnson (38:51)
Yeah, I really appreciated that about your book. It’d be a very easy book to write where you just point out errors. But you point out, here’s where he seems to be flubbing a little bit. Here’s the actual ⁓ academic story on that issue, in this case where there’s lots of detail and lots ⁓ of Greco-Roman accounts. And then here’s Lewis situated in a world in which he would have known that academic. ⁓
researcher, at least known of the texts that were involved. And he should have been able to Rolodex, you know, bring passages to mind from various things he had read over the years that would have gone against this very intuition that he’s saying here. And so you kind of remove all the yeah, buts of the discussion, which is very helpful because I think it would have been easier, very easy to do a hit job and hit and run. ⁓ well,
Leslie Baynes (39:34)
Thank you.
I don’t want to do that to Lewis.
Dru Johnson (39:44)
Yeah,
and that’s where I think your love of Lewis comes out very clearly is that you very much appreciate his work. And the last section on Narnia shows ⁓ how you think this works out in his work. ⁓ I’ll say one thing about, or I have one question about Narnia, which, so I always said two things to students who were like high on Lewis. I tried not to tear them down, but I’d say,
First of all, he’s not writing to you. He’s writing to an early to mid 20th century modernist Brit, quite honestly, mostly Brits and sometimes Americans, the overshot. Right. Yes. And so you do have to do a little bit of cultural translation because he’s not talking to you in the same way that anything written from the past is not written to you directly. So have to do a little cultural translation.
Leslie Baynes (40:22)
Yeah, he didn’t have a very high opinion of Americans. He was always very polite to them.
Dru Johnson (40:42)
And then secondly, I think of things like Narnia where Jesus is a lion and I think, that doesn’t really capture the Gospels. Jesus is not depicted in the Gospels as a lion, right? But this is to the very point. He doesn’t want it to be decoded as this kind of symbolic metaphor or allegory, right? ⁓ So what do you think he’s doing with things like, we’ll just take Jesus as a lion as an easy example. I’m sure you have…
dozens of others. What is he doing if he’s not doing allegorical retelling of the Gospels, which I think is what Tolkien accused him of being so dead on the, or did he accuse Tolkien of, one of them said, it’s too obvious what you’re doing, right? You’re doing this Christian story. Yeah, yeah.
Leslie Baynes (41:26)
Yeah, that was Tolkien to Lewis. Lewis
adored Tolkien’s work and I don’t think had much critical to say, though he did give him feedback and ⁓ Lewis gave Tolkien feedback and Tolkien evidently, I’m not a Tolkien scholar at all. I’m not even a huge Tolkien fan. I’ve read his main books, but I’m not really into Tolkien. ⁓ So it’s my understanding ⁓ that Tolkien really
Dru Johnson (41:34)
Okay.
Leslie Baynes (41:54)
got a little bit hot under the collar and didn’t accept too many of them. And I do know Lewis wrote a letter to someone about this process and said, basically, you may as well try to advise a bandersnatch as advise Tolkien about something. So, you know, using the Lewis Carroll language there. ⁓ Jabberwock, Jabberwocky. Yeah. So, OK. ⁓ How Lewis understood the genre?
Dru Johnson (42:10)
Nice. Okay.
Leslie Baynes (42:24)
of his Chronicles of Narnia was as fairy tale. And when people describe them as allegory, he actually got fairly upset because he was a specialist in allegory. His first published scholarly book was called the Allegory of Love. And he had his own definition of allegory that I have taken on as my own. I’m not a professional literary scholar, and I think there are other definitions of allegory.
But to him, it was a one-on-one correlation ⁓ where every person, every object, every event had a counterpart and an author does it consciously. This was very big for him that to write an allegory, you had to write it consciously with these one-on-one correlations. And Lewis says repeatedly in various venues, I didn’t do this. That’s not the way it worked. And if you define allegory that way,
you can see that there is a lot of material in the Chronicles that don’t have any kind of ⁓ representation with something else. For example, I like to think of in the Magician’s Nephew, the bird, was it a jackdaw, ⁓ who was the first joke, right?
Dru Johnson (43:44)
Right. That’s
a good way of thinking about it as well as, you know, when people start trying to map out the stands for that. I mean, it actually is something that drives me crazy and understanding of ritual where they just think everything ritual is just an allegory and they’re trying to map out the one for one correlation between everything and ⁓ it’s condensed symbology as Mary Douglas once said. ⁓ I think it’s a helpful way of thinking about him. I wonder at the end of the day, ⁓
You spent all this time, you’ve gotten a lot of critical feedback. I’m sure you’ve gotten a lot of good feedback as well. Praise and celebration of the work. What’s the bumper sticker you want people to know about Lewis? Is it drink critically? And buy a Switch before you swallow?
Leslie Baynes (44:18)
I think so, yeah.
⁓
I would say that Lewis is brilliant. He’s lovely to read. I love reading his work. It has affected me more than probably I’d put him in my top three of readers who have affected me from a child to today. ⁓ And
When he is talking about the Bible, sometimes you just can’t take him at his word in terms when he’s talking about the historicity of things. I want to say you can’t take his biblical scholarship as being 100 % correct, but then what
I hear from some people, and this is such a good question. It’s like, well, I’m not a biblical scholar. I’m never going to read Greek. I’m never going to get even a master’s degree in biblical scholarship. What do I do? Who do I listen to? And ⁓ I can give specific recommendations, ⁓ but I can see the confusion ⁓ and the anxiety. And those are people, you know, those are the people.
whom I’m writing to, not the people who say, don’t read the middle third of the book, just ignore it, right? They’ve made up their minds. There’s nothing you can do for them. You’re not going to break through. But people who are open to learning more and saying, okay, maybe Lewis was wrong here. He was right here, here and here, but here, that leaves something to be desired. ⁓ Another thing when it comes to reading Lewis on the Bible,
that I think speaks particularly to us in the United States today. And that is when Lewis didn’t understand a biblical passage, what he wanted to do was interpret it so it would maximize love of God and neighbor.
if a passage even seemed to
be hateful towards other human beings. He would actively try to interpret it so that it would lead to love and growth.
So I think that is something 1000 % to take away from Lewis’s interpretation of the Bible. If you could interpret something so that it would lead to love of other people and generosity, the gifts of the spirit, love, joy, peace, you know, whatever, that’s how you could interpret it. If you could interpret it in a way that would increase hate in the world, you don’t interpret it that way.
Dru Johnson (47:23)
Yeah. So hermeneutics of love in the kind of the fullest sense of the word love, the most robust version of it. Yeah, that’s very helpful. Last question. Was Lewis just the 1940s Jordan Peterson or pick your public intellectual who is probably good at what their thing they do, but then expand out to try to talk about everything.
Leslie Baynes (47:49)
Wow. I know who Jordan Peterson is. And I’ve even read like his first popular book. I don’t remember what the name of it was, but something like, you know, most famously it had lobsters and make your bed. Right. Yeah. 12. Yeah. Something. Yeah. And, um, I don’t know.
Dru Johnson (47:56)
you’re a better person than I.
yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are 12 principles for something.
Yeah, yeah.
Leslie Baynes (48:15)
Jordan Peterson today. I think I’ve heard that he’s done said some odd things. I’ll just stop there. ⁓ But if you just limit this to the idea of someone who is going outside their own field of speciality and becoming extremely well known for the things that they are
expounding outside their area of speciality. I would say yeah, that would work. ⁓ Again, I don’t know much about Jordan Peterson as a person, what he’s done. My impression, just from my own circle, has been that the results of Jordan Peterson’s work have been rather pernicious, but I’m not sure because I just don’t have the information.
Dru Johnson (48:45)
Hmm.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah,
I’m probably using Jordan Peterson as a caricature or an icon here because I don’t know either. ⁓ I only know what my students tell me over the years and watching some videos of his. But yeah, that kind of, like you said, becoming famous for mostly what you’ve said outside of your specialty. I think that’s a good way to put it. And that’s a good way to think of ⁓ Clive’s staples, Lewis.
Leslie Baynes (49:17)
Okay.
Dru Johnson (49:36)
⁓ Well, Leslie Baynes thank you so much for this book. I should get the title correct because I also am really bad with titles. Between Interpretation and Imagination, C.S. Lewis and the Bible. Thank you so much for guiding us through this life tour with C.S. Lewis.
Leslie Baynes (49:51)
Thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.
