If culture is tradition, education tradition formalized, and pedagogy education in practice, then a change in pedagogy—at any point—is a change in culture; and a change in the pedagogy enshrining a major cultural artifact like the Bible is, potentially, a major cultural change. As the Bible moves out of explicitly religious institutions—parochial schools, yeshivas, seminaries, denominational universities, etc.—and into the state universities of North America, what changes are likely to take place in the process by which it is transmitted? If, for example, the Old and the New Testament are to be taught in the manner in which a conventional classicist—say, Gilbert Highet—teaches the Iliad and the Odyssey, will they be differently taught?

The answer to such a question entails re-vision, in the sense in which culture-historian William Irwin Thompson likes to use that word, both of the Bible and of the institutions which enshrine it. For this reason, the reference to Gilbert Highet is not idle. The Homeric literature with which he is particularly associated was once the sacred scripture of a living religion. The religion is now dead; the scripture survives, caught up in a new civilization. If the Bible can now be taught as if it were the Iliad, are we to conclude that Judaism and Christianity are now as dead as Greek paganism? If indeed they are that dead (surely a conclusion not lightly to be drawn), what are the prospects that their sacred scriptures can make what we may call the Homeric transition?