Starting with the Bible

My first proper post to my blog! This took a lot of work to post; copying and pasting from a word processor into the editor on the blog site produced so many bits of strange formatting I ended up going through the HTML deleting <span> tags. Perhaps I need a span filter. (OK, you can stop groaning now.)

Since I am starting a new blog, I shall start by writing about starting points. Specifically, one starting point that is particularly popular today.

Starting with the Bible

I once heard a sermon in which the preacher asserted that there are no inconsistencies in scripture, and backed this up with a verse from scripture! I was so appalled at this fallacy that I didn’t even register what the verse was. Others to whom I tell the story usually suggest 2 Timothy 3:16, “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”

In Christianity today, this attitude to the Bible seems distressingly common. Many people would insist that faith must be “Bible-based”. The verse from 2 Timothy is often quoted; a maxim from Calvin’s commentary on that verse, “We owe to Scripture the same reverence that we owe to God,” is sometimes added. However, all these assertions beg an important question, seldom raised:

What do we mean by “the Bible” or “Scripture”? How do we know that the collection of writings that the Church accepts is correct?

So what’s the problem?

1. If you are trying to persuade someone that the Bible comes from God, the chances are that this is because they don’t yet accept its authority. So an assertion from within the Bible that it is all God-breathed (whatever that means) will carry very little weight with them. After all, anyone can write a book that claims to be from God – whether Mohammed, Brigham Young or L Ron Hubbard – but a claim within the book carries little weight unless we already accept the book’s authority; and if we already accept the book’s authority, it is superfluous.

2. What did Paul – assuming he actually wrote this – mean by “Scripture”? What did Timothy understand by it? Commentators are divided: some think he meant the Hebrew Bible – what Christians call the Old Testament – while others think he meant the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Jewish Bible that was common in the Near East in New Testament times. The latter contains many books that are not in the Hebrew Bible – some because the Hebrew had been lost, others that were written in Greek – and extended versions of some of the canonical books. Paul had studied in Jerusalem with a leading rabbi (Acts 22:3), so he must have known the difference. Timothy was half Greek; he had been taught the Jewish faith by his mother and grandmother, but he had not had a Jewish education, nor even been circumcised. Even if he spoke some Hebrew, I think it very unlikely that he read the Bible in that language. So would he have taken Paul’s “all Scripture” as meaning the whole of the Septuagint, not just the Hebrew Bible? Whatever Paul may have meant, it could not have been “the 66 books that will eventually become the Christian canon,” not least because not all of them had been written.

3. Even if Paul didn’t mean the Christian Bible, many would say that it can, even should, mean that for us. But this doesn’t answer the question: if we are taking it to mean some other collection of writing than that which Paul meant, it can no longer tell us what that collection should now include.

4. Does the verse even say that? In the Greek original, there is no word for is. Translators can insert it in the traditional place, All Scripture is God-breathed and useful … or, possibly better, insert it later: All God-breathed Scripture is also useful …. Again, commentators vary; some modern scholars give a good argument for the latter reading but chicken out at the last minute, concluding that although the function of the verse is not to assert the inspiration of scripture, there is no need to deviate from the traditional translation.

5. Finally, what do we mean by “Scripture”? Most people, I think, would give a definition that boils down to “Texts from our holy Book”. So to assert that all texts from our holy book come from God makes sense, but doesn’t say anything about what texts are to be included in the book. The same preacher who said there were no inconsistencies in the Bible (I was organist for twelve years at the church where he was vicar, so I heard a lot of his sermons!), also asserted that Mark 16:9–20 was “not scriptural”, because it was a later addition. So even if you accept the authority of Paul’s statement in its traditional translation, and its application to the Christian Bible, there is still room to pick and choose texts.

In short, the verse usually cited to justify reverence for Scripture may well be a mistranslation, and even as traditionally translated, it cannot bear the burden that it is so often called to bear: that of justifying reverence for the Christian Bible. It certainly does not justify the level of reverence that Calvin recommended, which I would consider idolatrous.

Calvin, at least, recognised the question of how we know which books are to be included. His answer was that when the believer reads the Bible in the proper attitude of prayer, the Holy Spirit enters him or her and reveals the divine nature of the writings. At face value, this provides an answer not only to the question of the extent of Scripture but to that of its interpretation. However, there are two important deficiencies.

First, it gives no help when people disagree, on either point. If you and I both believe we have read the scripture in the correct prayerful manner, but arrive at different answers, what can we do about it? To me, the only logical answer is the postmodern one: the Spirit has revealed one truth to me, and a different, equally valid truth to you. I have no more right to impose my truth on you than you have on me.

Unfortunately, this is of no value in establishing a single body of “scriptural” texts that everyone can accept as from God. Instead, what seems to happen is that when such a disagreement occurs, each party believes that they, being guided by the Spirit, must be right; the other must be wrong. Calvin has done the opposite of what he intended: in trying to provide a way for a book to be the authority, he has made the ultimate judge of correctness something within oneself. Unlike tradition, it provides no body of literature for disputants to consult; unlike reason, it provides no formal process of argument for one to present to another.

The second problem is that people don’t put it into practice. They may claim that the Holy Spirit, when one reads a text in the right (prayerful) way, reveals the text’s divine nature, and that this answers the question of which documents belong in the Bible; but they only apply it to documents that they already believe to be scriptural, or at least which have such a claim within the Christian tradition. Some may apply this technique to the Book of Tobit, but do any read the Gospel of Thomas this way? Or the Shepherd of Hermas? Or the Book of Mormon? Or the Qur’an? Or the Bhagavad Gita? The list is endless. And this, of course, means that we can’t answer the question this way – there will always be the possibility that there is a document we have missed that ought to be included in Scripture.

And yet, these people, who cannot answer the question “Why the Bible?”, insist that it is important. The vicar under whom I used to serve as organist (I promise this is the last time I’ll cite him, in this article anyway) went further in his sermon on Galatians 1:8, “But even if we or an angel from Heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse!” He asserted that “gospel” here meant the whole Bible, and that if anything were added to the Bible, or anything taken away, there would be no Gospel at all.

Leaving aside the question (which arises here just as in 2 Timothy) of what Paul meant, and his readers understood, by “gospel”, our original question arises here, too: I asked him how we know we have the right Bible to start with, and he said “I don’t see why you should question it!” So here was someone who not only taught that Scripture was a higher authority (“way higher” was his phrase) than tradition or reason, but also insisted that the collection of texts in scripture must be exactly correct, advising me to submit scripture to tradition – to accept what had been handed down to me – without question.

Seeing the way this argument is going, it would be too easy to conclude that a religion based on a holy book is absurd, and maybe reject Christianity altogether – or at least reject any modern notion of Christianity in favour of the “magisterium” model that ruled the Western Church before the Reformation: there is an institution – the Church (which could be the Roman Church, but bear in mind that the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society also makes this claim) – that takes upon itself the exclusive right to tell us what documents are to be included in the Bible and how to interpret them.

Instead, however, I want to ask a much more positive question:

If we can’t treat the Bible as the ultimate authority – because its authority cannot be established unless it is already authoritative – how can we start with the Bible?

One thing we can do is start with the Bible as a historical document. By this I do not mean that I am going to regard all the narratives in there as accurate records of events – that is an honour one might accord a holy book, not a historical record! – but ask the historian’s question, what can we deduce from this book about the events it describes?

The Christian Bible is in two parts: the first, longer, part is essentially the bible that was revered and considered authoritative by the Jewish people two thousand years ago (although it was not totally fixed, even then). The second, shorter, part describes the ministry of one itinerant Jewish preacher, who was eventually executed by the authorities, and whose followers then turned him – literally – into a cult figure: more than just a martyr, he has come to be regarded by the end of the book as God in human form (e.g. Philippians 2:5–11).

The turning point is the death of Jesus. From a historical point of view, we can see its importance to the writers simply from the amount of space it is given in the narratives. As you might expect, the effect on his followers, who “had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21) was huge. Some of them continued to meet, but in secret; they had no idea what to do; and by and large the movement was breaking up.

This is when things started to change. First, Jesus’s followers had an experience that they all interpreted as his having come back to life. This is not an example of a primitive culture that doesn’t know the facts of life: someone from those times would probably be more amazed by (say) our use of a defibrillator to revive someone whose heart has stopped than we are by the stories of the resurrection – not to mention other medical miracles that take place routinely in our hospitals. Indeed, “doubting” Thomas (John 3:25–29) probably showed the typical reaction to a story of this sort. This is not sufficient, qua historical evidence, to convince us. But it should certainly keep us reading!

Only one of the four versions of the narrative continues past this point. The writer we know as Luke followed his gospel with a book that we call The Acts of the Apostles. This tells the story of Jesus’s disciples as they regroup following his death and, galvanised by two experiences, they build a movement that has, by the end of the Bible, become a new religion. Those two experiences were the one they interpreted as Jesus’s resurrection, and another, seven weeks later (Acts 2:1–4), that they interpreted as “baptism with the Holy Spirit.”

It is worth noting here that “Baptism with the Holy Spirit” is not a phrase Luke uses in connection with the Pentecost experience, but one all four gospels (Matthew 3:11, Mark 1:8, Luke 3:16, John 1:33) attribute to John the Baptist; although John the Baptist predicts this phenomenon, it is not described in any of the four gospels.

The question for the historian is: what happened to these people to transform them from the scattered followers of a dead preacher into a new religion? The only testimony we have is theirs, recorded in the New Testament.

Seeing the New Testament in this way invites another question: what about Paul? Paul, who wrote so much of the New Testament, was not one of Jesus’s followers. According to Acts, he experienced not the resurrection and Pentecost, but a very personal conversion on the way to Damascus. (The attribution is important, because Luke was probably one of Paul’s ministry team.) And yet Paul has become one of the most influential of the witnesses who gave us our New Testament.

Unfortunately, this is a hard question to answer. While one might conclude that Paul is the writer who best presented the Christian faith, and therefore his writings were collected, this could become a circular argument: if the Christian faith is based on the Bible, then to observe that the writer most collected in the Bible best presents that faith tells us nothing.

A more plausible explanation is simply Paul’s career. He travelled widely as a missionary, and planted churches in many places. When unable to travel, he wrote many letters to people in the places where he had planted churches, and to people with whom he had worked. Not all of these letters survive – for example, there was at least one other letter to the Corinthian church, now lost (1 Corinthians 5:9). I think the sheer volume of correspondence, and the fact that he was highly regarded at the churches to which he wrote, can account for the preservation of so many of his letters. His individual take on Christian (and Jewish) doctrine has, however, made its mark on biblical Christianity.

Nonetheless, Paul’s writings were recognised by the Church before the New Testament was completed, let alone finalised (2 Peter 3:15–16). (Peter there calls them “scripture”, but we must remember that this term is not clearly defined.) The narrative of Acts 15 has a number of Pauline ideas articulated by Peter, though this may be Luke putting a Pauline spin on the story.

I think I have now reached the point where I can set forth how I start with the Bible.

1. Starting with the Bible as a holy book raises more questions than it answers, mainly along the lines of how we know we have the right holy book. This is not a useful place to start.

2. Reading the Bible as a historical document, I find that the followers of Jesus, demoralised and scattered after his death, had two transforming experiences in the few weeks following.

3. As a result of these two experiences – which they interpreted as (a) witnessing his return to life and (b) being baptised in the Holy Spirit – they regrouped. Behaving not as the scattered followers of an executed rebel, but an empowered movement, they built what would become the Christian religion.

4. The New Testament is founded on their testimony. Actually, few of them wrote much – most of the narrative comes from others who wrote down their testimony, and most of the teaching comes from Paul – but these are the documents that they and their successors recognised as “Scripture” on a par with the Hebrew Bible.

5. This recognition is the start – or a start – of what we might now call Christian tradition. It is therefore within the framework of tradition that the Bible can be regarded as a holy book. What this means for tradition must wait for a later article.

Further Reading

There are loads of good books on the history of the Bible, but one I’d particularly recommend is Making the Christian Bible by John Barton (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997)

Two commentaries with very different views on 2 Timothy 3:16 are The Letters to Timothy and Titus by Philip H Towner (Eerdmans, 2006); and Pastoral Epistles by William Mounce (Thomas Nelson, 2000: Word Biblical Commentary

Finally, I must apologise that I can provide no reference, still less a link, for Calvin’s views – either his maxim about the reverence we owe to scripture, or the way he believed the Spirit informed Bible study. I spent some time searching the internet, and found several instances of people using the maxim to justify their approach to scripture (and some of people misusing it!) but no actual source. If any reader can find a source that I can readily link here, please let me know!