What to Know Before Reading the Bible
Ask Me Anything
Week 4: What to Know Before Reading the Bible
What should I know before beginning to read the Bible?
The Bible, or biblical canon, can be seen as a library or collection of books that can guide us in spiritual instruction. We don’t often think of the Bible as a canon like Star Wars or Harry Potter, but that’s what it is. The Bible is a collection of argued upon and verified books that have come to be known as scripture. The protestant canon has sixty-six books: thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New Testament. The Bible was written over a 1,000 year span in three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. The Bible came about over time. It was not a magical, mysterious book that floated down from heaven, inspired by one author who was sitting directly next to God writing everything down. It is a diverse book written by inspiring, authoritative authors from various backgrounds and generations that eventually became adopted by the community of believers as scripture. In Israel, the Book of Deuteronomy was adopted as the Word of God around 621 BCE. The Torah, or Law (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible), assumed authority around 400 BCE; the Nevi'im Prophets around 200 BCE; and the Ketuvim or Writings around 100 BCE.
After much struggle, the Christians determined that the Hebrew Bible was Scripture for them as well. The New Testament as we know it was formed and adopted by church councils between 200 CE and 400 CE. These councils were mandated by Constantine and discussed a variety of things. There were no hard and fast criteria for how each book made it in, but there were several things that influenced the decision for each book:
Authorship: One major factor was authorship. Books such as James, Jude, 2nd Peter, 2nd John, 3rd John, and Revelation were highly debated because the authorship couldn't be proven. Most New Testament books were written by an apostle or a colleague of an apostle, which gave credibility because though Jesus didn’t write anything down, his close followers did.
Orthodoxy: Another deciding factor was whether or not the text was compatible with Orthodox teaching. Constantine called conferences to get everyone on the same page as to what Orthodox theology was. These councils were meant to bring people of diverse thoughts under more uniform teaching. Therefore the books such as the Gospel of Thomas, which was ruled heresy since it was considered a gnostic text, didn't make it into the Bible.
Relevancy: A third factor for what was canonized was the relevancy of the text, therefore versions of the Gospel or letters to church communities that didn't add anything pertinent and/or relevant weren't included.
Widespread/Longstanding: Another deciding factor was how widespread and longstanding the text was. These books were all several hundred years old, so a great way to tell how impactful they were was by how well received they were by various communities. A way that church fathers determined this was by how often certain books were mentioned in other books.
Paul references the book of Luke alongside an Old Testament reference in 1 Timothy 5:18: "For the Scripture says, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,’ and, ‘The laborer deserves his wages.’" This shows that not only did Paul consider the Gospel of Luke to be scripture, but he considered it equal to the Old Testament.
Polycarp, who is believed to be a follower of the apostle John, was an early church bishop and wrote various letters to encourage and instruct early churches. He quoted 17 of the 27 New Testament books.
The number of books in the Christian Bible vary. The New Testament is uniform, though it wasn’t for a brief stint in the Protestant Reformation when Martin Luther removed Hebrews, Jude, James, and Revelation. The Old Testament book count is what changes. If you want to see a chart that shows the variance between the Hebrew, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant bible, click here. One factor in the difference of books is the way the books were counted. In the Hebrew Bible, some books are combined. For instance, there is a book called The Book of The Twelve that combines twelve books into one (i.e. Joel, Hosea, Jonah, etc.) There are also various books added into the Orthodox and Catholic Old Testaments, including Judith, Tobit, The Maccabees, etc.
During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther moved books into a section called the apocrypha. He believed that those books weren't equal to scripture, but could be used as spiritual instruction. The interesting thing was that this was relatively recent when we think about how long the Christian Bible has been around. Martin Luther also highly valued biblical literalism (different from how we see it today) over and above moral or symbolic interpretations. We more commonly see literalism in protestant spaces. This brings to a conversation about three of the major schools of biblical interpretation today: inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility. Inerrancy and infallibility both stem from a literalist interpretation, therefore a large number of protestant spaces fall under the literalist interpretation. In fact, it wasn't until the Reformation that we begin to see the idea that the Bible is error free. Before this, it simply wasn't an issue. People openly acknowledged and didn’t try to argue away discrepancies, because they didn't believe that they took away from their belief.
Biblical literalism started to gain more prominence in the 1920s and 30s, as we discussed last week. There was a big debate in the Presbyterian church over issues such as the Bible's authority and the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Modernists, who believed that there was room for interpretation of the Gospel under modern day circumstances and issues, took over mainstream Christian culture, dominating seminaries and Christian publishing houses. Fundamentalists split off, started their own private seminaries and publishing companies, and began to hold tighter to biblical literalism. In the Catholic church, this lead to the idea of papal infallibility. Both scriptural and papal infallibility are a response to growing Western tension with religious authority.
There is a sharp rise in inerrancy and infallibility in the 70s and 80s after the Civil Rights Movement. An early version of the progressive church, called the emerging church, began after the Civil Rights Movement. As a response to the emerging church, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was released. The Chicago Statement asserted that the Bible was inerrant, or faultless and inarguably correct in everything that it teaches (in any form of translation). Inerrancy believes that the original manuscripts were completely God’s truth and don’t contradict each other. What is interesting is that this is primarily believed in U.S. spaces. Protestantism in the U.K. does not hold biblical literalism in the same way.
Biblical inspiration is the idea that the authors of the Bible were inspired by God and that the Holy Spirit is required to help derive meaning from the scriptures. The United Methodist Church (UMC) believes in biblical inspiration. The following information is pulled from the UMC's website, UMC.org.
“We hold that the writers of the Bible were inspired by God, that they were filled with God's Spirit as they wrote the truth to the best of their knowledge.”
“We hold that God was at work in the process of canonization, during which only the most faithful and useful books were adopted as Scripture.”
“We hold that the Holy Spirit works today in our thoughtful study of the Scriptures, especially as we study them together, seeking to relate the old words to life's present realities.”
The Bible's authority is, therefore, nothing magical. For example, we do not open the text at random to discover God's will. The authority of scripture derives from the movement of God's Spirit in times past and in our reading of it today.
The history of the Bible is complicated. Our relationship to and interpretation of scripture has shifted in the past century to a more literalist, legalistic interpretation. To assume you have to believe one specific thing about scripture to be a Christian can take away the beauty and power of the Bible. It is clear that through canonization and translation, the Bible was passed through human hands. It is important to be mindful and critical when thinking about the Bible. Knowing its history can give us deeper understanding and context as we begin to read for ourselves!
Discussion Questions
What were you (or weren’t you) taught about the history of the Bible growing up?
How does understanding the Bible’s history change how you view scripture?
How were you taught to interpret the Bible?
Inerrant: Without error or fault in all its teaching. (All stories are true.)
Infallible: Completely trustworthy as a guide to salvation. (All instructions regarding faith practices are true.)
Inspired: Authors were inspired by God and Holy Spirit is required to help us derive meaning.
Resources
How it's Made: The Bible - Oh, God! Podcast
The Gospel Truth? - Oh, God! Podcast
Chart of The Old Testament and Hebrew Bible