"What is the origin of the Bible as we know it?"
Knox, 27 June, 2010 © Scott McAndless
Deuteronomy 31:24-27; 34:1-8, 2 Timothy 3:10-17, Matthew 5:17-22
Sintaxi tells me what to preach about
When I posted my little video online – asking people who were not particularly interested in anything to do with the church to tell me what to preach about – I knew that the biggest challenge would be to get the attention of anybody. They say that, in the last two months, more original video has been posted on YouTube than would have been created if all of the three main American television networks had all been continuously creating new content around the clock ever since the oldest network, ABC, first went on the air.
How could I expect my little three minute video to get any notice among literally millions of minutes of video that are out there to be seen. So I asked you for your help to point people toward my video invitation. But I also tried a few other ways to get the word out. I posted a link to my video on an online community called Reddit – a community that encourages people to engage in discussions about all sorts of information that can be found on the internet.
I specifically wanted to try and spark a discussion on Reddit because Reddit is well known, in certain internet circles, as the place to go to talk with like-minded people if you are a someone who is an atheist or an agnostic or simply a person who is not too fond of religion in general. And the people on Reddit are often very thoughtful in their discussions of religion – at least in between their references to narwhals, bacon and quotes from movies like The Princess Bride. And so it seemed like the perfect place to look for insightful suggestions. And indeed it was.
For example, one Redditor, who posts under the user name Sintaxi, quickly put a finger on one key point that is a huge cause of frustration and miscommunication between Christians and non-Christians in response to my video. Sintaxi said, “This is what I would like your congregation to learn…
“What is the origin of the bible as we know it today? Who edited what books and for what reasons? What were the criteria for books to be included or omitted? Which biblical accounts have historical documents to corroborate said events actually happened.
“Basically, Christians have bet the farm on the bible being factual and expect others to do the same, yet they know nearly nothing about it. This seems irresponsible to me. I would sleep better at night if pastors put effort in educating their congregation on such matters.”
You see, we in the church have a very high view of the Bible, of course. It is, in many ways, the highest authority we have. In many Christian circles, if there is some dispute or disagreement over a point, people will naturally turn to scripture to resolve it and it is generally agreed, “If it says so in the Scriptures, that settles it.” And, yes, this does drive people who are not already committed to the Christian faith kind of crazy because, for them, they don’t necessarily see why this book should have any more authority – should be any more true – than any other.
And, honestly, we are often not very helpful. When we are asked why the Bible should have that kind of authority we will respond by saying that it says in 2 Timothy that ‘All Scripture is inspired by God,’ and if it is inspired by God it must be true. And then, of course, when somebody asks how you know that 2 Timothy is true, we give the obvious answer that we know that it is true because it is part of Scripture and all scripture is inspired by God. And yet, strangely, people are not impressed by this feat of perfectly circular reasoning.
I do think that Sintaxi is right and that we do not think enough about what makes this book special. In fact, we may even need to give a little bit of thought to that passage in 2 Timothy and what it meant when it was written. The second letter to Timothy was likely written sometime in the late first century. So that immediately begs the question, when it refers to “Scripture,” what exactly does it mean? When this was written, the New Testament as we know it did not exist. The canon of the New Testament (which is what we call the list of books included in the New Testament) was not agreed upon until 393 ad – hundreds of years after this letter was written.
Yes, certain parts of what we know as the New Testament certainly had been written by that time: the Gospel of Mark, certainly, and many of the Letters of Paul. But there was no collection of books at this time that had been put together and that all the Christians in the world would have recognized as being part of the Bible. No, when this letter refers to Scripture, it certainly doesn’t include what we call the New Testament.
So, maybe, you might think, when it says Scripture, it is talking about what we call the Old Testament. But, actually, it is not even as simple as that. There was, in the first century, no consensus on what was in the Hebrew Bible and what wasn’t either. Everyone agreed that the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – were Scripture, but there was no agreement about all the other books in our Old Testament. The Jewish community did not really come up with a canon of the Hebrew Bible until about the ninth century ad!
I simply point this out to remind us all about something that is pretty obvious but that we don’t stop to think about. The Bible didn’t just appear. It didn’t fall from heaven all printed and bound in a special red letter edition. It was something that developed over many centuries as all kinds of very different people wrote about their experiences of God in the midst of the trials and difficulties of their lives. Most of them realized that they were writing something important or special as they wrote it, but not many of them realized that they were writing The Bible.
I mean, when Paul wrote the Letter to the Philippians, for example, he was writing to a bunch of people in a church that he knew, trying to help them with their problems. When the Philippians received that letter, they received is as a helpful letter from their friend and teacher and they read it from that point of view. It took generations – literally hundreds of years – for the church to get organized enough to put their official stamp on the books of the New Testament and say that this one was in and that one was out.
So when, exactly, did that particular letter become Scripture? Did it only become Scripture when the Synod of Hippo put it in the Bible in 393 ad? Or did the group of Bishops at that synod merely recognize the fact that it had always been scripture? And, while we are asking, what really qualified them to decide anyway?
After all, they were just a bunch of men – and yes, they were all men – that the Church of that era had invested with some authority. And they made many of their decisions based on the political, theological and church issues that they were struggling with at that time – issues that actually would matter very little for us today. They explicitly included some books and excluded others even though those books were very popular and considered to be part of the Bible in certain churches. Books like The Gospel of Thomas, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, The First Letter of Clement and The Didache were summarily declared to be not scripture despite the fact that Christians had been revering them as scripture, in some cases, for centuries. What guarantees to us that they made the right decisions? Did God just intervene in that meeting – working through their petty little concerns – to make sure that they picked the right books?
We are told in 2 Timothy that “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” And, despite the fact that I know that the process that decided what would be in the Bible had its apparent flaws, I do agree with that passage. I think that we, as humans, have a certain need for Scripture – for a book or a collection of books that we can look to and find useful for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness even if we sometimes struggle with it. But finding and recognizing scripture is maybe not so simple as we may have assumed – unless you just want to take the word of a bunch of old guys sitting around at a synod meeting in a place called Hippo.
Of course, the key thing about all scripture according to this letter is that it is “inspired by God,” or, as it is put in the New International Version that we read from this morning, it is “God-breathed.” But whatever that means, it cannot mean that the creation of Scripture happened in such a way that everyone immediately knew that what Paul or Jeremiah or John of Patmos wrote had come directly from God. It can’t mean that God dictated the thing word by word. Inspired by God has to mean that somehow God’s spirit was at work in those writers lives – speaking through their experiences, counselling them in their decisions and correcting them in their mistakes.
So, yes, even though the Scriptures are inspired by God, that inspiration came through human experience. In the same way the recognition of certain ancient pieces of literature as Scripture also happened through a very human process as God worked through the events of the times. It really couldn’t have worked in any other way. If the Bible had simply dropped onto the earth as a fully printed and bound volume, written in the language of heaven and speaking of things like the Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Neuroscience (that is, speaking of things that we have only just begun to understand today) and perhaps even speaking of things that our modern scientists have only begun to dream of, what use would a book like that have been to ancient Israelites? They would have rightly thrown it out as so much gobbledygook.
To speak to them and to their lives – and ultimately, I believe, to speak to us and our lives too – the Bible had to speak in a language that they could relate to – the language of human experience and so it had to come out of human experience.
Sintaxi observes that “Christians have bet the farm on the bible being factual and expect others to do the same.” I know that there are many Christians who do exactly that – who insist that, in order to be valid at all the Bible has to be entirely correct in everything that it might have to say. They will treat the very possibility that the Bible might be wrong on some point of history or science as something that will bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.
But I will confess that I don’t think that way. I see the Bible as true. It is there to communicate the truth about God, about who Jesus was, about how we, as human beings are to relate to one another and to God. But it communicates that truth through the experiences of the writers and based on their human and sometimes rather primitive understanding of history, of science and of the universe. Sometimes their understanding was flawed and those flaws come through in the text which means it is not always perfect in the facts that it covers. But that does not stop it from being true.
God was committed to get the truth that it proclaimed through to us. And so God worked through the inspired minds of those writers, and perhaps even in the minds of a bunch of men sitting around at the Synod of Hippo deciding what books to leave in and which ones we could do without. Their decisions may not have been perfect – some of them may have had imperfect motivations – but somehow the result was Scripture because indeed those books are “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”