Category: Bible

A reader writes:

I have listened to Catholic Answers on EWTN Radio a little over a year and am very close to leaving the Baptist church where I have been a member for several decades, and joining the Catholic Church.  Still I have this question about Mary that I have never seen addressed anywhere:  Why is there no mention of Mary in the heavenly scene of Revelation 4 & 5?  I would appreciate an answer if you have one.

It seems to me that there are several possible answers here:

1) Mary was not relevant to the material God wanted to impart in the vision and so she did not appear in it. This answer would hinge on the idea that the vision of heaven in Rev. 4-5 is not meant to be a comprehensive survey/summary of the scene but a depicion that only depicts those aspects of heaven most relevant to the message at hand.

2) John’s limitations were responsible. The reality of heaven was so overhwelming that John could not possibly take it all in and thus God could not include everything of relevance, lest the experience be too debilitating for John. this answer may converge with the former.

3) John did see Mary in heaven but didn’t record it for an unknown reason. We know that he saw some things in the vision that he did not record. For example, he heard the voices of the seven thunders but then was specifically told not to write down what they said. He may also have been shown other mysteries (as Paul was) that he was not allowed to speak about–or even mention. Perhaps the full glorification of Mary in her Son’s presence was one of these.

4) Mary wasn’t dead yet. Personally, I’m somewhat partial to this one. I am of the school of thought that Revelation was written quite early. The internal evidence of the book supports a very early date. The book speaks of the Temple in Jerusalem as still standing, which would put the writing of the book before A.D. 70, when the Temple was destroyed. Further, much of the conflict in the book admirably fits the timeframe of the A.D. 60s, when the Roman Empire (the Beast) was getting ready to attack Jerusalem (the Whore–"the great city, where also their Lord was crucified"). Previously, the two had been allied (in that the authorities in Jerusalem had accepted Roman rule and were viewed as collaborators with the pagan empire), but the alliance was going to be broken and Jerusalem devastated, as Jesus had predicted in the Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24).

If you’d like more information, SEE HERE and HERE.

If Revelation was written within Mary’s lifetime–if she hadn’t yet died and been assumed into heaven–then there would be no reason to depict her there, so John wouldn’t have seen her.

There are likely other explanations, but these are the ones that immediately spring to mind. Hope they’re helpful!

A reader writes:

I read online recently (sorry, lost track of the link) that there was significant evidence that the story of the women caught in adultery in the Gospel of John was a late addition rather than part of John’s original Gospel.

I’d never heard this before, so I don’t know if this is some weird biblical scholarship theory or something moderately mainstream.  And if it is correct what, if anything, is the Church’s reaction to the question?  The article mentioned the story not appearing in a number of early manuscripts of the New Testament, and also said that although Augustine and later Fathers mentioned it, that earlier writers like Tertullian and Origin seemed not to be aware of its existence.

The claim that this passage in John’s Gospel–known as the pericope adulterae ("the passage of the adulterous woman"; John 7:53-8:11)–was not originally in this gospel is not at all fringe biblical scholarship. It is quite mainstream, and you’ll see it noted in the footnotes of some Bibles that the passage may not be in the original.

A good, brief summary of the reasons why it is so regarded is offered by Wikipedia:

The pericope is now viewed by critical scholars of the New Testament as an interpolation: it is argued that it disrupts the story told at the end of chapter 7 and in the remainder of chapter 8; it uses Greek more characteristic of the synoptic Gospels than of John; it appears in only one early Greek manuscript and sometimes appears in different places in later manuscripts, even interpolated in one case into the Gospel of Luke. B. M. Metzger writes that the evidence for the non-Johannine origin of the pericope of the adulteress is overwhelming.

So it’s not oddball scholarship that suggests this, which leaves the reader’s question of what–if anything–the Church’s reaction has been.

The Magisterium of the Church has not, to my knowledge, taken specific action regarding this passage, leaving us to apply the general principles that would be applied to any such manuscript discrepancy.

First, the passage is found in the Vulgate (including the Neo-Vulgate). Now, the Council of Trent issued a definition in which it said:

if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said
books entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the
Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin vulgate
edition; and knowingly and deliberately contemn the traditions aforesaid;
let him be anathema [SOURCE].

This has led some to suppose that if a passage is found in the Vulgate that it must, ipso facto, be sacred and canonical and thus in the original manuscripts, but this is not what Trent was saying. The Council was not attempting to address the question of what passages were in the originals. What it was doing was repudiating the Protestant claim that the deuterocanonicals were non-canonical. Among the deuterocanonicals are certain passages of Daniel and Esther that are not found in Protestant Bibles (e.g., Bel and the Dragon, the song of the three children). Trent’s reference to accepting "said books entire with all their parts" is meant to emphasize that not only the seven books that are wholly deuterocanonical are to be accepted as sacred and canonical but that the books that have deuterocanonical parts (i.e., Daniel and Esther) are to be accepted as wholly sacred and canonical as well.

The Council was not attempting to determine–beyond this–the authenticity of particular passages. Indeed, there were minor variations in what passages were included in different editions of the Vulgate itself, and there was no edition of the Vulgate that could be appealed to to unambiguously settle such questions. What specific passages were in the originals thus has to be determined by textual criticism, using the best manuscripts and manuscript-evaluation techniques that we have available.

This point was made by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu:

Nor should anyone think that this use of the original texts, in accordance with the methods of criticism, in any way derogates from those decrees so wisely enacted by the Council of Trent concerning the Latin Vulgate. It is historically certain that the Presidents of the Council received a commission, which they duly carried out, to beg, that is, the Sovereign Pontiff in the name of the Council that he should have corrected, as far as possible, first a Latin, and then a Greek, and Hebrew edition, which eventually would be published for the benefit of the Holy Church of God. If this desire could not then be fully realized owing to the difficulties of the times and other obstacles, at present it can, We earnestly hope, be more perfectly and entirely fulfilled by the united efforts of Catholic scholars [Divino Afflante Spiritu 20].

He went on to write:

And if the Tridentine Synod wished "that all should use as authentic" the Vulgate Latin version, this, as all know, applies only to the Latin Church and to the public use of the same Scriptures; nor does it, doubtless, in any way diminish the authority and value of the original texts. For there was no question then of these texts, but of the Latin versions, which were in circulation at that time, and of these the same Council rightly declared to be preferable that which "had been approved by its long-continued use for so many centuries in the Church." Hence this special authority or as they say, authenticity of the Vulgate was not affirmed by the Council particularly for critical reasons, but rather because of its legitimate use in the Churches throughout so many centuries; by which use indeed the same is shown, in the sense in which the Church has understood and understands it, to be free from any error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals; so that, as the Church herself testifies and affirms, it may be quoted safely and without fear of error in disputations, in lectures and in preaching; and so its authenticity is not specified primarily as critical, but rather as juridical [Divino Afflante Spiritu 21].

Here Pius XII articulates two points that are of use in assessing the pericope adulterae:

(1) the authenticity of the Vulgate is not critical but juridical, which means that Trent legally bound Catholics of the Latin Church of its day to use the Vulgate publicly but it did not attempt to set up the Vulgate as the official critical edition of the Bible so that we would no longer have to look at the original language manuscripts to determine what was supposed to be in a particular passage.

This means that whether the pericope adulterae was in the original manuscripts or not has to be settled by recourse to the original language manuscripts, not simply the Vulgate.

(2) The reason for the special juridical authenticity of the Vulgate is because its use through so many centuries had shown that "in the sense in which the Church has understood and understands it, [it is] free from any error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals."

This means that the pericope adulterae–by being included in the Vulgate–does not contain errors of faith or morals when properly understood.

And so those would be the two points that–in the absence of a current, binding statement from the Magisterium on the authenticity of the passage–one would naturally conclude regarding it: Critical scholarship must determine whether the passage was in the originals but, even if it was not, the passage does not contain errors of faith or morals when understood in a Catholic sense and so it may safely be appealed to as a passage from which Christians may learn.

MORE ON THE PERICOPE ADULTERAE.

A reader writes:

I know that the word deuterocanonical means "included in the second canon". I also know that the word is something of a misnomer since there has really only been one canon that is universally definitive, and there have been a lot more than two canons that have not been universally definitive. I have been told once by someone whom I can not now remember that the canon of the Council of Trent is closed, that there can never be such a thing as "tritocanonical books". So I remember being a little surprised some months ago when I read the decree from the Council which listed the canon that it contained no exclusive language, i.e., that it said, in effect, "these books are holy and to be received", rather than "these books and only these books are holy and to be received".

Just the other day, I was reminded of my surprise when I read this discussion of the deuterocanonical books from the Proemial Annotations of Volume I of the Old Testament of Douay, the 1635 edition from before Challoner’s revision:

"True it is that some of these books … were sometimes doubted of by some Catholics, and called Apocrypha, in that sense as the word properly signifieth hidden, or not apparent. So St. Jerome (in his prologue before the Latin Bible) calleth divers books Apocryphal, being not so evident, whether they were Divine Scripture, because they were not in the Jews’ Canon, nor at first in the Church’s Canon,  but were never rejected as false or erroneous. In which sense the Prayers of Manasses, the third book of Esdras, and the third of Machabees are yet called Apocryphal. As for the fourth of Esdras, and the fourth of Machabees there is more doubt."

Is it just me, or is Cardinal Allen here saying that these books may someday be "tritocanonical"? If this was true in 1592, could this still be true today? If not, then why not?

Please note that this issue seems different to me from the one you discussed HERE, which was primarily about a hypothetical newly discovered text. This issue is about texts which, before the 17th century, were part of or appended to almost every Christian version of the bible ever published.

As I mentioned in the post you linked, it appears that the places where the Magisterium has infallibly dealt with the canon are not phrased in such a way that they definitively close the canon. While they do infallibly include the deterocanonicals in the canon, they do not appear to infallibly repudiate the possibility in principle of ever declaring other books to be canonical.

Also as I mentioned before, I don’t think that there is any practical chance of a newly-discovered book being added to the canon, due to the lack of a tradition supporting its authentity and inspiration.

But you have named the one circumstance that could, conceivably–even as a long-shot–result in a book being added to the canon.

I don’t know what Cardinal Allen may have had in mind. It does sound like he was open to the idea of books such as the Prayer of Manasseh being declared canonical, though perhaps he was only clarifying the word used for such books ("apocryphal") without seriously entertaining the idea that they might one day be declared canonical.

But I can see a (hypothetical, long-shot) path by which such books might be declared canonical.

The fact is that some of the books that are referred to by Catholics as apocryphal (the Prayer of Manasseh, 1-2 [3-4] Esdras, 3-4 Maccabees, etc.) are accepted as canonical by other groups of Christians, notably in the East. That being the case, suppose the Catholic Church were to achieve visible union with one of these groups. How would the canonicity of these books be handled?

My guess is that they would be handled the way that other sensitive theological issues get handled in such unifications: The existing churches in the Catholic Church would not be bound to accept them but the newly unified church would be allowed to retain them.

This would be analogous to the way that there is a theological difference between the Latin church and some of the Eastern Catholic churches regarding when the consecration of the elements takes place during Mass. According to the standard theology of the Latin church (which I personally am strongly convinced is correct), the Real Presence appears at the point where the wods of institution are said ("This is my Body. . . . This is my Blood"). However, according to the theology common in some Eastern Catholic churches, the Real Presence appears earlier, when the Holy Spirit is invoked upon the elements to transform them, a point known as the Epiklesis.

Similarly, there is a theological difference concerning who performs the sacrament of marriage. According to standard Latin church theology, it is the parties themselves, but according to some in Eastern Catholic churches, it is the priest.

These theological differences are permitted within the scope of Catholic orthodoxy and, should the need arise, the question of which theological opinion is correct could be addressed definitively by the Magisterium. As long as that need is not pressing, however, the Magisterium is content to allow the differences to exist as trying to settle the question could produce graver harms, including potentially inaugurating a schism. While it would b enice to have every point of theology infallibly settled, the Church has deemed it appropriate to allow us to live with a certain amount of theological uncertainty regarding matters that occupy subordinate positions in the hierarchy of truths.

The same could be true–hypothetically–regarding the canonicity of certain books of Scripture. In fact, there was a long period of time when the Church did live with a degree of uncertainty regarding some of the books not infallibly recognized as canonical. This was because the books were of a subordinate position in the cnaon and issue of their canonicity was not pressing.

If the Catholic Church were to reunite with, say, the Russian Orthodox Church, and if the Russian Orthodox Church accepts 2 Esdras as canonical, it could be judged a matter that should not prevent the full visible union of the churches. Members of the Russian Orthodox Church-now-in-union-with-Rome would be free to continue honoring 2 Esdras as canonical, but members of the Latin church would not be required to do so.

This kind of solution I consider to be likely–IF–and that’s a significant IF–such reunions take place (which I pray they do; I’d love to see at least one such union in my lifetime).

Now let’s push it a step further: Following such a union, could the current (early 21st century) churches of the Catholic Church come to recognize such books as canonical?

Yes.

Upon the development of the kind of situation described above, it would be clear that Catholics previously in union with Rome would be free to hold the canonicity of such works, just as a member of the Latin church could–if he were so convinced–licity hold Eastern Catholic theological positions today.

It seems to me, then, that there would be a path for recognition of the canonicity of such books in the Latin and other current Catholic churches, but two things would have to happen first: (1) a long period of time would have to go by in which the canonicity of these books slowly became generally recognized in these churches and (2) there would have to be a canonical crisis at some point forcing a decision on the matter.

So I’d see a three step process to the infallible recognition of the canonicity of these books:

1) Reunion with a church that holds them to be canonical
2) A widespread acceptance of their canonicity in the previous churches in union with Rome
3) A canonical crisis to force the issue

There is also a fourth condition that would have to be met:

4) These books have to be inspired, for otherwise the Holy Spirit will not allow the Magisterium to infallibly recognize their canonicity

Independent of whether condition (4) is the case, I don’t expect to see (1)-(3) fulfilled in my lifetime for any book, unless we get an immortality pill soon.

But it is at least possible that this could happen one day (assuming condition 4 is met).

I’d note that this process finds a mirror in the early Church. While we don’t speak of the New Testament as having "deuterocanonical" books, we certainly could do so, because there were books of the New Testament whose canonicity was disputed in some churches in the early centuries. What happened was, as canonical consciousness grew, those New Testament books which were regarded as canonical in some regions eventually came to be recognized as canonical in all regions. If a sizable enough group of people regarded a book as canonical then it tended to become more favorably regarded as canonical elsewhere, until consent was universal. What we’re talking about above is essentially the same process, played out over a much larger timescale.

And such a process could also alleviate a particular nagging issue: the book of Jude quotes from the book of Enoch in a way that sure makes it sound like the book of Enoch (1st Enoch, that is) is inspired. Since the Ethiopian Orthodox Church regards Enoch as canonical, the above route could bring wider recognition of the canonicity of this book, solving the tension created by Jude’s use of it.

That’s not something to be automatically wished for, though. The edition of 1st Enoch that is used by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has lots of stuff in it that would generate new tensions, and they accept other books that would generate even further tensions if their canonicity were received.

I’m just sayin’.

 

A reader writes:

At the transfiguration it says that Jesus was talking with Moses and Elijah.  Moses and Elijah have been deceased for a considerable amount of time.  There are no portraits of either man anywhere.  Jesus is still alive, so the Holy Spirit has not descended on the Apostles yet.  So, How was Peter able to recognize that Jesus was talking to Moses and Elijah?

We really can’t do more than speculate on this one since Scripture doesn’t give us the answer, but I can envision a number of possibilities:

1) They heard the figures identified by a heavenly voice; it just doesn’t record this fact in Scripture.

2) The just knew–like in a dream–who the figures were. The fact that the Holy Spirit had not been generally given as he was on Pentecost is not really an issue for this since God can make exceptions if he wants and the Holy Spirit is said to have been active even in the Old Testament prophets; he simply had not bee poured out in the way that he was on Pentecost.

3) They may have had symbols associated with them that identified them. For example, in the icon above Moses is shown holding the Ten Commandments. I know if I saw a vision and there was an old guy with a beard talking to Jesus and he (the old guy) was holding the Ten Commandments, I’d think of him as Moses. Maybe Elijah’s mantle gave him away or (hypothetically) maybe he seemed to descend in a whirlwind or something like that.

4) It says that they conversed with Jesus, so maybe it was made clear from what they said. Perhaps Jesus referred to them by name or perhaps Moses and Elijah made references to things they had done during their earthly lives (e.g., "Back in my day the people were really ornery, too! Why I hadn’t even gotten off the holy mountain before they’d gone and made a golden calf for theyselves!").

Or maybe it was a combinatoin of these. We really can’t say, though personally I’m partial to the just knowing it like in a dream theory, followed by the conversation and symbol theories.

A reader writes:

Jimmy, I have been bothered by the question of Jesus’ geneology.  A lot of scripture refers to Him as son of David, descended from David’s line etc., and I think it traces the geneology down through Joseph, who was not Jesus’ natural father.  Can you help me here?

A lot of folks have this question, and it’s natural to wonder about this.

It’s true that Jesus was not physically descended from Joseph and thus could not have been physically descended from David via Joseph. However, physical descent is not the only form of descent there is.

There’s also adoptive descent or legal descent.

This occurred in a variety of contexts in ancient Hebrew society. As members of a patriarchical society, everybody in Israel needed to be related to somebody in order to know their place in the world, and this led to a lot of adoptions, including adoptions that were done posthumously–after the death of the person "doing" the adoption.

That’s essentially what’s going on in the case of the levirate marriage. If a man died childless, his brother was expected to marry the widow in order to produce a son who would legally be the son of the dead man. That’s a kind of posthumous "adoption" of the son by his deceased legal father, who happens not to be the same individual as his biological father.

Yet this didn’t stop the son’s sons from being reckoned as the dead man’s grandsons. Legal descent was counted as descent in a real and binding way. In fact, in the case of the levirite marriage, legal descent was more important than biological descent, for producing a legal heir to the dead man was the whole reason for the levirite marriage to being with.

There is some evidence that levirite marriages occurred in the genealogies of Christ.

SEE HERE.

So if legal descent of that kind doesn’t interrupt the descent of Christ from David then Christ being legally but not biologically the son of Joseph wouldn’t either.

This, then, may be how we are to understand Christ’s descent from David: He was a legal heir of David and so he was a son of David. Period. The biology doesn’t matter.

Or it may be that there is more to it.

St. Paul says in Romans 1:3 that Christ was "descended from  David according to the flesh." There’s a question here about how literally he means the word "flesh." He may just mean it to mean "humanly," in which case he could just be thinking of Christ’s legal descent from David via Joseph.

But he may mean the term more literally than that. If he does then . . . well . . . Christ got flesh from Mary, so perhaps Mary was also a descendant of David and Christ received biological descent from David in that fashion.

A reader writes:

I have a daughter who will be in middle school next year. She asked me a question yesterday that I didn’t have an answer for.

Basically, she wanted to know this:

Assuming that the Bible story of Adam & Eve is true, then where do dinosaurs and cavemen fit in?  What is the explanation for them?

There are basically two possibilities here, depending on whether the six days of creation are understood literally or figuratively.

If they are understood literally then the dinosaurs (I assume that you mean the land-living dinosaurs, not the aquatic or avian ones, who would have been created on the Fifth Day) would have been created on the Sixth Day, the same as mankind. They then died out at some point, the most commonly cited reason being the Great Flood.

(And who could blame Noah if he didn’t want to try to get Tyrannosaurs and Brontosaurs onto the Ark?)

Cavemen  (or at least those cavemen who were truly humans), by contrast, would presumably be descendants of Adam and Eve who took to living in caves since they didn’t have the Garden of Eden to live in anymore.

Other, not-quite-human cavemen who later died out presumably were created on the Sixth Day, along with the land animals and mankind.

If one takes the Six Days figuratively–so that they tell us what God did without telling us precisely when God did it–then presumably the common evolutionary account is what happened: God created live and allowed and guided its development over millions of years until eventually the dinosaurs arose. Then they all died (except for those that fought in the Civil War–that’s a joke!) and new life forms developed, leading eventually to the primates, which included not only monkeys and apes but also some species that were quite simliar to humans physically.

Then God took one of these (perhaps at the time of conception, and perhaps with a few new genetic changes) and endowed it with a rational soul to produce the first human.

Some of the almost-humans who didn’t have rational souls may have been some of the cavemen, but also–after the Fall–some true humans also undoubtedly inhabited caves and thus were cavemen, too, before they started building cities to live in.

Hope this helps!

A reader writes:

I’ve run across a quote in some Sabbatarian discussions:   Acts 20:7  And I want to know something about it in case it comes up again.

"On the first day of the week when we gathered to break bread, Paul spoke to them because he was going to leave on the next day, and he kept on speaking until midnight."

I’ve heard this quoted to mean that these Christians met _only_ Sunday.  The English doesn’t support that.  It could perfectly well describe a situation where they met only on Sunday, but it could also describe a situation where they met every day (as the Christians did earlier in Acts) but this was the one where Paul spoke until late.

Does the Greek have something that precludes "This is the meeting where Paul spoke late" instead of "We had our only meeting on Sunday, and Paul spoke late at it."?

There’s nothing in the Greek (as opposed to the English) that would insist that Christians didn’t have meeting times other than Sunday (the first day of the week). Christians could and probably did have meetings on other days of the week.

That’s not to say that this verse as no value for establishing Sunday as the distinctive Christian day of worship, though.

I think that the situation is more complex than a "Did they meet every day or just on Sunday?" dichotomy, though. It is possible for the early Christians to have met on multiple days of the week–including every day–while still retaining Sunday as the distinctive day of worship.

That’s how we do it today. Most parishes have daily Mass, but it doesn’t deprive Sunday Mass of its special place.

How many times a week the Christians in Troas (where this verse is set) met, I don’t know, but this verse–at least in conjunction with other passages–has modest evidentiary value toward establishing Sunday as a distinctive Christian day of worship.

Here’s how that works:

You’ll note that the verse speaks of "the first day of the week when we gathered to break bread." This doesn’t prove that they didn’t break bread (including having Mass) on other days of the week, but it does at least raise the question of whether Sunday was a distinctive day for Christian worship.

The idea that Sunday might be such a day is strengthened by passages like Revelation 1:10, where St. John records that he was in the Spirit "on the Lord’s Day," which tells us that there was some kind of special Christian holy day.

When we put that together with 1 Corinthians 16:2, where Paul tells the Corinthians to set aside money for charitable collections on the first day of the week, the idea is further strengthened that Christians were distinctively meeting on Sundays.

Add to that the fact that Christ was raised from the dead on Sunday and that Christian tradition in later centuries has been virtually unanimous in regarding Sunday as the distinctive (though not exclusive) Christian day of worship and we have a pattern suggesting that this was already established in the days of the apostles, and Acts 20:7 fits into that pattern.

SEE HERE FROM CHURCH CHURCH FATHERS MATERIALS ON THIS POINT.

BTW, don’t fail to read the rest of the pericope that Acts 20:7 introduces! It’s one of my favorite places in the book of Acts.

It’s got a terriffic story of humanity, humor, horror, and . . . and . . . something else beginning with the letter H, I guess (though I don’t know what that might be).

I think it’s hilarious that Paul keeps talking after the dramatic events of the incident.

GET THE STORY.

A reader writes:

A Baptist friend told me it is wrong for a Christian to actively seek a wife.  He says the Bible teaches this when Jesus says, "Seek first His Kingdom, and all these things will be added unto you as well," and in the verse where Paul says that if a man is single, he shouldn’t desire to get married…"

Jimmy, is it true that the Bible teaches this?  My friend said we should only be concerned about the Kingdom, not getting a wife, and God might give one to us.  I feel it is my vocation to marry.  Would it be wrong to join an internet dating service?  Or place myself in situations where I can easily meet a woman (like a line-dancing club?)

First let’s deal with what St. Paul said.

He indicated that he felt it would be better for people not to marry because "those  who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that" (1 Cor. 7:28b). The fact that he was living in an age when Christians would be persecuted may play a role in that judgment.

Nevertheless, it is not an absolute judgment, for he had just said, "if you marry,  you do not sin, and if a girl marries she does not sin" (1 Cor. 7:28a). He also said: "I wish that all  were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God,  one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and  the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do.  But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should  marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion" (1 Cor. 7:7-9).

It therefore is not wrong for a person to want to get married or to take steps toward finding a spouse.

Now regarding what Jesus said, let’s look at the "seek first the kingdom" passage with a bit more context:

[D]o not be anxious,  saying, `What shall we eat?’ or `What shall we drink?’ or `What  shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek all these things;  and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all  these things shall be yours as well [Matt. 6:31-33].

By telling people to seek the kingdom first (having it as your highest priority) instead of being anxious about what we will eat or drink or wear, does Jesus mean that we should not take active steps to get food and drink and clothes for ourselves?

No, of course not.

Jesus is not saying that we should refuse to work or make money or buy, grow, or raise food and drink and clothes.

So he’s not saying that we shouldn’t take active steps toward procuring such things, he’s simply saying that we shouldn’t stress over them to the point that it takes our focus off of God.

The same thing thus applies to getting a wife: There is nothing wrong with desiring one or taking steps to find one as long as one is not led away from God and into sin in the process.

Arthur of The Ancient and Illuminated Seers of Bavaria writes:

What exactly is the purpose of the Epistle to Philemon?  Or more appropriately, why is included in the New Testament canon?

Obviously the central message of "treat your slaves well" was far more important in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago than it is now, but even that doesn’t seem to be enough to include it in canon.

After all the rest of Paul’s epsitles are quite obviously teaching documents and were meant as such, whereas Philemon comes across more as a personal letter from Paul with some advice to a friend about a sticky household problem.

And the fact that it was simply written by Paul doesn’t strike me as sufficient reason to include it either.  A man as prolific and erudite as Paul must have written hundreds of similar short notes to people he had met on his journeys, yet they were not saved let alone considered part of biblical canon.

I think there are at least three ways of answering this question. I’m sure there are more, but here are three:

1) The Patristic Answer: In the age of the Church Fathers, anything written by an apostle came to be regarded as an important document of the faith–as Scripture.

While Paul may have written other notes, his reputation in the apostolic age was not everywhere appreciated. Thus, he had a bunch of critics and opponents, even within the Church in his own lifetime. It also was easier to see him as a man when he was still living so that you could still . . . uh . . . see him as a man. Thus he wrote some documents whose value was not fully appreciated in his own day, and they were lost under the providence of God.

This is analogous to those works mentioned in the Old Testament–including prophetic works, like the History of Nathan the Prophet and the Prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite and the Visions of Iddo the Seer–that were endorsed in the Hebrew Scriptures but were nevertheless lost in the end (cf. 2 Chron. 9:29).

For some reason, in both Testaments, God allowed apparent Scripture to be written that was not destined to be included in the final canon. Presumably these works had "short term missions" and were not meant to have the long term mission of being in the canon.

Or maybe God just allowed us to misuse our free will by losing stuff that would otherwise have benefitted us. (Though I doubt that when it comes to Scripture.)

In any event, had Paul’s other missives not been lost in his own lifetime, they would have been included in Scripture by the Christians of a generation or two later. Anything that had minimal theological content–anything other than a shopping list, let’s say–would have gone in by the time the canon was finalized. Apostolic authorship (plus minimal theological content) was enough for that.

But why did this missive survive when others didn’t?

2) The Individual Answer: In Philemon Paul is basically ordering-without-ordering Philemon to send Paul a slave named Onesimus, who had apparently run away from Philemon and then encountered Paul and become a Christian. Paul writes the letter to try to reconcile Onesimus with his master, but he also orders-without-ordering Philemon to send Onesimus back to him. He may even be hoping that Philemon will give Onesimus to Paul, who oculd then free him.

According to some of early Church writings, Onesimus later went on to become the bishop of Ephesus, and according to others, Philemon was bishop of Colossae. If either one of those is true then, since the Churches of Ephesus and Colossae were involved in the passing on of Paul’s epistles to other churches such that we have both a Letter to the Ephesians and a Letter to the Colossians in the New Testament, we have a route by which Philemon would have been preserved. It would have been important to the bishop of Ephesus or the bishop of Colossae (or both) and thus been preserved and disseminated along with the letters that were sent to these churches, so we have a route of preservation for this missive on the human level.

That still leaves,

3) The Theological Anwswer: While the overt message of Philemon may seem not-that-relevant to us in the 21st century in the developed world, where slavery has been abolished, we shouldn’t read its immediate relevance to us as a test for how relevant it would have been to others.

Slavery–in one form or another, with or without the name being attached to it–has been much more the norm than the exception in world history. It still exists legally in some parts of the world today, and it still exists illegally in others (including the United States). So its message would resonate for many people historically (and even today) much more than it would for most of us.

It would have especially resonated in the early Christian centuries since slavery was still legal at the time and–in fact–Christianity spread notably among the slave class.

Part of the reason for that was that Christianity carried the message of God’s compassion for the slave, which is the central theme of the book of Philemon.

"Treat your slaves well" may seem to be the obvious message of the book from a master’s point of view, but if you think about it from the slaves’ point of view, you get something else: "God loves you and has compassion on you and has given this letter to the Church to give your master a model for how to treat you with compassion and Christian charity."

This kind of message was in marked contrast to the way the religion of slaves was dealt with outside Christian circles. In Roman households, for example, slaves were often encouraged not to worship the gods directly but to show a kind of religious veneration for their masters (presumably this was to keep the slaves from complaining to the gods about what their masters were doing).

The Christian God, by contrast, wanted slaves to have a direct relationship to him, to become his children, to become "the Lord’s freedmen," and to be equal in the Church to their masters. As Philemon shows, God also wants their masters to show them human compassion and mercy even when they have run away from and (apparently) stolen from their masters.

All of this is a very big deal for anyone who has been a slave–and even for many who aren’t, such as people who, while legally free, are economically locked in to their jobs in a way that they cannot reasonably get out of them and go elsewhere for work.

It’s true that Philemon is not a straightforward book of teaching the way many of Paul’s epistles are, which is why it is classed among the "pastoral" epistles. But it shows how to address a pastoral situation in a way that reveals important principles that are of use not just in this particular situation but in others as well.

In this respect it is like a number of books in the Old Testament that represent wisdom literature–particularly Proverbs–that convey advice that contains important principles but that do not deliver straight law or theology.

It seems to me that, despite its brevity and obliqueness, Philemon is a clearer candidate for inclusion in the canon than certain other works, such as Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon, both of which are so unusual compared to other books of Scripture that their canonicity was doubted in the ancient world.

Still, they contain elements that are the basis of fruitful reflection, and God apparently wants us to glorify him by using our intellects to wrestle with the questions posed by the material, including the question, "Why is this book here?"

A reader writes:

Being starved for Catholic radio out here in the Bay Area, I find myself turning to an Evangelical radio station during my commute. Today, I heard a commenter saying something like this: that it was clear that the old testament writers didn’t believe in an immortal soul. The bible teaches we will be raised from the dead to everlasting life, but it doesn’t mean that our souls are immortal, that is, that our souls are alive while our body is dead.  This is an idea that is more common in Greek philosophy, he explains, but is not biblical.

Have you ever heard this theory bandied about? How would you respond to that?

There are a number of different groups that have variations on this idea. The Jehovah’s Witnesses (who are not Protestant or even Christian), for example, hold a physicalistic understanding of the spirit that basically precludes its existence between death and resurrection (meaning that there are serious questions about wheter you are still you at the resurrection). That view is not common in Protestant circles, however.

More common in Protestant circles is the idea of "soul sleep," which is that you do have a soul that continues to exist between death and resurrection but that it does not have conscious experience in the interim and is thus "asleep." Luther seems to have held this view, as do Seventh-Day Adventists and a few other groups, but it has been quite uncommon.

MORE INFO ON THESE TWO VIEWS HERE.

I can’t tell from what you said whether the gentleman you heard on the radio was saying that the Old Testament writers didn’t believe in an immortal soul or whether he was saying that it is untrue that there is an immortal soul.

These two positions are not the same. One could hold that the Old Testament authors did not believe in the immortality of the soul because this doctrine had not yet been revealed but–since it has been revealed in the New Testament–we now know what they didn’t.

If he meant this latter position then I would say he at least has part of a leg to stand on. The idea of the afterlife is not sharply defined in the Old Testament, and it is not clear what most Jews believed about the afterlife at this time. Indeed, they may not all have believed the same thing. The Old Testament spends very little time discussing the afterlife; it is focused primarily on salvation from dangers in this life rather than salvation from hell after this life, so we don’t have enough data to draw firm conclusions about the particulars of how the afterlife was conceived in this period.

We do have enough data, however, to establish that at least some Jews (and almost certainly the great majority) did at least acknowledge the existence of the afterlife.

For example, the fact that, when various patriarchs die, they are regularly said to be "gathered to their people" suggests a reunion with those who have died. That phrase is a little ambiguous, though, but here is something that is not: If belief in an afterlife was not common among the Jewish people then God wouldn’t have had to warn them against using mediums and spiritists to call up the dead.

There also is at least one passage in which the fate of a particular figure is prophecied and it describes the descent of his soul and its encounter with other souls, who recognize who it, is described. That occurs in the prophets, so one could interpret it non-literally, but one passage that is not vulnerable to this objection is the situation in which Saul has the witch of Endor summon up the spirit of the departed Samuel.

I know that there have been some (more out of a desire to say you can’t call up the dead than anything else) who have speculated that it was a demon impersonating Samuel, but this is not the way the text depicts the situation. The text presents it straightforwardly, as if the witch really did call up Samuel’s spirit (presumably by a kind of divine dispensation, since Samuel immediately prophesies Saul’s doom, which then comes to pass).

Whether or not it really was Samuel’s spirit, the passage attests to Israelite belief in the afterlife–and not just any kind of afterlife, but on in which the soul continues to exist between death and resurrection. If that’s not what you believe then there’s not point in trying to contact a dead guy.

So if the gentleman you heard on the radio was saying denying the presence in the Old Testament of belief in this kind of afterlife then he was overstating matters. It would be more defensible to say that the concept of the afterlife was not clearly defined in this age and that there may have been some Jews who did not accept it (just as some Jews did not accept the exclusive worship of God), but to say that the idea is foreign to the Old Testament is simply inaccurate.

If the gentleman was going further and saying that we do not have souls that exist between death and resurrection then he will have insuperable problems when it comes to the New Testament, because Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man clearly envisions conscious human souls in the intermediate state. The fact that this is a parable also is not an issue, for even if there was not a specific Lazarus and a specific rich man who had this experience (something that is likely), Jesus’ parables nevertheless are populated by things from the real world. They are about kings and merchants and fields and farmers and servants and sums of money and other things–like conscious, departed human souls–that really exist.

Even if he wanted to be truculent on this one, he’d also have to face the book of Revelation, which unambiguously depicts departed human souls, before the resurrection, worshipping God and talking with him in the intermediate state.

The idea that we don’t exist or are not conscious between death and resurrection simply is not tenable.

By the way, since the gentleman was Protestant he wouldn’t accept this, but it’s worth pointing out that the second book of Maccabees also has a very explicit passage on the reality and consciousness of departed souls, for Judah Maccabee receives a vision in which he learns that the departed (and unresurrected) prophet Jeremiah prays for the people of Israel. Judah also sees the soul of a departed priest in this vision.