Category: Bible

A reader writes:

What should I say to someone who says that Genesis
chapters 6 through 9 regarding Noah and the flood is
based on the 2nd millenium B.C. Babylonian story of
Utnapishtim told in the Gilgamesh epic, which in turn
was based on the 3rd millenium B.C. Sumerian story of
Ziusudra?

Don’t forget Atrahasis and Deucalion and Xisuthrus!

They were ancient mariners who survived floods because of superhuman warnings, too!

The fact is that there were just a lot of flood stories in the ancient world–and not just in the Middle East and Mediterranean region.

These stories are reflecting a primordial flood event (or events), and the stories ammount to a whole genre in the ancient world.

It’s clear when reading the early chapters of Genesis, if you know the legends of the surrounding pagan peoples, that what is happening is that the author is correcting popular stories of the day from pagan stories by offering the real (monotheistic) account of what happened and offering an anti-pagan apologetic in the process.

"It wasn’t the water god Ea who warned the flood survivor, it was the God of everything–Yahweh–who did so!"

And since everything asserted by the Holy Spirit is true, everything that is asserted in the story of Noah is true. The Genesis account offers a true account of everything it asserts.

The question of what in the story is an assertion is not always easy to determine, for the ancients’ modes of speech and writing are not the same as our modes. As Pius XII pointed out in Divino Afflante Spiritu,

What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context; the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use.

For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East [Divino Afflante Spiritu 35-36].

In fact, be sure to read all of sections 35-39 of the encyclical.

Much of the early chapters of Genesis employs forms that are quite different than those in use today, and the Church has acknowledge that the accounts in Genesis of the creation and fall of man in particular contain symbolic elements (CCC 337 and 390), and the same is presumably true of how it would have us read the other material of the primordial history part of Genesis–as expressing the actual truth but in a way that incorporates significant non-literal elements.

That means that we should expect the flood narrative to express the truth in a way that contains significant non-literal components.

What might those be?

Well, as Pius XII pointed out, the ancient writers used the modes of speech and writing that were common in their own day. To figure them out, you have to conduct "a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East," and the fact that there was a flood story genre at the time suggests that we would expect elements that were standard to that genre to appear in the Genesis account of the flood. They were standard parts of the flood story genre and would have been expected by the audience, the same way we expect the sheriff of a western to have a gunfight with the villain. The ancient audience was thus in a position (a better position than we are in) to recognize what elements are likely the author’s way of telling the story because it is required by the genre.

And this doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen that way in history. Sheriffs really did have gun battles with  criminals in the Old West, and ancient flood survivors really would have reacted to their experience in a particular way.

If the answer is "Opening a window, sending out a bird to see if the waters have receded, and offering sacrifices in thanksgiving" then the question is likely to be "What would an ancient flood survivor do, Alex?"

I am particularly unimpressed by some of the parallels mentioned here. The idea that the storm phase of the flood lasted for a certain number of days and nights in several epics can be directly attributed to the role of reckoning time in terms of days and nights in ancient Near Eastern culture. The fact that the survivor offers sacrifice is similarly unremarkable since that’s what survivors of calamities did. As is the idea that the aroma of the sacrifices were smelled by and pleased the divinity, since roasting meat smells good and the smell can be presumed to go up to heaven, like smoke.

These are the kind of things one would expect in any ancient flood narrative, so if the author of Genesis included them in his account of the event then that is nothing more or less than what one would expect. Their appearance is thus unremarkable.

If the author of Genesis knew that the ancient flood survivor was warned by the true God–not a false one–and told the story according to the conventions of the day, based on the culture of the day, then Big Deal.

We’re still left with the question of which of these elements are meant to be taken as factual assertions compared to which are meant as non-literal elements shaped by other instances of the genre, but it’s no surprise to find these elements here.

If I had to respond to the claim that the Genesis flood narrative is shaped in some way by other ancient flood narratives then my response would be, "So what?"

What it asserts is still true–guaranteed by the Holy Spirit. The question is what the actual assertions are versus what are non-literal elements required or permitted by the narrative conventions of the day.

No matter what the answer to the latter question is, the truth of Scripture is in no way threatned by the discovery of ancient texts that merely add more knowledge to our understanding of how these ancient genres worked.

BTW, did you catch the Toho Studios flick where Ziusudra battled Gamera and Godzilla? That was wicked awesome.

A reader writes:

I just picked up a copy of the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and skimmed through to paragraph 18.  That section deals with the truth of Sacred Scripture and says: "[Sacred Scripture] is said to be inspired and to teach those truths which are necessary for our salvation."

As an armchair observer of the inerrancy controversy, I think I recognize the italicized portion as the motto of theologians dedicated to a limited inerrancy.  This struck me as odd and I checked the Catechism. 

Sure enough, there’s no mention there of limiting the truth of Scripture to the "truths necessary for salvation."  Instead CCC 107 says: "[The Sacred Scriptures] firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures." 

Am I reading too much into this?  I’d appreciate your comments.

This is partly a translation issue. The Compendium is modeling its language off that used in the Catechism, and the Catechism is quoting from the Vatican II constitution Dei Verbum. It’s in Dei Verbum that the problem originates.

Basically, there was a huge, behind-the-scenes fight at Vatican II about inerrancy. The traditional Catholic teaching–which prior popes had said was infallible–is that Scripture has unrestricted inerrancy. That is to say, any time Scripture makes a factual assertion then, properly understood, it’s guaranteed to be true.

But after the rise of biblical criticism in the last couple of hundred years, and the increased skepticism that accompanied it, there were some at the council that disputed the unrestricted inerrancy of Scripture, and they were able to get a formulation into a draft of Dei Verbum that seemed to restrict the scope of biblical inerrancy.

Those who held the traditional view were apoplectic and appealed the matter all the way up to Paul VI himself.

In the end, the present wording of Dei Verbum was worked out, and assurances were given that the formulation–which was still not entirely satisfactory–was not to be understood as excluding the unrestricted inerrancy of Scripture.

But there were problems: While the final formula didn’t exclude the unrestricted inerrancy of Scripture, it didn’t mandate it, either. The formula could be read more than one way, with the clause about our salvation either serving to explain the purpose for which God put his truth in Scripture or limiting the scope of the truth which God inerrantly put in Scripture.

And so after the council people started reading the phrase both ways, and even translating it both ways. The translation that the Catechism relies on uses a rendering that is more open ot the purpose-oriented, non-restrictive interpretation, but other translations lean toward the restrictive interpretation.

I don’t know what the standard Italian translation says, but I suspect it’s in the latter category, and it seems to be influencing the way in which the Compendium formulates the matter.

So where does that leave us?

After the Catechism came out, Pre-16 made a big point, which I’ve blogged about before, of explaining that the Catechism merely summarized Church teaching without changing it. All of the points touched on in the Catechism had the same weight that they always had in Church teaching–no more and no less. The fact that they were placed in the Catechism didn’t increase them all to infallible status. Things that had only been tentatively taught by the Magisterium were still only tentative; things that had been firmly but not infallibly taught were still firm but infallible; and things that were infallible were, of course, still infallible. The Catechism summarized Church teaching without altering it.

The Compendium of the Catechism, precisely as a compendium–a summary–does exactly the same thing. It summarizes what’s in the Catechism, again without changing the doctrinal meaning or weights of the Church teachings that it covers. Changing or altering the weights of teachings is not its purpose.

As a result, if you want a precise, theologically-elaborated formulation of what the Church teaches, you have to go back to the original documents, which in this case means Dei Verebum and the documents on inerrancy that preceded it. The Compendium is just trying to summarize what the Catechism says, and the Catechism is just trying to present what Dei Verbum says. It’s Dei Verbum–if anywhere–that doctrinal development occurred, not in the later works summarizing its teaching.

That would seem to leave us with the ambiguous formulation of Dei Verbum, but there are a couple of problems for those who would like to read it in a restrictive way.

First, it’s patently obvious that Scripture makes assertions that are not connected with our salvation in any obvious way. For example, the fact that Andrew was the brother of Peter in some accepted first century meaning of the word "brother" (and clearly it meant that they were brothers living in the same household, with the same biological or adopted father, not just distant kinsmen) is quite clearly asserted in Scripture.

But if you recognize that there are matters of fact that Scripture asserts that have no bearing on our salvation then you have to explain how these assertions got into Scripture. If God put them there then, since God never   asserts anything erroneous, they have to be inerrant, too.

The only way for errant assertions of fact to get into Scripture would be for the human authors to put them there–independent of God asserting them–and this is precisely what Dei Verbum won’t let you do. Dei Verbum makes a big point of the fact that the human authors asserted all that God wanted asserted and no more, so that every assertion in sacred Scripture is an assertion of the Holy Spirit.

That means that, even though Dei Verbum does contain an ambiguous phrase that can be read in a restrictive manner, the overall context of the document still blocks an interpretation of Scripture as containing erroneous assertions of fact.

Anything that Scripture says that appears to the interpreter to be wrong or contradictory, therefore, either must not be an assertion of fact but something else or it must not be understood in the correct fashion by the interpreter.

That’s problem #1. Problem #2 is that the prior teaching of the Magisterium was awfully strong on this point and can, indeed, be read as infallible.

This means that, as far as I can tell, Church teaching has not changed on this point: The Church still teaches that Scripture has unrestricted inerrancy.

But we also have a huge problem, because many churchmen–including very high churchmen–are simply unaware of the problem here or the need to clearly reassert the Church’s traditional teaching.

The sooner an awareness of that is achieved, the better, for tremendous damage is being done to the faithful by their being told through priests and catechists and who have you that Scripture is not inerrant and thus contains errors.

A reader writes:

What is the church teaching on location of hell and the duality of it Abraham’s bosom vs. hell fire.

I am curious because I recently came across some audio claiming to be the sounds of hell emanating from a 9 mile dig in Siberia". I am also wondering what you could tell me about this story and any of the others I mentioned.

I have surfed and read numerous sites opinions and even heard that we,  the Americans have a similar story form the 60’s. Then I read about Jacques Cousteau hearing screaming voices coming from beneath the seabed of Cuba.

I also recently learned of the deep sea worms that were discovered living in 180 plus degree tempereatures and read about what Jesus said "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched" (Mark 9:43-48).

Finally I read about the "paradise" side of hell, Abraham’s bosom and then fire and brimstone Hell.

The Church allows a great deal of liberty in the interpretation of Scripture. For the vast majority of passages–including the parable of Lazarus and rich man (the one mentioning Abraham’s bosom)–the Church basically allows one to interpret the text in the way one feels that the evidence best supports, as long as one does not contradict a doctrine of the faith.

While stories about hearing what sounds like sounds of hell are scary and interesting to think about, I find it very unlikely that there is any truth to them, for several reasons:

First, departed souls don’t have physical form and thus would not naturally be able to make noise. No body, no throat, no lungs.

Second, the depiction of hell as "down" in Scripture is a metaphor. Hell isn’t really "down" any more than heaven is "up." The two are not physical places in this universe. You couldn’t go to heaven with a space ship or to hell with a backhoe. Heaven and hell are depicted as inaccessably high and inaccessibly low because they are places that are inaccessible to humans–we can’t physically go there in this life–and so Scripture metaphorically uses inaccessible places (up in the sky, under the earth) to depict where they are.

(Incidentally, note that though the two places are not in this universe, they can receive physical bodies–for the saved and the damned will have their bodies after the resurrection, just as Jesus and Mary do in heaven now.)

Third, if you think about the physics of sound (i.e., acoustics) then it would quickly be clear that voices don’t penetrate rock and earth very far. Even if you had a lot of voices, they wouldn’t be able to penetrate rock and earth very far at all as recognizable screams. That’s one reason we can’t find trapped miners that easily and can’t hear them until the material trapping them is very thin. Consequently, it is unlikely that Jacques Cousteau could detect the sounds of screaming under the ocean floor unless hell was very, very close to the surface.

Same thing goes with voices from holes in the ground. Voices–particularly recognizable screams–just don’t travel that far. Hell would have to be very, very close to the Earth’s surface.

We’ve done so much exploring that, if hell really were a physical place close to the Earth’s surface then we would have found it by now. Consequently, if you hear voices shouting from a hole someone has dug in the ground you should think "trapped miners" or something like that, not "damned souls."

About the imagery of fire and worms connected with hell, this is an extension of picturing it as "down" and a place of suffering. People in ancient Israel buried their dead, and they knew that worms get involved after burials (given the fact they didn’t have hermetically sealed coffins back then, or even coffins at all), and so it was natural to picture worms as one of the torments of the damned.

Similarly, being burned by fire is about the most intense torment that a human of the ancient world could imagine (since they didn’t know about sinking electrodes into the brain’s pain reception center), making it a fitting symbol of the natural of the ultimate torment of damnation.

I couldn’t rule out the idea that there is some role for the fact that if you go down deep in caves that it starts to get hot (due to the magma inside the Earth) in the development of this imagery, but I think by far the larger role is just the fact that being burned by fire is the most intense form of torment the ancients knew.

As to the relationship of paradise/Abraham’s bosom to hell, you should be aware that the terms for hell in Scripture do not (most of the time) pick out the unique place of the damned. In the Old Testament the word is sh’ol (not SHEE-ol!) and it just describes the place of the dead, both good and bad. Same thing with the Greek word hades. Even the English word hell originally just meant the place of the dead, not the place of the damned.

Because these words were used as a catchall for the place the dead went, it was presumed that the righteous dead were comforted in sh’ol/hades, while the unrighteous were being tormented there. That’s the background to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, where both Lazarus and the rich man are in the land of the dead but are experiencing different fates: Lazarus is apparently at a banquet with Abraham and is leaning against his bosom (the was John leaned against Jesus’ bosom at the Last Supper; the ancient Israelites ate dinner reclining at a low table) while the rich man is being tormented across a gap of some kind.

Since Christ has now opened the gates of heaven to the dead, the righteous dead are in a glorified state now that goes beyond the comfort they had previously, though what this means in terms in terms of how they are spatially related to the damned is something we can’t say–or possibly even imagine–at this point.

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.