Category: Bible

A reader writes:

I have become reaquainted with a friend from highschool and we have had a couple of conversations of a religious nature. I have just recently come back to the Catholic faith and have been studying diligently but feel inadequate to answer some of his questions. He recently wrote to me regarding his criticisms of the creation of the Bible.

He states that the process of collecting and consolidating Scripture was launched when a rival sect produced it’s own quasi-biblical canon. Around 140 a Gnostic leader named Marcion began spreading a theory that the New and Old Testaments didn’t share the same God. Marcion argued that the Old Testament’s God represented law and wrath while the New Testament’s God, represented by Christ, exemplified love. As a result Marcion rejected the Old Testament and the most overtly Jewish New Testament writings, including Matthew, Mark, Acts and Hebrews. He manipulated other books to downplay their Jewish tendencies. Though in 144 the church in Rome declared his views heretical, Marcions’s teaching sparked a new cult.

Challenged by Marcion’s threat, church leaders began to consider earnestly their own views on a definitive list of Scriptural books including both the Old and New Testaments. He goes on to say that he thinks the process was flawed.

Would you please comment on this and possibly refer me to some writings on this subject? Your thoughts on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

This is a case of "right premises, wrong conclusions."

It’s true that Marcion rejected the Old Testament, holding that it had a different god, and that he produced an edited version of the New Testament (consisting of an edited version of the Gospel of Luke and edited versions of Paul’s epistles) that he had stripped the overtly Jewish passages out of.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MARCION HERE.

It’s also true (or thought to be true) that Marcion’s release of his mutilated canon helped spur the solidification of the real canon by the Church.

But . . . so what?

God often uses heretics to spur the Church to codify in explicit form what was handed down from Christ and the apostles. The Church tends to deal with things in a pastoral manner, meaning that if something hasn’t become a problem, it doesn’t come down on it with the full force of its teaching authority.

The fact is: Being challenged makes people get more explicit and precise about their beliefs. As long as they aren’t challenged on them, they aren’t forced to think through how to defend them and precisely what their boundaries are.

In the beginning, Jesus handed on certain Scriptures as divine to the apostles (i.e., the Scriptures of the Old Testament), and the apostles and their associates wrote new Scriptures (i.e., the New Testament0, which they handed on to the Church.

As long as nobody was challenging these Scriptures with a rival set, there was little need to write out a formal list of precisely what they included.

But when Marcion comes along and starts chucking out large portions of Scriptures known to have been handed on from Jesus and the apostles, the Church needed to start making explicit statements on the point in order to protect the faithful from absorbing his harmful ideas.

It thus reaffirmed in a more precise form what had always been believed.

That’s what typically happens when a new heresy crops up: The Church his forced to articulate what it has always believed in a more forceful and precise way.

Marcion wasn’t the only gent who furthered this process regarding the canon, either. In the second and third centuries lots of Gnostic individuals wrote phony gospels that they tried to pass off as the genuine article. Since these disagreed with the doctrine that had been handed down from Christ and the apostles by Tradition, and since they showed up all of a sudden, with no tradition of their having been used in the churches as handed down from the apostles, it was easy to spot them as fakes. But to prevent ordinary individuals from being taken in by them, the bishops felt it prudent to start issuing lists of the authentic Scriptures and contrasting them with the new-fangled forgeries.

Again: What had always been believed was being reaffirmed more forcefully and precisely.

None of this gives us any reason to doubt the canon or think that the process leading to it was flawed. The process was superintended by the Holy Spirit, who inspired the Scriptures, to make sure that the Church ended up identifying the right ones. Individual bishops, not possessing the charism of infallibility, might make mistakes, but the Magisterium of the Church as a whole (which does possess the charism of infallibility), could not err once it defined the matter.

That was some centuries later, but even before then the fact that Marcion’s scripture and the Gnostic scriptures were rejected as incompatible with what had been handed down from Christ and the apostles shows that the process of preserving and passing down the authentic Scriptures was working.

A reader writes:

The recent blog post about the Pentateuch brought something to mind I hope you can help me with. I know you are busy and I don’t want to take much of your time, but my difficulty is how to find scholars whose works I can trust and learn from. I have heard you recommend the Word Biblical Commentary series before (which I intend to look into), but I am thinking more of Catholic individuals like Joseph Fitzmyer and Raymond Brown and the like. Both of these men have been members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and one would think that means they have some good things to say, but I have also heard some reservations expressed about some of their work. Finding sources I can trust has been a serious stumbling block for my delving deeply into scripture. I am not trying to open a political can of worms but I don’t know of any objective source to learn about scripture scholars. Who to read and who to avoid? Any thoughts you may have would be appreciated.

I wish I was able to offer more encouraging thoughts than what I am able to, but here is what I can tell you:

1. The state of Catholic biblical scholarship today is such that I can only recommend individual commentaries by individual authors here and there.
2. The biggest names (e.g., Ray Brown) cannot be recommended to a general audience. They do have good things to say, but they frequently are far too uncritical of higher critical ideas and they present their material in a way that is often faith-challenging rather than faith affirming. A lot of the time it comes down to how you say things, and these guys don’t have the knack of saying things in a way that communicates the concept in a way that makes it clear to the average reader how this is to be harmonized with the faith.
3. A lot of the problem goes to the hermeneutic of suspicion that is possessed of contemporary critical scholarship. Rome has been growing increasingly concerned about this problem and has been making noise about it but hasn’t yet acted decisively on it.
4. From what I can tell, it seems to me that the different biblical scholarship communities–Catholic, Protestant, Jewish–go through cycles in which the commentaries they are cranking out are flourishing or moribund. Currently, the Catholic community is in a largely moribund phase, though with some bright spots here and there.
5. What I would suggest is that you start by getting a copy of the 1950s edition of Bernard Orchard’s A Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, which is out of print but can be ordered from used book services like Loome Theological Booksellers. The scholarship is somewhat out of date, but at least it’s faith-affirming and will give you a baseline, traditional Catholic take on Scripture.
6. Once you have that, branch out by comparing what it says to more recent commentaries. Don’t limit yourself to Catholic ones, either. The Word Biblical Commentary is a good set, and it’s Protestant (broadly Evangelical, specifically). The Navarre Bible (a Catholic set that doesn’t cover the whole Bible yet) is orthodox and more contemporary but is more devotional than scholarly.
7. Some of the best commentaries I’ve read of late have actually been Jewish (they seem to be going through a flourishing phase). The Jewish Publication Society’s JPS Torah Commentary (edited by Nahum Sarna) is particularly good. Also, reading some Medieval Jewish commentaries like Rashi on Genesis is good.
8. There are some volumes of the Sacra Pagina set that are good, but I haven’t read them all, so I can’t give a general recommend.

Wish I could give better news, but that’s what I would recommend at present.

NOTE: I’d ask folks not to recommend this and that scholar or commentary in the comments box as I likely have not read and would not feel comfortabl letting a recommendation of this nature stand without having done so. If you want to suggest one, e-mail me and if I have read it and agree, I may include it in an update to this post. Thanks!

(Other comments are fair game.)

A reader writes:

Mr. Akin,

I have listened to you on EWTN’s Radio program ( when the reception is audible) and really enjoy your program and answers.

I have been struggling with some Faith questions for some time now re: Bible events and have tried not to think of them because of fear of the loss of my faith. However, especially lately when I listen to the Gospels, these questions have been insistently coming up.

ie; Who was there when?…….

The angel Gabriel spoke to Mary?

So far as we know, it was Gabriel and Mary. Others may have also been present, but even if so, we don’t know if they saw or heard Gabriel or if that was given only to Mary.

When the devil spoke to Jesus in the desert for 40 days?

So far as we know, Jesus and the devil during the actual moments of temptation (testing), though I’d suspect that other folks ran across Jesus during this period. Also, after the testing, angels came and ministered to Jesus.

When the ‘Babe lept’ in the womb of Elizabeth?

So far as we know, Mary, Elizabeth, and the two unborn babies. Zechariah and possibly others may also have been present.

Etc.

These are Gospel ‘stories’ and I assume they are to be taken as Truth. Today’s Gospel was of Jesus’ 40 days in the desert. St. Matthew wrote this Gospel. Or did he?

Despite the talk you hear, much of which is based on bias rather than evidence, I have no reason to think anyone other than Matthew wrote the gospel attributed to him. Indeed, the very fact that Matthew’s name is on it is evidence that he wrote it. Claims need to be taken at face value unless there is reason to doubt them. If you adopt a hermeneutic of suspicion regarding historical sources, whereby every source is "guilty until proven innocent," you’ll cause virtually all of our knowledge of the past to go out the window. That is simply unreasonable.

Further, Matthew was a minor apostle apart from his gospel, so if you were going to make up an attribution to make a gospel sound impressive, you’d pick someone other than Matthew.

Similarly, Matthew was a former tax-collector, a group hated and despized by first century Palestinian Jews. Yet Matthew’s gospel is the most Jewish of all the gospels, written with a clearly Jewish audience in mind. If someone were going to write a gospel for a Jewish audience and then make up a name to slap on it, they’d pick someone other than a tax-collector like Matthew.

Consequently, I have no reason to doubt the traditional attribution of Matthew.

There is a lot of controversy about who wrote what Gospel. Despite that, someone had to be a witness to these events didn’t they? These events had to have an author.

The gospels and other books of Scripture have to have authors, but the author doesn’t have to be there for every event they record. As historians (even if not historians of the kind we have today), the authors of the gospels talked to people who were there for the events they describe. It has long been thought, because of his focus on Mary in the early chapters of his gospel, that Luke spoke to Mary as a source. If not her, then another member of the family who preserved the family’s knowledge of the events surrounding Jesus’ birth.

Similarly, though Jesus was (so far as we know) alone with the devil during the temptation, that didn’t stop Jesus from telling the disciples of the event or them writing it down afterwards.

In each of these cases, the witness from whom the knowledge of the event springs is likely the person who experienced the event.

In the Annunciation, I would think Mary’s modesty would prevent her from telling anyone about the Angel Gabriel.

I don’t think I by this. I think you are likely projecting your own (praiseworthy) modesty on to Mary. I think Mary (a) would want to glorify God by telling people what marvels he was doing and (b) would be forced to disclose what happened by her ensuing pregnancy. She couldn’t simply get pregnant with no explanation of how it happened.

My questions go on and on.

My question for you is: Without my having to spend an exorbitant amount of time looking up books and reading mega pages, could you possibly direct me to somewhere or someone where I could get some answers to these Faith questions???

I would really appreciate any help you could offer. Surely, you must have struggled with some of the same questions at some point in your faith journey?

I did. And I hope the above responses are helpful for the questions that you mentioned. You’re welcome to e-mail further questions for answers here on the blog. I’d also recommend visiting these two sites:

CATHOLIC ANSWERS FORUMS

CATHOLIC-CONVERT FORUMS

Hope this helps, and God bless!

Well!

The post below on possible sources in the Pentateuch really triggered an avalanche of comments regarding the subject of inerrancy.

Rather than do a reader roundup on this, lemme address the subject in a more general way and see if that helps folks out.

First, the teaching of the Church is and always has been that the Scriptures are free of error.

This has to be understood with some nuance, however, as there are things in Scripture that could be taken in a sense that is erroneous. That does not make them errors. It means that the understanding being ascribed to them is erroneous.

For example, when Jesus teaches a parable and says that there was a man who rented our a vineyard and, when it was time to collect his share of the crop, he sent them servants who got beaten, stoned, and killed, and who later sent his son, on whom they fixed murderous designs–it would be erroneous to assume that there was such a man who did all these things. Jesus is asserting something in the parable, but what he is asserting is the deeper spiritual truth that the parable is meant to teach. He is not asserting the literal existence of such a man.

Thus we need to attend to what Vatican II said about the matter in Dei Verbum 11:

Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation [SOURCE].

Some have tried to argue that the clause "for the sake of our salvation" narrows the scope of inerrancy to just truths connected in a more or less direct manner with salvation. This won’t work, however, because the passage affirms that "everything asserted by the inspired authors
or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit." The only way this could be maintained while simultaneously maintaining that biblical inerrancy is restricted to soteriological truths would be if the only things the sacred authors assert are soteriological truths.

That hypothesis would clearly be false.

It is clear that Scripture does assert things, including matters of history, that are not soteriological. For example, Scripture clearly asserts that Peter was the brother of Andrew in some accepted first century meaning of the word "brother." It teaches the same for James and John, the sons of Zebedee. These matters are historical (at least from our perspective), not soteriological.

Consequently, Scripture contains assertions of a non-soteriological nature, including assertions about history, and such assertions are therefore assertions of the Holy Spirit and therefore without error.

The “for the sake of our salvation” clause thus refers to the purpose for which God put his truth into Scripture, not to a restriction on the scope of God’s truth.

The tricky part is figuring out what is an assertion and what isn’t. Scripture is a complex and rich text that uses many different means of conveying God’s truth. Since some of these involve ancient modes of writing and speech that are not used in 21st century English literature, it isn’t always clear to us what precisely is being asserted. Indeed, Scripture acknowledges that it isn’t always clear, as when St. Peter notes that St. Paul’s writings contain many things that are hard to understand (2 Pet. 3:16).

This difficulty in figuring out what is being asserted by the sacred author has thus been with us since the beginning. It is a principal cause of theological disagreements among Christians, and it is a sign that God wishes us to (a) use the intellects he gave us to try to figure out what he was saying to us and (b) since "no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of private interpretation" (2 Pet. 1:20) to also exercise the theological virtue of faith in relation to the Church, "the pillar and ground of truth" (1 Tim. 3:15) to help us when our own intellects fail.

Above I used the example of a parable of Jesus to show the difference between what the sacred author is asserting and how this could be misunderstood by misinterpreting the sense in which the particulars of the passage are to be taken (i.e., as a literal story of an actual historical event). I picked this because it is an obvious example.

Most of the time, the difficulty is not so obvious. The historical books of the Old and New Testament contain real history, but it is not history written the way we would write history today. It obeys the rules of ancient historical writing, which are significantly different (e.g., you don’t have to footnote everything you claim).

Because we do not today have a full understanding of the rules by which the ancients wrote history (and the rules varied from culture to culture and from time to time), it can be difficult figuring out what is being asserted in the proper sense and what is not being so asserted.

When we encounter something that is not being asserted, we cannot charge the sacred author with error because only assertions can be erroneous. If I’m not asserting that something is true then I am not making a claim that can be in error. The most that could be said is that what I said would be erroneous if taken as an assertion of fact.

Thus if I talk about the sun rising in the morning, and someone fails to note that I am using phenomenological language (the language of appearances), he might say that what I said was false, but he would be wrong. I was not asserting that the sun literally rises in relation to a stationary earth. That is not the sense in which I meant my words to be understood, and so that is not what I was asserting. I would be wrong if I had meant that, but I didn’t mean that. Therefore, my assertion was not false.

When we approach Scripture, we must be sensitive to the fact that there are many things in it that may strike us as being assertions that, to the ancient audience, would not have been so understood. If we run across something that seems false or seems to contradict some other passage, we know that what Scripture says is not wrong. We simply have not correctly identified what is being asserted in one or both passages.

MORE INFO HERE.

UPDATE: HERE, TOO.