Category: Bible

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.

A reader writes:

Hi Jimmy!

I’m a long-time reader of your blog, since the very beginning actually! I just wanted to ask your opinion on an issue that recently came up. I joined a bible study not too long ago on the book of Genesis. In this study, we learned that the Pentateuch was not actually written by Moses, but that portions were written by various authors at various times, which explains why many accounts supposedly contradict each other.

For example, the study mentioned 4 “authors”: Priestly, Yahwist, Elohist, and Deuteronomic. Each has a unique style to express their message. Our facilitator then talked about the two different creation stories, and how they reflected different authors with different purposes. This type of bible scholarship seemed a little too “modern” and liberal to me, so I wanted to ask if there was any merit to this type of scholarship. Has the Church said anything about the idea of 4 different authors composing the Pentateuch, esp. with regards to the book of Genesis? Thanks!

Early in the 20th century the Pontifical Biblical Commission issued documents rejecting this type of approach to the Pentateuch, though these documents were disciplinary in force (as opposed to doctrinal) and they lapsed in the mid 20th century. Since that time, Catholic Bible scholars have been permitted to advance this kind of view.

If you read John Paul II’s Original Unity of Man and Woman, it is clear that he personally favors the four-source hypothesis. This, however, is his personal opinion and not something that he (or the Church) has taught with Magisterial authority. Consequently, it is incorrect to represent it as something the Church teaches.

It also is worth pointing out that the four-source hypothesis is not certain. In fact, in Protestant circles, the theory has become passe to many, with scholars claiming that the so-called Elohist source is really not a separate source at all.

There are also significant refutations of the theory. I especially recommend the book Before Abraham Was, by Kikawada and Quinn. It is absolutely devastating. First they make the strongest case they can for the theory. Then they tear it apart. Unfortunatley, it’s out of print, but a used book service may turn it up.

Personally, I have not studied the matter in sufficient depth to resolve in my mind the question of how many and what sources there may be contributing to the Pentateuch, but I am quite suspicious of the idea that the four-source hypothesis has it correctly worked out.

I also would like to comment on the particularly destructive way in which the hypothesis is often presented. It often is portrayed as an explanation for numerous "errors" or "contradictions" in the Pentateuch. In reality, there are none of these. As Vatican II taught, whatever is asserted by the sacred author is also asserted by the Holy Spirit, and since the Holy Spirit is infallible, he makes no errors in his assertions. Therefore, any perceived errors or contradictions in Scripture are not this in reality. They are either to be harmonized or they are non-assertions (e.g., figures of speech not meant to be taken literally).

We’ve found something like 2000 clay seal impressions in Israel that contain the legend LMLK (lamed, mem, lamed, kaf).

This is a significant legend because it likely is to be parsed L-MLK.

L, in this case, being a preposition that means "to" but also can signal personal property.

MLK is probably to be understood as MeLeK, or "king."

LMLK thus probably means "Belonging to the King."

The king in question seems to have been King Hezekiah, who reigned about seven hundred years before Christ.

There are lots and lots of these seal impressions, but the thing is . . . we’re not sure what they were used for.

READ THE THEORIES.

A reader writes:

Hi Jimmy

I was listening of KIHM’s rebroadcast of Monday’s show this morning as I am
wont to do and enjoyed it as usual.  I liked your answer to the question
about why water is mixed with the wine at Mass and as I do know something
about the history of wine (I used to sell the stuff for a living) I do want
to expand on the subject if I may.

You said that wine in ancient times was concentrated.  This gives the
impression that it had a very low water to solids concentrate not unlike
juice concentrates that one buys in the grocery store today and to which one
adds water in order to drink.

But rather ancient wines were both slightly more alchoholic and considerably
sweeter than modern wines, cloyingly so.  Therefore it was part of all
Mediteranean cultures (all of whom were wine drinkers) to add water to the
wine simply to make it palatable.

Indeed the definition of immoderate drinker in Greco-Roman culture was not
one that drank to much, but rather one that drank unwatered wine.  The
implication being that if you did that you were too uncivilized to know
better.

Of course there were exceptions to the rule.  The wines of the Greek island
of Chios were considered to be of the highest qualtiy and it was considered
bad taste to dilute them.

So I suspect (and I admit I’m just making an educated surmise here) that in
the early days of the Church, when it was time for the Eucharist the
celebrant simply did what was the cultural norm and added the water to the
wine.  But I also suspect that fairly early on someone also realized that
this cultural norm also was a excellent symbol for the Incarnation and the
dvinization of man through the Eucharist as you mentioned and the prayers
were subsequently added.

Thanks much for the info!

(LINK TO THE READER’S BLOG.)

A reader writes:

Hi Jimmy

I was listening of KIHM’s rebroadcast of Monday’s show this morning as I am

wont to do and enjoyed it as usual.  I liked your answer to the question

about why water is mixed with the wine at Mass and as I do know something

about the history of wine (I used to sell the stuff for a living) I do want

to expand on the subject if I may.

You said that wine in ancient times was concentrated.  This gives the

impression that it had a very low water to solids concentrate not unlike

juice concentrates that one buys in the grocery store today and to which one

adds water in order to drink.

But rather ancient wines were both slightly more alchoholic and considerably

sweeter than modern wines, cloyingly so.  Therefore it was part of all

Mediteranean cultures (all of whom were wine drinkers) to add water to the

wine simply to make it palatable.

Indeed the definition of immoderate drinker in Greco-Roman culture was not

one that drank to much, but rather one that drank unwatered wine.  The

implication being that if you did that you were too uncivilized to know

better.

Of course there were exceptions to the rule.  The wines of the Greek island

of Chios were considered to be of the highest qualtiy and it was considered

bad taste to dilute them.

So I suspect (and I admit I’m just making an educated surmise here) that in

the early days of the Church, when it was time for the Eucharist the

celebrant simply did what was the cultural norm and added the water to the

wine.  But I also suspect that fairly early on someone also realized that

this cultural norm also was a excellent symbol for the Incarnation and the

dvinization of man through the Eucharist as you mentioned and the prayers

were subsequently added.

Thanks much for the info!

(LINK TO THE READER’S BLOG.)

Down yonder, a reader writes:

Speaking of Matthias, I caught a sermon by a fundamentalist preacher
on the radio somewhat in the middle of it, but it seemed to me that he
was arguing that the election of Matthias was invalid, presumably
because it was done by casting lots, and that God over-ruled the early
Christians by making Paul an apostle. The moral, he said, was that we
shouldn’t force God to choose between two man-made choices, but rather,
we should give him the maximum freedom in revealing his will. (He used
Matthias as an example of this, although the principle seems valid).

My question is: how common is this line of thought? And, if Paul was
an apostle and so was Matthias, then weren’t there 13 apostles?

The line of thought is somewhat common in Protestant circles. When I was Protestant, for a time I was a member of a church where the pastor held this idea, though he didn’t phrase it so strongly (e.g., he didn’t diss the drawing of lots, perhaps because he knew high priests often did this in the Old Testament to discern God’s will).

Still, the idea is not all-pervasive in Protestant circles, and my impression is that most reject it. There is good reason for doing so as Acts portrays the selection of Matthias as a divine act and never challenges his status as an apostle. The fact Paul (who wouldn’t be converted for some time yet) went on to be a more effective apostle proves nothing. Paul also was more effective, so far as we can tell, than–say–Jude Thaddeus or Simon the Zealot, but they were clearly apostles.

There’s also another reason why the argument doesn’t work: The basic motive for booting Matthias in favor of Paul (other than an anti-hierarchial bias) is to get the total number of apostles to come out to twelve. But this won’t work as soon as one realizes that Barnabas, along with Paul, is directly called an apostle in Acts 14:14, which would boot the number back up to thirteen.

One could, of course, count the martyrdom of James son of Zebedee (Acts 12) as bringing the number down to twelve even allowing Barnabas and Paul, but at this is so long after the Crucifixion that it would be hard to explain except on the Mormon-like idea that the Twelve constituted a group that needed to be continually replenished, which the early Church did not share. It also would not explain the other (though more debatable) passages that appear to refer to additional apostles (e.g., the Andronicus and Junias mentioned in Romans 16:7).

It is simpler, I suggest to look at the matter this way:

1) In the wake of Judas Iscariot’s suicide, Peter declares (Acts 1:20-22) that his slot in the Twelve needs to be filled and he lays out a specific condition for the kind of person that needs to fill it: someone who was with them the whole time of Jesus’ ministry, from the Baptism by John to the Ascension. This suggests that the function of the Twelve is to serve as witnesses of Christ’s earthly ministry.

2) Matthias was validly elected as a member of the Twelve, as Acts 1 suggests. The other apostles or early Church Fathers never challenged this.

3) The Twelve, as witnesses of Christ’s ministry, were a group that could not continue indefinitely since only a certain number of people witnessed it. It thus was not a continuing body, as Mormons maintain.

4) Despite the function of the Twelve as witnesses of Christ’s ministry, God did call other apostles, including Paul, Barnabas, and possibly others. Some of these, such as Paul, could not be members of the Twelve because they had not been around during the period of Jesus’ ministry, but they could be afterward commissioned as apostles, either in a vision of Jesus (1 Cor. 9:1) or perhaps by revelation from the Holy Spirit (Acts 13:2).

A reader writes:

My husband and I have a question about "The Lord’s Supper" and the apostles in attendance.  Our confusion arises from a very old print of "The Lord’s Supper" that we found many years ago at an antique shop in Florida.  It is in an old gray-colored frame under "bubble" glass, and I was drawn to it because it is exactly like one that my grandparents always had in their home.  On this print are the names of the apostles at the bottom edge of the tablecloth (altar cloth).

The names listed (in Hebrew? Latin?)  are as follows (from left to right):

Bartholomaeus Bartholomew
Jacobus II James II (meaning: James son of Alphaeus)
Andreas Andrew
Judas Judas (meaning Judas Iscariot)
Petrus Peter
Joannes John
Jesus Christus Jesus Christ
Thomas Thomas
Jacobus I James I (meaning: James son of Zebedee)
Philipus Philip
Matthaeus Matthew
Thaddaeus Thaddeus (a.k.a., Judas not Iscariot or Judas the son of James)
Simon Simon (a.k.a., Simon the Zealot, the Zealots being a political movement)

Therein lies our confusion.  After Judas betrayed Jesus and committed suicide, the apostles continued the Apostolic Succession by "voting" for Matthew to join the fold.  On our print, "Matthaeus" is listed as one of the apostles at the Passover.  Was there another Matthew who was already part of the original Twelve?  Or are the names incorrect or simply added as "artistic license?"  (We also know the English translations as most are obvious and that Jacobus is the Hebrew/Latin? name for James.)

I think I can clear up the confusion. Matthew was a disciple who was named an apostle during Jesus’ ministry (see Matthew 10:2-4). The guy who was elected an apostle after the suicide of Judas Iscariot was a different guy but had a similar name: Matthias. You can read about him in Acts 1:12-26 (you’ll note that Matthew is listed among the apostles before the election of Matthias in Acts 1:13).

Incidentally, the names above are Latinized forms of Aramaic names. The "bar-" in Bartholomew is a dead giveaway. "Bar" is Aramaic for "son of." If the name were Hebrew, that would be "ben." ("Bartholomew" = "son of Ptolemy," though Ptolemy isn’t an Aramaic name; it was popular around this time due to being the name of one of Alexander the Great’s generals who later ruled Egypt). What happened is the folks of olden times took the Aramaic names of Jesus and the apostles, passed them through Greek (where they got modified a little) and then made them sound Latin by adding Latin endings and such to them.

I’ve put the English equivalents along with some explanatory notes alongside the names above in red. Hope it’s useful.

We want to share this information with our church family at our Cathedral in Charleston, SC.  We have a fabulous stained glass window of the Lord’s Supper and were discussing the names of the Apostles with the head of the tour guides.  Many had never seen the names of the Apostles listed, so we wanted to share accurate information.  Any assistance that you may offer would be appreciated, or if you could direct us to another resource.  We were unable to find the exact names and the seating order in the Bible.  Our print is certainly not a "DaVinci," but it is quite beautiful and a prayerful part of our dining area.

Cool! Hope the above helps.

Incidentally, the seating order is something made up by the artist, so you should examine the stained glass version to see if it seems to have the apostles in the same places. Generally there are little visual signs to indicate which are which. For example, Peter is depicted as an old man, while John is depicted as a young man (and is always seated next to Christ in pictures of the Last Supper, typically with Peter next to him).
 

146 year ago today, Aleph was found.

Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It is also the symbol used to designate Codex Sinaiticus, which is the Aleph found in 1859.

Codes Sinaiticus is a fourth-century uncial manuscript of the entire Greek New Testament (as well as parts of the Old Testament and other works).

(An uncial manuscript is one written in all capital letters, which is basically what all manuscripts were before the invention of lower-case letters.)

Codex Sinaiticus is one of the two most important manuscripts in New Testament textual criticism (the study of which variants in New Testament manuscripts were most likely in the original–now lost–documents). The other most important manuscript is Codex Vaticanus.

Sinaiticus was found by Constantin von Tischendorf in a monastery (the Monastery of St. Catherine) at the ostensible site of Mt. Sinai (hence the name) in Egypt.

The text to the left is taken from Codex Sinaiticus.

(Incidentally, a codex is the modern form of a book that we use today, with pages attached to a spine, rather than the older form of book with pages dewn end-to-end, making a scroll. Christians popularized the codex or modern book.)

Codex Sinaiticus helped revolutionize the study of the textual history of the New Testament.

A reader writes:

Somebody’s been quoting this passage on a board I frequent often (www.bolt.com): Proverbs 6:16-19 "These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: {17} A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, {18} An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, {19} A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren."

Is it then proper to say that god Hates.

Also, What is youre take on the Hebrew notion of Hatred.  I am aware that it doesn’t have certain kinds of catagorically discriptive terms.  So if you have a first and a second choice, they may be discribed as "first and last" or if you like one option more than the other one may be "loved" and the other "hated".

Any thoughts.  Is it correct to say "God Hates,"?

Since Scripture uses the term in regard to God, it is possible to say that in some sense God hates. The question is: What sense? (Or senses.)

Since God is Love, and since he is very different from us, it is not to be expected that God hates in the same way we do. As Aquinas notes, God doesn’t have passions the way we do.

In an obvious sense, to say that God hates something (because it is evil, e.g., shedding innocent blood) may be taken to mean that it is inconsistent with his goodness.

In other cases, to say that God hates something (e.g., "Jacob I loved but Esau I hated") or that God wishes something to be hated (e.g., "If anyone comes to me but does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, and yes, even his own life–he cannot be my disciple") then it may be understood that he prefers something to it (Jacob rather than Esau) or that something else is to be preferred to it (having one’s first loyalty to Jesus rather than to any other).

It may also be possible to find places where divine justice is said to be administered in terms of God’s hatred of sin. In these cases, Aquinas would tell us (though I don’t have the reference handy) that God is willing a non-moral evil (e.g., pain) for purposes of a greater good (upholding justice, correcting behavior).

What cannot be said is that God commits the sin of hatred, i.e., willing evil against someone for its own sake.

As far as the Hebrews’ conception of hatred (which at times may have been expressed in Aramaic or even Greek rather than Hebrew), it may have been broader than ours, at least in the sense that the term could be used in senses that we today would never use it in English (e.g., Jesus’ statement about hating your family, though this may have been as shocking to its original audience as it is to us, so a broader understanding is not clear from that verse alone).

I am dubious of our ability at this late date to come up with a refined, carefully nuanced understanding of the meaning of the relevant Hebrew vocabulary. When you don’t have speakers of the dialect alive to question about what terms do and do not include (and biblical Hebrew is not identical to modern Hebrew, so the Israelis don’t count) it is difficult to reconstruct the exact parameters of words.

I suspect that the ancient Hebrews had a largely anthropomorphic understanding of God’s hatred, and the distinctions we would now draw are based on the revelation Christ gave us, as meditated upon throughout the centuries of Christian reflection.