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The Bible’s “Problems”: Reframing the Center E2
43 Plays14 days ago
Sometimes the Bible just doesn’t seem to cooperate with our efforts to develop tidy systematic theology. Pesky ‘problem texts’ require us to explain away, ignore, or discount the parts that don’t say what we want them to. "Harmonizing" texts is a polite way to describe misreading them to fit neatly into our theological paradigms our faith is built on. Nick and Matt look at some of the issues that arise when we try to use an eastern text to solve western problems. When we work to use the Bible as its authors intended, we can appreciate the multivocality of scripture, rather than selecting the parts to use and the parts to explain away. When we appreciate the benefit of dialogue, we can face the messiness of canon without a crisis of faith.
Interlude Music: I Will Hold Onto You (Instrumental Version) by Garden Friend
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
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Transcript
Introduction to the Christian Faith Exploration
00:00:01
Speaker
It's the Read Paradigm Podcast. We are continuing our conversations about the center of the Christian faith and how God is known on the Christian tradition.
Critique of Western Epistemology and Biblical Inerrancy
00:00:08
Speaker
Today we're discussing the major flaws, perhaps the defeaters, not of the Christian faith itself, but of an epistemology that rests on a sort of modernist, Western conception of the Bible speaking about God with inerrancy.
Hebraic vs. Western Interpretations of the Bible
00:00:28
Speaker
All right. In the last episode, we looked at how differently Hebraic mind handles practice and paradox and dialogue compared to the Greek and modern Western mind that we've inherited. At least I have. I don't know about you. Some days I'm a good Greek thinker.
00:00:42
Speaker
Keeping that contrast in mind, in this episode, we're going to look at what feels like devastating problems for the Western approach. And I want to say up front, this might make some of our listeners uncomfortable.
00:00:53
Speaker
The intent is not at all to be a skeptic toward the Bible or to take up the apologetics debates. It's to cut against the way we use the Bible. Because I'm really convinced that the way that we tend to use the Bible as Westerners sets it up for failure, actually.
00:01:09
Speaker
Yeah, if we as good Western thinkers pick up this Eastern text and try to use it as the basis for our systemization and for rationally organizing all the ideas, these abstract thoughts that we have about God, we're just using the text for something it wasn't designed to be used for.
00:01:26
Speaker
If we use a non-scientific text for scientific purposes, you're going to have big problems. If you use non-poetry text for poetry purposes, you're going to have big problems.
00:01:36
Speaker
And that's what
Challenges of Western Systematic Theology with the Bible
00:01:37
Speaker
we're going to talk about here. There are big problems with taking the Bible and making it the center of the Christian faith with kind of a simplistic veneer of the Bible says it, that settles it.
00:01:47
Speaker
I want to be really clear though that none of what we talk about here was a problem at all to the Hebraic mind that produced the Bible. So the problems only show up once we import Greek and Western assumptions into our reading.
00:02:02
Speaker
That truth only exists in a scientific, data-set sense. Now once we expect the Bible to function that way, its multivocality starts to look like a really big problem.
00:02:12
Speaker
you pick up a tool and start trying to use it for something it wasn't designed for, you might get frustrated feeling like this tool just doesn't always cooperate. And then what skeptics of the faith do is they will notice all these problems and they'll use these problems that we talk about here to try to cut down the faith.
00:02:29
Speaker
I would argue they're not cutting down the faith at all. They're just cutting down an epistemology that's not very sound. Hmm. So let's talk about these quote-unquote problems that we notice quickly when we approach the Bible with a Western mind.
00:02:44
Speaker
We've alluded to this several times now, and that is the problem of multivocality. Our ethics are derived from our understanding of God. This is probably true in other religions as well, I would assume it is, but for Christians, we are to be imitators of God, right?
00:02:59
Speaker
To embody his character, because we are his image bearers on earth.
Community Dialogue in Hebraic Tradition vs. Western Uniformity
00:03:03
Speaker
So, how do we know God? This is what we set out to answer at the start of the last episode and where we want to get to.
00:03:10
Speaker
What is the center of the Christian faith? Of course, evangelical Christians will say, well, we know God because of what the Bible says about him, right? Well, of course. Here's the problem, though. What part of the Bible?
00:03:21
Speaker
What part are we reading? What part has the final say in what God is like? you know, this question could actually make us who typically hold on to things like inerrancy teaching and things like that.
00:03:34
Speaker
It can kind of make us feel uncomfortable. But factually speaking, the Bible as a whole does not provide us a univocal understanding of the nature or the character of God.
00:03:45
Speaker
without butchering the individual texts by harmonizing them, we have to simply acknowledge that through the long compositional history of the Hebrew Bible until even the New Testament documents were penned, there is straightforwardly a vast difference in the way God is described throughout the biblical corpus, such that we can't simply say, well, I know God because the Bible tells me what God is like, without at least saying what part of the scriptural corpus we're talking about. That's
Multivocality in Genesis and Biblical Narratives
00:04:12
Speaker
interesting. If you'd pose that question to an ancient Hebraic thinker, they might have said something like, we know God when we, the community, wrestle through these ideas.
00:04:21
Speaker
And we discuss and dialogue and disagree and fight sometimes about how we're supposed to live out God's desire for us, his people. And the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible very much reflects that attitude, that there's space for exploration, space for a community to dialogue and to interact with this text in a really organic, meaningful way.
00:04:41
Speaker
So when we as Western thinkers pick it up thinking, oh, this is going to allow us to organize these abstract concepts into a very unified way, we're going to start running into issues really quickly. And we're left having to do things with the text that it was not designed to do.
00:04:56
Speaker
We see this sort of complex, multivocal understanding of the God of the ancient Hebrews at the very outset of the Tanakh. Hebrew scholars have long noted that there are two distinct creation accounts at the beginning of Genesis.
00:05:09
Speaker
In Genesis 1, God is described as lofty, you know, speaking order into chaos and fashioning the habitable portion of the world and telling the earth to generate all living life forms.
00:05:19
Speaker
This description aligns well with our inherited monotheistic ideas about God that we in the Western world have been brought up with. Yeah, we kind of like our picture of God far up in the sky, separated from the things that we do.
00:05:32
Speaker
The Father in the sky is a comfortable image for our monotheistic minds. However, in the Genesis 2 and 3 creation story, God is not only named in ah in a personal way that he's not in Genesis 1, but he's also not presented at all in a lofty, sovereign manner like we saw in Genesis 1.
00:05:51
Speaker
Rather, he's described as a figure who deliberates with himself. He's thinking to himself, kind of talking to himself. He sculpts the humans and animals out of the ground, seemingly with his hands. He even takes strolls through the garden and chats with his creatures.
00:06:05
Speaker
A very, maybe anthropomorphized image of this creator god. This dynamic, kind of inconsistent portrayal of God persists throughout the entirety of the Hebrew Bible, though.
00:06:16
Speaker
It's kind of an obvious feature of the Bible for anyone reading it with some level of care and respect. But importantly, it's not just these incidental details or, like I said, these anthropomorphisms that we see from time to time.
00:06:29
Speaker
Not at all. We actually see God's very character being portrayed in really extremely different ways throughout the Hebrew Bible. And that can make us really uncomfortable as Western readers.
00:06:41
Speaker
I think part of the reason we're so uncomfortable with this is because of the sort of arguments that we see in our culture around the Bible today. Absolutely. We see this debate where one side argues that the Bible is inconsistent or that it's self-contradictory and that can be used to discredit the Bible.
00:06:58
Speaker
The Christian response to that is to use interpretive methods to smooth out these differences, to show that the Bible is consistent and therefore credible. But both of these positions are taking a Western Greek thinking assumption that in order to be credible, the Bible must always present a consistent, uniform opinion. There must only be one voice in Scripture. Right. That's the assumption.
00:07:19
Speaker
i want to be careful to point out that we're not trying to step into that argument. What we're saying is that when we take the context of Scripture seriously, we don't need to unify the varying voices of Scripture, but we need to seek to enter into that dialogue that's being presented by the varying authors here. Mm-hmm.
00:07:36
Speaker
frustratingly, the apologetics debates that are so common can actually sometimes lock us out of using Scripture the way it was intended. It's really hard to engage this multi-vocal dialogue that Scripture presents if we come into the text with the Western assumption that we have to pretend that that doesn't exist. Right, yeah, exactly.
00:07:55
Speaker
I do think it's interesting to reflect on the ancient authors and compilers of the Old Testament, people who were very careful readers of these texts. It's not like they weren't aware of these differing portrayals of God and his character.
00:08:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's not like no one noticed the difference in Genesis 1 and 2. Yeah, there were different sects of Judaism where they had different texts that they considered scripture. Groups certainly could have worked to remove or edit out these inconsistencies if they had desired. They could have trimmed their scriptures down to give us a nice tidy presentation of God and his character.
Western Consistency vs. Biblical Multivocality in Ethics
00:08:27
Speaker
The fact that we know that the Bible had compilers proves the case that they could have done a better job harmonizing if they wanted to. But they don't see that as a problem. They appreciated the dialogue, the discussion, the tension that we see in the character of God.
00:08:42
Speaker
They wanted for people reading Genesis to sit down and reflect on the seeming tension that God is both lofty and separate, the creator of the universe, but that he can also work intimately with his creatures and his creation. in a way that, especially for a Western mind, is really hard to hold together.
00:09:00
Speaker
But they appreciated that holding those two ideas that seem impossible together and even being willing to wrestle with that when we as humans can't fully comprehend it is actually part of the process of coming to know who God is.
00:09:14
Speaker
But this multivocality gets really tricky when it comes down to things like the character of God, which affects our ethics and things of that nature. i kind of want to do a case study here to demonstrate that the multivocality that we see in scriptures really can affect our ethics in the real world.
00:09:30
Speaker
So, for example, according to the Bible, what does God think about collective punishment? You know, this is an important question, sweeping up the innocent with the guilty. What does God think about that?
00:09:42
Speaker
Does he always punish people specifically for their own wrongdoings? Or sometimes do innocent bystanders, other people in the community, take the brunt of that punishment? This matters a lot. It's kind of a foundational question to our theology and our ethics, and even to our societal formation and legal system.
00:09:59
Speaker
In Deuteronomy 28, 15-68, there's this really long, extensive curse list describing what would happen if the ancient Hebrews didn't keep covenant with Yahweh. God says there would be diseases, there would be drought, military defeat, their wives would be taken by others, their children would be given to foreign people, and eventually they would be sold back into slavery in Egypt.
00:10:21
Speaker
This is all framed as God's deliberate action against the whole nation, which is seemingly the result of the disobedience of some. You saw there that the children are caught up in this, even though they're not the ones being rebellious to the covenant with God.
00:10:37
Speaker
In Numbers 14, 26 through 35, after the spies seek out the land and they they report back that, you know, they'll be unable to take it, God told them to take it, but they're no, we can't do this.
00:10:47
Speaker
God condemns the entire generation of Israelites, everyone 20 and older at least, to die in the wilderness without entering into the promised land. God punishes harshly the whole community, even though they all clearly weren't part of the decision-making process.
00:11:04
Speaker
In Numbers 16, God decides to destroy the entire Israelite assembly for the rebellion of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. Moses intercedes to limit this destruction, but this is a good example of God changing his mind even, which happens kind of frequently in the Hebrew Bible, even though our Latin monotheistic tradition says that God is immutable, right?
00:11:27
Speaker
But the main point i'm driving toward here is even though it was literally just a few people committing the sin, the earth swallows up all the rebels along with their households, including their children.
Exploring the Boundaries of Biblical Conversations
00:11:38
Speaker
So these passages show us pretty clearly that God is for corporate punishment for the sins of an individual or a smaller portion of the people. Absolutely. Innocent people must get swept up with the guilty if they're in some level of proximity to them, say their children, their family, their neighbor, or something like that in this case.
00:11:55
Speaker
So God must think that collective punishment is at least sometimes justified, right? Well, not so fast. In Jeremiah 31 and in Ezekiel 18, we have something really different.
00:12:07
Speaker
In Ezekiel 18, there's this long and kind of beautiful passage. I'll kind of summarize it briefly here. it says, He goes on to give this example, he But if has a who doesn't any the right and doesn't treat his neighbor blah, blah,
00:12:19
Speaker
it is only the one who sins that shall die he goes on to give this example and he says if a man is righteous and does all the right things he shall surely live says the lord god but if he has a son who doesn't do any of the right things and doesn't treat his neighbor well and blah blah blah blah blah No, he shall surely die, his blood will be upon himself.
00:12:38
Speaker
But if that rebellious son has a son, and he then turns from his father's wicked ways and does the right things and lives the right life, then he shall surely live. The person who sins shall die. A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of the parent, nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child.
00:12:55
Speaker
The righteousness of the righteous shall be his own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be his own. Why will you die, O house of Israel, for I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God.
00:13:06
Speaker
Turn then and live. So, according to the Bible, is God for collective punishment or against it? Now I'm confused. Kind of sounds like yes and no We could give probably dozens of examples like this, where real theological questions and ethical implications are at stake.
00:13:24
Speaker
Yet the Bible, as an anthology of texts, gives us strikingly different answers depending on where we look. It's quite impossible, I think, to say in good faith, the biblical view on collective punishment is x It's also impossible to say the biblical view on justice in general is X, or of economics, or of nationalism, or warfare, or women, or slavery, or sexual sins, or masculinity, or femininity, or clothing, or property, or tithing, or familial relationships, or even things like salvation, or sacrifice, or life after death.
00:13:58
Speaker
The objective fact is that the Bible is not univocal about any of these things that i list in. These are all topics that the Bible certainly does mention or hint at or talk about, but it patently does not speak about them with one voice.
00:14:13
Speaker
Even further, the Bible obviously doesn't even address, per se, many of the questions in the modern world. You know, ai Christian nationalism, carbon gases, land allotments, policing, crypto, etc.
00:14:26
Speaker
So to have a biblical view on something turns out to be kind of a sticky task. Seems like even where we are looking in the Bible at the questions that the authors were trying to address, maybe sometimes rather than saying we're looking for the biblical view on something, we need to be looking for the kind of boundaries of the biblical conversation on that topic. Yeah, that's good.
00:14:50
Speaker
I think it's probably important to clarify here that when you're saying that the Bible doesn't give a clear single answer to every question, that you're not saying that it allows for any answer. Right. No, not at all. This is not the same as saying, oh, the text does not provide us any guidance or we can throw it out and make up whatever answers we want here. Right.
00:15:08
Speaker
careful contextual interpretation of the Bible is still extremely important. We have to pursue the author's intentions to understand the text. And I think sometimes when we look at scripture, we will find questions where all of the authors of the Bible are giving consistent single answers on.
00:15:27
Speaker
There probably are topics where there is a univocality, a kind of single biblical view. However, lots of times, like you've mentioned here, like you've pointed out pretty clearly, the authors of the Bible are going to express varying, contrasting ideas. And I think it's important that we take seriously what each of those authors is saying instead of working so hard to twist them all into some kind of an unnatural agreement.
00:15:50
Speaker
Recognizing the space that's left for dialogue between those expressions that don't always agree is actually respecting the Bible for what it was meant to do. It is precisely when you respect what each individual author is trying to say in their time and place that these discrepancies or these different voices or these different opinions come to the fore.
00:16:11
Speaker
When you're reading the Bible respectfully and properly, that's when you see more multivocality. If you want to read the Bible flatly and not honor its author, its time and place,
00:16:21
Speaker
then you can kind of more willy-nilly create harmonizations and do violence to the text. But in my opinion, like, that's actually the really unhealthy and really disrespectful thing to do.
00:16:33
Speaker
Because then the Bible could be understood to mean whatever one wants it to mean at any modern period of time. It seems like you're left having to kind of pick which of those voices you want to listen to and then wipe the rest off of the table.
00:16:47
Speaker
Yeah, disregard the rest, which we say that all scriptures are given by inspiration from God, right? That's not really an option. Gotta take it all seriously. We don't get to pick the ones that were really inspired and then the other the ones that we have to like reinterpret until they mean something really different.
00:17:04
Speaker
Correct.
Selective Interpretation Across the Bible
00:17:05
Speaker
So, multiplicality is kind of a major problem for the Western mind. It feels uncomfortable. But it's not even the only problem.
00:17:26
Speaker
Once you notice that the Bible doesn't speak with one voice, the next question is sort of unavoidable. And you kind of alluded to this. If everyone is reading the same sort of conflicted library of texts, how do we Western Christians decide what parts to actually live by?
00:17:43
Speaker
What happens, practically speaking, is that everyone just picks and chooses. And so I call this the selectivity problem. Because of the Bible's multivocality, every Christian group is left picking and choosing what biblical texts to prioritize, to emphasize, and to obey.
00:18:01
Speaker
For texts that any Christian group doesn't want to view as binding, they'll simply say something like, oh this is a descriptive section of the scriptures, not a prescriptive one. Other Christian groups will treat different texts in the same way based on their social norms in their group.
00:18:15
Speaker
It's precisely those social norms that seem to be the underlying through line by which the bindingness of any biblical text is prioritized. Hmm. Christians in social groups who aren't comfortable with tattoos or gay people will go to the Leviticus and they'll find a text that ostensibly bans both these things, right?
00:18:33
Speaker
But the far majority of Leviticus will be dismissed as not for us in our time. Or this is for the Old Covenant believers. Or this is, again, descriptive, not prescriptive.
00:18:44
Speaker
Now, I don't want us to think that this is just a feature of the Old Testament either. Even the most biblicist, conservative Christian groups will do the same thing with New Testament passages today. Christians in social settings with more traditional gender roles, for example, will appeal to passages like 1 Timothy 2.11 to say that women should not be given a place of teaching or public speaking in church gatherings, right? This is common.
00:19:07
Speaker
But most of them will not view the verses immediately preceding this passage as binding when it prohibits the use of jewelry, expensive clothing, the braiding of hair, or when it calls on men to raise their hands in the air while praying.
00:19:22
Speaker
So the admonitions that are not socially comfortable to the group will be labeled culturally bound, while the ones that reinforce group norms are treated as universal commands. one of the many tools in our tool bag of tricks that we can use for selecting which texts we want to actually live out and excusing the others away.
00:19:41
Speaker
I think it's really interesting to reflect on this wide variety of tools that people who are studying the Bible or learning systematic theology learn to use. You can look at a text and you can kind of rely on translation. You say, oh, well, you could translate this text to mean something that is in conformance with our systematic theology. A spurious translation. Yes.
00:20:01
Speaker
Sometimes you can rely on textual criticism for help there. you say You know, maybe there's some evidence that this passage was added later, so we don't actually need to consider it. You can use tricks like an imagined interlocutor or diatribe to say, ah, well, here, the author is actually quoting something that he doesn't agree with.
00:20:19
Speaker
You can just straight up go to circular logic, where you tell yourself, while looking at a passage that seems to say something wrong, that, well, we know the Bible doesn't teach that thing, so we have to find some other way to interpret this verse so that it's in accordance with what we know the Bible actually says. Right.
00:20:38
Speaker
Good interpretation of the text will sometimes be complicated and will require us to view text through a lens and a cultural understanding that doesn't seem natural to us.
00:20:48
Speaker
But it's not hard to see the ways that systematic theologies use those tricks toward the end of supporting their own systematic theology sometimes rather than actually pursuing the authorial intent.
Contextual Understanding of Biblical Commands
00:21:00
Speaker
Yeah, and when you say systematic theology here, I think it's important to note that what's more powerful, I think, and what is really going on is that Christian traditions impact sort of their group norms that then get instantiated and rooted down and then passed on from generation to generation.
00:21:16
Speaker
And it's really those group norms that end up, I think, dominating what passages of the scripture we view as binding and which ones we don't. I'm very convinced of this, that most of the time, our through line, our standard is that which we're comfortable with, we will reinforce. That which we're not, for whatever social, cultural, political reason, we will call that sin.
00:21:39
Speaker
And I'd be happy if someone wanted to challenge me on that, but that's what it seems like is going on. There's just so much discontinuity with the way people are reading and applying these texts, even in the New Testament.
00:21:51
Speaker
No, I think the only real way around this selectivity problem is to simply respect that the Bible has a context and an audience, and it's not us. We should treat the entire Bible as a contextualized corpus of literature and all of its commands as culturally bound to the audience it was written to.
00:22:12
Speaker
We aren't bound to obey the commands Paul gave to the first century Corinthian church, for example. Merely because he commanded them to do something in their social context in no way implies that it's wise advice for all Christians of all time to obey.
00:22:27
Speaker
Now, this isn't to say at all that we don't do any of the things that the apostles were advocating for in their communities. On the contrary, i think much of our social ethic continues to be derived from the wisdom that they offered those fledgling Christian communities.
00:22:41
Speaker
When the ethics of Christ are applied to our context today, there's often a lot of overlap with what the apostles advocated for in their communities. But there need not be 100% conformity.
00:22:52
Speaker
And we all know that. We all practice that.
Bible's Role in Challenging Cultural Norms
00:22:55
Speaker
We need not say in our context, slaves obey your masters, for example, as Paul did in his. All of us intuit this at some level.
00:23:03
Speaker
We live in a very different world, and as such, we would expect that the wise way to function as followers of Jesus will in fact vary from place to place and culture to culture and age to age.
00:23:14
Speaker
We shouldn't necessarily transpose biblical commands into contexts that they weren't issued into. I heard Caitlin Shess recently speak about this in terms of recognizing the shape of moral imagination of the biblical authors and then applying that same shape of moral imagination to our time and our place in our context.
00:23:35
Speaker
What direction are these commands steering their communities towards? Yeah, looking at that ethical formation within its context, that Hebraic or Eastern emphasis on actually changing behaviors rather than always spelling out abstract principles.
00:23:51
Speaker
Yeah, rather than spelling out all the scenarios in which one can find themselves and then all the specific answers to those scenarios. Hmm. I do not think at all that we should throw up our hands at this point and be like, well, the Bible is so random and its theology is, it's not useful for anything, right?
00:24:08
Speaker
No, not at all. But I think it's important to observe with some measure of objectivity here, what exactly the Bible is and how exactly it attempts to impart wisdom to its readers.
00:24:20
Speaker
What the Bible is not is an encyclopedia of universal moral principles or rules to apply to everyday life. We may want it to be that for us, that might be comfortable for us in our cultural context, but it will not conform to our desires.
00:24:38
Speaker
As some have said, facts don't care about our feelings, right? nor about the outsized epistemic weight that we tend to put on particular interpretations of the Bible in the service of holding up a version of Christianity that's comfortable to us in our socioeconomic context.
00:24:55
Speaker
Ethical formation is not usually comfortable. And if that's the purpose of the Bible, it should often make us uncomfortable.
Grounding Christian Faith Beyond Western Readings
00:25:03
Speaker
It will always be challenging to some of the cultural norms of its readers, and we should expect that.
00:25:21
Speaker
The reason all this matters is because if the Bible isn't univocal, right, it it doesn't speak with one voice on everything, if it's not universal in its descriptions about God even, or in its moral prescriptions to us, then the center of our faith can't neatly rest on a simplistic Western reading of the Bible.
00:25:40
Speaker
And we're left wanting a more precise location to ground the knowledge of God and to center the faith. So far, we've only talked about the Bible's multivocality and the church's selectivity, right?
00:25:53
Speaker
And the problem is that those pose for a framework that rests on a Western, the Bible says it, that settles it vibe as our epistemic grounding for our faith.
Challenges of Establishing a Consistent Biblical Canon
00:26:02
Speaker
Well, another major problem of this approach is that even if the Bible was consistent, it was univocal in all of its moral principles and theology, and even if selective applications weren't widespread, which they are, then you'd still need to choose and prove what Bible is authoritative.
00:26:22
Speaker
You can't simply say, oh the Protestant Bible, right? Without appealing to a very specific strand of Christianity that worked its way through Europe to the Americas, then prove that yes, this indeed is the most correct version.
00:26:37
Speaker
Not only would that assumption be grossly self-serving, but it's impossible. It really is impossible to prove that the 66-book Protestant canon has the divine approval of God while other canon traditions do not.
00:26:52
Speaker
There's no mechanism in evangelical theology or Protestant theology to prove something like this. And depending on how you analyze it, you could make the argument that the 66-book canon doesn't even necessarily have the strongest early Christian witness.
00:27:07
Speaker
There are many fuzzy edges, so to speak. Not to mention that there are demonstrably, I think, pseudepigraphical authors in some of its books. Early Christians recognize that some of the books that are now in the New Testament are indeed probably pseudepigraphical.
00:27:21
Speaker
or penned by a different author in the name of an apostle. Even as late as 3.30, Eusebius quotes Origen as saying, ah Peter left us one acknowledged epistle, possibly two, though this is doubtful.
00:27:34
Speaker
Origen, of course, was living in the early to mid 200s before we had any formal canon list. He's actually the first person on record, I think, to even mention that a second letter attributed to Peter existed.
00:27:45
Speaker
Origen himself seems to respect it and kind of include it in his preferred canon, but the authorship was disputed, and evidently Christian communities were reading it, and some were finding value in it no matter who wrote it.
00:27:56
Speaker
So this is not like Origen was part of some debate against the inclusion of 2 Peter in the canon. This is just one of the many texts that the early church was using. And he recognized, oh yeah, this is still useful, even if it probably wasn't written by Peter.
00:28:09
Speaker
Sure, at least in its final form or something like that. It's also been long observed by critical scholarship that the pastoral epistles are not exclusively from Paul, though some of their content may be like Pauline or from his tradition.
00:28:22
Speaker
The pastoral epistles are excluded from our earliest New Testament manuscript called P46, which is around 200. There's a couple other books that are excluded as well, like 2 Thessalonians and Philemon. So, you know, some people think it's just happenstance that those are all missing.
00:28:36
Speaker
In addition, though, the internal textual evidence doesn't lend itself at all to a Paulian authorship, both in terms of vocabulary and grammar. There's also theological emphases that really are different when compared with the more undisputed Paulian books, as scholars would call them.
00:28:52
Speaker
You know, scholars of conservative evangelical institutions, they try to offer some solutions to these problems, but to say that they have like a slam dunk explanation for all these data points would be saying far too much.
00:29:04
Speaker
The pseudepigraphy stuff is really interesting because it was thought of so differently in the ancient world. The idea of taking somebody's texts or texts that were attributed to somebody and reworking it, exploring it, and leaving that person's name on as a way of indicating that you felt that that text should still carry some authority or had been accepted authoritatively by a community was normal practice, which can make us very uncomfortable as Western Greek thinkers who prioritize history the way that we do.
00:29:33
Speaker
And we're so sensitive to things like plagiarism. So we see something like this, we see a practice like this, and we're like, oh, no, that's not truthful. That's ethically wrong. When this may well have been an honoring practice to the person whose name is on the document.
00:29:48
Speaker
Yeah. And there's probably good evidence that smaller letters written by people were conglomerated and filled out and made maybe to look more like formal letters later on.
00:29:58
Speaker
There's a lot of messiness with the way portions of the New Testament got put together. And we just aren't able to always get to the kind of tidy answers that we would love as Western thinkers.
00:30:10
Speaker
We're just dealing with a text that was put together and organized and assembled by people who thought very differently than we do. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's important to recognize things that are true, perhaps especially when it makes us feel uncomfortable.
00:30:23
Speaker
We cannot simply disregard good scholarship on something because it makes our epistemic system uncomfortable. That's no good reason. But there's more. Some of the books now contained in our New Testament canon were actually flatly rejected by early Christians at different times and places.
00:30:41
Speaker
They were not thought to be profitable by some or appropriate for reading in Christian gatherings. Revelation is kind of at the top of this list. It's very controversial, much to my chagrin because I love a Revelation. It's one of my favorites. But James, Hebrews, 1 and 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, these are also common books to see omitted by early Christians or labeled as disputed by other early Christians.
00:31:07
Speaker
Even Luther in his time, which is like way later the 1500s, he didn't even like some of the books that were in his Bible. James, the Gospel of Straw. He famously couldn't stand Revelation either.
00:31:19
Speaker
he says Christ is neither taught nor known in it. Hmm. So many of the books now included in our canon were not included by some early on, but on the other hand, there are other books that were included by some early on that are now excluded from our current canon.
00:31:36
Speaker
Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement, and Origen, they all cite Shepherd of Hermas with a high degree of reverence, and they treat it basically as a scriptural text. Parts of the shepherd, along with the epistle of Barnabas, are both included, bound with the rest of the scriptures in one of the most important biblical manuscripts that we have, Codex Sinaiticus, which is dated to the 300s.
00:31:58
Speaker
So we literally have a bound codex, in other words, a book, um a Bible, as we would see them today, with books that we don't now include in the three hundreds So had I walked into an early church gathering in the first couple centuries, there's a good chance that they wouldn't have been using texts that I consider canon today. yep And there's also a good chance that they would have been reading from texts that are not in the Bible that I have. That's quite correct.
00:32:25
Speaker
Clement quotes Didache as scriptural, but Eusebius lists it as rejected, along with Revelation. Aww. So we we could kind of summarize some of this. If earliness is one of our most important historical criteria for what should be in and what should be out of the canon, then it's interesting to note that our earliest canon list, the Muratorian Fragment, excludes some books that we now include, like 3 John, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter.
00:32:52
Speaker
And it includes some that we don't include in our current canon, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Wisdom of Solomon. If acceptance by the church is one of our most important historical criteria for inclusion or exclusion, then we should obviously just go with the Catholic canon because of its wideness of acceptance, just the sheer numbers of people who accept it across the world. Sure. If you were to tally up all Christians who were there and say, what do you consider the Bible?
00:33:18
Speaker
The Catholic canon with the Apocrypha would definitely top the list. Of course. That canon tradition has far more followers than does the Protestant version. If we wanted to include more of the texts that were used by the early church, well, then we should go with the Ethiopian Orthodox canon, which is the largest canon tradition. It's got the largest number included. They keep Enoch in there, don't they? Absolutely. That's a fun read.
00:33:43
Speaker
The fact is canonicity is not an exact science. Tens of thousands of Christians today accept different canons. Each tradition can easily just appeal to God's sovereignty, right?
Centralizing Jesus Christ in Christian Faith
00:33:55
Speaker
We can all just say, well, God's sovereign hand guided the church to accept these books.
00:34:01
Speaker
That's fine. We can all say that. But this recognition of God's sovereignty must also apply to the fact that tens of thousands of Christians accept different canons.
00:34:12
Speaker
You can't prove your canon unless you're going to rely on your tradition's authority to declare or recognize that canon. The Catholic Church hasn't been shy about investing this kind of authority into their tradition's hierarchy, but it's not going to work for Protestants.
00:34:27
Speaker
Even if you do take a settled canon for granted, there's still a lot of questions within that canon around textual criticism that you have to deal with. Absolutely. These are usually small, but they're not always insignificant.
00:34:39
Speaker
Pretty recently, the Dead Sea Scrolls have opened up much bigger questions about what belongs even within the Protestant canon. Hebrew textual discoveries have called into question significant portions of 1 Samuel and Jeremiah.
00:34:52
Speaker
They've opened up big questions around how we're supposed to use Greek translations and whether we consider those Greek translations, the Septuagint, as closer to the original or the Hebrew text that we've used previously. yep Even within the New Testament, there are major sections of Mark and John that are disputed.
00:35:10
Speaker
Most English translations will include them and then kind of note that, hey, these were not included in the earliest texts. This also means we can't rule out for sure that future discoveries could make non-negligible changes to what we consider the text of Scripture. right Another Dead Sea Scrolls discovery could clarify and modify, maybe not insignificantly, what we consider to be the text of Scripture.
00:35:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're right.
00:35:37
Speaker
Okay, so these problems, all three of these problems that we discussed, they can make us feel really uncomfortable. And like I said, they've been used by skeptics of the faith to try to discredit the faith at some level.
00:35:51
Speaker
But I think that none of these are actually a problem, precisely because the heart and center of the Christian faith is not technically the Bible.
00:36:02
Speaker
And this is where we want to move next in this series. The center of the Christian faith is the incarnate Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, the Word made flesh, a human person, and all the canon traditions point to him as the locus of
Teaser for Next Episode: Purpose of Scriptures
00:36:17
Speaker
our faith. yep This matters because if Christ and not the library of books we call the Bible is where our faith actually rests,
00:36:25
Speaker
That doesn't make scriptures unimportant, obviously. It just means we need to be honest about what they're for and what happens when we misuse them. And we want to look at exactly that in our next episode.
00:36:37
Speaker
What the scriptures are for and how Western American Christianity has perhaps subtly misunderstood and redefined that purpose. And why grounding our faith ultimately in a person rather than a book is necessary, but it can raise some questions.