The Bible, Part I

Recall one of the questions I mentioned facing in an earlier post was, "If the Bible is inspired and protected from error in transmission, then who's interpretation of it is correct?"  Given my Protestant upbringing, I felt the Bible was the ultimate authority, and in order for me to figure things out--which Protestant denomination I should belong to, such Baptist, Presbyterian, etc., what theology I'd hold such as Calvinism versus Armenianism, how best to evangelize to my non-believing friends and defend my use of the Bible in determining my position on social issues, etc.--then I needed to understand the origin of the Bible better (e.g., how did they decide which books to be included in this sacred text) and be better equipped to defend it.  This happened to also have relevance to the fact that folks I knew were converting to Catholicism, and I knew there was controversy there about sola scriptura (Scripture alone) on the Protestant side versus Scripture and Tradition on the Catholic side.

So when my friend had a book called, "By what authority?" by Mark P. Shea, I decided to read it. Whoa, was my mind blown by what I read and learned. And it actually made sense--it explained why I was finding myself in the predicament I was in when evangelizing and discerning what version of scriptural interpretation/theology I was going to embrace.

First, in terms of "which came first," the church or the Bible, it seems to be an indisputable fact that it is historically accurate to place the Church before the complete Bible—the church existed decades before it was all written and centuries before it was fully collated and canonized.  That was why there was a Thessalonian Church for Paul to write the earliest parts of the New Testament to!

It is also a fact that it was not until the Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397 and 419) that the Church defined which books made it into the New Testament and which didn't.  So for the first 400 years, there were different sets of scriptures that folks were teaching from and finally at the councils, it was decided which set (canon) would be declared and deemed the authoritative and divinely inspired scriptures.  

So when we, as Christians, hold firmly to the divine inspiration and authority of the Bible, it is because the Church declared it to be so.  As Augustine wrote (“Against the Letter of Mani”): “I would not believe in the authority of the Gospel myself if the authority of the Church did not influence me to do so.”  Yes, 2 Timothy 3:16, says, "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness," but this was referring to the Old Testament Scriptures, and it was the Church's authority that canonized the additional New Testament Scriptures as a part of our authoritative Bible.  Protestants would probably say that we believe in the authority of the Bible because 2 Tim 3:16 refers to past and future Scriptures that God would give us. But this is not logical reasoning, to remove the inspiration of the Church from the loop--to say the Bible is inspired, inerrant, authoritative, but the Church who declared the books that would be in the Bible somehow is not.

Note that again at the Council of Trent in 1546, the Catholic Church reaffirmed the (same) canon, in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, and the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) established the canon for the Orthodox Church. It was at this time that the Protestants removed the deuterocanonical books (the "Apocrypha") from the Old Testament canon (and Luther also wanted James removed, calling it "an epistle full of straw," and others wanted 2 Peter and Revelation removed, but they weren't). For 1500 years, these books had been included in the Bible and affirmed around the world as divinely inspired, but then a group of European reformers removed them.  Why? These books were set aside in part because they were not in the Hebrew Old Testament that the Jewish people used. However, they were in the Greek Old Testament--the Septuagint, which is the oldest manuscript of the Old Testament in existence, dated 2nd century BC, written in Greek. (Some of the Septuagint manuscripts are the oldest surviving nearly-complete manuscripts of the Old Testament in any language; the oldest still existing complete Hebrew texts date from around 1000 AD.)  The Apostles themselves were quoting from the Septuagint in the Gospels, and were teaching their congregations to use it as well. So the early, unified Church (and later the Catholic and Orthodox Churches) choose to include these books. This is an example of the church keeping with the apostolic (i.e., Christian) tradition, rather than the rabbinic (i.e. Jewish) tradition--the early Church had canonized books because they were attested by apostolic tradition, and the Catholic and Orthodox churches remained faithful to this, while the Protestant churches broke the consistency and continuity with the Scriptures that had been transcribed and transmitted for over 1500 years.

How did I not know this already?? It seems like foundational background knowledge for anyone putting such weighty stakes on the Bible in evangelical discourse. Protestants are so committed to the authority of Scripture, yet we aren't trained in knowledge about how they came to be? It seems like Protestants would be ready and equipped to defend their/our position against this narrative the Catholics and Orthodox have about the Bible's origins, but here I was blindsided. I was raised going to church and Bible studies 2-3 times a week and went to a Christian (Baptist) university, yet I was never taught about this history.  I do remember reading the intro to my NIV study Bible when I got it in high school, and it explained in very verbose/confusing language about the scholarship that went into various manuscripts and such to determine it. But this was all presented in a scholarly way with no context of what the Church throughout history had believed.  So now learning this, I actually felt somewhat deceived, like something was being hidden from me, and it seemed suspicious. I was taught to always give a reason for what I believed, and yet here was exposed an area where I hadn't been taught why and how we came to revere the Bible so--and to such an extent that we broke away from the historical church of 1500 years, proclaiming sola scriptura.

So I was compelled to keep investigating. What if those historical claims about the councils and such were somehow inaccurate? Why don't I go straight to the Bible and see what it says about the matter, what examples are there?