If God really meant for the Bible to provide his doctrines and standards to the world, then he has a lot of explaining to do. Without the Bible, there is no Christian tradition. The Jewish tradition relied on the scriptures from its beginning. When the Book of the Law disappeared, Israel became confused. When it was found again in 2 Kings 22, King Josiah tore his clothes in frustration with what he had not known—what he could not have known—about his religious duties. The gospels and letters of Paul solidified what Christians believed in a way that oral tradition and songs had not. The Jewish and Christian scriptures alike were essential for their adherents to know what they believed and how to behave.
I find it odd, however, that God entrusted his primary (and only concrete) method of communication into such a human process—writing, literature, and language. So many problems with this system have arisen that it seems too imperfect to be the work of a perfect omniscient being. What if the literature is lost from sight? This happened. What if most of the people in the world are illiterate? This was the case. What if the language (a 100% human process) is too ambiguous for people to understand? This is still the case. What if the people who copy it mess up? Hence the study of textual criticism. What if the people with access to it fail to translate and distribute it around the world? What if there is an ocean between those who have it and those who need it? Such an imperfect process. It is easily invented by humans, but far beneath the expectations one should have from an omniscient and omnipotent being with a message for all humanity.
Does the Bible Think the Bible is Necessary?
So what, you might ask? The Bible isn’t entirely necessary; only faith in Jesus Christ is. Well, yes and no. To be “saved” according to New Testament theology, one must understand salvation. To understand salvation, one must understand why he needs saving. To understand that, he must understand sin. To understand sin, he must know the standard he violated. To understand that, he needs that ridiculously long standard found in the Torah (that standard is anything but straightforward). Remember what happened to Israel when they lost the Torah?
Salvation aside for a moment. Without the Bible, how do you refute false doctrine? What standard do you appeal to? As is obvious from reading Church history, “heresy” and “false doctrine” (as a modern Christian would call it) are unavoidable. From Nestorianism[1] to Arianism[2] to the hyper-Pentecostal Christian denominations of Africa, it is clear that the gospel story itself (and technically even the Bible) is no guarantee against false doctrine. Paul himself had issues with Christians denying that Christ rose from the dead (1 Cor 15:12-34). Why? Likely because just hearing the story rather than having a canon (“rule”) to go by, the Corinthian Christians couldn’t differentiate what was true and what wasn’t. The leading figures of the New Testament make it clear that the scriptures (namely that which existed at the time) are the designated antidote to heresy and false doctrine. Jesus himself constantly retorts to the Jewish leaders, “Have you not read the Scriptures?” then proceeds to correct them by quoting the scriptures. Paul urges Timothy to continue studying “the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work,” (2 Tim 3:15-17). Do you not see that the scriptures, according to the scriptures themselves, are a central part of God’s communication with man about the divine? How can you have faith in something for which you don’t have enough information to understand? The biblical God had no intention to count on illiterate missionaries to bring the “plan of salvation.” The scriptures were intended to act as a standard. A rule. A canon. You cannot have the Christian or Jewish traditions without them.
Scripture Gone Missing
In 2 Kings 22, the high priest discovered the Book of the Law and gave it to the king’s secretary. Apparently it had gone missing for centuries. As King Josiah listened to the secretary read it, he tore his clothes under the realization that Judah had not lived up to the Law. He ordered the high priest to go and inquire about it, knowing that the wrath of God was coming to Judah for failing to keep this Law to which they had no access. So the high priest consulted a prophetess (apparently God chose not to communicate the instructions of the missing Law with her, but had no problem informing her of his impending wrath as soon as she learned of its existence). She told the high priest that God would, in fact, punish Judah for failing to keep the Law to which it had no access, but Josiah would never see it because he tried to fix the problem. What we can learn from this story is that if you fail to follow instructions that you don’t have, you are still liable for the ways in which you deviate from those instructions.
Even in the 20th century, portions of the Bible were yet to be discovered that are intact today. If you were shopping for a Bible just a few years after World War II, for example, you couldn’t have purchased a Bible with the second half of Psalm 145:13. Don’t believe me? Compare it here. Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the world didn’t have access to a Hebrew manuscript with that line.[3] It did seem, however, like a line should be where that one was missing. You see, Psalm 145 is an alphabetic acrostic—that means that each line starts with a different letter from the alphabet in order (Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, etc.). But one of the letters, “Nun,” was missing from the acrostic, as though the author had skipped it. It turns out it (as scholars realized after 1947) that the author probably wrote that line, but it was lost among Hebrew manuscripts in the copying process. Lucky you for being born later than your grandparents—you get to have that much more of the Bible than they did.
Reign of Illiteracy
It is common knowledge that most of the ancient world was completely illiterate. Few people could write their own names, let alone read the Bible. This seemingly wasn’t an issue since people could rely on their priests, scribes, and church leaders to read it aloud for them. But think for a moment about the issues this causes. For one, even the Bible talks within itself about corrupt religious leaders (the sons of Eli, for example, 1 Sam 2:12-17, Jesus’ continuous rants about his religious, leaders, etc.). The fact that only a very few people could read put power into the hands of irresponsible people. Many of them ostensibly led their listeners astray, and it is not as though an illiterate listener could correct false doctrine by reading the Scriptures himself. Consider Matt 23:13, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them,” (NRSV). One wonders if Jesus ever considered that literacy and education could be the antidote to this problem—or better yet, informing the world of his demands in some way other than literature in an illiterate world. Little did he seem to know that this system would allow for a millennium of ignorance, poverty, oppression, and superstition at the hands of the literate leaders of the Roman Catholic Church.
Ambiguous Language
Languages are a 100% human process. They are imperfect and often fail to adequately express ideas. Sometimes with just one sentence, a speaker can provide several different perfectly logical meanings. Consider this deeply theological verse: “But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe,” (Romans 3:22, NRSV). Well, that’s one way to translate it. Where you’re seeing, “faith in Jesus Christ,” the Greek reads, “πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.” There are actually two perfectly logical ways to translate this: Paul could have meant, “faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe,” or “faithfulness of Jesus Christ to all who believe.”[4] Both translations give quite different meanings, and biblical scholars are divided. Now, perhaps this alone isn’t a big deal. But the fact that the Bible itself is leading people in different directions by giving one sentence that could equally mean two different things? What a careless means for an omniscient God to communicate his essential doctrines.
That is a translational issue that scholars have to deal with after the text has been parsed. That is, if you open a Greek New Testament today, you’ll find that the letters have capital and lower-case, there are spaces between the words, there are accents, and there is punctuation. Not so in an ancient Greek manuscript. All of the most reliable Greek manuscripts are written with their letters squished together, no punctuation, no accents—nothing. It was called scriptio continua, and it looked something like this:
Reading literature in the ancient world was a more subjective experience than we’re accustomed to today. Often there was more than one way to interpret a line, and both would make perfect logical sense. Take this phrase from The Aeneid, for example. If you have a phrase like, “collectamexiliopubem“, how should you separate those words? The 4th century grammarian Servius preferred, “collectam exilio pubem” (“a people gathered for exile”) and critiqued his colleague Donatus for having read it as “collectam ex Ilio pubem” (“a people gathered from Troy”)[5] But being stuck together in that scriptio continua style, both interpretations made perfect logical sense. Sometimes context is helpful, but sometimes it isn’t. Perhaps the lack of punctuation was an even greater problem. When you read Jesus telling the sinner on the cross, TRULYITELLYOUTODAYYOUWILLBEWITHMEINPARADISE (in Greek, of course, Luke 23:43), where did he mean to end the first clause? We traditionally think he meant, *today* you will be with me in paradise,” but what if he really meant, “Truly *I tell you today*, you will be with me in paradise”? Did Jesus mean that the sinner would be in paradise today, or that he was choosing today to mention that the sinner would be in paradise with him at some point? This is a huge theological issue. Yet we can never really answer the question for sure because the language is too unclear.[6] This is a failure on the author’s part to communicate. This is a failure of language to express ideas.
Languages exist because people groups apply meanings to sounds to express their thoughts—at least the thoughts that are common enough to deserve a way of expressing them. Language cannot express every concept. Some languages cannot even express something as familiar to us as causation. Teribe, an indigenous language of Panama and Costa Rica, can only express the concept of “because” if everything is in perfect chronological order. So when Bible translators tried to provide them with 1 John 4:19, “We love God because he first loved us,” they had to switch it around to something like, “God loved us and now we love God.” This was sufficient for that verse, but they ran into some very confusing problems. For example, Teribe did not have a generic word for “brother”; they only had a word for “older brother “and “younger brother.” So if you were talking about Jesus’ brothers, you had to specify whether they were older or younger. Well, you could say “older brothers” since Joseph might have had some children before he married Mary. But are you sure he did? And you could you say “younger brothers,” but are you sure that Mary had more children after Jesus? The Catholics are sure that she didn’t. Either way, if you are a Bible translator among the Naso-Teribe people, you have a guess to make. You could say “older,” “younger,” or “older and younger” and risk being wrong either way. This is the Word of God we’re talking about, so choose correctly. Remember, as we learned from 2 Kings 22, you’re still liable for being wrong whether you have any way of knowing the truth or not.
Textual Criticism
Perhaps you’ve heard scholars say something like, “We don’t have the entire New Testament as the authors wrote it.” What they’re talking about is the mistakes that scribes made when copying the New Testament over the centuries. Well, for the most part, I’d say they’re wrong. The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough of the New Testament—the problem is that we have too much of it. We have so much extra text in New Testament manuscripts that we have trouble deciding what the author wrote and what a scribe came up with. For example, that story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery in John 7:53-8:11? “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”? That was almost certainly written separately from the Gospel of John.[7] The earliest Greek manuscript to have it dates to at least 500 C.E., and it is written with very non-Johannine vocabulary. Yet Christians have been teaching and preaching it as literal gospel for centuries.
Still, some things have gone missing. Little things, most likely. We’ve recovered some text, like Psalm 145:13, which I mentioned earlier. Another example is 1 John 3:1, in which the phrase, “καὶ ἐσμέν” (“and we are”) went missing for centuries.[8] You won’t find it in the King James Version, but you’ll find it in almost any version from the 20th century or later. That is because the manuscripts that had that phrase weren’t discovered until the 19th century. My point is that textual criticism simply radiates with human error. Is this really how God wanted his primary source of communication transmitted?
Failure of Distribution
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. FYI, there’s a continent on the other hemisphere with many civilizations and tribes who do not know of me or my commands. They’re not accessible by land, only by sea.” Now there’s a Great Commission that would impress me. Because as it stood, no matter how diligent the followers of Christ could have been, they had no way of knowing about the millions of Native Americans across the Atlantic. Exactly what excuse does the creator of the universe have for this oversight? Better late than never?
Okay, so here we are 2000 years later. Are you aware that there are still indigenous people groups in the United States that don’t have a Bible in their language? Take the Choctaw Natives in Mississippi, for example. Bible translators have still been working on their language in recent years. Not to mention the languages in Central and South America that have hardly heard the name “Jesus.” And what does God say to those indigenous people groups who had no access to his standards at no fault of their own? Read 2nd Kings 22 again. What a flimsy system—almost as if it were made by humans rather than a divinity omniscient in basic geography.
Summary
I’m not arguing that this system is impossible, but that it is unlikely. If the Judeo-Christian God exists and really intended the Bible to serve as his primary method for communicating his doctrines and standards, then he has a lot of explaining to do. But if men wrote the Bible and falsely attributed its ideas to God, then the issues I have put forth above make perfect sense. The rich and powerful imposed this word-of-God-in-writing system on the poor and weak, and few had the means to question it. But if you are reading this, then you are not illiterate. You have more access to the Bible and biblical studies than the most powerful religious leaders in the world did merely 100 years ago. Unlike the illiterate poor antiquity, you have the opportunity to reconsider what you’ve been told about the Bible based on evidence.
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Footnotes:
[1] Nestorianism was a doctrine that arose in the 5th century through the Patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius. It emphasized a wider distinction between Jesus’ human nature and his divine nature. It led to a massive amount of political and Christological controversy and was later condemned as heresy.
[2] Arianism, a doctrine credited to Christian presbyter Arius, argued that Jesus was born and therefore was subordinate to the father. This doctrine, later condemned as heresy, made its way into the Germanic tribes of Europe via missionaries.
[3] The Syriac Peshitta and the Septuagint contained the second half of Psalm 145:13. But without a Hebrew manuscript to further evidence that line, neither of them carried enough weight to make it into the average Bible translation.
[4] The interpretation, “faith in Christ,” in linguistic terms, would be the objective genitive view, while “faithfulness of Christ” would be the subjective genitive view. This is a debated issue among Bible scholars.
[5] Parkes, M.B. 1993. Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West. University of California Press. Berkeley, CA. pp. 10-11.
[6] Another potential theological issue is the punctuation in Revelation 5. “a scroll written on the inside and on the back, sealed with seven seals.” The NRSV has chosen to interpret this as a scroll that was written on both sides, which also had seven seals. But if we shift the comma to follow “inside,” we get “a scroll written on the inside, and on the back sealed with seven seals.” The interpretation of this is completely subjective.
[7] This story of the woman caught in adultery, known as the Pericope Adulterae, is thought by many scholars to have derived from a story told by Papias and a similar story in The Gospel of the Hebrews (a mostly lost text not to be confused with the New Testament epistle).
[8] This omission occurred due to a scribal error known as “haplography,” in which a scribe would find a series of letters (in that scriptio continua style, I might add) that he confused with another. In Greek, it would have looked something like, “ΚΛΗΘΩΜΕΝΚΑΙΕΣΜΕΝ.” Notice the 3rd person singular ending “MEN” twice in this line. The scribe likely looked away after “ΚΛΗΘΩ” knowing that the next segment began with “MEN,” then skipped to the “MEN” that followed “ΚΑΙΕΣ” rather than “ΚΛΗΘΩ” by mistake. His manuscript was copied, and so was the next, and so forth, thus resulting in the loss of this phrase for centuries.
