Q5: The Bible
The Bible
Stop one: Corinth, the year 50
Let’s all jump into a DeLorean and head back to 50 AD.
Corinth, Greece. The year 50.
You are sitting in somebody’s house. Forty people, maybe. A meal on the table.
As far as Scripture goes, you have the Law and the Prophets, in Greek. The New Testament does not exist. Matthew has not been written. Neither has John. Paul is alive and traveling and has written maybe one or two letters so far.
What they were doing without a New Testament
And here is what those people in Corinth were doing without a New Testament.
They were being baptized.
They were breaking bread and calling it the Body of the Lord.
They were confessing that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose on the third day.
Paul says he handed that on to them as he had received it. (1 Cor 15:3–4.)
Everything I told you in the last hour had already happened. The bush. The ark. The Incarnation. The empty tomb. All of it, behind them.
They had no New Testament. They had what the apostles handed them. And they were the Church anyway.
Stop two: Corinth again, the year 96
Everybody back in the car. Forward about forty five years.
Corinth again. Same city. The year 96.
We are in a house, and somebody is reading a letter out loud.
It came from Rome. The Church remembers the man who sent it as Clement, the bishop of Rome. He tells them to go get something off the shelf.
“Take up the epistle of the blessed Apostle Paul.” (1 Clement 47:1)
So look at what changed in this room in forty five years. Paul is dead. And Paul’s letter is being kept, and copied, and read out loud, and quoted back to them by the bishop of Rome.
The handing on is now partly on paper.
Stop three: Patmos, around 95
Back in the car. A short hop east.
Patmos. A rocky little island off the coast of what is now Turkey. Around the year 95.
There is an old man on that island, and he is writing. The Church remembers him as John, the last apostle left.
What he is writing is the last book in your Bible. Open it to the first verse. The revelation of Jesus Christ. The word there is apocalypse, and apocalypse means unveiling.
What John sees: the heavenly liturgy
And I want to tell you what he actually sees, because it is not what most people think.
He sees a throne. An altar. Golden lampstands. Incense going up, and the incense is the prayers of the saints. Elders in white. He hears singing. Holy, holy, holy.
And in the middle of all of it he sees a Lamb, standing, and it looks like it has been slain.
He tells you what day it was. The Lord's day.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Next opportunity, at Mass, listen for what happens right before Communion. The priest holds up the Host and says: Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.
That last sentence is from Revelation, chapter nineteen.
The Church has a name for what John saw. The heavenly liturgy. And here is what she teaches about it: when we celebrate Mass, we are not copying it. We are joining it.
And John was told to write it down and send it to seven churches, to be read out loud.
The handing on, again.
Stop four: Ephesus, around 100, the door closes
One last short hop, to the mainland. Ephesus. Around the year 100.
Here, the Church remembers, John dies.
And with the last apostle, public revelation ends.
The deposit of faith, and the two ways it was handed on
What the apostles left behind has a name. The deposit of faith.
Everything God revealed, handed over once, into the hands of the Church, to be guarded.
And look at how they handed it on. Two ways at once. Some of it they preached out loud. Some of it they wrote down.
The Church has names for those. Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. They are not two piles. They are one deposit, from one source, and they are not ranked.
What Paul said standing in that room in Corinth and what Paul wrote from the next city carried the same weight, because it was the same man, sent by the same Lord. He says so himself, writing to another church. Hold to the traditions you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter. (2 Thessalonians 2:15).
And who guards it? The apostles, and then the men they laid hands on. The bishops, with the successor of Peter. The Church calls that teaching office the Magisterium. It is not above the Word of God. It serves it.
So the book you are holding was not the beginning of this.
This book did not create the Church. The Church, handing on what she received, gave us this book.
It is not a book, it is a shelf of books
This is my Bible.
Here is the first thing to get straight. This is not a book. The word Bible comes from a Greek word that means the books. Plural. What you are holding is a shelf of books.
Seventy three of them, in a Catholic Bible.
Written across about a thousand years. In three languages. By people who mostly never met each other.
There is war poetry in there (Judges chapter five), and a legal code (Leviticus chapter nineteen), and personal letters (Philemon. Twenty five verses), and a book of love songs (The Song of Songs), and a man arguing with God about why his life fell apart (Job chapter twenty three).
So when somebody asks you what the Bible says about something, slow down before you answer. A poet is not doing what a lawyer is doing. They do not sound alike, because they were not alike.
And the chapter and verse numbers? None of the authors put those in. The chapters were added around the year 1200. The verse numbers came later still. Useful for finding your place. Not part of what was handed on.
Inspired does not mean dictated
Here is the second thing, and it is the one people get wrong most often.
We say these books are inspired. The word means God breathed. The Holy Spirit moved the people who wrote them, so that they wrote what God wanted written, and no more.
But it does not mean God dictated it. The authors were not stenographers.
Their personalities are still in there. Their vocabularies. Their ways of telling a story.
Paul writes like a man with a lot on his mind, and sometimes loses the thread of his own sentence. (Ephesians chapter three). Luke writes like an educated man doing careful research.
So God is the author. And so are they. Fully both.
Which, if you think about the first half of this morning, is exactly the pattern you would expect. God did not bypass a human body to save us either. He took one on.
Who told you which books go in it?
The Bible did not come with an inspired table of contents.
A lot of things got written. There were other gospels going around. A Gospel of Thomas. A Gospel of Peter. Some were forgeries. Some were good books that many Christians took for Scripture.
Somebody had to sort it out. And the questions the Church asked were these.
Does it come from an apostle, or someone standing right next to one?
Is it read at worship, not in one town but everywhere?
And does it match the faith the Church already believes and already preaches?
Look at that last one. It assumes a faith that is already there. Already being taught. Already being prayed.
The faith was the ruler. The books got measured.
And hear this carefully. The Church did not make these books inspired. God did that. The Church recognized the ones that were.
How the list was settled
It took about three hundred years.
The year 367. Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, writes down the twenty seven books of our New Testament, and only those. First time in surviving history.
The 390s. Councils of bishops at Hippo and Carthage, in North Africa, set out the whole list, Old Testament and New. The same books that are in a Catholic Bible today. In 405 the Pope gives the same list.
1442: The Council of Florence gives that list again. Seventy five years before the Reformation.
1546: The Council of Trent defines it, once and for all, because by then there were competing lists. So Trent did not invent the canon. Trent defended one that was already more than a thousand years old.
Whatever Bible you own, you are trusting the Church’s judgment about its table of contents. The only question is whether you know it.
The seven books
Quick show of hands. How many of you have heard that Catholic and Protestant Bibles have a different number of books?
It is true. But start with what is the same, because it is almost all of it. The New Testament is identical. Twenty seven books.
The difference is seven books in the Old Testament. Tobit. Judith. First and Second Maccabees. Wisdom. Sirach. Baruch. And longer versions of Esther and Daniel.
We call them deuterocanonical. It means their place was confirmed later. It does not mean second class. The Church receives them with the same reverence as the rest.
Why we keep them
Here is the short version.
By the time of Jesus there was a Greek translation of the Old Testament in wide use, called the Septuagint. It was the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews all over the Mediterranean, and these books circulated with it.
That is the collection the Church inherited. When the New Testament authors quote the Old Testament, they usually quote that Greek version. And when Christians first bound their Scriptures into single volumes, books from this group were in them.
The New Testament echoes them, too. Hebrews chapter eleven describes people who were tortured and refused release so they might rise again. That story is in Second Maccabees. A mother and her seven sons.
Was there disagreement? Yes. Saint Jerome doubted these books. Saint Augustine defended them. And notice how it was settled. Not by the better scholar. By the Church. The councils gave the longer list, and Jerome translated some of these books and quoted them.
And here is something almost nobody has been told. The first Protestant Bibles kept these books. Luther's German Bible had them, in a section of their own, marked as useful but not equal to Scripture. So did the King James Bible of 1611. They only dropped out of most English Protestant Bibles in the 1800s.
So the Church did not add seven books. Scholars argued about them. But from Hippo to Trent, every time the Church gave the list in council, it was the same list.
Which Bible should I buy?
Every translation trades something away. The only question is what you want to trade.
On one end are translations that go word for word (formal equivalence). Closer to the original wording. Better for study. They can also read like furniture assembly instructions.
On the other end are translations that go thought for thought (dynamic equivalence). Far more readable, and much better if you are new. But somebody has already done some of the interpreting for you.
Whichever you choose, make sure it is a Catholic edition, so that all seventy three books are in it.
Here are popular Catholic versions:
Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius) Formal equivalence. Word for word. For: study, theology, apologetics.
New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE) Middle of the scale. Moderately literal, readable phrasing. For: the standard American Catholic study Bible.
New Jerusalem Bible Dynamic equivalence. Thought for thought. For: reading long stretches, and prayer.
How Catholics read it
Last thing, and it is the one most likely to matter to you personally.
Somebody is going to ask you: do Catholics take the Bible literally?
The answer is that we take it the way each author meant it. And knowing how he meant it is most of the skill.
Some things are meant flatly. That Jesus is the Messiah is not a metaphor. The death, the Resurrection, the Ascension are claims about things that happened.
When he says to eat his body and drink his blood, in John chapter six, he is not being poetic. People walked away from him over it, and he did not call them back and explain.
But not every page is that kind of writing. When Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son, nobody needs there to have been an actual younger brother with an actual inheritance. It is a parable. It is one of the truest things ever said about God, and it was never trying to be a news report.
So the question to ask of any page is: what kind of writing is this, and what is the author claiming?
And you do not have to work that out alone. The Church reads every page in the light of the whole Bible, and in the light of the faith she has handed on from the beginning. The same Church that gave you the book has been reading it for two thousand years.
Here is how she puts it, at the Second Vatican Council. Everything the sacred authors assert is asserted by the Holy Spirit. And so the books of Scripture teach firmly, faithfully, and without error the truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.
The word for that is inerrant. Without error.
Without error in what the author is asserting. A poet asserts one way. A historian another. A storyteller another.
Everything in this book is there for one reason. Our salvation. It is not a chemistry textbook, and it never claimed to be.
And it never claimed to be the whole story either. John ends his Gospel by saying that if everything Jesus did were written down, the world could not hold the books.
Genesis: who, and why
Which brings us to the first page.
Genesis is not a scientific account of how the world was made. It is not trying to be. Ask what kind of writing it is, and the answer is that it speaks in figures and images.
But figures and images of real things. Here is what it teaches.
That God made the world, out of nothing, on purpose.
That everything he made was good.
That men and women are made in his image and likeness.
That we are the caretakers of what he made.
And that at the very beginning of our history, something went wrong. We turned away from him, and we have all been living with it since.
That last one matters. The Church says the story of the garden uses figurative language, but it is telling you about something that really happened. The serpent and the tree are the way it is told. The Fall is the thing that is told.
Genesis tells us who, and why, and what went wrong. And that was never the smaller question.
Is it still happening?
So let me finish where we started.
We started this half in a house in Corinth, where forty people had no New Testament and were the Church anyway.
Is God still doing this? Is He still revealing Himself?
Here is the answer, in two parts.
First. Nothing new is being added. When the last apostle died, the deposit closed. The Church says it plainly. No new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
There is no volume two.
The Church does recognize some private revelations. Lourdes. Fatima. They add nothing to the deposit. They help us live it.
Second. Complete is not the same thing as fully understood. The Catechism says it this way. Even if Revelation is already complete, it has not been made completely explicit. It remains for Christian faith gradually to grasp its full significance over the course of the centuries.
Think of it this way: You have all of a person the day you marry them. You spend the next fifty years finding out who they are.
Nothing was withheld. And we are nowhere near the bottom of it.
Faith is the answer
Remember the word I gave you first thing this morning. Dabar.
A word that does not sit there. A word that does something. And a word that is spoken to someone, and waits for an answer.
That is the whole morning in one line. God speaks. And then He waits.
He spoke at the bush, and Moses could have kept walking.
He stood in a room in a body, and people walked away from Him over a hard saying, and He let them go.
So here is the second Hebrew word, and this one is your side of it. Shama. It means to hear. But it carries obeying inside it. Translators render it hear in one verse and obey in the next. In Hebrew, you have not heard a thing until you have done something about it.
Dabar is God's side. Shama is ours.
The Church has a name for that answer. Faith. She calls it the obedience of faith. You believe what God has revealed, all of it, because of who revealed it. And then you live it. Faith that does nothing is dead. Saint James says so (2:17).
If you want to see it done perfectly, look at Mary. An angel brings her a word from God. And she answers: let it be done to me according to your word. And the Word became flesh.
That is what a word from God does when somebody answers it.
And nobody answers alone. Faith is a gift, and it comes to you through the Church. She heard first. She hands the word to you the way it was handed to her.
You will hear it this Sunday. The reader finishes and says: The word of the Lord. And the whole room answers.
So faith is not passing a test on this book.
Faith is your answer to the One who is speaking in it. With your whole life, in His Church.