CATHOLICS AND THE BIBLE

The newspapers are filled with religion related stories which I will comment on shortly but first I need to get in one Catholic issue from my childhood.

My religious education was Catholic. I was taught primarily by nuns from grade school all the way through high school. We had regular “religion” classes which were sometimes attended by the local priest and “Catechism” classes where we studied the latest edition of our Catechism book.

Early on in my education, I was told NOT to read the BIBLE because I may become confused. I was told to rely on the Catholic Church and my Catholic teachers to convey everything about religion I needed to know.

Obviously, I went and got a Bible and started reading it but they were right, it did not make much sense to me even though I enjoyed some of the “dirty” stories.

The instructions to NOT read the Bible puzzled me. My Protestant friends would tell me that in their religion SCRIPTURE was paramount. In my study of religious history I saw how the words in the Bible not only dictated what people believed about God but influenced their views about a variety of subjects.

Today Christian Fundamentalists, who believe EVERY WORD in the Bible came from God himself, play an influential role in our government and therefore in our society which means a direct affect on us as individuals.

As you know, I have been studying religion and the history surrounding religion for most of my life. I credit my Catholic education for inspiring me to search for answers my Catholic education did not provide.

Anyway, the Bible is a study topic all by itself and the most interesting part of Bible study to me is how it came to be written and by whom. Most books are about the words in the Bible and what they all mean but I needed to know how the Bible itself came to be.

A great new book by Bart D. Ehrman, my favorite religion professor and author, called “MISQUOTING JESUS; The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why”, 2005, came on the market recently. It not only talked about how the Bible became what it is today but also touched on why the Catholic Church, at one time, discouraged its members from reading it.

I am referring mostly to the New Testament Books.

Now I am not going to detail all that has happened with the Bible throughout history but kind of summarize what scholars have found. We do not have the originals of any of the Books found in the New Testament (NT). We don’t even have the first copies of the originals. What we have are a hell of a lot of translations of copies of copies……………………………………………….etc.

In 1707 a book was published that is considered a classic in New Testament textual criticism. This particular book compelled scholars to take the “textual situation of our NT manuscripts seriously”.
John Mills, a fellow at Queens College, Oxford, England spent 30 years researching his Greek New Testament edition.

He compared ALL available translations of the NT in all languages. In his “critical apparatus” notes he indicated places of variation among all the surviving material available to him. He listed thirty thousand (30,000) variations.

His work prompted the BIG question IF ONE DID NOT KNOW WHICH WORDS WERE ORIGINAL TO THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT, HOW CAN ONE USE THESE WORDS DECIDING CORRECT CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE AND TEACHING.


Protestant scholars quickly argued that God would never allow the holy text to be so corrupted as to render the standard of faith insecure. They accused the “Papists” (Roman Catholics) of trying to undermine the basis for Protestantism.

This was 1707 but today we have discovered and catalogued 5,700 Greek manuscripts. We also know of 10,000 manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate plus versions of Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Old Georgian, Church Slavonic and the like. The number of variations has now grown to 400,000 or more.

Not all the variations are earth shattering. Many are accidental but many are intentional and those should give us pause.

The Catholic Church knew about the variations and the unreliability of any one text from the very beginning. They continued to teach that true faith required the “Apostolic Traditions” preserved within the Church itself and that true faith cannot be based solely on scripture (Sola Scriptura) as the Protestant Reformation maintained because the scripture is unstable and unreliable.

The Protestants then set upon devising methods of textual criticism that would enable modern scholars to reconstruct the original words of the NT.

Many, many books have been published on the subject and continue to be published but in my opinion it is virtually impossible to reconstruct the original words of the N.T.

Today, the Protestants have their version of the Bible and so do the Catholics. Each version tends to reflect the specific theology of each Christian sect.

But to me, the early admonition not to read the Bible makes perfect sense when trying to mold young minds into the “correct” religious thinking. It is easier to study “stories” from the Bible instead of the actual words of the Bible which may or may not be correct.

On a deeper level, religion scholars cannot guarantee that the words in the N.T. are the ones originally written and because such a guarantee cannot be made, the idea that the “words” were / are “divinely” inspired cannot be supported either.

This obviously wreaks havoc with the people that use Biblical “words” to support their way of thinking about matters.


Janusz