Religion assignment(Written Reflection 2)

Who composed the Bible?

One needs to think a little differently about the authors of the books in the Bible than one thinks about authors of contemporary writings such as Stephen Prothero’s composing God Is Not One. The focus on biblical authorship is not to celebrate the genius of particular individuals who decided to publish their personal views on God. Many individuals had a hand in composing the final versions of the books of the Bible, but these individuals wrote them in the context of their communities of faith, drawing their material from a variety of written and oral sources passed on in the communities of faith. The Christian Bible has as its primary purpose witnessing to and passing on the faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, revealed in Jesus Christ. The writings are always in service to the Church’s faith in Jesus. It is the community of faith who produced the Bible and continues to make the Bible a living Word through its entering into the text as the normative source for understanding how God has worked, is working, and will continue to be present in the communal and personal lives of the ecclesia in the world.

What do we know about the authors of the New Testament?

We know, for example, that an individual, Paul of Tarsus, a convert after Jesus’s death and resurrection, wrote letters to some of the communities where his preaching inspired believers to form some of the earliest Christian communities. The Letter to the Galatians is an example of one of those letters. Paul’s powerful message communicated in his letters focused on the Good News of salvation and new life found through faith in the risen Christ. These letters are some of the earliest Christian writings that we have. Other letters are attributed to apostles whose names are mentioned in the Gospels, especially Peter, John, and James. The Gospels too are associated with the names of four individuals, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These names are of individuals who were close to Jesus or the apostles who were with Jesus during his life. Still little historical information remains about who these men were or about their precise role in composing the Gospels, and we do not have an account of the actual process of producing the final versions of the four Gospels.

Why did the early Christians not save accounts of the writing process?

Recall that the early Christians’ focus was not on the writer but on the message written about Jesus. We do, however, know some things about the general development of the New Testament. The earliest Christians treasured stories about Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. They passed them on to new believers first by word of mouth when they shared with those they met the good news they had found in Jesus the Christ. Gradually these stories were written down and organized to make it easier to hand on the faith as Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire. Recall what Portier told us: “Tradition literally means ‘what has been handed on’” (20). It is also what is found in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, “For I handed on to as of first importance what I also received” (1 Cor 15:3) (Portier, 7). The focus is on handing on the treasured stories of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, stories from reliable witnesses, especially the apostles and those who worked with the apostles. Of course, the New Testament includes more than the stories of Jesus, it also provides accounts of early Christian worship, the history of the church’s development, and early Christian hymns and prayers. The written forms of the books that make up the New Testament were pretty much completed by the year 100 CE. It is also important to remember that written versions of texts were much rarer than today. The chart from Tradition and Incarnation provides a visual overview of the various books and important dates in the history of the Bible as the Church’s book.

What do we know about the composition of the Old Testament?

The Old Testament (which is the Scriptures of Jesus and the Apostles) has a much longer and more complex history of development that spans over 2000 years. The books do not appear in the order that they were written nor were individual books necessarily written in a single period of Israel’s history. In a way similar to the New Testament, the books are the treasured stories of God’s covenant with Israel, with the Jewish people. Of course, the Old Testament includes more than stories. It also includes the Jewish Law, historical accounts of the nation of Israel, the witness of the prophets, accounts of worship, and the prayers of the Jewish people. The Old Testament is divided into three major parts. In Hebrew, the acronym, TaNaKh is used to remember these three parts. The “T” stands for “Torah,” the first five books of the Old Testament. The “N” is for the Nevi’im, the Hebrew word for “Prophets.” The “K” is for the Ketuvim, the Hebrew word for the “Writings,” which are often divided into two subgroups, the historical writing and the wisdom books. Another chart from Tradition and Incarnation provides a visual overview of the Old Testament books and important dates in the history of the Old Testament’s development.

How did the Bible come to be the Bible?

Recall that before there was a New Testament, there was a Church, i.e., those called together in faith in Jesus Christ. First among these were the apostles, the men and women who knew Jesus, were taught by him, and were witnesses to his death and most significantly his resurrection from the dead. Many of them along with others who came to believe the apostolic witness became martyrs in the name of Jesus Christ. Martyr means “witness.” These men and women professed by their lives and ultimately their deaths a faith (trust, active commitment) in the new life offered in Jesus Christ. They gave over their lives fully into the Body of Christ, the Church, trusting that entering into Jesus’s death is a passing over into his new life. The treasured stories about Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection as well as the apostolic testimonies to Jesus’s significance for all people were handed down from the apostles and martyrs to others who came to believe. There were many written testimonies and speculations about the significance of Jesus; more than what we find in the Bible. Some of the other writings the Christian community judged to be too distant from the apostolic teachings or contrary to the martyrs’ witness as the Church. In the early part of the third century (around 220 according to Portier’s chart), the Church had come to accept certain books as more of an embodiment of Jesus than others. These are the ones we find in today’s New Testament.

What does it mean to say “the Church” determined what books belong in the New Testament?

Now the preceding simple description of how the New Testament came to be does not reflect the complexity of the process. It must be kept in mind that the Church here means a “communion of local churches” (Portier, 115). Recall that the great Church was composed of local churches united through baptism into the one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church. (Think about Paul’s letters to different communities. Cf. Clement, 118-121). The bishops of these local communities were in regular communication with each other and came to a general agreement primarily through their use of certain books in prayer, worship, and teaching on what books should be included in the New Testament. Given their use of the Old Testament in coming to deeper understanding of how Jesus is the Word made flesh, they also accepted the continuing authority of the Old Testament. That process is called canonization. “Canon” simply means rule. The Church in seeking to follow what had been handed on from the apostles and the witness of the martyrs determined that the four gospels, the letters of Paul, and the Catholic letters as well as the Old Testament were normative.

What does it mean to say that Bible is normative for Christians?

Normative here means that these books, the Bible, both Old and New Testament, provide the rule of faith, i.e., the standard by which Christians measure their continuity in belief and practice with that of the apostles and martyrs. The Bible invites people of every period in history into a life-giving relationship with Jesus Christ. Scripture “embodies the Word,” as Clement wrote (97). Christians understand these texts to be “inspired.” The word, “inspired,” comes from the same word as “Spirit.” Its root meaning is “breath.” When the Church proclaims the Bible to be “inspired,” it is saying in a sense, that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of love between the Father and his Son, has breathed life into these words. To say that Scripture is inspired does not erase the very human, historical process which produced this holy text and the very human, historical process in which the text is read. What it does mean is that in reading the Bible, taken as a whole, one comes into a relationship with the living God. This kind of reading requires the reader to have an understanding of that “sea of historical connections” in which this text is interpreted (Portier, 19). Scripture is always to be read in the context of Church, the body of Christ. It is because of the ongoing life the Christian community, the Church, Christ’s Body, that the New Testament continues to have normative authority nearly two millennia later after it first proclaimed the Good News or Gospel of Jesus Christ. And it is because of the New Testament that the Church continues to have a Living Word to proclaim in its prayer and worship. Much more can be said and needs to be said about the Bible. For those interested, the Religious Studies Department offers a variety of courses on the study of the Bible.

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