In this episode, I wrap up part three of my series based on the first lesson I taught in my local Catholic parish inquiry program for 30 years. I’m not here to convert anyone. I’m just sharing my stories. In this episode, we explore how Scripture scholars use historical critical methods, textual analysis, and knowledge of ancient languages and cultures to help us understand the original intent of the Sacred Authors.

Hello, this is Chris Young. Welcome to Episode 92 of Contemplating Life.

In this episode, I continue a multi-part series based on my 30 years teaching the Catholic faith in my local parish’s inquiry program.

Whenever I talk about religion, I’m not out to convert anyone to my beliefs. As with all topics, my purpose is to educate, entertain, enlighten, and possibly inspire. But that doesn’t include trying to evangelize you into Christian or Catholic traditions. I’m just telling my stories.

This week, I will talk more about how scripture scholars use historical critical analysis to help us understand the deeper truths to be found in Scripture. This episode is part 3 of the first class I ever taught for the RCIA program.

That lesson was titled “Revelation and the Bible.”

As previously mentioned, the Bible was written over the period of perhaps 1000 years by at least 50 different authors in three different languages. In our last episode, we discussed the scholarly debate over the translation of the opening word of the Old Testament. While the average person can typically find something meaningful and useful in Scripture translated into their native language, such as English, if we want to get serious about what the Bible really means; we have to rely on people who have a deeper understanding of ancient languages, ancient culture, textual analysis, and ancient history.

We also need to understand the distinction between what the Bible actually says and how our particular denomination or faith tradition interprets Scripture. One of my favorite Scripture scholars, Dan McClellan, says we need to consider data over dogma. Although I quote him often and use him as a valuable and respected resource, personally, I don’t place data over dogma. I simply believe it’s important to understand the distinction between the two.

In the same way that I trust scholarly investigation to help me understand the original intent of the Sacred Authors in the context in which the works were written, I also trust the centuries of church leadership who have reflected on how to apply Scripture to everyday life and to clarify the deeper meaning behind the written words.

In short, the scholars tell us what Scripture really says. The theologians and church leadership help us understand what it means.

While I don’t have the skills to teach an entire course on scriptural analysis, I want to give you some insights into the types of things that scholars use to help us understand scripture better. The general name for their work is the “historical critical” method of Scripture analysis.

This method is not just used by atheists or Catholic theologians. Such analysis is also used by many of the mainstream Protestant denominations, which are not those that would be described as Evangelical. We are talking about certain branches of Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Anglican as well as Reformed Jewish traditions. These denominations do not take a strictly literal, “what it says is what it means exactly” approach.

In contrast, Evangelical churches such as Southern Baptist, Church of God, Church of Christ, and others interpret Scripture in an extremely literal manner. These denominations take the “descending view” of Scripture that we talked about earlier, in which what is written is totally inspired, inerrant, and univocal.

So, here are some things that Scripture scholars consider to understand the original meaning intended by the Sacred Authors.

1) HISTORICAL CRITICISM: What were the historical circumstances when the book was written? For example, many people interpret the Book of Revelation as predicting what will happen in the end times. However, we need to understand that it was written in a time when Christians were being persecuted. It was written to comfort first-century Christians and reassure them that although they were suffering for their faith now, the good guys would win in the end.

Other historical issues to consider… Is it verifiable in secular history? Do we have evidence of the facts of the story from nonbiblical sources?

For example, we have no outside sources to indicate that the plagues described in Exodus actually occurred in Egypt in Mosaic times. Many scholars even question whether Moses was a real person or was simply a legendary character, similar to someone like King Arthur. There probably was a historic Moses, but the stories have been elaborated and may be an amalgam of various early Jewish leaders.

On the other hand, we do have nonbiblical sources that talk about Jesus of Nazareth, around whom the Christian religion was founded, and which confirm that he was crucified by the Romans. A Roman historian, Josephus, describes Jesus and reports that his followers claimed he rose from the dead. It stops short of saying he actually did rise.

2) SOURCE CRITICISM: What sources did the author use? For example, the gospel of Matthew and Luke have copied entire sections of Mark. Furthermore, there are sections of Matthew and Luke that are common to one another that are not found in Mark. Scholars believe that it came from a third source, which they called the “Q” source. We’ve already seen that Genesis 1 and 2 apparently came from independent sources. Sometimes, this analysis notes that the style changed. While the books of 1 and 2 Timothy, as well as Titus, claimed to have been written by Paul, analysis shows that the style is significantly different from other Pauline epistles and in places contradicts the principles found in genuine works by Paul.

3) TEXTUAL ANALYSIS: Scholars look at what the earliest manuscripts said. The older the manuscript, the more likely it is that it has not been altered. One of the problems is that even our earliest manuscripts were produced a couple of hundred years after the originals were written. We have no idea what kind of changes may have been made during that time.

In some instances, we have direct evidence that changes have been made. We have a manuscript where a verse was written in the margin. Manuscripts prior to that version did not contain the verse in question; however, manuscripts produced after that alteration do contain the extra verse. See the video linked in the description where Dan McClellan describes several places where we believe verses were added at a later date. Modern translations usually delete these verses that make reference to them in a footnote. It reports that some manuscripts include this verse.

When given conflicting manuscripts, one of the rules of thumb that scholars use is that the more difficult it is to understand a particular passage, the more likely it is that this is the original. The thought being that somewhere along the way, someone found these difficult passages and tried to fix them by rewriting them to make them clearer. It’s unlikely someone would deliberately rewrite something to make it more confusing. So, scholars favor the confusing version as being the original and the easy version as being something that was edited.

4) LITERARY FORM: We earlier discussed that Scripture uses many literary forms and genres, including myth, law, poetry, history, epic stories, parables, and philosophical statements such as proverbs. You can’t interpret poetry as you would history. You don’t read law like parables. In modern times, we have difficulty distinguishing between editorials and news sometimes. So you have to understand the genre of writing you are reading.

5) INTENT and CONTEXT: We already discussed that Revelation was not intended to predict the end of the world but rather to comfort troubled Christians. We have to determine intent based on context. Here is an example of a simple English sentence with seven words in it. Without context, we can put emphasis on any of these seven words and come up with seven different meanings.

Consider the sentence “I never said he stole the money.” Here are seven variations

“-I- never said he stole the money.” You said that. I didn’t.

“I NEVER said he stole the money.” Not once! Not ever did I say that.

“I never SAID he stole the money.” I may have implied it, but I never outright said so.

“I never said HE stole the money.” Maybe she did, or someone else? Not him.

“I never said he STOLE the money.” He just borrowed it, but didn’t return it for a long time.

“I never said he stole THE money.” Not the money you were talking about. Different money. Not the money.

“I never said he stole the MONEY.” Just the jewelry and the artwork, but not the money.

If we don’t understand the context of that sentence, we cannot determine the author’s intent.

6) CULTURE and TIMES: This is a big one. Consider what the role of women was in biblical times. When Paul says that wives should be obedient and subservient to their husbands, consider that he also said husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the Church. And how did Christ love the church? He died for it. The first-century model of a marriage in which both parties were committed to one another meant that wives obeyed and were subservient to their husbands, and husbands sacrificed for their wives. It’s not at all the model we use today, but it is the one used in ancient times. Today, we consider marriage as a partnership of equals. That was a foreign concept to people in biblical times. But the core idea of total commitment is the same. That remains the same in both cultures. They expressed that total commitment to one another in vastly different ways.

7) PERSPECTIVE: Different people can view the same event from different perspectives. For example, as I’m writing this, the Indiana Pacers just lost Game 3 of the second round of the NBA playoffs, 126-104, at Gainbridge Fieldhouse last night.

Consider how different people view the event.

Coach Carlisle: “We didn’t play to our potential. And the referees were against us.”

Pacers owners, the Simon brothers: “It was great! We sold out every ticket.”

Mayor Hogsett: “Indianapolis is a major league city, not just known for auto racing. The city looked good on national TV.”

A teenager who didn’t see any of his friends at the game: “Nobody was there.” As if the 17,000 fans in attendance didn’t count.

Cleveland fans: “God is on our side.”

Pacers fans: “God abandoned us.”

You have to understand the perspective. What are the biases? How do people view the same events differently? Remember that Scripture sees things through a theological perspective, not a scientific or historical perspective.

8) ADAPTATION: How does the author adapt the Gospel message into stories? Take, for example, the story of the paralytic at Capernaum. This story is found in Matthew 9:2-8, Mark 2:1-12, and Luke 5:17-26. This is one of my favorite stories of the New Testament. Jesus was preaching in a building surrounded by a huge crowd. There was a paralyzed man whose friends wanted to bring him to see Jesus, but it was so crowded they could not carry him in through the door. So, his friends carried him on a mat up to the roof, opened a hole in the roof, and lowered him down so that he could see Jesus. I often say this illustrates one of the earliest examples of a disabled person who could not get into church because of a lack of proper accessibility.

Anyway, in Luke’s version of the story, he says that they removed the tiles from the roof to make a hole. Neither Matthew nor Mark included that detail. They just said the friends opened a hole in the roof and lowered him down. They did not mention the tiles. There’s a good reason for that. Luke was unaware of the fact that the buildings in Capernaum did not have tile roofs. Luke had heard the story, and he lived in an area where there were tile roofs. He presumed that if you’re going to lower someone down through a hole in the roof, you would have to remove some tiles.

There are many such geographic errors throughout Scripture because the author was not intimately familiar with the exact details of the geography. Yet they adapted the same stories to their own needs and told the stories in their own manner.

Speaking of tiles and accessibility, one day I was entering our parish facility to teach this very lesson. Our meeting room is on the lower floor of the building, which I entered through the Northeast corner of the building. As I went down the hall, a workman was replacing the tile floor that had been damaged. He had just spread a layer of contact cement over the concrete floor and was waiting for it to get sticky so that he could lay the new tile. The area completely stretched across the entire hallway, and there was no way around it.

He laid down a pair of wooden planks over the sticky area, and I carefully rolled my wheelchair over this impromptu bridge. When I got to this part of the story, I began laughing uncontrollably until I could compose myself and explain to the class that they nearly had to open a hole in the roof to get me there that night.

In subsequent years, I thought that story over and over again, but I didn’t realize until now the irony that it was missing tiles that prohibited me from getting in the building, whereas in Luke’s story, they had to remove tiles to get the disabled guy into the building.

Let’s take another example of adapting the same story in three different ways. In Mark 8:34, it reports that Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me.” In Matthew 16:24, it says, “Take up your cross and follow me.” However, in Luke 9:23, it says, “Take up your cross and follow me EACH DAY.”

In the time and place in which Mark and Matthew were written, the church was very much under persecution, and people were literally at serious risk of crucifixion or other forms of death for their beliefs. However, when Luke wrote, things were a bit easier on Christians. Furthermore, it was becoming more apparent that Jesus might not return as quickly as early believers thought he would. Luke’s message is that the day-to-day challenges of living life as a Christian are a different way to take up your cross and follow Jesus, and to do so each day, not one time, literally on a cross.

For many years, I would follow up on this story of how Luke adapted the words of Jesus to his own audience by commenting that we were fortunate to live in times that were more like Luke and less like Mark and Matthew. These days, we don’t face crucifixion. So, we take up our cross each day.

I used that observation until 1999. That is because on April 20, 1999, two armed students walked into Columbine High School in Colorado and killed 13 students and one teacher. Media reports at the time said that two different female students were asked by the gunmen if they believed in God. When they answered yes, they were killed.

From 1999 onward, I pointed out that post-Columbine, maybe we do live in times more like Mark and Matthew, where we might die for our beliefs.

In my research for this podcast, I discovered that the accounts of the martyrdom of these two young women may not have been accurate. Still, I think we can all agree that we live in dangerous times, and while we should follow Luke’s advice to take up the cross of Christianity in our daily struggles, we never know when we might have to sacrifice for our beliefs.

The point is, as circumstances evolved over my 30 years of teaching, I had to adapt my material to my particular audience. The Sacred Authors adapted their material based on their cultural conditions and intended audience when they wrote Scripture.

To summarize, to accurately understand the original intent of the Sacred Authors, one has to be well-versed in ancient languages, ancient culture, cognitive linguistics, and a variety of other disciplines. Internet research on such topics has pitfalls unless you are confident of the sources the Internet presents to you. There are a lot of people who are trying to renegotiate what the text means to suit their own social identities and political agendas.

I’ve recommended scholars such as Dan McClellan and Bart Ehrman because they have well-established academic credentials and claim to represent the views of a consensus of Scripture scholars. They back up their views with recommendations of other well-credentialed scholars, if you want to read further on these topics.

Even if you do find reliable sources, the consensus among well-trained Scripture scholars is a constantly evolving endeavor.

Attempting to use biblical concordances or Greek and Hebrew dictionaries can lead to erroneous assumptions. See the McClellan video I’ve linked on the problem with dictionaries.

The bottom line is, unless you intend to do sufficient research to become an academic scholar on these topics, take my advice and, as they say, “Don’t try this at home.” That may sound hypocritical coming from someone with no formal theological training. However, I know my limitations. Everything I present on these topics has come from trustworthy sources. I’m not attempting to do my own historical critical scriptural analysis. I’m just reporting what I have found to be the consensus.

Before we wrap up this lesson, let’s define some terminology we use and give you a brief overview of what’s in the Bible.

Bible: from Greek “Biblia” (books) – a collection of inspired writings arranged into 72 books which relate the faith experience of God’s saving activity among his people.

Testament: (covenant) – agreement between God and His people. “Old Testament” – offered by God to Abraham and Moses. “New Testament” – offered through Christ to all who believe in Him.

Scripture: (writing) – that part of the Church’s experience of God that has been written – much of it hasn’t been; and including some writings not included in the Bible as we have it today, (e.g., the Gospel of Thomas and the letter of Barnabas).

Gospel: (good news) – the account of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and his teaching understood as the good news of God’s love for us and our forgiveness in Christ.

Epistle: (circular) – a letter from an apostle offering spiritual guidance and encouragement.

Revelation: (making known) – that which God shares with us about Himself. Also, the name of the last book of the Bible.

Literary Form: a form of literature (history, poetry, myth, parables, law, proverbs, hymns, epic) used to reveal God’s truth. Some forms employ imagery and symbolic language as a means of proclaiming a deeper level of truth. Accuracy of detail is readily sacrificed for the purpose of a more easily related presentation of the deeper truths.

Canon: (collection) – the set of books of scripture held to be the inspired word of God. The church determines what is or is not canonical.

Now, let’s take a very brief overview of what’s in the Bible.

The Hebrew Scriptures, referred to by Christians as the Old Testament, are a collection of 46 books written somewhere between 900 BCE and 100 BCE. There are seven books and parts of two others that are accepted by Catholic and Orthodox churches, which are not present in the official canon of Jewish tradition, and many Protestant churches. We will discuss those more in the next episode.

The first five books are known as the Pentateuch or the Jewish tradition called the Torah. They consist of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It is the most important part for Jewish people.

This is followed by historical books Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, which relate the story of Israel in the first days it entered Palestine. Note that while we describe a book as “historical,” it does not necessarily mean that it is strictly a history book. It is the story of the Chosen People that is told through a theological perspective.

This is followed by 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, and 2 Chronicles. These are also historical books about Israel’s rise to power during the reign of the kings and the Babylonian exile, which is attributed to their infidelity to God.

Ezra and Nehemiah are historical books about the return of the Jews to Jerusalem at the end of their captivity.

The books of Tobit, Judith, and Esther are parables or morality stories that probably do not have a genuine historical basis.

1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees are historical books from the era just before the time of Jesus. They are the latest written of any of the books of the Old Testament.

There are wisdom books that describe how a good Hebrew should live their life. These include Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, The Song of Songs, Wisdom, and Sirach (also known as Ecclesiasticus).

We then have books about the prophets divided into major and minor prophets. This refers only to the book’s size and not its contents’ importance. Major prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, and Daniel. The minor prophets are Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

The New Testament consists of 27 books written between about 48 CE and 100 CE. Protestant and Catholic Bibles do not disagree on which books belong in the New Testament.

We begin with the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which recount Jesus’s life and teachings. This is followed by the Acts of the Apostles, which is the history of the early church and is believed to have been written by Luke as an extension to his gospel.

Then we have a collection of epistles or letters beginning with the letters of Paul to various churches. We have Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians. This is followed by personal letters written to individuals supposedly by Paul. It includes 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. Note that only Philemon is undisputed in its authorship. The other three so-called pastoral letters were probably written by someone impersonating Paul because the style is significantly different, sometimes contradicts earlier teaching of Paul, and shows evidence that it was written after his death.

The letter to the Hebrews was once believed to have been written by Paul, but that is generally rejected because it reads nothing like Paul. It explains Christian theology in the context of Jewish tradition.

We have what are known as the “Catholic letters,” although that has nothing to do with the Catholic Church. The word Catholic simply means “universal.” These books appear in both Catholic and Protestant Bibles. In this context, it simply means they were written to the entire church and not specific individuals or church communities. They bear the names of their authors. We have James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2, and 3 John, and Jude. The Johannine letters are believed to have been written by the author of the Gospel of John, who also wrote the book of Revelation. Note that this John is not John the Baptist nor John the Apostle. He is often referred to as John the Evangelist to distinguish him from other Johns.

Finally, we have the Book of Revelation, sometimes called the Book of the Apocalypse. It is a highly symbolic work of apocalyptic literature designed to give comfort to first-century Christians in their struggles against Roman occupation. It was not designed to predict the end of the world.

This wraps up our three-part series covering the first lesson I taught for RCIA. In our next episode, we will dive into my second lesson, which discusses the role of tradition in the Catholic Church. Protestants believe in a doctrine called sola scriptura, which means Scripture alone. This means that the Bible is the sole authority and only method for passing on what God has revealed. In contrast, Catholics believe that both sacred Scripture and sacred tradition have authority and are means by which we preserve what has been revealed. We will explore all of these topics in the next few episodes.

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I will see you next time as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.