I don’t know what you are asking or why.
Whenever someone says they believe the word of god is inerrant I ask which one? The KJV is different from the NIV. One of those bibles used Meier her a better or worse translation for one of their words. That often gets dismissed as even if a word is changed the same story still comes out. When that happens I ask well where did Mark end? The earliest manuscripts end with the women scared and running. The later manuscripts ended with a handful more to the story. At this they often say well at worse case that part of the story could have been filled in by the other gospels and so it’s ok. Then I bring up well what about the books we don’t have that the Bible mentions like the book of Jasher, or when it mentions a story that is found in the assumption of Moses or the book of Enoch?
Now once we come to terms that you have a translation that’s different from their translation because it’s based on a different set of manuscripts then yours and that yours comes from a later version and that some books are potentially missing you now have to show that the culture, not just the language is properly translated we must then deal with how do you know the copy your copy is based on was based on what was a good copy and not a bad one.
I have been reading The Biblical Canon by McDonald and came across this which indicates that there is indeed a middle ground.
McDonald gives the example of Hebrews
Most of Chapter 12 would apply to this discussion.
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Dale Allison wrote a wonderful work on The Jesus Tradition in Q. This type of idea was mentioned. When we apply Papias’ statement to canonical Matthew problems abound. Its not only logia (though this is explicable) but more troubling is its certainly based on traditions received in Greek (Q and Mark both of which were used by Luke as well). It’s not written in Aramaic. But what if the Apostle Matthew composed an early version of Q in Aramaic, the contents of which can seemingly be found scattered in Paul’s writings in the 50s… This document which predates the Gospels was expanded and then eventually incorporated another Gospel that utilized a passion narrative. As material was added to Matthew’s original writing, the name stuck in its community as it evolved into current canonical Matthew I might not be doing it complete justice but I could dig up a quote if interested. Of course this is a speculation. But it does serve as a nice middle ground between wholesale dismissal and wholesale acceptance of Papias’s statement on Matthew. Both of those options don’t seem to do the evidence full justice.
In a sense the same thing could have happened in the Johannine community with the redaction of GJohn. There are also some scholars who think some of the pastorals utilized genuine Pauline material. I mean the evidence clearly suggests 2 Corinthians is a combination of two to possibly almost half a dozen letters letters of Paul that were combined into one. It is possible the pastorals are reworked Pauline material. Some argue Romans was original 14 chapters and some 15, with the 16th being a different letter to Ephesus that was tacked on.
The earliest manuscript evidence for the Pauline corpus is p45, which dates to ca. 200CE, 150 years of so after Paul wrote, give or take 50 years. IIRC the textual critical reconstruction of Paul really goes back to a single archetype. Paul presumably wrote a lot of letters that were lost.
Vinnie
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That only helps to explain vocabulary differences in the Pastorals. Scholars put forth a plethora of reasons that all converge on the same idea: namely that these not only don’t come from Paul, but reflect a later time period.
Vinnie
There are quite a few scholars who think the Pastorals are reworked letters of Paul. Or at least they used other writings of Paul.
Sure I can easily see how it seems deceptive from modern human standpoint and even in some ancient eyes. +1 to Bart. But not to all. For some it was acceptable. But if God inspired a later disciple of Pauls to add to a letter Paul wrote, that is certainly his Divine prerogative. The evidence favors pseudonymous composition of the final work and I honestly can’t see how accepting this is remotely as difficult as accepting God killing children, advocating rape and misogyny and genocide. You can imagine God wiping 20 million (or however many it was) people off the face of the earth with a flood but you draw a moral line at God inspiring someone to rework a few letters of Paul at a later time? To me that is absolutely mind-blowing.
Rape. Check.
Slavery. Check.
Misogyny. Check
Killing babies. Check.
Pseudonymous composition . Deal breaker!
???
You could also ask them to open their Bible and read the following verses: Matthew 17:21, 18:11, 23:14; Mark 7:16, 9:44, 9:46, 11:26, 15:28; Luke 17:36, John 5:3-4; Acts 8:37, 15:34, 24:6-8, 28:29; Romans 16:24 and 1 John 5:7-8. If they are not using a King Jimmy, they might be a bit perplexed as they are all missing from modern translations of the Bible which just skip right over them. Or go through the PA, the redaction of John, 2 Corinthians which is multiple letters of Paul merged into one and many known or suspected interpolations throughout the NT such as the ending of Mark which you referenced.Textually speaking, no single person in the history of the church EVER possessed an inerrant Bible. It has never actually existed. He who inspires an inerrant text can also inspire inerrant copying if he so desired.
How can we argue God cares about inerrancy when it likely no single person in the history of Christianity ever possessed a complete and inerrant Bible? Clearly we are more preoccupied with this notion today than God ever has been.
Good points on Jude. 2 Peter also seems to have all but incorporated the text of Jude into itself. Clear literary dependence there.
Vinnie
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I have read someone (? Roger Olson) state that it is not about actual inerrancy, but rather that things like the Chicago Statement are written to be boundry markers: Their purpose is to tell you who is in the group and who is not. I think you can say that about a lot of other position statements also.
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It would definitely be beneficial for churches to emphasize some teachings on how the current collection of scriptures came to be. I meet Christians who were Christians and pastors before I was even born that are still caught off guard snd have somehow went their entire lives without realizing the Bible mentions Jasher and if they do they regurgitate thst the current book of Jasher is not the original and authentic book which does not change my point. It’s still not in there. It seems to have been completely lost.
I think for denominations or congregations. But there are a lot of average Joes that believe in it.
I can definitely see that. That is what a statement of faith is more or less is it not? Same with a creed, Your earlier point about there being so much wiggle room in the Chicago statement that it makes inerrancy meaningless is absolutely correct in my eyes.
Though the difference with the Chicago statement is I think many will actually argue for inerrancy based on the thinking found in the Chicago statement or at the least, use it as a hermeneutic for understanding Scripture. They employ these articles in their exegesis. It is as much a hermeneutic as it is a statement of belief in my eyes.
Vinnie
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that is totally okay. We all miss stuff. The larger point was still relevant. If we had an entire nation of David’s their collective fallenness and cycles within their relationship to God becomes cultural as well. Let’s take expansionist England as an example, they by force expand their empire and build it using violence, theft, and slavery. Then God works to address and ban the slavery aspect using people within the system. Awesome. The empire then continues its expansion using violence and theft and doesn’t stop this until is forced to do so. I do not know why you consider unarmed a factor. If you invade someone’s home and murder them and steal their stuff, they are innocent regardless if they hold an inferior weapon to yours. It is the same with nations.
Yes I struggle with where to stop as well. I thought @Daniel_Fisher made a good point in the other Sparks thread asking in what reasonable sense the Bible is still God’s word? I did my best to address it.
It is quite plain that a lot of pretty straightforward statements in the Bible can no longer be taken at face value. For me a lot changes once you accept Biblical criticism especially when you realize it extends to the gospels as much as it does the Pastorals or Old Testament. I can’t argue over small doctrines anymore. I can only look at the biggest picture of scripture, the biggest picture of Jesus and so on. From there to me the Bible is not primarily meant to be a theological encyclopedia giving us factual knowledge about the world. It certainly contains some but it’s supposed to make us wise for salvation and lead us to do good works. But this of course is based on a passage from 2 Timothy but I also think it’s self evident from the entire NT which tells us about Jesus and calls us to repentance and charitable and selfless living. Aside from the broadest themes, the more you try to define and narrow down specific doctrine from scripture the less certain your conclusions become. Scripture now has different theologies so you can’t automatically just use one scripture to interpret another. To me it’s about tempering.
I struggle with the same issue as you but I had to recognize a different purpose of how I understand the Bible. I just read Sparks who writes that Moby Dick by Melville wasn’t written about whaling, but primarily about the obsession of Ahab. So we shouldn’t judge it based on its accuracy of whaling. That’s not the point. Does God really care if we are preterist? Calvinist or Arminian? Premillennial or amillennial? Believe in once saved always saved or don’t? Personally, I don’t think God really cared much about any of these things. If he did scripture would be clearer. The point is to mediate the sacred, to bring people to repentance through Jesus. We want to know what it all means and build a theology but maybe the main purpose is to read it through the Spirit for an experience with the divine.
What Sparks says about Cartesian thinking and desiring indubitable knowledge really hits home for me. I also read Enn’s “The Sin of Certainty.” It absolutely was not easy losing “certainty.” Took me a decade to really come to grips with it. Daniel speaks of wresting with the text. I believe we all have to do this. It’s not about just cutting what we don’t like. We have to wrestle with the text everyday to figure out why it’s in scripture and if God is trying to tell us something. Most of us have to wrestle with scripture, even if it’s, “why on earth is this in my holy book”?
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“They talk about a life of brotherly love/show me someone who knows how to live it.”
But the enemy I see
Wears a cloak of decency
All nonbelievers and men stealers talkin’ in the name of religion
Dylan
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“If we look at all the material in John, all the self-identification statements of Jesus are inexplicably absent from the synoptic Gospels.” E.P. Sanders and Margaret Davies.
“Inexplicably”? My, my, my. Very strong word and it isn’t true by a mile.
Um, sorry, but what in the world does the example of an anonymous epistle have to do with pseudopigrapha in this context??
In general, I don’t disagree at core with the argument as it is. I stated as much. In principle, I grant it is conceivable to have pseudopigripha of the type you described/quoted. But if you noticed my observations, the pastorals clearly do not fall into that category. The author of these letters - if not Paul, took great care to include lots of minor little details that have no relevance or purpose except to deceive the reader/audience into believing that the author was in fact literally Paul.
I’ll repeat what I described earlier. These kinds of little historical and personal details included in a letter aren’t simply protecting the actual author and allowing him to write anonymously, or to attribute a vague or general honor, or visionary status, to a more famous author. The inclusion of such personal details is there only to deceive.
Now, it is rare, but in this instance at least, I find myself in agreement with this basic observation of Bart Ehrman:
Why, for example, would a forger tell his alleged reader (who was not actually his reader!) to be sure to bring his cloak to him when he comes and also the books he left behind (2 Tim. 4:13)? This objection has been convincingly answered by one of the great scholars of ancient forgery, Norbert Brox, who gives compelling evidence that this kind of “verisimilitude” (as I called it in Chapter 1) is typical for forgeries. Making the letter sound “homey” removes the suspicion that it’s forged. The personal notices in 2 Timothy (there are fewer in Titus and fewer still in 1 Timothy) serve, then, to convince readers that this really is written by Paul, even though it is not.
I just rediscovered this yesterday, and it would seem to be relevant here:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Sorry. Wrong quote.
McDonald’s point was even if a book wasn’t written by the supposed author it was still considered inspired and part of the canon. Why does authorship mean so much to you? Or is it only Paul’s letters?
Very interesting argument indeed. But one which can easily be turned around in whatever direction a person desired. I could easily argue that “loving”/“merciful” and “just”/“holy” are indeed not two symmetrical yin/yang attributes, but that any love or mercy expressed by God must always be understood in light of God’s far deeper, more pervasive, and more “core” attribute of his holy, retributive, righteous and terrifying justice.
- If God is merciful toward something or someone, then it must be just for God to be that way perhaps for some reason we cannot yet see, because God cannot ever be anything other than just .
- If God is just toward something or someone, then it must be merciful for God to be that way perhaps for some reason we cannot yet see, because God cannot ever be anything other than merciful
Obviously, I maintain that only the first sentence makes any kind of either logical or scriptural sense. Good and righteous Judges don’t exercise justice for the purpose of being merciful and loving, or in light of their larger commitment to mercy. Good military commanding officers exercising justice in the USMC don’t have an obligation to exercise mercy.
And, not to mention, there is plenty of Scriptural warrant to recognize that God - while he is indeed lavish and generous with his mercy, kindness, and love, exercises those qualities with a certain discrimination - He is clearly and undeniably just toward everyone, and exercises mercy toward some while sometimes giving the full extent of raw retributive justice. The thousands that died in the flood weren’t victims of God’s mercy, or the countless other plagues and judgments that resulted in entire destruction of entire people’s was demonstrating God’s righteousness, justice, and the like, but it was in these moments that he was clearly not expressing or acting in “mercy”.
so clearly, God’s justice is the more foundational attribute, and we must understand his mercy and love in light of his justice. And thus, any scriptures that speak of God’s love, mercy, and kindness must be understood, reinterpreted, or sometimes rejected by using a “hermeneutic of justice”.
And of course, there are plenty of prooftexts I could toss out in support of such… “Jacob I loved, Esau I hated”. “But he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished…”
Now, I could hypothetically argue something like that, although I will refrain from that at present.
My more significant point is this: If someone were to argue along those lines, on what basis would or could you challenge that position? Does the Bible say that God’s love or mercy is more central or foundational than his justice? If so, why can the Scriptures that claim such not be those Scriptures that require reinterpretation, if not outright rejection, through the lens of the “hermeneutic of justice”? Is it your personal experience and personal perspectives? If so, then why is your own personal experiences that make you believe God’s love to be more foundational inherently superior to those others whose personal experiences lead them to see God’s justice or holiness as the foundational starting point of his character? Is it the analogy of a loving father? Why is that analogy more “foundational” to God’s character than his being the “judge of all the earth”?
I hear it often, some variation of using a “hermeneutic of love” to reinterpret, modify, redefine, or outright reject that plethora of passages that speak of God’s wrath and justice. All well and good… IF there was an inerrant reason that this is the hermeneutic God wants us to use. But my point is simply that if someone chose to use a different hermeneutic - and reinterpret, modify, redefine, or outright reject the plethora of passages that speak of God’s love and mercy, on what basis could you claim that they are using the wrong hermeneutic? Is there some particular part of Scripture that is inerrant that says we must use a hermeneutic of love instead of one of justice? Would they not be justified to reinterpret, modify, redefine, or outright reject any passage you pointed to that expresses said hermeneutic of love?
I suspect you have assumed that love /mercy to be the more “foundational” attribute, and that justice / wrath must be interpreted “in light of” the former. But if you don’t have a, dare I say, inerrant reason for so claiming, then so far as I can see, your position only remains that - an assumption.
Thoughts?
MUCH of the Bible is anonymous, and no evangelical cares. But when someone LIES about the authorship of such, it is more of a big deal.
If I submitted an article to People magazine anonymously, and they chose to publish it on its own merits, no one would blink at this, and certainly not think there was any ethical or moral difficulty in that fact alone.
If I submitted an article to People magazine, and they published it specifically because I had falsely deceived them into believing that it was written by Kim Kardashian… That would be a bigger deal, no?
If I did so, it would not only call into question the legitimacy of everything written in it, it would also be proof positive that the real author was a deceitful, lying charlatan, and make one wonder why he should listen to anything said author wrote, no?
Only to some.