{First posted in 2012; ever relevant to both long-time bible-students and those about to venture into reading the book that is purported to be “the very words of God”. —Admin1]
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First let’s get one thing straight: when we say “bible,” what exactly do we mean? Casual use of the word refers to some sort of a manual, as in “a golfer’s bible.” The word however is almost always understood to mean the Bible of Christianity, so let’s look at that Bible first.
The Christian Bible contains two parts: the “Old” Testament [OT] and the “New” Testament [NT]. The number of books in the NT canon is 27 but the number of books in the OT canon vary, 39 as decided on by the Protestant Reformers, while the Catholic OT canon includes additional books called alternatively—
Deuterocanonical (the second canon), Apocrypha (questionable authenticity), Pseudepigrapha (false writings).
The obvious questions that should immediately come to mind are:
- Why is Christianity messing with the Hebrew Scriptures that were not originally theirs but Israel’s?
- It is bad enough that they chose to label these Sacred Scriptures as “Old”;
- worse, they changed the order of the books into something more systematic to their Greek western way of thinking;
- and further, the Catholic Bible accommodates books that the Jews themselves chose not to include in their canon for good reason; as if there is not enough to read in the “Old” testament, they have to burden their flock with additional books that the Jews themselves consider as not inspired by God;
- finally, not connected with the canon is another culprit — the translating process, where specific verses in OT were tampered with, and words actually changed to fit NT doctrines.
In the various discourses between Sinaites and Christians posted on this website, the arguments of each side are based on the Bibles each use, as well as the translations. Because of that, the discussants never see eye to eye and most likely never will. Sinaites debate from the vantage point of having “been there done that.” Having studied the New Testament for decades and taught those Scriptures, we know what we have left behind and why. Christians use the very same arguments Sinaites used to propound so there is nothing more that could be said to convince us.
Here is yet another book that provides some explanation on why and how diverse beliefs could come out of what is claimed as “the Word of God.” It is a short history of the “Scriptures” entitled: Whose Bible Is It? [paperback, published by Penguin Books]. The author, Jaroslav Pelikan, is “Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University” and has written many books including: The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Jesus Through the Centuries, and Mary Through the Centuries.
His dedication page says this: “To all my honorary Christian Alma Maters—Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox—and to The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, which on 16 May 1991/3 Sivan 5751 made me an honorary Doctor of Laws.”
The Introduction’s title: “The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible?”
Excerpt:
In a variation on all those jokes about the rabbi, the priest, and the minister walking together into a bar, three women take advantage of the lunch hour in their downtown office to visit the bookstore across the street. One of them is Jewish, the other two are Christian—one Roman Catholic and the other Protestant. Because it is the season of Passover and Easter (closely related holidays that are nevertheless observed on separate dates), each of them wants to buy a Bible for her daughter.
And yet each of the three needs to buy a different Bible. Therefore, a knowledgeable clerk should ask each of them, “Which Bible do you want?” For not only must any buyer or reader of whatever religious affiliation find the many English translations of the Bible bewildering (King James Version, Revised Standard Version, Good News Version, Jewish Publication Society Version, New English Bible, Revised English Bible, Jerusalem Bible, New Jerusalem Bible, etc.), but the buyer has the right to expect “the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible.”
Yet the table of contents—technically called canon, meaning “rule”—-is fundamentally different in the different Bibles. The difference between the Jewish Bible and all the Christian Bibles is the greatest: there is no New Testament, and the Jewish buyer ought to be able to demand “nothing but the Bible,” especially if on her last business trip she examined the Gideon Bible in her hotel room, which includes the New Testament. But the Protestant Bible is also very different from the Roman Catholic Bible: it has no Apocrypha, so the Roman Catholic customer may well ask, “Is this the whole Bible?” It is sometimes said that these differences are “discernible [only to] ecclesiastical scholars,” but five or ten minutes of comparison shopping ought to be enough for anyone to see the contrasts.
Two terms that are often used in connection with the Bible, one from law and one from medicine, will illustrate the importance of “the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible” for anyone who takes the Bible as authoritative: testament and prescription. We are so accustomed to tossing around the terms “Old Testament” and “New Testament” that we may forget their root meaning, which comes out in the legal title “last will and testament.” Such a “will and testament” is a contract between the living and the dead, and both the testator and heirs are entitled to have the confidence that this document authoritatively represents “the whole testament and nothing but the testament” of the one who has made it and dictated its terms. Similarly, when a physician writes a prescription, it is legitimate for both the doctor and the patient to demand that the pharmacist honor the “authorial intent” in the document and provide “the prescription and nothing but the prescription.” Both the testament and the prescription can be matters of life and death, and so can the Bible, which is why we speak of “salvation,” which means health, and of “what the Word of God prescribes.”
In a sense, Whose Bible Is It? may be said to use the “history of the Scriptures through the ages” to tell how all those various Bibles are the same, but also how and why each of them is different—not only initially in what it contains but also in how it has been read and understood, and to explain why that is still important.
The history of Jewish-Christian relations, and then the history of the divisions within Christendom, is at one level the history of biblical interpretation. The parties have faced each other across a sacred page that they held in common but that only served to emphasize their separation. In every Bible, whether Jewish or Christian, God says to Moses:
“I will raise up a prophet for them from among their own people, like yourself: I will put My words in his mouth and he will speak to them all that I command him; and if anybody fails to heed the words he speaks in My name, I myself will call him to account.”
As quoted in the New Testament, is this a prophecy of the decisive transfer of authority from Moses to Jesus? And in every Christian Bible, Jesus declares:
“And I say to you: you are Peter, the Rock, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall never conquer it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; what you forbid on earth shall be forbidden in heaven and what you allow on earth shall be allowed in heaven.”
Emblazoned around the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, is this the charter of the Papacy? It is essential to recognize the importance—-but also the limitations—of these issues of doctrine and biblical interpretation in our understanding of how Christians and Jews have viewed each other, and of how Christians have viewed other Christians.
Because of this central concern for the place of the Bible both in Judaism and Christianity, the nomenclature of the books and portions of the Bible is far more than a matter of names. Christians are accustomed to speak of “the Old Testament” and “the New Testament,” the contrast between “the old” and “the new” unavoidably carrying with it connotations such as “the superseded” or at least “the updated.” In these pages “New Testament” is retained, because that is what Christians call it.
But instead of “Old Testament,” or the various recent attempts at politically correct euphemism such as “First Testament” or “Hebrew Scripture,” it is usually called what it is called within Judaism, Tanakh, which is an acronym of the first letters of the Hebrew titles of its three parts:
- Torah, the Five Books of Moses;
- Nevi’im, the Prophets;
- Kethuvim, the Writings.
Only as a reference to its place within the Christian Bible is it called here “Old Testament.” Following the exalted precedent of Psalm 119, the title of each of the twelve chapters—12 for the 12 tribes of Israel or for the 12 apostles of Christ—includes the name “Bible” or some synonym for it.
1. The God Who Speaks
2. The Truth in Hebrew
3. Moses Speaking Greek
4. Beyond Written Torah: Talmud and Continuing Revelation
5. The Law and Prophets Fulfilled
6. Formation of a Second Testament
7. The Peoples of the Book
8. Back to the Sources
9. The Bible Only
10. The Canon and the Critics
11. A Message for the Whole Human Race
12. The Strange New World Within the Bible
So, does the author answer the question in his book’s title?
AFTERWORD After all this —
After all the commentaries; after all the controversies; after all the sermons; after all that biblical scholarship, whether Jewish or Christian or secular; after all the heresies and all the orthodoxies, whether Jewish or Christian or secular; after all the other books (including this one); after all the prayers and all the tears; after all the forced conversions and all the progroms; and after the Holocaust —
—after all this, the question with which this book began still remains: Whose Bible is it?
In an ultimate sense it is presumptuous for anyone to speak about “possessing” the Bible. As both Jewish and Christian communities of faith have always affirmed, the Bible is the Book of God and the Word of God , and therefore it does not really belong to any of us. Psalm 119, which is one long hymn of praise about the word of God, insists throughout that it is speaking about “thy statutes,” ‘thy testimonies.”
Disappointingly, the rest of his conclusion is “politically correct” in a world of religious diversity. It was our hope that this one book would confirm what we have suspected all along. Sinai 6000 has arrived at recognizing only a very limited part of the “Bible” as the very Word of YHWH. But to explain this requires another article, part III of this series.
If there is one thing we do recognize and are thankful to Christianity for, it would be this: that in appending the “Old Testament” to the “New,” people all over the world have been exposed to the Hebrew Scriptures. Thanks to our owning Christian Bibles, we had access to the “Old.” Unfortunately, for decades we hardly read, much less seriously studied that part of our Christian Bible because there was enough to study in the New Testament alone. If we ventured into the Old at all, it would be to check out a ‘prooftext’ that would confirm that the “Old” is obsolete and superseded by the “New,” and to check out the many “messianic prophecies” that all pointed to Jesus as the long expected messiah of Israel. Thanks to Messianic teachers, we read much more of the “Old” but still kept seeing Jesus as we were programmed to see him in our NT orientation. So, will a Christian ever understand what a Sinaite sees and understands today? Hopefully so, but probably not, not as long as he/she is using a Christian Bible.
In behalf of the Sinai Core Community,
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