Some Difficulties a Person Encounters in Studying the Bible
1. The Problem of Canon and Text: Can We Be Sure That We Have “The” Bible?
The first difficulty a person encounters in studying the Bible is simply the fact that a person can never be sure that the book that he or she is studying is actually “the” Bible. There are at least two reasons for this uncertainty.
(1) On the one hand, there is the problem of defining the “canon,” that is, the official listing of just which books should be considered the authoritative Scriptures for a person’s religion. Almost every religion has its own “authoritative” writings (“Scriptures”) that tell the stories, set the boundaries of belief, and define the faith. Most, if not all, adherents of various religions believe that their holy books came, not from human imagination, but by means of Divine revelation. Nearly all Christians and Jews and Muslims certainly have that understanding. But how can a person “prove” Divine inspiration and revelation to everyone’s satisfaction?
The story has been told about a man who bragged to his friend that his pastor’s sermons were absolutely infallible and inerrant. The friend asked, “How is that possible?” The man said, “Because he talks face to face with God every day.” “But how do you know that is the case?” the friend asked. The man answered: “Do you think a man who talks with God face to face every day would lie about a thing like that?” And many people use the same kind of circular reasoning in defense of their choices of sacred books.
Certainly most Muslims believe the Qur’an is inspired, authoritative, and even "infallible," because the Qur’an’s own content says or suggests that it is. And many (but by no means all) Christians believe that the New Testament is likewise inspired and authoritative, and "infallible," solely because they have come to the erroneous understanding that verses like 2 Timothy 2:15 are declaring that it is. In fact, 2 Timothy 2:15 simply makes the point that the Christian Scriptures, “inspired” though they may indeed be, are “useful.” But the concepts of “inerrancy” and “infallibility” are never mentioned in that passage or in any other. “Inspiration” and “inerrancy”/“infallibility” are not the same thing. One concept does not require the other.
But even within the “Judaeo-Christian” tradition there are disagreements about what constitutes “the” Bible, and there always have been. If you are Jewish, your official canon is the Hebrew Bible, the “Tanakh,” which Christians have commonly called “the Old Testament.” If you belong to one of the many branches of the Christian faith, additional books are added to those in the Hebrew Bible. Almost all Christians give authority to at least the 27 books commonly called “the New Testament.” But even among Christians there are some differences.
So-called “main-line” Protestant Christians and Pentecostal Christians generally limit canonical authority only to the 39 books commonly called “the Old Testament” and to the 27 books called “the New Testament.” But if you are a Roman Catholic Christian your church also gives authority to a group of some 14 or 15 books called “the Deuterocanonical Books” or “the Apocrypha.” And if you belong to one of the Eastern Orthodox branches of the Christian faith a couple of additional books are added to that group, plus an additional Psalm. (Some Lutherans and nearly all Episcopalians also give a degree of semi-authority to most or all of the Apocryphal books when they include texts from these in lectionaries of daily worship readings.) The Ethiopian Church adds the Book of 1 Enoch, which was written originally in Greek, but which, except for a few Greek fragments (Codex Panopolitanus), has survived only in the Ethiopic language.
Adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the “Mormons,” usually accord canonical authority to The Book of Mormon, The Pearl of Great Price, and The Doctrines and Covenants, as well as to official pronouncements made by the Presiding Elder of that church.
And if you are a Seventh-day Adventist Christian, the writings of the founder of that denomination, Mrs. Ellen White, hold a degree of at least semi-“canonical” authority for you.
Furthermore, if you are a member of the Church of Christ, Scientist, you probably give a degree of at least semi- “canonical” authority to a work called Science and Health, With Key to the Scriptures, and perhaps to other works by the founder of the Christian Scientists, Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy.
And those are only the present-day differences. In fact, nothing like a unanimous decision about the extent of the canon for all of Christianity has ever existed. In the New Testament itself, the Book of Jude, verses 14-15, quotes from the “pseudepigraphical” Book of 1 Enoch (“Ethiopic Enoch”) (1:9; cf. 5:4 and 27:2). It is clear that the writer of Jude regarded 1 Enoch as an inspired and authoritative text. Furthermore, Jude, verse 9, refers to an incident in the work called The Assumption of Moses with similar implications. There are many other references of similar nature scattered throughout the New Testament, especially in the Pauline letters.
As late as the year 325 CE, bound copies of the New Testament often included books like The Shepherd of Hermas and The Letter of Barnabas and The First Letter of Clement [Bishop of Rome c. 100 CE] to Corinth. At the same time, many such bound NT copies omitted some books in our current New Testament, like Hebrews, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and the Revelation to John, because these were not thought to be authoritative Scripture.
It is true that by about the year 397 CE something like a consensus had been reached and published in some regional decisions within the Roman Empire. But even as late as the year 1534 CE the Protestant reformer Martin Luther felt perfectly free to place the books of Esther, James, and the Revelation into an appendix to his German translation of the Bible because he held that they should not be considered authoritative for Christians. He felt those books did not reflect the central doctrines of the Christian faith, as he understood them, especially the concept of “justification by faith.” The Roman Catholic canon was set in April of 1546 during the fourth session of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), but was never recognized as authoritative by Protestants.
(2) There is a second reason that a person can never be certain that the book he or she is studying is actually “the” Bible. Let us accept for the moment, either on faith, or just for the sake of argument, that only a certain group of books were correctly chosen by some person or group with authority to make such a choice, to be the only authoritative and canonical books. There remains another problem. It is the unfortunate but true fact that we do not currently have even a single book of the Bible available to us in the original copy (the “autograph”), as it came from the pen of the original writer or compiler.
All that we have are copies—or to be more accurate, copies of copies of copies of copies . . . And if you have ever attempted to copy any long passage by hand then you have probably experienced this problem first hand. Today we have thousands of manuscripts of all or parts of Biblical books from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. But no two of them read exactly alike! Those copies were preserved under less than ideal conditions, long before the age of printing and proofreading. They contain numerous unintentional errors by scribes, and often even some deliberate alterations to the earlier text that reflect some scribe’s attempt to clarify obscure references or bad grammar, or to put forth his own special bias or interpretation of the Biblical writer’s intent.
Devout Biblical scholars called “textual critics” have worked for many years to develop principles by which to determine, as closely as possible the correct and original text of the Biblical books. Both “conservative” and “liberal” translators must depend on the work of such scholars. But this science of “textual criticism” is still very inexact. Although we may indeed have a fairly reliable and generally correct text of those books that our particular faith-tradition may designate as Holy Scripture, we are nowhere near having a text identical with the original as it may have come from the pen of an Amos or a Paul or a John. We simply can never be sure that the text that we have in our hand, or the text that we purchase in a bookstore, is “the” Bible. Therefore it is incumbent on us all to approach our sacred texts with openness and with humility rather than with dogmatic certainty.
2. The Problem of Translation
A second difficulty that a person encounters in studying the Bible is that of translation. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that we could be sure that the right books were chosen for our canon, and even that we had the original text as it came from the hands of the earliest writers or compilers. Even so, very few people in our modern world could actually read them! This is because they were not written in our Modern English, nor even in King James English, but in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek. Thus, those Biblical texts must be translated into the everyday language that we read and speak, so that an average person can read them with any kind of understanding. Otherwise they would be of value only to Biblical scholars proficient in those ancient languages.
Our generation is more fortunate in this respect than any generation that has preceded us. There do exist in our time a multitude of good translations in English and in other modern languages. However, far too frequently many English-speaking persons still seem content to use only one translation, the King James Version, which came into being nearly four hundred years ago. It was completed in the time of William Shakespeare, using the English language of that time rather than that of our own time. In fact, the King James translators themselves deliberately used an archaic style that was already out of date even in 1611. The version we use today is not the first edition of 1611, but the seventh edition of 1769.
One would think that, after twenty centuries of Bible translation, Biblical scholars by now would have arrived at some consensus concerning the one and only true and authoritative meaning in English of those ancient texts. But as we have noted, in our time translations are in fact becoming more and more numerous. And they often differ from one another today to a much greater degree than they ever did in the past. This is because Biblical scholars have become increasingly aware that translation is a very difficult and complex science.
In part this complexity is due to the fact that our modern languages just do not always have vocabulary and syntax corresponding to those of the ancient Biblical languages that can do justice to the original intent of the writers and compilers of Scripture. Translation involves not merely finding equivalent words in each of two languages. Translation also involves communicating, insofar as possible, what the original writer intended to say in his language into equivalent thought-units in another language. But sometimes there are just no really appropriate equivalents. All that the most devout linguists can do is work with their limited understanding of two languages, in the hope that what is said in one language can be approximated in the other.
This complexity of the science of translation is also due in part to the fact that every modern language is constantly changing—words and concepts do not stay the same. New words are added daily and new ways of expressing ideas keep coming as well, even as older ways become outmoded. Both because our use of our modern languages and our knowledge of the ancient ones are constantly changing, translations of the Bible can never come to a fixed, static, unchangeable position.
Then there is the problem of “textual criticism” that we mentioned earlier. Translators are dependent on the work of “textual critics” (work that is always in progress) to determine just which text represents most closely the original words of the Biblical writers. And new Biblical manuscripts keep turning up in every generation to throw new light on the Biblical text. Thus, the text that we translate today is indeed quite different from the one that the King James translators used in 161l. Many differences in translations may be due to the fact that the translator has concluded that a differing Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek text from an earlier or more reliable manuscript more accurately reflects the earliest we can know about what the Biblical authors actually wrote.
For all these reasons, the American Bible Society has recommended that every modern translation be revised at least every thirty to fifty years. Thus, the very popular Revised Standard Version (NT 1946, and OT 1952) was revised in 1989 as The New Revised Standard Version. The New English Bible (NT 1961 and OT 1970) was revised in 1989 as The Revised English Bible. And The Holy Scriptures, published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1917, was revised in 1985 as TANAKH: The Holy Scriptures.
Several other revisions of standard translations have recently been completed or are in progress. But there will never be only one “correct” Bible translation, in English or in any other language. Most modern translations are fairly dependable, but the student of the Bible must always remain humble, working always with the awareness that none of them is final.
3. The Problem of Culture
A third difficulty that persons encounter in studying the Bible is that we are separated from the culture of the Biblical writers and their readers/ hearers in terms of both time and space (distance). Languages reflect and interpret more than just words and thought-units. They also reflect and interpret cultural conditions and assumptions.
Culture is transmitted from one generation to another through the use of language. Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek are dead languages from ancient cultural conditions on the other side of the world from us. The Bible came out of a culture that is totally foreign to us in the modern United States. We must always resist the temptation to read our modern Western ways of logic and practice into the ways of those ancient cultures.
Let us assume again that we had the correct canon, and its original text, and even a perfect translation of them. Even so, to interpret a text in the Bible accurately it still is necessary for us to come to a realistic understanding of the ancient Middle Eastern cultural context out of which the Biblical writer wrote and to which the writer addressed himself. This is a basic presupposition for all Biblical interpretation.
But today’s Middle East itself is not entirely the same as the ancient one. Even if we had the means to travel to the geographic area from which the Bible came, we still could not also project ourselves back into their time and reason with the thought patterns of those times. We can analyze the archaeologists’ discoveries of ancient manuscripts and analyze their findings at various excavated sites. Yet archaeologists themselves often differ in their own understanding of the cultural remains that they find. Thus we can never be sure we have it all down right. We can never fully understand the cultural context out of which the Biblical books arose.
All we can do is humbly try to educate ourselves, to learn all we can about the geography and history and customs and thought-patterns and other cultural circumstances of that world and that age. Indeed, this will be a large part of what the present course of study attempts to do. We are impelled, if we hope to interpret the Bible correctly, to gather all the information we can about those matters of cultural context, all the while humbly realizing that our store of such knowledge will always be imperfect and less than adequate for the job.
4. The Problem of the Bible’s “Religious” Character
A fourth difficulty a person finds in the study of the Bible is that one is compelled by the linguistic and cultural evidences found in the Bible to admit that the Bible is primarily a “religious” document (or more correctly, a collection of “religious” writings). And this means that the Bible is not primarily or essentially the same thing as certain other kinds of writing—history, biography, or science, for example. And while it is true that certain data from those other disciplines may indeed occur within the Bible, always reflecting the often limited understanding that people of those times held of such matters, such data are secondary to the Bible's main purposes, which are religious.
As a religious document, the Bible deals with certain “ultimate” questions of life: “Why do human beings exist?” “Why must human beings suffer, and how should they deal with their sufferings?” “What is the ultimate purpose or destiny of humanity?” “What is to be the relationship of humans to the Divine?” “What is to be the relationship of human beings with each other?” “How should human beings deal with questions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ and with their own consciousness of ‘sinfulness’?” And "how have the people in the past who considered themselves to be God’s people dealt with such questions?"
The Bible is not just carefree literature, like a paperback novel, intended by its writers/compilers to be read simply for relaxation or entertainment. Neither is it a biography, or a textbook of history or of science, to be read just to gather “facts.” The Bible “interprets” life and history in the light of the writers’ profound faith in, and experiences with, their God. The Bible is not solely their remembrance of the chronological course of events in the ancient Middle East, or of the biographical facts of the lives of Moses, or David, or Jesus, or Paul. Rather, the Bible is an “interpretation” of those matters, as seen through “eyes of faith.” Thus, Biblical scholars conclude that the Bible contains “sacred history” or “salvation history,” (German: heilsgeschichte) rather than pure “objective history.”
For example: “objective history” might conclude from the available records that sometime around the year 1280 BCE, there occurred an escape of a band of unpaid Hebrew laborers, and a minor border skirmish between them and their Egyptian rulers, near a marshy body of water called the “Sea of Reeds.” But a Jewish or Christian believer might interpret those same events through “eyes of faith,” as “salvation history.” Such a person might conclude that in those events there was the intervention of the one and only eternal God, an intervention that resulted in the formation of a community of faith out of a mixed rabble, and that forever changed the human situation. “Objective history” can neither prove nor disprove such an assertion.
Likewise, “objective history” might speak of the execution of one Jesus of Nazareth about the year 30 CE in Jerusalem by a group of Roman soldiers, acting under orders-from the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate, perhaps at the instigation of certain Judean religious leaders, as the execution of a rabble-rousing revolutionary. But a Christian believer, reading the same story through “eyes of faith,” might interpret that same event as another instance of Divine intervention into human history. He or she might see it as another instance in which the eternal God entered into a human life in a unique way, engaging in a self-offering, as a kind of “sacrifice” for the sins of the world, again forever changing the human situation. Again, “objective history” can neither prove nor disprove such an assertion. It is a matter of personal faith-interpretation.
Such conclusions as these can never be proved or disproved by the methods of scientific or historical research. The student of the Biblical texts must always be humbly aware that the Biblical writers do read their history through “eyes of faith,” as “salvation history,” because the Bible is a collection of “religious” writings.
5. The Problem of the Limitations of Human Language
When we recognize the Bible’s religious character and purpose we then encounter a fifth difficulty in studying the Bible. We now find ourselves compelled to recognize that those Biblical writers were attempting to perform an essentially impossible task. They were attempting to express ideas that are basically inexpressible, and to describe events, and concepts that are basically indescribable, simply because human words have limits, and because human language is inadequate to communicate what the Biblical writers were attempting to communicate.
Those Biblical writers were attempting, through “eyes of faith” to speak of encounters of human beings with that which is Divine or transcendent, or supernatural. Human language is not really adequate for this task. Human words cannot totally communicate the kinds of realities these Biblical writers wanted to describe. And much of the time they had to use symbolic, or poetic, or metaphorical, or parabolic, or even mythological language, because those are often the only kinds of language that can even come close to doing justice to the kinds of realities these Biblical writers were trying to communicate.
Thus, the writer of Genesis speaks of a primeval time when human beings had personal fellowship with God in a Garden, where there existed talking snakes, and trees whose fruit was not apples or pears, but Life, and the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And thus, the writer of the Revelation speaks of the reward of the faithful that included a New Jerusalem, with gates made of precious stones and streets paved with gold. That is the language of poetry, of metaphor, of allegory, of symbol, of parable, and of myth. Such language does not make the realities any less real for the person of faith, but the Biblical student must humbly recognize this problem of literal versus figurative or mythological language in dealing with Biblical texts, and not get the two kinds of language confused.
The final difficulty is the simple fact of our own human imperfection. Even with all the knowledge available to Biblical interpreters today, and even with full realization of, and compensation for, all the other difficulties that have been described above, there is still no guarantee that anyone can provide a perfect interpretation of any Biblical text.
Whatever a person might believe about the theory of an infallible or inerrant Bible, the plain fact is that such a Bible, even if it exists, must still be subject to interpretation by fallible and errant human beings like you and me. No Pope, no Church Council, no Council of Rabbis, and no pastor or Bible teacher can guarantee a perfect interpretation. As Martin Luther observed, Popes have erred, and Church Councils have erred. And the plain fact is, that you and I err also. And since human beings are imperfect and fallible, how would they be able to recognize something infallible and perfect if they encountered it? One might even conclude that, if God purposed to send an inerrant or infallible revelation to humanity, then God had failed in that purpose, since humanity has never discovered an infallible or inerrant interpretation of the infallible inerrant revelation that all humanity could agree upon and recognize immediately for what it is!
Examples abound throughout history of the ways in which persons of equal sincerity and devotion and scholarly ability and knowledge and persistence still have come to widely divergent interpretations of the very same crucial Biblical passages. This fact applies not only to Rabbis Shammai, and Hillel, and Akiba, in Jewish interpretation, and not only to Pelagius, and St. Augustine, and St. Jerome, in the early centuries of Christian history, and not only to Luther, and Calvin, and Zwingli, during the Protestant Reformation. It applies to all of us in every generation.
And thus it is that our world is still divided by a multitude of religious denominations and sects. Most of them have at one time or another chosen to believe that theirs was the only way to believe, and that all others were “heretics,” while “each drew his sword on the side of the Lord.”
But even if I myself were to rely solely on my own judgment and scholarship and devotion, without benefit of those potentially erring opinions of others—an impossible proposal in itself—yet the problem remains. The only way for the concepts of the Bible to get into my own mind and value-system is for them to become intimately involved with all of my own human imperfections.
The very moment that any written text passes through the prism of my eyes it is in danger of being mis-understood and mis-interpreted by me. And the moment that any spoken text passes through my eardrums on the way in it is in danger of being mis-understood and mis-interpreted by me. And the moment that the text leaves the tip of my tongue as an “interpretation” on the way out, it is in danger of being mis-understood and mis-interpreted by others. Try as I may, I simply cannot perfectly understand the Bible, nor perfectly explain it to someone else.
And yet, if my value-system or my religion includes the Bible in any of its canonical forms or texts as an authority, or as a source of guidance for my living, as an individual, or as a member of a faith community, I must humbly press ahead with the task of interpretation. Even if I am simply seeking to understand my own culture, so influenced by the Bible, and by people whose religious heritage and authority have been rooted in the Bible, I must humbly press ahead with that task, in spite of all the difficulties involved.
This discussion was strongly influenced by lectures of Dr. William Hull, formerly Dean of the School of Theology, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, and Dr. Calvin R. Mercer, Professor of Religion, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina.
