So this is going to be more of an academic Bible study about the origin of the Bible itself and the culture it and the Church have developed in. I don't really mean this to be like an apologetics class because I don't have any credentials outside of going to a Christian high school, so I can't double-check the scholars on everything. If you have a severe doubt about anything in the Bible, church history, Tradition, and all that, I don't even believe that apologetics would help you anyway. I think John 9-10 explains this.
(read John 9)
So here we have our super smart scholar people, the Pharisees, who they might be able to see, but they are spiritually blind. Like their heart is blind. And they can't understand this beautiful simple, transformative gospel standing right in front of them.
(read John 10)
So Jesus says He is the door. If you want salvation, you go to Him. If you have a critical issue about our faith, you go to Him. Don't go to apologetics, scholars, pastors, or anyone with less authority than Jesus. He might use things like scholars, but it's vital you go to Him, you share your concerns with Him, you rely on Him, and you're open to listening to Him. We're all blind from birth, and He's the only one who can open our eyes.
So I want us to be careful to not get too into the scholarly debates because the main point of any Bible study should be the simple and transformative truth of the gospel. But frankly, whenever we get into ancient Tradition, a lot of it is lost to time, so the debates get emotional and defensive. For example, when it comes to studying canonization, which is the term for how the books of the Bible actually became part of Scripture, you'll come across the Council of Jabneh or Jamnia which supposedly officially solidified the canon of Hebrew scriptures. There's no evidence this council happened at all. We have the writings of rabbi in the area of Jabneh and their stances on the canon, but we don't have any actual writings about the council. We don't know who attended or what the decisions were, yet the book Origin of the Bible used it as a source, so I don't know. It might have happened, but you have to be careful when dealing with scholars because though some are really good, they are still people at the end of the day with their own biases and agendas.
Number 2, I want us to more grounded when we talk about the Bible. I know Michael referred very recently to the Catholic Church's tradition and his respect for it when making a point, so I'm not calling him out, but I hear people in New Life Chapel and the different small groups say things like that all the time. But there's Jewish Tradition, there's Catholic Tradition, there's the writings of the Church Fathers, even apocryphal books like the Gospel of Thomas are lumped in with tradition. I think there's a lot of value in having some familiarity with what you're referencing.
On the other hand, I want us to be really bold about asking critical questions about the Bible, the Church, and everything about Christianity. If you look into the nature of the Bible and kind of how the Church has used it over time, you'll see that there's a lot of divisions and politics involved.
So after King Solomon, the kingdom split into what would become Samaria and Judea, and they each have their own version of the Scriptures. The Ethiopian Church, which is called Cush in the Bible, has different canon. And I think most of us know that Catholics and Orthodox Christians also have more books in their Bible that we do. So that might raise some questions, and a lot of them have to do with Church politics.
As Protestants, our Old Testament reflects the Tanakh specifically, but with that, you get into rabbinical politics. One issue that's particularly curious to me is the the book of Lamentations. Does anyone know who wrote it? (Jeremiah). So we actually don't know. The book's anonymous. We get this from Jewish tradition, specifically the Talmud. The style is similar, the time period is similar, as Lamentations is the fulfillment of Jeremiah's prophecies, who better to write the book? But there's an element of rabbinical politics involved, too. The book is brutal. If you read it with a lot of empathy for the Jewish people, the destruction of Jerusalem is cataclysmic. It's not like, idk, like a really bad war or something. The Temple is gone. The holy of holies is gone. It's a devastation now. They're carried into slavery, literally Babylon. How could something so bad happen to God's covenantal people? Specifically this is called the issue of theodicy - How can you call this divine justice? How can a good and all-powerful God let this happen? Well, if you claim Lamentations was part of Jeremiah's ministry, it becomes a lot easier to contextualize. His entire ministry is about God's love in the midst of suffering and His commitment to giving a future to the remnant of His people. So part of why we attribute Lamentations to Jeremiah is because of politics over matters of theodicy.
So as the Bible is a book written by both the Holy Spirit and human authors, I worry that some people might see the Bible as not so clean. The Bible isn't like the tablets of the testimony that Moses received on Mount Sinai, written with the finger of God. (Exodus 31:18) There's a lot of human involvement with the Bible. But I want you to know that all of that didn't bother Jesus one bit when He read the Bible and extensively quoted it with authority.
I think this is the most anticipated section. I am going to give you a little introduction to what's out there, so you can do your own digging on whatever specifically interests you. I don't really like a lot of what scholars have to say about the biblical manuscripts because, frankly, there's a lot of cope and unsubstantiated claims. For example, a whole lot of people, a whole lot of scholars in their publications, say that even without manuscripts, the early Church fathers quoted the Bible so extensively, that we could recreate the Bible from their quotations alone. And that's just not true. A lot of the quotations are uncited and heavily paraphrased. Several books are sparse. It's just a legend, but people go around saying it as a fact. So if you really want to know, I recommend you got directly to manuscripts and the Church fathers who used them. I tried to do my due diligence here, but it's a lot.
So if you want everything to line up perfectly and point to one clear perfect Scripture, I don't think you're really going to find it through textual criticism or whatever scholarly venue. It's really messy. If we go to the word of God, though, it tells us why.
