An Account of the Bible

Note: this is by and large a summary and re-presentation of sources. Greater explanation is given in them and they are recommended. The principal source for points is the late Anglican bishops' book, Hanson, A. T. and Hanson, A. P. C. (1989), The Bible Without Illusions, SCM Press, but there are others.

Books of the Bible

More than twenty to thirty people wrote the Bible (as was once thought):

Tanakh

The Pentateuch/ the Torah

• Genesis 1.1 - 2.3 is the latest element (300 years after earliest)
• Genesis 2.4 - 3.24 is the earliest
• Genesis contains no history at all
• Genesis tells nothing about the age of the universe
• Genesis tells nothing about the origins of humankind

• No history with Abraham and the patriarchs
• No clear history but legend with Moses (nothing at all reliable)

• Deuteronomy is a recasting of the law
• It is dated with Josiah's reformation of 621 BCE (2 Kings 22-23)

The Historical Books

• Actual history comes only with Joshua and Judges but with legends
• Israel did not conquer Canaan in one go (it also involved assimilation)
• Judges has historical elements in an unhistorical wrapping

• The Book of Ruth is not history
• It challenges the narrow focus on God's interest in Jews alone

• 1 and 2 Samuel and 2 Kings attempts to give history of Saul's and David's kingdom up to Babylonian exile
• There is contemporary history with the rise of Saul up to Solomon
• Two sources - earlier approval of kingship and later disapproval
• David did not kill Goliath but Elhanan the son of Jaareoregim (2 Samuel 21.19)

• Kings shows much legendary material with historical elements
• Elijah and Elisha are myths
• The regnal years of the kings do not add up
• They provided a pattern for the kinds of miracles claimed for Jesus

• Chronicles is dated around 350 BCE
• These are overblown accounts and little of history

• Ezra may not have lived

• Nehemiah is quite historical and is the mission to Judah after 500 BCE

• The Book of Esther is similar to Ruth but with less of a moral lesson

The Poetical Books

• The Book of Job is written after the exile:
• It challenges the view that only sinners suffer and the righteous prosper
• Job is not patient (eg used in James 5.11) but challenges God's justice and demanded it
• Job did not believe in life after death - the Prayer Book use of 19.25-27 turns the trusted vindication of God into bodily resurrection
• Job does not answer its big questions

• Only Psalms 18 and 24 may come from David's time
• Others are from the exile period (137)
• Or when the Torah is central (119)
• Psalm 18.49 is not about the entry of Gentiles into faith (as says Paul - Romans 15.9) but that David would impress even non-Jews
• Psalm 69.9 gets has been used for pre-existent Christ (Romans 15.3 and 15.9) but does show a correspondence of suffering
• Psalm 85.11 is not a prediction of the incarnation belief but a vision of a golden age

• Most Proverbs are from later than Solomon
• Proverbs 8.22 on on Wisdom reflect 200s BCE when Greek culture had impact

• Ecclesiastes was written during Greek rule
• Certainly Solomon was not the author
• It is about someone who tried but made no sense of life
• There is God and providence but no purpose in human life

• The Song of Solomon is not written by Solomon
• The love songs have been used as if filled with secret meaning but that is not their intention

The Major Prophets

• Isaiah lived between 743 BCE and after 700 BCE
• He is urban in focus
• Some of Isaiah up to before Chapter 40 is not written by him
• Nothing from chapter 40 is written by Isaiah
• He/ they focusses on Judah (around Jerusalem) alone
• He similar to others condemned social and religious sins
• He similarly wanted more than offerings and celebrations
• Judah will be punished
• With the northern Kingdom gone to the Assyrians, Isaiah believed God would not abandon Judah (with its Temple)
• Isaiah does see a golden age under the line of David
• (Thus in its misuse by Matthew, Jesus later is once both born of a virgin and his father's line is of David!!)
• This is more idealism than prophecy

• The unknown later prophet from Isaiah Chapter 40 sees liberation
• He has a lofty style of poetry
• Cyrus the Persian will beat the Babylonians an Israel will return
• Babylon is condemed
• Thus God is the only God and will save Israel
• There will be a servant of the Lord (in the servant songs)
• The identity of the servant is not known or given
• This servant will be trained by God and speak for God
• He will be scorned, rejected, suffer and die but will redeem
• There is a suggestion of reward after death

• Chapters 56-66 from an unknown writer consider the period after the return and Zion's glory

• Jeremiah lived from before 621 BCE (Josiah's reformation) to after 587 BCE (the fall of Jerusalem)
• He condemned religious (idolatry, false prophets) and social sins
• He foretold disaster, which he does not like
• He foresees a hopeful New Covenent
• He thought God had deceived him (Jeremiah 12.1-6, 20.7-12)

• Ezekiel is a prophet from exile
• Up to Jerusalem's fall he condemned those still behind
• After Jerusalem's fall he encouraged
• His blueprint for a new Temple is probably not his
• God is like a human form he claimed

• Book of Daniel at face value suggests it is written at end of Babylonian Empire (538 BCE) and the beginning of the Persian Empire and predicts Greek rule (333 BCE to 165 BCE), thus Daniel knew about Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties before they started!
• It is actually written during the Antiochene persecution (168 to 165 BCE)
• Earlier prophecies are the least accurate - the rise of the Persian empire is inaccurate in several respects
• Later prophecies are more accurate
• Its prophecies are rough history getting better closer to the time of writing, like all history!

The Minor Prophets

• Hosea lived middle on 700s BCE
• He has a poetical style which compares with the natural and human world
• He condemns social sins too
• He also condemns movement from Jahweh to local Gods
• But God still unconditionally loves and will win Israel back

• Joel in late writing (Greek period) considers the Spirit's outpouring

• Amos is likely the earliest of the written prophets
• He lived middle 700s BCE
• God wants better than Israel's
• God wants right living
• Amos denounces sins to the poorer people
• Amos 9.5-15 comes from later writer/s matching the concern with later events

• Obadiah sees a future vision of what is sowed is reaped as the day of the Lord comes
• Yet this offers little original or vital

• The Book of Jonah has similarities with the Book of Ruth
• Jonah protested about returned exiles' exclusivist religion

• Micah also lived around the later 700s BCE like Isaiah
• Micah adds corruption and hatred to his list of sins
• The currupt were religious and secular officials
• This is brave - he is not punished (Jeremiah 26.16-19)
• He too lived in Judah
• He is of the country
• Micah in 5.2-4 forecasts the location for the Messiah's birth, though this passage probably comes after Micah, and suggests the restoration of Israel under the line of David
• Bethlehem was, in the New Testament, thus made into the location for registering for a census in the time of Herod and Quirinius, and one proof Micah was not predicting Jesus (using Matthew 2.3, Luke 2.2) was that Herod was dead when Quirinius came into office (Quirinius is too late for Jesus's birth anyway, if such a census ever happened)

• Nahum offers little original

• Habakkuk keeps to the faith despite advances from the north
• The righteous live by their faith

• Zephaniah is a minor prophet in what is said

• Haggai is similar in lack of impact

• Zechariah starts 422-415 BCE when the Temple is rebuilt (8 chapters)
• He thought Zerubbabel, a Jewish governor appointed by Persians, is the Messiah or God's prince - Joshua gets substituted
• Later chapters could be the Greek period (333 BCE on) with odd material
• This is of use to John in the New Testament

• Malachi adds little of additional importance to all the other prophets

• The Apocrypha is recognised as Old Testament by the Roman Catholics
• It is in the Septuagint but not the Hebrew Bible
• Ecclesiasticus gives background to the New Testament
• The Wisdom of Ben Sura (written 180 BCE by a Jewish diplomat) gives background to the New Testament
• The Wisdom of Solomon incorporates Greek thought into the Jewish faith
• 1 Macabees tells something of the fight that removed Greek rule from Israel

New Testament

The Gospels

• The first three synoptic gospels are not biographies
• They have historical material in them

• Matthew presents the risen Christ rather than a Jesus of history

• If Mark thinks Jesus might possibly be divine he also shows Jesus rejecting he is divine and God (Mark 10.8)
• Mark is written in a simple Greek but is an economic, unsentimental literary tour de force
• Mark 13.9 on is a good piece of afterthought planted on to Jesus, who would not have seen a Jewish-Christian division or preaching to all nations!

• Luke's Jesus is recognisably of the same kind as Matthew and Mark, but not of John and Paul
• Luke like Matthew suggest a divinely approved birth of a human Jesus
• If anything Luke pulls back more than Matthew did from impressions by Mark that Jesus has divinity
• Jesus is in the line of great men of God, a carpenter in the line of David. Jesus's sonship is a divine appointment rather than his nature (which is later thought)
• Luke calls Adam the son of God (Luke 3.38)
• God is to be approached without a mediator (as in the other synoptics)
• Again, Jesus did not believe in his own divinity
• Luke is comparatively undeveloped theologically unlike John and Paul

• John's gospel is interpretation of the early Church into Jesus's significance:
• John is not written by John the apostle
• Johns' gospel is not a reliable account of the words of Jesus
• Jesus did not reflect philosophically with Pilate as in John
• Miracles including the raising of Lazarus are given to Jesus for reasons rejected in Luke and Matthew (temptation of proof)
• John has Jesus as the Shepherd whereas other gospels have God as the shepherd
• There is little history and great embellishment
• A post resurrection interpretation is plastered on to the Jesus who walked and talked
• Thus John's gospel invented teachings of Jesus
• There is an absence of vital eschatology in favour of christology
• It stresses pre-existence unlike other gospels
• There is some incarnation thinking but not in two natures
• Jesus is losing his humanity in John
• John is already answering questions made later about why Christ had not returned
• Thus the Church is saying Christ Jesus is already within the Church
• It gives views that only later became the Incarnation and Trinity
• The Holy Spirit is signicant in John (and Acts and Epistles) unlike in the previous gospels

The Early Church

• Acts is written about 90-100 CE
• It is the only source of history
• The first years are legend
• History comes with Paul

The Letters of Paul

• Paul did write Romans, 1 Corinthians 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon.
• It is doubtful whether Paul wrote Colossians, 2 Thessalonians
• Paul definitely did not write the Pastorals
• The Pastorals show the Pauline churches in the next generation
• Paul had a mastery of Hellenistic Greek but wrote without literary pretence
• He believed that the Parousia was imminent and he was wrong
• His imminent eschatological conviction governed all he wrote
• He may have been writing according to Jewish Hellenistic ideas which we cannot recover - or post-Jewish ideas where he thinks somehow of the Messiah being made sin (2 Corinthians 5.21 and Galatians 3.13)
• So God sort of suffered with us in an unexpected way to redeem
• The resurrection shows God's love
• He never calls Jesus God
• He displays no doctrine of the Incarnation
• Philippians 2.5-11 nearly stated this but Paul did not write this
• For Paul, Christ is the second Adam, the Messiah in whom all humanity died
• He says little about the Jesus of history
• Paul had no gospels on which to check his views!
• He also shows variation from the traditions that would become the gospels
• The real Pauline letters relate the churches and how Paul understood Christ
• Collossians show application of Pauline views to the church after his death

The Other Letters

• Early church people knew Hebrews was not written by Paul
• Hebrews draws in the Tanakh to argue the meaning of Jesus' death
• Hebrews 9.22 argues that without shedding of bood, there can be no forgiveness
• This reflects the rest of the New Testament
• It is a faith claim made in the context of that culture, yet our culture finds it meaningless

• James may have been written in the 00s CE
• It is written in Greek about Jewish Christianity

• 1 Peter is from early 100s CE
• It shows the attention of Roman rule
• It has enthusiasm and joyfulness

• 2 Peter is not written by Peter
• It comes from 120 CE
• It's based on the likely contemporary Epistle of Jude
• 2 Peter and the Epistle of Jude warn against diffferent teachings

• 1 John, 2 John, 3 John are probably by a disciple of the author of John's Gospel
• The most trinitarian statement in the Bible is at 1 John 5.7 in the King James Version but this has no credibility and other versions reject it

A Prophetic Book

• Revelation reflects persecution by the Romans
• The Devil reflects the work of the emperors
• The lamb reflects the suffering Church
• It uses Tanakh imagery

How it was understood

Here are some details:

• Rabbinical gematria - numerology - is rubbish
• The Epistle of Barnabas from around 120 CE uses gematria and it is rubbish
• The Jewish Bible is regarded as oracular by the early Christians
• Early Christians allegorised the mundane and of little meaning into enormous significance
• New Testament writers wrote of the Old Testament this way (Acts 7.38, Romans 3.2, Hebrews 5.12)
• Origen found concealed wisdom decipherable in the Bible
• This went on for hundreds of years, and for some people has never stopped
• Today some use the Bible as supernatural itself, so that one can open any page, point at a passage, and see what it means for oneself or the world

The criticism of this is that:

• Text is taken out of context
• Writings that form a narrative get separated when so interpreted
• Poetic writings were unappreciated in the raid for oracular bits (eg Origen interprets Psalm 22.6 'I am a worm but no man' as fortelling the virgin birth)
• Mistranslations didn't matter (if they realised it)
• One translation was used over another if it suited
• Isaiah 7.14 was mistranslated in LXX when the Hebrew meant young married woman
• Hebrews 10.5 uses a mistranslation of Psalm 40.6 for the incarnation where so that LXX produces 'a body thou has prepared for me' when the Hebrew was 'thou hast given me an open ear'
• Sometimes oracular use jumped on key words
• Christians extracted any likely trinitarian clue word or phrase
• One version that conflicted with another is used to suit
• In some cases text is added (Trinitarian words into 1 John 5.7-8 that appear in the Book of Common Prayer and King James Bible)
• Piety got in the way of accuracy
• The Bible is used in available parts in parchments

Because they believed the Old Testament figures had predicted the New testament events:

• Old Testament prophets must have been talking about Christian doctrine
• Huge misinterpretation resulted and even reversals of meaning
• This misinterpretation is put into the New Testament too
• Jesus in Mark 10.18 saying that only God is good is turned into Jesus being God
• When Christ claims ignorance in fact he is all knowing (because of prior doctrine)

A More Discerning Approach

The Jews call the Old Testament:

• The Bible
• The Hebrew Scriptures
• The Tanakh

The Bible in two Testaments is a unity of documents:

• Because the Christian Churches have said it is
• Because it has been seen as a sufficient witness in making their faith statements

There are no original parts of the Bible existing...

• A fragment of the Fourth Gospel dates from not later than 150 CE
• There are other New Testament papyrus fragments from Egypt
• The earliest complete Bibles come from after 300 CE
• Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus help establish the original text
• Written on parchment not papyrus, they are in Greek
• Of the hundreds of versions that followed, some in Latin are earlier than some in Greek
• There are Syriac, Coptic (Egypt), Old Gothic, Armenian, Georgian versions too

• Christians kept to the Greek Old Testament
• The Jews kept to Hebrew manuscripts as sacred text
• Upto around 1950 CE the oldest manuscript is from 800 CE
• This is because Jews agreed on the Massoretic text and alternative texts were then destroyed

• Finding material saved by the Qumran Community (200 BCE to 70 CE) changed this limited inheritance
• Discovered were very many fragments of the Hebrew Bible
• These Hebrew texts go back to about 200 BCE
• They are similar to the Massoretic text, suggesting standardisation
• This is still hundreds of years after the writing process
• Qumran showed the shared assumptions of eschatological thought
• Qumran also showed variations in emphasis between prophetic figures of the time
• Note that no New Testament material came from Qumran (such claims have been discredited) - it came before Christian development

• The Septuagint and the Hebrew Bible differ considerably

It can be said that:

• The earliest material is 1,000 BCE with Song of Deborah in Judges 5 (?)
• The latest material is 120 CE with Second Epistle of Peter (?)

• The Tanakh ranges from 1000 BCE until 165 BCE
• All the New Testament documents were between 50 CE until 120 CE

• By far most of the Tanakh was written in Hebrew
• The Jews spoke Hebrew up to the Babylonian exile around 522 BCE
• Then people spoke Aramaic
• This limited Hebrew as a sacred language

The latest books were written in Aramaic - these include:

• Daniel 2.4 - 7.28
• Some parts of the Book of Ezra
• One verse in Jeremiah (Jer. 10.11)

• The New Testament was written in Koine Greek
• This Greek was spoken in the eastern Roman Empire

• In the Second Temple period many Jews were in Egypt
• In Judea many Jews speaking Aramaic could not read the Hebrew
• The Alexandrian Jews used Greek, being Hellenized after Alexander the Great
• The legend is that in the 200s BCE a late Egyptian Pharoah wanted a copy of the Hebrew Bible for the archives in Greek
• He invited 70 or 72 scholars from Palestine to translate
• They all produced the same translation

• The reality is translation took probably several centuries to do
• The Septuagint preserved texts considered uncanonical by rabbies and Masoretes
• Qumran texts sometimes show that in places the Septuagint is more reliable in parentage than the Hebrew passed down!

• There were also other Greek translations known to New Testament writers
• It is usually the Septuagint version that gets into the New Testament

• The New Testament was translated into Syriac
• Syriac is the native tongue of Palestinians and probably Jesus (and Aramaic?)

• The Bible has always been written according to running traditions
• There is no purity of the biblical text
• There always needs to be interpretation

Every New Testament writer displays the influence of Jewish (mis or developed) interpretation into the Greek:

• The LXX modified the anthropmorphism of God
• In LXX Psalms and Isaiah were modifed to be more Gentile friendly
• New Testament writers took Jewish tradition interpretations of texts
• Sometimes these writers took LXX mistranslations to make their point (as these mistranslations made their point!)

• Jesus it seems accepted traditional interpretations
• Jesus saw his destiny in readily available Jewish scriptural terms
• Most likely he did not see himself as the servant of the Lord destined to suffer, die and be vindicated (unless near the end), but he used available models about another figure or himself or a transformation...

• Paul accepted traditional interpretations and added his own Jewish-Hellenistic christological twist
• The gospel writers, synoptic and John used traditional interpretations and again gave a christological twist

People who say that the Gospel writers were (had to be) "honest" simply fly in the face of the evidence facing them, and are imposing a category of "honesty" that does not properly apply:

Moving on...

• The whole Bible was translated into Latin (Vulgate)
• This happened in North Africa from 100 CE onwards
• The Western Church used the Latin Bible from 400 CE
• This continued into the Middle Ages

• The Reformation was encouraged in part by comparisons with the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament
• Translations into local European languages began around 1500 onwards

• Protestants translated the Bible into local languages around the world
• Only since Vatican II have Roman Catholics helped translate the Bible this far
• Many countries only have one translation where Britain is aware of varieties
• Some varieties of translation try to interpret as well as accurately translate (New English Bible, Good News Bible)
• It needs many versions to check around!

So it's a case of choose your interpretation book and period - or to see the varieties as relative traditions

Canon

As for the processes of making a canon of scripture:

• The Torah was sorted out quite quickly after the Jews came from exile
• Early 100s BCE Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezeckial the prophets were added
• There were later additions
• The highly literary writings were added but unclear of their limit until 100 CE

• Greek Jews in Alexandria had additional books than Palestinian Jews
• These formed (later on for Christians) the Apocrypha
• The East treated the Apocrypha equally and so did the West until the Reformation
• Then some churches (Anglican, Lutheran) gave them second class status and others rejected them
• Roman Catholicism, like the Orthodox, maintained them
• Ruth and Esther in these kind of writings were accepted into shorter canon
• But Ecclesiasticus and Maccabees (etc) were not accepted

• The complete canon of the New Testament was uncertain for some 400 years
• By 120 the synoptic gospels, Acts, Pauline material, Hebrews and Revelation were widely used
• The Fourth Gospels and Pastoral Epistles were included in the canon in 170 CE
• John's Gospel was suspected as Gnostic
• Irenaeus of Lugdunum (and less so Melito of Sardis) said the Fourth Gospel was not Gnostic and gave it a (doubtful in fact) reliable pedigree
• Many around 200 CE still did not accept it

• Hebews did not look Pauline so it is not acepted
• 200 to 370 CE it is ignored
• Origen (225-250 CE) liked it for doctrine but is unsure of its origin
• The East used it

• Eusebbius of Caesarea in East was suspicious of Revelation because of its millennialism
• They did not like it implying the fantastic ending of the world
• The West did have it
• Only by 300s to 400s CE was it accepted

Problems

Scholarship has revealed:

• Inconsistencies
• Conflicts with known evidence
• Misapplication of a prophecy made in one context that gets reused for one (usually christian) for which it is never intended

Another area ripe with errors is obviously mistranslations:

• Absence of vowels in the Hebrew (several later transcibers disagreeing)
• From the Hebrew to the Greek
• The use of Aramaic
• Across several Greek versions including the mythically constructed Septuagint (Isaiah 6.9-10 gets quoted by different New Testament writers using several Greek versions or translating themselves from Hebrew)
• Latin
• Local languages (eg King James Bible based on some dodgy Greek)

Prophecy stretching across different periods is dodgy and implies:

• That such prophets were predicting events about the distant future
• They had a great deal of knowledge about the future
• That there is no free will (the logic of Calvinism, but excluded by biblical criticism)

They believed that no prophecy in the Bible could continue unbroken:

• John says this in 10.35
• Jesus is not likely to have used Psalm 82 to support a claim which is simply John's own imposed christology

Against fundamentalism

• It exposes fundamentalism as an inheritor of ancient culture but turning it into pseudo history and pseudo science
• It tries to justify prophecies well out of context
• It avoids obvious and simple conclusions
• It justifies errors and different intentions by ever increasing complicated explanations and conjectures
• Whereas no one in the Old Testament was thinking of Jesus of Nazareth

Therefore Bible transmits to us:

• A strange and a different culture
• A radically different way of representing "truth" for a people
• Everyday assumptions we do not share

• They did not critically deduce
• Their motive each time was to make a faith based point
• They put words into peoples' mouths
• They made them act according to the need of the message
• They embellished and made stories
• They used in a literalist way scrolls that themselves had been embellished
• They used in a literalist way as if true sources with errors
• There was a strong oral tradition in the inter-Testaments period which was bound to have inaccuracies

So there are:

• Reinterpretations
• Misinterpretations
• Misreadings
• Legends
• Writings assuming history where the texts was just a good story with meaning
• Patchy histories with gaps filled in
• Often no histories told as history (with no meaning)
• New Testament writers assumed false is true back in the Tanakh and building on past errors
• Tanakh writings after the event given in the form of predictions
• Failures to predict when it was within their own time
• New Testament writers assuming that Tanakh writers were predicting (out of their time and experience)
• Writings in the form of psuedo science that are legend
• New Testament story again written for effect
• Paul not basing much of his own material on the arising gospels tradition

Blind alleys regarding the Bible have therefore been exposed:

• Useless material has still to be ignored or discarded
• The Bible is not a consistent theological textbook - there are different theologies
• There is no plenary sense of the Bible to be discovered within the text
• There too many motives in the writing for such consistency
• Some books reject theology (Ecclesiastes, the Book of Job)
• Theology needs to be created from it
• Doctrines like the incarnation and the Trinity were certainly not ready contained even late on

Just as there is no consistent theology, nor is there a consistent plan for worship:

• The New Testament does not give a detailed pattern of worship as some (especially Calvinists) claim
• Only from 150 CE on is there a sufficient account of the Christian eucharist
• Catholic/ Orthodox worship is derived from the first four centuries

• Nevertheless the Bible has devotional impact as a selection of readings to reflect upon
• These should still be read in context

• The Bible contains no science worthy of modern techniques
• The Tanakh miracles have been discredited, so Joshua did not stop the sun, Balaam did not talk to his donkey, Jonah did not enter the whale...
• Also the New Testament people believed that death and sin were personal powers to be defeated - when we see this as biological and thus renders much of the associated crucifixion belief meaningless
• The stories of the resurrection becomes a fantastic series of stories of encounters and traditions where deducing the truth becomes impossible within a fog

• The Bible is definitely not a history book
• Much given as history is fable
• The Old Testament is historically inaccurate. For example:
• The New Testament is not historically accurate

• Historical criticism is a revolution against magical and allegorical approaches to the Bible
• This means the Bible is treated critically to become reliable before it is used to say anything
• It allows a place for stories with poetic and correspondent meanings, drawing a moral or an ethic
• In this sense errors can still avoid abandonment

Themes and claims

• God is only God
• God is living God
• God is creator
• God is redeemer
• God cares for Israel
• God condemns Israel's sins
• God forgives those who truly repent

God in the Bible has several terms:

In Christianity God eventually became defined as having three persons in one:

• There is a development of views of Christ in the New Testament, though not the Trinity
• The Holy Spirit is seen as part of eschatology
• The Holy Spirit is seen as active where worship took place
• It/ he/ she is a link to God who made Christ known

In this case Hanson and Hanson (1989) argue:

• Prophecy is replaced, or better seen as, those of their time giving a picture of God
• The prophets and Old Testament show a partial revelation of God's character
• The full character is revealed by Jesus Christ (according to the witness)
• The Bible is a human record of the witness deemed sufficient

Hanson and Hanson (1989) also argue:

• The Church is not master of the Bible but its interpreter
• The Church is not the controller of the Bible but its guardian

• Christian believers are offered guidance in interpretation of the Bible by the Churches
• It is a norm, against which Church doctrinal belief is checked
• The Old Testament starts as a guide to belief
• Jesus is a guide to belief as written
• Continuing New Testament development after his ministry is also a guide to belief
• The Bible is used by faith communities taken as a whole

However, this is a tricky one:

• The individual conscience must come first
• It is the individual who permits the Church in conscience to interpret
• Once by power, this teaching is now done in a condition of freedom
• This includes Protestants as well as Roman Catholics
• Individuals, theologians too, may think the church has it wrong
• Other times individuals decide for themselves (including Christians)
• Biblical critics (Christians, Jewish, non-believers) also give guidance
• Churches/ individuals may reject biblical parts
• Churches change their collective minds
• Some say 1 Timothy disallows women's headship and teaching, but this by an author (not Paul) 40 years on only assumes what Paul thought - the Church has changed its tune!
• Inspiration may help use but is patchy
• Much in the Bible is uninspiring
• So it becomes a document that demands a view as a whole
• But the Church has no privileged position

• The Churches also select
• Doctrines could have developed in several different ways
• Many Christians make an appeal to the supernatural in tradition
• The creed is but one conclusion and enforcement

• Most Christians accept that the Bible leads on to trinitarian beliefs
• However, trinitarian beliefs are not in the Bible
• Are not Christians making the same leaps as between Old Testament prophets and New Testament situations?
• Early Christianity is Jewish, Pauline, Gnostic (later) and diverse
• Only later did it settle as a tradition
• It never is intended to be an imperial tradition of order and unity
• The creed of 325 CE and Chalcedonian Definition of 451 CE were not obvious outcomes of biblical writers
• One "fundamentalist" interpretation of the Bible is Unitarian (a Christ centred Unitarianism that, for example, believed in miracles and the resurrection)

Cultural change
and Relativism

• The contemporary Church lives in a culture of a more dissecting approach to truth
• Yet it still maintains an imperial structure based on all those accumulated errors and fantastic beliefs related to the supernatural
• Many believers now think differently of the Trinity from how it was believed
• The Trinity is now a label for a variety of relationship views, many compatible with developing unitarian theologies
• Bizarrely, dedicated biblical Unitarians were in the first place literalists which contemporary Western thought rejects

The question then is what remains of the Bible:

• Use it differently as a community defining drama (defining the Christian community non-objectively regarding culture beyond)
• Fantasise as if within a lost ancient culture
• Abuse it with fundamentalism
• Read it as an insight into developing culture/s with its strange beliefs (especially those eschatological and supernatural) as we might the Incas or Mayas
• Abandon it as so much hooey
• Use if for selective inspirations
• Treat it as literature for readings
• Use if for secondary moralistic insights and expressions of the human condition

Clearly the attitude one takes to the whole given canon depends on:

• Individual membership of a Church
• Conscience
• Individual faith and belief

An alternative is to accept:

• Culture added on to culture
• Ancient cultures we cannot understand or reinhabit
• Tradition added on to tradition, via misinterpretations and translated meanings
• We are left as readers of different texts
• We do not know all the writers' motives
• We do not share the same eschatological fears and hopes (unless sectarians)
• Everything is rich, diverse and variable
• A great deal is rubbish
• Story and myth is seen for what it is

The strange time & place
into the New Testament

There is a history behind Jesus and which surrounded him:

So what can be said of the "Word" who became, according to doctrine, fully God and fully Man is actually quite limited:

• Jesus is a messianic period Jew who spoke to his own world and had no intention of founding a religion
• Jesus of Nazareth is largely hidden from us as is Christ a mystery
• It is very difficult to base interpretation on such little historical fact
• Only perhaps some 20% or so of his sayings can possibly be attributed to him
• There isn't an historical Jesus which commands general agreement
• If we see a connection between the synoptic gospels we do not know what the historical truth is
• It all depends on the starting assumptions so that different scholars starting points lead them to different "biographies"
• Jesus authority to teach must be affected by being wrong about the imminent end of the world never mind hell and divorce

There is the apparent clincher of the resurrection which involves at its heart reference back to legitimating texts:

• Just as Jesus based his ministry and is described in terms of the Hebrew scriptures so after his death they had to be employed to give the messianic claim continuing legitimacy
• The scriptures selected are those which respond to times of uncertainty and distress as well as a desire for hope
• Sometimes these texts expect a messiah and sometimes they do not (or are not explicit)
• They see suffering, cataclysm, distress but the faithfulness of the Jewish God
• Isaiah 53 was used to show Christ as the righteous suffering servant
• Hosea 6.2 was especially important to claim that after two days there is revival and on the third day raising up
• Hosea was not talking about Christ, but the early Christians decided he was and this for them constituted literal fulfilment
• Hosea was taken to be predicting because David had died but Christ was risen, and therefore it applied to Christ
• The literal twist is such that the three days may have been metaphorical when written but became actual with the Christian writings
• The resurrection was connected with Jesus's teachings and with starting the messianic kingdom which would require allegiance to this messiah
• Isaiah 6.9 on was used to take account of the opposition to the claims being made (and more)
• Psalm 118.22 illustrates the condition of those who reject the new claim
• Psalm 69 is used as a curse against unbelievers
• Of course Jesus was not around in a bodily sense as expected of a messiah
• Psalm 110.1 (and more) is used to demonstrate this difference
• So very rapidly, in the ferment after the death of Jesus, the claim is made to be continuous with the existing tradition
• After all, this must happen if any religious experience is to carry convincing meaning
• It is from this point of using these texts that christology begins, with texts from the messianic and eschatological sources that build up the meaning of Christ as a lived, dying and raised man
• As time moved on this meaning was to become more complex with again the need to go into the scriptures for support in the development of the early church's motives
• This complexity involves more modifications, greater interpretations and shifts of meanings
• Nevertheless this complexity was to change the biography and character of Christ as more was read back into him for the accounts of before and after his death
• The Christians and Jews were to diverge, not because of the central claim that Jesus was the messiah (because this is not blasphemous) but because of disagreement over observance of the law
• The disagreement with the Jews was lessened by the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE

Of course there could well be a core experience demanding a response but we do not know what the core experience might have been because the way that the Bible is embellished by its writers:

• The tomb tradition has various tellings
• The tomb could be a core experience or a later tradition (ie was not part of Paul's central account)
• Either (say) the first witnesses were women because they are unreliable witnesses
Or this is an embarassment about which the even the contradictory explanations can do nothing but report
• However, the Romans, who killed Jesus, are likely to have dumped the body into a common grave (again, speculation)
• The Christian belief in resurrection used and developed the Pharisies' belief in resurrection
• The resurrection drew on later Tanakh messianic texts
• It adapted this belief within Paul (that Christ risen is not experienced as a body but a spiritual body)
• This shift of explanation from a simple "lives again" explanation is more likely to support our knowledge that completely biologically dead people do not come alive again
• There are appearances in the resurrection with non-recognition, recognition and disappearance once the point is established in story forms
• There are contradictory appearances
• Even those who believe that Jesus uniquely did come alive again in a literal sense have to ask if this means he would fail the test of having been fully human
• It is heavily embellished/ invented (in part/ whole) to tell the good story
• The later stories of encounters read meaning back into Christ's mission and go on to the ascension and Pentecost as a continuation still within the belief in the last days
• On the appearances, we know of modern day "real" appearances of loved ones that seem to be more than a dream
• The person may appear at the foot of a bed or some situation of meaning, become recognised, and on disappearing leave the person who saw more than a dream comforted
• People who have near death experiences with the white light tunnel usually put a symbol of their own beliefs at the end of this tunnel and on returning to consciousness no longer fear death
• We would explain such appearances in our ways as others have theirs and the New Testament writers had their references
• The description of these visions (as of after death experiences too) is culturally guided - and was then
• More than this we have society penetrating the individual and group through language and culture and these facilitate experiences rather than experiences existing independently which we then describe
• The explanation is likely to build through time according to the meaning attached, the resources available to add meaning and the number of people the message filters through
• In this way the descriptive power of the later Jewish scriptures, the intensity of events in the light of understanding them, the painful tortured death and the messianic expectations all imposed on the individuals and groups involved
• Whether the language centred view is taken or the experience centred view is taken we still have no historical access to whatever may have been the original intentions or experiences of the original followers
• Immediacy of events, the actuality of experience written into stories of encounters, can only be speculated upon
• It is even possible that there is a post death deception
• Or there is a core bereavement set of experiences hapeening to the disciples in the context of much added distress, fervour and messianic hope
• Unfortunately we start with inescapable writings which already have meaning and interpretation and reinterpretation built into them
• All that can be said is that branches of the early Christian movement formed around an already embellished core set of experiences existing as a recent tradition

Conclusion?

Sources:

Holy Bible: Containing Old and New Testaments, Revised Standard Version, Collins

Cupitt, D. (1979), The Debate about Christ, SCM Press.

Edwards, D. (1989), Tradition and Truth: The Challenge of England's Radical Theologians 1962-1989, Hodder and Stoughton, particularly replies by John Bowden, 291-296, and Dennis Nineham, 296-306.

Hanson, A. T. and Hanson, A. P. C. (1989), The Bible Without Illusions, SCM Press.

Hodge, S. (2001), The Dead Sea Scrolls: An Introductory Guide, Piatkus, particularly 200-218 on 'The End of Days and Messianism'.

Kennedy, L. (1999), All in the Mind: A Farewell to God, Sceptre, especially 45-81.

Lindars, B. (1961), New Testament Apologetic: The Doctrinal Significance of Old Testament Quotations, SCM Press.