How Do We Understand This Thing? Pt. 2--Finding the Text

One of the things I found most shocking while in seminary was the processes by which the thing we call the Bible came to be. This is something that I had never thought about before. I was mostly concerned with reading the text and having it apply to my life today. While I didn't exactly think that the book just came down from heaven as is, I assumed it was something at least like this.

As I studied, I found out how convoluted the process was and is. First off, there was the process of deciding on the canon, which books were to be considered Scripture and which weren't. There was not consensus early on about which books would be included, or even if Christians would continue to look to the Hebrew Scriptures as authoritative.

In the class last Sunday, we looked at a different part of the puzzle, specifically how we go from the original events of Scripture to the words we have in our English Bibles today (for my notes from the class, please visit http://projectbraintrust.com/cogburn/sundayschool/hdwrttall.doc). This is once again a much muddier process than most would like to believe. Unfortunately, we don't have any autographed copies of the books in the Bible, New Testament or Old. Instead, we have copies of copies of copies. And even the best of these copies don't agree completely with one another. This is not surprising. For two copies to be perfectly alike, a scribe would have to copy one perfectly, without making any errors, writing by hand. The best copies we have include minor variations, like spelling errors or skipped lines or words, to larger errors, words, phrases or even whole lines of text added. With some of the intact manuscripts, scholars can see how these changes took place later in the cycle. What we can never know is what changes were made to the text before our oldest manuscripts came about. Just one example of the problem here can be found in Mark 16, where the Gospel has three endings, at least one of which was not original.

On top of this is the issue of translation. Moving from one lanuage to another is complex, even for those with fluency in both languages. Going from the ancient Greek used in the New Testament to contemporary English is enourmously complicated (in addition to the fact that the old manuscripts generally did not use spacing or punctuation). Any student who has wrestled with the intricacies of Hebrew and Greek can testify to the fact that it is not a simple process.

Learning all this extinguished any lingering inflexible literalism that I may have had. To say that "God said it, I believe it" is to practice selective ignorance that is intellectually dishonest. A more nuance literalism says that the texts were indeed perfect in their original autographs. But this too for me is ultimately unsatisfying. I just see too much humanity mixed up in the process (there's that total depravity again).

So, back to the original question, how do we read this thing? The complexity of how Scripture comes to us often leads to either denial or paralysis. One option is to simply deny that there is a problem, choosing ignorance and calling it faith. Another possibility is to become so overwhelmed by the complexity of the interpretive task that we become paralyzed.

The third way is the way of faith. Seeking to understanding the complexity, we still trust in the Holy Spirit that the Word will be revealed to us among the words. We need to do the work to understand where the text comes from so that we can see where it is going. We will inevitably run into our own limitations, being limited creatures as we are. Ultimately though, we trust that God will reveal God's self to us through the stories, the letters, the poetry of the ancient text. If we will be read with open minds and open hearts, we will encounter the living God.