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Swimming the Bosporus 10: The Good Book and Holy Tradition
I did a lot of church-hopping in my college and Navy days. To simplify the search, I would look to see if a church claimed to be “Bible-believing.” This indicated they were non-denominational, pretty conservative, and focused on the Scriptures. If their name included “Bible Church,” even better.
Following the Bible is the main point of these assemblies, a principle that stems from the Reformation. Martin Luther declared that the Catholic Church was wrong to emphasize both Scripture and tradition. Instead, the authority should be Scripture alone (or, Sola Scriptura in Latin).
You can find all the Swimming the Bosporus posts here.
Luther looked at the Vatican of his day and thought they had lost the plot. He viewed their many rituals, traditions, and innovations as so many barnacles that had attached themselves to the Barque of St. Peter. So, he decided to strip them off.
If a practice or teaching wasn’t clearly stated in the Bible, it was tossed. Veneration of the saints was out. Clerical celibacy, gone. Purgatory, done-zo. Other reformers went further, forbidding musical instruments, religious art, and fancy duds for the priests.
By making everything conform to the Bible, especially the New Testament, they sought to restore the church to what they imagined it was when Christ and His Apostles founded it. They couldn’t access many documents from the first century, so the Bible itself would have to do.
This made a lot of sense in the 16th century. Rome had added innovations, such as papal indulgences or Mary’s immaculate conception (not official dogma until years later), that seemed unfounded to Luther and his fellow Reformers. There needed to be one common, agreed-upon source to divide Truth from Error. The Bible was an obvious choice.
Over the years, the Bible gained even more prominence among Protestants. With the spread of the printing press and increasing literacy, for the first time people could own and read the Bible for themselves. Today you can get 25 translations of the Bible for free on your smartphone.
Raised Lutheran and becoming evangelical as a teen, I agreed that the Bible was all that mattered and that traditions were human inventions. I even used to scandalize my fellow evangelicals, mostly for amusement, by going further into Sola Scriptura. I would drop a question like, “Why do we celebrate Christmas or Easter anyway? That’s not in the Bible.” A fierce debate would take over the Bible study and I’d slip out the door whistling. (Such a troublemaker.)
But today’s interaction with Scripture is radically different than it was from 33 AD to 1500 AD. The vast majority of people were illiterate. A scroll or codex of holy writings was exceedingly rare and wildly expensive. The only time most Christians would even see a copy was from afar at church; they would only hear what it said from the liturgy. (Even today, I’d guess about half of the Orthodox liturgy is quoting the Bible.)
“Just me and my Bible” would be as foreign a concept to ancient Christians as computer programming or “Keeping Up With The Kardashians.” But the Bible’s newfound accessibility fueled new interpretations from learned scholars and unschooled laity alike.
The Lutherans were countered by the Reformed Church, the Church of England, the Baptists, and the Anabaptists. Then all of those groups split further and today there are endless denominations, each with their own beliefs. Inadvertently, Sola Scriptura didn’t overthrow the Pope as much as it turned everyone into their own Pope.
Since God doesn’t change over time, I don’t think He would fundamentally change his Church in reaction to technological innovations. Practices that worked for a poor Syrian shepherd in 250 AD should work for us today. Not only was that guy unable to read, there wasn’t even a Bible if he could.
The Bible as we know it didn’t exist until Athanasius of Alexandria codified the list of included books in 367 AD, which nearly all Christians quickly adopted. That means the church existed and thrived for more than three centuries without a Bible. Sola Scriptura wasn’t an option.
Contrary to the Reformers, the Bible proceeded from the Church; the Church did not proceed from the Bible. The Holy Spirit inspired the writings and likewise informed the Church in assembling the Scriptures three centuries after Christ.
So how did all those early Christians know how to observe their faith? The Old Testament, any scattered gospels and epistles they could get their hands on, and … tradition. Even the New Testament confirms this.
The Apostle Paul told the Thessalonians to “stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle.” Since Paul was in Thessalonica for about three weeks, he taught a lot more by mouth than he wrote down.
Paul stayed in Corinth for a year and a half and told the Christians there to “keep the traditions just as I delivered them to you.” Again, he said more than he put on papyrus and he commanded them to keep the oral traditions he taught.
Over many years, my belief in Sola Scriptura ultimately led me to believe that tradition was important as well. If St. Paul told me to “keep the traditions,” who was I to do otherwise?
This is from the “Swimming the Bosporus” series, on my journey from the megachurch to the Orthodox Church. Installments Sunday mornings. Click here to see all the posts.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Which Bible is that?
Luther cut a lot out of the canon of Old Testament books. He nearly took his knife to the Epistles as well, musing about ditching James especially.
Even Athanasius didn’t totally settle the matter, as the Latin west and Greek east arrived at slightly different canons, and even arranged their books differently, with different names.
The Ethiopians, meanwhile, kept even more texts, which has been a boon to modern scholarship.
I congratulate you Jon on bringing discussions of Bible and faith to this website. I assume Ed. means you are the editor, an astonishing appointment on a website typical in it’s hohum attitude towards faith and spirituality, which you find on both progressive and conservative sites. I pray you are allowed to continue in this position.
I’ve been really enjoying this series. Thank you for them.
Say what?
Thanks for this post and indeed the entire series. The Lord be with you.
The Bible is not a unified book. It should be understood as a library, but bound into a single volume.
It is important to remember that the biblical canon was set, not as a limitation on what was authorized or beneficial to read for Christians, but as what was to be used and read liturgically – in church services. If you study service descriptions by early Christians, they are clearly based on Jewish synagogue services, with a Eucharistic celebration. So you would have had readings from scriptures, readings from Psalms, a homily by the episcopos (the bishop or priests anointed by him), all bracketed by communal hymns and prayers.
In the earliest days of the church, the only scriptures would have been what we call The Old Testament, but as the various epistles began to circulate they were often read too. As the Apostles died, their successors continued to send epistles, and those circulated as well (Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, etc.), and often these churches wrote back, so their letters circulated too. In time, and as churches could afford to make copies to trade with each other, churches came to have similar collections, and so by the end of the 100s you start to see discussions of what churches should have, and what they should be using. The growing consensus was that churches should limit what they used liturgically to the 4 best (and authentic) gospel accounts, and the epistles were limited to those by the apostles themselves.
The OT canon went through a similar evolution. There are a number of different texts that Jesus or the apostles quote that are not in the biblical canon today. These are works that were in wide circulation at the time, and so would have been in the popular consciousness during Jesus’s day, and because of their prophetic nature were popular with early Christians too, and cited by them. These, like the epistles of the successors to the apostles, were often used liturgically too. A number of these were retained in the biblical canon, both East and West. But Rome had issues with some that the East kept, and Ethiopia kept some that Alexandria and Antioch came to later downplay.
(cont)
(cont from 8)
During these same centuries, books changed in form from scrolls to flat folios, which were easier to transport, store, and use. The people figured out how to sew and bind multiple folios with each other into a codex – the modern book. Codices are far far easier to ship and sell than scrolls (though massively expensive), and their adoption made the question of what should be in a standard church volume more important. If you’re working on a budget and having to pay a copyist to get your Bible, you only want to pay for what you really need to use (though if you had a bit of extra cash you might slip an extra folio or two in).
Sadly, this process meant that many of the post-apostolic epistles were not copies as frequently anymore, and over time many were lost entirely due to disuse (the Corinthians, for instance, wrote back to Paul), while other copies survived only in desert monasteries in places like Armenia, Georgia, Syria, and Egypt.
Meanwhile the diaspora Jews had actively banned certain works as heretical. What with their controversial nature even in Christian cities, they too fell into disuse or survived only far afield in Christian communities like Ethiopia and Armenia, where they maintained a great deal of independence from the Romans (both East and West). With the rift that began after Chalcedon, which turned into a full schism, and then many of the non-Chalcedonian Christian lands falling to Islam, these texts were long thought lost, though their existence was known – both from having been quoted within the gospels and epistles, and by other surviving church writers. Among these pre-Christian texts are such works as the Book of Enoch, and the Book of Jubilees. A vast amount of early Christian writing, practice, and imagery came from these sources, and was kept alive in the church even as the sources were lost for centuries.
If you want more information on Enoch or Jubilees, I highly recommend Fr. Stephen DeYoung’s blog. He has just concluded as series on Enoch, and recently had one on Jubilees too.
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/wholecounsel/
The last shift in biblical canon was the Protestant Reformation. While Luther ultimately left the New Testament canon untouched, he cut out a number of books from the OT canon, either because he flatly disputed their content, or because he knew the Jews had rejected these works, or the books just didn’t mention God enough.
So Skip. Do you believe God allowed books He authored by human hand, by the power of the Holy Spirit to be left out or lost ?
Do you believe the cannon was God ordained ?
My questions are not meant to insinuate that the books that are not in the cannon unimportant.
Canon. Cannons go ‘boom.’
Canons do too, from time to time, but not as often.
As my priest is fond of noting – all the bibles in the world could be lost and yet Christianity would endure borne on the hymnography and embedded scripture in the Liturgy. The early church survived and grew for 200 years without much in the way formal scripture to go on. The Bible is an outgrowth and distillation of that church, and needs to be understood within the context of that church.
To get into the question of whether the canon is “God Ordained”? I hesitate to go there at all, because that risks turning the Bible into an idol, or (as one scholar likes to put it, treating it as “a magic book”). The first problem is that this elevates the Bible above everything else – above history, tradition, above anyone’s interpretation. And yet, nobody ever interprets the Bible ex nihilo. Everyone starts from some basis for interpretation, especially if using a translation, since one is necessarily relying on the translator’s own judgement on meaning (see below). You haven’t made the Bible supreme at all, in that case, but have merely staked out your own interpretation as being a direct channel. If the Bible really is “God Ordained” in that sense, why so very many competing and contradictory interpretations?
The second problem is the phrasing of your initial question “He authored by human hand…” How exactly do you mean this question? Did God hold each author’s hand? Did God dictate, either directly or by an angel (the latter is exactly what the Mormons and the Muslims claim about their books)?
Going down that trail one quickly runs into the entire inerrancy question, which quickly gets thorny the moment one begins to translate from one language to another as that begs the question of “Well, would God permit faulty translations if He ordained the canon?” And there are massively faulty translations out there. For instance, the Vulgate for centuries referred to Moses as “horned” due to a translation error from Hebrew – you see a lot of depictions of Moses with horns all throughout medieval Roman Catholic depictions because of this. There are any number of modern translations out there with significant issues too – the NIV (one of the most widely circulated out there) will often translate the same words into English to give them positive or negative connotations in line with the translators’ own theology, imparting meanings simply not found in the original Greek. So we have translations today that, depending on the translators’ own theologies, contradict each other. They can’t all be inerrant.
And was Luther “acting by the Holy Spirit” when he “corrected” the canon? If canon was “God Ordained”, how could this be?
So does the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.
For instance,
some guy named Michelangelo.
“… towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.”
As stated in the Book of Armaments.