Tim Ross’s talk on “The Bible - The word of people or the word of God ?”

We have to decide what status we give to the Bible, because doing so will determine what influence we should let its writings have over our lives.

There are two possibilities:

• It is the words of people
• In some way or other it is the Word of God

The Words of People = Humanly Inspired and Created

The “words of people” argument says that the Bible is a solely a work of human creation and that it is merely a record of the religious faith of a particular nation.

If the Bible is a human creation; if it is just the writings of devoutly religious people recording their faith, then all we can say about it is that it may be a supreme example of human writing, it is nothing more. As such, we can simply pick and choose bits of the Bible that we like, which have some kind of meaning for us, in the same way we might choose helpful poems or inspiring biographies. Then, we can ignore the rest as being meaningless for us.

Bible sceptics also point out that the Bible is thousands of years old, and began in many cases as an oral tradition, which was handed down over many generations. When they were written, they were copied and copied again. All the original manuscripts are lost, so what we have now is copies of copies. There are bound to be errors and omissions. In any case, the Bible shows the culture and ideology of the times in which it was written, and these are not always relevant for us.

The Word of God= Divinely Inspired and Created

If the Bible is in any way the Word of God, then that is a whole different ball game, because now we are claiming that God was involved in its creation and that he can speaking to us through the Bible in some way or other. If this is the case then we need to make every effort to find out what exactly God wants to say to us through it, because it could have potentially eternal consequences for us.

If we do claim that the Bible is “The Word of God” then we have two further questions to answer:

• In what way is the Bible “The Word of God”?
• (Was it dictated by God to its writers? Is it a human record of divine revelation?)
• How do we go about understanding it?
• (Do we take every word literally? Is intellectual study of the Bible enough to find its meaning?)

If the Bible is a divine creation; if it is in some way “The Word of God” then, traditionally, there are three ways of understanding what that means.

1. The Bible is literally the Word of God

 This 10^th Century ivory carving shows St Gregory writing at the dictation of the Holy Spirit, sitting on his shoulder. This was how Christians understood the Bible to have been written – many still believe this is the case.

According the literalist view, though God used human hands and human minds, He is nevertheless the author. All the words in the Bible are God’s words. Through the Holy Spirit, God oversaw the of the Bible’s creation, making sure that his words were the ones kept.

In 1893, Pope Leo XIII issued a letter to his bishops called Providentissimus Deus. In it, he says this:

“For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical, are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true... Hence, because the Holy Ghost employed men as His instruments, we cannot therefore say that it was these inspired instruments who, perchance, have fallen into error, and not the primary author. For, by supernatural power, He so moved and impelled them to write - He was so present to them - that the things which He ordered, and those only, they, first, rightly understood, then willed faithfully to write down, and finally expressed in apt words and with infallible truth. Otherwise, it could not be said that He was the Author of the entire Scripture.”

What this is claiming is that the Bible is inerrant meaning that it is completely without error. The argument in nutshell goes something like this.

If God is perfect and without error then it follows that His word must be too. Equally, if the Bible was written under the guidance (dictation) of the Holy Spirit, then the Bible must completely without error, and free from all contradiction – it must also be completely accurate, both historically and scientifically. If we say that there are errors in the Bible, that is tantamount to saying God is lying to us, or that God is fallible.

If this is true, then this means that when you read the Bible, it must be taken absolutely literally, but there are a couple of problems with this argument.

1. There are dozens of verses that would be difficult to take absolutely literally without some kind of modern interpretation. Here are just a few.

Exodus 20:9 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it Holy”. Saturday is the Sabbath, not Sunday. This is a later tradition.

• Genesis 3:16 “…with pain you will give birth to children”. God’s curse is that childbirth should be painful, so women should not have anaesthetics in childbirth.
• Leviticus 19:28 “Do not… put tattoo marks on yourselves.”
• Leviticus 19:19 “Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.” Polyester/Cotton shirts are forbidden.
• In other parts of the Bible it is clear bigamy is acceptable permissible.
• The New Testament assumes that slavery is OK and commands slaves to obey their masters. It also commands women to have long hair, cover their heads and never speak in church.
• Beating children with rods to make them obedient is actively encouraged.

2. Some passages in the Bible are quite clearly the words of people. Ezra 7:11-28 is stated as being a copy of a letter written to Ezra by the king

3. If the words as recorded by the writers of the Bible are the actual words of God, then which version of the Bible should we use? The translators of the different versions sometimes come up with different ways of expressing the same verse. More seriously, many modern version completely miss out entire verses and whole phrases which were included in the King James Version. The verses are omitted because they are not found in older, more reliable manuscripts, which have been discovered since the King James Version was created in 1881.

Here is one example of a verse omitted from the Good News Bible and the New International Version:

• Mark 11:26 “But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.”

A list of missing verses and phrases can be found on the Internet at: http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/List_of_omitted_Bible_verses

Of course, the original languages of the writers of the Bible were Hebrew and Greek, so shouldn’t we read the Bible in those?

4. There are other difficult passages of the Bible, which would be difficult to accept as coming from the mouth of God.

e.g Psalm 137:8-9

• “Babylon, you will be destroyed. Happy are those who pay you back for what you have done to us - who take your babies and smash them against a rock.”

How is this “The Word of God”?

The literalist view interprets the phrase the “Word of God” to mean that the Bible is the word from God, or that it is the words of God. 

Move on to part 2 >