Is the Bible What It Appears to Be?

I. What is the Bible?

A. For one thing, it is a collection of writings, some apparently very old.

B. Some parts of the Bible, such as the Psalms, are poetry. Other parts, such as Genesis, Judges, and Kings in the O.T., or the gospels and the book of Acts in the N.T., appear to be accounts of things that happened to various people at various times and places. Still other parts (much of the N.T.) seem to be letters from important leaders in the early church to various churches and people.

C. This wouldn't normally be a problem. There are many old documents around, and most of them, while critically studied, are taken pretty much at "face value." But with the Bible, this is often NOT the case. Many people (many outside of Christianity, but many within Christianity, too) say the Bible cannot be what it appears to be.

D. There are two main sources of objection to the Bible being what it appears to be, and these two sources are related.

1. It is said that the events of the Bible cannot have occurred the way they are portrayed there. More on that later.

2. It is said that the various books were not written by the people it has been traditionally thought wrote them. There has been a tendency among some students of the Bible to discount authors named in the text, and an ever greater tendency to claim that authors known only by inference and/or tradition could not be the real authors.

E. It is worth noting that in the case of any other kind of documents, when an author is stated in the text, the presumption is in favor of that statement unless it can be proven otherwise. But this is not the case often with the Bible. David is the stated author of many of the Psalms, but many deny that he could or did pen them. Paul is the stated author of I & II Timothy, but some deny that Paul wrote these two letters.

II. Why These Denials?

In the consideration of anything, what you are already thinking (your presuppositions) will have an effect on your conclusion. Around the beginning of the 20th century, the presupposition of anti-supernaturalism (or just naturalism) began to permeate almost every area of study, including the study of the Bible. Naturalism is a general view that rules out any appeal to anything beyond nature in our analysis and explanation of things.

When naturalism was assumed in the study of the Bible, some very important things happened.

A. The Old Testament - this approach was first taken with the O.T.

1. If you rule out the supernatural (God), then you need to offer some explanation of the O.T. documents. When this approach first became popular, Darwin's evolutionary views were new and very influential. (They still are, for that matter.)

2. Evolution was soon applied to almost every area imaginable, not just biology. It was seen as a grand way of explaining almost anything. When applied to the study religion, especially the religion of the O.T., it gave us the view that religion starts out very simple and primitive, and then "evolves" into later, more complex forms.

a. This, in turn, implies that any very sophisticated piece of writing from a religion must come much later, to give time for evolutionary development. So the first conclusion was that much of the O.T. had to be much later in origin than had always been thought.

b. It also implied that, since we are dealing with naturalistic evolution, that the O.T. documents could not be at all what they appear to be. Each part of the O.T. (take the first five books, for example) had to be the work of many authors over a long period of time, much later than most of the events and characters portrayed in the books themselves. Supposedly, you could analyze the Pentateuch by looking for the parts written by these various authors.

3. What, then, was the origin of the Old Testament documents?

a. There was a (or a group, perhaps) of Jehovists - an unknown writer from Judah (the Southern Kingdom) who was interested in personal biography, liked to portray God in anthropomorphic terms, liked to speak in theological terms, and referred to God as "Jehovah" (Yahweh). This writer, it is said, was not interested in sacrifice or ritual.

b. There was a group of Elohists - who saw God as "Elohim," were from the Northern Kingdom of Israel, were less interested in theology, more interested in particular names, also interested in ritual and worship, and tended to glorify Moses.

c. There was a group that was especially interested in the "priestly" aspects Israel's religion (sacrifice and ritual), the Israelite theocracy, and genealogical lists. This writing came much later than the two just mentioned (J and E), and was the last work done in what became the O.T.

d. There was a group of Deuteronomists - they also came much later than J & E and were concerned with the Jerusalem temple and the prophetic movement.

4. This is the "JEPD" theory of the Old Testament.

a. It can become much more complex than this, but you can see the basic idea by looking at Genesis 1 & 2. (Gen. 1 is "E" and Gen. 2 is "J" material - - all put together later by an editor.)

b. Another famous conclusion of this approach is that the book of Isaiah is the work of at least three separate authors, "Isaiahs" one, two, and three.

c. The overall point here is that, seen this way, the Old Testament cannot be what it appears to be. It cannot be an account of God's dealing with a group of people, and His collection of these people into the nation of Israel, the work of God's prophets, with all that implies.

B. Eventually, a similar kind of methodology was applied to the N.T.

1. It was often been denied that any person named Matthew, a disciple of Jesus, could have written the gospel of Matthew. Likewise for all the other gospels. But the anti-supernaturalists were still interested in trying to explain where the gospels came from. Their view of the N.T. generally had three related parts:

2. "Source criticism" was a label applied to one of these parts. The practitioners of source criticism thought they could detect from the text of the gospels the existence of now-lost "sources" that came before our gospels. There were many versions of this. Some held that there were many sources, some just one. The most common view was that there was some now-lost collection of sayings about and by Jesus, which was called "Q" (not the guy on Star Trek, but from German Quelle meaning "source"). The gospel of Mark came first. Matthew and Luke came about by combining Mark and "Q" in various ways. John was considered much later, and not thought to have much connection to the life of the real Jesus. Why? Because John in particular emphasizes Jesus as the supernatural Son of God, and these critics, remember, are anti-supernaturalists.

3. The other kind of analysis was called "redaction criticism." A redactor is simply and editor/compiler of a document. According to this view, which fits in well with source criticism, long after the events of the life of Jesus, someone put together the documents we call the gospels. One or more editors may have worked on a gospel over a period of time, and these editors were thought to have very definite axes to grind, which we can discover by seeing what they included and excluded from the sources available to them.

4. Another kind of analysis or criticism of the gospels goes beyond source criticism and redaction criticism. This is "form criticism."

a. This focuses on the kind of literary form used to compose the gospels from the sources by the redactors (editors). Several scholars have done this using different schemes. Generally is goes something like this: there are two general forms -- deeds of Jesus and words of Jesus. Then, in each of these two categories there are various sub-categories. For example, in deeds of Jesus would be "miracle stories." In words of Jesus would be things like "I-words" (where Jesus says things about himself).

b. Why did they go to all this trouble, you ask?

(1) The goal was to use these various forms as a clue to the circumstances (often using the German term sitz im leben) where the particular piece of the gospel in question originated. You can't assume, these critics say, that things that look like accounts of events in the gospels are really that at all. Often, they are not.

(2) As you can see this view emphasizes the idea that the gospels are all kinds of little fragments, some not very related to the others, which have been stuck together to produce the gospel as we see it today. To illustrate how this is supposed to work, consider Mark 8:27-30. What is going on here? According to many form critics, this has nothing to do with any real exchange between Jesus and Peter. By looking at the "form" of this the critic concludes that because of "Christ talk" here, this is the product of the church long after the death of Jesus. Someone invented this story to justify the later church's confession that Jesus is the Christ.

C. This approach leaves very little account of real events in the gospels. Exactly, and that is part of the point of the critic. Remember, these critics are usually anti-supernaturalists to some extent. Thus, miracle stories, claims by Jesus to be divine, and all such things ARE NOT MATTERS OF FACT and cannot be true. All these kinds of criticisms are attempts to make sense of the gospels given the assumption of anti-supernaturalism.

D. This whole approach gave rise to the idea of trying to discover "the historical Jesus." In other words, when you strip off all the later additions and confessions, etc., what do we really know about Jesus? This is what the continuing "Jesus Seminar" is all about, if you have heard of that.

1. One of the more famous of these critics, Rudolph Bultmann, said that what we really know about Jesus is that he lived and he died.

2. Not all these critics go this far, but they all go in this direction.

III. Conclusions

A. In many ways this is a hidden question about philosophy more than a question about the Bible. The motive for this approach to the Bible is the assumption that it cannot be what it appears to be. To rule out the possibility of a document being what it says it is because its contents is unpalatable is to look at the horse from the wrong end!

1. The objections to taking the Bible for "what it appears to be" seem to be based not upon the nature of the documents, but upon the underlying presupposition that the events narrated in the Bible are impossible.

2. This problem can readily be seen when we consider what the philosopher David Hume said of the category of events which form a key element in the narrative of scripture. Hume defined "natural law" as something that cannot be violated, and he defined "miracle" as a violation of natural law.

3. Once you have accepted these kinds of definitions, it is necessary to offer some other explanation of many events alleged in the text of the Bible.

B. But we are not compelled to accept those definitions, and we might just as well question those definitions on the basis of some of the events described in the Bible! In other words, why not assume that the Bible at least could be true and therefore supernatural events are at least a possibility?

Consider again Genesis 1 & 2. If, for other reasons, you think that there is no God the Creator, no original human pair, and so forth, then trying to understand Genesis 1 & 2 as two separate "creation narratives" jammed together by an editor is perhaps plausible. But I say again that the whole motive for this kind of explanation is a basic, philosophical assumption that what the Bible seems to say cannot be true.

C. When We Can Check It Out, Is the Bible What It Seems to Be?

1. Example: The Book of Acts. When you read the Book of Acts, it seems to be an account of events in the early church. No so, said the critics. If not that, then what is it?

a. The theory was, and still is according to many, that the Book of Acts is really the product of a struggle in the later church, between the followers of Paul and the followers of Peter. When they finally hammered out their differences somewhat, they later produced this document we call the Book of Acts in order to justify what the church later believed.

b. It was said that Acts had no connection to events in the first century, when it appears to be set. Instead, it is a tissue of inventions by several writers long after the time of the early church.

2. Sometimes it is possible to check out the accuracy of the N.T. writers. Sometimes there are areas where we have independent evidence of historical fact that overlaps with the N.T. accounts. For example, Acts 17:6 refers to the rulers of Thessalonica as "politarchs," a term not used by any other classical authors for the rulers of a city. At one time critics claimed that this showed just how "out of touch with reality" was the Book of Acts. Later, seventeen inscriptions were found (five in Thessalonica) which referred to the city rulers as (guess what!) politarchs. [See Robertson, Luke the Historian in the Light of Research, p. 188.]

D. While we naturally do not have independent evidence for everything in the Bible, there are enough examples like this to show, at the very least, that the Bible is not wildly off the mark, as some claim.

1. Very often, the reason for denying that the Bible is what it claims to be lies in a person's assumptions.

2. Of course, the Bible cannot be an account of God working in history, of the Son of God, His resurrection, and His followers IF there nothing is, or even could be, supernatural.

3. But merely making an assumption about these things does not make it so. It's like saying that this can't be the will Aunt Martha wrote because she left all her money to charity and none to me!

4. Unless you wade into the Bible assuming that it cannot possibly be anything like an accurate account, there is a good case to be made for it and a good case for the Christian faith that stems from it.