Who has the authority to say, “The Bible says…”? (Part 1: A Little History Lesson)

A man in an adulterous relationship, who has left his wife and children, comes to church on Sunday with his new girlfriend. He tells the pastor, “The Bible says that God wants me to be happy.”

A Yale scholar writes an article explaining how the terms translated as “homosexual(s)” in the New Testament are faulty translations, and that modern biblical criticism has proven that the NT writings do not in fact speak against this sort of sexuality.

A couple tells their pastor that they’re concerned that some of the young men in the congregation are falling away from their faith because their hair has grown too long, and Paul expressly forbids this in his letter to Timothy.

A website advertises, “It’s a sin to eat meat, because Jesus was a vegetarian!”

Your grandmother tells you that it’s a sin to drink alcohol, and that Jesus drank “unfermented” wine (he drank what, grandma?) at the Last Supper.

Have you ever noticed how many millions of interpretations—many of them incredible—there are concerning the Scriptures? If you’re a part of the American Evangelical crew you know I’m not making these stories up.

The question of the authority of interpretation is one that I have been wrestling with for a long while now, and almost constantly: Who determines who gets to say, “The Bible says…”?

I think I’m beginning to see a little light at the end of the tunnel on this issue, and I want to open up the dialogue on the issue outside just the walls of the university. However, I’ve found it very difficult to just start talking about the issue of biblical interpretation without first laying some of the historical groundwork concerning the formation of the Bible itself. So, there are a few things we should realize about this collection of texts we call “The Bible” before we proceed with the conversation….

A question I enjoy (probably to an annoying extent) asking people from time to time is this: Did you know that the Bible did not come down on a string from heaven, leather-bound, in KJV or NIV edition?

Obviously, it’s a sarcastic and rhetorical question—of course it didn’t come to us that way. OK, if not that way, then how did we come to have this book called “The Bible”?

In two words, the answer would be: gradual consensus. The Church, as a whole—spread over 300+ years, in all places of the known world—gradually came to agree that some of the many letters and gospel accounts floating around during the early years of the faith should be considered, not just edifying works by fellow believers, but “Scripture”—words inspired by God Himself. This consensus was generally governed by four criteria:

1) Apostolicity—if a work was tied in a significant way to one of the original Apostles, it was a good candidate for being considered Scripture.
2) Orthodoxy—the Church had to approve of what was taught in the text for it to be considered for canonization.
3) Universality—if the text was well-known and approved by Christians all over the known world, this was also a big plus for its potential canonization.
4) Liturgical use—the question of which texts churches were already using in their worship was a huge contributing factor to the question of whether or not a given gospel account or letter should be considered Scripture.

The Reader’s Digest version of the process of this gradual consensus goes something like this:

The Old Testament (OT) or Hebrew Bible (HB) is easy: the OT/HB was canonized--officially standardized--by the religious leaders of Israel nearly 300 years before Christ. After Christ’s resurrection, when the Church realized that Its story was inextricably intertwined with the history of the people called “Israel,” the OT/HB was the first to be acknowledged as a part of what would be considered Christian Scripture. In fact, very little changed in this regard for the early Christians, since most of them were Jews and they already considered the HB to be inspired Scripture anyway.

Secondly, very early on in this process Paul’s writings came to gain the same status as the HB—a fact that is attested to in 2 Peter 3:16, where the author compares Paul’s letters to “other Scriptures.”

Following most of Paul’s letters, the four Gospels we have in our Bibles today were recognized as Scripture.

After Paul’s letters and the four gospel accounts, the so-called “Catholic Epistles” (James, 1&2 Peter, 1,2&3 John, and Jude) came to be accepted as Scripture.

Hebrews and Revelation had a harder go at acceptance by the general Church, but they too were eventually brought into this consensus.

It was not until 367 A.D.—in Bishop Athanasius’ 39th Easter Letter—that the 27 books we now call the “New Testament” were exclusively acknowledged as those which the whole Church ought to consider “Scripture.” And even Athanasius’ Letter was nothing like a hard-and-fast decision by a general council; nevertheless, these 27 books did finally come to be recognized again and again by councils and other ecumenical decisions to follow as the books that composed the “New Testament,” which was added to the Hebrew Bible—the “Old Testament”—to one day give form to that leather-bound, KJV or NIV (or NASB, or whatever…) Holy Bible we can so easily access today.

So, as I wrap up the first part of this discussion, you might ask me: “What’s the point of this little history lesson?” The point is to remind us—especially us modern, Protestant, Americans, who seem to so easily forget (or who, perhaps, simply are ignorant of)—why, in the first place, we even have a Bible to appeal to for our myriad of (bad and good) interpretations today. The reason the 66 books we have compiled today are considered Scripture—inspired words of God, the Bible—is that the Church, guided collectively—over time and space—by the Holy Spirit, saw fit to call them Scripture.

In fact, the fifteenth chapter of Acts gives us a good idea of how this decision making worked: the Jerusalem Council, addressing the Church at large concerning the issue of Gentiles’ (you and me!) acceptance into this fledgling faith—self-proclaimed as “The Way”—wrote, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us….” (v.28)

It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to the Church (capital ‘C’) to give us the Bible. When we take the Bible—any part of it—out of that context, we are sure to miss the mark interpretively. But more on that very important consequence to come….