How We Got the Bible

The first chapter of Elgin Hushbeck's Evidence for the Bible is basically constructed around the refutation of two strawman arguments. The first, that church councils altered the Bible during the fourth through sixth centuries, is an argument that has its origins in pop culture and in novels like the Da Vinci Code rather than in serious, scholarly attacks on the Bible. While the council at Nicaea was certainly followed by a vicious campaign (spearheaded by the emperor Constantine) to burn gnostics and heretics along with their books, there is no evidence that the councils directly altered the biblical texts we have today. The second strawman argument that Hushbeck knocks down is the assertion the Bible has been corrupted by going through "translation after translation after translation", rather like a game of Telephone. (You know, the one where you pass a whispered message around a circle and by the end it's unrecognizable.) The truth is, the only people I've ever heard this argument from are Mormon laypeople who don't know what they're talking about. Although Hushbeck could undoubtedly have found a citation from some stupid person who really argues this, he puts this absurd argument instead in the mouth of Tom Paine (Hushbeck, 7-8). Hushbeck quotes Paine,

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are of themselves evidence that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. The Word of God exists in something else.

A careful reader even of this isolated paragraph can see quite plainly that Paine isn't claiming what Hushbeck says he's claiming. Paine's argument, rather, is that the fluid and unstable nature of language makes it an inapt vehicle for the conveyance of divine communication, and that the instability of language is evident in issues of both translation and transmission. In the preceding paragraph, Paine had argued that if the Bible is really the Word of God, then any change in it is simply unacceptable. Since the act of translation cannot help but introduce subtle alterations of meaning, the "purity of ideas" that supposedly exists in the Bible is nullified (Paine, 38). Postmodern philosophers like Jacques Derrida would certainly agree with Paine. In fact, Derrida argued that true "translation" of a text is impossible, and Levinas argued that a translation is at best a sort of metaphor. What's more, even reading the Bible in its original Greek and Hebrew does not remove the problem of translation. The mere act of reading is a translation of the author's words, written in his context and from his perspective, into our own cultural and mental idiom. Much of the original import of the words of the Bible is therefore lost when they are read in a modern context. (For more on postmodern thinkers and "translation", see here.) One could certainly argue with Paine's critique by challenging his basic assumption that the introduction of changes into the Word of God would be unacceptable. But Hushbeck apparently fails to even grasp the argument.

I suppose I should add a few words here about what I think are the implications of Paine's argument. For one thing, it means that affirmations that "the Bible is the Word of God" are facile and naive. I actually agree with Paine when he writes that "language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. The Word of God exists in something else." I see the biblical texts as human beings' records of their encounters with the divine. We can learn from them, but they do not somehow provide us unmediated access to the Word of God. The Word of God is something that we must encounter for ourselves, in our own experiences of the divine, or not at all.

Hushbeck's treatment of the transmission of the Bible is useful so far as it goes. Hushbeck does a reasonably good job demonstrating that the church councils didn't alter the Bible, and that our manuscripts are old but their contents are still older. But what he does not accomplish is to demonstrate that there were no very early changes made to the Bible. He suggests that the apostles would have resisted any changes to their writings during their lifetimes, but frankly it seems unlikely that the apostles could or would have known about changes that were made, let alone stopped them. There are several indications that changes were made to the biblical texts very early on. For example, the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11) has a convoluted textual history with approximately 80 manuscript variants, sufficient to give any text-critic a headache. Moreover, it is missing from the earliest manuscripts and when it finally does appear in the manuscripts they do not agree on its location in the text. While it usually appears in John, sometimes it shows up instead in the Gospel of Luke (Metzger, Textual Commentary, 219-20). There are also strong stylistic differences between 1 & 2 Timothy/Titus/Ephesians/Colossians and the remainder of the Pauline corpus. This difference suggests to most text-critics that the just-named books are not authentic epistles of Paul. Similar observations have been made about 2 Peter, which also contains other clues pointing to post-first-century authorship. Examples could be multiplied. Hushbeck, apparently, is unaware of these arguments; he quotes both 1 Timothy and 2 Peter to demonstrate that the apostles already considered each other's works to be scripture, but frankly neither of these books were probably written by their alleged authors.

One of the most problematic aspects of Hushbeck's argument is his section on canon. In discussing the so-called "Lost Books of the Bible," for example, he discusses the Gospel of Thomas (which he incorrectly says is "clearly gnostic") and the Shepherd of Hermas (which, contrary to his intimation, was left out of the canon largely because it's just terrible literature) (Hushbeck, 25-6). But he does not mention the Book of Enoch, which is quoted as scripture by Jude 14-5 and possibly alluded to by Jesus and the book of Revelation. He also does not mention the Wisdom of Solomon, which Ben Witherington III (a paragon of conservative scholarship) has argued comprises the major conceptual background for the book of Colossians. Still more problematic is Hushbeck's argument from tradition. He suggests that the sealing of the canon at the council of Carthage in 397 AD merely codified a consensus that had been reached in the "Western church "at large. There are three problems with this argument. One is that he exaggerates the extent to which consensus existed by ignoring the Eastern church completely. Another is that the Apocrypha continued to be a subject of heated debate until the Reformation, when they were rejected by Luther but canonized by the Roman Catholic council at Trent. If one wishes to cite Luther as an authority in determining the canonicity of books, one must also reject the books of James and Revelation (the former of which Luther infamously called "an epistle of straw"). The third problem is the more serious one: on what basis do we conclude that tradition or "consensus" has the authority to determine the biblical canon? The entire Protestant enterprise is predicated on a rejection of tradition and on a belief that the church slumped into patriarchal, authoritarian decline over the first several centuries of its existence. Why, then, should we allow this corrupt, patriarchal institution to choose the epistemological foundation upon which we build our entire religious enterprise? If Protestants choose to take a particular ancient text as authoritative for their faith and practice, it should be because we have used our reason and determined that it provides accurate, useful, and edifying information about the author's experience of God. But if this is the criterion, then Christians should not be afraid to treat some of the stories about St. Francis, for example, with the same reverence that they treat the epistle to the Galatians. Protestants frankly have no reason to even accept the idea of canon, let alone to adopt the particular canon that has been passed down to us. The true Word of God, in my opinion, is lodged in God's self-revelation in all of history (not just biblical history) and is internalized by means of communal reflection on our shared experience of that self-revelation.