WHY The Bible Exists....
...and its not what you think!
✠
Why The Christian Bible Was Created
M any Christians, today, proudly hold up the Bible as the sole foundation of their faith. They claim it is the "end all" - that there is nothing else. These Christians are known as, "Bible-only," fundamentalists, and their Bible-only notion is known as, "sola scriptura."It typically resorts to giving simplistic answers to complex issues, which sola scriptura adherents claim are biblical. You'll hear them say things like, "It's God," or, "...its in the Bible and you don't need anything else..." and that is often as far as they think things through.
Further, they often justify this by claiming the Bible is, "...from God..." without ackowledging that it had human origins and was the work of physical human beings.
Is that sound thinking?
I have found myself increasingly interested in this matter, over time... not just what is IN the Bible, but why it's there and how it came to be.
Now we, as Christians, admit that the Holy Spirit of God guided the Bible's human author's. We believe that.
And we have convinced ourselves that in God's infinite plan, a Bible was surely to be forthcoming.
But, there's a problem with that, too, because nowhere IN the Bible does it say that God was going to give us a Bible, or that one was even needed.
And Jesus certainly never did so.
If we understand what Jesus did, we know that a, "bible," wasn't needed - and Jesus never intended it. He didn't bring a book to give to anyone, nor did he tell anyone to write anything down. There are quite literally NO writings that came directly from him during his time on earth.
What he did instead, was to give us a living Church through his Apostles, a Church that was to last until the end of all things, and which would function by action and oral teaching... that which is called Sacred Tradition.
No book, and none needed.
Okay, but we know the Bible WAS created. So what happened? What set the wheels in motion for the writing and compiling of the Christian Bible, by the early Catholic Church?
Because youre fooling yourself if you don't recognize that the Bible exists now, and in the past, as a physical thing. It has existed, and still does exist, in the material world. So talking about the Holy Spirit and, "It's God," is fine, but we still must acknowledge that the Bible was developed and created from earthly elements by human effort.
Which leads to the questions... Why? And How?
To get that answer, we must start from the beginning...before the Bible came into being.
The early Church, that is the early Catholic Church (for there was yet no other), faced many challenges in its infancy.
Persecutions, the religious status quo of the time, multiculturalism, multideism, distance, all these and more presented road blocks to the Church. But among the many problems to be faced, one was often considered the most dire: The first century heretical sects within Christianity, itself.
These sects were groups that contradicted the teachings of the Apostles in one way or another - groups like the Donatists, Montanists, Ariansists, and others.
They literally concoted their own versions of exiting doctrine, adding things or taking them out, and thus threatened to undermine the core teachings of Christ throught his Apostles. They are considered, "Christological," that is, within the Christian realm.... but they were, "off the plot," you might say.
So the Protestant Reformation, which began the very same thing 1500 years after Christ, was hardly the first to do that.
And of all these early heretical groups, one was considered the most threatening - the Gnostics.
Christianity in Flux
Our current view of Christianity doesn't match the reality. That is, it was not always the stable belief system we enjoy, today. It had many conflicting belief systems within it, during its infancy.
One of the strongest was Gnosticism.
The general doctrine of the Gnostics was based on, “gnosis” or 'Knowledge.' In this case, it was a semi-secretive knowledge, one that was a mixture of religious, philosophical, and cosmological (esoteric) notions derived from various eastern sources.
(The New Caxton Encyclopedia, Vol: 9 page 2747).
The influence of Gnosticism in the early Christian Church was quite negative and destructive to the faith, and it took four centuries to finally put it down.
The Gnostics
In reaction to the apostolic Christian teachings about Jesus Christ, His death, and His resurrection, the intellectual centers of the Mediterranean world raised questions about Jesus Christ, the man:
"Who was he"?
"How did he get here?"
"If he was actually God, how could he die"?
These were obviously rooted in human viewpoints, and they were not at all what we might call, "Christian faith."
That faith was still developing at that point, so these other influences crept in.
In want of satisfactory answers to these types of questions, the Gnostics developed their OWN philosophy about Jesus Christ.
Gnostic philosophers looked down upon and ridiculed Christian teachings.
The Gospel messages were considered foolish to them because, they lacked the uppity, philosophical tone which was the usual for the day, given the pre-eminence of the Greek Stoic and Epicurean school of thought (Acts 17:18).
In his Letter to the Church at Corinth, St. Paul made a brilliant defense of Church teachings and refutes the so-called, 'knowledge' of these philosophers, when he wrote:
"For God in His wisdom made it impossible for people to know Him by means of their own wisdom. Instead, by means of the so-called foolish messages we preach, God decided to save those who believe. Jews want miracles for proof, and the Greek looks for wisdom" (1 Cor.1:21-22)."
The Gnostics rejected Christian teachings about Christ’s divine nature, too, and claimed that he was purely human, without any inherent element of divinity in him.
To them, Christ was purely human at birth and divine nature was infused into him only at Baptism, which eventually fled from him at his death on the cross.
Basically, they reckoned he was more puppet, than God-made-man.
They even claimed that THEY were more spiritually endowed than the Apostles of Christ, those anointed with the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And if you weren't one of them, well, you couldn't possibly know the real truth...which only they possessed. So they were elitist, too.
That is still common among many Protestant sects to this very day.
The Gnostics contradicted nearly all Christian doctrine; they believed and saw the salvation of the soul as merely the release of one’s soul from the bondage or prison of the flesh. For them, there was no resurrection after the soul was released from the bondage of the flesh at death.
The New Testament writers ultimately devoted their time and energy in defending Christian teachings from the falsehoods of the Gnostics. St. Paul personally challenged them with a question:
If there is no resurrection, why are people baptized for the death (1 Cor.15:29).
"Baptism-for-death" was a common feature in the early New Testament times; early Christians were threatened daily with death by Roman persecution, so they were eager to be baptized solely for the reason of the expected resurrection of Christ and the dead.... just as prayers were offered for the dead for the hope of resurrection in the old and New Testament times (2 Macc. 12:45-46, 1 Jn.5:16, 2 Tim.1:18),
The early Christian teachings on the Sacrament of Penance were also attacked, just as today.
Common among Gnostic teaching was the belief that all material things are evil, except the indwelling soul in a man. The soul was considered a perfect entity which existed independently of the evil and sinful human flesh.
They saw the soul as sinless, therefore human sins committed in the flesh cannot disfigure it.
In line with this, confession of sins was considered irrelevant and of no spiritual value.
St John refutes such heresy when he writes:
"If we claim that we have no sin, then we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. (1 Jn.1:8-9)."
Today, many Christians exhibit this same attitude towards confession of sins as the Gnostics. The Sacrament of Penance (aka, "confession") has no spiritual value to them. Being "born-again" is easy, and they believe that a person is, "once saved always saved"... no matter what you do in life thereafter.
The Apostle St. John in totality rejected the Gnostic theology on penance.
He rightly reasoned that sins committed in the flesh pollute the soul, since the thought of committing these sins comes from the mind which is not material, but spiritual. This means the soul-mind is responsible for every sin committed in the flesh. Therefore, the only means of obtaining forgiveness is through confession.
To make matters worse, the early Christian Church was dangerously infiltrated with Gnostic teachings.
Christians in Colossae, for example, were taught by these infiltrators to observe the Jewish Sabbath, the compulsory abstinance from certain foods, to celebrate New moon festivals and to worship angels.
This after those early faith communities had been warned against the wolves infiltrating the Church of Jesus Christ (Col.2:16-18, Acts 20:28).
Fighting Back
The Apostles seemed to have tolerated the excesses of the first Gnostics in their time, probably because the Gnostics were just begnning. But that didn't last - their successors took up a hard-line opposition against them.
Through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and after long contemplation, Pope Damasus (366AD) finally decided to compile what would become the Christian Bible as an effective means of checking such heretical influences in the Church.
Four reasons influenced his decision.
- First, the compilation of the Christian Bible would facilitate the proclamation of a unified Gospel. Christianity had spread rapidly through the Roman and Greek worlds, and there were numerous communities scattered around the region.
- Second, its compilation was a counter measure taken by the Catholic Church to counter the upsurge of heretical writings.
Many spurious works were being written and taught, all claiming to be inspired. At the same time, works like the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — were considered legitimate.
The question thus arose: Which books truly belong to Scripture? Someone had to answer that, and the need to differentiate the official teachings of the Church, from the falsehoods of the Gnostic heretics and others was pressing.
- Third, the differing views of the Christian faith during the 1st century led the Church to collect together the writings (memoirs) of the Apostles. The Church needed these writings as authority against concocted, unacceptable religious opinions.
- Lastly, The Church also wanted to preserve the authentic story of Jesus Christ's life, death, and Resurrection in writing for the future.
Also, the Apostolic Rule of Faith, the Apolstles Creed, which issued from the Apostolic Tradition of the Church, itself, was used as a defense against the Gnostics and other syncretic movements.
So the negative influence of the Gnostics was to be fought with every weapon at the disposal of the Catholic Church.
And finally, with these weapons, the Gnostic influence was eventually halted within the Church.
Safeguarding Scripture
Apart from checking the influence of heretics in the Church, there was another very important reason for compiling a book, for creating a bible: The safety of the scriptural scrolls.
At that time, the security of the Hebrew and Greek scrolls was a major concern to The Church. Pope Damasus was deeply disturbed about the safety of the many scriptural scrolls scattered abroad, thanks to the dispersion of the Jews during the second Roman invasion of Judea in 70 AD.
These scrolls were, by then, quite old and the materials they were written on fragile and not made to last. So to ensure the safety of the many scriptural scrolls, they had to be gathered up and their content compiled into a book format.
The idea of the compilation of the Christian Bible was not the sole prerogative of the Pontiff, either... this wasn't a one man show.
The Pope consulted with the College of Cardinals (The Curia) for input.
From that initiative, several Councils in the late 4th century, one at Hippo (393 A.D.) and the other at Carthage (397 A.D.) finalized the canon of Scripture — that is, the list of 73 books to be Catholics still use today.
Later, the Council of Trent (1546) reaffirmed this canon in response to the Protestant Reformation, which saw seven Old Testament books shuffled around in the Bible, this restructuring of Scripture ocurring at the hands of Martin Luther.
So, lets stop for a moment to be perfectly clear: It was Catholic bishops of the 4th century, led by the Pope and the Holy Spirit - and not no-name collection of random individuals - who officially determined which writings were divinely inspired.
This is historically verified, even as some fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge it. That, as they say, is their choice.
But it is, sadly, also their error.
It was after these canonical councils, and much consultation between the Pope and the governing body of the Catholic Church, that Pope Damasus appointed his personal secretary St. Jerome (AD 347- AD 420) to do the work of compiling and translating the many Hebrew and Greek manuscripts into Latin (Stokstat, 2009 p.242).
Jerome was a good choice as he was a man of deep faith, and a renowned scriptural scholar, monk, and linguist who was fluent in Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and some Hebrew.
Collecting The Writings
After the inauguration by the Church, Jerome and his team embarked on thier holy mission, traversing the whole length and breadth of the Mediterranean region, scouting out the manuscripts for verification and authentication.
These verification exercises were necessary, too, so as to ensure they selected the original Hebrew and Greek scrolls over the fake ones in circulation. And there were many such false writings floating around.
It was common that any given faith community might have a letter from an Apostle (or they thought so, anyway), or perhaps, some other document that they would teach from. But, there was no, "quality control" with this, and it was just as likely that what they had was illegitimate.
This doesn't mean these folks were wrong, of course. In their defense, they didn't know any better and there wasn't yet any cohesiveness to these works.
The collection of the actual New Testament scrolls, was especially problematic because the true Gospels, that is, the letters written by the Apostles, were also not in one place, but in scattered locations.
For example, the Gospel of Matthew was found in Antioch. Mark's was in Rome..., Luke's in Greece, and those of John in Ephesus.
Also, the various apostolic letters had to be collected from the different churches they were written to.
This means, the Letter of St, Paul to the Corinthians was only known and read in the Corinthian Church....so St. Paul and his team had to go there to get it.
This applied to the other churches, too; Ephesian, Galatian, Colossae etc.
By now it's obvious that the New Testament didn't fall from heaven ready-to-go. It was not compiled into a widely distributed book format yet, and it wouldn't be that way for many years to come. So the local churches were only familiar with the letters they had.
St. Jerome and his team had to travel long distances by wagon, camel or mule, or even on foot..., slowly, laborously... going from one place to another to assemble the scrolls for verification.
He was able to do this only because the local churches all belonged to the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church that had been set into motion by Christ, Himself...aka, the early Catholic Church. They were separate, situated all around the region, but they were still part of the One Church.
Therefore, as an emissary of The Church, he was given all the necessary assistance needed by the local presbyters (bishops).
Jerome also worked in Rome, and in Jerusalem, respectively.
While in Rome, he stayed in the catacombs, just as worshipers had done for centuries.
In Jerusalem, he preferred staying in Christ's empty tomb, working quietly on his manuscripts. That way, he could better learn the Hebrew dialects he needed for translations.
It took him about fourteen years to complete his work of compilation and translation, which, for the first time ever, he bound together as the Old and the New Testaments.
Jerome's bible was then officially called, "The Vulgate." It was in Latin, the lingua franca of the day, and the name means, "in the common tongue."
Before this time, however, the term, “bible,” was unknown. That name was first applied by St. John Chrysostom in AD 404, and derives from the Greek word "bibila," meaning 'books' or 'scrolls.'
In time, however, the Catholic Fathers adopted the name, "biblia" for the Christian scriptures. Interestingly, nowhere does the word 'bible' appear in the Bible itself.
It couldn't, as we've seen.
We may find reference to "books," or, "book," in Scripture (Rev.22:28, Lk.4:17...). But the people who wrote what is in it never called it, 'the Bible.' In fact, you may see some social media picture or other content that claims the word Bible is in the Bible.If so, you can know right away it's a fake. 😉
Yes, friends, bibliical fakery still occurs, even today. And from what I've seen, such blatant fakery comes almost exclusivley from those who claim to be Bible-only!
When the compilation was completed and the entire tome presented to the Church, there was an uproar among some of the Church leadership. Pope Damasus was criticized and accused of elevating the writings of the Apostles to the same status as the Hebrew Scriptures.
This may surprise us today, but remember, the Hebrew Scripture, aka, The Old Testament, was the only sacred writing at the time, and it was held in the highest esteem.
The writings of the Apostles were perhaps seen as valid, but they were viewed as merely, "walking memoirs" when held up against God's covenants in the Old Testament.
However, Pope Damasus and the other Church leaders regarded this noise as storms in a tea cup. The decision was made....and it was needed.
But, The Church, being led by the Holy Spirit with concern for its faithful members, gave reasons for joining together the Old Testament with the New.....
1. She explained that the Christian Church was, and is, a heritage offshoot of Judaism. They were interlinked in the history of God and humanity.
2. Secondly, the Church stressed the fact that the New Testament was hidden within, and foretold in, the Old Testament.
Today, we take for granted that what was prophesized in the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New Testament. But this had to be reinforced, at the time, that the Old and New Testaments complement each other.
The Arrangement of the Bible in Chapters and Verses
However, the Bible did not exist in the form we have it today. The first Bible translation of Jerome was a continuous writing without chapter and verse divisions. It was written by hand, in Old Latin cursive script...which is where the name, "scripture" originates.
Thus, it was difficult to read, and it wasnt an ideal teaching tool in that form. So it wasn't the perfected thing we know.
Since its compilation, it has gone through many transformations, in fact. A great many.
We enjoy a great luxury we take for granted, in both availability and ease of use with the Bible, that didn't exist for centuries.
The Printed Bible
When St. Jerome completed the compilation of the Christian Bible in AD 405, the Latin Vulgate was handwritten, and without the convenient reference points we accept as the norm. In those early days of the Church, there was no printing press, either.
Therefore, all scriptural manuscripts were duplicated by hand, in the long form, by monks in monasteries. This was slow, painstaking work.... it might take one monk 3 years, or more, to complete one Bible!
Without their faithful devotion, much of Scripture would have been lost. The illuminated manuscripts they created are still considered treasures of world culture. They are really unsung heroes in biblical history.
And this way of producing bibles remained that way for a little over 1,000 years.
This, then, explains the limitations in the circulation of the Bible at the early stage of the Church’s existence. They were very precious, and essentially rare, so they weren't widely distrubuted - they couldn't be. The handy, inexpensive Bibles we tote around today were unheard of in those times.
However, to ease reference to the scriptures, the Bible eventually had to be arranged into a basic 'chapter and verse' format. But that was a long time coming...it didn't happen until the early 13th century.
This was the work of the Catholic Bishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton.
Classically, scrolls of the books of the Bible were divided by blank spaces at the end (petuhoth) or middle (setumoth) of the lines. However, Langton, a prolific writer himself, is considered the one who first divided the Bible into the standard arrangement of chapters we recognize.
After Langtons death, Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro, of Saint-Cher, France, also devised a systematic division of the Bible (between 1244 and 1248). However, it is Langton's arrangement of the chapters that remains in use today,
So it was a matter of growth over centuries that significant improvements to the quality of the Bible were seen.
The final development occurred in 1456 AD when the first printed edition came into use. That was the work of Johannes Gutenberg, the Catholic inventor of the printing press who produced a folio copy of the Latin Vulgate in print.
This epochal event ushered in the era of printing, and Christianity would never be the same. While Bibles would remain precious, and relatively expensive for several centuries to come, Scripture started to become more accessible, ensuring its spread worldwide.
The Latin Bible version, The Vulgate, had then been in existence for a little over 1100 years, when Martin Luther came along to edit and translate his own version of the Bible into German, in 1522 AD.
He pulled together several resources to make sure he got the right German language inflections, and he removed seven books of the Old Testament as, in his personal opinion, they were of dubious inspiration. Some say he did this after losing an argument with a priest over the matter. And while that would not be out of character for him, I dont know if that's true or folklore.
Luther also added things to the Bible. One of the main reasons Luther got
into trouble was because he wouldn't submit his personal
translations of the Bible to the
Bishops ... because he knew he had been
tinkering with the Greek, adding words that weren't there in the
original:
Romans chapter 3, verse 28, is one
example, where he says, "A man is justified by faith
alone."
And he makes that the battle cry of the
Reformation.
BUT that word (alone)
is not in the Greek, from which the Vulgate was derived - and he knew it. Yet, he insisted on that mistranslation to further his own cause. That's the
hero of the reformation.
But he did say that without the Catholic Church creating and keeping the Bible true through eleven centuries...there would be no Bible. So Luther was a mixed bag of a man.
Once in print, his version of the Bible made its way to England and was soon translated from German into old English. It eventually formed the basis of the subsequent English language variations.
The final piece of the Bible fell into place at the hands of Robert I. Estienne (d. 1559) a French printer. Raised a Catholic, he was a prolific printer of Bibles and would, in fact, add his own translations to Scripture. Surprisingly, this was actually common at the time, with publishers and others adding whatever they wanted to the Bible.
Again, "quality control" was not the big thing, then, which we make of it today.
Thus, most of Estiennes published Bibles also included his own commentaries, which caused the Catholic theologians of the Sorbonne to censor him. The Sorbonne was opposed to the humanist-liberal ideals of the time, and Estienne exhibited his own influence in this regard.
But Estienne was protected by King Francis I of France, a strong patron of his... as Estienne was his chosen printer and was instrumental in keeping the king in power thourgh his print shop.
But the suppression of the Sorbonne upset him, and he couldn't cope with their disputes. So, he did what every petulant child does when he is doing what he ought not - he dumped his former religion and switched sides to become Protestant.
In time, King Franics died, and Estienne no longer enjoyed his protection, so he fled to Geneva. There he continued his printing, uncensored - but now he turned his attentions to the works of John Calvin.
So why bother with all this information about Estienne?
For two reasons:
1. It illustrates just how much the influence of men affected the Bible over its very long history...especially the impact of the later,Reformation years. Often, these works were not exactly inspired; they were the handiwork of individual interpretation by men that had more influence than one would consider proper.
2. Estienne was the one who added the verse arrangements to the Bible chapters that we now enjoy.
Whatever else he did, for that he deserves due credit.
In 1611 AD, the Church of England (Anglican) under the reign of King James, commissioned the translation of the much-edited King James Version of the Bible.
Thus, it took a hundred years or so beyond the Reformation, and umpteen translations and re-edits, before the Bible appeared as a set form, in English.
Conclusion
The Bible, as we have seen, is both the inspired Word of God, AND also a fascinating study of 20 centuries of the hand of man in biblical development. And WHY it exists is still as interesting today as ever.
The Catholic Church does not just use the Bible—it gave the Bible to the world. So, like it or not - and many of my Bible-only brothers and sister will not like it - they owe a debt to the Catholic Church.
From preserving ancient texts, to discerning the canon, to protecting Scripture through history, the Church has been the guardian of God’s Word.
And down to this very day, The Catholic Church does everything in its power to assure that the Bible versions it approves are as faithful to the original works they contain as possible. So, the next time you open your Bible, remember: you are holding a gift carefully preserved and handed down by the Catholic Church.
Which is why I tell people, whether Catholic or Protestant,... "If you want a Bible that is as close as can be to the original texts - get you a Catholic Bible."
Compiled from several sources including the internet, Catholic study groups, and literary resources. I am indebted to all of them, and give all due credit wherever possible.
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