By Rev. Herbert Crees
Last time Fr. Crees looked at the idea of considering truth in itself as a preliminary to examining the various teachings of the Catholic Church. This time he moves on to Sacred Scripture.
To begin on what may be familiar ground, how would you like to start thinking a little about the Bible? (were you going to say "but Catholics aren't allowed to read the Bible?" - never mind, that is just another one for the dustbin as we shall see.)
Once upon a time all Christians believed that the Bible is the word of God: that - in other words - all the writers of holy Scripture were directly inspired by the Holy Ghost to write down exactly what they did write; so that in this very real sense, God himself is the author of these writings which we call the Bible.
All Catholics still believe this, and always have believed it. So do some Protestants, but with this difference: a Catholic has a reason for believing it, and a non-Catholic has no reason for doing so. To put it in another way: Catholic belief in the inspiration of holy Scripture is an act of faith in the Holy Ghost; Protestant belief in the same thing - where it still exists - is a superstition. This may seem to you an outrageous statement to make, but that doesn't matter if only you will start thinking about it, and try to discover for yourself whether or not it happens to be true.
Let us begin. The word Bible means 'the book', a most misleading name for it. Why? Because obviously - except in a physical sense - it is not a book at all as we usually understand the word. It is a collection of about seventy different works written by a large number of different men over a period of hundreds of years. Among other things it contains works of prophecy, large tracts of Jewish history, sacred songs, some public and private letters, some accounts of the life and teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the first volume of Church history ever written.
The important word here is collection because it implies that someone did the collecting. But it means more than that. The writings which are included in the Bible are not the only works of their kind. There were others contemporary with them, and very similar in scope and purpose. It was not merely, therefore, a matter of collection but of selection as well. Some works being included as having God for their author, and others omitted as being of purely human authorship. As we shall see, this is of the greatest importance.
If, for the purpose of illustration, we consider the New Testament and the apostolic age, we find that there were, in addition to the Gospels and the Epistles, a number of other writings which were very highly esteemed in the Church at that time. Indeed, they still are.
We have for instance the Epistles of St Ignatius; there are seven of them, and he wrote them while on his last journey from the east to Rome, where he was martyred only about three years after the death of St John the apostle. St Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch. He was born less than thirty years after our Lord's ascension into heaven, and he was a disciple of St John himself. These letters like those of St Paul are full of edification, exhortation and encouragement, and have been treasured by the Church ever since they were written.
After St Paul’s death, also, St Clement, bishop of Rome (who was ordained by St Peter) felt obliged, as St Paul had done, to write an Epistle to the Corinthians because they were still distracted and divided by the same disunity for which St Paul had reproached them. This Epistle of St Clement was written in St John’s lifetime in about the year A.D. 96.
We are familiar with the acts of the apostles; but - again in the lifetime of St John - another work called the teaching of the apostles (the didache) was well known and highly regarded in the Christian Church.
Along with the Epistles of St Paul, moreover, the Epistle of Barnabas, written in about A.D. l00, was also read by the faithful. This is by no means a complete list of the religious literature of the early Church; but it is sufficient to show that the New Testament as we have it now is not only a collection but also a selection from the sacred writings of apostolic times.
And so we find, for instance, that the Epistle of Barnabas is not included in Scripture, while a small private letter from Paul to Philemon is. The acts of the apostles are in; the teaching of the apostles is out. St Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians are holy Scripture; the Epistle of St Clement to the Church of Corinth is not.
If you are thinking about this, you must already be asking yourself some very significant questions.
Who did the selecting? When? On what grounds was the choice made? And (most important of all) by what authority did someone presume to say: 'this work has the Holy Ghost for its author: that one has not'?
Surely, if your belief in the inspiration of holy Scripture is to be something more than a superstition, you must have the answers to these questions. Have you got them? Perhaps the best way I can help you here is to answer the questions myself. You can call them the Catholic answers if you like; but I cannot see any alternative to them. All I ask you to do is to think about them and to judge whether they make sense. If you don't like them, try to find some other answers.
First: there is only one possible way in which we could know with certainty whether the Holy Ghost had inspired a certain man to write a particular work: and that is by the Holy Ghost telling us so - or at least telling somebody.
Please remember that we are not at the moment concerning ourselves with the truth of holy Scripture, but with its divine authorship. The two things are quite distinct. I may have the very best of reasons for believing a certain author’s history of England to be absolutely true and reliable. But this would not cause me to think that it was inspired by the Holy Ghost. Indeed it would be unreasonable to think so. It would be just as unreasonable for me to believe that any Jewish historian or letter writer - however true and edifying his work may be - was directly inspired by the Holy Ghost, unless I had good reason to believe that God himself had revealed that this was in fact the case.
Secondly: if we assume for a moment that God did inspire certain men to write the Scriptures for our benefit, it is surely unthinkable that he should have failed to give us clear evidence of what those Scriptures are.
The questions we have been asking, therefore, resolve themselves into this: has the Holy Ghost given us the infallible guidance without which we cannot possibly distinguish with certainty what is truly the word of God and what is not? Unless he has done so, we simply do not know.
Very briefly this is what happened: It was the Catholic Church, guided unerringly by the Holy Ghost, which gave us the Bible. It was the Pope or, to be more exact, a series of Popes who said in effect: these works, and these only, have God for their author and are therefore holy Scripture. We will think about infallibility a little later on; but for the moment I want you to realise that Catholics believe that the Bible is the word of God because the Church says so, and because the same Holy Ghost who inspired the writers of Scripture will not allow the Church to go wrong about a thing like that.
There is nothing to prevent you from studying the history of the Church and finding out exactly how it all happened. Indeed it would be an excellent thing to do; because here I can only give the merest outline of what took place.
To begin with, do not think for a moment that the four evangelists, together with Peter and Paul and the others, had the slightest intention of collaborating to produce a volume called the New Testament. They wrote quite independently at different times, and for quite different and special reasons. St Matthew wrote primarily for the benefit of the Jews; St Luke in order to instruct and reassure the gentiles. St Paul wrote for all sorts of reasons: to chide the Corinthians, to fortify his beloved Galatians against false teachers, to tell the Thessalonians to get on with their work instead of wasting time waiting for the end of the world, to tell Timothy how to be a good bishop, and so on. (By the way, you should realise that the Catholic Church was founded and surprisingly well organised before a line of the New Testament was written.) How, then, were these writings first brought together? In a perfectly natural manner. Everything known to be written by the apostles naturally carried great authority.
These men had known our Lord personally and had heard His voice. Their eyes had beheld His risen body. They were, moreover, the men to whom He had said ‘he that heareth you heareth me’. When, therefore, it became known that there were three eye witness accounts of His life, and some time later a fourth, and that some Churches and individuals had received actual letters from the apostles, full of comfort and instruction, the early Christian communities strove to obtain copies of then. With these, and such spiritual letters as those of Clement, Barnabas, Ignatius and others, those communities who could do so gradually formed their own collections. In at least one case, St Paul particularly asked that his letters should be passed on and exchanged between two of the Churches (as you can read in the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the Colossians.)
Among these works also, they placed the writings of the prophets, and the other books that make up what we call the Old Testament, because our Lord had made it clear that He came to fulfil the old law and the prophets, not to destroy them. Moreover, early Christian writers like St Paul and St Clement quoted extensively from the Jewish Scriptures.
This was the first phase: the process of collecting the sacred writings which were read in the Churches to instruct and edify the faithful. But we know that these writings did not all enjoy the same degree of importance in the eyes of the Church. And as the years went by and the number and extent of these collections increased, the feeling grew that the Church must examine them all and, with its divine authority, declare which were to be received as the word of God, and which were to be regarded as works of merely human authorship.
So began the second phase: the process of selecting; and this, like the first, was a gradual one. From the second century lists were being compiled and much was being written on the canon of Scripture. Great Catholic saints and scholars made it their study, among them St Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Jerome and Augustine, bishop of Hippo. The most complete list was drawn up at the council of Hippo in the year 393 and reaffirmed at the third and fourth councils of Carthage in 397 and 418. To this list was appended a request that it should be sent to Rome for approval and confirmation, preferably, it said, "to holy Boniface, bishop of Rome." On such an important matter, it was felt that authority, in the person of the Pope, must speak.
At about the same time, we find that St Exuperius the bishop of Toulouse had written also to the Pope (Innocent I) asking formally for a list of the true books of Scripture. In 405 Innocent replied, and the list he sent was the same as that of the councils of Hippo and Carthage.
As yet, however, the Church had made no infallible pronouncement on this matter; and so there continued to be a great deal of controversy and discussion; but the same list appears again, proclaimed by the council of Florence in 1441. Finally at the council of Trent in l546, all doubt was removed when the same list once more was formally defined as the canon of Scripture. For it rested now no longer on the testimony or scholarship even of the greatest saints and scholars, but on the infallible decree of the Church of God guided by the Holy Ghost.
And that - very briefly - is the story of how the Catholic Church preserved, selected and gave us the Scriptures, guaranteeing them to be the word of God and backing the guarantee with her own infallibility. These are simply historical facts which you can verify. If you are in any doubt about them, you should verify them. But you cannot fail to see what they imply: that our belief in the divine authorship of Scripture rests on the infallible testimony of the Catholic Church. If the Church could be wrong about this, then our faith in the Bible as the word of God is vain.
