The Old Books of the Bible Come to Us Through Scholarship
Thank God for Biblical scholars, pastors who prayerfully study, and a community, the church, that checks our reading of the books of the Bible!*
We need them even when we do not know we need them. After all, nobody now living speaks Biblical languages. Even the text of the Greek New Testament sitting on my shelf is the product of the hard work of scholars putting together the best texts for me to read! When we read the Bible, there are parts that the translators have made plain to us. Sometimes the ancient language translates easily into English. With harder passages to translate, some translators give us the meaning and not just the words. Other scholars make a different translation choice and give us the actual words, but then in a footnote or commentary explain the figures of speech or other usages that are hard to translate. Good pastors teach the Bible after careful study, so that those of us without the benefit of a seminary education can learn to read carefully on our own.
Part of the role of a good church is education. In fact, if you go to a church for a few years and do not know more about how to read the books of the Bible, the time has come to find a new church! For most of church history, most of us did not have our own copy of the Bible, because books were costly and rare. As many people as could owned Bible, but the number was small. The printing press changed all of that, but when we read the Bible, we should recall that the books were often written to be read in community or read and immediately interpreted.
An untrained layman sitting alone reading a Bible has a wonderful opportunity, a great gift, but due caution is important. We have to know what we don’t know and take care in our interpretations and applications.
One Mistake I Made with an Old Book that We Sometimes Make with the Bible
Maybe my own experience with old books has made me more cautious. I know how easy it is to make mistakes, especially with a old book or set of ideas. When I started reading Plato, I was constantly aware that a book like Republic was an ancient book, written in Greek, by a world class mind, in a genre (dialogue) that was new to me. Mistakes were made.
I made them!
At one point, I wrote a paper that suggested a “clever” interpretation of the text. My patient teacher pointed out that while I had explained what the text said, much of my argument was from the “silence of the text.” Plato said quite a few things, but he did not say what I thought he should have said. This seemed significant to me, but an argument from silence is very weak. After all, even a book as complicated and rich as Republic is not dealing with every issue, every nuance of every issue, and is certainly not dealing with the kind of issues that would have occurred to a 1990’s kind of student in a philosophy department in America reading the Greek with a twentieth century “accent!”
Given his context, would his contemporary reader have expected Plato to have said what I hoped he would have said? I did not know. In this case, nobody could know. We have no access to Plato’s internal mental life and know all too little about the way people thought at his time beyond the very books I was reading.
There might be cases where Plato’s text does not do something he often does, say use a craft analogy**, that might make us wonder. There might be a major contemporary event in Athens he does not mention and we might wonder why he does not. Even in these cases, however, the text is the text and what we have. An argument from silence in the text, even in the best cases, might provide some weak support for an interpretation, but there had better be other reasons for the reading!
Why You Might Care: An Attack on the Bible by a Novice Exegete
I meet skeptics who will frame an argument based on what the Bible does not say. One persistent critic of Scripture in my social media feeds will assert that Jesus and the apostles believed something because there is no specific examples of their not believing it. After all, if they did not believe it, shouldn’t the text tells us?
Well, no. That would make for a very long book and if all the footnotes were added, this critic would suggest, then the silence on other issues would look even more “damning.”
A specific example helps illustrate the problem. This tireless interlocutor asserts that the apostles should have encountered people believed to be demon possessed that were not. There are no such stories in the Bible. If the apostles believed that one could get a “false positive” when it comes to demon possession, they would have surely mentioned it. They did not, so the apostles did not know this. Since we know (as Christians) that some people who appear demonized (in some ways) simply have medical conditions, this critic thinks the “mistake” a blow to the New Testament.
This is the kind of bad exegesis that tempted me as a youngling in Plato. Notice the Bible does not say there were not false or mistaken exorcisms on the part of the Apostles. The New Testament is intent on recording what (generally) went well and showing the apostle’s power. Sometimes, if needed for the narrative, the texts also show the apostles making big errors (especially about Jesus and the earthly Kingdom).
Why wasn’t this error mentioned ? After all, Jesus does give some specific instructions about casting out certain demons. Why not point out that not everyone is demonized?
Note: we can never be sure why something is not in a text unless there is only one possible explanation or we have powerful external evidence for the reason. Neither is the case when it comes to “false positives” and demons.
First, there is no limit to the kind of errors people can make. The text was left in a community to help avoid these kinds of mistakes. Do not practice exorcism in isolation!
Second, this particular warning is unnecessary, because not everyone, even those who are helped through direct divine intervention, is presented as demon possessed in the New Testament. The Bible presents Jesus and the apostles as healing and doing exorcisms. Disease is not simply attributed to evil spirits in the New Testament. In fact, the category “disease” is where divine healing is possible… an exorcism is not the appropriate solution. For example, some are healed of disease after the doctor has failed as in the woman with the issue of blood.
This creates two categories (at least) of trouble: demonic and disease. If you have two categories, then (of course) the diagnosis might be wrong. Even the apostles were not perfect, we certainly are not. That we might confuse a case that calls for exorcism with a disease or a medical condition with demonization is obvious.
For our purposes in dealing with why the text doesn’t contain “false positives” of demonic possession this is enough. We have at least another possible motive or the absence of what (at least one) modern reader wishes were there.
In a normal or healthy church community, all good gifts are utilized. My church routinely prays that we be healed, made free from demons, and then also sends us to the proper medical practitioner if we are not immediately and lastingly helped by prayer. Revered ancient and modern saints have been outstanding medical practitioners and also saw people both divinely healed and delivered from devils in their work. (See Saint Luke the Surgeon.) A good religious community makes use of all the helps God has given us.
Prayer is beneficial. An exorcism done decently and in order might be as well. Medical care, physical and psychological, is as it always has been, central to the work of the Church. There should be no demonization (!) ever of any of the gifts of God including medicine and psychology. Simultaneously, I have known people who have received lasting relief from troubles by both types of spiritual interventions.
I am suggesting why the particular caution might not be in the text, beyond a “mistake,” but of course I do not know. The text gives us categories for human troubles and several solutions. Why wasn’t a particular type of mistaken response given in the text? I have suggested some reasons, but note I do not know and base no theology on this “silence.”
The Church behaves as she does based on the positive witness of Scripture, the spiritual wisdom gained through our long history in community, and the tools developed as we helped produce scientific methods.
In any case, whatever the merits of the New Testament views, the argument from textual silence is not generally useful and is often foolish. We are guessing the intention of the author based on little more than what we would have said if we were the author. We are not!
The psychology of an author from ancient times is known to us only through the texts preserved and the context of the times. Basic exegetical rules are the same for any text, including Scripture. An argument from silence in the text is often just an argument from ignorance: “I would have done this, so that it was not done indicates such and such as it would in me.”
Reading old books is a skill and too often our preconceptions or desire to score points for or against a reading of the text, tempts us to put weight on the argument from silence.
Beware of this trap.
Saying nothing might be saying something, but centuries later it is hard to know what. Beware (I say to myself) making too much of what the text does not say, beyond noting it does not say it.
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*I am certainly not one.
**Plato can drive a reader crazy by comparing almost every activity to some craft such as being shepherd or a navigator. He was a crafty writer.
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