I admit my almost daily struggle with my faith, or rather lack thereof. I bounce between believing there is no god to believing, based on what we have to work with, I cannot know if a god exists to believing a deity can exist/may have existed but it certainly is not/was not the deity of the Bible.
From what I understand, Christians (and Jews, too, with regards to the Old Testament or Jewish Bible?) believe the Bible is the divine word of God. It was penned by mortals but they were merely a vessel through which God word flowed.
Here are my questions:
Does the Bible claim to be the divine word of God?
If so, where does it make this claim?
Is the belief that the Bible is the divine word of God a matter of faith? In other words, do you concede if we were discussing any other matter such a belief would be circular logic?
If you believe the Bible is the divine word of God don’t you also have to believe it is infallible? If not, why?
Why is the King James Version so highly regarded (I’m mainly asking about the New Testament here)? Here’s my take on it. If I recall correctly, the KJ version was largely based on Tyndale’s translation. Tyndale’s translation differed from Wycliff’s translation mainly because the former used Hebrew and Greek writings as the basis of his translation whereas the latter translated from the Latin Vulgate.
Do you believe King James’ translators were divinely inspired, too? If you base your faith on another translation of the Bible, feel free to use that translation in lieu of King James in the above question.
I hear you on this, although I don’t really bounce between believing that there is no God and there being a God. I bounce between believing in a Christian God and the acceptance of not knowing if there is a God or not. This is a rather recent development I might add.
I do not believe it does, IIRC. IIRC Jesus said his word was the word of God, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the people writing the bible got it right…
Don’t know if the claim is actually made.
To be brutally honest, yes I believe it is a matter of faith.
I don’t think so, because God didn’t actually write the bible. People did, in addition God is omniscient (supposedly), so it would be hard for the scribes of the bible to write down exactly what happened-seeing as they are not omniscient. I don’t know if I’m being clear, but my thoughts are like this:
God tries to explain the universe, but ancient man wouldn’t understand the big bang, evolution, and what not. In addition, the point of Genesis isn’t that it’s a step-by-step account of how it happened, the point is God created the universe and the introduction of sin-at least in my opinion.
Don’t know.
Not really, I think they were inspired to get the point across but that inspiration comes mainly from their personal faith.
Then again, I’m not entirely sure about any of it-I’m currently questioning my beliefs rather heavily due to a few different factors-so with that in mind, take my post with a grain of salt.
I’m an atheist, but I could see believing that the bible was the divine word of God, but much only applicable to the ancient Hebrew society it was written for. For example, in Leviticus 19:19 it says “Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.” Could God really care that I’m wearing cotten blend shirt?
If I believed in God, I would believe that he wanted us to use our judgement, and not blindly follow a book written for a society across the planet thousands of years ago.
The Revelation has the famous “jot and tittle” passage, which is, I believe, the only place that the Bible refers to itself (and even that is a matter of some interpretation.)
The “jot and tittle” passage is Matthew 5:18, Jesus speaking:
Okay, first, Jesus is speaking of the Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy). Second, his comment is that (1) no part of the Law shall pass away till all be fulfilled; and (2) He has come to fulfill the Law. Most Christians understand that He accomplished this in the Atonement, the giving up of Himself to Crucifixion as a sacrifice for the sins of all, and His Resurrection to new life. This gave Him the authority to proclaim the New Law, which is summarized in the Two Great Commandments (which He, a scholar of the Law, borrowed from Hillel as summarizing the precepts of the Law).
This, then, has very little to do with any self-definition of the Bible, but rather Jesus’s take on what Torah really means – a formulation that, in and of itself, is not totally unamenable to most Jews, as it happens.
BTW, a “jot” was a yodh, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet, equivalent to a Greek iota, or English small i. A tittle was the small mark at upper right that distinguished a roth from a daleth, two letters superficially quite similar – for an analogy, think of the squiggle that distinguishes O from Q.
More often, Christians intent on having the bible self-justify turn to II Timothy 3:16, where Paul advises Timothy:
This of course refers to the Old Testament, the Tanakh, since Paul cannot be speaking of a New Testament that has for the most part not yet been written. However, that does not stop anyone from extending its application to the canon of Scripture as received by the (Protestant) churches – for some reason, the books that Luther rejected 1450 years later don’t count, although Paul, a Diaspora Jew familiar with the Septuagint, probably would have accepted them as Scripture.
Needless to say, using Scripture to validate Scripture is a case of circular argument: “We know the Bible is inerrant, because it says so, and it can be relied on to tell the truth, because it’s inerrant.” What does validate Scripture is the God who inspired it. Needless to say, that then gets into the question of inspiration – and many Christians accept that it was written by fallible human beings with their own preconceptions and prejudices, with God’s inspiration being an inducement to write and providing an underpinning of truth that makes the book as a whole worthwhile.
Anyone who cannot distinguish between the Beatitudes and Psalm 137:9 (“Happy shall he be who takes your little ones, and dashes them against the rock!”) has distinct comprehension problems, IMHO.
I’ll try to give what I understand as the Orthodox Jewish POV on questions 1-4. (Questions 5 and 6 are not relevant from a Jewish perspective, since we don’t assign any special status to the KJV.) Hopefully some of our other local experts, such as zev, cmkeller, or IzzyR, will stop by to correct any of my inevitable mistakes.
**Well, there are any number of verses where it says that G-d said such-and-such to Moses or one of the other prophets. Offhand, though, I don’t know of any verse where it says in so many words that all of the written Torah as we now have it is the word of G-d, although this is certainly a core principle of traditional Judaism. Maimonides, in his explanation of the thirteen basic principles of Jewish belief (a rough translation can be found here), states that this principle derives from Moses’ statement in Numbers 16:28: “Through this you shall know that G-d has sent me to do all these things, for they are not from my heart.” Another relevant verse is Malachi 3:22 (4:4 in the English versions): “Remember the Torah of Moses My servant, which I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel, containing statutes and judgements.”
**I guess I would have to say that at the end of the day this is indeed something that has to be taken on faith, seeing as how none of us were physically present when the Bible was composed.
There are various logical arguments that can be used to point in this direction, though. Here’s an oversimplified presentation of one of them, first articulated in the 12th-century work The Kuzari by Rabbi Judah Halevi: it would be difficult, if not impossible, to convince an entire nation that their ancestors had experienced an important event if it weren’t really true (“If this actually happened, why didn’t our parents ever mention it to us?”) - yet as recently as about 200 years ago, all Jews all over the world maintained as a unanimous tradition inherited from their parents, who got it from their parents, etc., that an entire nation of some two to three million experienced a divine revelation. (As far as I know, no other religion makes a claim to having had their founding events witnessed by more than a couple of hundred people at most.)
Yes, but with an important caveat: traditional Judaism holds that the divine word as recorded in the Torah (Bible) is only part of the whole, the rest constituting what we call Torah she-ba’al peh (the Oral Law, so called because it was originally not allowed to be studied from written texts; it forms the foundation of the Talmud and Midrash). Among other things, there are numerous verses, laws, and narratives in the Bible that appear to contradict each other; the Oral Law explains how to reconcile them, and often uses this method to derive details of law. For this reason, too, the Oral Law-based understanding of a verse often differs from its simple meaning. (A classic example: Exodus 23:19 commands, “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” and this is repeated in Exodus 34:26 and Numbers 14:21; the Oral Law understands this threefold repetition as establishing a prohibition against cooking, eating, or deriving benefit from any mixture of dairy and meat.) Even more so, when it comes to the narrative portions of the Torah, various classical Jewish authorities often explain specific verses - or even whole passages - as being metaphorical or otherwise not meant to be taken literally.
(Incidentally, Revtim, the verse you mention is another example of this phenomenon. The same Hebrew word for “mixed stuff” (shaatnez) is used in Lev. 19:19 and Deut. 22:11, but in the latter place it’s qualified with the phrase “wool and linen together”; so Jewish tradition understands both verses as establishing a specific prohibition against wearing mixtures of these two materials. So wearing a cotton-blend shirt is okay according to Jewish law.)
“Needless to say” indeed. The argument you put forth is so obviously circular that I am skeptical as to whether anyone has ever actually made it. I rather suspect that the argument that you are ridiculing goes slightly different.
You see, the assumption in your argument is that the only reason to accept anything the Bible says is if it is the word of God, or if it is inerrant. This is not a valid assumption - your posts are not the word of God, nor are they inerrant, and that does not imply that we should ignore all claims in them. In fact there are many people who do not believe that the Bible is the word of God, but still believe they were written by honest people (some like to say “inspired by God”). In that case, if the Bible does in fact claim to be the word of God, it is a claim that should be given some credence. Because otherwise, the authors were liars.
Does the Bible claim to be the divine word of God? Yes
If so, where does it make this claim? 2 Timothy 3:16-17
Is the belief that the Bible is the divine word of God a matter of faith? In other words, do you concede if we were discussing any other matter such a belief would be circular logic? That’s like saying you can’t prove that the President lives in the White House by looking into the White House. It is looking into the White House that will provide the necessary proof.
If you believe the Bible is the divine word of God don’t you also have to believe it is infallible? If not, why? Yes you do.
Why is the King James Version so highly regarded (I’m mainly asking about the New Testament here)? Here’s my take on it. If I recall correctly, the KJ version was largely based on Tyndale’s translation. Tyndale’s translation differed from Wycliff’s translation mainly because the former used Hebrew and Greek writings as the basis of his translation whereas the latter translated from the Latin Vulgate. I don’t value it any higher than any other translation. The King James Only Controversy by James White was good.
Do you believe King James’ translators were divinely inspired, too? If you base your faith on another translation of the Bible, feel free to use that translation in lieu of King James in the above question. That’s a good one. I’ve never really thought about it. I tend to think that English is lacking, therefore some English versions lack in areas as well. I tend to use the NKJV, NIV, Jewish Translation, and my Bible program, to get a better picture. The Jewish one, although requiring a lot of cross ref. I like a lot, NKJV as well.
Not among a lot of fundamentalist Christians, it doesn’t. They absolutely do to use the Bible’s say-so to prove it’s own divine authorship. It is stupid and circular but believe me, they do it.
It may not be circular but it’s lame (and it’s not an argument used by Christian fundies). The assumption that the Bible was written by honest people has no logical basis. That is simply a presumption based on faith. I see no reason that the authors couldn’t be liars, or mistaken or writing deliberate myth without any intention of presenting literal history.
2 Timothy 3:16
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”
One problem with this (as Poly pointed out) is that it does not define “scripture.” Since the New Testament didn’t exist yet, this verse almost certainly refers only to the Hebrew Bible which was the whole of “scripture” at the time that Timothy was written. There is no reason to assume that it was meant to include the NT.
And of course the biggest problem is that it’s a totally circular argument. It is logically no more valid or convincing than the following sentence:
This sentence was written by God.
What makes my sentence any less believable than Tomothy’s?
Q: Is the bible the divine word of God?
A: Yes.
Q: How do you know?
A: It says so in the bible.
Q: What if the bible is wrong?
A: It can’t be.
Q: Why not?
A: Because it’s the divine word of god.
Q: How do you know?
A: It says so in the bible.
Q: What if the bible is wrong?
A: It can’t be.
Q: Why not?
A: Because it’s the divine word of god.
Q: How do you know?
A: It says so in the bible.
Q: What if the bible is wrong?
A: It can’t be.
Q: Why not?
A: Because it’s the divine word of god.
Do you see where I’m going with this? I have no problem with the above as long as it is conceded it’s a matter of faith.
Again. If the argument was being used as a counterargument to the notion that the authors were liars, the argument would be circular. If it is used as a counterargument while accepting the notion that the authors were honest it is not circular (though you may still disagree with it). I imagine it is typically used in the latter context.
Here is an overview from religioustolerance.org Here is an example of how the Timothy argument is typcically presented. Tell me this isn’t circular:
I can give a list of all the Fundamentalist websites which give some variation on the above statement or you could just ask one of our own resident fundies.
I wasn’t saying that your contention was circular only that it was unconvincing. It throws in a totally arbitrary predicate (that the authors of the Bible were honest) simply to avoid sounding circular.
Christian Fundamentalists do not try to argue that the Bible was written by honest men, they think it is the literal and inerrant word of God. They use passages like the one in 2 Timothy to prove it. Ask one.
Does the Bible define itself anywhere (in terms of the collection of Books it comprises)? - I don’t think it does, in which case even a statement in one of the books of the Bible to the effect ‘this book is the infallible Word of God’ could be of rather limited scope.
Well, the problem was with the question. The question asked if the Bible says it was inspired by God, and it does. Now to say that this is the only reason I believe the Bible was inspired by God is inaccurate. I do not believe the Bible to be inspired simply because it says so. If I see a hot stove, and someone tells me it’s hot, I may have faith that it’s hot. But if I reach out and touch the stove, it’s moved out of faith, and into experience as soon as my pink fingures start to feel the pain. So no, it’s not just a matter of it says so, so I believe it. And if 2 Tim is in ref to the OT, then that is great. There’s lots in the OT. Now we then have to ask if the testimonies of the NT writers are accurate, and we get into the same arguement as other threads.
I dispute this interpretation. All Scripture is certainly God-Breathed, but that does not make it the Divine Logos, which is what the Divine Word of God is. The Divine Logos is Christ and Christ alone. The Logos is not a book, not a set of writings. The Logos is alive and reigns at the Right Hand of the Father. Scripture is words from God but not the Word, since Scripture states very plainly that the Word is God.
Your “proof” is no proof at all. The strength of Scripture ultimately rests upon the living Tradition and Witness of the Church. The Church compiled Scripture. The Church is older than the Bible. Never forget that. The Church was around before some of the books of the Bible were even written. The Bible did not create the Church.
Ultimately, though, it all is a matter of faith, but there is nothing wrong with that.