On the Bible or Holy Scripture

Appendix — On the Bible or Holy Scripture

Here we seek to present a brief but clear and sufficient answer to the following questions:

1. What is the Bible?

The Bible, or Holy Scripture, is that collection of writings which the Church of Jesus Christ recognizes as the word of God revealed through the writing of inspired men. Three things in this definition are notable: (a) Without the pronouncement of the infallible Church of Christ we should not know what writings really belonged to the Bible as the true word of God. The Bible itself does not state what books belong to it or what books are excluded from it. Only the authoritative voice of the Church, appointed to lead men unfailingly in the way of true faith and right morality, can determine this important matter, (b) The Bible contains revealed truth, (c) This truth is set down by men writing under divine inspiration. Now, inspiration is not one with revelation. A book may contain revealed truth without being an inspired book. And a man may be inspired to write that which he can learn by his natural powers without supernatural revelation. Inspiration has ever to do with writing; revelation has to do with the making known of truth by Almighty God. We may profitably pause upon the matter of inspiration to declare more fully just what it is. Inspiration involves three things: (a) God stirs the will of the writer, moving him to the work of writing; (b) God illumines the mind of the writer, either by direct revelation of what is to be written, or by guiding the writer to make the study and research that will inform him of the matter to be written; (c) God guards the actual writing, keeping the writer from making any error.

The Bible is a collection of inspired writings. The word Bible is taken from the Greek Biblia, which means “books.” The Bible is divided into the Old Testament or books written before the coming of Christ, and the New Testament or books written after Christ’s coming. These books, in detail, are the following:

The Old Testament

The Old Testament contains forty-five books. The Hebrew Bible contains thirty-nine, for it does not contain the books of Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and 1 and 2 Machabees. Protestants follow the Hebrew Bible and number thirty-nine books in the Old Testament.

The Books of the Old Testament are: the five books of Moses (called collectively Pentateuch), to wit: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy; Josue; Judges; Ruth; four books of Kings; two books of Paralipomenon or Chronicles; two books of Esdras, of which the second is called Nehemias; Tobias; Judith; Esther; Job; Psalms; Proverbs; Ecclesiastes; the Canticle of Canticles; Wisdom; Ecclesiasticus; Isaias; Jeremias (Prophecies); Jeremias (Lamentations) with Baruch; Ezechiel; Daniel; the twelve minor prophets, viz., Osee, Joel, Amos, Abdias, Jonas, Micheas, Nahum, Habacuc, Sophonias, Aggaeus, Zacharias, Malachias; two books of the Machabees.

The New Testament

The New Testament contains twenty-seven books, as follows: the Four Gospels (according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John); the Acts of the Apostles; fourteen Epistles of St. Paul (one to the Romans, two to the Corinthians, one to the Galatians, one to the Ephesians, one to the Philippians, one to the Colossians, two to the Thessalonians, two to Timothy, one to Titus, one to Philemon, one to the Hebrews); two Epistles of St. Peter; three Epistles of St. John; the Epistle of St. James; the Epistle of St. Jude; the Apocalypse of St. John (called “Revelation” by Protestants).

Both Testaments are commonly arranged by scripture students in three groups, viz., historical, didactic, and prophetical books.

In the Old Testament the historical books contain the account of creation and the history of the patriarchs and of the Chosen People. The didactic books contain psalms, words of wisdom, rules of conduct and of life. The prophetical books contain prophecies, instructions, admonitions.

In the New Testament the historical books contain the account of Our Lord’s coming, His life, death, and Resurrection; the founding of His Church and the mission of the Apostles; the coming of the Holy Ghost; the spread of Christ’s Church. The historical books of the New Testament are the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.—The didactic books (Epistles) contain instructions to the faithful of Christ’s Church, admonitions, comments.—The prophetical book (the Apocalypse) is a series of prophetic visions relating to the future of the Church, the glory of Heaven, the end of the world.

2. Is the Bible a Genuine and Trustworthy Document?

For a historical document to carry authority it must have three qualities, viz., (a) it must be authentic, i. e., it must be really the work of the age or the writer to which it is ascribed; (b) it must be intact, i. e., unmutilated; it must have come down to us without essential alteration, interpolation, or excision; (c) it must be trustworthy, i. e., the writer must be known as one who is well informed in that of which he writes, and who is truthful and sincere. If these three qualities are found in any document, it is authoritative, and one would be unreasonable should one refuse to accept its testimony. We apply the test of these three requirements to the books of the Bible.

The Old Testament

The book of the Old Testament are authentic. The oldest of them were written soon after the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. They were written by men enlightened from on high. To these facts the unanimous and constant tradition of Jews and Samaritans attests; further testimony is found in the internal structure, contents, and character of the writings themselves, as well as in the fact that Christ and the Apostles obviously knew that the Jews regarded their sacred books as authentic, and confirmed this belief by appealing to the Scriptures, quoting them, declaring that they must needs be fulfilled. Not all books that claimed to be sacred were accepted as authentic, but those that we have listed as parts of the Old Testament were carefully sleeted out from all others, guarded most religiously from earliest times, preserved and reverenced. The ancient Hebrew Bible lacked some of the books we have listed as of the Old Testament. Yet the Greek Version, in use from about 250 b. c., was the commonly accepted “canon” or “standard version” even among the Jews; and this Greek Version (called the Septuagint) contains all the books we have listed, i. e., 45 books.

The books of the Old Testament are intact. We know this from the reverence with which the sacred writings were guarded and from the fact that these books were well known and regularly read aloud in the synagogues. Interpolations, omissions, or other corruptions could not have passed undetected by a people as jealous of their scriptural treasury as the Hebrews. Besides, by order of Moses, a copy of the original was always preserved in the Ark of the Convenant, and with this, other copies were diligently compared. Again, we have the testimony of Christ, and the Apostles, who often quoted the Old Testament, referring the people to it in confirmation of truth. Christ would not have approved a corrupted Scripture, nor would such a Scripture have pointed unmistakably to His coming, His character, His office: essential alteration would have certainly mangled at least some of the many prophecies pointing to Christ (which are called Messianic prophecies, since they indicate the Messias), and Christ would surely have indicated any essential, and therefore damaging, corruption of the sacred text if such corruption had existed therein.

The books of the Old Testament are trustworthy. With the exception of the account of creation, the writers of the Old Testament historical books were in nearly every case the actual witnesses, or at least contemporaries, of the events they narrated. As for the account of creation, the long, long lives of the patriarchs safeguarded the purity of their tradition, and the jealousy guarded seclusion in which the Israelites lived guaranteed the further preservation of that tradition in its purity. Hence, the writers of these books knew what they were writing about, they were informed. Besides, they were sincere and truthful men, as all students of their style confess. Finally, they could not deceive, even had they wished to, for they wrote for a people who were intimately familiar, on their own part, with the existing histories and with contemporary events.—As for the didactic and prophetical books, their wondrous dignity and the elevated character of their teaching, added to the fact that their prophecies were actually fulfilled, make their trustworthiness evident.

In all reason, then, we must accept the Old Testament Scriptures as reliable.

The New Testament

The books of the New Testament are authentic. We know this from the fact that from the first these books were known as to authorship, and their continual use and the reverence with which they were regarded was a certain guarantee that no false notions in the matter could come to prevail. The men taught by the Apostles themselves have left writings full of quotations from the New Testament. Besides, the New Testament Scriptures were as well known to the Christians as the Old Testament to the Jews; they were public possessions, publicly read at times of worship, and everywhere recognized as of Apostolic origin. In themselves, the New Testament writings reflect the customs, institutions, and laws of the time to which their origin is ascribed; the language in which they are written is the language of that time; the vividness of their narrative parts shows them to have been written by actual witnesses of events known to belong to that time.

The books of the New Testament are intact. These books were reverently received and guarded; they were read at public worship; they were copied and distributed to different communities of Christians. Any error would have been detected as soon as it crept into a single copy. The earliest writers of Christian times quote copiously from the New Testament, and these quotations agree with one another and with the copies of the New Testament.

The books of the New Testament are trustworthy. All the authors of the New Testament books were either actual witnesses of what they recorded or in close touch with such witnesses. They wrote for contemporaries, very many of whom were actual witnesses of what was written, witnesses who would have been quick to detect any distortion of the facts. Besides, the moral character of the writers is known, and was ever known, to be upright, honest, holy. They proved themselves of God by miracles and prophecies; they proved their sincerity by dying for the truth of what they wrote.

Reason compels us to accept the New Testament books as reliable documents.

3. Can the Bible really be known as the word of God?

The Bible, as we have seen, is reliable and can be known as such. Now, this reliable Bible proposes doctrines and facts as revealed by God. Therefore, such revelation can be reliably known as the true word of God.

The wondrous unity of the Bible, considered as a single document, could not have been achieved or approximated unless one splendidly equipped and marvellously intelligent author had written the whole work. But the human authors of the Bible were very many. They were widely different in time, education, culture, language. No one of them, or certainly not more than a very few, could have written their part of the Bible with knowledge that it was to be joined to the other parts; no one of them could have consciously prepared his part as a logical and requisite section of the Scriptures, taken as a whole. And yet the sections fit together in such a way as to make the unity of the Bible the wonder of scholars. Therefore, the true authorship of the Bible is more than human; it is divine.—Suppose some sixty architects were employed to prepare plans for a building. Suppose each architect made his plans and completed them, and left them for all to see. Suppose the sixty were men of different degrees of skill, of different ideas about the kind, size, and purpose of the building designed, of different “schools” of architecture. Suppose each architect drew his plan for a complete small building. And now suppose the sixty small plans were joined together and actually found to constitute a complete, unified, and beautiful plan for a very big building! Impossible, you say. Yes, impossible except in one peculiar circumstance. This amazing result would not be impossible if the sixty architects were unfailingly guided by a superior power that really planned the whole big building and led the sixty individual architects to work, each in his own way, at a set of plans for a small building that was really only a part of the large one. In such circumstance, the superior power that guided the whole work by directing the sixty individual architects would be itself the true designer and architect of the building. So God is the true author of the Scriptures. And if this can be known, it is known that the Scripture is truly God’s word.

The Bible contains statements of fact that men could not know by their unaided powers (as, for example, the order of creation, the fact of the Incarnation, etc.); it contains prophecies of things that no human or created knowing-power could foretell (as, for example, the coming of the Redeemer, at such a time, in such a place, in such a way); it contains authentic accounts of miracles in proof of the doctrine which it (the Bible) teaches. Now miracles and prophecies and the exhibition of knowledge beyond the power of created understanding, are certain indications of a work or a word that is of God. Therefore, the Bible is truly the word of God.

Add to these considerations the amazing influence over minds and hearts that the Bible alone, of all books in the world, has exercised for more than thirty centuries—since the Exodus from Egypt, in fact. No human document could conceivably have been to men what the Bible has been. The conclusion to which we are literally forced is that the Bible is not a mere human document. Hence, it is a document of divine origin. And, certainly, if it is divine, it is God’s true word.

4. Is the Bible alone the sole and sufficient source of Revela

tion?

We have a simple answer, and a sufficing one: If the Bible alone is the sole and sufficient source of Revelation, we must have God’s word for it. Obviously, God’s revelation cannot do for us what He means it to do, unless we know that we have it, unless we know that we have all the necessary revelation He has made. Now, if the Bible alone is God’s word, God’s only revelation of supernatural character, then the Bible will surely say so. But the Bible does not say so. Chillingworth, a Protestant divine of the 17th century said: “The Bible and the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants.” If that be true, then the religion of Protestants has no authorization in the Bible; for the Bible {sole source of religion and rule of faith) does not say that it alone is sufficient. Now, there must be some authoritative rule of faith, some truly complete and sufficient source of revelation. The Bible does not measure up to this requirement. It contains, as St. Peter says in his Second Epistle (III, 16), “things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and the unstable wrest to their own destruction.” Nor does the Bible contain all the truths revealed to men. The Bible is not in itself a