The Divine Library of Sacred Scriptures

The Bible is the name given to the collection of seventy-three books which go to form the Old and New Testaments. The name "Bible" is derived from the Greek "Biblia" the neuter plural of "Biblion," "a book." Thus the name was originally plural; it has passed into the singular partly owing to a natural misunderstanding of the word, but partly also through a very true feeling regarding the real character of the Bible. For though the authors were many, the Divine Author is but One, as St. Jerome says: "The lion of the tribe of Juda is Our Lord Jesus Christ; He 'broke the seals of the Book,' and that 'Book' is not merely the one book of the Psalter, as many think, but the Book of all the Scriptures, for they were written by the One Holy Spirit and are therefore termed one Book" (in Isaiam xxix). It is in this sense that the Fathers speak of the "Divine Library" when referring to the Sacred Scriptures; see, for example, St. Jerome Ep. lxxxix, to St. Augustine; also his Preface to Esther. In the Bible itself we read of "the books," Daniel 9:2; of "the holy books" in 1 Maccabees 12:9; cf. also 1 Maccabees 1:59-60, 3:48, Matthew 21:42, Matthew 22:39-40, Luke 24:32, John 5:39, Acts 18:24.

The titles "Old" and "New Testament" are familiar to us, and St. Paul uses them in 2 Corinthians 3:6 and 3:14; but the Greek word "diatheke" in the Old Testament, e.g., in Genesis 17, means rather a Covenant than a will or testament, though in the Epistle to the Hebrews 9:15-17, it is used in this latter sense. Tertullian uses almost habitually the term "instrument," understanding thereby "a legal document"; he was a lawyer.

The divine character of the Bible has always been a fundamental principle with the Fathers of the Church. Thus St. Augustine beautifully describes the Bible as God's Letter to us men: "We could believe Him," he says, "merely on His word. But He did not wish us merely to believe His word, He wished His writing to be held to. Much as though you were to say to a man when you promised him something: Do not accept my word for it, I will give it to you in writing. For since generations come and go, and the centuries slip by — we mortals give place to and succeed one another — God's writing had to remain; it was to be His Handwriting which all who passed by might read and so might hold to the way of His promises." Enar. in Ps. cxliv. Similarly, Confess. VII. xxi, he terms the Sacred Scriptures "the venerable pen of Thy Spirit." And since the Bible is thus Divine there can be no error in it; thus St. Augustine writes to St. Jerome: "I have learnt to pay only to those Books of Scripture which are called Canonical such reverence and honor as to firmly believe that no one author of those Books has erred in aught that he wrote. Hence, if in any one of those Books I stumble upon something which seems opposed to the truth, I have no hesitation in saying that either my copy is faulty, or that the translator has not fully understood what was said, or that I myself have not understood." Ep. lxxxii. ad Hier. But though Divine, these same Scriptures are only for a time: "When the Lord Jesus Christ shall come, then in the presence of the Day lamps will no longer be needed; the Prophets will not be read to us, we shall not open the Book of the Apostles, we shall not seek the testimony of John, we shall not need the Gospel. Then all the Scriptures will be taken away; in the night of this world they were lit for us to be like lamps lest we should remain in darkness. But when they are taken away what shall we see? ... We shall see Him even as He is." Tractatus in Joan, xxxv. 9. "But while these Scriptures are with us," says the same great Saint, "we must needs study them and study them deeply for they are difficult."

No one studied Holy Scripture more assiduously than did St. Augustine, yet no one complains more feelingly of their obscurity: "They who read them rashly," he says, "are deceived by many and manifold obscurities ... for so obscurely are some things set forth as to be wrapped in deepest darkness." Doct. Christ. II. vi. 7. Indeed St. Augustine's whole treatise De Doctrina Christiana is devoted to showing how the student may best avoid the difficulties which the Saint himself had encountered in his laborious Scriptural studies. These difficulties, he tells us, are due to several causes:

A. The Original Languages of Scripture

The Scriptures are written in what are, for the most part, dead languages; hence he insists much on the need of cultivating a knowledge of these languages: "a knowledge of these tongues is necessary; for while we can count those who have translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, the Latin translators (of the Greek versions) are innumerable." Doct. Christ. II. xi-xii, cp. De Civ. Dei. XV. 14, and XVIII. 43.

B. The Distant Origins of Scripture

The remote date, too, at which these Books were written is another source of obscurity; hence, the divergence of their authors' ideas from ours; while the allusions to customs of long ago naturally elude us.

C. The Senses of Scripture

And there must be added the complication arising from the different "senses" of Scripture; again and again Augustine returns to the difference between the spirit and the letter, between the literal and the metaphorical sense; cf. Conf. XII. 18-32, and especially note his words in De Doct. Christ. III. v.: "The ambiguity of the translated word calls for no small care and industry. For at the outset we must beware lest we take the figurative for the literal." This is what the Apostle means when he says : "the letter killeth but the spirit qulckeneth ... And nothing can be more fittingly termed the death of the soul than when, by following the letter, that intellect by which we are distinguished from the beasts is subjected to the flesh"; and he instances as examples of such slavery, a merely material understanding of the words Sabbath and sacrifice.

St. Augustine on Studying the Bible

St. Augustine is never weary of telling the student how he must approach to the study of the Sacred Word.

First of all he must ever bear in mind the Divine authority which speaks: "For we walk by faith and not by sight; but faith totters if the authority of Holy Scripture is weakened; and when faith totters charity itself languishes." Doct. Christi II. 37. We must come, then, in a spirit of fear: "They that fear God, and through love of Him are meek, seek in all these Books the will of God. And the starting point of all this toil and labor must be, as we have said, to know the Books themselves and, even if you have not yet arrived at their understanding, to strive by assiduous reading either to commit them to memory, or at least not to be entirely ignorant of them. ... And then when at length you have gained a certain familiarity with the actual language of Holy Scripture you can go on to examine and discuss those passages which are obscure, so that from the less obscure you may rise to the understanding of the more obscure, and thus the witness of certain clear phrases will remove all doubtfulness from those which are not so clear. And in this study the memory is of great assistance, so much so that if it is lacking you cannot attend to my teaching." Doct. Christ. II. ix. 14.

Humility, too, is necessary: "When you begin to examine the Sacred Scripture cease not to reflect upon the Apostolic maxim: knowledge puffeth up, charity edifieth. Doct. Christ. II. xli. 62. And besides humility we need its corollary, prayer: "We must not only admonish those who study these venerable Letters, to know the modes of expression proper to Holy Scripture, and to note carefully and commit to memory the fashion in which things are there said, but also, and this is more especially necessary, let them pray to understand." Doct. Christ. III. xxxvii. 56.

And with St. Augustine, the foregoing are but the preliminaries. To the student who has grasped them he proposes certain sound principles of investigation in the Third Book of the De Doct. Christ.: these rules the student should read for himself, as indeed the whole of his treatise, but St. Augustine has summed up his teaching on the elementary rules of criticism in a passage of the De Gen. ad Litt. I. xxi. 41: "When we read the Divine Books and find so many diverse but true interpretations deduced from but a few words and supported by sound Catholic faith, we should choose that interpretation which the Sacred Author whom we are reading appears to have held; but supposing we cannot determine what he really thought, we must choose that interpretation which does not run contrary to the context and which agrees with sound faith; and if, lastly, we cannot arrive at any clear understanding of the context, then we can but follow the interpretation which sound faith demands. For it is one thing not to know what a writer really meant, quite another to fall away from the rule of piety." And these last words of the Saint bring us to the question of interpretation and therefore to the Church.

The Church and Bible Interpretation

As we have already pointed out, the Bible is essentially an obscure and a difficult book. This is no new idea. St. Peter said it long ago when he complained that in the Epistles of "our most dear brother Paul ... are certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and the unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction." 2 Peter 3:15-16. If the Apostles needed Our Lord's special instruction to enable them to "understand the Scriptures," Luke 24:44-45, we must need the same assistance, cf. also Acts 8:30-31. Indeed it is a mystery how any one can ever have convinced himself that the Bible was an open book and one which could be safely put into the hands of all. All heresies are the outcome of misunderstanding of Biblical texts, cf. St. Augustine Tract. XVIII. I in Joan. It is important to understand this clearly, for in these days of widespread propagation of the Bible we are sometimes apt to think the Church hard in Her treatment of The Bible Society for instance. But the truth is that the Church condemns this Society not for spreading the Bible broadcast — though that is certainly not to be commended — but because its fundamental principle is the all-sufficiency of Scripture, i.e., that it needs no interpreter and that each man is at liberty to deduce from it what doctrine he pleases. St. Irenaeus voices the tradition of the Church when he says: "Where, therefore, the gifts of the Lord have been placed, there it behooves us to learn the truth, namely from those who possess that succession of the Church which is from the Apostles, and among whom exists that which is sound and blameless in conduct as well as that which is unadulterated and incorrupt in speech. For these also preserve this faith of ours in One God Who created all things; and they increase that love which we have for the Son of God Who accomplished such marvelous dispensations for our sakes; and they expound the Scriptures to us without danger, neither blaspheming God, nor dishonoring the Patriarchs, nor despising the Prophets." Adv. Haer. IV. 26. And since Origen is often spoken of as though he were in some vague way opposed to the teachings of the Church (we do not of course deny that he held wrong views on many points of doctrine, but this was not in opposition to the Church which had not at that time defined the true doctrine to be held on the points in question), it may be as well to quote the express teaching which he lays down in the Preface to that work of his the De Principiis, which afterwards brought him into such obloquy: "As the teaching of the Church, transmitted in orderly succession from the Apostles, and remaining in the Church to the present day, is still preserved, that alone is to be accepted as truth which differs in nothing from ecclesiastical and Apostolical tradition. . . The particular points clearly delivered in the teaching of the Apostles are as follows:" — and he proceeds to enumerate various points of doctrine — adding, "and finally, that the Scriptures were written by the Spirit of God." That certain Scriptures are inspired could be gathered from certain Books, but none of them tell which are the inspired Books. It needs the living voice of the Church to declare this.

This traditional doctrine is summed up in the words of the Council of Trent as follows:

"Further, it is decreed that no one should, relying on his own skill, and distorting the Holy Scriptures to his own purposes, interpret the Holy Scriptures in matters of faith and morals—which are concerned with the upholding of Christian doctrine — in any sense other than that which Holy Mother Church has held and continues to hold; for it is for Her to judge of the true sense and interpretation of Holy Scripture. Nor should he interpret them contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers," --Sessions IV.

This decree was renewed in express terms by the Vatican Council, Sess. III. cap. ii.

But while the Church reserves to Herself the right to officially interpret the Bible, She in no sense forbids Her Doctors and learned men to comment on and interpret Holy Scripture — subject of course to certain necessary reservations. This point is fully brought out in the Encyclical Providentissimus Deus. It will suffice to indicate a few of the rules which every Catholic exegete must observe:

(a) If the Church has definitely defined the sense attaching to any particular passage a Catholic commentator must adhere to such interpretation. Such authoritative interpretations, be it noted, are rare, we may instance James 5:14-15, Luke 22:19.

(b) And the Catholic interpreter is not only bound by these solemn and Conciliar declarations, but also by those less solemn indications of the Church's mind which occur in Papal Encyclicals; for, though not infallible, these yet emanate from the teaching office of the Church.

(c) He is bound also to argue in accordance with the analogy of Catholic faith; a Catholic cannot, for instance, give such an interpretation to the expression "the Brethren of the Lord" as would run counter to the doctrine of the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Virgin.

(d) Neither can he give his assent to interpretations which are not in accord with the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, for if he did so he would not be judging with the Catholic Church, in accordance with St. Augustine's dictum "Securus judicat orbis terrarum.'

The following practical rules are too often neglected:

(a) In arriving at an ultimate decision upon any interpretation we can never abstract from the inspiration of the passage in question. For the ultimate decision of any discussion must necessarily take into account all the factors, and inspiration is one of these.

(b) We must not treat these ancient Books as we treat a modern work, we must bear in mind the genius of the Hebrews. Their methods of writing history, or even poetry, were not those of the twentieth century. There were no such things as copyright or plagiarism in those days.

(c) History is of a different character according as the author intended to write a strictly historical book or merely a book containing historical details which were the framework of his treatise, e.g., the Book of Job.

(d) The context has to be studied, and not merely the immediate context but the whole literary context of the book in question; this is especially true of the Gospels which differ, not so much in the actual facts they present, as in the mode of their presentation.

Nothing can be more instructive than the way in which St. Thomas faces these complicated questions of exegesis. When he is treating of the Creation he distinguishes two things: the substance of what belongs to faith, viz. "that the world began to be created," and the mode and order of this creation. This latter, he says, only belongs accidentally to faith, i.e., inasmuch as it is told in Holy Scripture, and of this the Fathers have given various interpretations, for example, St. Augustine, who in four different places and at four different times examines the first three chapters of Genesis and was never satisfied with any of his explanations. St. Thomas points out that some of the Fathers maintain that the various phases of the creation indicate different periods of time, but that St. Augustine thinks that "Moses, since he had to instruct an uneducated people in the story of the world's creation, divided up events which really took place all together." St. Thomas allows that the former opinion is the more common, but he says that of St. Augustine "is more reasonable and less liable to expose Holy Scripture to the contempt of unbelievers." Here we have very broad principles of exegesis, yet they are established on a solid basis and no one can contemn them as rash.


by
Very Rev. Hugh Pope, O.P., S.T.M.
Doctor in Sacred Scripture,
Member of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, and
late Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the Collegio Angelico, Rome.