In the last part, we dealt with three interrelated questions concerning Scripture:
- What is the proper response to allegations of contradiction?
- How does one deal with charges of error (apart from contradiction)?
- Can one rely on traditional notions of authorship, dating, and order of composition?
In this article we will address two more questions of importance:
- Did the Gospel writers put words in Jesus’ mouth?
- How impressed should one be with the findings of scholars?
Words in Jesus’ Mouth?
Is it likely that the Gospel writers put things in Jesus’ mouth for promotional purposes or to compensate for faulty recollection? Certainly not. Apart from the retentiveness of students’ memories in those days (phenomenal by our standards); apart from the fact that Matthew and John studied for several years—spring, summer, fall, and winter—at the feet of the greatest teacher the world has ever known; apart from the fact that Jesus must have used numerous techniques to stamp his teaching indelibly upon impressionable minds, there was the working of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord promised his apostles that “The Holy Spirit . . . will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you” (John 14:26, emphasis added). According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we may take such words at face value because “the Church holds firmly that the four Gospels, ‘whose historicity she unhesitatingly affirms, faithfully hand on what Jesus, the son of God, while he lived among men, really did and taught’” (CCC 126, emphasis added). It is worth noting that Jesus wanted his words reported with precision. “My words will never pass away,” he prophesied, adding that “every word that comes forth from the mouth of God” is spiritually nourishing.
As for charges that the sacred writers invented sayings or entire discourses for the sake of evangelization, no student with any respect for his mentor would ever have dreamed of doing such a thing, let alone individuals who took their cue from the God-Man. In an age when one rarely took notes owing to the scarcity of paper, the rabbis used to say that a good pupil was like a cistern that never leaked. Faking a mentor’s teachings would have reflected as much on the mentor as it did on the student. It would also have been exceedingly risky, for such fraud would almost surely have come to light in an age of eyewitnesses. No one during early apostolic times ever questioned the veracity of the Gospel records of Jesus’ teachings. Later on, Christian apologists from Justin Martyr to Augustine challenged Jewish leaders to deny the reliability of the Gospels, and the answer was silence (Hilarin Felder, Christ and the Critics, vol. 2, 294–295).
Could there have been substantial tampering with the original copies? Again, highly unlikely. A skewed manuscript would have stood out in comparison with manuscripts located elsewhere, and, once detected, it could have been corrected by members of a faith community that imposed severe penalties for falsification. John, in his Book of Revelation, warns against the slightest addition or subtraction from his words (22:18–19). Tampering is doubly ruled out by virtue of the uniformity that characterizes extant copies.
Luke and John, who go out of their way to claim accuracy, are also remarkably fastidious. Scholars have studied Luke’s books and concluded that he is right even in minor historical details. Why, moreover, would unscrupulous “spin” artists have included so many homely details? Why would they have recorded Jesus’ claims to be God, along with his insistence on the Real Presence in the Eucharist (John 6)? Such teachings served merely to make Christianity a hard sell. Why would John, who stressed Jesus’ divinity, have included so much material damaging to his case? John’s Gospel has been called “the gospel of truth” because of its singular emphasis on integrity. Its author might likewise be called the “apostle of truth” since his letters highlight the same theme. One finds no less than four such references in one paragraph, six more in a brief chapter (1 John 1:5–10; 1 John 2).
Christianity in general represents a greatly stepped-up insistence on truth telling. Not that the Old Testament was lax in this regard. On the contrary, Proverbs and Deuteronomy warn against altering the inspired text, and lying is condemned by Leviticus (cf. 19:11) and Proverbs (cf. 6:17). Sirach describes lying as worse than stealing (cf. 20:24)—an interesting inversion of the Commandments—while, according to the book of Wisdom, falsehood destroys the soul (cf. 1:11). But Jesus went further, telling his followers that the truth would set them free and that he was himself “the Truth” in comparison with the devil, whom he dubbed “the father of lies.” Before his passion and death, he clashed with Pilate on the issue of absolutes and, following the Resurrection, he rebuked Peter for lying to inquirers in the courtyard of the high priest despite extenuating circumstances.
Not long after Pentecost, two of Christ’s disciples felt the fire of this insistence on truth when Peter took them to task for deception, and both were struck dead. Paul exhorted his fellow Christians to feed on “the unleavened bread of sincerity” (1 Cor. 5:8). Some he chastised for duplicity, others he warned lest, like Ananias and Sapphira, they incur the wrath of the Almighty. This is why it makes little sense to compare liberties such as Plato may have taken in his literary portrait of Socrates with the writings of Christian evangelists. Unlike them, Plato did not come from a rabbinical background; he did not worship his subject or regard him as God; he was not working under any special power of the Holy Spirit; nor did he give his life for what he had written, as did many of the early Christians. Socrates, moreover, unlike Jesus, could not make a divinely backed claim that his words would “never pass away.”
In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas was adamant about the need for absolute integrity of discourse (Summa Theologica, 2:2:109), and the tradition continues. The Catechism condemns mere adulation (in the sense of hollow flattery) as sinful, even if the goal is only to avoid evil (cf. CCC 2480).
Why, in the final analysis, would the first generation of Christians have given their lives for a lie? According to Tacitus, dean of Roman historians and no friend to Christians, an “enormous multitude” of Christ’s disciples were martyred under Nero (cf. Annals 15:44). Their deaths occurred at a time when many eyewitnesses were living who would have known if any of the standard accounts had been false.
What About the Findings of Scholars?
How impressed should one be with the findings of scholars? We have traversed some of this ground already. But there is more to be said. A good portion of conventional wisdom is based on the irrational assumption that miracles either do not or cannot happen. Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), professor of biblical studies at the University of Marburg, Germany, and the father of modern “demythologization,” said it was “impossible to use electric light . . . and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles” (William Most, Catholic Apologetics Today, 7). Bultmann came to the United States in 1958 and delivered an influential series of lectures entitled, “Jesus Christ and Mythology.” From then on, it has been open season on the Bible for many Catholic intellectuals, who appear only too willing, in many cases, to second Bultmann’s preposterous claim that we can know practically nothing about Jesus’ life and personality.
Academia is full of individuals who suffer from mysterophobia. They would not believe in a miracle even if 75,000 people, including agnostics and atheists, witnessed it and even if it was reported in the newspapers—such as happened at Fatima in 1917. If one were to levitate twenty feet off the ground in broad daylight before their very eyes, they would not believe. Yet these are the folks who would dictate what we are to think about the Bible.
Modern scholarship piles assumption on top of assumption and treats speculation as fact. At once unscholarly and unhistorical, it is not even scientific. As Karl Keating has pointed out, the “Q” source theory that many rely upon to justify the idea that Mark preceded Matthew is overwhelmed by countervailing data, but “Q” marches merrily on.
The phrase “most scholars” should leave us cold, for scholars in overwhelming numbers have been wrong. In the fourth century, most of the Church’s intelligentsia questioned the divinity of Christ. Centuries later, a preponderance of “brains” held that a Church council could override the pope. Both of these theories, Arianism and Conciliarism, were badges of academic respectability at one time, and both are heresies. Neither is the prestige of individuals any guarantee of orthodoxy. Tertullian (c. 150–230), the author of thirty-three books, was second to none during his lifetime as a Christian scholar-theologian. Yet he wound up apostatizing because he could not abide Catholic absolution of persons guilty of grave sexual sin.
Scholars are also notorious for their mutability. Until recently, many Bible exegetes placed the writing of the Gospels after the year 100, thereby excluding the possibility of direct eyewitness testimony. Now, based on advanced archeological science, most experts put the date before 90, most of them before 70. Once upon a time, Homer, King Arthur, and the city of Troy were viewed as figments of the literary imagination. No longer.
We tend, as a breed, to place too much credence in what “scholars” have to say and not enough in what Holy Mother Church has been saying for two thousand years and continues to say. Many of today’s theologians have set themselves at odds not only with Sacred Tradition, the Bible, and common sense, but also with the Catechism, the Doctors of the Church, a long line of pontiffs, and the infallible pronouncements of Church councils.
Vatican II’s teaching on Scripture, as set forth in Dei Verbum, is worth noting for the number of times certain phrases occur. For example: Scripture as “truth” (seven times), as “the Word of God” (nine times), as written “under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit” (seven times). We are assured that the evangelists “consigned to writing what he [God] wanted and no more”; that they did it “truthfully and without error”; that after the Ascension, they “handed on to their hearers what he had said and done” (italics added); that they then handed on in writing “the same message they had preached.” Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are named as authors of Gospels that “have told us the honest truth about Jesus.” Finally, the Bible is described as an “unalterable” book which “stands forever.” It is hard to imagine a sixteen-page document going any further by way of reassurance.
In 1995, twenty-four years after Pope Paul VI reorganized the Pontifical Biblical Commission, placing it under the aegis of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, John Paul had stern words for its members: “Your ecclesiastical task,” he told them, “should be to treat the Sacred Writings inspired by God with the utmost veneration and to distinguish accurately the text of Sacred Scripture from learned conjectures, both yours and others’ . . . A certain confusion can be noted inasmuch as there are some who have more faith in views which are conjecture than in words which are divine” (George Weigel, Witness to Hope, 919).
Veneration of the type recommended by John Paul II is perhaps best exemplified by Augustine, who handed down a famous rule of interpretation: namely, “not to depart from the literal and obvious sense except . . . where reason makes it untenable or necessity requires” (De Gen ad litt. lib. 8 cap. 7, 13, quoted in Leo XIII’s Encyclical Letter on The Study of Holy Scripture). A spirit of veneration requires, in addition, that one accept biblical teaching on faith and morals as universal and timeless unless the magisterium of the Church indicates otherwise. Cultural change is no reason, in and of itself, to discount Sacred Scripture. Jesus himself said, “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35), “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Mark 13:31), and “not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished” (Matt. 5:18). Paul added, in similar vein, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8) and “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). We also have Psalm 119:151–52: “But thou art near, O Lord, and all thy commandments are true. Long have I known from thy testimonies that thou hast founded them for ever.”
If we continue to regard Scripture as unreliable and teach others to do the same, our prospect for converting non-Christians will approach the zero mark. We will also lose more of our brethren to evangelical Protestant groups, whose respect for the Bible is a given. It is time for Catholic homilists and apologists who have allowed themselves to be infected by the virus of biblical skepticism to turn over a new leaf and to cry out for all to hear that the emperor has no clothes. He is naked, and the game is up.