Lesson 2 - The Bible

The bible is the best-selling book for all of human existence. It was the first book printed when Gutenberg invented the printing press. Until that time, it has been hand-written on everything from stone tablets, to animal skins, to papyrus, and eventually paper.

We often think of the bible as a single book, but in reality, the bible is a collection of books. The word bible actually means library. The bible is a library of books and like a library has many different genres or types of writing. It is important to understand what genre a book is when you are reading it. You wouldn’t read a law book the same way you would read a poetry book. You wouldn’t read a history book the same way you would read a prophetic book.

We will break the bible down into seven different genres.

1: History: Stories and epics from the Bible are included in this genre. Almost every book in the Bible contains some history, but Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Acts are predominately history. Knowledge of secular history is crucial, as it dovetails perfectly with biblical history and makes interpretation much more robust.

2: Law: This includes the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The purpose of law is to express God’s sovereign will concerning government, priestly duties, social responsibilities, etc. Knowledge of Hebrew manners and customs of the time, as well as a knowledge of the covenants, will complement a reading of this material.

3: Wisdom: This is the genre of aphorisms that teach the meaning of life and how to live. Some of the language used in wisdom literature is metaphorical and poetic, and this should be taken into account when reading it. Included are the books of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes.

4: Poetry: These include books of rhythmic prose, parallelism, and metaphor, such as Song of Solomon, Lamentations and Psalms. We know that many of the psalms were written by David, himself a musician, or David’s worship leader, Asaph. Because poetry does not translate easily, we lose some of the musical “flow” in English. Nevertheless, we find a similar use of idiom, comparison and refrain in this genre as we find in modern music.

5: Narrative: This genre includes the Gospels, which are biographical narratives about Jesus, and the books of Ruth, Esther, and Jonah. A reader may find bits of other genres within the Gospels, such as parable (Luke 8:1-15) and discourse (Matthew 24). The book of Ruth is a perfect example of a well-crafted short story.

6: Epistles: An epistle is a letter, usually in a formal style. There are 21 letters in the New Testament from the apostles to various churches or individuals. These letters have a style very similar to modern letters, with an opening, a greeting, a body, and a closing. The content of the Epistles involves clarification of prior teaching, rebuke, explanation, correction of false teaching and a deeper dive into the teachings of Jesus. The reader would do well to understand the cultural, historical and social situation of the original recipients in order to get the most out of an analysis of these books.

7: Prophecy and Apocalyptic Literature: The Prophetic writings are the Old Testament books of Isaiah through Malachi, and the New Testament book of Revelation. They include predictions of future events, warnings of coming judgment, and an overview of God’s plan for Israel. Apocalyptic literature is a specific form of prophecy, largely involving symbols and imagery and predicting disaster and destruction. We find this type of language in Daniel (the beasts of chapter 7), Ezekiel (the scroll of chapter 3), Zechariah (the golden lampstand of chapter 4), and Revelation (the four horsemen of chapter 6). The Prophetic and Apocalyptic books are the ones most often subjected to faulty eisegesis and personal interpretation based on emotion or preconceived bias. However, Amos 3:7 tells us, “Surely the Sovereign LORD does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets.” Therefore, we know that the truth has been told, and it can be known via careful exegesis, a familiarity with the rest of the Bible, and prayerful consideration. Some things will not be made clear to us except in the fullness of time, so it is best not to assume to know everything when it comes to prophetic literature.

So, who wrote the bible?

As you can imagine, since the books of the Bible were written over more than a thousand years, there is not just one single author of the Bible. Or is there?

The Church has always asserted that the contents of Scripture have been committed to writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and thus they have God as their author. That’s your one author of the Bible! This is why we profess that the Scriptures are the Word of God.

But the Church also acknowledges that God chose human authors to physically write down the words of Scripture. It was actual people, after all, who put pen to paper and wrote this all down. While they were inspired by the Holy Spirit, they were true authors who wrote in their own language and style. And not just one person: dozens of authors from across the centuries.

In fact, many of the authors are not clearly known. Tradition used to hold that the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses, but modern scholarship has moved away from that belief. Among the dozen or so letters attributed to St. Paul in the New Testament, there is much scholarly disagreement over which ones were definitely written by Paul, and which ones were likely written by his close followers and attributed to him.

Regardless of who the human authors actually were, we can be assured that the bible is truly the word of God because the authority Jesus gave to the Church stands behind it. Every word in the bible is true when viewed through God’s eyes. But God does not see the same way we see. The Church upholds that the bible is without error when it comes to matters of faith and morals. That does not mean that we believe everything is literally true. We are not bible literalists. So how can you know what is literal and what is figurative? Luckily, we have the Magisterium to guide us. The Magisterium is the Pope in union with his bishops and they are the official teaching arm of the Church. They have the solemn responsibility to pass on to the faithful the true teachings of Jesus. We believe that God will not allow the Church to fall into error when it comes to faith and morals. This is why when you find yourself disagreeing with the Church on faith and morals, you are not disagreeing with the Church but with God himself.

If there is one thing Catholics are accused of it is that we don’t read our bibles. That happens mostly because we don’t quote chapter and verse as many of our non-Catholic Christians brothers and sisters do. Yet, everything we do comes straight out of the bible. If you only come to Mass on Sundays, you will hear the entire bible read to you in three years. If you come daily Mass, you will hear the entire bible read in two years. Where we are different from the other faith traditions is that while we are encouraged to read our bibles, we are not to interpret the bible ourselves. We can certainly draw inspiration from what we read, but we do not have the authority to interpret the bible. That is left up to the Magisterium and communicated through our bishops, priests, and deacons.

How is the bible organized?

The bible consists of seventy-three individual books. A non-Catholic bible is either missing seven of these books or these books are set apart into something called the apocrypha or the deuterocanonical books. Apocrypha means that they are not part of the approved canon and deuterocanonical means second canon. Canon is a word that means measure. The canon of scripture are the approved books, the books the Church says measures up to the inspired word of God. Catholic bibles have seventy-three approved books and Protestant bibles only have sixty-six.

The bible is divided into two parts; the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament is the Hebrew scriptures; the scriptures the Jewish people use. The New Testament is about the life of Jesus and the Church.

The Jewish scriptures, called the Tanak, were written in Hebrew. There are forty-six books, separated into four sections; the Law, the historical books, the Prophets, and the Wisdom literature. The Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus about 250 years before Jesus was born. Greek was the language of the nations at that time, much as English is for us today. This translation was called the Septuagint, or the translation of the seventy. The story is that six translators from each tribe of Israel came together to translate the Hebrew scriptures independently into Greek. When they were done all seventy translations matched perfectly. The Septuagint is what makes up the Catholic canon of the Old Testament.

There are twenty-seven books in the New Testament. These consist of the gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the epistles, and the Book of Revelation. The four gospels tell about the life and times of Jesus. The Acts of the Apostles tell of the creation and actions of the early Church. The epistles tell us how to live as Christians and the Book of Revelation is about the wedding supper of the Lamb at the end of time.

In the first centuries of the Church, it was left up to the individual as to what they read at their Mass. For example, churches that received a letter from Paul would read that, whereas other churches would read things specific to them, and others still would read other things. There was no universality in the early Universal Church.

The Church came together at the Council of Rome in 382 to create the canon of scripture that all Churches would use and this was later affirmed at the Synod of Hippo in 393. It was there that we received the bible we use today.

In the first century, Christians were a sect of the Jewish religion. After the destruction of the temple in 120 the Jews separated from the Christians and Christianity became its own religion. In the following centuries, in an attempt to purify the Jewish religion, the Jews redid their canon of scripture. One of the requirements for a book to be included was that they had to have copies written in the original Hebrew. Seven books that were in the Septuagint were removed because no copies in Hebrew could be found. This makes the Catholic canon of scripture older than the Jewish canon. Ironically, copies of some of these books in Hebrew were found when the Dead Sea scrolls were found at Cumran.

The Catholic Church did not remove these books from our canon. Jesus quotes from several of these books, which indicated that he was familiar with the Septuagint. If the Septuagint was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for us.

Along comes Father Martin Luther, a Catholic priest. When he broke away from the Catholic Church to start his own religion, he believed the Church was wrong for keeping the seven books of the bible that the Jews had removed, so he removed them from his translation of the bible as well. The other Protestants followed suit and this is why their bibles only have sixty-six books instead of our seventy-three. Some Protestant bibles include these books in a separate section called the apocrypha or the deuterocanonical books.

Like the Septuagint, the New Testament was written in Greek, which was the language of the world at the time. But the world was changing and what used to be ruled by the Greeks was now being ruled by the Romans and Latin became the world language. During this time the Church moved its head from Jerusalem to Rome. With this move the texts of scripture were translated from Greek into old Latin called the Vetus Latina. In 382 Pope Damasus commissioned Saint Jerome to translate the scriptures into the common Latin.

Saint Jerome was a true scholar and went back to the original texts written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. He authored what was known as the Vulgate. It wasn’t until the Council of Trent in 1563 that the Church officially affirmed the Vulgate as the official Latin Bible. The Vulgate is still our official bible today.

Bible Translations and Versions

With the invention of the printing press, it became practical to translate the bible into the common language for an area in the world. The bible has been translated into 700 different languages and parts of it have been translated into over 3000 languages. There are over 450 known versions in English alone. If you were to compare these side by side you would find they don’t always agree with one another. This is because we are translating from one language to another to another to another and things don’t always translate well.

There are many different ways of translating. For example, you can do a literal, word-for-word translation. This will often render a clunky translation that sometimes ends up communicating something quite different from the original text. Other translations aim to communicate what they believe the original intent to have been. The correctness of this type of translation depends greatly on the translator’s knowledge, experience, and bias. Sometimes translators will write into the text what they want the text to convey. Lastly, we have a problem with ever changing language. If I gave you a copy of the Duey-Rheims or King James bible written in old English you would have a hard time understanding it because we just don’t talk like that anymore. The other problem is that words change meaning over time.

So, the big question that is always asked is what is the best translation for me to read. Unless you can read Latin, there really isn’t one. Some are better than others and there are some to avoid, but the best translation of the bible to read is the one you will actually read. If you think of the bible as a work of art then the more you expose yourself to various versions the deeper the beauty you will find. Read one version, then read another. Each will create a deeper, more vivid picture of this story of salvation. The official version that we use for all of the readings at Mass in the New American Standard addition. You can’t go wrong starting with that version. Any Catholic bible is going to be good.

With over one hundred English translations of the Bible available today, how do we know which to use? Here’s a list of approved translations an English-speaking Catholic can choose from in chronological order of publication date.

New American Bible: Revised Edition – 2011 – Optimal Equivalence
Ignatius Bible – 2006 – Formal Equivalence
Good News Bible: Catholic Edition – 1992 – Dynamic Equivalence
New Jerusalem Bible – 1990 – Dynamic Equivalence
New Revised Standard Version – Catholic Edition – 1989 – Formal Equivalence
Jerusalem Bible – 1966 – Dynamic Equivalence
Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition – 1966 – Formal Equivalence
Douay–Rheims Bible – 1582 – Formal Equivalence