Scholarship for a personal life with God

Matthew the Evangelist, the Ebbo Gospels c. 816

The reality of God taking to Himself a human existence is central to Christian belief, and this same kind of act, of the divine joining with the human, is key to understanding God's word recorded in the scriptures. Therefore, we need to take care in studying the stories, poetry, historical accounts, narratives and other genres to get a clear understanding of the message from God that the inspired writer conveys to us. 

The Church supports the scholarship needed make clear the message expressed in human forms. Pope Paul II stated "The Church takes the realism of the incarnation seriously, and this is why she attaches great importance to the 'historico-critical' study of the Bible. Far from condemning it...my predeccessors approved" (Address on the Interpretation of the Bible in the Church). 

However, he goes on to state the need to ... "avoid becoming lost in the complexities of abstract scientific research, which distances them from the true meaning of the Scriptures. Indeed, this meaning is inseperable from their goal, which is to put believers into a personal relationship with God."

When it comes to the gospels, we find ourselves wondering how Jesus' words and message were accurately preserved to be communicatied to all nations till the end of time. Dungan and Kloppenberg, in reviewing the Q source theory versus the two gospel hypothesis, which keep New Testament scholars busy, state: 

All of the ways of accounting for the composition of the gospels are hypotheses - that is, heuristic models that allow us to imagine the compositional process. None of the currently viable hypotheses is "proved" beyond a reasonable doubt and each admits to strengths and weaknesses. [*]  

In this and other debates on the origin of the gospels scholars tend to concentrate on the internal evidence, almost dismissing the external evidence as to the provenance of the work. Central to that external evident is the body of information preserved by the Church, and referred to as Tradition, a pillar supporting the beliefs and values we have received from Jesus and the early Church.

The Catholic Church understands the apostolic Tradition about Christ as the rock on which the Church is founded. It is in this sense that St. Paul, for example, speaks of the Church as “built on the foundation of the Apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Eph 2:20). The apostolic Tradition is first and foremost the witness of the Apostles about the person, life, and teaching of Jesus Christ. The Church has always held that this apostolic witness is contained in a preeminent way in the four Gospels. [**]

The Second Vatican Council states in the document Dei Verbum:

The Church has always and everywhere held and continues to hold that the four Gospels are of apostolic origin. For what the Apostles preached in fulfillment of the commission of Christ, afterwards they themselves and apostolic men, under the inspiration of the divine Spirit, handed on to us in writing: the foundation of faith, namely, the fourfold Gospel, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. (#18 - available here)

Mark and Luke are the "apostolic men" referred to, given they transcribed the oral tradition derived from Peter and Paul;  and it's interesting to note that for the Church there is a single gospel delivered by the four different agents of God.

The Council declaration continues:

Holy Mother Church has firmly and with absolute constancy held, and continues to hold, that the four Gospels just named, whose historical character the Church unhesitatingly asserts, faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while living among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation until the day He was taken up into heaven (Acts 1:1). (#19)

These Council statements assert, against those who exercise form criticism to excess, especially those who are part of the demythologization movement, that in the time that passed from the time of Jesus' preaching till the final redaction of the gospels, the guiding hand of the apostles, under God's inspiration, preserved the historical truth of Jesus' actions and words with regards bringing everyone into a full relationship with God.

To take the example of Matthew, the Pontifical Biblical Commission has determined that “the testimony of tradition sufficiently supports the opinion that Matthew wrote before the other evangelists and that he composed this first gospel in the native dialect then in use by the Jews of Palestine, for whom this work was intended.”

 There is a sufficient amount of evidence that those who were in a position to know about the Church's initial documents, the Fathers of the Church, vouched for Matthew as principal author, and so too for the other evangelists. The consensus of those figures of authority and erudition, the Fathers of the Church, is recognised as a sure witness of the Tradition handed down from the time of the apostles. Tradition combines with Scripture to produce the one Deposit of Faith.

As for John the apostle as author of the gospel bearing his name, the Church is adamant that this is so because of the “constant, universal, and solemn Tradition of the Church.” 

The Pontifical Biblical Commission states that this Tradition is manifested in four sources:

(a) from the testimonies and allusions of the holy Fathers, ecclesiastical writers, and even heretics, which, having been certainly derived from the disciples or first successors of the apostles, are linked by a necessary connection to the very origin of the book;

 (b) from the fact that the name of the author of the Fourth Gospel was received always and everywhere in the canon-lists of the sacred books; 

(c) from the most ancient manuscripts, codices, and early translations of the same books; and 

(d) from the public use in liturgy obtaining throughout the whole world from the very beginnings of the Church.

The reliance on internal factors for judging the historicity of New Testament works has led to the disorder we see in biblical scholarship which, to a large measure, creates more of a disservice to Christians than a service.  Such sentiments were expressed by Pope Leo XIII:

There has arisen, to the great detriment of religion, an inept method, dignified by the name of the “higher criticism,” which pretends to judge of the origin, integrity and authority of each Book from internal indications alone. It is clear, on the other hand, that in historical questions, such as the origin and the handing down of writings, the witness of history is of primary importance, and that historical investigation should be made with the utmost care, and that in this matter internal evidence is seldom of great value, except as confirmation.

To look upon it in any other light will be to open the door to many evil consequences. It will make the enemies of religion much more bold and confident in attacking and mangling the Sacred Books; and this vaunted “higher criticism” will resolve itself into the reflection of the bias and the prejudice of the critics.

It will not throw on the Scripture the light which is sought, or prove of any advantage to doctrine; it will only give rise to disagreement and dissension, those sure notes of error, which the critics in question so plentifully exhibit in their own persons; and seeing that most of them are tainted with false philosophy and rationalism, it must lead to the elimination from the sacred writings of all prophecy and miracle, and of everything else that is outside the natural order.

For these reasons, not a few scholars in recent decades, Protestants and Catholics, have called for greater caution in the use of internal indications and for giving greater importance to external testimony. See, for example:

John A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976); and E. Earle Ellis, History and Interpretation in New Testament Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 50–51: “The literary criticism of New Testament literature accepted by most scholars today, and the New Testament chronology based upon it, has underpinnings that are tenuous and that in some cases can be shown to be historically false. If this is so, the dating of the documents must perforce rely less upon internal literary characteristics and more upon the book’s attributions of authorship, upon early Patristic tradition and upon historical correlations such as those that J. A. T. Robinson pointed to.” 

Among others, Jean Carmignac, The Birth of the Synoptic Gospels, trans. Michael J. Wrenn (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1987); Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Downer’s Grove: IV Academic, 2007); Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel: Issues & Commentary (Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001); and Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids. Erdmans).

The loss of respect for Tradition is highlighted in The Decline and Fall of Sacred Scripture: How the Bible Became a Secular Book, where authors Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker "trace the various malformations of scripture scholarship that have led to a devastating loss of trust in the inspired Word of God". They find that, having shed adherence to the Church's teaching authority based on Tradition, Protestants fought amongst themselves on whose interpretation of scripture was correct. The results were twofold:

[Luther's] doctrine of sola scriptura collapsed in less than a century, as disagreements about what the Bible actually said caused seemingly irreparable splintering, which had political ramifications. “By the middle of the sixteenth century,” notes Michael Legaspi, “the Reformation had remade societies and governments: churches and territories across Europe lay in a patchwork of state-sponsored confessions, with the division between Lutheran and Reformed [Calvinist] often as rigid as the one between Catholic and Protestants.” 

Moreover, the attempt of each theological party to vindicate its cause in the Bible necessitated a turn to the original languages, not just Hebrew and Greek but Aramaic as well. That, however, meant a search for, and confrontation with, multiple manuscripts in the original languages that brought to light variant readings, which themselves became part of the battle over what the Bible actually says.

A key result was that no one could hope to participate in this increasingly divisive conflict unless he was very well versed in the ancient languages and the science of philology. The simple believers among the priesthood of all believers were soon left far behind. 

From the Reformation and then the Enlightenment the stress in biblical studies has been on the external factors relating to a scriptural text. But Gutwenger, having reviewed the sad result, states: 

The important point to be noticed is the easy way in which the savants of the age [the Enlightenment] separated themselves from the historical evidence provided by the documents of early Christian literature. On the whole it must be said that both in its origins and in its later development higher criticism has signally failed in respect for external historical evidence about the composition of the gospels. Right from the beginning it put its trust in its power of literary analysis rather than in the broader approach which includes analysis and historical tradition alike. [***]

The fact that Tradition, the patristic sources, have not been utilized in biblical study is another deep fault in the work of today's scholars. In effect, they have limited their own sources of insight. Edwards highlights one example that is as true today as when it was written: 

In defining and investigating the Synoptic Problem, modern scholarship has by and large favored literary evidence and hypotheses over historical testimony from the church fathers. Since Schleiermacher, approaches to the problem have limited themselves almost exclusively to internal evidence among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Little reference has typically been devoted to the evidence of the church fathers relating to the formation of the gospel tradition.

Several reasons contribute to this neglect of the early tradition, among which are the elevation of Scripture over tradition in Protestantism, a bias against Roman Catholic scholarship and dogma that has characterized some streams of Protestant scholarship, and a predisposition in favor of Greek over Hebrew origins of the Christian tradition. [****]

So the case is clear enough that the distortion of approach, the ideological heuristics, concerning the manner in which the gospels were generated and so their accuracy as providing the truth as to the teaching and life of Jesus, makes the product of that scholarship a joke compared with the more historical evidence that the Church treasures because it arises from the careful research of the Fathers at the birth of  the Church.  

The information available from the Fathers is extraordinary. In his introduction to St. Irenaeus of Lyons: Against the Heresies; Book 3, Steenberg writes:

For Irenaeus, the oral origins of the Gospel are part and parcel of the common voice of the Church’s true witness—for the four gospel accounts do not emerge out of the independent textual or historical traditions, but out of the same, common oral preaching that was the product of the apostolic experience of Christ. … In the same way, Irenaeus is keen to identify and stress the apostolic origins of each account of what he does not call ‘the four Gospels’ (as we are wont to do today), but, rather, the ‘fourfold Gospel which is held together by the one Spirit’ (3.11.8)—stressing its common and divinely united proclamation.

Gutwenger adds:

Not only did the Apostolic Fathers allude to our canonical gospels, but Papias, c 120, reports the words of the Elder who almost certainly is identical with John the Apostle. We are told that Matthew wrote in Hebrew (= Aramaic) and that Mark, the interpreter of Peter, wrote down what Peter had preached in Rome about Jesus. ... But our chief witness is St Irenaeus. For he knew the tradition of Asia Minor, where he came from, of Rome and Gaul.

Besides, he was conversant with the writings of Papias, and as a youth had heard St Polycarp the disciple of the Apostle John. He again c 185 testifies to the authenticity of the gospels and to the order in which they were written. It is the traditional order. In all this he is supported by the tradition of Italy, Africa and Alexandria as represented by St Justin († c 165), the old Latin prologues, the Muratorian fragment (c 180), Tertullian († 220), Clement of Alexandria († c 215) and Origen († 253).[***]

Of course, we must give respect where it is due in the realm of biblical scholarship - I'm using the labours of biblical scholars to make my case here - but those of us who love the word of God in the Bible have to always bear in mind that many scholars have gone far from the source of food that Jesus left for the health of His people in the Church, and through them for everyone in the world.  The Bible is a witness to the supernatural activity of God in the world, and through the Bible God reveals Himself to us. If certain biblical scholars do not leave us with the knowledge that puts "believers into a personal relationship with God", shun them. Christians can be proud of, and feast from, the heritage that God's providence in history has left us.

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[*] David L. Dungan and John S. Kloppenborg, "The Synoptic Problem: How Did We Get Our Gospels?" in The International Bible Commentary,  ed. William R Farmer. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,  1998.

[**] Lawrence Feingold,  Faith Comes From What Is Heard: An Introduction to Fundamental Theology,  Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2016.

[***] E. Gutwenger, “The Gospels and Non-Catholic Higher Criticism,” in A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, ed. Bernard Orchard New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953 (753).

[****] James R. Edwards, The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2009 (1).