By Harvey Cox – Chapter 11 – pages 155 – 161

Which Bible Do the Bible Believers Believe?

When the late Jerry Falwell introduced Ronald Reagan to a group of his fellow pastors, he told the president, with a radiant smile, that they were all "Bible-believing preachers." Reagan looked pleased. Protestant fundamentalists like to call themselves "Bible-believing Christians."

During the last decades of the nineteenth century especially in America, "believing the Bible" began to become a kind of litmus test of whether one was a "real Christian." Given all the upheavals and uncertainties of the times, it is understandable that some people felt they needed an absolutely dependable, indeed infallible, authority. The declaration of papal infallibility in 1870 had responded to the same yen among some Catholics. References to the fundamentalist view of the Bible as a "paper pope" are historically quite apt. However, the result in both cases has been ruinous, degrading faith into a kind of credulity.

It might be impolitic to ask such "Bible believers" which Bible they believe, but the question is a useful one to understand the appropriate place of the Bible in a community of faith. The answer must begin by recognizing that there is no such thing as the Bible. There are number of different ones. What Jews, Catholics, and Protestants call "the Bible" are different books. The Jewish one, called the Tanakh and first written in Hebrew, incorporates the five "Books of Moses" (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), the Prophets, and the Writings. The Protestant "Bible" includes all of these, though arranged in a different order, plus what Christians refer to as the "New Testament," originally written in Greek. The Catholic Bible has all of the above plus the "Apocrypha," which incorporates such books as Judith, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), 1 and 2 Maccabees, and several other, shorter books. Protestants excised this whole section during the Reformation, when—it is reliably reported—Luther would like to have torn the Letter of James out of the New Testament as well. It does say, after all, that "faith without works is dead," so the testy Wittenberg theses-nailer called it a "straw epistle." A champion of salvation by grace, he feared that the Letter of James might mislead people into thinking it might be gained by good works.

Since what we mean by "the Bible" has been changing from century to century, with various books being included and excluded depending on the theological climate, it would be useful for "Bible-believing" Christians to engage in an imaginary experiment. What if they were Bible-believing Christians in the second century CE? At that time the only Bible Christians had was the Old Testament. The New Testament had not yet been compiled. What if they lived at a time when books like First Clement and the Apocalypse of Peter were still being read in many congregations along with the various letters of Paul? Many Christians at that time wanted to include them in the New Testament, but eventually they were not. What if our Bible believers lived in the fifteenth century when the "apocryphal" books that Protestants excluded a few decades later were still considered to be Holy Scripture and still read in the churches (as they are in Catholic churches today)? The idea that "the Bible" has always been the same book year in and year out and you either believed it or you did not may be comforting, but it has no basis in reality.

Having settled which Bible they believe and when, another query one might put to our self-described Bible-believing Christians is: Which translation do they believe? There are shelves of translations, even in English, and at points they vary widely on how to render particular verses.

This explains why such a flurry arose among fundamentalists when the Revised Standard Version of the (Protestant) Bible first appeared in 1952. In the King James edition, dating from 1611, a familiar verse in the Old Testament reads, "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (Isa. 7:14). In keeping with the common Christian approach to the Hebrew scriptures in those days (and in some quarters today as well), this text was often interpreted as an obvious prediction of the birth of Jesus Christ from the Virgin Mary. It is a favorite for Christmas season readings. But the scholars who prepared the new translation noticed that the Hebrew word in question (almah) actually means a young woman who has reached sexual maturity, but does not indicate whether she is a virgin or not. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) uses the word parthenos, which does mean "virgin." The RSV translators, however, rightly wanted to use the original Hebrew version. But they noticed that when the word almah appears in the Hebrew scriptures, it always means "young woman," so that was how they decided to translate it. They based their decision on linguistic grounds, not on theological proclivities.

But as soon as the "new Bible" rolled off the presses, outrage erupted among fundamentalists. They viewed the RSV as blasphemy.  Some, noting it had been published in a red cover instead of in the usual black imitation leather (or white invitation leather for brides to carry at weddings), began to brand it the "red Bible." Since the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was raging at the time, the hint that there was something both sinister and subversive about the new Bible was not subtle. This translation was part of a Communist plot.

The scholars who had made the translation were surprised by the fierce reaction. Perhaps somewhat ingenuously they thought they were merely applying their best philological insights to their work. They had translated the Hebrew word almah quite literally. But this quite literal translation threatened the theological preconceptions of the fundamentalists, who nevertheless vehemently insisted that they believed the Bible "literally." They had no problem deciding which Bible they would believe, and it was not the red one.

Translation has stirred up both linguistic and theological issues since the early years of Christianity. In the third century Origen tackled it, assembling an edition of the Old Testament that set six different versions in parallel columns. A huge tome, it included the original Hebrew text, then a phonetic transcription of the Hebrew in Greek letters, similar to the English phonetic notes found today in some Conservative and Reformed synagogue prayer books. Next came a very literal translation of the same text in Greek, then another Greek translation in more idiomatic Greek. Next to that was the Septuagint and finally yet another translation into what was then "modern Greek." The whole work is called the Hexapla ("Sixfold"). It required an immense expenditure of labor, but Origen placed the columns side by side so that readers could compare them. He wanted to demonstrate as clearly as possible how disparate the different translations of the same passage can be. Which of those six columns do our Bible believers to believe? The Hexapla was a monumental accomplishment, and it represents a formidable challenge to anyone who contends, as the fundamentalists still do, that the words and sentences of "the Bible" contain one self-evident meaning.

The disputes still go on. The young woman/virgin question is not the only one on which there continue to be serious disagreements about translating certain phrases. This is especially true in Hebrew books in which there are passages with words that do not appear anywhere else in the Bible, so comparing contexts to discern the meaning is not possible. Most of the last chapter of the book of Job, for example, stumps even the best Hebrew scholars, and this leads to wildly differing views of how the story ends. Does Job really repent and eat his previous rebellious words, or does he remain defiant to the end? Does God commend him for his fierce insistence on his innocence, or does God condemn him? No one knows for sure. There are numerous cases like this, and often what translators do is to make their best educated guesses. Sometimes they indicate a guess in a footnote, but sometimes they do not, thus leading readers to think they are reading "what the Bible says," when that might not be the case at all. Plainly, as we pursue the question of what it means to "believe the Bible," the plot constantly thickens.

Sophisticated fundamentalists, of course, know Greek and Hebrew and are familiar with the translation problem. What Bible do they believe? Their usual answer is that they do not fully believe in any translation, but only in what the text says in the original Greek or Hebrew. But this means they believe it even when, as with the example of Job, they do not know for sure what it says, which seems a bit odd. They defend their position by explaining that, since they believe every word in all the biblical books (at least in the Protestant Bible) was literally inspired by God, they believe whatever it says "on faith." But here "faith" is once again debased into accepting as true something for which you have no evidence. Thus to "believe the Bible" in this sense does not foster the biblical understanding of faith; instead, it is at best a diversion, and at worst a betrayal.

To push the controversy another step back, it is important to recognize that no one anywhere has the original manuscript of any of the biblical books. All we have are copies of copies. This includes even the oldest copies, like the ones found in the Dead Sea caves. In many cases the several copies of a given text differ from each other, sometimes quite markedly. The oldest manuscripts in existence of the Gospel of Mark, for example, have radically different endings. If you piled them all on one table, you would have a fascinating choice of how you think the gospel ends or perhaps how you think it should end. One manuscript has only Mary Magdalene and Mary "the mother of James" (not, interestingly, the mother of Jesus) coming to the tomb where the body of Jesus had been laid. Another version of the same gospel has Salome with them. One ends abruptly with the women who come to the tomb trembling with amazement, so afraid they are unable to say anything to anyone. Some scholars think that this ambiguous ending is just the way Mark wanted it, but others believe there was once additional material, which was subsequently lost. Yet another manuscript of the same Gospel of Mark has the women reporting to Peter and the other disciples. What is a translator to do when confronted with this embarrassment of manuscript riches?

The King James translators more or less ignored the problem. They simply pieced together how they thought the story should end. Three hundred and fifty years later, and more humbly perhaps, the scholars who translated the Revised Standard Version included them all, allowing readers to take their pick. Incidentally, in recounting the same story of the Resurrection, the Gospel of Matthew has only Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary" at the tomb, while the Gospel of Luke includes a woman named "Joanna," and the Gospel of John mentions only Mary Magdalene. These are significant discrepancies, and not on some marginal passage, but on one of the most significant texts in the New Testament, making it even harder to know just what "believing the Bible" might mean.