Jesus is the Cornerstone
The Apostles, Not a Book, are the Foundation.
When the Son of God came, he came as a man. This means that God reveals himself in a human way, using human persons and human means (such as talking and writing, as well as gesture, memory, tradition, sacrament, and ritual) to communicate his life and teaching to us. Thus, the Word Made Flesh—Jesus Christ—is the cornerstone on which the Church is built and his apostles—not a book—are the foundation. Scripture, in fact, says exactly this:
So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. Ephesians 2:19–22
Scripture is the Actual Word of God.
Now that we know that Scripture is not the foundation of the Church, we must recognize that it is the indispensable written revelation of God himself. The Catechism of the Catholic Churchmakes this clear:
In Sacred Scripture, the Church constantly finds her nourishment and her strength, for she welcomes it not as a human word “but as what it really is, the word of God.” “In the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children, and talks with them.”
The Bible is Two Things at One Time.
The Bible, like the Church and like the human body, is “one body with many parts.”
• In one sense, it is a single book revealing a single truth: Jesus Christ, crucified for our sins and raised for our salvation.
• In another sense, it is a collection of 73 books written over a period of about 1,600 years in three languages by a wide variety of people. How can it be both these things at once? Because the eternal Holy Spirit—God himself—is the true Author of Scripture.
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Where Did We Get the Bible?
Some Christians seem to talk as though the Bible fell out of the sky, leather-bound and gold-leafed. In reality, the Bible reflects a long process whereby the experiences, first of Israelites, then of the Church’s, relationships with God are first lived, prayed over, meditated upon, then written down, edited, sifted, pon-dered—and, not infrequently, fought over—by the community under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Writing and Compilation of the
Old Testament
The development of the Old Testament took place over thousands of years, beginning with The Law, written by Moses around 3,300 years ago, to which was added the Prophets and the Writings, which together form the complete Old Testament. The exact date on which the Old Testament was finally closed is not absolutely certain. Regardless, we know for cer-tain that at 100 B.C. the Hebrew Old Testament existed precisely as we have it now.
The Old Testament found in the Catholic Bible is the same one that Jesus and New Testament writers and speakers quoted. As Jews began to settle in lands outside of Palestine, they began to lose their Hebrew tongue and Greek became the universal language. As a result, they needed to have a copy of the Sacred Scriptures in Greek. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament is known as the Septuagint. This is the version that Jesus and the New Testament writers and speakers quote when referring to the Old Testament. The Septuagint is the complete Old Testament in the Catholic Bible today.
Writing and Compilation of the New Testament
It was not until at least ten years after the death of Christ that the disciples began to write what has been preserved for us today. The first of the New Testament books was not written until around A.D. 45, approximately twelve years after the
death of Christ; Paul’s letters date from A.D. 52 to A.D. 68.
For over 300 years, the Gospels and epistles of the New Testament were read aloud to congregations of Christians who gathered on the first day of the week for the divine liturgy. The writings were scattered about the world wherever there were large groups of Christians. Various groups had various collections that agreed in the main. Although there was some fuzziness about certain books for a while, eventually the Church came to consensus. By the end of the fourth century, local councils in Rome, Carthage, and Hippo, as well as papal decrees from Pope Damasus I, reflect this consensus. None of these definitions were dogmatic, but the canon of Scripture was taken so much for granted that there was not much controversy about it for 12 centuries. The Latin Vulgate reflects this consensus as well.
1 Taken from Henry C. Graham,Where We Got the Bible, (El Cahon, CA:
Catholic Answers, Inc., 1997) pp. 15–29.
When did the Bible Change?
For Catholics, it did not. However, in the sixteenth century, some Reformers removed seven books and accepted as inspired only the Hebrew versions of Daniel and Esther. The reasons for this were complex. Some believed that these seven books (called the “deuterocanon” by scholars) taught things contrary to the rest of Scripture. Others disliked them because they contradicted personal theo-logical theories. Some wanted a canon of Old Testament Scripture that matched the canon used by Jews under the mistaken notion that the modern Jewish canon was the same as that used in the time of Christ. The missing books are:
In the sixteenth century, Reformers removed books from the Bible that had been typically (though not absolutely) accepted by all of Christianity until that point. And though some early Protestant versions of the Bible (such as the King James Version) retained the deuterocanon for a time, it eventually was dropped from most Protestant Bibles.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church simply went on holding to the Septuagint canon of the Old Testament that the apostles and Christ had used, cited, and taught the Church to use. In fact, 85% of all Old Testament quotes found in the New Testament are taken from the Septuagint and not from the Hebrew Bible. Today, as the passions of the Reformation have cooled, many Protestants are regaining an appreciation of the deuterocanonical books, a change that the Catholic Church welcomes.
The Role of Scripture in the Catholic Church
“The Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Lord’s Body. She never ceases to present to the faithful the bread of life, taken from the one table of God’s Word and Christ’s Body.” Next time you pick up a Bible, stop and remember that this book is not a merely human document any more than Jesus was a mere man or theEucharist you are given is just a piece of bread. As Christ is the Incarnate Word of God and Eucharist is the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ, fully present on the altar, so Scripture is vastly more than mere paper and ink compiled by human beings. Scripture is the actual word of God, not a mere human word, given by the Spirit of Jesus Christ for our instruction in order to make us saints. 7 • Tobit • Baruch • Judith • Wisdom • Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) • 1 Maccabees • 2 Maccabees
• Seven Chapters of the Book of Esther
• 66 verses of the Third Chapter of Daniel1
The History Books
These books tell the story of Israel’s fortunes after the passing of Moses.
The promise that Abraham received from God—“I will make of you a great nation”—has been fulfilled. Israel is now a great nation and its people have been led to the border of the Promised Land by Moses. Now the task before that nation is to take possession of that Land, be faithful to the covenant, and see what will come next. The History Books chronicle the conquest of Canaan, the fortunes of Israel under the Judges, the events leading up to the establishment of a kingdom of Israel under David, and the fifth and last covenant God made, that with the House of David.
The Covenant with the House of David. In this covenant, God’s choice both narrows and expands. David is but one member of one family in one tribe of Israel, but he is promised that he shall rule over the nations and that one of his sons will always be on the throne of Israel and shall be God’s son as well. In an immediate sense, this promise to David is fulfilled by Solomon, who builds a Temple to God. Despite many challenges, God keeps his promise to David. David sins with Bathsheba, Solomon falls, civil war splits Israel into the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and eventually the Davidic monarchy comes to an end politically. This is the tale told by 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles. The northern kingdom of Israel is eventually annihilated by the Assyrians (these are the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel”). The southern kingdom of Judah is exiled to Babylon after long ignoring the warning of the prophets. But the promise to David stands and so Judah is eventually repatriated and the nation is mysteriously preserved in anticipation of a coming “son of David” who
will somehow fulfill the nation’s destiny in being Chosen. • Joshua • Judges • Ruth • 1 and 2 Samuel • 1 and 2 Kings • 1 and 2 Chronicles • Ezra • Nehemiah • Tobit • Judith • Esther • 1 and 2 Maccabees
Bible Search
Look up the covenants God made with human beings.
Genesis 2–3 Covenant with Adam
Genesis 9:8–17 Covenant with Noah
Genesis 15:18; Genesis 17 Covenant with Abraham
Exodus 24:7–8 Covenant with Moses
2 Samuel 7 Covenant with David
Matthew 26:17–29, Mark 14:12–25, “New and Everlasting
Luke 22:7–38 Covenant” in Jesus Christ
2 Samuel 7
1 and 2 Samuel 1 and 2 Kings 1 and 2 Chronicles
How Do Catholics Interpret Scripture?
Jesus, as we have already seen, teaches us that Scripture is about him ultimately, whatever else it may be about, since he is the Son of God who “fulfills the Law,” the Son of David foretold by the prophets, and the Wisdom of Godforeshadowed by the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament. Therefore, to understand Scripture, we have to understand that it was inspired by the Holy Spirit to point us to Christ and that, as St. Augustine said, the New Testament is hidden in the Old Testament and the Old Testament is only fully understood in light of the New. For this reason, Scripture is something that, as St. Thomas More observed, “an ant can wade in and an elephant can swim in.” It is written so that everyone can read it and profit from it. Therefore, Scripture can and should be read by everybody. But the readers’ intent should not be to determine “what the Scripture means to me,” but to “discover the sacred authors’ intention, [by taking]
into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking, and narrating then current.”3
The Lens of Sacred Tradition
In addition, we must also bear in mind that because the Holy Spirit is the author of Scripture, the Holy Spirit is also the interpreter of Scripture. Because of this, the Church provides us with tools for reading
Scripture as the first Christians did. This is precisely where the “lens” of Sacred Tradition is invaluable, since it gives us the collected experience of Christians from the time of the apostles to the present to draw on. It preserves for us insights into the text of Scripture and connections between the parts of Scripture and the life of the Church that we would never have noticed by ourselves. Likewise, just as the Light of Scripture is focused by the Lens of Tradition, so the Lens is illumined by Light so that we see it all the more clearly and understand it more profoundly.
“T”radition
Sacred Tradition is the living voice of the Church which transmits the entirety of the Word of God, both oral and written. It was entrusted to the apostles with the guidance of the Holy Spirit and must be faithfully preserved, expounded, and shared throughout the world through the apostolic succession in the Church.
“t”radition
refers to various theological, disciplinary, liturgical traditions born in local churches over time. These traditions can be retained, modified, or even abandoned under the guidance of the Church’s magisterium.
Examples of “t”radition:not eating meat on Friday, altar girls, use of Extraordinary Eucharistic Ministers, Latin Mass, etc.
What’s the difference between
“tradition” and “Tradition”?
15 CCC 110
CCC 111 Matthew 5:17
CCC 33
Three Guidelines for Sensible
Scripture Reading
The Catechism of the Catholic Churchsummarizes three guidelines for sensible Scripture reading:
• “Be especially attentive ‘to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture.’ ”
• “Read the Scripture within ‘the living Tradition of the whole Church.’ ”
• “Be attentive to the analogy of faith.”
1. All Scripture must be read in the context of the passage, paragraph, book, and the whole of Scripture.
It is important that we do not interpret particular portions of Scripture out of context. The Catechismexplains:
Be especially attentive “to the content and unity of the whole Scripture.” Different as the books which compose it may be, Scripture is a unity by reason of the unity of God’s plan, of which Christ Jesus is the center and heart, open since his Passover. The phrase “heart of Christ” can refer to Sacred Scripture, which makes known his heart, closed before the Passion, as the Scripture was obscure. But the Scripture has been opened since the Passion; since those who from then on have understood it, consider and discern in what way the prophecies must be interpreted.
We must pay attention, not just to a word in Scripture, but to the passage in which that word occurs. Similarly, you must not read the passage alone but in the context of the paragraph, the paragraph in the context of the book in which it occurs, and the book in the context of the rest of the books. The New Testament should be read in light of the Old Testament and the Old Testament in light of the New.
CCC112
CCC113
CCC114
CCC112
4 John 1:29: The next day he saw Jesus
coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
5 Hebrews 10:1: “The law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the
true form of these realities.”
6 John 19:36: “For these things took place that the scripture might be fulfilled, ‘Not a
bone of him shall be broken.’ ”
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HENJ
OHN THEB
APTISTrefers to Jesus as the “Lamb of God”4itis not enough to have a gauzy picture of a cuddly lamb float through your mind and say, “This means to me that Jesus was sweet and harmless like a widdle wamb!” That is not, in fact, what John was really getting at. Rather, he had in mind the fact that Jesus was a sacrificial lamb—the Sacrificial Lamb—toward which all the Old Testament sacrifices were intended to point and which all its sacrifices foreshadow.5The Gospel
of John pounds this point home by noting that Jesus’ legs were not broken after his death on the cross—and quoting an Old Testament regulation about the Passover sacrifice as the Scripture this “fulfilled.”6Without
knowledge of the Old Testament such connections will be lost on us.
2. Scripture is a part of the living Tradition of the whole Church.
Just as there is a connection between the various books of Scripture, so there is a connection between the Bible and the life, teaching, and worship of the community that produced it—the Catholic Church. The Catechismexplains,
Read the Scripture within “the living Tradition of the whole Church.” According to a saying of the Fathers, Sacred Scripture is written principally in the Church’s heart rather than in documents and records, for the Church carries in her Tradition the living memorial of God’s Word, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives her the spiritual interpretation of the Scripture (“. . . according
to the spiritual meaning which the Spirit grants to the Church”). Scripture and Tradition are not two separate things. They are two sides of the same apostolic coin, the hydrogen and oxygen that fuse to form the one living water of the Gospel. Scripture is simply the written expression of the Tradition of the apostles. For this reason, it is essential to read the Bible in the full context of the Sacred Tradition that assists us in understanding the meaning of the people who wrote it. The biblical writers were, after all, people living 2,000 years ago on the other side of
the world who spoke a strange language and lived in a culture profoundly different from ours. Because of this, they often say things that are incomprehensible to us or (what may be worse) say things we think we understand, but which we radically misinterpret.
Understanding Sacred Tradition. St. Paul gives us the thumbnail sketch when he tells the Thessalonians to “stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter”
(2 Thessalonians 2:15). The apostles did not
transmit the Gospel to their churches purely in writing. They passed it on primarily in unwritten form just the way the Gospel is preached today, from person to person. It is the transmission of the Gospel, both in written and unwritten form, that the Church means by Sacred Tradition. It is, in a nut-shell, the common life, teaching, and worship of the Body of Christ in union with the apostolic successors of the apostles and Peter, that is, the bishops and the Pope, who articulate the Church’s teaching by virtue of their magisterial office.
“He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me.”Luke 10:16
17 CCC113
CCC75–100
Bible Search
There are several references to Tradition in Scripture. In most cases, it is referred to as something that is “key” and should be preserved.
•2 Thessalonians 2:15 •1 Corinthians 11:23
•1 Corinthians 11:2 •2 Timothy 2:2
However in two instances, we are cautioned by Jesus and the Apostle Paul that not all tradition is Sacred. They tell us that we must hold true to the Traditions revealed by God that are essential to our life with Christ, not human tradition.
Reading Scripture as the
First Christians Did
Because Scripture, like Jesus, is both divine and human and has, so to speak, both an “outside” and an “inside,” Catholic tradition has always taken seriously the real-ity that there are both a literal sense and more-than-literal senses to it.
The Literal Sense
The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture in the way the sacred writer intended to say it.It is important to distinguish the lit-eral sense of Scripture from the flat-footed (and often flat wrong) litlit-eralistic way in which many modern people read it. Every passage of Scripture has a literal sense, but not every passage of Scripture conveys its literal sense in literalistic language. Thus, when Scripture describes God’s “mighty arm” it has a literal sense (i.e., that God is powerful, not weak, and that all things are within his grasp and sovereign control), but this does not mean that God is a mammal in possession of a well-developed set of biceps.
Figurative language does not mean there is not a literal meaning. At the same time, the fact that Scripture uses figurative language does not mean that Scripture does not have a literal meaning that it intends to convey. For instance, the Church does not insist that the first three chapters of Genesis be read like a science textbook. However, the Church does insist that the story of the Fall be understood as historical and not as fictional. How do we unravel this seeming contradiction?
The difference between literal sense and literalism
Mark Shea gives an example of the difference between the literal sense and flat-footed literalism in Making Senses Out of Scripture:
Genesis 3recounts the primordial catastrophe of our race—the fall of Adam and Eve. And once again, it is essential to know what the author is really trying to tell us here. Two mistakes are often made with this text:
• The first is to “take it literally” in the fundamentalist sense of saying, “God says there were talking snakes back then, so that is a Scientific Fact.”
• The second mistake is to say, “It’s just a myth and therefore is ‘true’ in some vague and empty sense, but the Fall is not something that happened in history.”
Both of these are misreadings of the text. It is not true that Genesis or the Catholic faith demands we believe in talking snakes. But neither is it true that Genesis and the Church do not demand we believe in a historical Fall of Man. Genesis most emphatically does demand this and the Church has always taken the reality of a historical Fall literally (see Romans 5), just as it has always taken the reality of Christ’s historical crucifixion literally. But the way in which Genesis tells the story of this historical reality is not necessarily to be understood literally.
21 This tendency to confuse literalism with the literal sense of Scripture
illus-trates one reason God has given us a Teaching Church to assist us and give us the “lens” of Tradition with which to focus the “light” of Scripture. Although grasping the literal sense of Scripture is more
complex than we might have thought, God has not left us high and dry. He has given us his Church that began with Peter and the disciples and has had an unbroken chain of succession ever since.
We Catholic students of Scripture have been given a great gift by God—the gift of the Teaching Church, which is guided by the Holy Spirit to help us under-stand what that Word is truly saying. We are not just abandoned out in the wood with a Bible and told to find our way home. There is a well-worn path trod by the millions who have gone before us, with big road signs and helpful directions. Such road signs include the teaching documents of the Church, such as the
Catechism of the Catholic Church, the teaching of John Paul II, writings of the Early Church Fathers, and the work of reliable Scripture scholars.
Bible Search
This distinction is made in other books of Scripture as in the literal and figurative descriptions of the great crime committed by King David.
Read 2 Samuel 11.
Here, we read a historical record of a great crime committed by King David. He committed adul-tery with Bathsheba and then had her husband murdered to cover the crime. This really happened. Now read 2 Samuel 12:1–15.
The prophet Nathan “tells the story” of what David did in order to confront David with his crime. But instead of giving a newspaper-like account of the tale, he uses figurative language to describe a real event. Nathan tells David, “A rich man had a feast, but instead of killing one of his own sheep and serving it, he robbed a poor man of his only ewe and served that instead.” When David condemns the “rich man,” Nathan responds “You are the man!” and confronts David with his crime of adultery and murder. Is Nathan denying the historicity of David’s crime by using figurative language to describe it? No, he is simply telling history in a very different way—a way perfectly clear to David.
The More-than-Literal Senses
In addition to the Literal Sense of Scripture, the Church has also traditionally spoken of three “more-than-literal” senses:
• allegorical
• moral, and
• anagogical
These senses are in play on a large number of occasions in the celebration of the Mass. For, as in the early Church, the liturgy is constantly drawing our attention to the way in which the Old Testament prefigures the fullness of revelation found in the New. Next time you go to Mass, pay attention and ask God to show you the link between the Old Testament reading and the Gospel. It is there.
The Allegorical Sense
The allegorical sense is when Scripture contains hidden spiritual meaning that goes beyond the literal sense of sacred text.
The literal sense of the story of the manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16)is what the human author intended to convey: God fed Israel manna in the wilderness. But when Jesus looks at that story in John 6he sees something more:
So they said to him,“Then what sign do you do, that we may see, and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Lord, give us this bread always.”Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.”(John 6:30–35)
What does he see? The literal bread of the Old Testament means something more than food: it is an allegorical image of himself, who is the “true bread from heaven,” now given in the Eucharist.
Many times over, the New Testament identifies spiritual meaning to literal statements in the Old Testament:
• The Passover Lamb is an image of his sacrifice (John 1:29).
• The Ark of the Covenant and Tabernacle (which were “overshadowed” by the Shekinah glory of God) is an image of Mary, while she herself an image of the Virgin Daughter of Zion and of the Church, the Bride of CCC115–118
• Israel’s passage through the Red Sea is an image of baptism for Paul
(1 Corinthians 10:1–5).
• Melchizedek is a foreshadowing of the eternal priest who is Christ
(Hebrews 7:1–3).
• The first Adam foreshadows the Last Adam(1 Corinthians 15:45–50).
• The piercing of Christ’s side is the birth of the Last Adam’s bride in the baptismal “spirit, water and blood” (1 John 5:6–8)just as the birth of the first Adam’s bride is from his side (Genesis 2:21–25; John 19:34–35).
• The imagery at the opening of Luke’s Gospel (2:7) is carefully
Eucharistic: Jesus, who is accepted by the Gentiles but rejected by his own people is noted to have been born in Bethlehem (“House of Bread”) and laid in a feedbox, recalling Isaiah’s lament“The ox knows its owner, and the ass its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, my people does not understand” (Isaiah 1:3).
The Moral Sense
The moral sense is the way in which we follow Jesus and model our behavior on his.
The most obvious examples of the moral sense of Scripture are found in the plain moral teaching of Christ (“Love your enemies. Do as you would be done by,” and similar statements. (cf. Matthew 5:44). Jesus gives a demonstration of his moral teaching when he washes the feet of the disciples (John 13:1–17).
Images of moral teaching abound throughout scripture:
• The image of David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17)has long given us a picture of moral courage against fearful odds.
• The Temple at Jerusalem becomes, in the moral sense of Scripture, an image of the body so that Jesus can say, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up”(John 2:19), and Paul can insist that the body is a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).
• Physical ugliness images moral ugliness and physical beauty images moral beauty. So Isaiah writes: “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my soul shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns her-self with her jewels.” (Isaiah 61:10)That is, the grizzled old prophet likens his own soul in the presence of God to a beautiful, blushing bride standing in the presence of her beloved on her wedding day.
