Understanding the Bible
An old platitude has it that Catholics are ignorant of the Bible because they don’t read it. Whether or not that is true today merits some inspection, but it cannot be said that modern Catholics are discouraged from engaging with Scripture.
Indeed, as the local Church’s annual celebration of Bible Sunday on the last Sunday of August shows, the bishops are encouraging us strongly to read and understand Scripture.
Fr Bonaventure Hinwood OFM explains in this issue that the Church has done so at least since 1943 when Pope Pius XII promoted the study of the Bible in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu.
The Second Vatican Council emphatically echoed the need for all Catholics, including the laity, to open their Bibles.
Vatican II’s constitution Dei Verbum (1965) advises that it is not enough to just read the Bible as though one is a spectator: “In order to see clearly what God wants to communicate to us, [we] should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by their words.”
We must understand Scripture through prayerful reflection and study of available knowledge; we cannot do so by only rote reading.
It is of no good use to know chapter and verse by heart if one does not know what it is that the writer of that passage was aiming to communicate, or in which context it was written.
To understand and know the Bible, we must know not only what is written, but why it was written.
To illustrate: the Old Testament passages that we know by the “an eye for an eye” principle (Ex 21:24; Deut 19:21; Lev 24:20) are commonly believed to offer a justification for acts of retaliation and revenge. Most Scripture scholars would agree that these passages in fact replaced older laws, which had made provision for private retaliation, and instead invested the right to extract justice exclusively in the hands of the state.
Some scholars suggest that the passages might even indicate a system of restorative justice, whereby transgressors would have to make good the damage they caused their victims, for example by a period of indentured labour, rather than by being maimed.
For Christian ethics, these passages are in any case superseded by Christ in Matthew 5:38.
In our bid to try to understand the context in which the various books of the Bible were written, we are aided by the work of Scripture scholars and annotated Bibles. Readers of The Southern Cross are fortunate to have weekly recourse to the writings, exclusively for this newspaper, of world-renowned Scripture scholar Fr Nicholas King SJ.
Disciplines such as anthropology and archaeology are invaluable in decoding Scripture. Sometimes new insights overturn old wisdoms.
For example, Bible scholars for centuries held that St John’s description of the “five covered colonnades” at the Pools of Bethesda, where Jesus cured the lame man (5:5-14), was a metaphor—until archaeologists excavating the site in the 19th century found it just as St John had described it.
Other things require our individual, personal reflections. An important question, for example, confronts us right at the beginning of whichever gospel we choose to read: Why did God send his Son in a time of occupation by a pagan world power?
In our reflections, it is good to know about the background of the people in the Scripture, knowledge which the biblical texts often do not provide. We know, for example, that Simon Peter was a fisherman, but was he a struggling working man or a successful entrepreneur? What did he, and the other apostles, leave behind to follow Jesus’ call?
Those who have been fortunate to have made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land return with a whole new understanding of Scripture. Having been on the waters of the Sea of Galilee and surveyed the area of Jesus’ public ministry animates a fuller appreciation of the words in the gospels.
Reading the Bible in isolation and without knowledge of context can be dry, confusing and discouraging.
Happily, there are many ways to enrich that experience — through literature, Bible study groups in parishes, reflection techniques, and the invaluable work of our Bible institutes.
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