Theology for the Masses

I present to you McNaughton Fine Art’s One Nation Under God.   Yes, some people still think we were and are the new israel a shining city upon a hill.  If you click though, be sure to read the artist’s interpretations.  (They’ll make you curse.)  For an interpretation of the interpretation, see Greg Boyd’s commentary on the painting.

Thanks to JR via Tom.

P.S. I am totally not reading Resident Aliens this week or anything.

Yes.  Some people still think we were and are the new israel a shining city upon a hill.

DeConnick, over at the Forbidden Gospels Blog, laments the propensity for immediate “misreading, mischaracterizations and negative assessments” by her “biblioblogging” peers.  Yesterday, DeConnick put up an excellent (and I mean excellent) list of 10 principles for the historical-critical interpretation of ancient texts.  It seems that there was a swift and negative reaction to the principles she outlined.

The real gem of her post is found in her discussion concerning the need for a recovery of dominated voices in our histories.  DeConnick says:

… So the kind of history that has been recovered and written has been the history of the dominant group, and it is the history that justifies and sustains that group. […] But we haven’t rewritten our histories to reflect what we are learning about the hidden histories and the marginalized past nor have we commemorated it as a society […]. Why not add a paper dollar to those we use already, and put Anthony on it? Why not make a government holiday commemorating the Suffrage movement? Why not rename important boulevards with the names of women we wish to commemorate? …

She ends her post saying that the challenge of our generation is

to understand our past more fully and appreciate the variety and complexity of it. We need to give proper credit to the marginalized histories for their own sake, but also with the recognition that the dominant stories would not be what they are if those it marginalized had not lived.

I am going to spend the rest of the day thinking how that can come to pass with my scholarship and lived life.

Bibliography:
Deconick, April. “What is it about biblioblogging…?.” The Forbidden Gospels, September 22, 2009. http://forbiddengospels.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-is-it-about-biblioblogging.html.

One of the topics that is very dear to me is the role and function of women in early Christianity (both canon and post-canon).  A few days ago, I came across a post by the warm and fussy Jim West who linked to Gary Macy’s podcast on women being ordained until the 12th Century.  Edgar asked me why none of this shows up anywhere.

In this series, I’d like to highlight some of the primary sources for women being ordained in the early church.  I’ll cover official church documents, Roman sources, and unofficial church documents.  Today I am going to look at a letter dated in the early second century concerning a Roman governor’s report of Christian activity to the Emperor.

Source one: Pliny the Younger’s Letter to Trajan.

If there was one thing the Roman’s did not get, it was supertitio such as Christianity.   Christianity befuddled the Romans.  Why should a group Jews [1] revere a executed Roman criminal as a God?   Furthermore, why would people show such an excessive devotion to this person.  As weird as the Jews were to the Romans, these Christians  were even more excessive.

Viewing Christians through the eyes of the Romans helps us negate a certain bias inherent in any internal Christian writing.  Quite naturally, Christians writers were/are heavily invested in painting their brand of Christianity as the correct one over and against all other brands of Christianity, including internal dissenters within their own community (Think about a Cowboys or Boston fan writing about the NFL or the NBA).  Roman sources, while handicapped as mentioned above, bypass this bias.

In this letter from a Roman governor to the Emperor, Pliny asks Trajan what he should do with these darn Christians that have been rounded up.  There are a couple of telling passages in this letter, both about early Christian practice and for our immediate purposes, women’s roles in the early Church:

…They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food–but ordinary and innocent food. Even this, they affirmed, they had ceased to do after my edict by which, in accordance with your instructions, I had forbidden political associations. Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition.

I therefore postponed the investigation and hastened to consult you. For the matter seemed to me to warrant consulting you, especially because of the number involved. For many persons of every age, every rank, and also of both sexes are and will be endangered. For the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities but also to the villages and farms. But it seems possible to check and cure it…

(it is worth mentioning that this is the earliest non-christian course for christian practice)

What do we see here?  We see, around 110CE, a local assembly of Christians in the Bithynia-Pontus province that consisted of the complete strata of Roman society.  Slaves, freed persons, rich, poor, young and old.  Pliny, in his quest to find something prosecutable among their deeds, tortures two of the leaders of the community.  Horrifyingly enough (for an elite Roman) the leaders of this community were two slave women.

Thus, we see in unbiased Roman sources that historically women served as deacons in the early Church and, at least in Bithynia-Pontus, they were the leaders of the community, as least as it related to outsiders.

Now, there are some things that need to be held in tension here.  First, is this representative of Christianity of this period?  It is only one source, after all.  Secondly, how do we know that these were the leaders.  All Pliny really mentions is that they are deaconesses (the female form of deacon).  To be minimal in our interpretation of the letter, perhaps that there were women deacons is all we can say.  But, we can say that.  Additionally, it is these two and only these two that Pliny plucked out and tortured.  He would have gone right to the top of the community’s hierarchy to do this.  So, assuming these were the only leaders is a bit of a stretch, but, as stretching goes.  It is about two miles short of the gymnastics Christian historians go through when they try to make the whole of the Bible historically accurate and consistent.  So, as leaps go, it is pretty small.

1. Romans saw them all as Jews [↩]

Humanity has rebelled against their maker and creator, I AM. I AM has therefore cursed his entire creation by taking away shalom, the universe in that state where everything is as it should be. The created order is thrown into chaos and misery. Sin and death reign supreme over I AM’s creation now that shalom is gone. Yet I AM did not abandon his creation to its abysmal failure and self-destructing sinful rebellion against him. He gracious entered into the world and created a community through which shalom is restored. A sacrificial system in put into action, with a priesthood and temple/tabernacle to facilitate it, to atone for the rebellion of the people and re-establish communion between I AM and humanity, and the members of the community. Laws were enacted to facilitate proper relationship of I AM and the people within the community, including amongst themselves. The people were taught how to relate to I AM and to each other. The poor and oppressed were cared for. Now let us see if this worked. continue reading…

A while ago Tom wrote about the connection between the bizarre dictums [1] found within the Pauline letter to the Ephesians and the Artemis cult in Ephesos.  While I remain unconvinced about the genuine Pauline authorship of the letter [2] and therefore am more open to early Christian patriarchal forms seeping into the canon than Tom is, his posts on the topic are very good and the counter-point I hold when thinking through issues of authorship and gender relations in the Pauline corpus. [3]

ProTip: Read his posts on the topic!

Part of a frieze from the temple of Artemis, Ephesos.  Greeks under Herakles (marked by his club and lion’s cape) scare off hour Amazons, who seek Sanctuary with Artemis (on block to right, not preserved). Found inn and described by Price in Religions of the Ancient Greeks. 

With that said, I came across an interesting passage in Religions of the Ancient Greeks by Simon Price on this very topic.  After discussing the merits of talking about Panhellenism [4] , Price opens a discussion concerning local versions of myths.  In doing so, he contrasts the Athenian myths of Theseus fighting the Amazons [5] with the Ephesian myth of the town harboring Amazons. 

Not only was Ephesos guardian of a unique image of Artemis, which has supposedly fallen from heaven, but Ephesos also claimed that Artemis had been born there (and not as it was often claimed on the Aegean island of Delos).  The Ephesians also sometimes claimed that her cult had been established by the Amazons, who thus sometimes had a much more positive significance at Ephesos than at Athens.  The benevolence of Artemis towards the Amazons is also illustrated in the local story of how the Amazons successfully sought the sanctuary of Artemis, both from Herakles and from Dionysos.  Artemis remained the protector of both the Amazons and the city right through antiquity.

The city’s connection with something as repulsive to the average Greek [6] as the Amazons, one of the ultimate threats to the Greek way of life, can only lend further support to Tom’s thesis. [7]   It further demonstrates the pull that Artemis had in the city and demonstrates that there was a substantial mythic will in the city to invert the male/female domination scheme, which was a product of the fall.

1. saved through childbirth??? [↩]
2. I am textually liberal, theologically conservative, politically indifferent, and socially… something [↩]
3. could that be a longer sentence? [↩]
4. it is a problematic, but useful term [↩]
5. the fabled feminist threat to the male/Greek way of life [↩]
6. well, often this hypothetical “Average Greek” is constructed from the particular Greek of Athens and then abstracted over all of the Greek cities, a topic for another post [↩]
7. Even though it is circumstantial evidence at best, which I might add, is the best kind of evidence you are going to get either way here.  We simply don’t have the sources to demonstratively demonstrate anything on this topic! [↩]

As for history and theology, I continue to maintain that we must perceive these as separate fields. Theology is not history and history is not theology. Theology is a hermeneutic which attempts to take old authoritative texts and read them doctrinally, with the big question at stake: what does this text say to me about my life as a Christian? Theology isnt “bad.” Defining it next to “history” just recognizes that “theology” has a different goal than “history”. It also has a different set of assumptions, and one is that the laws of the physical world can be suspended: as in dead people can be resurrected and virgins can give birth. The quest for truth operates in a completely different arena from the historical quest for truth, approaching more the realm of philosophy and philosophys criticism of history than anything else.

via The Forbidden Gospels Blog: Theology is not history.

Some food for thought.

Magneto, after skewering Xavier in Ultimate Origins 5.  No relation to the post, I just thought it was a cool pic.

Conservative scholars and practitioners have a lot invested in biblical prophecy.  For them it is a great confirmation that the Bible was divinely inspired.  After all, if your God tells you what is going to happen in 30 or 200 years, and it happens, then that can only bolster your claims. 

For many scholars and practitioners [1] if a text is written ex eventu, then the implication is that the text is somehow less inspired.  After all, you can’t really make the appeal to prophecy then, now can you? 

For this reason, when it comes to the dating of texts such as Daniel, Jeremiah, and Mark, conservative scholars are beholden to forcing the texts to be written before the events in the prophecies. [2]     Ironically, this approach actually neuters the text they are wanting to save.

You have to remember that just about all ancient texts are propaganda.  I don’t mean that in a negative sense, only that these texts are being written for a specific purpose – to influence people to buy into their message.  Nothing, not even so-called “histories” are just reporting the facts, ma’am.  Prophecies are huge in terms of their rhetorical effects.  As Mark Goodacre puts it, “The prediction only gains traction because the reader is saying, ‘Hey, yes! I know what that’s about!’”  It is a powerful argument in favor of the text in the reader’s eyes.  The writers of the text know this and skillfully employ the use of fulfilled prophecy to this end.

Now, lets assume that the text is written down and disseminated before the event in question happens.  The once powerful effect of prophecy loses its power.  Now, in the reader’s eye, doubt is summoned and laid over the text.  Here, our imaginary reader says to herself, “Man, Jesus is saying that the temple is going to be destroyed, but… just look at it!  It is still standing!”  Prophecies only gain rhetorical power after they are fulfilled.  Thus, in forcing the writers to pen unfulfilled prophecies, scholars deny the texts their original power over the reader.

Now, notice what I am not saying.  In no way does this assume that the writers are inserting fake prophecies onto their characters.  From a position of faith, I believe that Jesus, Jeremiah, Daniel and others uttered their prophecies beforehand.  However, this is a different question than when the texts were written.  And when we are dating texts, we need to let the evidence speak louder than our theological preconceptions which may or may not be artificial.  If we date from a position of theological comfort, then we need to reevaluate our methods.

For more reading on this topic, see NTWong’s Scholarly dating of Daniel to After the ‘Prophecies’ were ‘Fulfilled’ and Mark Goodacre’s Dating Sacred Texts on the Basis of Fulfilled Prophecy. 

1. at least ones I have heard in lectures at Central Christian College of the Bible and others in person and in print [↩]
2. And really, as a person of faith, this is attractive, even if I think it prejudices this theological implication over other more concrete forms of evidence. [↩]

Our very own Hank, from Think-Wink, linked to בלשנות (balshanut), which is a biblical linguistics blog, on the topic of loan words in the Hebrew Bible.  There the claim is made that:

Some scholars have argued that Biblical Hebrew was never a fully spoken language, but was an artificial literary language created by post-exilic scribes. For instance, Ullendorff’s paper “Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?” BSOAS 34 (1971): 241-55, Knauf’s “War ‘Biblisch-Hebräisch’ eine Sprache?” ZAH 3 (1990): 11-23, and North’s “Could Hebrew Have Been A Cultic Esperanto?” ZAH 12: 202-17. In this article, Eskhult argues that if BH is an artificial language created only in post-exilic times, then loanwords ought to be fairly equally distributed throughout the various books and genres contained in the Bible… 

[However], the Akkadian, Egyptian, and Persian loanwords seem to follow the pattern of the political history described by the biblical texts. It is difficult to explain such a connection if the language was artificial and late. Further, Perisan loanwords abound within the books that are obviously late, but do not appear at all in the Pentateuch.

For those of you following along at home, this is important because it suggests the tradition behind the biblical text dates to the periods and cultures from which the text itself claims to be writing, compared to being composed entirely as an after-thought. 

BOOK REVIEW : A Review of “Become a Better You” by Joel Osteen from Challies Dot Com
A scathing review of our favorite Bible exegete.

Osteen seems unable or unwilling to bring the power of the gospel to bear on life–real life. Life, he teaches, is not a meant to bring glory to God, but is meant to bring blessing and ease to the individual.

CHRISTIAN HISTORY : Skarsaune and the Jerusalem Council from The Forbidden Gospel’s Blog
DeConnick talks about a plausible explanation of the Jerusalem council, given the contradictions in Paul’s letters and Acts.

1. Paul’s first visit to Jerusalem: Gal 1:18=Acts 9:26-30
2. Paul’s second visit to Jerusalem: Gal 2:1-10=Acts 11:30; 12:25
3. Antiochean Affair: Gal 2:11-14=Acts 15:1-3
4. The writing of Galatians: before the council in Acts 15
5. Paul’s third visit to Jerusalem and the Jerusalem Council: Acts 15:2-29

DeConnick thinks that there are some problems with this, but that it is a good start. She follows up this post with What about this scenario? where she proposes a new sequence of events that is too long to quote here.

RELIGIOUS THINKING : Inerrant, infallible, inspired from 4Simpsons Blog by Neil
A devotional conclusion on Christians and the [un]holy trinity of loaded i-words: inerrant, infallible, and inspired.

We can read the Bible with confidence that God has transmitted his Word to us accurately. Sometimes the words inerrant and infallible are too loaded with various meanings to be helpful, so I like to emphasize that the original writings of the Bible turned out just the way God wanted them to.

RELIGIOUS LIVING : The Center from Bentch.com

“Each day you have to decide, am I going to be Christ-centered or self-centered?”
I love this because it reminds me that life is not all about me. It is about showing others Christ’s love.

BIBLE TRANSLATION : Gender language literally speaking from the Better Bibles Blog

I have to wonder if most people really do think that gender neutral language is less literal than gender specific language. Each case has to be assessed in isolation and then the group as a whole.

First, brothers and sisters…

Is the Acts of the Apostles history? [1] Boy, I bet that could set off a good debate `round these parts! (But please see the first footnote and the links contained therein before you jump all over me.) This is an interesting and valuable question indeed. Late last month a couple of scholars that I enjoy reading brought up this very issue.

April DeConnick, at the Forbidden Gospels Blog, brought this topic up in her post: Is Luke a trustworthy historian? In the post, she asks why Acts is written off as a Lukan myth. She acknowledges that in the past people have trusted in its historical value a little too much and not treated it as histories should be treated. However, the conception of Acts as history has shifted to the other extreme. She argues that Acts must have been based off earlier sources and that understanding these sources is valuable in learning about the earliest Christians traditions and as a consequent constructing the earliest Christian history. Her argument is as follows:

1. When Luke uses Mark, he does not rework Mark as much as Matthew.
2. When Luke uses Q, Q-scholars tell us that he retains Q better in terms of verbage and order than Matthew. In fact, our reconstructed Q is versed according to Luke.
3. Luke tells us in the beginning of his gospel that he relied on older sources to rewrite the Christian narrative which we apparently trust given our hypothesis that Luke is a second edition of Mark.
4. If we think that Luke used Mark and Q as literary sources, wouldn’t the best assumption be that he also used older traditional sources for the composition of Acts?
5. If 4 is valid, then shouldn’t we be trying to figure out what those older traditions are and what they tell us about Christianity earlier than Luke?

The first comment on DeConnick’s post summed up my thoughts on this issue quite nicely. Judy Redman asked why do people think that Luke’s gospel is reasonably accurate but that in writing Acts Luke engaged in “wild flights of fancy“? Judy points out that just because something is written “from the perspective of a particular faction of the early church does not make it myth.”

Mark Goodacre, over at the NT Gateway Blog, picks this question up and first goes into a critique of the use of Q (an interesting discussion in its own right) and ends with a rather positive view on Luke as a historian with qualifications. It is quite obvious that there is no video taping of history in Luke or Acts (or in any of the Biblical books for that matter), but that the situation is not as bleak as some modern scholars might think.

One of the other comments on April’s original post, left by JC Baker, asked the excellent question: What, if anything, can we know about history from our texts? DeConnick wrote up a great post in response that is worth reading now matter you interest in the Bible [2] [3] : How can we know anything from our texts? She outlines four steps everyone should take when glistening a text’s modern historical value.

First, one should seek to identify the “authorial revision of received tradition” because every furthered tradition has been recieved by an earlier tradition and most likely been edited to some extent. After this is accomplished, one must “read against the grain” to seek out the parts of the narrative that are inherently troublesome for the author. These troublesome bits are most likely to be historical. [4] Next, one should try to identify the back story that the author does not give, but the recipients would be familiar with. Lastly, use contemporary texts to compare and identify agreements (more likely to be history) and disagreements (most likely to be functions of the point of view of the author or community than history). Using these methods one can begin to ascertain a text’s historical value.

In conclusion, Acts is not a history in the modern sense of the world. Acts is useful in many respects for building a history of the early church before 100CE but is not completely authoritative as history [5] and should not be used in lieu of a history book. There just was not the intention there to write the same sort of thing we look for in a modern history. However, that is not to say that Acts has zero historical value. Instead, through the processes outlined above, one can sift through Acts and use it to piece together a modern history of the early Christian movement.

Further reading: Danny at Danny’s Blog Cabin takes up the issue of the Harmony of the gospels and comes to a very negative conclusion. While I disagree with some of his conclusions and demands of the text, it is a very open and honest approach to the issue and worth reading and wrestling with.

1. I am talking about what our idea of what history is, namely an accurate description of events, both in chronology and substance from an unbiased 3rd-person perspective, not the way the ancients viewed history, which were stories that were designed to illustrate lessons to be learned by the reader. [↩]
2. devotional, scholarly, or any mix of the two [↩]
3. or of any text, for that matter [↩]
4. note, this does not by itself invalidate the bits that serve the author’s purpose, but the bits that don’t we can be more sure about their historicity [↩]
5. See the conflict between Acts 9 and Gal 1 for an example [↩]

Danny, over at Danny’s Blog Cabin has a poll up asking about the nature of the bible. I encourage the readers and authors to go and vote in the poll.

Click this link.

It is an early paper that serves as a beginning point of exploration of my master’s thesis on Syrian Christianity.

In preparation for some posts I am working on, I want to talk about history in Antiquity. It is very easy to import modern ideas and standards of history writing onto Ancient texts. However, to do so, will skew one’s reading of the text in a way that the author did not intend. The following are several concepts to keep in mind when reading ancient texts. [1]

1) Lost in Translation Often the only copies of texts that we have today are copies of copies. Furthermore, they are often translations of the original text. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas was probably written in Syriac, but the earliest copy we have is written in Greek. On top of this, sometimes the original texts were translations of the speeches being recorded. An example of this last point are Jesus’ speeches recorded in the Gospels. Jesus spoke Aramaic; the Gospels were written in Greek. [2] It is important keep this process in mind when the exact order of words is being scrutinized.

2) History was for instruction, not for tracking details Ancient histories were not designed to be modern ones. Their primary focus was not on keeping track of historical minutia, nor was it designed to show a character’s development throughout time. Instead, it was designed to illustrate lessons to be learned by the reader. There was “… great freedom with which many ancient writers adapted their materials to achieve such goals…” [3] This frame of mind should be accounted for when when studying ancient texts of all origins.

3) Look – Peter wrote this; hence it must be true Ancient authors had no problem with attributing works to authorities in order to give their work credibility. Christians have not been immune to this phenomenon. As early as the middle part of the first century, Christian leaders were complaining about letters being written in their name that contradicted with their positions. [4] The problem for “Christian texts” only got worse as the years went on. Robin Fox writes:

In the period c.400-600, “aggressive forgeries” added false letters to the collection of almost every early Christian Letter writer. These fake texts of theology helped to enlist the great authorities of the past on this or that side of a contemporary schism or unorthodoxy. [5]

Imagine someone finding a letter from Paul where he argues quite clearly for each of the five points of Calvinism. The problem was so bad that it was not until the 1500s that people could begin to sort the forgeries from the authentic letters. [6]

4) Good Forgeries Even when people were not outright co-opting authorities for the sake of their own positions, there is the problem of attribution. It was common in Classical and Hellenistic Greek culture for a student to classify their own positions and work as their teacher’s work. For example, there are more texts attributed to Aristotle that he could have humanly wrote. It is hard to determine in some cases where the teacher’s writing ends and the student’s begins. James H. Charlesworth has delineated the above idea into seven rough categories: [7]

1. Writings not by an author, but containing some of the author’s own thoughts
2. Writings by someone who was influenced by another work whom the work is attributed
3. Writings influenced by someone who was influenced by the earlier works of another author to whom the work is assigned
4. Writings attributed to an individual, but actually deriving from a circle or school surrounding that individual
5. Christian writings attributed by their authors to an Old Testament personality
6. Once anonymous writings that have been incorrectly attributed to another individual
7. Writings that intentionally try to deceive the reader into thinking the author is someone else

Quite naturally, the accuracy, dependability, ect, depends on which category the text being examined falls.

5) Recording Speeches There were not any tape recorders or stenographers around in Antiquity. Because of this, not all of the speeches recorded in ancient texts are verbatim copies of the original works. As a matter of fact, people recording the speeches often either gave abridged or paraphrased versions of the speech in question. Sometimes, the speech was elaborated on for the sake of effective rhetoric. Thucydides, an ancient Greek historian, admitted as much in his History of the Peloponnesian Wars.

I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches I have listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for in each situation.

After about 300 B.C.E speakers issued written copies of their speeches to combat this problem. [8]

6) Say it enough, and people will think it is true Remember Hitler’s idea of the “Big Lie?” Same principle at work. If an author had a agenda to push, there was nothing to keep the author to fudge the facts to push their version of history. In a less deliberate manner, if errors crept into the historical record and subsequent authors relied on erroneous accounts of history for their facts, the resulting account will carry or perhaps magnify the original error, intentional or not.

Despite these difficulties, it is still possible to sift through historical manuscripts to uncover the most likely account of history by our modern standards of accuracy. My next post will deal with how to correct for these errors.

1. The above list was taken from Novak. Christianity and the Roman Empire: Background Texts. pp 3-7 [↩]
2. The Canonical ones were all written in Greek. There is a slight chance that the Gospel of Matthew was written in Hebrew, but it is most likely that it was written in Greek like the rest [↩]
3. Novak. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
4. See Second Thessalonians 2:1-5 [↩]
5. Novak. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
6. Fox. Ibid. p. 154. [↩]
7. James Charlesworth. “Pseudo-Epigraphy”. Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. p.765-767 [↩]
8. Novak. Ibid. p.6. [↩]

Yesterday, I posted an open question about how our authors and readers view scripture. I replied that I did not hold to the doctrine of inerrancy. While this may seem shocking at first to some of our readers, allow me to flesh out my position with this post.

First, I need to give my definition of inerrancy. In this post, I am primarily concerned with the Chicago Statement’s position on inerrancy, hereto referred to as Chicago Inerrancy. According to this view, inerrancy implies that the Bible is completely true and accurate – historically, scientifically, and spiritually. In order for this to be the case, every book, every sentence, and every word must be the literal truth. :”(If this precludes your definition of inerrancy, please let me know in the comments.)”: I don’t think the Chicago position allows for any other definition of inerrancy. Consider the following portion of the Chicago Statement:

Article XII. We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.

We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.

All it takes to demonstrate the falsehood of the above statement and the Chicago position is to demonstrate a single historical or scientific error. I will provide two.

Example 1: The healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law

Was Peter’s mother healed before or after Peter was called to be a disciple? According to Luke 4:38-40, Jesus healed her hand before he called Peter as a disciple in Luke 5:10. However, Matthew gives us a different story. According to Matthew 8:14-15, Peter’s mother-in-law was healed after Peter was called to be a disciple in Mt 4:18. Both cannot be true at the same time. And before someone tries to say that Peter’s mother-in-law was healed twice, consider two additional problems this would bring up. First, Jesus would be healing the same person’s fever twice in a relatively short period. This implies that the first healing did not stick – was Jesus’ first healing ineffective? This is more of a problem than differences in editing bring up. The second issue is literary in nature. If you examine each pericope, one finds that they are really the same pericope, just out of order in each narrative.

Details were changed for the sake of the narrative. The events are not called into question, just the order of events. Peter’s mother-in-law was healed; Peter was called to be a disciple. However, the gospels themselves disagree on the order of events. Both cannot be true; rather, both cannot be historically accurate. One of them is errant on the answer to the following question: “Was Peter’s mother healed before or after Peter was called to be a disciple?” Notice that both do give an answer to that question. Both are not accurate down to the littlest detail. Both accounts can be inspired, but not inerrant. :”(At least not inerrant according to the Chicago position.)”:.

Example 2: The Day and Time of Jesus’ Crucifixion

What day and at what time was Jesus crucified? If one goes by the events in Mark 14:12-20, the Last Supper happened on Passover. Jesus was then crucified the next day at 9AM (Mk 14-15). This differs from the account in John, the last gospel to be written. In John 19:14-16 the narrative is explicit that Jesus was crucified on Passover at 12PM, not the day after at 9AM. The last Supper was the day before. John has a very good reason for moving the crucifixion a day up – one of the themes of the gospel of John is that Jesus is the Passover lamb.

Once again, the historical details were changed for the sake of the narrative.:”(Or, they were recorded differently by two different sources. No matter which one is the case, the historical record differs between the two.)”: Just like in the earlier example, there is no question that the events happened. Jesus was crucified; the Last Supper did take place. However, the gospels themselves disagree on the dating of the events. Both cannot be completely historically accurate to the smallest detail. One of them is errant on the answer to the following question, “What day and at what time was Jesus crucified?” Again, but accounts can be inspired, but are not inerrant, at least the way that the Chicago Statement suggests.

Conclusion

The Chicago Statement and a sizable number of Christians hold that the Bible is inerrant in all matters, including its historical claims. This includes all historical claims. I have demonstrated, through two examples, that the Bible is internally conflicted on a historical matters. These examples can be easily explained away by the editing process and the need to argue spiritual points. However, if these explanations are allowed, Chicago’s strict historical inerrancy claim must be abandoned for a more nuanced claim.

What might be such a claim? I think that the Fuller Statement of Faith gives a good view of inerrancy and infallibility. While the statement does not come right out and give their position on this matter, Parableman has summed up their view quite succinctly (emph added).

So what the Fuller view has done is co-opt a term about the nature of inspiration, a term used for describing the impossibility of God’s word containing errors, to use it to apply to a view about the scope of inerrancy or infallibility, i.e. the view that scripture can or does have errors about some matters while not having, or being unable to have, other kinds of errors. A more accurate description of their view, then, would be that the Bible is infallible or inerrant about matters of faith and practice but not infallible or inerrant about matters of history and science. Calling that infallibility as opposed to inerrancy is wildly confused.

Notice that the Chicago Statement explicitly denies this a good way to view scripture.

It should be noted that the Gospels were ancient biographies, not modern histories. As such, they were primarily concerned, not with historical minutia, but with demonstrating the character’s static personality through examples. Because of this, one should not expect there to be a unified narrative time line among the different accounts, for that was not their purpose. Their purpose was to demonstrate who Jesus was and why he was important to their audiences. In this, they are inerrant.

The authors were not trying to write scientific treatises or modern histories, but something else. As such we should not import our modern categories onto them.

The danger with creeds and statements like the Westminster Confession and the Chicago Statement is that they lead to divisions in the body of Christ. Don’t get me wrong, they are useful in clarifying and communicating positions, but we should be wary in judging other believers in light of them.

I want to open this post up for a discussion on how you view the scriptures. Here are some starter questions.

• Which books do you allow and why?
• Were the authors trying to write scripture?
• Do you think the scriptures are infallible?
• Do you think the scriptures are inspired?
• Do you think the scriptures are inerrant?
• Is there a difference between inerrant/inspired/infallible?
• Are all seemingly historical accounts supposed to be taken at literally as possible?
• Can some of the seeminly historical accounts be figurative in some fashion and the scripture still be inerrant, inspired, and infallible?

Here are my short answers to get the conversation started.

• Protestant Bible
• Some were, some weren’t – but they all did.
• Yes.
• Yes.
• No. See the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’s arrest and trial and see John’s narrative vs the Synoptics.
• Not entierly.
• Yes.