Now, about those magical words ‘as originally given’. I revert to them because they crop up on the websites of flourishing churches and because they are as unstable as TNT. Those who find this topic irredeemably tedious should stop reading now. Those who see it as a King Charles’s head should look away and avoid an apoplexy.
The potency of these three words comes from its being a formula that is welcomed by those who like to regard the Bible as infallible. It seems at a stroke to evade the problems and heart-ache that arise out of this. Most readers of the Bible nowadays have no truck with this phrase and use more temperate language when they refer to the sacred texts. A respectful reserve is in order.
Where, then, do we find this ‘original’ Bible that is said to be infallible? No answer is forthcoming. There cannot be an answer. No such thing exists. It is a phantom. To take just one example, we have to ask the infallibilists how the ending of Mark’s Gospel was originally ‘given’. We may like to think it ended at verse eight with the telling words ‘…for they were afraid’. We may be right. We may be wrong. Who is to say what was ‘given’? And at what point, exactly was it ‘given’?
Think of the difficulties facing somebody proposing the existence of such a phantom Bible. He or she has to decide at what point the phantom came into being. The supposition of a Q document in the composition of the synoptic Gospels is warning enough of the contretemps that takes place when such a document – if it ever was a document – came into being.
Did the phantom Bible (or let us restrict ourselves to the Gospels for the moment) come into existence when Luke, for example, put his notes of interviews etc into order and wrote a first draft or when he amended that in the light of further information coming his way? Who knows? Did the writer of the fourth Gospel select and organise his material once and for all or was there any revision process? We don’t know and we can’t know.
What we do know is that when histories, poems and narratives are written nowadays there is an author, an editor and a publisher. Other people than the author have an input. Very rarely they are the same person. Whatever understanding we have of inspiration, it is very difficult to say at what point the history, poem or narrative cane into existence. At some point it was a glint in an author’s eye. At another point it was the beginnings of a first draft. By using the phrase ‘as originally given’ we open the door to surmise, speculation and meddling on a grand scale. We also make it possible to construct a version of the Christian faith that then becomes possible to regard as a gold standard to which every Scripture must conform.
To conclude, the phrase is misleading and nonsensical. It is misleading because it engenders false expectations. It is nonsensical because it quickly becomes apparent to a serious reader that it is meaningless. Where were the Gospels during the 30-year oral period? At what point did the Gospels as we know them come into existence? We cannot expect sensible answers because we are not asking sensible questions.
With that out of the way we can give serious consideration to the authority of the Scriptures. When we have considered where the Scriptures begin and end (the canon – and there has not been universal agreement on that) we bow before the quality that is inherent in them. We don’t have to use words like ‘infallible’ to describe them. We merely have to compare them with other literature. Because they are diverse and disparate, they require differing approaches to assess their worth. They do not fail such a test and that is enough. To approach the Bible as though it is one coherent document having all the plodding characteristics of a legal document is to fail to take the Bible seriously. The error is compounded by fantasising about a phantom Bible.
Such fantasising is like imagining a congregation composed of Crocodile Dundees, or an army consisting entirely of Ph.D.s No thank you.
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