by
Damien F. Mackey
“To take the Genesis account as historical information … its value is
simply nil in informing us about what happened “in the night of times”.”
M. Lagrange
Dr. Dominque
Tassot, writing an article, “The Influence of Geology on Catholic Exegesis”,
for the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, tells us something about the
opinions of M. Lagrange:
…. On June 30, 1909, the Pontifical Biblical
Commission granted liberty to Catholic exegetes to consider the word “yom”
either in its proper meaning or in a broader meaning (sensu improprio) of indeterminate duration (DS 2128).
In 1896, Fr Lagrange (who had founded Jerusalem’s Biblical College in 1893)
rejected “concordism,” considering that the hexameron days and geological
periods did not correspond.
The shaping of the Earth went on a long time after the
appearance of life; plants and animals developed in parallel. But remains
established the fact that the Earth took a considerable time to form. We
renounced forever the
historic precise duration of six 24 hours days.7
My comment:
The ‘Six Days’ of Genesis One, real 24-hour days, have nothing whatsoever to do
with the duration of God’s work of creation, and it is futile to attempt to
make them fit so-called scientific views about origins, such as the ‘Big Bang’,
or an evolutionary-based geology:
What exactly is Creation Science? Part One: Our Western obsession with
'Science'
Some have observed
that the ‘Six Days’ (Hexaëmeron) may
be a revelation of a creation already
effected. Dr. Tassot continues:
The further influence of Lagrange on Catholic exegesis
is indisputable: he devised the three main ways to render the presence of
scientific errors in the Bible acceptable. These were set out in five lectures
given at the Catholic Institute of Toulouse a century ago, in November 1902,
later published under the title The
Historical Method. I will not dispute Lagrange’s dedication to the
Church and the Bible. But we will touch here upon the direct influence of
geology on the exegesis of the 20th century through Lagrange’s
ideas.
When a schoolboy, Lagrange used to wander with his
uncle, a geologist, in the foothills of the Alps, where he lived. Maybe this
explains how readily and completely he accepted the long ages, not only for the
earth but also for the history of Man. He wrote in the Biblical Review, which he founded:
Mankind is older than one believed when piously
collecting the wrecks of remembrances assumed to be primitive. (…) Humanly
speaking, oral transmission from the beginning of the world is supremely
unbelievable. (…) To take the Genesis account as historical information, … its
value is simply nil in informing us about what happened “in the night of
times.”
So Lagrange invented a new and paradoxical concept: “Legendary primitive history.” The Fall, the Curse, the Flood are neither true
history nor simple myth. Genesis gives an account based on a “generating fact”
but inevitably distorted and downgraded by the transmission through thousands
of generations. Another such concept is that of “historical appearances.”
Here Lagrange tried to transpose to history what Leo XIIIth said in Providentissimus Deus about astronomy (the
Galileo affair!), that the Bible speaks “according to appearances.”
From a Thomistic perspective, our senses give a true
path to knowledge. But in the Kantian perspective of that time, “appearance”
meant the opposite of reality. In 1919, Lagrange abandoned his theory of
“historical appearances,” but the idea remained that the Bible had to be
confined to the sphere of religion, and this was indeed the most secure way to
prevent any conflict with science.
The third method proposed by Lagrange to explain
supposed natural science errors in the Bible was the theory of “literary
genres.” The idea underlying this explanation was that one does not
deceive when simply asserting the false, but only when teaching it:
All that the sacred writers teach, God also teaches
and this is true. But what do the sacred writers really teach? What they affirm
categorically. But—it has been said for a long time—the Bible is not a
collection of categorical theses or affirmations. There are such literary
genres where nothing is taught concerning the reality of the facts. They only
serve as basis for a moral teaching.”8 [And further:] “It is
impossible that God teaches errors. Of course [there are places in] the Bible,
where everybody is speaking errors; but it is impossible that an intelligent
examination of the Bible compels us to conclude that God taught errors.”9
It is obvious that an intelligent use of these
three methods is sufficient to get rid of any difficult passage of the Bible.
But the authority of the Sacred Writings disappears at the same time, divine
inspiration and inerrancy being inseparable! ….
[End of
quotes]
We could term this method of
exegesis as emptying the Bible of all of
its meaning.
Père Marie-Joseph
Lagrange (1855-1938) was a Dominican (OP) priest and the Dominicans
figure rather prominently in my life inasmuch as OP priests celebrate Masses at
the University of Sydney (St. John Paul II) chapel and at Notre Dame University
(St. Benedict’s), at both of which places I attend several times a week.
The day that a
well-informed friend of mine queried, in an e-mail, the strange biblical views
that have emanated from the École
Biblique which père Lagrange himself founded in Jerusalem, I happened to
attend a Mass at the University of Sydney chapel celebrated by a learned
Dominican priest. I thought that I must tell him about the concerned e-mail
letter that I had just received, I being particularly interested to get his
(Dominican) reaction.
He is a scholar,
basically a theologian, who seems to flit effortlessly around Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, and French for starters. It soon became clear to me, though, that the
Scriptures were essentially, for him, about theology - fair enough - but that
what my colleagues and I would consider to be historical accounts were written
late, perhaps beginning “about 900 BC”, and that “Moses and Joshua could not
personally have written about contemporary events, nor did they record dates”.
He also made the typical comment that the early Scriptures would have been
passed on by means of “oral tradition”. Also fair enough, but the written
aspect always seems to get downplayed. Whilst some of this was starting to rub
with me, especially that Moses and Joshua did not write down the biblical
events of the time, I did not feel inclined to become argumentative or contrary
with a man who has an easy-going, genial nature.
But, at the same
time, I tried to push home some bullet points, such as:
-
God told Moses and Joshua to “write”.
-
Moses, in Egypt, was already a learned man and a
scribe. [Cf. Acts 7:22]
“Yes”, he
replied, “but he did not write in Hebrew, but in Egyptian”.
Some of what the
priest said here is, I believe, just plain wrong, and smacks of what I find
that père Lagrange had written decades earlier.
Deferring to the Numbers (Chronology) Men
Whilst I (and
apparently Monty Python) find accountancy, numbers, to be utterly BORING:
Counsellor:
(John Cleese) Ah Mr
Anchovy. Do sit down.
Anchovy: (Michael Palin) Thank you. Take the weight off
the feet, eh?
Counsellor:
Yes, yes.
Anchovy:
Lovely weather for the time of year, I must say.
Counsellor:
Enough of this gay banter. And now Mr Anchovy, you asked us to advise you which
job in life you were best suited for.
Anchovy:
That is correct, yes.
Counsellor:
Well I now have the results here of the interviews and the aptitude tests that
you took last week, and from them we've built up a pretty clear picture of the
sort of person that you are. And I think I can say, without fear of
contradiction, that the ideal job for you is chartered accountancy.
Anchovy:
But I am a chartered accountant.
Counsellor:
Jolly good. Well back to the office with you then.
Anchovy:
No! No! No! You don't understand. I've been a chartered accountant for the last
twenty years. I want a new job. Something exciting that will let me live.
Counsellor:
Well chartered accountancy is rather exciting isn't it?
Anchovy: Exciting? No it's
not. It's dull. Dull. Dull. My God it's dull, it's so desperately dull and
tedious and stuffy and boring and des-per-ate-ly DULL. ….
numbers appear
to be greatly revered in modern times. Numbers seem to have replaced ideas.
It probably has
something to do with the power that measuring offers, and, even, of man’s
seeking to be ‘the measure of all things’. See e.g. my article:
The Futile Aspiration to Make ‘Man the Measure of All Things’
Mathematics
makes a wonderful servant, but it can be a very cruel taskmaster.
Chronologists
are the powerful numbers men of (ancient) history.
In Egyptology,
historians and archaeologists deferred to the ‘superior wisdom’ of the numbers
man, Berlin School chronologist, Eduard Meyer (c. 1906), and allowed him to
create a chronology of dynastic Egypt that has little bearing on reality.
See e.g. my:
Was Meyer, the
numbers man, dull?
“The late great Classical scholar
Werner Jaeger once said that the only time the lectures of the immortal Eduard
Meyer were really interesting and the only time he was ever able to fill his
lecture hall at the University of Berlin was when he talked about the Mormons”.
Enough said!
Meyer’s
artificial dating of the Egyptian dynasties did not fit the shorter histories
of, say, the Greeks and the Hittites. So, to save the situation, a massive
slice of ‘Dark Ages’ (1200-700 BC) had to be inserted into these histories in
order to ‘make’ them align with Egypt.
These ‘Dark
Ages’ did not occur in real history, and their insertion has caused a
disruption to the proper sequence of Greek and Hittite history.
Henk Spaan tells
briefly what happened and how Dr. I. Velikovsky had identified the problem: http://www.henkspaan2.nl/velikovsky/15darkages.php
The history of ancient Greece is usually divided
into several periods. The Archaic period is the time of ancient Hellas, that
ran until about 1200 BC and ended shortly after the Trojan War. During this
period Mycenae was the centre. Then followed a period of decline, the Greek
Middle Ages, also called Dark Ages, when the country was invaded by primitive
Dorians. The Greek heyday that we call Classical Greece, when Athens was the
main centre, lasted from about 700 to 323 BC. Finally there is the Hellenistic
period that begins with the conquests of Alexander the Great throughout the
Middle East. In the Hellenistic period, Alexandria was the centre and the
period lasted until the Roman conquest of Egypt.
The part of Velikovsky's work dealing with "the dark ages of Greece" never appeared in print. Velikovsky worked on it in the last years of his life, but could not finish it. It is published in the Internet archive of his work entitled "The Dark Age of Greece".
The Mycenaean civilization is closely linked to the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. During excavations in Mycenae, many objects from the 18th Dynasty were found and vice versa in Akhet-Aten, the city that Akhnaton had built, much Mycenaean pottery was found. This means that there must have been a period of more than 500 years between Archaic Greece that existed until 1200 BC and Classical Greece that began around 700 BC. This period is called a dark age because we know little or nothing about it and little remains of this period are found. Understanding those 500 years is difficult, because 500 years of human activity, however primitive, must have left traces above the remains of Mycenaean civilization and there must have been rulers, however barbaric, about whom people wrote of with fear or surprise. However, those traces are not there and neither are the stories. Of the Greek Middle Ages we know of no people like Vikings or Charlemagne of AD history.
Yet, if we move the Mycenaean civilization to 500 years later, it will be closer in line with the rise of Classical Greece and we are then more in line with what, for example, Herodotus and other Greek historians thought about their past.
Furthermore, many problems become easier. For
example, the famous riddle: how could Homer write a detailed report of the
Trojan War if the war took place more than 500 years before Homer wrote his
work?
[End of quote]
Thus, when the
likes of W.F. Albright, in close alliance with the École Biblique, attempted to date Joshua’s Jericho, the absence of
any Mycenaean pottery at the site meant that - at least according to what
Eduard Meyer had established chronologically about the Egypt of the same time,
that it was to be dated to c. 1400 BC - the Jericho destruction would
inevitably have to be shifted back centuries before this time.
A major part in
all of this was played by another (pottery-) chronologist (numbers man) and
another Dominican, père Louis-Hugues Vincent, who joined the École Biblique only a year after it was
founded. Of course, coming for a Lagrangian background, père Vincent was always
going to be operating from a base of biblical fluidity.
He, being a
pottery-chronologist, was accorded a respect similar to that of the ‘expert’,
Meyer. Consequently, we now find ourselves in the situation in which the
biblical events have been separated from their right archaeology and history by
many centuries – almost a millennium in the case of the famous Jericho
incident.
One of my
correspondent’s main concerns was that this - the Bible’s no longer fitting
with the textbook history - was one of the reasons why many dismiss much of the
Scriptures as being myth or fantasy, having little in the way of historical
credibility.
“Didactic
fiction” is how one elderly Dominican in Sydney has described the Book of
Jonah.
Not that the
Bible is essentially about history, or science, of course.
For the
Dominican priest to whom I spoke, it is really about “theology”.
According to
pope Francis, in Aperuit Illis, it is
about “our salvation” (# 9):
The
Bible is not a collection of history books or a chronicle, but is aimed
entirely at the integral salvation of the person. The evident historical
setting of the books of the Bible should not make us overlook their primary
goal, which is our salvation.
It is clear from
this, though, that the biblical books have an “evident historical setting”,
contrary to Lagrange’s view that early Genesis is pre-historical, but also
non-historical (see below).
Dei Verbum even has “our first parents”
(Cardinal Pell take note), Abraham, Moses, and so on.
3. God, who
through the Word creates all things (see John 1:3) and keeps them in existence,
gives men an enduring witness to Himself in created realities (see Rom.
1:19-20). Planning to make known the way of heavenly salvation, He went further
and from the start manifested Himself to our first parents. Then after their
fall His promise of redemption aroused in them the hope of being saved (see
Gen. 3:15) and from that time on He ceaselessly kept the human race in His
care, to give eternal life to those who perseveringly do good in search of
salvation (see Rom. 2:6-7). Then, at the time He had appointed He called
Abraham in order to make of him a great nation (see Gen. 12:2). Through the patriarchs,
and after them through Moses and the prophets, He taught this people to
acknowledge Himself the one living and true God, provident father and just
judge, and to wait for the Savior promised by Him, and in this manner prepared
the way for the Gospel down through the centuries. ….
M. Lagrange, on
the other hand, according to the following, denied early Genesis historicity: https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/dominicans/artifacts/the-bible-in-context/
His major
challenge, however, would be to establish for fellow Catholics the importance
of the Bible’s literary and historical contexts while still proclaiming it to
be the Word of God.
To promote
Catholic biblical scholarship Lagrange founded first the periodical Revue
biblique which was to publish articles on exegesis by teachers at the
Jerusalem school and elsewhere, and second Études bibliques, a series of
commentaries which began with a study of Judges published in 1903. Church
censorship was a continual possibility.
Lagrange
challenged in his lectures and articles the Mosaic authorship of the
Pentateuch, and he denied the historicity (though not the truth) of the
creation narrative in Genesis 1–11. As a result, he found himself forbidden to
publish a commentary on Genesis.
[End of
quote]
The Dominican
priest to whom I spoke did not actually deny an Adam and an Eve, but said: “The
first man and woman are called Adam and Eve in Genesis, but these would not
have been their real names as they are Hebrew names”.
I also advanced
this bullet point:
-
The JEDP sources that scholars claim to identify in the
Book of Genesis are not fundamentally the sources from which Genesis was
compiled. These latter are the toledôt
divisions, to be read as endings of family histories, the histories of the
pre-Moses patriarchs.
Whilst the
priest was familiar with toledôt, he
did not comment on my insistence that they were endings, not headings. He
admitted to being uncomfortable with JEDP – “you can’t preach it”.
I also recalled
to him the case of the French Catholic physician, Jean Astruc, really a pioneer
of the modern documentary sources, who had intuitively discerned that the Flood
account in Genesis appeared to have been composed from more than one source.
The toledôt perfectly accounts for
that, of course, it having been written by Noah’s three sons.
The next series,
I said, was signed off only by Shem, who must by then have become separated
from his brothers, Ham and Japheth.
Furthermore, I
said, scholars who deny the influence of Moses in the compilation of the
Pentateuch may not have any expertise in the ancient Egyptian language, and are
not able, therefore, to discern a prevailing Egyptian influence throughout much
of those books - this being an indication that these books, in their original
states (before later editing) were written at an early point in time when
Israel had been in close contact with Egypt, and not written in a later
Babylonian period as the documentists insist.
I queried that,
if the early Bible were not really historically or archaeologically relevant,
why was it that there is a substantial archaeology underlying e.g. the Conquest
when properly dated, and not dated according to the whims of the unreliable
chronologists. The Middle Bronze I (MBI) people - the priest knew of them -
basically trace the same geographical pattern as do the Exodus Israelites, and
they are known to have been bearing Egyptian artefacts.
But conventional
historians (the more biblically-minded ones) tend to identify the partially
nomadic MBI as belonging to the time of Abram (Abraham).
Once we fix
Abram to his right stratigraphical level, however, which is Late
Chalcolithic/Early Bronze I, we can identify the destruction caused by the four
invading kings as narrated in Genesis 14, Amraphel of Shinar and his
confederacy.
All of this is a real history, with a real
underpinning archaeology.
The Book of James considered today
Clearly a farmer is not expected to be patient over a period of
centuries for his crop to emerge.
And that is the difficulty with any timetable that does not accord with
the bald statements of Jesus Christ and the Apostles that that very generation would
be experiencing his “coming”.
The emptying of
the meaning from the holy Scriptures that was considered in relation to the
Dominican founder of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, Pere Marie-J. Lagrange (1855-1938),
seems to be a continuing phenomenon among Dominican priests, with one recently
emphasising to Catholics at a Mass in Sydney (Notre Dame University), with
regard to Genesis: “Whatever you do, don’t take any of this literally”.
Then, a few days later (15th December,
2019), another Dominican priest, at the same venue, made some statements
regarding the New Testament Book of James that I would consider to be emptying
that book of some of its meaning, and to be implying that the Apostles were
rather clueless about “the Second Coming”.
First of all,
the priest claimed that the Book of James was written about 90 AD.
That is after
the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD (conventional dating).
And James was
already dead by then.
The bald
statements of James regarding Jesus’ imminent return (5:7-8): “Be
patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming. See how the
farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the
autumn and spring rains. … the coming of the Lord is at hand” [literally, “has drawn near”]”, was
an indication to the Dominican priest that the Apostles did not have any idea
as to when the Second Coming was due to occur. But, still, he added, we need to
await it patiently just as does a farmer for the land to yield its crop.
Clearly a farmer is not expected to
be patient over a period of centuries for his crop to emerge.
And that is the difficulty with any
timetable that does not accord with the bald statements of Jesus and the
Apostles that that very generation would be experiencing his “coming”:
·
Romans 13:12: “The night
is far gone; the day is at hand” [literally, “the day has drawn near”].
·
Hebrews 10:25: “[Do not
neglect] to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encourag[e] one
another, and all the more as (because) you see the Day (already) drawing near.”
·
1 Peter 4:7: “The end of
all things is at hand” [“has drawn near”].
70 AD, far from
being a couple of decades before the Book of James was written, was the year
when the prophesied “coming” would occur. For more on this, see my article:
Beyond the "Second Coming"
Who was this
James?
The following
article poses a similar question:
Who
Was James, the Brother of Jesus?
It is no secret that the Catholic Church
teaches, and has always taught, that the Blessed Virgin Mary was just that — a
virgin — all the days of her life. This teaching does not come out of nowhere,
but is based on a long tradition in Christian history. Despite this venerable
Christian tradition, Mary’s perpetual virginity is one of the Catholic beliefs
most often questioned by Protestants.
It is interesting to note that most, if not all,
Protestant denominations have no official teaching on whether or not Mary
remained a virgin after giving birth to Jesus. Virtually all of the founding
fathers of Protestantism (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, et al) maintained a belief
in Mary’s perpetual virginity. Luther preached that “Christ… was the only Son
of Mary, and the Virgin Mary bore no children besides Him” (Sermons on John,
ch 1–4). Zwingli wrote, “I firmly believe that Mary, according to the words
of the gospel as a pure Virgin brought forth for us the Son of God and in
childbirth and after childbirth forever remained a pure, intact virgin” (Zwingli
Opera, Corpus Reformatorum, Berlin, 1905, v. 1, p. 424.).
Most Protestants today, however, assume Mary and
Joseph would have had normal marital relations resulting in other children.
This is not based on any new historical data unavailable to those in the early
Church. Rather it is based on an assumption that… well, that’s just what
married people do, isn’t it?
For many, the belief that Jesus had younger
siblings seems supported by the Bible itself. After all, we have verses like
this: “Is this not the carpenter,
the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon?” (Mk 6:3). Isn’t this biblical
proof that Mary had other children besides Jesus?
Before we delve into this specific question, it
is important to keep one thing in mind …. The Church has studied the scriptures
for thousands of years.
Yet the Church maintains that Mary remained a
virgin all her life. Has the Church somehow remained unaware of Mk 6:3 all this
time? Or is there more to the story?
“Brethren of the Lord”
There are several other passages that mention
the “brethren” of Jesus (Mt 12:46, Jn 7:5, Acts 1:14, 1 Cor 9:5). “Brethren” in
this context has always been taken to mean “cousin.” This is how Martin Luther
interpreted its meaning in his Sermons on John quoted from above. The
reason for this is simple. There was no word for “cousin” in Hebrew or Aramaic
(the language Jesus most likely would have spoken). The term “brother” or
“brethren” was used generically for any male relative, and this is how it is
used in the Greek of the New Testament (even though Greek does have a word for
“cousin”).
….
Those who maintain that James, Joseph, Judas and
Simon were other biological children of Mary and Joseph might say that this
“cousin” explanation is a little too convenient. But it can be demonstrated as
true in at least one case — the case of James, the most famous “brother of the
Lord.”
St. James was one of the Apostles, the first
leader of the Church in Jerusalem, and a very prominent figure in the early
Church. Was he, in fact, another son of Mary and Joseph?
We do know that his mother was named Mary. The
gospels give us that information. But they also tell us that she was not
Mary, the mother of Jesus. We can tell this by comparing the different gospel
accounts of the women standing at the foot of the cross.
“Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the
mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee” (Mt 27:56).
“Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the
mother of James the less and of Joseph, and Salome” (Mk 15:40).
“And meanwhile his [Jesus’] mother, Mary the
wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene had taken their stand beside the cross of
Jesus” (Jn 19:25).
If we compare these three accounts, we see three
women named Mary standing at the foot of the cross: Mary, the mother of Jesus;
Mary Magdalene; and Mary, the wife of Cleophas who was also the mother of James
and Joseph.
So James’ mother was a Mary, but not the
Mary (Mary is a very common name among 1st century Jewish women. I can’t cite
it now, but I remember reading in one source that 25% of Jewish women of the
era were named some version of “Mary”).
What do we know of James’ father? In Mt 10:3,
James is called the son of Alphaeus. It is worth noting that the Aramaic name
for Alphaeus could be rendered in Greek as either Alphaeus or Clopas/Cleophas.
Since James’ mother Mary is described as the “wife of Cleophas” in Jn 19:25,
this is probably the same man described here.
And what do we know of him? Not too much from
the scriptures, but according to the 2nd century historian Hegesippus, he was
the brother of Joseph, Jesus’ foster-father. This would make James the cousin
of Jesus.
However, even if Hegesippus is wrong about that
detail, we still know from the gospel accounts that James is the son of
Alphaeus/Cleophas and a different Mary, and not the son of Mary
(mother of Jesus) and Joseph. In other words, James cannot be the biological
brother of Jesus.
Does this prove the perpetual virginity of Mary?
No. But it does show the danger of challenging any long-held and
well-established Christian teaching on the basis of one or two “proof texts”
from the Bible.
Benedict XVI - Bible “based on history”
“The evident historical setting of the books
of the Bible should not make us overlook
their primary goal, which is our salvation”.
Pope
Francis
In this article
I have suggested that the ‘emptying Scripture of its meaning’ exegetical
approach of Père Lagrange
of the École Biblique appears to have been followed by contemporary Dominicans.
From the recent
exhortation by one to by no means take literally the content of the Book of
Genesis, to another’s insisting that neither Moses nor Joshua wrote down
contemporary records - biblical writing did not begin until “900 BC” - to
another’s labelling the book of Jonah “didactic fiction”, to another’s
uncertainty as to whether Daniel and his three friends were actual historical
characters.
And that is only
a part of it.
As a Christian, I found the last one,
concerning the Book of Daniel, to be particularly disconcerting as the aged
priest mentioned it in a sermon in which he also proposed that the courageous
witness of Daniel and his three friends, in the face of fierce persecution,
ought serve to strengthen us today as we face persecution and ridicule for our
faith.
I don’t know how other Christians would
feel about this, but if ISIS had a knife at my throat ordering me to renounce
my faith, I would not find it terribly consoling to have that particular
Dominican close, Book of Daniel in hand, urging me to remember the heroic
witness of Daniel and his three friends. “But you said they may not have been
real!!!”
Far more refreshingly, I think, pope
Benedict has insisted that the Bible was “based on history” (as quoted by Greg
Sheridan in “Christmas story still resonates down the ages”):
The
former Pope Benedict, in his magisterial, scholarly book, Jesus of Nazareth,
explains the importance of historicity: “It is of the very essence of biblical
faith to be about real historical events. It does not tell stories symbolising
supra-historical truths, but is based on history, history that took place here
on this Earth.”
Benedict
also explains the severe limits of the historical-critical method in trying to
deconstruct the New Testament. Concerning biblical critical studies, which once
in their wilder speculations did much to undermine religious faith, Benedict
writes:
“We
have to keep in mind the limits of all our efforts to know the past: We can
never go beyond the domain of hypothesis because we simply cannot bring the
past into the present. To be sure, some hypotheses enjoy a high degree of
certainty, but overall we need to remain conscious of the limit of our
certainties.”
And more
recently pope Francis referred to, in “Aperuit Illis” (# 9): “The evident
historical setting of the books of the Bible …”.
First,
recalling Paul’s encouragement to Timothy, Dei
Verbum stresses that “we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture
firmly, faithfully and without error, teach that truth which God, for the sake
of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures” (No. 11). Since
the Scriptures teach with a view to salvation through faith in Christ (cf. 2
Tim 3:15), the truths contained therein are profitable for our salvation.
The Bible is not a collection of history books or a chronicle, but is aimed
entirely at the integral salvation of the person. The evident historical
setting of the books of the Bible should not make us overlook their primary
goal, which is our salvation. Everything is directed to this purpose and
essential to the very nature of the Bible, which takes shape as a history of
salvation in which God speaks and acts in order to encounter all men and women
and to save them from evil and death. ….
