White Stone Journal

The Bible

part 1

What is the Bible?

A collection of stories, poems, wise sayings, doctrine and letters that we regard as the word of God through the abilities of human authors.

from the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation

What is it used for?

Christians find their lives expressed in the Scriptures.  This is especially true in the Psalms and the Gospel accounts of the Passion of Christ.  The Bible contains a great deal of wisdom as well and is “useful for teaching.”  Praying the Scriptures means reading them in a more leisurely way, with a conscious effort to join our reading with what God is trying to tell us.  We sometimes may pause in our reading and become lost in a prayer sparked by quiet reading of the text.

Where did it come from?

Some parts of the Bible were passed on from generation to generation by oral tradition, which means that these stories were not written down.  The Old Testament (Scriptures written before the birth of Christ) was committed to scrolls between roughly 600 B.C. and 100 B.C.  The New Testament, which consists of Four Gospels (centered on the ministry of Jesus) and various letters written by Apostles, was written between 50 A.D. and 100 A.D.  The Bible was assembled into its current form by St Jerome around 399 A.D.  It remained untouched until the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, when Martin Luther removed some books within the Bible.  The Catholic Church still uses the original form from 399.

What about translations?

Generally, the oldest known copies of Scripture were written in Greek, but the original scrolls of the Old Testament would have been written in Hebrew.  The Dead Sea Scrolls contain very old copies of Scripture in Hebrew, and the Psalms translated matched the current translations almost exactly, so we have reason to believe that Scripture has been preserved very well.  Even various translations of disputed or controversial texts vary only slightly.  The Gospels especially were written in a simple way such that even a bad translation gets the point across.

What does “without error” mean?

As Catholics, we believe that the Scriptures are without error.  This does not mean that we take the Bible literally in every case.  It means that we can completely rely on the Scriptures to faithfully be God’s Word to us.  In other words, the Scriptures will not say something about the nature of God that is incorrect.

What should we not do with the Bible?

·         The Bible is not a fortune-telling machine.  Using Scriptures to try to predict the future or determine when the end of the world will occur is wrong.

·         Taking Scripture verses out of context distorts their meaning.  Scripture is made to be taken as a whole, although some verses are very clear on their own, such as “love your neighbor” or “love God with all your heart, mind and strength.”

What should we do with the Bible?

·         Read it!  St. Augustine said that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of God.

·         When someone gives you a verse to read, always read the verses before it and after it.

·         Read it again!  We should be refreshing the memory.  We need to be reminded.

·         Pick a theme, and try to find it all through Scripture.  Try finding all the references to friendship, love, patience, marriage, death, etc...