JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ible
the foundation stone of Judaism’s serious view of itself as the
one true revealed religion, destined to be the religion of all
mankind. Through the years the confidence had matured that
in the Bible was the complete and all-embracing record of all
that men would ever need to know. Here stood revealed the
full and complete will of God: all that men were to do and to
be had been revealed to them. Their conduct toward one another
and toward Him, the way they were to worship Him and
regard Him, even their attitudes of mind and will, all had been
revealed and was man’s for the knowing. No circumstance
could ever arise that had not been anticipated, no question for
which the certain answer had not been given. Even before the
moment of creation it had stood in the mind of God. Subsequently
the blueprint for all time had been revealed by God
to men through the agency of Moses and the other specially
designated and inspired agents. The Bible was not 24 books,
as it might superficially seem to be to Jewish eyes, or 29, to
those of the Christians. It was fundamentally one book, with
God its one author.
As the movement eventually to be styled Christianity became
separate from the parent, it never lost this confidence
in the nature of its inherited Scriptures, which, as the true
Israel it regularly conceived itself to be, it easily came to believe
were actually primarily its own, not the parent’s, “for,”
as Justin *Martyr phrased it in his Dialogue with Trypho (ch.
29): “we believe them, but you, though you read them, do not
catch the spirit that is in them.”
Gradually, in the course of almost exactly 100 years,
a large number of additional chapters, so to speak, were
produced. As the years passed, many of these later writings
became dear to an ever-increasing body of believers, with
the result that by the middle of the fourth century 27 more
writings had come to be widely regarded and formally accepted
as a part of God’s Revelation, of which He was the actual
author, having seen fit to reveal His mind through the
records which evangelists and apostles had written at His
dictation.
Through the centuries this view was maintained. It is
this which is meant by the statement in the twentieth of the
still-authoritative Thirty-Nine Articles that the Bible is “God’s
word written.” In the 18th century Locke was asserting nothing
new when he insisted: “It has God for its author, salvation for
its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter.”
A century later, an Oxford theologian, Dean Burgon, spelled
it out: “The Bible is none other than the voice of Him that
sitteth upon the throne. Every book of it, every chapter of it,
every word of it, every syllable of it (where are we to stop?),
every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High. The
Bible is none other than the Word of God, not some part of it
more, some part of it less, but all alike the utterance of Him
who sitteth upon the throne, faultless, unerring, supreme” (Inspiration
and Interpretation (1861), 89).
This view of Scripture, despite two centuries of inquiry
during which in the eyes of an increasingly large group it has
been discredited or drastically qualified, is still with nuances
the verdict of Christianity, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and
Protestant alike. The Protestant Reformation did not affect
the matter in the slightest. There was and is no real difference
between Catholics and Protestants as to the proper attitude
toward the Bible or the basis on which they rest their creeds.
The sole difference lay – and still lies – in the fact that to the
Catholic (and Orthodox) Scripture is not the sole authoritative
and infallible source of belief. Scripture (i.e., Old and New
Testament including the deuterocanonical books) and tradition
are the source of God’s revelation. For the Protestants
the Scriptures alone can have such a claim. Both, however,
accept the Bible as the authoritative and infallible statement
of revealed truth. Actually, Protestant scholars at times went
to greater extremes in their stress upon biblical interpretation
than did Catholics. During the years, ecclesiastical infallibility
and scriptural infallibility had grown up together.
As a result of the Reformation, ecclesiastical infallibility was
thrown overboard by Protestants. The infallibility of the Bible
was set up as a bulwark against the rejected infallibility of the
Church. It is accordingly not surprising that in consequence
a literal view of inspiration, like that enunciated by Dean Burgon,
resulted.
Thus the real and distinctive note in the Christian attitude
toward the Old Testament has never been whether the
Old Testament is or is not Scripture, to be accepted and prized,
for this acceptance has been universal. Rather, the problem
has always been how the Old Testament is to be interpreted
and used.
Beginning, and continuing for many years, as a part of
Judaism, sounding the proclamation of Jesus, whom they believed
to have been raised from the dead by God and to be
with him in heaven soon to return to establish the speedily
expected new age, which, like him, they styled the kingdom
of God, the Christians’ main differences from the rest of orthodox
Jewry were their developing views of Jesus himself. So
far as fundamentals were concerned, they remained orthodox
Jews, in their views of the unity of God, of His relation to
Israel, of His complete revelation in Scripture.
With their basic view of the all-inclusive content of the
Divine Revelation in Scripture it was not unnatural that Christians
saw prophesied therein their movement and their Christ.
As the movement came more and more to be separate from Judaism,
the conviction deepened that Judaism, which failed to
see in the predictions in the Old Testament the Christian Jesus
and the success of the movement resulting from his preaching,
was blind to the real content of the Scriptures, which Scriptures
they were confident were theirs. The Old Testament, according,
for example, to the Epistle of Barnabas, has meaning
only when it is understood in terms of the gospel. It was held
that God’s covenant has always been made with Christians,
and the Old Testament has always been misunderstood by
the Jews. This in no wise minimized the Old Testament. “All
scripture is inspired by God and helpful for teaching,” as the
author of II Timothy 3:16 was to insist; but it must be rightly
understood.
664 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3