Foundations of our Faith: Scripture (Part 1)

Shabbat shalom, everyone. Welcome again to everyone here.

I will be continuing today with the series we’ve been discussing, which we’ve titled Foundations of our Faith. So far we have covered the believer’s identity; the gospel; the sabbath; tithes and offerings; and the food laws. We do have all of those recorded and available online. In the event anyone has missed any of those, you can listen to them on our website: nrfcommunity.org, under sermons. Or you can find them on YouTube.

For today’s installment of our Foundations series, we will be looking at Scripture. Well, yeah, that should be apparent, right? By that I mean, our doctrine of Scripture, how we see Scripture, what we consider Scripture, and what we do with it.

I started putting together my notes for this teaching and quickly found myself overwhelmed with different points I need to make in order to try and do this topic justice. There’s just so much ground to cover, and I certainly don’t want to leave out any of the crucial parts. Because of that, I have decided to split it into two parts. That way I’m not up here lecturing for 2 ½ hours while y’all start to stare at me with eyes glazing over.

Today, I’ll be covering the topics of:

The parts of Scripture. What makes up Scripture, or what we commonly call the Bible.

This – of course – leads us into a brief description of the canon. That is, which books do we have, and why those.

This also leads us to ask: why not other books?

Biblical languages.

Literary types: what that even means, and how it informs our reading of Scripture.

Hopefully this doesn’t get too dry or technical for anyone. We’ll have a Q&A at the end of both this week and next, so if (or I suppose I should say when) you feel like something needs to be better explained, do let me know. Next week we’ll get into the topics of inspiration, authority, inerrancy; we’ll look at why we need Scripture, and what we do with it. Is it just a reference manual for moral living? Does it just exist for us to ask a few questions? Those are the sorts of things we’ll discuss next week.

For now, let’s set the stage.

As I tend to do, I want to first give a few definitions for you. The word “scripture” as we find it in the New Testament, is from the Greek γραφη, meaning “writing.” Its usage, however, as it is found roughly 50 times in the New Testament, refers exclusively to the Old Testament. The English word, Scripture, comes from the Latin scriptura, which was the translation chosen by Jerome in the 4th century for the Greek graphe. So as with so many things in our English vocabulary, we get the word from Latin.

Bible - and interesting word since we call our copies of the Scriptures “Bibles” - is not found in the “Bible” at all. We get it from Middle English, which got it from Old French, which got it from the Latin biblia, which got it from the Greek biblion, which comes from an Egyptian loanword biblos, which just means “book” or even “long document” and originally referred to papyrus writings.

For us though, we know that culturally, if someone says Bible, they’re most likely referring to the 66 books of the Protestant Bible. If they say Hebrew Bible, that’s equivalent to “Old Testament” though you’ll mostly hear that term, Hebrew Bible, from scholars.

So even the terms we use for Holy Writ are in fact somewhat generic. But clearly the way we use those terms, implies something more.

When we say “Scripture” today, or “Bible” we are referring to the whole collection of writings. In the Apostolic Writings (New Testament), we find the many references I mentioned a moment ago to the Scriptures, as being references to the Old Testament. There are only a couple places where the New Testament refers to a New Testament writing as “Scripture” but this is because it was still being written, and had not yet been compiled. We’ll cover that in a moment, but let me just say something here.

There has been a growing faction within this movement to treat the NT as something lesser than the OT. Terms such as “inspired commentary” are used. While I don’t feel that is entirely inaccurate, it is the way people use the term that bothers me. This, too, I intend to address.

So let’s start with the beginning and work our way forward. Over time, as the Old Testament began to take shape, we see that it has been divided up into three sections. These three sections are:

Law

Prophets

Writings

In fact, this very division is how Jews refer to the Old Testament. In Hebrew, we have Law (Torah), Prophets (Nevi’im), and Writings (Ketuvim). These three Hebrew letters, tav, nun, khaf, are then used as an acronym and pronounced as Tanakh. This is actually how I prefer to refer to the Old Testament. And here’s a quote from OT scholar John Goldingay that explains why:

Old Testament Theology, Volume 1: Israel’s Gospel Chapter 1: Introduction: Old Testament Theology as Narrative

I do not care for the phrase “Old Testament,” which we inherit from some time in the patristic period, because it rather suggests something antiquated and inferior left behind by a dead person. But the politically correct term “Hebrew Bible,” as well as not being quite accurate (there is Aramaic in these Scriptures, too), from a Christian perspective moves too far away from the twin expression “New Testament.” “Tanak,” the Hebrew acronym for “the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings,” is more accurate, but as the Jewish equivalent to “Old Testament” it is close to being a confessional title that feels odd in Christian usage.

Goldingay is not the only one who has taken to the term “first testament.” One of my favorite scholars - if we’re allowed to have such a thing - on the OT is Daniel Block, and he says the same: first testament. For me, I agree with the complaint about the term OT. However, in our particular context here, I believe it is common usage enough to use the term Tanakh. Hopefully that makes sense.

But again, the origin of the term Tanakh comes from the arrangement of the Scriptures themselves into three units: Torah (law), Nevi’im (prophets), and Ketuvim (writings). This sort of general description could be broken down further of course, but it will suffice.

So we have already established, then, the division of the First Testament. The first 5 books (Gen. - Deut.) are called the Torah, meaning law or instruction. The next section contains the writings of the prophets, going from Joshua to Malachi. It may seem odd to consider Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings as prophets, but in general, they are dealing with narrative and prophecy, so they fit the second category. Lastly we have the writings, which includes the Psalms and Proverbs and Job and Esther and even Daniel. You may wonder why Daniel is not included among the prophets. The short answer is, the Rabbis debated whether or not Daniel even was a prophet. The book of Daniel says he has visions and interprets dreams and so on, but doesn’t actually call him a prophet. It’s worth noting, however, that Yeshua did according to Matthew 24:15.

When we come to the New Testament, we find another sort of tripartite arrangement:

Gospels (which are like ancient biographies)

Epistles (letters)

Revelation (apocalypse)

It’s interesting to note that again we find three kind of broad categories, isn’t it? The Gospels were each composed by a different author, and while scholars dispute and debate, there is pretty good reason to stick with the traditional view of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John being the authors of the books which bear their names. Luke also having written Acts.

One thing we must keep in mind when studying the Gospels, is that they were written with different perspectives in mind. For example, they often relate the same events, but may differ on some details. These books were composed decades after the death, burial, and resurrection of Messiah, and at least one of them - Luke, because he tells us - collected his information from eyewitnesses of the events.

The epistles (Romans, Galatians, 1 Peter, 2 John, etc.) are written predominantly in the style of ancient letters. They include greetings, exhortations, personal commendations, a salutation, etc.

Lastly is Revelation, which is an apocalyptic book. We’ll circle back around to that in a moment.

So why these books? Related: why not other books? Why don’t I quote the book of Tobit just as often as Isaiah? Or Jubilees like I do Deuteronomy? This gets into the topic of the Biblical canon.

I have heard the rhetoric go like this: there are many more books that belong in the Bible, but a bunch of Catholics decided to exclude them, because they didn’t like them.

That’s not only inaccurate, it’s actually even further from the truth. The Catholic Bible has more books than ours does. As does the Eastern Orthodox Bible. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church actually has nearly 90 books in their Bible. So how do we know what belongs in ours? And who gets to decide?

We know Scripture is called the Word of God. We find passages throughout the NT that use this language. We also see it used in the Tanakh, though often it refers to individual words. That is, such as 1 Sam. 9:27, where Samuel expects to receive a word from Adonai for Saul, and says, “stay here for awhile, so that I may proclaim to you the word of God.” Similarly, Prov. 30:5 says “every word of God is purified.”

In the NT though we find the term refers most often to Scripture as a whole collection. Matthew 15:6, Luke 8:21, Acts 6:2, and many other places in Acts.

So knowing that Scripture is intact is vitally important to our walk as believers.

Let’s take a look then at the canon, in two sections.

First, the Tanakh.

This is what is most often disputed. The claim is often made that there are books that have been “removed” from the Tanakh. This is most commonly in reference to the Apocrypha. These books include 1 and 2 Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, Sirach (aka Ecclesiasticus), Wisdom of Solomon, 1 and 2 Esdras, 1 Baruch, Letter of Jeremiah, as well as 3 additional sections of Daniel, and additions to Esther. Three other books are usually included here which are: Jasher, 1 Enoch, and Jubilees.

The claim - among its variations - goes something like this: these extra books were translated from their original Hebrew into Greek as part of the LXX (Septuagint, which we’ll cover in a moment). They were left out of the canon for any number of reasons. Either by Christians because they’re too pro-Torah (Tobit, 1 Maccabees, Sirach, Jubilees) or by Jews because they support the NT (Wisdom of Solomon, 1 Enoch).

So the claim is made that these books were originally part of the Scriptures of the Tanakh, but were removed. The evidence cited for this usually includes how some of these books were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as how some of them are quoted in the New Testament. This isn’t some sort of made-up theory, this we can confirm. We know for a fact that some of these were found at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. We also know some of these are quoted in the New Testament. But these two factors alone do not determine whether something is Scriptural or not.

For example, there are MANY (and I mean MANY) extra-Biblical books among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some are commentaries, such as the Habakkuk Pesher. Others are known as sectarian documents such as the apocalyptic War Scroll, or the Community Rule. Others contain lists of special observances or rules, like 4QMMT, “Concerning Works of the Law.” Very few people would argue about trying to force these texts into the canon. So the simple fact that they were found at Qumran does not decide if they should be in the Bible. The Book of Esther was absent at Qumran, and it is also not quoted anywhere in the NT, yet I don’t see anyone saying we should cut it out of our Bibles. Well, that’s only partially true, I have heard a few people that make that assertion.

The next part is: the NT seems to quote some of these books. And that’s true. 2 Peter alludes to the first section of 1 Enoch, when he writes in verse 4, “For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment.” Jude similarly quotes this book in Jude 14-15, which is a quote of 1 Enoch 1:9. Matthew 27:43 says, “HE TRUSTS IN GOD; LET GOD RESCUE Him now, IF HE DELIGHTS IN HIM; for He said, ‘I am the Son of God.’ while Wisdom 2:18 says, “if the righteous man is God’s son, He will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.” The book of Acts contains various references to giving to the poor, or almsgiving. This theme is found all over the book of Tobit. James 1:19 says “be quick to hear, slow to speak.” Sirach 5:11 says, “Be quick to hear, but deliberate in answering.”

These are just some of the many references, allusions, and even quotes of extra-Biblical works found in our Bibles. So does this mean that we need to add these books back in? This is actually a case of petitio principii, or “begging the question.” These books weren’t in what was considered “canonical.” We must understand that the concept of canon was a bit more fluid prior to the first few centuries CE. While they may have used some texts as a point of reference, that does not mean they placed them on equal footing with the whole of the rest of Scripture. Paul quotes some very interesting sources in some of his letters.

Acts 17:28, “for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.'”

The first part of verse 28 comes from Cretica by Epimenides, and the second part of the verse from Hymn to Zeus, written by the Cilician poet Aratus. To be sure, both of these lines were directed at Zeus in Greek literature, but Paul applied them to the Creator of whom he spoke.

1 Cor. 15:33, “Do not be deceived: “Bad company corrupts good morals.’”

“a current saying, forming a verse in MENANDER, the comic poet, who probably took it from Euripides [SOCRATES, Ecclesiastical History, 3.16].”3“The words “Bad company ruins good morals” are found in a play by Menander (4th-3rd century B. C.) but may well have become a common saying by Paul’s time.”

Titus 1:12, “One of themselves, a prophet of their own, said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.”

“Epimenides of Phaestus, or Gnossus, in Crete, about 600. He was sent for to purify Athens from its pollution occasioned by Cylon. He was regarded as a diviner and prophet. The words here are taken probably from his treatise “concerning oracles.”

Each of these are examples of Paul quoting pagan Greek philosophers and writers. He was using it as a jumping off point to describe Biblical truth. To Paul, these words he quoted were true. But we dare not assume Paul considered Menander or Epimenides to be Scripture. The same can be said of 1 Enoch: Peter and Jude may well have made use of it. In fact, we know many of the early Church Fathers did. Tertullian used it for proving doctrine, and even argued for its inclusion in the canon. Eventually he lost the debate.

Similarly, there are those today who also argue for the inclusion of these extra books. After all, why should they be included?

While the canon itself was not formally set for a couple hundred years, there were various lists compiled that noted which books were to be accepted as possessing authority. The Melito canon, attributed to Melito of Sardis, originates from the 2nd Century. The Muratorian fragment, also from the 2nd century. The Bryennios List also likely from the 1st or 2nd Century. And the letter of Athanasius, from the 4th century. All of these show a great deal in common. While a couple of them exclude Esther, and perhaps include an extra book here or there, they largely all include the same books, and these are the same ones we have in our Protestant Bibles today. I suggest this as a homework assignment; it’s a fascinating topic to read about.

The last point I want to make on this topic, is that of the concept of deutero-canon. In the Catholic and Orthodox Churches (Eastern Orthodox, Assyrian Orthodox, Anglican, etc.) they consider most of the apocryphals books to be not canon, but deutero-canon. Some books are also considered trito-canon. Deutero- which probably brings to mind Deuteronomy, means “second.” Deuteronomy is so named because it is deutero-second, and nomos-law, since the book is largely a retelling of the commandments.

The concept of deutero-canon is one that I think we can also find useful. That is, we recognize that these books play an important role in shaping Biblical history. However, we also recognize that they are not on the same level as Scripture. I personally enjoy a lot of extra-Biblical books, and they help me understand some biblical concept better. Some of them, like Tobit and Maccabees, also help fill in that large gap of a few hundred years between the close of the Tanakh and the beginning of the NT.

I could say more about the canon, but that begins to get much deeper and more technical, so I’ll reserve that for a future article.

Now to the subject of Biblical languages. There 3 Biblical languages. Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

The Tanakh is written almost entirely in Hebrew. There are a few sections - specifically, Ezra 4:8–6:18 and Ezra 7:12-26 (67 verses), Daniel 2:4b–7:28 (200 verses), Jeremiah 10:11. There’s also a couple individual words in the Torah, such as Gen. 31:46, where Laban names the place of the rock heap in Aramaic, while Jacob does so in Hebrew.

We could ask why these specific sections are written in Aramaic. Some of it makes sense. For example, Laban was an Aramean, so it makes sense that he would name the rock-heap in his native tongue. The sections from Ezra are the letters sent between the King of Persia and others. Aramaic was the language of the Persian empire, so we expect that they communicated in it. Daniel is an odd case, since it actually switches languages halfway through a verse by saying they spoke in Aramaic, and then continues for 200 verses. Jeremiah is also an odd case; perhaps it was recorded in Aramaic because YHWH knew the people would lose Hebrew as their language, like we learn in Nehemiah 13. Either way, that’s how the Tanakh comes to us, in these two (but primarily one) language.

The New Testament. This is the one that gets argued about so much in this movement. There are a lot of Hebrew Primacists out there. That is, people that believe the NT was originally written in Hebrew. There are also some Aramaic Primacists, those that believe it was originally written in Aramaic. I’ve written about that subject before, so I won’t rehash it all, y’all can just let me know if you want to read into that. In short, the New Testament is Greek. I know we can argue about how a couple of the Church Fathers claim Matthew wrote in Hebrew. That’s a decent argument, though we still lack the manuscript evidence. Simply put, we have no evidence, even fragments, of Hebrew manuscripts of the NT for the first roughly one thousand years after it was written. There are some medieval copies of Matthew in Hebrew, but these are pretty easily shown to be translations from Greek and Latin back into Hebrew. They were also commonly composed to 1: convert Jews and 2: for the Rabbis to get to know the NT well enough to argue against Christians.

But if we set aside those technical arguments for a moment, we should consider the Greek language itself. Now I’m in the middle of completing a Master’s degree in Biblical Languages. So I am studying both Hebrew and Greek pretty intensely right now.

First, let me tell you this: Hebrew - while it may seem odd with its weird alphabet and being right-to-left and lack of vowels - is actually a simple language. It really is. It’s not super complicated; it doesn’t have a bunch of rules that it then breaks. That’s actually a joke that is told about Biblical Greek: year 1 you learn all the rules; year 2 you learn all the exceptions to those rules. Greek is a much more complex language, with more rules. It is a very expressive language. You can say more, with more nuance, in Greek, than you can in Hebrew.

Second, Greek was the language of the gentile world. The Gospel started in Judea, where we know multiple languages wee spoken. Among the Jews of Judea, it was likely spread orally in Aramaic. But when it came time to write it down, especially for it to be sent out to the nations, doing so in Hebrew or Aramaic would not have been effective. Most of the known world could understand Greek; much less so Hebrew or even Aramaic.

In the time of Alexander the Great, there were multiple dialects of Greek. Alexander’s massive army actually spoke these different dialects, and that made it difficult to communicate at times. Naturally as a result, the Koine Greek - what we would call New Testament Greek - form came about, as a means of bridging these various types of Greek. As Alexander conquered the world, this language spread everywhere. Mind you, Alexander conquered - and subsequently died - in the 4th Century BCE. But his conquest spread this language everywhere. I find it remarkable and indeed too much to be mere coincidence, that this took place prior to the penning of the NT.

The apostles needed a way to get the Gospel to the whole world, and this new worldwide language allowed that to happen. The timing of Yeshua coming onto the scene was not merely coincidental. Most people by the time that the NT was being written were illiterate. They couldn’t read or write any language, let alone 3 or 4 different ones. This is why when Paul writes in some of his letters, he implies that the letters are to be read before the congregation, not merely passed around to let everyone read it for themselves, since so many couldn’t read.

Now I mentioned earlier the Septuagint, or the LXX. This was a copy of the Torah in Greek. There’s a legend about 70 (or 72, depending on which version) Jewish scribes tasked with translating the Torah from Hebrew into Greek. The legend goes that these 70/72 scribes were sequestered away in different rooms, all working on their own copies, and when they were done lo and behold, all of them were identical. Now whether that is true or not doesn’t change what the LXX (Roman numerals for 70) became: a primary text for most Jews outside of Judea. And even some in Judea. We have fragments of the LXX found among the Hebrew texts of the DSS, for example. Many of the quotes in the NT of the Tanakh are actually from the LXX, not from the Hebrew version. I personally believe this is because by merely translating the Hebrew into Greek, there was already an interpretive framework from which they could work. So they took advantage of that. It may well also relate to how more readily available Greek versions of the text were over Hebrew ones, especially outside of Judea and further away from the Temple.

The last topic I want to touch on, very briefly, is that of literary types. This is very important, but really takes more personal study than anything I can cover here.

In the US, we most often say that we believe the Bible to be literal. And I agree, but only to a certain extent. I believe the Bible should be taken literally, when it implies itself that it should. And this depends on different types of literature. For example, a parable is true, even if the narrative itself didn’t literally take place. The parable of the wedding feast is a parable, and it is entirely true. But that doesn’t mean there was once a regular old guy who invited people to a wedding and they didn’t show up, so he then invited everyone he could find. Yeshua doesn’t use the parable to relate a literal story of a literal person, but rather to demonstrate a parallel with the theological concept of God’s Gospel invitation into the Kingdom.

I briefly touched on different types of literature earlier, and there isn’t enough time today to cover how that impacts our reading fully. But I would definitely encourage people to look into this.

For example, we have apocalyptic literature. By far, more theories have come about regarding the End Times because of the different ways people want to take Revelation literally, than probably any other book. But as an apocalypse, we have to ask: did John himself intend for us to read the book the way we often do? It’s full of symbolic imagery. And to be clear, I do believe the end, where we see new heaven and new earth and new Jerusalem, is yet still a future event. But I don’t think much of the way we approach the book is helpful or correct.

So in closing: you can be confident in the Bible you have. It is a book written by many authors, over many years. Yet we know that God speaks through it. The reason we have it is so that we may be transformed by it. His Spirit, working through His Word, to conform us to the image of Messiah Yeshua. Amein.