By Joseph T. Lienhard, S.J.
Dunwoodie Review 24 (2001): 161-75. Reprinted by Permission.

A consideration of the authority of Scripture [1] needs to be delimited.  Hence, there are several topics that I will not touch on.

One is Scripture and science.  I will not ask about the authority of Scripture as a warrant for teaching creationism or for affirming or denying the theory of evolution.

Another is Scripture and tradition.  Since the sixteenth century, the relation of Scripture and tradition as channels of God's revealed truth has been rigorously debated.  Protestants, for the most part, maintain Luther's "sola scriptura," - by Scripture alone.  Catholics, at the Council of Trent and the Second Vatican Council, affirmed that the truth that God revealed is transmitted both in Scripture and in tradition or traditions, but in such a way that the two may not be considered discrete sources of revelation.

A third topic I will not touch on is the authority of modern interpretations of Scripture, and specifically of the historical-critical method.  Since the nineteenth century, the canons of historical criticism have been applied to the Christian Bible.  In the eyes of some, this method has removed the Scripture from the realm of faith and put the study of the Bible under purely secular criteria.

Positively, I will treat three topics.  The three are fairly distinct, but, taken together, they should cover the main points that are relevant to the question of the authority of Scripture. 

The first topic is the authority of Scripture according to Christian, and specifically Catholic, doctrine.  The second is the authority of translations of the Scriptures, a topic that has generated much heat, and perhaps some light, too.  The third topic is the authority of Christ over Scripture.  And, at the end, I will add a sort of coda: the non-authority of Scripture, or the limits of the authority of Scripture.

Finally, a prenote on the meaning of the term "authority." Authority, as it is used here, may be defined as the legitimate power to command assent.  In the case of Scripture, the power is legitimate because it respects the freedom of the one who assents.  But authority is indeed power: in this case, the power of the truth, for it is the truth that commands assent.  Yet to assent to the truth of Scripture is an act of faith, and faith is a gift.  Thus it is grace that enables us to assent to the truth of the Scriptures.  God commands us to assent to the truth of the Scriptures, but that assent is possible only when God gives us the grace of faith to do so.

The Authority of Scripture in Catholic Doctrine

First, then, the authority of Scripture according to Christian and Catholic doctrine. By doctrine I mean, borrowing Jaroslav Pelikan's definition, "what the Church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches, and confesses on the basis of the word of God." [2]  Catholic doctrine on the authority of Scripture falls under three headings: the canon, inspiration, and inerrancy.

What are the sources of this doctrine?  The sources of doctrine, besides the Scripture itself, are the creeds, the decrees of the councils, and the other teachings of the magisterium.  The Scripture cannot authenticate itself.  The creeds say little about Scripture, except perhaps for a clause in the Creed of Constantinople (381), in the article about the Holy Spirit, which reads, "who has spoken through the prophets." This clause is a refutation of Marcion, who taught that the Old Testament, or the prophets, did not come from the God who was the Father of Jesus Christ but from another god.

The modern doctrine of the magisterium on Scripture is found quite compactly in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, or Dei Verbum, promulgated by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).  The key passages from Dei Verbum are conveniently excerpted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  Besides Vatican II, the Council of Trent (1545-63) also made important doctrinal statements about Scripture.

The Canon

First, then, the question of the canon.  In this instance, canon means the list of biblical books that the Church recognizes as authoritative.

The Church's teaching authority, or magisterium, was in no hurry to define the canon of biblical books.  The first list to come from an ecumenical council was promulgated by the council that met in the first half of the fifteenth century in four cities, and hence is called the Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence-Rome.  One of the goals of the council was reunion with the eastern churches.  On February 4, 1442, while meeting in Florence, the council promulgated the Bull of Union with the Copts, the Christians of Egypt.  This bull contains a list of the canonical books of both testaments.  The council counts the books of the Old Testament as forty-five - that is, the same list as the current Roman Catholic canon, except that the book of Lamentations is not mentioned.  It would not be wrong to assume that the council counted Lamentations with Jeremiah.  The council also lists twenty-seven books of the New Testament.  These are the twenty-seven books of the universally accepted New Testament.  The only oddity is that the Acts of the Apostles is listed second last, after the fourteen Pauline epistles and the seven Catholic epistles and just before the Apocalypse. [3]

The union with the Copts did not take effect.  The next promulgation of a scriptural canon was far more important; it is that of the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century.  The council was opened on December 13, 1545.  In the fourth session, held on April 8, 1546, the first decree of the council was promulgated.  According to the title of the decree, "the sacred books and the traditions of the apostles" were received. [4]  Once again, forty-five books of the Old Testament and twenty-seven of the New were received.  Among the books of the Old Testament is listed "Jeremiah with Baruch," but not Lamentations. The Acts of the Apostles appears in its familiar place, between the gospels and the Pauline letters.  The council also added this clause:

If anyone does not accept as sacred and canonical the aforesaid books in their entirety and with all their parts, as they have been accustomed to be read in the Catholic Church and as they are contained in the old Latin Vulgate edition, and knowingly and deliberately rejects the aforesaid traditions, let him be anathema. [5]

The First Vatican Council, in its Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, promulgated on April 24, 1870, did not repeat the list of books from Trent but merely quoted the substance of the sentence just cited. [6]

The canon was never a seriously disputed question in the western church, at least from the fourth century until the Reformation.  The reason for the absence of controversy was St. Augustine, and especially his enormously influential work entitled De doctrina christiana, variously translated "On Christian Doctrine," "On Christian Culture," or "On Christian Learning."  In a part of the work written in 396 or 397, just after he had been ordained a bishop, Augustine listed forty-four books of the Old Testament and twenty-seven of the New.  With the addition of the elusive books of Lamentations and Baruch, we already have the standard western canon.  Three local councils in North Africa, in Augustine's time, confirmed these lists. [7]

The most important question about the canon in ecumenical circles is the inclusion or exclusion of the seven so-called deutero-canonical books, which are not found in the Hebrew canon but are included in the Septuagint translation, or Greek Old Testament.  The books are best remembered with the acronym J. T. Web and the Two McCabes: Judith, Tobit, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and First and Second Maccabees, along with Greek additions to Daniel and Esther.  Augustine and most of the other Fathers accepted the Septuagint canon as authoritative.  Jerome, ever proud of his knowledge of Hebrew, favored the shorter, Hebrew canon.  The West, in general,  adhered to the longer Old Testament canon until the Reformation.  Influenced partly by the revival of Hebrew learning among Christians, Martin Luther favored the shorter, Hebrew canon, and almost all of the Reformers followed.  The fathers at the Council of Trent debated the issue, but finally accepted the longer canon as the Old Testament of the Catholic Church.

Inspiration

The doctrine of inspiration was expressed in a compact way in Dei Verbum at Vatican II.  The divinely revealed realities, the Council states, that are contained and presented in the sacred Scripture were committed to writing "under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit." [8]  Because of this inspiration, these books have God as their author. [9]  Yet divine authorship does not exclude human authorship, and the human authors are true authors. [10]

The teaching of Vatican II on inspiration steers a middle path between two extremes.  One is denying any true human authorship to the Scriptures and holding a doctrine of strict verbal inspiration, divine dictation, or even automatic writing, as if the human author were no more than a pen in the service of the Holy Spirit.  The other extreme is reducing the inspiration of Scripture to some generic sort of literary inspiration, as we might call Sophocles' Oedipus Rex or Shakespeare's King Lear inspired.

 The council avoids the question, how inspiration took place.  Theologians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries speculated at great length on this point, and James Burtchaell has traced the history of their ideas in an impressive book. [11]  How inspiration took place, and whether the Holy Spirit assisted the author at the moment of writing or later approved of what had been written earlier - if, for example, a biblical writer was using written sources - is a matter for theological speculation.  The Church maintains the doctrine of inspiration without specifying how it took place.  Every liturgical reading of the Scriptures that ends with the phrase "The word of the Lord" attests to this doctrine.

Inerrancy

One of the corollaries of inspiration is inerrancy.  If God is the author of Scripture, then the Scripture cannot teach error.  In the United States today, among Protestants and Catholics as well as Jews, every point on the spectrum of theories of inerrancy can be found.  There are Christians who firmly believe that Jonah lived inside a fish for three days (Jon 1:17), that the sun once stood still (Jos 10:13), that a shadow moved backwards ten steps (2 Kgs 20:11), or even that they should handle poisonous snakes to demonstrate their faith (Mk 16:18).  The opening chapters of Genesis have given rise to acrimonious controversies over evolution and creationism.  On the other extreme - excluding those who reject the authority of the Bible altogether - are Christians who reject the truth of certain teachings of the Bible (such as its teaching on homosexual acts), or who want some passages excised from the public proclamation of the Bible (such as the passage in Ephesians on husbands and wives).

Once again, the Church's doctrine steers a middle path.  Dei Verbum states simply: "The books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation." [12]  The truth that Scripture teaches, in other words, is not astronomical, or geological, or zoological; it is religious truth or, more precisely, saving truth.  Put into a jingle, the Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

The Authority of Translations of the Bible

My next topic is the authority of translations of the Bible.  Granted that the Scripture is the word of God, how do we hear that word in our language?  The answer to that question has been the subject of disagreement, dispute, and even violent controversy for just about as long as Christianity has been around.

Few Christians read the Bible in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek; almost all read it in a translation.  We can laugh at the fictitious fundamentalist who said, "If the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me." Translations of the Bible can be invested with enormous authority, and many disputes about the authority of the Bible are in fact disputes about translation.  These disputes stretch from the very beginning of the Christian era until today -  and, undoubtedly, tomorrow, too.

Let me give just a few highlights from the history of the translation of the Bible, highlights that involve the question of authority.

The first great translation of the Bible was not a Christian translation at all, but a Jewish one.  In the third and second centuries B.C., Jews in Alexandria translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, a translation that became known as the Septuagint.   This was the first great translation project in history, and the achievement was astonishing.  It involved translation from a Semitic language into an Indo-European language.  It was done without dictionaries, by men who no longer spoke Hebrew as their native language.  The translators not only translated Hebrew into Greek, but a Hebrew mentality and culture into a Greek mentality and culture; the sort of language found in the Septuagint is often much closer to the abstract, philosophical language that the Greeks had developed than to the Hebrew original.  Eventually, the Jews rejected the Septuagint, mostly because of the use that Christians made of it, and three other Jewish translations into Greek were made, each more literal than the Septuagint.

The Christians, however, made the Septuagint their Bible, and the Septuagint became authoritative for the development of early Christian theology.  Two examples must suffice.  At Is 7:14, the translators rendered the Hebrew word almah, which means "young woman," with the Greek word parthenos, "virgin," so that the verse read in Greek, "behold, the virgin will conceive and bear a son." The translation of this text has been a test-case for translators ever since.  And, at Ex 3:14, the translators rendered the name of God - "I am who I am" in the Revised Standard Version, "I am who am" in the New American Bible - "I am He who Is."  In doing so, they took a step that had enormous implications.  Later interpreters took this translation to mean that the Scripture identified God with Being, so that all that the Greek philosophers had said about Being applied to God.  But the translators did not use the normal Greek expression for Being, to on, in the neuter.  They used ho on, in the masculine, indicating that Being was all the Greeks said it was, but also something that the Greeks never suspected, namely, a Person.

Leaving aside translations into Syriac and other eastern languages, the next great Bible translation was Jerome's retranslation and revision of the Latin Bible in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.  Before Jerome, the Latin Bible was a ragtag collection of translations made at various times by translators of vastly differing skills.  The Old Testament was translated from the Greek of the Septuagint, not from Hebrew.  Jerome bemoaned the state of the Latin Bible when he wrote, "tot . . . exemplaria, quot codices," or, to translate a little more of the phrase, "among the Latins, there are as many versions as there are copies, and each one adds or removes what pleases him, at his own whim." [13]

Around 382, Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome to revise and standardize the Latin version.  Jerome began by revising the four gospels in light of the Greek originals; he also made a new version of the Psalter.  When he retreated to Bethlehem after Damasus's death, he first tried to revise the Latin Old Testament in light of the Greek but then undertook a new translation from Hebrew.  What is now known as the Vulgate is actually a very mixed collection.  Some books are Jerome's translations from Hebrew, some are his revision of the Old Latin, and some he never touched at all.

One incident will illustrate the risks of Bible translation in the early Church.  Augustine wrote to Jerome in 403 that the bishop of the town of Oea in Tripolitania had decided to use Jerome's new translation in church.  A passage from the book of Jonah was read, and a violent discussion ensued.  Those who knew Greek accused the translation of error.  The disturbance was so serious that the bishop had to consult the Jews, who apparently supported the local traditionalists.  The bishop then had to issue an apology, since he was at risk of losing his congregation.  After he narrates this episode to Jerome, Augustine adds tartly, "After this, it seems to us that you, also, among others, can be wrong." [14]

Augustine was the typical pastor and wanted harmony in the churches.  Jerome was the meticulous scholar.  In his reply, written in 404, Jerome lectures Augustine on his translation of Jonah.  The point may seem small to us, but we need to let the early Christians be themselves, for the congregation in Oea was willing to riot over one word - and not a word of great doctrinal importance - in the Bible.  After Jonah leaves Nineveh, he sits down in exhaustion, and a plant grows up to shade him.  The translation that the North Africans were familiar with had this plant as a gourd.  Jerome changed it to ivy.  Jerome explains that the Septuagint has "gourd," whereas Aquila and the other, later Jewish translators have "ivy," or kittos in Greek.  To rub the point in a bit, Jerome adds that the Hebrew word is ciceion (qiqayon in modern transcription), which in Syriac is ciceiam; surely he knew that Augustine knew neither Hebrew nor Syriac.  If he used the Hebrew word, Jerome writes, no one would understand; if he used gourd, he would be unfaithful to the Hebrew.  The local Jews, Jerome adds, are either liars or ignorant of Hebrew. [15]

For the next thousand years, few translations of the Bible were made.  Why was this?  One still reads that it was because the Catholic Church did not want the Bible translated, lest the people understand it.  But the situation was more complex.

The answer to the simple question, can the Bible be translated, may seem perfectly obvious to us.  But for much of Christian history, it was far from obvious.  Most of us simply assume that one can translate the Bible into another language just as one translates a novel, or instructions on how to set up a VCR.  (Perhaps the latter is a bad example.)  Secular colleges offer courses on the Bible as literature, so that the Bible is assimilated to other classics like Homer, Vergil, and Shakespeare.  But for the people of the early Middle Ages, for example, the formula was reversed: they did not read the Bible as literature, they read literature as the Bible. [16]  Non-biblical history and narrative were assimilated to biblical genres and categories.  The Bible was not one book among others on a shelf, but a divine oracle, sacred and filled with meaning in all its details, down to the very order of words and the apparent errors.  Even the book itself of Scripture was filled with power; "Roger of Hoveden records that the eyes of a murderess fell from her head as soon as she gazed on an open Psalter." [17]

Not every era was up to translating the Bible.  The Anglo-Saxons saw little point in rendering the Bible into what they considered a sub-standard dialect.  Put the other way around, the Bible could not be translated until acceptable principles of interpretation were established.  As an oracle, the Bible was ambiguous, and it was rash to translate what one could not interpret.  The translation of Scripture also implies the existence of a theology.  Once a translation is made, of course, the translation in turn influences theology.

There are moments that are right for the translation of the Bible.  The vernacular language must possess a certain prestige, so that it can bear the weight of God's word.  And theological language must have enough fluidity to permit some adjustment of its terms.  This conjunction was present at the end of the fourth century for Latin, and it was present in the sixteenth century for German and English.  Thus we have the Vulgate, Luther's German Bible, and the Authorized or King James Version, each of which was authoritative for centuries.

Dispute over the translation of the Bible is not restricted to the ancient or medieval worlds, or to the Reformation.  If anything, dispute over translation has become more intense, and more acrimonious, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A book written by Peter J. Thuesen and published in 1999, entitled In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible, [18] offers a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining narrative about disputes over the translation of the Bible into English.

Thuesen reminds us that the Authorized Version, or King James Bible, was for 270 years the sole Bible of Protestants, especially American Protestants.  No other translation had the authority of the King James Bible.  Thuesen writes that, when the Puritans adopted the King James Bible as their translation, "the words of 1611 became America's sacred lexicon, the language in which divinity addressed humanity." [19]

By 1870, however, the language of the King James Bible needed revision.  In that year, a translation committee was appointed in England, and soon some Americans were asked to join them.  The revised New Testament that they produced, based on a critical edition of the Greek testament, was released in the United States on May 20th, 1881.

The sensation that the translation caused is hardly imaginable today.  In New York City,  horse-drawn wagons lined up at 4:00 a.m. outside the offices of Thomas Nelson and Sons to obtain copies and deliver them to bookstores.  By 5:30, bookstores were selling copies, and by 3:00 p.m. a quarter of a million copies had been sold. [20]  Vendors hawked copies on Wall Street for a quarter, and the New York Herald quoted one old gent there who sniffed,  "They need it here badly enough, Lord knows!" [21]

Enthusiasm was not unanimous, however.  The translators had appealed to textual criticism, which led them to change some readings and delete some verses.  This decision shook the defenders of biblical inerrancy, for the question now had to be faced: if the Bible was inerrant, which Bible was inerrant?   Which original?  Which translation?

If the Revised Version, issued in the United States as the American Standard Version, was greeted with general enthusiasm, the same was not true of the next revision.

In April of 1930, a group known as the Standard Bible Committee began to meet to discuss a new revision; the eventual result was the Revised Standard Version.  The New Testament of the Revised Standard Version appeared in 1946, and the whole Bible on September 30, 1952.  That night, 3,418 Protestant groups held services of thanksgiving and dedication: 16,000 gathered in Pittsburgh, 6000 in Indianapolis, 6000 in Paterson, New Jersey, 5000 in Waterloo, Iowa, and so on.

But the celebrations were hardly over when the opposition began to gather its forces.  A Baptist pastor in North Carolina announced plans to burn the RSV in public. [22]  (Eventually, after a warning from the fire marshal, he burnt only one page, from Isaiah.)  In 1953, the House Unamerican Activities Committee investigated the RSV translators, and Senator Joseph McCarthy cast suspicion on the RSV as a product of the Red Menace.  A resolution was debated in the Michigan legislature to protest the sale and distribution of the RSV, on the grounds that our national security was threatened by the dissemination of godless ideologies. [23]  Early in 1960, a countersubversion training manual published by the U.S. Air Force Reserve warned recruits to avoid the communist-tainted RSV; the Secretary of Defense soon apologized. [24]

What was at stake?  The opponents of the RSV objected to any change that appeared to impugn the doctrine of the divinity of Christ; once again, it became clear that a translation of the Bible was expected to conform to doctrinal presuppositions.  Several texts caused particular rancor, but none drew so much attention as Is 7:14, which the RSV translated, "behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son."  In Rom 9:5, the problem was punctuation; a change in punctuation took away a proof-text for the divinity of Christ.   In Lk 24:6, the textually uncertain phrase "he is not here, he is risen" was omitted.

Open controversy over the RSV eventually died down, but opposition did not.  The most recent Protestant version of the Bible, the New International Version, is a deliberate substitute for the RSV and is enjoying great success among many Protestant congregations.

Lest Catholics be tempted to laugh at the Protestant wars over translations, they should recall that they, too, have entered the battle, albeit much later than the Protestants.

The classic English Catholic translation of the Bible was the one made at the English College in Douai, later moved to Rheims; hence it is called the Douai-Rheims Bible.  The New Testament was published in 1582, the Old Testament in 1609.  The translation was made from the Vulgate, not from the Hebrew and Greek texts.  Bishop Richard Challoner published a revision of the translation in 1750.  The translation was good, although it retained many Greek and Latin terms.

The Douai-Rheims-Challoner version remained the Catholic Bible for 360 years.  Then, early in 1944, members of the Catholic Biblical Association were asked to undertake a wholly new translation from the original languages.  The result is the New American Bible, published in 1970.  Despite its sometimes graceless style - the rendering of Lk 2:7, "because there was no room for them in the place where travelers lodged," has been the object of much ridicule - the NAB is the achievement of mature Catholic biblical scholarship.

In the past two or three decades, however, another element has come to the fore in the question of Bible translations - namely, an insistence that the translation should conform to the expectations or sensibilities of some of its readers or hearers.

Attempts to shape a translation of the Bible with external criteria are not wholly new.  When the Revised Standard Version was being made, the committee received many letters that suggested improvements in the Bible.  Some wanted "ass" replaced with "donkey," to avoid giggles in Sunday School.  (It wasn't.)  An official of the national leprosarium in Louisiana wanted the biblical stigma on leprosy softened.  A chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union wanted 1 Tim 5:23, "use a little wine for thy stomach's sake," changed; they were sure that Paul had meant pure, healthy grape juice.[25]

More recently, in Catholic circles, other requests have been made: for example, in Ps 118:16, "the right hand of the Lord is exalted," to substitute "mighty hand" for "right hand," since the translation "right hand" might offend those who are left-handed. Or, at Ps 107:10, "some sat in darkness and in gloom," to substitute "captivity" for "darkness," since the use of  "darkness" might offend people of color.  But, without a doubt, the strongest voices demanding new norms for translating the Bible have come from feminist circles, under the rubric of "inclusive language."

Perhaps the clearest instance of a recent dispute in Catholic circles over the translation of part of the Bible was the dispute over the ICEL Psalter.  ICEL, the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, prepared a new translation of the Psalter for liturgical use.  In 1995, the Psalter was published with an imprimatur.  In 1996, the Holy See instructed the American bishops to withdraw the imprimatur, and they did so in 1998.  One of the principles used by ICEL in its translation was that God was never to be referred to as "he," nor was any grammatically masculine pronoun or possessive adjective to be used of God.  After considerable debate, the committee did retain the title "Lord" for God.  While "inclusive language" was not the only reason for objections to the ICEL Psalter, it surely played a role in the controversy.

Catholics may snicker at Protestant outrage over the translation of a single Hebrew word in the prophet Isaiah.  But do they not sometimes sin in the opposite direction?  In some places these days, any parish assistant or campus minister feels authorized to go through the lectionary readings and change whatever is considered "offensive." What scholars spent two or three decades translating is now revised in the sacristy fifteen minutes before Mass.

With controversies like the one over "inclusive language," we see a change that calls for long and hard reflection.   The more radical forms of demands by feminists and others - and feminists are not the only ones demanding a voice in the translation of the Bible - represent nothing less  than a new epistemology.  With the dawn of Greek philosophy, the human quest was seen as a quest for truth, and the translators of the Bible sought to present the truest possible translation.  The rise of historicism changed the understanding of truth, but in general did not affect the way the Bible was translated.  Since the time of Karl Marx, however, the basic analytical category has shifted, for some, from truth to power.  For them, the root question was no longer, is it true? but, to whom does it give power?

This shift has affected the translation of the Bible, since "inclusive language" is understood in terms of power or empowerment.  The RSV has appeared in a new, "inclusive language" version, the NRSV.  For Catholics, a new version of the lectionary for Sundays, Solemnities, and Feasts was published in 1998.  It, too, makes a gesture toward "inclusive language," at least horizontally.  Unfortunately, the volume shows signs of haste, and translations are occasionally ungrammatical or even incomprehensible.

We do not know how the English language will develop in the future.  But we should ask what principles govern, or should govern, the translation of the Bible now.  One of the Bible's most distinctive teachings is that God made us in his image.  Do we dare to remake God's word in our image?  The temptation to place ourselves over God's word is surely never absent.  It appeared at the dawn of time, when the serpent said to Eve, "You will be like God" (Gen 3:5).   The spirit of the translator should rather be that of John the Baptist, "He must increase, but I must decrease" (Jn 3:30).

The Final Authority: Christ

In third place, I would like to consider the proposition that, for Christians, the final authority is not the Scripture but Christ.  It is different for orthodox Jews, for whom the Torah is God's final word, and every consonant of the text is sacred.  Scholars know how many letters each book has, and which is the first, the middle, and the last, so that no letter can ever be lost.  If the text needs to be emended, it is emended only in the margin, with vowels points inserted as reminders.  Some Jews even speculated that the Torah existed before creation as a hypostasis with God.

The vast majority of Christians do not have the same sense of awe before the biblical text.  We freely subject the Greek New Testament to textual criticism.  The Scripture we proclaim in worship is not Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek, but a translation.

In one of its summary statements, the Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes Hugh of St. Victor, who wrote: "All Sacred Scripture is one book, and that one book is Christ, because all divine Scripture speaks of Christ, and all divine Scripture is fulfilled in Christ." [26]

The Fathers of the Church recognized that the vast book of the Scriptures was open to misinterpretation, even distortion.  But there was a clear key to interpreting the Scriptures correctly, and that key was Christ.  Concretely, Christ, or right faith in Christ, was available in the rule of faith, a compact statement of the essence of Christian faith.  Without the rule of faith in Christ, the Scriptures are easily misinterpreted, because every interpreter comes to the Scriptures with his own set of presuppositions, as did, for example, the Gnostics, the Manichees, and the Arians.

A few examples will illustrate how the rule of faith in Christ operated concretely as a norm for the interpretation of Scripture.  The first great dispute over interpretation is attested by Irenaeus; he and the Gnostics read the same Scriptures but interpreted them very differently.   Irenaeus compared the Scriptures to a great supply of colored stones and gems.  The orthodox use them to make a splendid mosaic of the emperor; the Gnostics use the same stones and gems to make an ugly picture of a dog. [27]   For the right ordering of the stones and gems, Irenaeus appealed to the faith in Christ that every Christian has, a faith given shape in the "rule of faith."  In fact, he wrote, for those who have the rule of faith, the Scriptures are not even necessary.  Even the barbarians, who cannot read and write, believe in Christ and have salvation written in their hearts without paper or ink by the Spirit. [28]  In his dispute with the Arians, Athanasius of Alexandria wrote of the scope and character of the Scriptures, that is, of a principle of interpretation that applies to the whole of the Bible: namely, that the Bible contains a double account of the Savior, one of his eternal existence as the Son of God, and the other, beginning in time, as the son of Mary. [29]  This principle, the principle of the overarching skopos, must guide the interpretation of Scripture, lest one fall into the errors of the Arians.  St. Augustine expressed the principle in his own way, when he wrote, "I would not believe the Gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to this." [30]

Thus, in authentic Catholic teaching, Christ is the key to interpreting the Scriptures, and in particular the Old Testament.  The reality of Christ is present concretely in the rule of faith.  Every interpreter of the Scripture brings a set of presuppositions or expectations to the Scripture.  The Catholic principle says that the right presupposition for interpreting the Scripture is Christ himself in his holy Church; thus the authority of Christ stands over the authority of the words of Scripture.

The Non-Authority of Scripture

In Catholic teaching, we need to consider not only scriptural authority but also its limitations.  The authority of Scripture is limited in at least three ways.

First, the Hebrew and Greek texts are not fixed.  Textual criticism, archaeology, and comparative linguistics can always lead to a better text; the text is always open to emendation.

Second, no translation is finally authoritative; every translation can be improved.

Third, the Scriptures exist within the Church, and the Bible is the Church's book.  Or, phrased another way, the authority of Scripture is complemented by the authority of tradition, but it such a way that "sacred tradition and sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God."[31]

Conclusion

A few words in conclusion.  The Church has recognized the canon of the Scriptures and confessed that the Scriptures are inspired and inerrant.  The one key to rightly translating and interpreting the Scriptures is Christ, Christ the rule of truth.  But, someone may ask, is this assertion not just as much an exercise of power as the demand for inclusive language is?  Has not the Marxist epistemology simply acknowledged what has always been the case, that everyone strives for power but, for a long time, some managed to disguise the struggle for power as a quest for truth?  I do not think so.

  The three topics I proposed have a certain unity.  Christ stands over the Scriptures and is the key to their interpretation.  Faith accepts the canonical books as inspired and inerrant.  Translation is the first step in interpretation, and must therefore take place within the context of faith in Christ.  So the rule of faith is not one possible norm among others, but the one norm that makes it possible to read, translate, and interpret the Bible aright.  The rule of faith guided the Church as it recognized the canon of Scripture, and the rule of faith guided the interpretation of the Scriptures.

But the day will come when we will not need the Scriptures.  Let me close with the beautiful words of St. Augustine, who reminds us that the Scriptures accompany us on our way; they are not the goal.  Writing of the end time, he says:

When, therefore, our Lord Jesus Christ shall come and, as the apostle Paul says, "bring to light things hidden in darkness and make plain the secrets of the heart, so that everyone may receive his commendation from God," then lamps will no longer be needed.  When that day is at hand, the prophet will not be read to us, the book of the Apostle will not be opened, we shall not require the testimony of  John, we shall have no need of the Gospel itself.  Therefore all Scriptures will be taken away from us, those Scriptures which in the night of this world burned like lamps so that we might not remain in darkness.[32]