Several years ago when I was a young and dumb pastoral intern, I got into a debate with the pastor I was working with. One afternoon over coffee I made a passing comment about how we don’t know for sure who wrote the Pentateuch, that is, the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). A few days later, the pastor called me up asking me to join him for coffee again; he wanted to follow up on that comment.
I would consider this pastor to hold to a rather fundamentalist view of Scripture. If I was smart, I never would have made the comment in the first place…I just wasn’t thinking about the face that he probably felt quite differently from myself.
So we sat down, and he began, “I’m concerned about your view of Scripture. The other day you said that we don’t know who wrote the Pentateuch. The problem is that Jesus states very clearly that Moses wrote those books. Not to mention, that by rejecting known authorship, you’re rejecting the authority of Scripture. Authorship was a key factor in determining which books were inspired and which were not.”
Before I go on, here’s a little history for you – the real history of the Bible, not the DaVinci Code’s version. In the early 4th-century, Emperor Constantine called together a council for the purpose of laying out the official understanding of the Christian Church. There’s good reason for doing this: Constantine just declared Christianity to be the official state religion of the Roman Empire (largely a political move) and there needed to be a certain amount of consensus on some of the more difficult issues. At the time there were a number of groups running around claiming to be the true church, and so things needed to be worked out. Despite the opinions of some, there is overwhelming evidence that the council did not decided to consider Jesus God at that point and determine which books were to be excluded based on the council member’s own male-dominated, power-hungry opinions. Rather, the council merely acted to affirm the most widely accepted beliefs present at that time. Many of their decisions have since become the “essentials of the faith” – those points of doctrine that a Christian absolutely must hold to in order to be considered a Christian.
With regards to closing the Canon (a fancy word for the 66 books of the Christian Bible), one factor among many used to determine divine inspiration was authorship of the book under consideration. However, this point of criteria applies primarily to the New Testament books and is only one of several tests used. The it worked was rather simple: if a book was generally agreed to have been authored by an Apostle (there were a few dissenters), than it was considered authoritative and inspired. For the Christian Old Testament, the books included are those long recognized (going back at least several hundred years) by Jews as divinely inspired.
This is all background information. The point I was attempting to make to my pastor-mentor is that the Bible does not get its authority from the people who wrote it…the Bible’s authority comes from the truth contained within its pages; truth that has long been recognized as “God-breathed” by Christians all the way back to the early 2nd-century. My pastor was unable to handle this distinction. For him, the authority was necessarily tied to who wrote the books. In other words, as I understand his position, if one could prove that Moses did not in fact write the Pentateuch, then the authority of the words contained within those 5 books came into question.
I can’t help but to ask, “WHY?” Why does that have to be the case? Why can’t the Bible be authoritative despite who wrote it? Isn’t God capable of working through whoever He chooses? Haven’t people been led to the Lord through those who personally rejected the message they preached for their own gain? Doesn’t God’s sovereignty stand for anything anymore?
As I’m sure you can tell by this point, I don’t put a whole lot of weight on the authorship argument. I just feel that if you’re going to be serious about the nature of Scripture, then you’ll admit that the Bible’s authority for our lives is inherent within its pages…no other criteria is necessary.
Filed under: Bible Study, Ministry, Theology
