INTRODUCTION TO THE READING OF THE SACRED SCRIPTURES (Excerpts from the Purpose of

the Bible by Eugene H. Maly. The New American Bible)

The English word “Bible” comes from the Greek ta biblia which means “The Books,” a
name well-chosen since the Bible is a collection of many individual works and not a product of
a single person.

I. INSPIRATION
The Bible is the Word of God. That is the commonly accepted phrase that expresses belief in
inspiration. And by “inspiration” is meant that the Spirit of God was at work in the
community of Israel and in the early Christian community to produce through a number of
human authors, a series of books that witness to God’s revelation of himself through
history.

How did inspiration work? Since we are dealing with an action of God in the words of men
and women, we can never fully understand or explain what happened; inspiration partakes
of the mystery of God Himself. There are certain explanations of inspiration, however, that
the Church has discarded as being unworthy either of God or the human author. One of
these is the so-called “Divine Dictation” Theory. According to this idea, God alone is
responsible for the content of the Bible. The human authors were merely recording
machines, or robots, who wrote down what God, in some unknown way, dictated to them.
Another explanation is the so-called “Negative Assistance” Theory. According to this
theory, the human authors were alone responsible for the writing of the books except when
they were in danger of leading the reader into religious errors. Then, God in some way,
intervened and directed the author to the truth. The same must be said of the so-called
“subsequent Approbation” theory, in which God approved of the Bible only after it was
completed. While the Church has rejected these theories of Inspiration, she has not
officially adopted any one explanation as her own. We can, however point to two elements
that must be guarded in any explanation that is given”

1. God is actively present in a unique manner in the composition of the biblical books.
2. The human authors exercised their freedom in making use of their own talents and
resources, in cooperation with the Spirit of God, in composing the sacred books.
Thus, Pope Benedict XV, in the Encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus, wrote that “the individual authors
of these books worked in full freedom under the divine inspiration, each of them in accordance
with his individual nature and character”. This conviction was repeated by Pius XII in the
Encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (#33) and by the Second Vatican council (Dei Verbum #11).
Because of this human element, we can rightly say the Bible is the Word of God in the words of
Men (and Women).

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 II. REVELATION

Revelation means God’s showing of Himself by word and act to his people. This self-
revelation took place primarily in history: in the lives of the patriarchs, in the saving
events of the Exodus, in the history of Israel, the people of God, and finally and most
fully in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Reasons why this divine self-revelation had to be recorded:

1. For correct interpretation
2. For preservation.
Because of the oral tradition was put down in written words, we who live in an age
far distant from that time of God’s self revelation are assured that we have a true
picture of God. We meet him in the words of the Bible as he revealed himself then
and as we cannot meet him an any other book.

III. UNITY OF THE BIBLE

The Bible was composed over a period of more than one thousand years. The
human authors involved in its composition varied greatly in their background,
education, social and cultural insights, and even, to an extent, their religious
perspective. Moreover, they were frequently unaware of what other inspired
authors were saying or, especially of what would be said later on. There will be
differing pictures of God, but not conflicting pictures of God. The most basic source
of unity and the one unifying theme of biblical revelation is, not surprisingly, the one
God himself. It is the very same God who reveals himself in so many richly divergent
ways on every page of the Scriptures. In other words, there are different ways of
presenting God by reason of the different experiences of the biblical authors, but
God is the one and same God.

IV. COMPLETENESS OF THE BIBLE

The Bible is (in some way) complete in its revelation inasmuch as it contains all the
God willed to reveal of Himself in this inspired form. It is because of this
completeness of the Bible that one scholar has referred to what is called
“constitutive revelation”. What this literally means is that the Bible is the
constitution of, or the essential basis for, our understanding of God and his will for
salvation. But – and this is where we want to explain the phrase “in some way” ---
God does continue to reveal Himself to the world in the period after the bible,
although not in the form of biblical inspiration. He reveals himself in the Church

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 through the councils, through what Catholics call the magisterium, or the “teaching
authority of the Popes and bishops” and through the lives of our people. In the
Catholic faith, this has been called “Tradition.”

This ongoing revelation of God in history and in the Church, however, does not mean
something totally different form the revelation in the Bible. Rather, it is necessarily
and intimately associated with that revelation….Thus, the Bible and Tradition go
hand in hand. As the Fathers of Vatican II put it, “Sacred Tradition and Sacred
Scriptures form one sacred deposit of the Word of God, which his committed to
the Church” (Dei Verbum # 10). In a sense, Tradition if Scripture lived in the Church.

V. SACRAMENTALITY OF THE BIBLE

In the book of Isaiah, God says:

10
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it
without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for
the sower and bread for the eater, 11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It
will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the
purpose for which I sent it. Isa.55:10-11)

This passage speaks so convincingly of the power of God. Modern scholars refer to
this effect of inspiration as the sacramentality of the Word. It means that the biblical
Word has some similarity to the seven sacraments. In a sacrament, there is a real
encounter with God through Jesus Christ. In the biblical Word, it has a similar effect
when it is read or listened to in the openness of faith; it brings God in his self-
revelation closer to us. That is why the Church encourages the reading of the
Scriptures and why she attaches so much the importance to the Liturgy of the Word.

VI. THE TRUTH OF THE BIBLE

In the bible, we learn the truth about God and about his will for the world’s
redemption in Jesus Christ. But the truth of the Bible has often been grossly
misunderstood as giving us precise answers to scientific, historical, geographical and
other problems. This misunderstanding flows from an excessive concern for the
literal meaning of the words (Eg. The stories in Gen 1 ) The Bible must be understood
in the sense in which it was intended by God and by the biblical authors. All their
purpose was not to write history book in the modern Western sense of that term,
but to set forth the history of God’s salvation.
VII. THE CANON OF THE BIBLE
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 Canonization of the inspired literature is the process whereby the books are
recognized as inspired. For Catholics, the process was completed in 1546 AD when
the Council of Trent explicitly and authoritatively announced the canon of seventy-
three books of the Bible. The institutional Church, through its magisterium, that
made the decision, as Trent’s decree dictates.

Some standards used by the Church were the following: the inner unity or
cohesiveness of the books, their apostolic origin, their ability to foster prayer and
love; and their acceptance by the local Christian community. In the end, however,
our basic assurance of the correctness of this canon rest on faith in the guidance of
the Church by the Holy Spirit.

The books that are not included by the Protestants are namely: 1 & 2 Maccabees,
Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Wisdom, Baruch and some addition to the Book of Daniel and
Esther. Catholics refer to these books as deuterocanonical (“Second-listed”),
meaning that they were conclusively accepted only after some debate.

VIII. TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE

The OT was written, for the most part, in Hebrew.

The whole of the OT was translated into Greek about two hundred years before
Christ. It is known as the Septuagint. It was used by Christian missionaries among the
Greek speaking pagans. The whole of the NT was written in Greek.

When Latin became the dominant language and the missionaries took Christianity to
other peoples who did not know Greek, it was clear that translations had to be
made.

First among the [translations] was the Latin Vulgate (meaning common) version
done by St. Jerome in the later part of the 4rth Century AD.
From this Latin Vulgate, the Douay-Rheims English was made in the last part of the
sixteenth century.

Among the English-speaking Protestant Christians, the most influential translation

was the Authorized Version (more commonly known in the US as the King James
Version), completed in 1611.

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 When Pius XII issued his Encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943, the door was
opened for new Catholic translations that were not dependent on St. Jerome’s Latin
Vulgate. Because of the great increase in the knowledge of the ancient biblical
languages, official translations directly from them were encouraged. In 1970, the
New American Bible, done for the most part of the American Catholic scholars, was
completed. It is the first American Catholic translation to have been based on the
original languages rather than on the Vulgate.

The Revised Standard Version is the least interpretative of all, striving for word-for-
word fidelity to the original text. The Jerusalem Bible and the New English Bible
strive for even more contemporary language. The Good News Bible is quite
interpretative, striving to render the meaning, rather than the words, of the original
text.

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