THE BI8LE SUBDIVIDED: PART 1

 I chose the word “subdivide” on purpose since one way of viewing the various borders in the Bible separating one section from another is perhaps by using an extended analogy with the way physical space is divided up. As a typical example of divided space I will start with the medium-size town in which I now live.

Two Testaments

If my town is compared to the Bible, then the first thing to note is it can be seen to have an older community located on one side of the interstate highway and actually called “Old Town” in our particular case. But more recent explosive growth has expanded greatly the geographical boundaries of the town in a ring circling “Old Town” and dwarfing it in combined area and population. A quite similar situation occurs in the Bible wherein the Old Testament, at least for Christians, has been supplemented and overshadowed to a great extent by the addition of the New Testament to the Canon of Scripture.

And in both cases, this expansion is accompanied not only by a quantitative change but by a qualitative one as well. To explain what I mean, the older part of town contained all of its administrative offices, courts, DMV, library, firehouses, etc. So when expansion took place further and further away from this center, the newer occupied areas still had to rely on these vital offices for a number of needed facilities even if it became harder and harder to reach them. Instead the newer developments predominantly consisted of housing developments supplemented with a few large grocery stores, fast food venues, and medical offices. In other words, all the modern amenities most people might require on a fairly frequent basis.

In the same manner, the composition of the books in the Old Testament such as those devoted to laws, history, and prophecy tends to be quite different from that found in the New Testament. It is true that both testaments contain a large amount of historical material, But the NT has much less emphasis on prophecy and very little on laws per se. Instead we find a large number of communications addressed to particular fledgling congregations attempting to give them practical ad hoc advice regarding some specific problems they are experiencing as well as counsel to new church leaders concerning how to deal with various church problems they have been having or will be likely to encounter in the course of their pastoral duties.

Returning to the city: Although most of its inhabitants accept all of the present boundaries of the city as valid, their heart may really belong to only one half of it. So we get those living in the older portion of town moaning and groaning about how much better it was in the good old years before the rampant growth took place while those in the suburbs tend to feel that the old-timers are resisting the inevitable future. And there is the same divide among those who accept both the Old and New Testament as inspired by God. On the one hand, there are the majority of church groups who call themselves “New Testament Christians,” who may only reluctantly agree that the teachings and events in the Old Testament were a necessary preparation for the eventual appearance of Jesus Christ who fulfilled those teachings in every way. And I have met extreme examples of congregations in which the study of Old Testament books is unofficially forbidden on Sunday morning.

But on the other hand, there are the Bible churches which actually teach that the New Testament era in which we now live is a “mere parenthesis” in the overall plan God has for the Jewish people. I know from experience that some of those in that general group even start their own sub-groups within a congregation in which the participants have their own services during church time patterned after the Jewish rituals. And I visited one small congregation in which the men who were leaders felt that they needed to grow their beards long in order to obey OT practices. This particular sub-group has its roots going all the way back to the early church where they were known as the Judaizers and roundly condemned by Paul.

The Canon of Scripture

The inevitable growth taking place in an area like ours which still has available land for development adjacent to the city boundaries gives rise to two opposite trends. One the one hand are those politicians who see any sort of growth good since it adds to their power base. They are constantly proposing that the city annex new property whether or not we have the infrastructure and resources to support it. But on the other hand, some of the larger communities on the outskirts of the city boundaries feel that they are being inadequately served by the existing government centered far away from where they are living. Thus, they are always threatening to secede unless their demands are met, and are catered to since they represent a very powerful and unified voting bloc.

Those same sorts of opposing trends can be seen in church history. The official canon of God-inspired writings developed by a sort of consensus among individual Christian communities over the first centuries AD. Eventually the New Testament canon was agreed upon. But there was some controversy regarding the number of acceptable OT books. Since most of the early church leaders at the time were fluent in Greek but knew little or no Hebrew or Aramaic, they tended to rely on the early Greek translation known as the Septuagint for guidance. However, that collection contained a number of additional writings which we know as the Apocrypha.

The feeling among the majority of leaders in the church when the canon was slowly being formulated was that these particular books must have been part and parcel of the official Jewish canon (which they actually weren't) and therefore must be accepted (annexed) into the Christian canon. It wasn't until much later during the the time of the Reformation that Christian scholars came to recognize that there was no hard evidence that any but maybe one of two of the writings in the Apocrypha were actually written in Hebrew to begin with. Therefore, especially as the Reformation Movement proceeded to grow in strength, the new Protestant groups began to treat the Apocryphal books with growing suspicion and either discarded (de-annexed) them from the Canon or grouped them in a separate portion of the printed Bibles with an explanation that these writings contained instructive material but should not be used to establish any official church doctrines. Such a note was necessary since the Medieval church teachings regarding purgatory and the practice of selling indulgences had their “Scriptural” basis only in the Apocrypha. Of course, with time even the Roman Catholic Church relented somewhat and relegated some of the Apocryphal books to the status of “deuterocanonical.”

Unfortunately, that didn't stop the process of annexing and de-annexing biblical material. Thus, we have the Mormons who have basically replaced the whole Bible with their own “inspired” writings; the Christian Scientists who have re-interpreting the Bible out of all semblance to its original meaning; and the Jehovah Witnesses with their faulty Bible translation designed to get rid of the whole concept of the Trinity. And that doesn't include the vast number of tiny cult offshoots which continue to pop up all the time.