[Another in the series of “Responding to Bumper Stickers,” or “Long Answers to Short Questions,” in which I try to give a Latter-day Saint response to a question or accusation commonly lobbed against us on X.]
A lot of the disagreements between Latter-day Saints and creedal Christians are really about implicit definitions that undergird whatever the argument seems to be about on the surface.
One entire genre of debate rests on unshared assumptions about the New Testament. So let’s unpack what this Latter-day Saint, at least, believes about the New Testament.
Q: Is the New Testament inerrant?
How could it possibly be? How can anything divine that inspires a fallible, finite human mind, which is then processed through imperfect human language, ever be inerrant in the best of cases? It’s a widescreen technicolor epic being experienced via VHF broadcast to a 12″ black-and-white TV. Visual detail and nuance is lost; dynamic audio range is curtailed and tinny.
And that’s while the ink is still wet. Then you have to content with the fact that we aren’t the original audience for those texts. Paul’s letters were to people whom he had previously met, with whom he had a shared history, to whom he could make reference to previous teachings without spelling them out. Revelation begins with messages to seven churches which would understand pointed references which John makes to each of them. The gospels were written with the assumption that the readers would know contemporary Greek as either a first or second language, that they would understand the background of the Roman world without it being explained to them.
And finally, you have copying errors, variant texts, likely interpolations by people looking to “improve” the text…
Fortunately, nothing in the New Testament says that the New Testament is inerrant. The closest that those defending inerrancy can find is 2 Timothy 3:16:
All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.
…which is not the same thing as saying it’s inerrant.
Q: Is the New Testament complete?
The question itself needs to be questioned before it can be answered: What do you mean by “complete”?
Do you mean that it’s a full record of all that Jesus and the apostles taught? That’s obviously not true; John says,
And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. (John 21:10)
Of the original Twelve Apostles (even counting Matthias in place of Judas Iscariot), we have minimal correspondence ascribed to four of them; the majority of the non-gospel documents in the New Testament are from one man, who wasn’t even knew Jesus during His ministry.
Do you mean that the New Testament contains all foundational truths which Christianity needs? Two answers to that:
- Most of the epistles that Paul and company were written to the people to whom they, y’know, addressed the epistles, dealing with questions and challenges specific to those congregations and answering their questions. There’s not much indication that they were writing for futurity nearly as much as they were writing for the here-and-now. Theological controversies in the ensuing centuries, after a “canon” had been standardized, have been and continue to be characterized by conflicting interpretations over questions as fundamental as, “Should there be a priesthood?” or “Do you have to be baptized?” Everyone has wondered, What did Paul write to the Laodiceans that he thought was just as valuable as what he wrote to the Colossians? Just think what else we would know, and how our understanding would be anchored, if we had a few other epistles or records of teachings from the other apostles.
- Was a collection of documents itself supposed to be the foundation? Both Jesus and His apostles (and the Seventy) preached in person. Baptisms, blessings, the laying on of hands, all were performed by people with God-given authority. Letters were very much an afterthought, necessitated by the distances involved, and they only assumed so much weight in a post-apostolic world in which they were made to take the place of actual live apostles who could teach with authority.
Q: So are you denigrating the New Testament?
Far from it, although it may look that way if you see it as the end-all be-all of God’s intended revelation on His Son. The writings of the New Testament are, as Paul said of scripture as a whole, “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” Further, I think that the eventual compilers of the New Testament canon did a pretty good job of including only things that seemed authentic, and rejecting things that didn’t smell right (such as the apocryphal “Epistle to the Laodiceans” floating around, which seems to be just a clumsy pastiche of the Pauline epistles). Were there other epistles and gospels that should have been included? Very likely, although we don’t even know that the rest of the apostles even wrote (or dictated) epistles, and it’s awful easy for handwritten manuscripts that originally existed in a single copy held by a persecuted semi-underground sect to have been lost without ever being copied.
But the fact is that the New Testament that we have is first and foremost an artifact — a fragmentary record of the whole of Christian teaching preached either by those who had been chosen by Jesus during His ministry, or those who been called of God and given authority and inspiration to teach; both bodies presumably taught far more, in both breadth and depth, in emulation of their Master whose acts “even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” I would propose that practically all of the theological and doctrinal controversies which began within a century of the writing of those disparate documents were answered in the in-person teaching of the apostles.
My own metaphor of choice is that the New Testament is a fossil (a dinosaur fossil, because I like dinosaurs):
It preserves many of the important, load-bearing parts of apostolic teaching. Some of it is disjointed, but with a bit of figgering and some experimentation, we can articulate what bones we have.
But it’s so incomplete. We’re missing all of the binding soft tissue. We have to guess at the muscles that tied it all together, and as far as skin texture and/or feathers, we’re mostly on our own. (To say mothing of coloration!) We can’t be sure how it behaved, what exactly it ate, what its social structures were. (Remember the dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park — the “spitter”? The venom was an addition of Crichton’s in the novel, and Spielberg and crew added the neck fringe. No fossil evidence points to either, but especially in the case of the venom, there’s no reason to say it didn’t have that ability. We just can’t tell from the bones.)
At least paleontologists try to reconstruct what the living animal could have been like. But some strains of Christianity insist that the bones is all there was, or at least it’s all we need to understand the creature completely. Nothing is missing. Nothing is necessary. Why, the dinosaur is actually alive as-is! But as much as they say that… dem bones, dem bones, dey don’t walk around.
I am not dissing historic Christianity. For the most part, they have done the best they could with what they had. But too many of them have insisted that it’s complete because it’s what they had.
Whereas I say that no number of ancient documents, no matter how trustworthy they are, can equal the living creature.