[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 claim 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.
For the record, the same church at which I learned of salvation through faith as opposed to works-based salvation also taught a class on doctrine (which I experienced second-hand when my mother was homeschooling me, as we had by then moved to a different state with a very different selection of churches when I was ten years old) on these very subjects. To give an executive summary of its teachings, yes, the New Testament is inerrant—in its original form (a very important qualifier, in case my use of italics for emphasis didn’t clue you in). While the teachers of my Sunday School classes used the King James Version extensively, it was always commonly understood that it was only a translation, that other translations could be accurate as well, and that one ultimately has to go back to the original texts in their original contexts to unlock the Bible’s full meaning (i.e. those finer nuances).
Of course, something else commonly understood in my old church (and in my family after we moved away) was that the New Testament was founded on the Old Testament (also inerrant in its original form) and that it wouldn’t make much sense without that foundation. Throughout his ministry, Yeshuah (Jesus is the anglicized Greek version of his name) made constant references to the Old Testament, going so far as to say (in Matthew 5:18) that not so much as a yodh (the smallest Hebrew letter, which looked something like an apostrophe) nor a stroke of the pen (i.e. a serif on any of those Hebrew letters) of the Law (i.e. the Pentateuch) would ever perish before the very earth and sky (which the ancient heathens with their cyclical thinking believed to be eternal things) were destroyed. Self-proclaimed “Christians” who try to pretend the New Testament somehow nullifies the Old Testament’s teachings (as the heretical Marcion of Sinope infamously did) are therefore going directly against Christ’s teaching there; it’s rather contradictory to claim to be a Christian when going against the Christ for whom our faith is named.
The main problem with the Bible’s original form is getting at some of that context: as you say, the text we have is the bare bones of our faith. Faith also requires the muscles and flesh and blood of sacramental worship, practical application, and personal communion with our God. Still, those bare bones don’t lie—unless (like the “archaeoraptor” or “Piltdown Chicken” hoax) one puts them together wrong; which is one reason why my old church’s teachings on doctrine put a particular emphasis on 2 Timothy 2:15’s talk of proper handling or (particularly in the KJV and its derivatives) “rightly dividing” our Scriptures.
There’s also the problem of languages and the words they use being rather slippery items: so much so that God even threatened Israel in Deuteronomy 28:49 (and again in Jeremiah 5:15) with the punishment of being invaded by a nation speaking a language they wouldn’t be able to understand. The original manuscripts of the Old Testament are primarily in Hebrew and Aramaic, and yet by New Testament times, most Jews outside of Judea itself (and even many within it) were working from the Koine Greek translation known as the Septuagint. Aside from Koine Greek already being a rather lowly dialect of the language (nowhere near so orderly and sophisticated as the kind of Greek e.g. Socrates spoke in his time), the kind of Greek John uses in his Gospel and his three letters is so substandard that it could be considered a pidgin language, comparing to the standard Greek of his time roughly as Gullah compares to standard modern-day English.
Then there’s Luke, who (out of the four Gospel writers) was a native speaker of Greek and therefore the best at writing it. Ironically—however—he likely had to write his Evangelium and Acta originally in Latin, as he was writing to “Most Excellent” (Kratiste in Greek, Carissima in Latin) Theophilus; “Most Excellent” is how one addressed a man of Senatorial rank in Rome, something like how we address judges as “your Honor” in court these days. Hence, the Greek manuscripts we have of his writings were undoubtedly re-translated from his original Latin manuscripts (which the good Senator sponsoring his works had likely gotten copied in Rome so that it might be distributed to other churches throughout the Empire).
Of course, even within the same language, words have a way of changing their meanings over distance and time. For just one example, having “a gay old time” (as the old Flintstones cartoon theme song assured us we would) would mean something extremely different nowadays from what it did back in the 1960s; and what people in the UK refer to as “college” is what we describe as the junior and senior years of high school here in the USA.
Fortunately, due in good part to archaeology and to the historical records of our ancestors (fragmentary though many of them are), we do have considerable context to help understand the Bible in its original form. Courtesy of Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio Cassius, and Josephus (among others), we have detailed records of what was going on in Judea and the rest of the Roman Empire throughout Jesus’ and the Apostles’ ministries. Thanks in good part to what our archaeologists have dug up in Israel and throughout the Middle East, we also know a fair amount about what was going on throughout those Old Testament times. (Why was the prophet Jonah so determined to flee from his assignment of prophesying God’s words to Nineveh warning of its impending doom? Try reading some of the Assyrian Kings’ tablets full of their old war stories casually bragging of all the mass tortures and mutilations and slaughters they inflicted on their vanquished foes, and you’ll see why.)
Concerning Paul’s letter to the Laodiceans, I should point out that the passage referencing it (Colossians 4:16) actually refers to it as coming from the Laodiceans, though it was obviously his letter since he wanted the Colossians to exchange the letter he wrote to them for it. While the letter might have been one he wrote specifically to the Laodiceans, his instructions to exchange letters strongly imply that it was one of several such circular letters he had written with the intent that it be distributed to all churches. He wrote another such letter around this same time that we know today as his epistle to the Ephesians—although only because they were the first ones to receive it; a far likelier explanation of what that “letter from the Laodiceans” he mentions in that passage, therefore, is that it was one of the many copies of his letter the Ephesians had made and mailed off to the other churches and which had now reached Laodicea.
As for the importance of preaching in person, it’s true that in the Old and New Testaments alike, this made up the bulk of every man of God’s ministry; yet God saw fit to make these prophets (or sometimes their helpers, as with Jeremiah’s secretary Baruch in particular) write down what they were preaching for the benefit of future generations. Why else would we have the writings of the likes of Amos, Jonah, Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, to name just a few? As in those earlier times, God continues to preserve those writings that tell us what we need to know: “blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe” (John 20:29) and in the words of Matthew 26:11, “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
Speaking of what we need to know, and concerning the final words of John’s Gospel (21:10, which you cited), what he basically says there is “I could have written a lot more—we all could—but I think I’ve made my point.” A point the pastor at the church I’m currently attending brought up last year, and which I’ve also discussed with friends in a certain Bible study group is: how much Scripture does one truly have to know in order to be saved? For all the Bible’s complexities, salvation is not reserved only for scholars fluent in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek and Latin who can understand all the nuances of any passage anywhere in the Bible well enough to explain it in depth and at length.
While the scholarly Jews who wrote the Talmud would probably love to bicker with each other endlessly over this question (and probably have; I haven’t read enough of that door-stopper of a volume to know), I do know that in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus had Father Abraham telling the rich man in Hell that his five brothers still living could be spared his fate if only they would listen to and obey “Moses and the Prophets” (Luke 16:29-31) i.e. the Pentateuch and the histories in the Books of Samuel and Kings along with the “major” and “minor” prophets of the Old Testament—long before the first word of the New Testament was written and not even counting supplementary writings of the Old Testament like the Books of Chronicles or Job or Ecclesiastes and the like. Also, though the Jews listening to Jesus at the time did have a comparatively high literacy rate, a great many of them (possibly including that rich man and his brothers in the parable) were still illiterate and would therefore need someone else who was literate to read those Scriptures to them; hence the part about “listening” to them. Moreover, in the aforementioned Moses’ time, Israel had only that Pentateuch, and the vast majority of them were illiterate and needed someone to read it to them; and before that, Father Abraham himself had enough faith in God to get him into Heaven back when what would eventually be written down in Genesis was (probably) still an oral record.
All that said, I should also point out that in all these teachings from Jesus and the Apostles and their Old Testament predecessors, I’m not seeing any room for a sequel or any parallel writings. Part of the whole point of the Reformation was that Martin Luther (and John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli, among others) had noticed the ecclesial authorities of their time were interpolating and extrapolating an awful lot into the Gospel teachings that simply wasn’t there, e.g. where did Jesus or any of the Apostles ever speak of indulgences, or of “meriting the blood of Christ” or of Papal infallibility? Then, as now, the corrupt clergy (a great many of whom were shockingly ignorant of the very Scriptures they were supposed to be preaching) seemed to be very much like the Scribes and Pharisees Jesus condemned in Mark 7:6-7 for replacing God’s teachings with their own.
If anything, the Reformers were looking to strip away the dubious “supplementary” teachings the clergy had affixed to Jesus and his Apostles’ teachings like so many barnacles, not add to them. In many ways, the clergy had become like the many Gnostics and Judaizers and legalists in Paul’s time who had tried to roll Christianity up into some grander religious scheme with “deeper” learning and more elite ranking to be had: sure, basic Christianity is fine, but Christianity and [circumcision/a kosher diet/praying to Saints/Spiritualism/etc.] is even better! They were certainly not looking to write any new Scriptures.
Like those Reformers before me and like Paul and the other Apostles before them, therefore, color me skeptical whenever anyone comes proclaiming some new revelation is to be added to the Bible’s canon. Invariably, said “revelation” contradicts Scripture, usually quite brazenly and in a way obviously intended to trick Christians into accepting things like baby butchery, Climate Cultism, homosexuality, transer rubbish, polyamory, Liberation Theology, and religious syncretism into the church. (I’ve seen a church that fell prey to this kind of “revelation” in a town near where I live: it’s got a painting of one of those new epilepsy-inducing rainbow flags from the Alphabet Soup Nazis on a big granite edifice near its entrance and a sign reading “Everyone is welcome here!” to which I say “Everyone except God Himself… and any actual Christians, that is.”)
Long story short, while we can never truly understand all the finer details of everything in the Bible, it’s historically grounded, divinely inspired, has a proper ending (and John’s Book of Revelation, I should point out, is merely the capstone to numerous other prophecies and teachings about the End Times found elsewhere in both the Old and New Testaments), and plenty of instructions on what we are to be doing while we await that end. In short, yes it is sufficiently inerrant and complete. What teachings we have in the Bible are already far more than we need; and we do not need even more than that.