In Saint Augustine’s Confessions, the Doctor of Grace reflects on how he was not able to understand the teachings of the Christian faith because he could not “conceive of any substance but such as [he] saw with [his] own eyes.” Augustine initially believed nothing existed but the material and lacked the categories in his thinking to conceive of something that was spirit and not matter. Before he could come to believe in the Christian faith, he had to overcome this barrier, and so prepare his mind to be able to receive the seed of faith.
With the eyes and heart of someone who has returned to faith, I now reflect back on the questions I asked when I was losing it. My hope is that by reflecting on some of the questions I had, anyone who is searching and troubled by the barriers I faced will come to see, like I did, that they can be overcome, and that Christian faith is indeed reasonable.
Question One: How can you believe the incredible things in the Bible are real?
This question is only really troublesome if you presuppose that God does not exist. If we do not suppose that, and believe it is at least possible that God exists, then there really is not anything truly incredible in Scripture, in the sense of being beyond the realm of possibility. An all-powerful God could certainly do things like part the Red Sea or raise someone from the dead.
Question Two: How can the Bible be the word of God when it is full of errors?
To begin with, “full of errors” is a great exaggeration, even if you take lists of errors in the Bible offered online at face value. Many of the so-called errors are things like whether Soloman had 40,000 stalls for his horses, or 4000. Discrepancies like these are easily explained by scribal errors; someone accidentally left out a zero, and no difference is made to the meaning or message of the text.
Addressing the inerrancy of Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 107 says this:
The inspired books teach the truth. “Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.”
A key part of this is the end of the paragraph: “teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.” It is not a blow to the truth of the Bible when minor unimportant copying errors sneak into the text, and no message is lost by these errors. In his 82nd letter, St. Augustine addresses the topic of errors in scripture when he writes these words to St. Jerome:
For I confess to your Charity that I have learned to yield this respect and honor only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error. And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it.
St. Augustine here provides a model for how we should deal with supposed contradictions in scripture. First, is it really a contradiction or am I simply misunderstanding it? Second, can it be explained by a copyist’s error? Third, is the translation at fault? Jumping to the conclusion that scripture is errant and “full of errors” is a leap at best, and is certainly not a strong argument for disbelief in God.
Question Three: How can I trust a Bible that is just copies of copies from the original?
Anyone who is familiar with the game of telephone can understand where this question is coming from. In telephone, a group of people sit in a circle or row and the first person in the chain whispers something to the second, the second repeats it to the third, and so on until the last person receives the message. The last person then announces the message they received, and everyone gets a good laugh at how much the message has changed.
Is the Bible just like telephone, where after it was written it was copied, then copies were made of copies, in a chain until today? Not exactly. When a copy was made of a manuscript, the one it was copied from did not cease to exist, and could be used to make more copies. Additionally, unlike telephone, the stakes were extremely high.
Considering that the people copying the Bible were likely devout Jews and Christians, they believed and feared the consequences of deliberately changing things to their liking, and so took seriously the duty to reproduce the texts exactly. Even so, mistakes can enter into the transmission, which is where the field of textual criticism comes in.
To liken all this to a game of telephone would mean playing telephone with a group of people who all took the duty to repeat exactly what they heard seriously, could ask the person before them to repeat what they said as many times as they want (a manuscript does not disappear when you read it!), could ask not just the person before them but people down the line many links before them what they said, and scholars would scrutinize the messages along the way to see exactly where mistakes enter into the transmission.
When all is said and done, we can be confident that the Bible we have today is accurate to what it originally said, and it isn’t simply the end of a long game of telephone.
Discoveries from the ancient world related to scripture confirm for us that the Bible we have today is indeed accurate to the original. Famously, the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm that the books of scripture used at the time of Christ match the later manuscripts we currently possess in content. We do not just have to trust that the books of scripture we have today match the content of the originals, we have good evidence to believe they are very, very close.
Connor P. Fitzmaurice
Connor P. Fitzmaurice is an Augustinian novice, an amateur writer, and a chess player. He is an adult convert to the Catholic faith, and he is passionate in his desire to share that faith with others.
