Two very interesting posts at T&S (as well as the ensuing discussions), have got me thinking about how we approach the bible in our church. This is not a new topic for me, despite my complete lack of familiarity with the scholarly knowledge-base surrounding it. And despite that ignorance, I thought it might be worthwhile to re-publish an old post of mind about my difficulties with the bible, to see what thoughts it might elicit from the very sophisticated audience here.
The Invisible Clauses of the Eighth Article of Faith
The Eighth Article of Faith reads as follows: We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.*
*and we mean “translated correctly” in the loosest sense, contemplating caveats for historical omissions, bad-faith additions, and all the weird stuff that’s just too strange to accept.
You may never have seen that little coda there at the end, but for most of the church, it is real and relevant. Once, while reading the New Testament with a group, I asked what Jesus meant when he said he came not to send peace but a sword. The leader of the group said simply: “That’s a mistranslation,” and moved on.
I’ve recently had some very involved arguments about what happens to scripture once you open the door of allowing that there is unspecified error in it. (See here and here, if you have the stomach for it). And I think Article of Faith number Eight suffers from the same problem: we have opened the door of errancy in the book, and from there it’s an easy ride to not really being sure if any of it happened at all. How do we Latter-day Saints draw the line between the truth and error of the Bible?
Of course our perspective differs based on which part of the Bible we’re talking about. It seems the New Testament is accepted almost wholesale among members of the church (with some holdouts on various Pauline ‘idiosyncrasies’ if you will). But when it comes to the complete morass of strange stories and behaviors we find in the Old Testament, it’s hard to escape the feeling that we’re lucky to have the qualifying clause of A of F 8 to let us out of having to believe it all.
Here’s the thing though: read literally, that article of faith only lets us out of accepting text that results from translation problems. I’m no expert in ancient languages, but I’m guessing the stories of Balaam’s Ass and Elijah and the bear didn’t suddenly appear because some scribe somewhere missed the nuance of the syntax in the original documents (“Oh, you thought it said ass, it really said ‘mouth.’ Easy mistake.”). And yet many in the church dismiss these stories and others like them, that seem so hard to explain in light of our modern understanding of gospel principles.
What is our authority for disbelieving parts of the Bible? Is there more to the “translated correctly” caveat than appears there, or are we all too faithless in our understanding of difficult biblical passages? We could attempt to construct elaborate defenses of these stories, to make them somehow make sense. Or we could just be content with the parts of the bible we feel comfortable with, leaving the rest to the Jehovah’s witnesses and others.
The scriptures provide a footnote above the word “correctly” in the Eighth Article of Faith. That footnote cites 1 Nephi 13:26, which reads in part:
. . . for behold they have taken away from the gospel of the lamb many parts which are plain and most precious, and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away.
It’s worth mentioning that Nephi’s focus on the “gospel of the lamb” as well as “many covenants of the Lord” might suggest things missing from the New Testament, as well as the Old. That’s just speculative though. The real import of this footnote is that when we speak of translation, we don’t just mean someone reading something in one language and writing it down incorrectly in the other language. Nephi’s concerned about broad omissions that may either help explain what was included, or maybe even add completely new parts to the canon. Well, if omissions are a part of “incorrect translation,” could it be that the phrase is broad enough to include erronious inclusions? Does the Bible include stuff that is either incorrect or useless?
It almost certainly does. The mere existence of the Song of Solomon as a Biblical book strains the credibility of the Old Testament as a whole. Our approach to an errant Bible might be easier if we had a list of the non-trustworthy parts. But we don’t. And that’s why we find it easy to degrade the entire book to a position of secondary importance, subordinate to our ‘most correct’ book, because we don’t know which parts are dependable and which aren’t. I’m partially okay with this. I do believe that the Book of Mormon is and should be pre-eminent in our gospel study. However, I think it’s sad that we’ve turned the Bible into a bit of non-canonical canon. So many in the church are fluent in the stories and characters of the Book of Mormon and know nothing about the Bible. It would strike early church members as very odd, but as far as many LDS are concerned, the Bible is now only a teaching aid and supplement to the Book of Mormon. It’s true, it’s scripture, but there’s stuff in there we’re not sure about. So in reality, it’s never more reliable than your basic non-canonical general authority talk, which is probably great, but can’t pass for unequivocal doctrine.
The answer, of course: personal revelation. But there are multiple reasons why a large institution like the church can’t rely only on that to parse the meaning of all biblical text. We need clarity on a larger scale if the Bible is ever to truly take its place beside the Book of Mormon. The JST is a great start, but obviously only affects a small percentage of the book, and doesn’t claim to correct it completely. For now, we are stuck with a book that claims to be the word of God, but admits to some amount of error. You figure out which is which. The rest of the church may just stick with the Book of Mormon.
If you’re interested in seeing the original comments to the post, click here and scroll down to the haloscan link (you may enjoy seeing how many people were rightfully able to find errors in my thinking).