Why is there no accounting for translations? Of course there are errors in many (protestant) translation. You need to specify.
The Bible, as God guided it to be written, contains no errors.
I cannot, by myself, understand all the meanings in every passage. (I don't believe any single person could.) We are looking through a glass darkly, see things imperfectly, and do not fully understanding them. Our lack of understanding might look, in our ignorance, as if it is error.
The Tradition of Catholic teaching guides me to avoid erroneous interpretations. If I still don't understand, I leave it. Maybe God will let me understand when I get to Heaven. I trust he gives me whatever understanding I need for my station in this life.
Protestants and self-guided Catholics misunderstand many things and reach conclusions that are errors of their own making, not of the Bible itself.
The purpose of this poll was for Scripture itself, not translations. I assume everyone agrees that translations can contain errors. But your position would align with the first option in this poll.
While you are correct on the translations part, I can tell you for a fact that not everyone makes the distinction between the original and the translation. I teach it every year in Fundamental Theology, and rarely do I find someone who understands the distinction.
Honestly it surprises me. The difference between textual errors in translations and errors of faith, morals, science, history, etc. in the original text itself seems to be a self-evident distinction to me.
What do you mean by "Scripture itself, not translations"?
As an English speaker, what access do I have but from translations? I have never seen Scripture that is not a translation, which seems to me is the experience of the majority of people in the world.
How can I or any other non-expert read Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek? That's not reasonable. Was your poll meant for experts? Like Andrew, here, who says he teaches Fundamental Theology?
Should the first sentence of your reply have read: "The purpose of the poll was to get the opinions of experts on Scripture itself"? Not lowly, uneducated people like me.
You write, “The purpose of the poll was to get the opinions of experts on Scripture itself"? Not lowly, uneducated people like me.”
I don’t believe that to be Kaleb’s intention. Here is how I would answer your inquiries—
When I was taking Methods of Biblical Exegesis at Holy Apostles, the late Fr. Randy Soto made the point that “every translation is a work of exegesis (interpretation).”
The original language doesn’t translate neatly into English, Spanish, etc. The translator will have to make a decision on a particular word or turn of phrase. The translator will with little doubt translate in favor of his/her traditions doctrines. That being said, any Catholic, including Kaleb, Andrew, myself, you, etc. can be confident of translations with ecclesial approval to convey the magisterium’s guidance as the servant of Sacred Scripture.
Thank you, Phillip. That was a lovely explanation. But here's the thing: I already knew all that. One doesn't get to 70 y/o from a cradle Catholic without knowing those basics.
I'm still waiting for Kaleb's answer to my question.
First off, thank you for ‘waiting’ for my reply. Not everyone has the same schedule, so I apologize for not replying to you more immediately.
Second, I also cannot read Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, so I guess I’m not one of the ‘hoi poloi intelligentsia’ either. Textual differences between translations are usually very minor, especially between approved Catholic translations, so my poll applied to the contents of Scripture itself, not textual differences.
Third, as a Catholic, you should have more charity and humility, especially when talking to fellow Catholics. We accused you of nothing, we made no assumptions about you or anyone else, and my poll was simple and general, not limited to ‘experts’. If you didn’t want to reply to it, you didn’t have to. Going on the defensive and making accusations against us without any foundation isn’t right. I hope you can learn from this.
I cannot show you because you did not. Your explanation was very good and got your point across effectively. My comment with the phrase "looking down" should have been a reply to Stanton's comment. Sorry about that.
Is it an err if a scriptural accounting of a battle (for example) is logistically so implausible to likely be false, but the whole point of the recounting wasn’t numbers but the sense of impending doom or some other emotion?
Scripture is unerring Truth which sometimes doesn’t care about historical facts on the ground. But that means it is not inerrant in that realm. So I selected other.
That’s a poor layman’s understanding without any formal theological training.
Great question! St. Thomas Aquinas has a helpful principle here: when the sacred writers of Scripture wrote in such a way that the text is meant to be taken as historical fact, then we should understand it as historical fact, even if it might seem implausible to us or unsubstantiated by current research. It is possible that the sacred writers could’ve chosen specific numbers, for example, to make a symbolic point, but they would never have written an account as history if it’s false or made-up.
Even when Scripture does simply report fact, God still intends deeper spiritual meaning through the historical events, of course, but this doesn’t make it any less historical. This is why the traditional teaching of the Church is that Scripture is totally inerrant according to the sense intended by God and the sacred writers.
I've studied enough ancient writers to know that, when reporting 'facts,' they do not report them in the same manner within the scope of historiography before Leopold Van Ranke. What modern historians regard as facts, with citations, would have been completely foreign to writers even up to the 18th century. It's a modern invention.
For example, Plutarch wrote that Alexander the Great faced a million Persians. There wasn't enough population on Earth for a million Persians. And you get the same issue with Exodus numbers. However, for me, that doesn't mean I discount the general battle or the Exodus from Egypt. So, totally inerrent in every way?
I'm with Andrew here...I need some more definition fleshed out because, at the moment, I am somewhere between the first two options.
I think the previous paragraph explains much of my thought, but let me use an example.
The Exodus reports 600,000 men leaving Egypt. Kaleb notes that St. Thomas Aquinas argues that if it's supposed to be a historical account, we have to take it as such. I will say, on its face, St. Thomas Aquinas is misguided here unless you account for the study of historiography — the study of how people write history.
What do you receive from the overall Exodus account?
1. Semitic peoples enslaved in Egypt. Verified in Archaeology. Goshen Region
2. Settlement Patterns (Egyptian names with Levites)
The purpose of the overall narrative isn't really affected by the change of 600,000 men to 60,000, 6,000, to 600. There's no need to reconcile it. And, if you account for the genre of Ancient Near East War Propaganda, when it comes to Joshua and moving into the Promised Land, there's less needed to reconcile it there, too.
I think the problem is that this can easily become a slippery slope, where we say, if the numbers are changeable to fit what current scholarship and our presumptions say, then maybe the genre or mode of the Pentateuch in general makes it mostly fictional. This tends to be the position of most biblical scholars today and even many believers.
As always, I think the Fathers are the best place to turn, and St. Augustine gives many rules for interpreting Scripture properly, according to its genres and senses, which St. Thomas naturally followed. They recognized that people wrote differently that long ago, but that they still understood the difference between fiction and historical fact and that they lived closer to the time than we do.
This is one reason why nearly all scholars today deny Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, because if he actually wrote most of it (with Joshua as editor, as Scripture says), its historical facts must be accurate from his firsthand experience or the tradition he received from his ancestors.
The Church has always held that the Bible is totally inerrant, even in historical and scientific facts, and we must maintain this even if we read Scripture according to its genres and the historiographic perspective of the sacred writers.
Catholics also need to be careful understanding of your assertion, “The Church has always held that the Bible is totally inerrant, even in historical and scientific facts.”
Catholics are not strict fundamentalist when it comes to Sacred Scripture—
Here is the relevant passage from Dei Verbum 12:
“The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture.
For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another.”
I have read those yes, Dei Verbum and Pius XII on it, and neither deny the absolute inerrancy of Scripture in history and science. In fact they clearly uphold this teaching, as they must, since it is the tradition of the Church. The historical perspective of the sacred writers doesn’t abrogate this, and even before Ranke, humans were capable of knowing fact from fiction. Pius XII is helpful here:
When, subsequently, some Catholic writers, in spite of this solemn definition of Catholic doctrine, by which such divine authority is claimed for the "entire books with all their parts" as to secure freedom from any error whatsoever, ventured to restrict the truth of Sacred Scripture solely to matters of faith and morals, and to regard other matters, whether in the domain of physical science or history, as "obiter dicta" and - as they contended - in no wise connected with faith, Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Leo XIII in the Encyclical Letter Providentissimus Deus, published on November 18 in the year 1893, justly and rightly condemned these errors and safe-guarded the studies of the Divine Books by most wise precepts and rules. (Divino Afflante Spiritu, 1)
“This is one reason why nearly all scholars today deny Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, because if he actually wrote most of it (with Joshua as editor, as Scripture says), its historical facts must be accurate from his firsthand experience or the tradition he received from his ancestors.”
I’d argue that doesn’t follow via the discipline of historiography. Again, if you read ancient authors, and I know you have, they just don’t record “the facts” like modern historians—they just don’t before the 19th century when Leopold Van Ranke developed the citation system that modern historians use. And that includes folks like St Augustine. Anyone recording history prior to that time just didn’t think of “fact,” as the same.
So, no, when a number is stated in any ancient history, it can be at the most “a large number,” but to the exact measurement, the historian of the age just didn’t write that way in the Bible or any Ancient Near East/Greco-Roman document.
Would you say that this applies only to numbers in the OT, or to other situations too? Could I say, for example, that since the first two chapters of Genesis use mythic language, as the Catechism says, I can interpret it as entirely fictional, like the Edda or Iliad? Do I have to believe that Moses was a historical person and that the Exodus really happened?
I would say biblical scholarship examines all of this all the time — BUT note that they get it wrong, too. If you read my article on the historical David, historians argued against David's existence for some time until archaeologists turned over a stela bearing "House of David" on it.
For example, with the Exodus, there are books written on the topic. There's no need to 'correct' the Bible in my opinion because it isn't wrong. Ancient writers wrote in a style different from our own. In my historiography class, while we acknowledged a universal human condition, we discussed that if you could time-travel, dropping yourself off in the Greco-Roman world would be akin to landing on an alien planet.
You also have to account for genre, which modern biblical studies have done a good job of doing. Jesus says, "The Mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds." It's not. So has the Bible erred? Jesus isn't giving you facts about a Mustard Seed; that isn't the point of what he's saying. The ancient accounts are dependent on oral history. I am sure there are some here who believe in Mosaic authorship, Solomon for Proverbs, David for Psalms, etc. However, you fall within that debate; all writers still use source material.
I would say that such a ‘correction’ is impossible, because Scripture cannot have errors. Usually what happens is that scholars think they have ‘corrected’ something in Scripture, only to be disproven later.
To take an example, for a long time biblical scholars thought Pontius Pilate was just a fictional character, since there was no historical record of him - until 1961, when archaeologists discovered the ‘Pilate Stone’ which dates from the first century AD and explicitly names him as Prefect of Judea.
The OT is harder of course since most of its events are many millennia older, but even then archaeology has eventually corroborated Scripture, for example scientists thought the same thing about King David, until the 1993 discovery of the Tel Dan inscription and subsequent artifacts definitively proved he was really the king of Israel from the time period identified by Scripture.
Unfortunately, since Catholics today tend to believe the Bible is only inerrant on faith and morals, there’re more resources on this from Protestant scholars. The Introduction to the Old Testament by John Bergsma and Brant Pitre, however, has a section for each book of the OT on historical issues.
A poll without definitions is bold, my friend.
Probably so, though it seemed clear enough. People are welcome to comment if there’s any confusion!
Why is there no accounting for translations? Of course there are errors in many (protestant) translation. You need to specify.
The Bible, as God guided it to be written, contains no errors.
I cannot, by myself, understand all the meanings in every passage. (I don't believe any single person could.) We are looking through a glass darkly, see things imperfectly, and do not fully understanding them. Our lack of understanding might look, in our ignorance, as if it is error.
The Tradition of Catholic teaching guides me to avoid erroneous interpretations. If I still don't understand, I leave it. Maybe God will let me understand when I get to Heaven. I trust he gives me whatever understanding I need for my station in this life.
Protestants and self-guided Catholics misunderstand many things and reach conclusions that are errors of their own making, not of the Bible itself.
The purpose of this poll was for Scripture itself, not translations. I assume everyone agrees that translations can contain errors. But your position would align with the first option in this poll.
While you are correct on the translations part, I can tell you for a fact that not everyone makes the distinction between the original and the translation. I teach it every year in Fundamental Theology, and rarely do I find someone who understands the distinction.
Honestly it surprises me. The difference between textual errors in translations and errors of faith, morals, science, history, etc. in the original text itself seems to be a self-evident distinction to me.
What do you mean by "Scripture itself, not translations"?
As an English speaker, what access do I have but from translations? I have never seen Scripture that is not a translation, which seems to me is the experience of the majority of people in the world.
How can I or any other non-expert read Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek? That's not reasonable. Was your poll meant for experts? Like Andrew, here, who says he teaches Fundamental Theology?
Should the first sentence of your reply have read: "The purpose of the poll was to get the opinions of experts on Scripture itself"? Not lowly, uneducated people like me.
Greetings Sylvia,
You write, “The purpose of the poll was to get the opinions of experts on Scripture itself"? Not lowly, uneducated people like me.”
I don’t believe that to be Kaleb’s intention. Here is how I would answer your inquiries—
When I was taking Methods of Biblical Exegesis at Holy Apostles, the late Fr. Randy Soto made the point that “every translation is a work of exegesis (interpretation).”
The original language doesn’t translate neatly into English, Spanish, etc. The translator will have to make a decision on a particular word or turn of phrase. The translator will with little doubt translate in favor of his/her traditions doctrines. That being said, any Catholic, including Kaleb, Andrew, myself, you, etc. can be confident of translations with ecclesial approval to convey the magisterium’s guidance as the servant of Sacred Scripture.
Thank you, Phillip. That was a lovely explanation. But here's the thing: I already knew all that. One doesn't get to 70 y/o from a cradle Catholic without knowing those basics.
I'm still waiting for Kaleb's answer to my question.
First off, thank you for ‘waiting’ for my reply. Not everyone has the same schedule, so I apologize for not replying to you more immediately.
Second, I also cannot read Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, so I guess I’m not one of the ‘hoi poloi intelligentsia’ either. Textual differences between translations are usually very minor, especially between approved Catholic translations, so my poll applied to the contents of Scripture itself, not textual differences.
Third, as a Catholic, you should have more charity and humility, especially when talking to fellow Catholics. We accused you of nothing, we made no assumptions about you or anyone else, and my poll was simple and general, not limited to ‘experts’. If you didn’t want to reply to it, you didn’t have to. Going on the defensive and making accusations against us without any foundation isn’t right. I hope you can learn from this.
I reply to myself as this comment is aimed at the whole thread.
My final sentence is aptly illustrated by Stanton's final sentence: "That’s a poor layman’s understanding without any formal theological training."
Looking down on us common, uneducated, but fully faithful Catholics. Hoi polloi to you intelligentsia.
Can you show me where I looked down on you for my own edification?
My attempt was to explain that I am the same as you & we can have confidence in the translations approved by the Catholic ecclesial bodies.
I cannot show you because you did not. Your explanation was very good and got your point across effectively. My comment with the phrase "looking down" should have been a reply to Stanton's comment. Sorry about that.
Apparently we need a magisterium for this poll lol
Is it an err if a scriptural accounting of a battle (for example) is logistically so implausible to likely be false, but the whole point of the recounting wasn’t numbers but the sense of impending doom or some other emotion?
Scripture is unerring Truth which sometimes doesn’t care about historical facts on the ground. But that means it is not inerrant in that realm. So I selected other.
That’s a poor layman’s understanding without any formal theological training.
Great question! St. Thomas Aquinas has a helpful principle here: when the sacred writers of Scripture wrote in such a way that the text is meant to be taken as historical fact, then we should understand it as historical fact, even if it might seem implausible to us or unsubstantiated by current research. It is possible that the sacred writers could’ve chosen specific numbers, for example, to make a symbolic point, but they would never have written an account as history if it’s false or made-up.
Even when Scripture does simply report fact, God still intends deeper spiritual meaning through the historical events, of course, but this doesn’t make it any less historical. This is why the traditional teaching of the Church is that Scripture is totally inerrant according to the sense intended by God and the sacred writers.
I've studied enough ancient writers to know that, when reporting 'facts,' they do not report them in the same manner within the scope of historiography before Leopold Van Ranke. What modern historians regard as facts, with citations, would have been completely foreign to writers even up to the 18th century. It's a modern invention.
For example, Plutarch wrote that Alexander the Great faced a million Persians. There wasn't enough population on Earth for a million Persians. And you get the same issue with Exodus numbers. However, for me, that doesn't mean I discount the general battle or the Exodus from Egypt. So, totally inerrent in every way?
I'm with Andrew here...I need some more definition fleshed out because, at the moment, I am somewhere between the first two options.
That’s good to know! Thank you for the edification.
Follow up: have there been instances where modern research “corrected” a historical citation from
Scripture? How do we reconcile those differences?
You asked How do we reconcile those differences?
I think the previous paragraph explains much of my thought, but let me use an example.
The Exodus reports 600,000 men leaving Egypt. Kaleb notes that St. Thomas Aquinas argues that if it's supposed to be a historical account, we have to take it as such. I will say, on its face, St. Thomas Aquinas is misguided here unless you account for the study of historiography — the study of how people write history.
What do you receive from the overall Exodus account?
1. Semitic peoples enslaved in Egypt. Verified in Archaeology. Goshen Region
2. Settlement Patterns (Egyptian names with Levites)
The purpose of the overall narrative isn't really affected by the change of 600,000 men to 60,000, 6,000, to 600. There's no need to reconcile it. And, if you account for the genre of Ancient Near East War Propaganda, when it comes to Joshua and moving into the Promised Land, there's less needed to reconcile it there, too.
I think the problem is that this can easily become a slippery slope, where we say, if the numbers are changeable to fit what current scholarship and our presumptions say, then maybe the genre or mode of the Pentateuch in general makes it mostly fictional. This tends to be the position of most biblical scholars today and even many believers.
As always, I think the Fathers are the best place to turn, and St. Augustine gives many rules for interpreting Scripture properly, according to its genres and senses, which St. Thomas naturally followed. They recognized that people wrote differently that long ago, but that they still understood the difference between fiction and historical fact and that they lived closer to the time than we do.
This is one reason why nearly all scholars today deny Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, because if he actually wrote most of it (with Joshua as editor, as Scripture says), its historical facts must be accurate from his firsthand experience or the tradition he received from his ancestors.
The Church has always held that the Bible is totally inerrant, even in historical and scientific facts, and we must maintain this even if we read Scripture according to its genres and the historiographic perspective of the sacred writers.
Catholics also need to be careful understanding of your assertion, “The Church has always held that the Bible is totally inerrant, even in historical and scientific facts.”
Catholics are not strict fundamentalist when it comes to Sacred Scripture—
Here is the relevant passage from Dei Verbum 12:
“The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture.
For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another.”
The paragraph cites—Pius XII, loc. cit. Denziger 2294 (3829–3830); EB 557–562.
I have read those yes, Dei Verbum and Pius XII on it, and neither deny the absolute inerrancy of Scripture in history and science. In fact they clearly uphold this teaching, as they must, since it is the tradition of the Church. The historical perspective of the sacred writers doesn’t abrogate this, and even before Ranke, humans were capable of knowing fact from fiction. Pius XII is helpful here:
When, subsequently, some Catholic writers, in spite of this solemn definition of Catholic doctrine, by which such divine authority is claimed for the "entire books with all their parts" as to secure freedom from any error whatsoever, ventured to restrict the truth of Sacred Scripture solely to matters of faith and morals, and to regard other matters, whether in the domain of physical science or history, as "obiter dicta" and - as they contended - in no wise connected with faith, Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Leo XIII in the Encyclical Letter Providentissimus Deus, published on November 18 in the year 1893, justly and rightly condemned these errors and safe-guarded the studies of the Divine Books by most wise precepts and rules. (Divino Afflante Spiritu, 1)
“This is one reason why nearly all scholars today deny Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, because if he actually wrote most of it (with Joshua as editor, as Scripture says), its historical facts must be accurate from his firsthand experience or the tradition he received from his ancestors.”
I’d argue that doesn’t follow via the discipline of historiography. Again, if you read ancient authors, and I know you have, they just don’t record “the facts” like modern historians—they just don’t before the 19th century when Leopold Van Ranke developed the citation system that modern historians use. And that includes folks like St Augustine. Anyone recording history prior to that time just didn’t think of “fact,” as the same.
So, no, when a number is stated in any ancient history, it can be at the most “a large number,” but to the exact measurement, the historian of the age just didn’t write that way in the Bible or any Ancient Near East/Greco-Roman document.
Would you say that this applies only to numbers in the OT, or to other situations too? Could I say, for example, that since the first two chapters of Genesis use mythic language, as the Catechism says, I can interpret it as entirely fictional, like the Edda or Iliad? Do I have to believe that Moses was a historical person and that the Exodus really happened?
I would say biblical scholarship examines all of this all the time — BUT note that they get it wrong, too. If you read my article on the historical David, historians argued against David's existence for some time until archaeologists turned over a stela bearing "House of David" on it.
For example, with the Exodus, there are books written on the topic. There's no need to 'correct' the Bible in my opinion because it isn't wrong. Ancient writers wrote in a style different from our own. In my historiography class, while we acknowledged a universal human condition, we discussed that if you could time-travel, dropping yourself off in the Greco-Roman world would be akin to landing on an alien planet.
You also have to account for genre, which modern biblical studies have done a good job of doing. Jesus says, "The Mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds." It's not. So has the Bible erred? Jesus isn't giving you facts about a Mustard Seed; that isn't the point of what he's saying. The ancient accounts are dependent on oral history. I am sure there are some here who believe in Mosaic authorship, Solomon for Proverbs, David for Psalms, etc. However, you fall within that debate; all writers still use source material.
Thank you! Your other comment re: Persians is what I instinctively thought but had no formal way to express.
I would say that such a ‘correction’ is impossible, because Scripture cannot have errors. Usually what happens is that scholars think they have ‘corrected’ something in Scripture, only to be disproven later.
To take an example, for a long time biblical scholars thought Pontius Pilate was just a fictional character, since there was no historical record of him - until 1961, when archaeologists discovered the ‘Pilate Stone’ which dates from the first century AD and explicitly names him as Prefect of Judea.
The OT is harder of course since most of its events are many millennia older, but even then archaeology has eventually corroborated Scripture, for example scientists thought the same thing about King David, until the 1993 discovery of the Tel Dan inscription and subsequent artifacts definitively proved he was really the king of Israel from the time period identified by Scripture.
Unfortunately, since Catholics today tend to believe the Bible is only inerrant on faith and morals, there’re more resources on this from Protestant scholars. The Introduction to the Old Testament by John Bergsma and Brant Pitre, however, has a section for each book of the OT on historical issues.