With a Capital “S”
All Scripture is inspired by God and beneficial for teaching, for rebuke, for correction, for training in righteousness; 2 Timothy 3:16 NASB
Scripture – You can’t get far in a discussion of the authority of the Bible without running into this verse. Of course, there’s a lot of debate about the phrase “inspired by God,” but that won’t be the direction of our investigation today. Today we want to ask another question. “What is Scripture?” What did Paul have in mind when he wrote this sentence? There are two standard answers. 1) the “Christian New Testament” didn’t exist as such when Paul wrote to Timothy. Therefore, the only official “Scripture” that Paul could have referred to was the Hebrew Bible. 2) the concept of “Scripture” might have been linguistically restricted when Paul wrote these words, but the application of Paul’s statement embraces the idea of a canon and therefore, proleptically authorizes all those books now included in the Bible.
Actually, it doesn’t matter which of these two options you like. Both are insufficient. When Paul wrote, neither the Christian Scriptures nor the Jewish Scriptures were fixed. There was no “canon” yet. But that isn’t the real issue. The real issue is whether or not the text that Paul refers to, namely the Hebrew Scriptures, were ever really canonized. In other words, the real issue is how did the Masoretic standard become the canonized version of the Hebrew Scriptures that both Jews and Christians hold as sacred and authoritative?
Some important scholars have been wrestling with this question. Perhaps you’d be interested in what they have discovered. Pieter B. Hartog reviews Elvira Martín-Contreras, and Lorena Miralles-Maciá’s book The Text of the Hebrew Bible. From the Rabbis to the Masoretes. JAJ Sup 13. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (2014). Below are citations from his review:
Emanuel Tov argues that the concept of the stabilization of the text of Hebrew Scripture is a myth. Rather than a conscious attempt to arrive at a standard text, the prevalence of MT from the rabbinic period onwards reflects the historical fact that “after the year 70 only MT was left in Jewish hands” (p.45).
John Van Seters goes even further when he argues that even for the Rabbis, MT did not always serve as a standard text. Drawing an analogy with the study and transmission of Homer in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Van Seters argues that the emergence of MT as a standard text depended not on the preferences of learned scribes or sopherim, but rather on the use of Scripture in more everyday contexts: “The development of standard texts was always the product of the marketplace” (p. 61). Learned individuals, by contrast, would long have been able to appeal to various textual traditions. This included the Rabbis; according to Van Seters, “the Rabbis could choose whatever text tradition suited their exegetical or homiletic interest” (p. 61).
Arie van der Kooij agrees with Tov that the prevalence of MT is not the result of a conscious process of standardization. Rather, its emergence as a standard text must be attributed to the fact that a manuscript belonging to this textual tradition was deposited in the Jerusalem temple and taken care of by a group of leading priests. This temple exemplar served as a standard for other copies of the biblical text, which were made for reading and studying purposes. Thus, what we have in the Second Temple period is a stable textual tradition associated with the Temple alongside a less than stable tradition outside of the Temple.
Hartog summarizes the work of these and other scholars as follows:
“ . . . several articles seek to characterise the biblical text that the Rabbis inherited. Was this text the outcome of a conscious process of standardization or, as the authors in this volume tend to argue, was the predominance of MT the outcome of coincidental historical events? And if this is indeed the case, did the Rabbis accept MT as a largely uniform standard (so Tov and Van der Kooij), or did they have the opportunity to appeal to other textual traditions as they saw fit (Van Seters)?”[1]
Why does this matter to us? It matters because what this means is that we really have no idea what Paul meant by “Scripture.” He was obviously referring to some body of accepted literature but that corpus might have been simply the traditional material he was familiar with. It would be nearly a thousand years before the Masoretes “standardized” the text and even then it now seems the standardization was probably based on a tradition the priests kept alive. If other rabbis between 70 CE and 1000 CE could appeal to other versions, who is to say what Paul had in mind? What we face is scholarship that demonstrates the fluidity of the early texts. Canonization didn’t actually change the corpus of material used by various religious groups. It merely established “official” boundaries; boundaries which apparently were not in place when the texts were written and during the next ten centuries while they were used. The claims of contemporary religious believers about the authority of the original documents now seems highly suspect. What we have is tradition, not textual certainty. All the more reason to ask, “Where did that idea come from?” when we want exegetical integrity.
Topical Index: Scripture, authority, canon, tradition, 2 Timothy 3:16
[1] Pieter B. Hartog, review cited above
