We Just Can’t Get Away

All Scripture is inspired by God and beneficial for teaching, for rebuke, for correction, for training in righteousness;  2 Timothy 3:16  NASB

All Scripture – How many times have we investigated the nuances and implications of this single verse?  A dozen?  Two dozen?  It seems that Paul’s statement in a letter to a pupil just keeps drawing us back into one controversy after another.  What does he mean by “all Scripture”?  In the first century, does this include Enoch, The Testament of the Twelve, Esther, Ezra or other books whose authority was still being debated?  Does it include the LXX?  Did the Jewish world of the Diaspora consider the LXX to be Scripture?  And what about the Hebrew text itself?  Which one of the Hebrew textual traditions was “Scripture”?  The proto-Masoretic, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the text of Qumran, others?  Paul certainly doesn’t include his own work and he can’t mean any of the later apostolic writings since they didn’t exist at the time.  Why, then, do we treat his letters or the gospels as “Scripture”?  No Jew in the first century would have made that claim. Is Paul’s statement theological dogma or just friendly advice?  If the textual tradition and transmission wasn’t even fixed when Paul wrote these words, what could he possibly have meant?

Perhaps a few comments from Nahum Sarna provide some insight:

“Translations of the Bible have no authority for Jews.”[1]

He notes the Jewish view about the standard of the Christian world, the King James Bible.  Notice the necessity of a prophetic origin:

“ . . . Jews were the guardians of Scripture, bearers of a long interpretive tradition of their own.  They had no reason to defer, as subordinates, to a translation authorized by, as he put it, ‘a deceased king of England who certainly was no prophet.’”[2]

“Translation by its very nature involves interpretation.  Furthermore, all Bible translations are heir to interpretive traditions which, consciously or not, shape their scriptural understanding.  Calls for ‘literalism,’ or movements ‘back to the Bible,’ . . . really seek to cloak with legitimacy efforts aimed at replacing one mode of interpretation with another.”[3]

Speaking of more recent Jewish Publication Society attempts at translation, Sarna notes:

“ . . . the translators insisted on rendering their text into English idiomatically, rather than mechanically and literally. Convinced that word-for-word translation did violence to the spirit of the Hebrew original, the translators permitted themselves wider latitude than their English predecessors even had.”[4]

What can we learn?  If Sarna’s comments can be applied to the first century, we would conclude that even the LXX, a translation done by Jews, did not carry the authority of the original Hebrew text, no matter which traditional source it came from.  But this seems to fly in the face of the way Paul uses the LXX, and the way the LXX was actually used in the Diaspora.  Perhaps Sarna’s comment only makes sense after the canonization of the MT.  Nevertheless, it is certainly true today.  If you’re Jewish, the Hebrew is authoritative, and nothing else.  We should keep that in mind when we investigate the scriptures of our English Bibles.

Secondly, the prophets play a crucial role in the transmission of Scripture.  This implies that books without prophetic origin are not authoritative.  Certainly this includes all of the apostolic writings, another significant distinction between Jews and Christians, but, we might ask, does it also include those books in the MT that do not have prophetic origin?  That question is a Jewish one.

Finally, Sarna’s comments on translation itself and the risks of violating the spirit of the original are completely justified.  The Hebrew text is extremely malleable, as we have learned.  It does not lend itself to one rigid form or interpretation.  But how to capture that “messiness” in a translation is a serious problem.  As Zornberg points out, “. . total certainty can never be achieved in human affairs.  Meaning cannot be finally arrested, stopped in its tracks.  It is affected by sociological conditions, even by the very fact of reading.”[5] Every act of reading is an act of interpretation, all the more so in a language devoid of punctuation and vowels.

What does Paul mean?  Perhaps all we can truly say is that Paul had a tradition in mind, not a set of chapters and verses. “All Scripture” encompasses everything that the tradition held as inspired and sacred.  What that was for Paul is not the same as it is for us if for no other reason than our tradition, Jewish or Christian, has evolved.  So, be happy.  You’ve got room to breathe.

Topical Index: Scripture, tradition, text, translation, 2 Timothy 3:16

[1] Nahum Sarna, “Jewish Bible Scholarship and Translations in the United States,” in Studies in Biblical Interpretation (JPS, 2000), pp. 174.

[2] Ibid., p. 177.

[3] Ibid., p. 179.

[4] Ibid., p. 200.

[5] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg,  Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers,  p. 53.