"How Big is Your Bible?"

By Dr. Mickey Anders

South Elkhorn Christian Church

Lexington, Kentucky

May 3, 2009

Text: 2 Timothy 3:16-17   "All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work."  

Bibles come in a wide variety of sizes.  My ordination Bible is an old Revised Standard Version that I received upon my ordination in 1973.  I have since had it rebound in sturdy black leather.  It's a chunk of Bible.  When I carry it, I always borrow a phrase from U. S. President Theodore Roosevelt whose foreign policy was "Speak softly and carry a big stick."  I say, "Speak softly and carry a big Bible."

But I also have a thin Bible.  I have the Ultra Thin Reference Edition from Holman Publishers.  It is a New International Translation and has pages of onion skin, which are very difficult to turn. 

Several weeks ago, I shared with the congregation a 14 inch by 22 inch poster with the entire King James Version printed in microscopic print.  It looks like a poster of gray paper, but with a magnifying glass, you can actually read the text.

Our congregation is proud of an historic pulpit Bible usually displayed in the Historic Sanctuary.  It was printed in 1864, which makes it 145 years old.  It was rebound in 1953, and is a massive book. 

So what size is your Bible?

We might describe our Bible by the number of books in it.  The Protestant Bible which we use contains sixty-six books from Genesis to Revelation.  The official list of books is called the canon, which comes from a word meaning standard.   

Writers like Dan Brown have made their millions by implying that the Bible should be bigger than it is.  He says there was some grand conspiracy behind the selection of the books included in the Bible.  He would tell you that the hierarchy of the Church actively suppressed books that would reveal an uncomfortable truth for them.  Perhaps, as in the DaVinci Code, the suppressed books would have told us that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and fathered children by her.  They say that Jesus' physical descendants are still with us today, and they are the Holy Grail. 

The DaVinci Code makes for entertaining reading, but just remember that the book is found in the fiction section of the library.  Yes, you can find people who believe in conspiracy theories behind the Bible, but we all know that some people believe conspiracy theories about everything.  Some say that Elvis is alive and that the holocaust never happened, and the Apollo 11 landing on the moon was staged on a back lot of a television studio.  There are conspiracy theories everywhere, but there was no conspiracy here. 

In fact, most modern scholars will tell you that the books of the Bible (the canon) were approved by the church councils only after there was widespread agreement among Christians as to which books were most helpful to them.  The real selection process took place over 400 years of readership by churches and church people.  Like a modern day best-seller list, certain books proved to be more helpful to Christians than other books. There were many books that floated along the edge of the list.  Some finally made it in, some did not.  If you examine those that almost made it, you won't find much difference between them.  There is no grand conspiracy going on behind the books selected to be included in the Bible.

A good example of this is the Apocrypha.  These are the books included in the Catholic Bible but not in the Protestant Bible.  The reason Protestants decided not to include them is that they were not the most ancient documents.  These books were written in the Greek language and not the more ancient Hebrew language.  All the books in the Protestant Old Testament were written in Hebrew. 

But if you read the Apocrypha, as I have, you will find it to be not a lot different from the books that are included in our Bible.  They may not have our official stamp of approval, but they are good books to read.

Some people suggest that the Bible should be smaller than it is.  Alexander Campbell had an idea of a canon within a canon.  That simply meant that some books were more valuable to modern Christians than other books.  I think Campbell is right in that.  Some books really are more important than others. 

For Campbell, that principle meant that the books of the Old Testament generally were not as valuable as the books of the New Testament.  And even there, Campbell preferred the books from Acts to Revelation, but especially he liked the book of Hebrews.

Campbell’s point is well-taken in that all of us have a canon-within-a-canon.  We all have parts of the Bible that speak to us more than other parts.  I like to think of the Bible as a mountain landscape, where some passages are like the mountain peaks that almost peer into heaven itself.  Others are dark valleys, where the real message from God is hard to fathom.  The world may be flat, according to Thomas Friedman, but the Bible is not. 

Our third President took this idea to the extreme.  Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper.  In a letter sent from Monticello to John Adams in 1813, Jefferson said his "wee little book" of 46 pages was based on a lifetime of inquiry and reflection. 

He called the book "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Friends dubbed it the Jefferson Bible.  

One professor asked, "Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, 'I only believe these parts?' "

Most of us would be shocked by the idea of taking scissors and paste to the Bible.  But if we are honest, many of us would like to excise certain portions of the Bible.  Many people struggle with the violence in the Old Testament, and especially with the specific instructions from God to kill all the men, women and children of specific villages.  We’d like to snip that out.   

While portions of the Old Testament are problematic, I also have a few issues with some texts in the New Testament as well.

I don't know why 1 Corinthians 15:29 is there. It says, "Otherwise, what will those people do who receive baptism on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?"  Well, we don't do baptism on behalf of the dead.  The Mormons are the only ones I know who do.  I wish Paul had left that line out of his letter.  

I struggle with 1 Timothy 2 where we read, "Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent."  That part is bad enough, but then the writer goes on to explain why by saying, "For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor."  That doesn't really seem to be a very good reason for women to be prohibited from speaking in church.  But the clincher is the next verse, where the writer describes how women will be saved, "Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty."  We don't really believe there are two ways of salvation: faith in Christ and childbearing.  Nobody can explain this text either.

But one of the texts that I most struggle with comes from Titus 1 where I see the worst case of out and out prejudice.  The writer says, "It was one of them, their very own prophet, who said, ‘Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.’" It's the kind of false logic that we work against all the time in the modern world.  It is a bad thing to lump all of a race of nationality together.  It's like saying that all Indians are alcoholics, all blacks are on welfare, or all whites are rednecks.  It's the worst kind of ethical mistake we can make.  But the writer of Titus quotes this cruel line, "Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons" and then adds his endorsement by saying in verse 13, "That testimony is true."  Outrageous.

The key to finding the canon within the canon is the manner of choosing.  How do we pick which parts of the Bible are more important than others?   

I don't find Campbell's method particularly helpful.  He divided history into several dispensations- Creation, Law, Christ, Church.  One oddity of his division of history is that he relegates the life and teachings of Jesus to a former dispensation, and therefore that is not as important as the books written to the church, Acts-Revelation.

Alexander Campbell's approach has been taken by some in our movement and pushed to an extreme.  I remember well when the ministers in Pikeville were discussing whether or not the Ten Commandments should be posted in schools and courthouses, the Church of Christ minister made it clear that, for him, the Old Testament held no bearing at all. It was a previous dispensation and has virtually no meaning for Christians.  Can you imagine ripping out the whole Old Testament from your Bible? 

But for most of us, we find great value in the Old Testament, even if there are sections of it that we struggle to understand.  In fact, we can hardly understand the New Testament without an understanding of the Old Testament.  And who would want to do without the creation stories, without the exodus narrative, without the history of the judges and kings of Israel, without the Psalms, without those wonderfully prophetic passages from Isaiah and Amos?  The Old Testament is a rich treasure of stories of God's dealings with Israel.  How poor we would be without it!

For most modern preachers, their canon-within-the-canon is the Gospels.  Since the publication of the Revised Common Lectionary, a series of four scripture passages for each Sunday on a three-year rotation, preachers in many denominations have found the lectionary useful.  But most preachers choose their sermon texts from the gospels.  It is common for a preacher to deliver sermons almost exclusively from the gospels.  Alexander Campbell would not approve! 

I once heard a seminary professor say that her guiding principle for interpreting the Bible were the two commandments Jesus said were the most important:  Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.  She put every part of the Bible to that test.

But our early Disciples founders had a pithy quote that gives us guidance here.  They were fond of saying, 'No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible."  I like that saying because it provides for us a clear guideline for interpreting the Bible.  When in doubt, go by Christ.  Jesus is the principle by which we interpret the rest of the book.  I think that makes a lot of sense. 

Tony Campolo has a similar suggestion for Biblical interpretation.  He suggests going by the part in red letters.  Of course, he is referring to a red-letter edition of the Bible, in which the words of Jesus are printed in red.  In fact, a national group has been formed with the name “Red Letter Christians.”  They argue that the Religious Right has tried to reduce the faith to two hot button social issues – abortion and homosexuality, when in fact, the red-letter words would have us to be concerned about fighting poverty, caring for the environment, advancing peace, promoting strong families, and support a consistent ethic of life.

Focusing on the red-letter words is not a bad method for deciding which parts of the Bible are most important.  If Jesus is the fullest revelation of God, then we should pay more attention to the words Jesus spoke than to any other part of the Bible.  And this method of interpretation would get us out of a lot of difficult issues that arise in the more obscure parts of the Bible. 

So what size is your Bible?  Does it weigh two pounds or two ounces?  Of course, I don't really care about the weight of your Bible because I am speaking metaphorically here.  Your physical Bible may be huge, but if you haven't read it, then it is not really yours.  And what if we suddenly had our physical Bible's taken away from us?  How much of it could you recreate?  How many verses do you have memorized?  How many books could you even summarize the content?  I want to suggest that our Bible may be very, very small.