The Bible

The three great canons

There are three main biblical canons in present-day Christianity and rabbinic Judaism^[7]:

• Catholic canon: 73 books (46 OT + 27 NT). Lists received at Hippo (393) and Carthage III (397, local synods), confirmed at Florence (1442), defined at the Council of Trent (1546). Includes the deuterocanonical books (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1–2 Maccabees + the Greek portions of Esther and Daniel) found in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Bible produced at Alexandria) and the Vulgate (Saint Jerome's Latin translation).
• Protestant canon: 66 books (39 OT + 27 NT). In 1534 Luther set apart the seven books the Church received as inspired (called "deuterocanonical", that is, "of the second canon": received later into the canon from the Greek Septuagint), relying on the shorter Hebrew canon — on the debated hypothesis of a rabbinic fixing at Yavneh (Jamnia) around the year 90 (see below). He called these books "Apocrypha" — useful but not inspired.
• Rabbinic Jewish canon (TaNaK): 24 books (grouped differently). The idea of a fixing by a rabbinic synod at Yavneh / Jamnia (c. 90 AD) is a hypothesis proposed by Heinrich Graetz in 1871, now largely called into question in favour of a progressive, longer and less centralized stabilization^[8]. Three sections: Torah (the Law, 5 books), Nevi'im (the Prophets), Ketouvim (the Writings).

The Eastern Orthodox Churches have slightly broader canons: the Ethiopian Church, for example, recognizes 81 books including 1 Enoch and Jubilees. Counts vary with groupings (Samuel–Kings counted as 1 or 2 books, Ezra–Nehemiah as 1 or 2, etc.).

A library, not a single book

The Bible is not a book in the modern sense, but a library composed over a millennium in very different historical contexts. At least forty authors contributed to it: kings (David, Solomon), prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel), priests and scribes (Ezra, Nehemiah), sages, historians, apostles, a physician (Luke), fishermen (Peter, John, James), a converted Pharisee (Paul), scribes and secretaries (Ezra, Baruch).

There are three languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek) and a vast diversity of literary genres: historical narratives, law codes, genealogies, wisdom books, liturgical prayer (Psalms), love poetry (Song of Songs), prophetic oracles, apocalypses, pastoral letters, Christological hymns, systematic Pauline theology. This diversity has a major interpretive consequence recalled by Dei Verbum § 12: "To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to 'literary forms'"^[9].

Biblical Hebrew

Hebrew in its classical form is the language of almost the entire Old Testament.

It is a Northwest Semitic language, related to Phoenician and Moabite, written from right to left with originally no vowels (vowels were added late by the Masoretes from the 8th century AD onwards to fix the reading). Biblical Hebrew has about 8,000 distinct words^[10] — a very limited vocabulary compared with classical Greek (~120,000 words) or modern French. This lexical poverty has an interpretive consequence: the same Hebrew word must often carry several senses depending on context, and translation into richer languages requires choices.

Aramaic

Aramaic, another Semitic language related to Hebrew, is used in certain late portions of the OT: Daniel 2:4 – 7:28; Ezra 4:8 – 6:18 and 7:12–26; a few verses of Jeremiah and Genesis. It is also the language spoken by Jesus and his disciples in 1st-century Galilee. Several Aramaic sayings of Christ are preserved as such in the Greek Gospels: "Talitha koum" (Mk 5:41), "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani" (Mt 27:46), "Effatha" (Mk 7:34), "Abba" (Mk 14:36).

Koine Greek

Koine Greek (κοινή, "common") is the language of the whole New Testament and of the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint (LXX). It is the international Greek born of the conquests of Alexander the Great (4th century BC), simplified compared with classical Athenian Greek, which became the vehicular language of the eastern Mediterranean basin. The apostles wrote the Gospels and Epistles in Koine in order to reach the widest possible audience.

The Pentateuch — the Torah (5 books)

The Pentateuch (from the Greek pente "five" + teuchos "scroll") or Torah (Hebrew תורה, "instruction" or "law") contains the five founding books of the revelation to Israel. Jewish and Christian tradition attributes their principal authorship to Moses (c. 1290–1230 BC, on the conventional dating of the Exodus to the 13th century).

The Church holds Moses to be the true author of the Pentateuch: this is the unanimous Jewish tradition, confirmed by Christ Himself — "If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me" (Jn 5:46) — and defended by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in its reply of 27 June 1906 on the Mosaic authenticity of the Pentateuch. Some contemporary scholars propose a different reading: starting from the work of Jean Astruc (1753) and Julius Wellhausen (Prolegomena to the History of Israel, 1878), the documentary hypothesis^[11] posits four sources written between the 10th and the 5th century BC: the J source (Yahwist, c. 950 BC, kingdom of Judah), E (Elohist, c. 850 BC, northern kingdom of Israel), D (Deuteronomist, c. 620 BC, reform of Josiah), and P (Priestly, c. 550–450 BC, exile and post-exile). The final compilation would, on this hypothesis, be the work of the scribe Ezra around 450 BC. These sources exist in no recovered manuscript: they are reconstructions from literary clues, which already assume what they claim to establish — namely that Moses did not write.

The historical books (16 books in the Catholic canon)

These books cover the history of Israel from the entry into Canaan (c. 1200 BC) to the Maccabean revolt (167–160 BC).

The wisdom and poetic books (7 books)

The prophetic books (16 books: 4 major + 12 minor)

The prophets are classified as "major" (long books) and "minor" (short books — often grouped into a single scroll in Jewish tradition: the Dodekapropheton, that is, "the Twelve Prophets").

The four major prophets:

The twelve minor prophets:

The New Testament gathers twenty-seven books written between the years 50 and about 120 AD by authors belonging for the most part to the apostolic circle (direct witnesses or immediate disciples of the apostles). The datings below are those proposed by Raymond E. Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament, Yale 1997 — the major Catholic reference)^[19], to be read alongside John P. Meier (A Marginal Jew, 5 volumes 1991–2016)^[20], Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Eerdmans 2006)^[21], and N. T. Wright.

The four Gospels

The canonical order of the Catholic Church (since Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome's Vulgate) is not the chronological order of composition. Modern exegesis almost unanimously accepts the priority of Mark: Matthew and Luke drew on Mark and on a common source of Jesus' sayings called Q (from the German Quelle, "source") — the so-called two-source theory (in German Zweiquellentheorie, "two-source theory")^[22].

Richard Bauckham argues in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006) that the four Gospels still depend very directly on identifiable eyewitnesses, which strengthens the historical case against the excessively late datings proposed by the radical 19th-century critics (Tübingen school, F. C. Bauer)^[23]. Bauckham bases his argument notably on the study of Jewish names in 1st-century Palestine (what specialists call "onomastics", that is, the study of proper names): the proper names found in the Gospels statistically match the real frequency of Palestinian Jewish names of the period, as established by Tal Ilan from 3,000 names on contemporary inscriptions, ossuaries and papyri^[24]. Of the nine most frequent names in 1st-century Palestine (Simon, Joseph, Judas, Lazarus, Yohanan, Jesus, Hannah, Mary, Salome), the New Testament shows an almost identical distribution — a statistical coherence inexplicable if the narratives had been composed late by Hellenistic Christians ignorant of the names actually borne in Palestine at the time.

Bauckham also notes a device consisting in framing a narrative with the name of its witness (specialists speak of inclusio, that is, "framing"): Mark names Peter from his very first episode (Mk 1:16) and mentions him last at his Passion (Mk 16:7), thus placing his Gospel under the authority of the apostle whose secretary he was — a device attested in Lucian of Samosata (How to Write History) among Greco-Roman historians concerned to cite their direct witnesses. This internal signature, also present in John (framing by the "beloved disciple"), accredits the patristic tradition of Papias of Hierapolis (c. 120 AD) that Mark faithfully renders Peter's preaching^[25].

"This elder (John the Presbyter) also said: Mark, who was Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately — though not in order — all that he remembered of the words and deeds of the Lord." — Papias of Hierapolis, quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History III, 39, 15 (c. 325 AD)^[26]

Acts of the Apostles

Luke wrote the Acts of the Apostles as the second volume of his work, dedicated to "most excellent Theophilus" (Lk 1:3; Acts 1:1). Dating: around 80–90 AD. This book covers the history of the early Church from the Ascension (~33) to Paul's arrival in Rome (~62), with a particularly detailed account of Paul's missionary journeys in which Luke personally took part (the "we" passages, Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–21:18; 27:1–28:16).

The epistles of Saint Paul (14 letters in the Catholic canon)

The Pauline letters are the oldest texts of the New Testament, predating the written Gospels. The Church receives them as the work of the Apostle: the Tridentine canon lists them under Paul's name. Some contemporary scholars propose distinguishing the seven letters whose Pauline authorship is least disputed, three letters some exegetes attribute to Paul's disciples rather than to Paul himself (called "deutero-Pauline", that is, "of a second Paul"), and the three pastoral epistles (dated by that same exegesis to the post-Pauline era) — distinctions resting on criteria of style and vocabulary, not on manuscripts, and which the solemn Magisterium has not defined as dogma (the Council of Trent lists these letters under Paul's name). The Epistle to the Hebrews is a category apart: tradition long attributed it to Paul, but the Church herself has recognized since the 3rd century (Origen) that "only God knows who wrote it"^[27].

Seven letters of least-disputed authorship (datings per Brown):

Three epistles received by the Church as Pauline, which some scholars attribute to Paul's disciples:

Three pastoral epistles (traditionally attributed to Paul; some scholars date them to the post-Pauline era):

Epistle to the Hebrews: debated dating, between the 60s and c. 80–90 AD. Some scholars place it before the destruction of the Temple (70) — silence on that event — others shortly after; debate on the exact date. Origen as early as the 3rd century: "But who wrote the epistle, in truth God knows"^[28]. Proposed candidates: Apollos (Luther), Barnabas, Luke, Clement of Rome.

The seven catholic letters

The "catholic letters" (in Greek καθολικαί, "universal") are addressed to all Christians rather than to one particular community.

Revelation

Revelation (from the Greek ἀποκάλυψις, "unveiling, revelation") closes the New Testament canon. Received by tradition as the work of John the apostle, dated to around 95 AD under the persecution of Domitian. The book relates prophetic visions received by the author exiled on Patmos (Rev 1:9). Some scholars propose another John of Ephesus — a debate already open with Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria in the 3rd century, who noted stylistic differences with the Gospel of John.

The overall picture is striking: the entire New Testament was written in under 70 years, by a generation that knew Christ or received Him directly from the Apostles. Compared with the 400 to 500 years separating Buddha from the first written canonical Buddhist texts (Pali canon in the 1st century BC)^[29], or the two centuries separating Muhammad from the first reference biography (Ibn Hisham, 9th century)^[30], the speed with which the New Testament was put into writing is, for any serious historian, a major guarantee of authenticity. As the biblical scholar F. F. Bruce essentially stresses: New Testament textual criticism does not lack documentation — on the contrary, it is the abundance of manuscripts that gives it the means to correct copyists' errors^[31].

The Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran 1947–1956)

The most important discovery of 20th-century biblical archaeology is that of the Dead Sea Scrolls, unearthed from 1947 onwards near the site of Khirbet Qumran, on the north-western shores of the Dead Sea (present-day West Bank). Eleven caves yielded about 981 different manuscripts (often in fragments), dated between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD^[32]. The community that copied and preserved them is Essenism — a monastic branch of Second Temple Judaism settled at Qumran from ~150 BC to 68 AD, when the site was destroyed by the Roman legions during the First Jewish–Roman War.

Composition of the library:

• ~200 biblical manuscripts (every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther; Qoheleth — Ecclesiastes — is attested there; of the Ezra–Nehemiah whole, only Ezra is represented, with no fragment of Nehemiah)^[33]
• ~30% apocryphal or pseudepigraphical texts (1 Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, Sirach, non-canonical psalms)
• ~30% sectarian texts (Community Rule, Damascus Document, War Scroll, Pesharim — "commentaries" applying the prophecies to the life of the community)

The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ) is the most emblematic manuscript: 7.34 metres long, containing all 66 chapters of Isaiah, dated to ~125 BC. Its comparison with the Masoretic text copied about a thousand years later (Leningrad Codex B19A, 1008 AD) reveals remarkable fidelity^[34]. The variants noted are almost all orthographic, scribal, or minor stylistic ones, and virtually all are without doctrinal import. The most discussed exception is Is 53:11: the scroll reads "he shall see the light" there, like the Septuagint, against the Masoretic text which lacks the word — a reading of obvious Christological significance, since it is the light contemplated after the Servant's anguish. The result is without parallel in the transmission of any other text from antiquity.

The whole collection is now kept at the Shrine of the Book, a special wing of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, in a controlled atmosphere. The building, a partially buried white dome (architects Armand Bartos and Frederic Kiesler), was inaugurated on 20 April 1965.

The Septuagint (LXX)

The Septuagint (from the Latin Septuaginta, "seventy", abbreviated LXX) is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made at Alexandria between the 3rd and the 1st century BC by and for the Greek-speaking Jewish community of the diaspora. Tradition (reported in the Letter of Aristeas, c. 130 BC) holds that seventy-two Jewish sages (six per tribe of Israel) translated the Pentateuch in seventy-two days under the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (c. 285–247 BC), each arriving at an identical text — hence the rounding to "seventy". This tradition is probably legendary as regards the miracle of unanimous translation, but it authenticates the Alexandrian origin and Ptolemaic dating^[35].

Importance for Christianity: the Septuagint is the Bible of the apostles and of the early Church. The large majority of Old Testament quotations in the New Testament (over 300 recorded) follows the Septuagint — hence occasional translation nuances (Isaiah 7:14: parthenos, "virgin", in the LXX, whereas the Hebrew text uses almah, "young woman" — it is the LXX reading that Mt 1:23 takes up). But some follow the Hebrew text or depart from both: Mt 2:15 quotes Hos 11:1 after the Hebrew ("out of Egypt have I called my son") where the LXX has "his children", and Jn 19:37 quotes Zech 12:10 after the Hebrew ("him whom they have pierced")^[36]. It is also the Septuagint that includes the deuterocanonical books (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1–2 Maccabees) — hence the Catholic position of regarding them as inspired, against the Lutheran Protestant position which adopted the shorter Hebrew canon in the 16th century, relying on the debated hypothesis of a rabbinic fixing at Yavneh around 90 AD^[37].

The great Byzantine codices (4th–5th centuries)

Beyond the papyri, the textual transmission of the New Testament is secured by the great parchment codices dated to the 4th–5th century, copied in the first official Christian workshops after the Constantinian peace (313). These codices, written entirely in Greek capitals (uncials), are the most important textual witnesses for biblical criticism. Bruce Metzger in The Text of the New Testament (Oxford UP, 4th ed. 2005)^[38] classifies them as follows:

• Codex Vaticanus (B, 03) — c. 350 AD — Vatican Apostolic Library. Alexandrian tradition, one of the two most reliable.
• Codex Sinaiticus (א, 01) — c. 350 AD — British Library. Only one of the great uncial codices to preserve the NT in its entirety.
• Codex Alexandrinus (A, 02) — c. 450 AD — British Library. Mixed tradition (with gaps, notably in Matthew, John and 2 Corinthians).
• Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (C, 04) — 5th century — National Library of France. A palimpsest (parchment washed then reused: rewritten in the 12th century over the biblical text), deciphered by Tischendorf (1840–1843) and edited by him in 1843–1845.
• Codex Bezae (D, 05) — 5th century — bilingual Greek-Latin — Cambridge. Western tradition.

The papyri predate the codices and are the oldest witnesses:

• P52 (John Rylands Library) — c. 125 AD on the classical, debated dating^[39] — fragment of John 18 — oldest known NT manuscript on that dating
• P46 — c. 200 AD — almost complete Pauline letters
• P66 — c. 200 AD — Gospel of John
• P75 — c. 225 AD — Luke and John — text very close to Codex Vaticanus, showing the stability of the Alexandrian tradition

The New Testament is attested by thousands of Greek manuscripts and ancient versions (Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Gothic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, Slavonic) — a dossier without parallel for any text from antiquity. By comparison, Homer's Iliad — the best-preserved ancient text after the Bible — is attested by only a few hundred manuscripts, whose oldest complete copies are medieval, more than fifteen centuries after its composition. The textual reliability of the New Testament is therefore, by the very criteria of classical philology, beyond compare^[40][41].

The Latin Vulgate (382–405)

The Vulgate (Versio vulgata, "common version") is the Latin translation of the Bible produced by Saint Jerome (c. 347–420) between 382 and 405 AD at the request of Pope Damasus I. Jerome translated the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew (Hebraica veritas), breaking with the earlier tradition that went through the Greek Septuagint. This bold decision was contested at the time, notably by Saint Augustine, who feared that touching the Church's common text would scandalize the faithful and disunite the Latin and Greek Churches. The correspondence between Augustine and Jerome on this subject (Augustine's letters 28, 71, 82; Jerome's letters 102, 105, 112, 115) is one of the greatest philological debates of Christian antiquity.

In his Letter 71 to Jerome (c. 403 AD), Augustine illustrates the danger with a fact: at Oea, the reading of the new translation of Jonah caused such an uproar that the bishop had to appeal to the testimony of the resident Jews. He therefore asks Jerome, rather than a version from the Hebrew, for an exact Latin translation of the Greek Septuagint — a version of great authority, widely circulated and used by the Apostles themselves^[42].

Jerome defends instead the authority of the original Hebrew text, out of concern for textual truth against any Jewish apologetic argument that might have reproached Christians for using an inaccurate Greek version. The Church ended up adopting the Jerome solution, which progressively established itself as the official version of the Latin Catholic Church — a status solemnly confirmed by the Council of Trent in 1546 (Session IV, decree Insuper), which declared the Vulgate "authentic" in public use, without rejecting the value of the original languages.

In his Letter 84 (c. 400 AD) to Pammachius and Oceanus, Jerome defends his method by recalling his philological labour and his teachers — including a Jew named Bar-Anina from whom he learned Hebrew^[43].

A revised edition called the Neo-Vulgate (Nova Vulgata) was promulgated by Saint John Paul II in 1979 (apostolic constitution Scripturarum thesaurus), incorporating the contributions of modern exegesis while preserving the Jerome tradition. It is today the official reference version for liturgical editions in Latin and for translation into vernacular languages.

The history of the biblical canon is a history of progressive discernment by the Church, not of a single decision fallen from heaven. The apostles and the first Fathers of the Church first transmitted the living Gospel in preaching; the written texts were progressively recognized as inspired and read in the liturgy; formal lists appear only in the 4th century, in reaction to the proliferation of apocryphal writings (Gnostic gospels, legendary acts of apostles, etc.).

Council of Rome (382) under Damasus I

The Council of Rome convened by Pope Damasus I in 382 is traditionally presented as the first official list of the Catholic biblical canon. The attribution of this list to the Roman council of 382 remains debated — the reference works themselves speak only of a council "probably" held at Rome in 382 — but the list handed down under the name of the Decretum Gelasianum (reproduced under Pope Gelasius I in 495) is identical to the one Trent would define^[44].

Synods of Hippo (393) and Carthage III (397)

It was at the African synods of Hippo (393) and Carthage III (397) — under the major influence of Saint Augustine — that the canon of 73 books was formally received by the African episcopate of the Catholic Church^[45]: local synods, not ecumenical councils. The same list was confirmed by the Council of Florence in the decree for the Jacobites (bull Cantate Domino, 4 February 1442)^[46], before being solemnly defined at Trent. The canon of Carthage III was ratified by Rome in the 5th century and remained the universal norm of the Church for a millennium.

Council of Trent, Session IV (8 April 1546) — "Sacrosancta"

Faced with the Protestant Reformation, which rejects the deuterocanonical books (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1–2 Maccabees + the Greek portions of Esther and Daniel), the Council of Trent solemnly reaffirmed the Catholic canon on 8 April 1546 at its Session IV, by the decree Sacrosancta^[47]. The decree explicitly lists by name the 73 books, declares them "sacred and canonical" in all their parts, to be received "with an equal affection of piety and reverence", and pronounces anathema on whoever would reject them:

"If anyone does not accept as sacred and canonical these books in their entirety, with all their parts, as they have been read in the Catholic Church and are contained in the old Latin Vulgate edition, and knowingly and deliberately despises the aforesaid traditions, let him be anathema."^[48]

The decree also confirms Saint Jerome's Vulgate as the official authentic version of the Church.

The three great biblical encyclicals (1893–1943)

Between Trent and Vatican II, three successive papal encyclicals form the modern doctrinal backbone of Catholic teaching on the Bible. They respond to the rise of 19th-century historical criticism and prepare the Catholic reception of scientific exegesis.

Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus (18 November 1893) — the first great magisterial encyclical devoted exclusively to the Bible. Leo XIII defends the absolute inerrancy of inspired Scripture against the rationalists:

"It is absolutely wrong and forbidden either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture or to admit that the sacred author has erred." — Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, § 20 (18 November 1893)^[49]

Leo XIII also founded the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1902 to guide Catholic exegesis in the face of Protestant and rationalist critical currents.

Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus (15 September 1920) — published for the 1,500th anniversary of Saint Jerome's death, the encyclical reaffirms scriptural inerrancy and proposes Jerome as the model of the Christian exegete: "All his teaching, his works, his life attest the exact knowledge and deep love he had for Sacred Scripture"^[50].

Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu (30 September 1943) — a decisive turning point. Pius XII officially authorizes the use of historico-critical methods (study of ancient languages, archaeology, textual criticism, study of literary genres) for Catholic exegesis, yielding nothing on inspiration or inerrancy:

"For, in the words and writings of the ancient authors of the East, often the literal sense does not appear with as much evidence as with the writers of our time; what they wished to signify by their words cannot be determined by the laws of grammar or philology alone, nor by the context alone. The exegete must absolutely go back in thought to those remote centuries of the East, so that, aided by the resources of history, archaeology, ethnology and other sciences, he may discern and recognize what literary genres the authors of that ancient age wished to use and actually did use." — Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu, § 35 (30 September 1943)^[51]

It is this opening that enabled the flourishing of 20th-century academic Catholic exegesis (Raymond Brown, John Meier, Joseph Fitzmyer, Joseph Ratzinger, etc.) and prepared the doctrine of Dei Verbum.

Vatican II, Dei Verbum (18 November 1965)

The dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum ("The Word of God"), promulgated by Pope Saint Paul VI on 18 November 1965 by an overwhelming majority of 2,344 votes to 6, is the contemporary magisterial reference document on the Bible, inspiration, Tradition and interpretation^[52]. Dei Verbum:

• Receives the canon defined at Trent without redefining it (DV § 11): Dei Verbum sets out the doctrine of inspiration and interpretation, not a new canon.
• Defines biblical inspiration: "written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, [the holy books] have God as their author" (DV § 11), while respecting the human freedom of the hagiographers: "God chose men and while employed by Himself they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted" (DV § 11).
• Affirms inerrancy: the Bible teaches "firmly, faithfully, and without error the truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation" (DV § 11). The phrase "for the sake of our salvation" says why God had this truth put into writing, not what inerrancy covers: in continuity with Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus (1893) — "it is absolutely wrong and forbidden either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture or to admit that the sacred author has erred" — the Church holds that Scripture is without error in everything it affirms^[53].
• Encourages rigorous historico-critical exegesis (DV § 12) while recalling that Scripture "must be read and interpreted in the sacred spirit in which it was written" (DV § 12).
• Articulates Scripture and Tradition: the two "form one sacred deposit of the word of God" (DV § 10).

In the 16th century, Martin Luther (1483–1546) erected into the founding principle of the Reformation the slogan sola scriptura — "Scripture alone": the Bible would be the sole rule of faith for the Christian, to the exclusion of any living Apostolic Tradition and any magisterial authority. The Council of Trent condemns this position by affirming that "the truth of salvation and the rule of morals are contained in the written books and in the unwritten traditions" (Session IV, decree Sacrosancta)^[54].

The Catholic answer in four arguments

(1) The canon argument — Scripture alone cannot be the supreme rule since Scripture nowhere contains the list of the canonical books. To know that the Gospel of Mark is inspired and the Gospel of Thomas is not, an authority outside Scripture is necessarily needed to have discerned the canon. That authority is the Catholic Church: lists received at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, local synods), confirmed at Florence (1442), defined at Trent (1546). Luther himself had to rely on this tradition for his own canon, while removing from it the seven books the Church receives as inspired.

(2) The biblical argument against sola scriptura — paradoxically, Scripture itself affirms the authority of an oral apostolic Tradition alongside the written text:

"So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter." — Saint Paul, 2 Thessalonians 2:15^[55]

"And what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also." — Saint Paul, 2 Timothy 2:2

And John explicitly closes his Gospel on the scriptural incompleteness of revelation:

"Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book." — Saint John, Gospel 20:30; cf. also 21:25: "But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written."

(3) The patristic argument — the Fathers of the Church of the first four centuries unanimously attest the coexistence of the living Apostolic Tradition and the canonical Scripture. Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, combating the Gnostics in the 2nd century, founds the rule of faith on both:

"What if the Apostles had not in fact left us any writings at all? Would it not be necessary to follow the rule of that Tradition which they handed down to those to whom they entrusted the Churches? A rule to which many barbarian nations who believe in Christ have submitted, having salvation written in their hearts by the Spirit, without ink or paper." — Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, Adversus Haereses III, 4, 1–2 (c. 180 AD)^[56]

(4) The historical argument — the Christians of the first three centuries had no complete Bible: the Gospels circulated separately, copies were rare and costly, most of the faithful were illiterate. The living rule of faith was therefore necessarily for 300 years the living Apostolic Tradition handed down by the bishops and the liturgy — not Scripture alone. To claim that sola scriptura is the authentic apostolic rule is to claim that the Christians of the first three centuries had no access to the authentic rule of their faith — an ecclesiologically untenable conclusion.

The Catholic position: Scripture, Tradition, Magisterium

Catholic doctrine articulates three inseparable poles in the transmission of Revelation, definitively formulated by Dei Verbum §§ 9–10:

"It is clear, therefore, that sacred tradition, Sacred Scripture and the teaching authority of the Church, in accord with God's most wise design, are so linked and joined together that one cannot stand without the others." — Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum § 10^[57]

This articulation does not oppose Scripture to Tradition: it subordinates the Magisterium to the service of the written and handed-down Word of God. The Magisterium is not "above" the Word, but at its service: "For the Magisterium is not above the word of God, but serves it" (DV § 10).

The most striking apologetic argument developed in chapter 16 of Bolloré and Bonnassies' Dieu, la science, les preuves lies in this observation: a small obscure people — the Hebrews of the 1st millennium BC, semi-nomadic, without great cities, without observatories, without libraries, without great philosophers —, deprived of all the material conditions required to produce great cosmological insights, nevertheless holds and hands down through the biblical text a series of truths about the universe, about man and about God which:

1. were not attainable by the scientific or philosophical knowledge of the time;
2. were counter-intuitive against immediate experience;
3. ran counter to the beliefs of all the more powerful and more learned neighbouring peoples (Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans);
4. turned out to be accurate millennia later, in the light of modern science^[58].

This is what Bolloré and Bonnassies call "humanly unattainable truths". Their accumulation — not one, but a dozen — makes the chance hypothesis practically untenable and constitutes, for the authors, a major cumulative argument for a divine revelation.

1. Sun and Moon are mere "lights"

All ancient civilizations divinized the Sun and the Moon: the Sumerians with Nanna (Moon) and Utu (Sun), the Babylonians with Sin and Shamash, the Egyptians with Ra (the greatest god), the Persians with Mithras, the Greeks and Romans with Helios/Apollo and Selene/Diana. Archaeologists have found no temple dedicated to the Sun or the Moon among the Hebrews. Genesis presents these heavenly bodies as mere "lights" (Gn 1:14: "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night") — that is, created luminous objects, not divinities. This desacralization was so scandalous to pagans that the philosopher Celsus, in his True Discourse Against the Christians (c. 178 AD), indignantly protests:

"First, it is astonishing that men who worship heaven and the angels of heaven make nothing of the Sun and the Moon, the fixed and wandering stars — that is, of what is most august and most powerful in heaven."^[59]

2. The universe has an absolute beginning

The Bible opens with "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Gn 1:1) and hammers home this affirmation in dozens of passages (Gn 2:4; Is 42:5; Is 44:24; Ps 89:2; 2 Mac 7:28 making "out of nothing" explicit: "God made all this out of nothing"). All ancient cosmogonies — Sumerian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Hindu, Japanese, Mayan — are on the contrary cosmogonies of transformation: an eternal primordial chaos progressively reorganizes itself, but nothing truly begins^[60]. The idea of an absolute beginning of the universe remained philosophically marginal until the 20th century.

Contemporary science, since the work of Lemaître (1927), Hubble (1929), Penzias and Wilson (1964), and the Borde–Vilenkin–Guth theorem (2003), holds that the universe did indeed have a beginning — dated by the current cosmological model to about 13.8 billion years ago. The Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, co-discoverer of the cosmic microwave background, put it in these terms to the New York Times on 12 March 1978 — remarks reported by the chemist Henry Schaefer (2008, p. 80) and taken up by Bolloré and Bonnassies^[61]: "The best data we have [concerning the Big Bang] are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole."

The Church has not settled the question of the age of the world: what belongs to faith is that the universe has a beginning and is created out of nothing — not the figure. Alongside the current model, Catholics loyally hold the short chronology received for centuries: a world on the order of six thousand years old, with Adam's creation around 4000 BC (Theophilus of Antioch, Eusebius, Saint Augustine, Saint Bede, Ussher in 1650). Works such as those of Fernand Crombette (CESHE) propose a rereading of datings in this direction — a hypothesis to be taken with the reservations of its own supporters. This position is not a dogma, but a received traditional interpretation which every Catholic remains free to hold.

3. Time is linear and directed toward an end

Almost all ancient civilizations (Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Mayans, Greeks with the "myth of the eternal return" studied by Mircea Eliade) conceive of time as cyclical: everything repeats, history has no direction, individual life counts for little since it is diluted in infinite cosmic cycles or reincarnations. The Bible affirms on the contrary that time is linear and directed toward an end (Wis 7:17–19; Is 51:6: "The heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment").

This anthropologically revolutionary conception — each human act has unique value, each life counts, history has meaning — was scientifically confirmed only in the 20th century, when cosmological theorems (entropic death of the universe per the second law of thermodynamics, expansion with no Big Crunch) ruled out any "eternal return".

4. Man is drawn from matter

The Bible teaches that man's body is drawn from dust (Gn 2:7; Gn 3:19: "you are dust, and to dust you shall return"; Job 10:9; Ps 89). Only his "breath of life" (ruah), that is, his spiritual soul, is breathed into him by God and is of another nature. Neighbouring mythologies present man on the contrary as made of divine flesh (Mesopotamians: clay mixed with the blood of a sacrificed god; Egyptians: "men are the tears of my eye" says Atum; Greeks: clay kneaded by Prometheus or direct emanations of divinities). Modern science confirms that the human body is material — composed exclusively of atoms and organic molecules —, which accords with biblical anthropology while leaving open the philosophical question of the spiritual soul (CCC § 366).

5. No divinity in natural elements

For ancient peoples, seas (Poseidon), forests (Pan, Naiads), lightning (Zeus, Thor, Indra), mountains and rivers harboured divinities. The Bible performs a radical demythologization: these natural realities are but created elements, "the work of human hands" as regards idols (Ps 113B:4–7: "Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak..."). Three thousand years later, no one in the West any longer believes thunder is a manifestation of Zeus. Science has confirmed the biblical position.

6. All men descend from a single couple — fundamental equality

The Bible affirms that all men descend from Adam and Eve (Gn 1:27; Tb 8:6: "It was you who made Adam; you made him a helper and support: Eve, his wife. And from the two of them the human race was born"). This unity of origin founds the fundamental equality of all humans, opposed to hierarchically ordered castes of divine origin (Indians, Egyptians, Babylonians) or to the divinization of kings and emperors (Pharaohs, Augustus, Caligula). The Hebrews are among the rare peoples of antiquity never to have divinized a human being.

Population genetics observes, for its part, the unity of the human race: through the Y chromosome (transmitted only from father to son) and mitochondrial DNA (transmitted only from mother to daughter), all present-day humans trace back to common ancestors on the paternal as well as the maternal line — what popularizers call "Y-chromosomal Adam" and "mitochondrial Eve"^[62]. Two limits, to be stated plainly: in these models, these two ancestors did not live at the same time and therefore did not form a couple; and their datings (on the order of one to two hundred thousand years) belong to the long-chronology model, with its presuppositions (mutation rates, calibrations) — which the supporters of the short chronology presented in § 2 above dispute. What genetics confirms is therefore the unity of the human family, not the single couple; monogenism itself rests on Revelation and the Magisterium (see below), not on laboratory demonstration. The anthropological and moral implications of this unity remain immense: equality of dignity, condemnation of racial hierarchies, universal fraternity.

Monogenism — the origin of all humanity from a single couple — is moreover doctrinally necessary to account for the universal transmission of original sin by way of generation, as Saint Paul teaches (Rom 5:12: "as sin came into the world through one man") and as Pius XII explicitly reaffirmed in the encyclical Humani Generis (12 August 1950):

"But when it comes to another conjectural view which is called polygenism, the sons of the Church in no way enjoy the same freedom. (...) For it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with what the sources of revealed truth and the acts of the Magisterium of the Church teach concerning original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by one single person, Adam, and, transmitted to all by generation, is found in each as his own." — Pius XII, Humani Generis § 37 (12 August 1950)^[63]

The Bible's detractors — from the 18th-century rationalists to contemporary atheist websites — line up a list of alleged "scientific errors" in the biblical text. Bolloré and Bonnassies in chapter 17 of Dieu, la science, les preuves show that these "errors" almost always stem from a misreading of the Bible — either excessive literalism, or ignorance of the constraints of language and ancient literary genres, or unfamiliarity with contemporary scientific discoveries^[64].

"Creation in seven days"

A classic first objection: "the Bible says the world was created in seven days, whereas the current cosmological model speaks of 13.8 billion years". Answer: the word "billion" did not exist in biblical Hebrew — nor in any language of antiquity — and appears in French only in the 15th century. It was impossible for the sacred author to convey a quantified duration. Genesis therefore presents creation in seven days: this weekly framework communicates (a) that creation happened progressively and not all at once, (b) in a precise order (light, waters, earth, vegetation, heavenly bodies, animals, man), (c) that man appeared last, (d) and founds the rhythm of the seven-day week with a day of rest — a Hebrew innovation all humanity would adopt. That these "days" are not necessarily 24-hour days, Origen was already writing around 230 AD:

"What man of sense will ever believe that the first, the second and the third day, evening and morning, could have taken place without sun, without moon and without stars? (...) Taken literally, these things have hardly any reality."^[65]

The non-literal interpretation of the seven-day framework is therefore patristic, not modern. Saint Augustine in the 4th century (De Genesi ad litteram) already defended the idea that the "days" of Genesis do not mean 24-hour days. But this framework narrates real events: the creation of the world by God out of nothing, the appearance of man last, Adam and Eve as the real first parents of the whole human race, the original fall — the Catechism specifies that Genesis 3 uses figurative language "but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man" (CCC 390) — and the Flood, which really happened.

"The Earth before the stars"

Second objection: "Genesis 1:1 says God created the Earth at the beginning, whereas the current model makes it appear about 9 billion years after the beginning." Two-part answer:

(a) The Hebrew word used is ha'arets — a generic term meaning "the ground, the land, the expanse", not the planet Earth (a concept foreign to Hebrew cosmology). Modern translations that write "Earth" with a capital letter introduce an anachronism.

(b) The expression "the heaven and the earth" is in Hebrew a way of saying "all that exists" by naming the two extremes — just as "day and night" means "all the time, continually". The sentence "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" must therefore be translated: "In the beginning God created all that exists." One may even see in it a stunning intuition of Einsteinian cosmology: "in the beginning" (time appears), "the heaven" (space appears), "and the earth" (matter appears) — three inseparable and simultaneous dimensions of the Big Bang according to general relativity.

"Light before the stars"

Third objection: "Genesis 1:3 — 'Let there be light!' — is created even before the stars, the supposed sources of light." Answer: according to the current cosmological model itself, light appeared about 380,000 years after the beginning (decoupling of photons at recombination), that is, well before the formation of the first stars (~150 million years after the beginning on that same model). It is the order described by this model that corresponds precisely to the biblical order. The cosmic microwave background discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1964 is precisely that first light.

"The flat Earth"

Fourth objection: "the Bible teaches that the Earth is flat." Answer: no biblical passage teaches this. The expressions invoked — "the four corners of the earth" (Rev 20:8; Rev 7:1) — are idiomatic expressions we still use today with no geometrical implication. "To the four corners of the world" does not mean for us that the world is cubic. The Bible rather presents a phenomenological cosmology describing the world as it appears to the observer, not a geography treatise.

"The Exodus and the crossing of the Red Sea"

The biblical episodes (Exodus, Flood, Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah) are debated today. Biblical archaeology has progressively validated much of the Bible's historical data: the existence of King David (Tel Dan stele, 9th c. BC, discovered 1993, bearing the mention "house of David"); Hezekiah king of Judah confirmed by the Siloam tunnel inscription (701 BC); Sennacherib king of Assyria and his siege of Lachish (701); Cyrus the Great and his edict authorizing the return of the Jews (538 BC, confirmed by the Cyrus Cylinder). The Genesis and Exodus narratives are told with the literary means of their era — which archaeology, the science of stones and inscriptions, reaches less directly — but the Church holds to their substantial historical content: Adam and Eve as real persons and first parents of all (monogenism, Humani Generis § 37), original sin as an event that really happened (CCC 390), the Flood as a real event.

The doctrine of inspiration according to Dei Verbum

The Catholic doctrine of biblical inspiration is defined by Dei Verbum § 11:

"Holy Mother Church, relying on the belief of the Apostles, holds that the books both of the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself."^[66]

The key concept is that of dual authorship: God is the principal author (by inspiration), but the human hagiographer is the true author (with his language, culture, style, freedom). Dei Verbum specifies: "God chose men and while employed by Himself they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted."

The four senses of Scripture (patristic tradition)

Patristic and medieval tradition, formalized notably by John Cassian (5th century) and taken up by Saint Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 10), distinguishes four senses in Scripture, recalled by the Catechism of the Catholic Church §§ 115–119:

1. Literal sense (sensus litteralis) — what the words mean in their immediate writing context.
2. Allegorical sense — what Scripture announces by figuring Christ and His mystery (the OT foretells the NT).
3. Moral sense — what Scripture teaches for Christian conduct.
4. Anagogical sense — what Scripture suggests about the last things.

This doctrine is summed up by the medieval distich: "Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia" — "The letter teaches the deeds, the allegory what you should believe, the moral sense what you should do, the anagogy where you are tending"^[67].

Literary genres (Dei Verbum § 12)

Dei Verbum § 12 asks the reader to discern literary genres: the Bible contains historical narratives, law codes, poems, parables, hymns, prophetic oracles, apocalypses, pastoral letters. Each of these genres has its own rules of interpretation. Reading Genesis 1 as a scientific cosmology manual is an error of genre, just as reading the Acts of the Apostles as a parable would be.

This article belongs to a network of related articles in this encyclopedia. To explore further:

• Scientific truths: Cosmological fine-tuning · The Kalam cosmological argument · The astronomical probability of the first cell · The origin of life and Pasteur's axiom
• Christian apologetics: The divinity of Jesus · The resurrection of Jesus · Did Jesus really exist? · The Holy Shroud of Turin
• Catholic doctrine: The dogma of the Trinity · Papal infallibility · Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur
• Answers to Protestantism: Answers to Protestantism · Sola scriptura · Martin Luther (1483–1546) · John Calvin
• Biblical Magisterium: The Council of Trent · The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith
• Modern Catholic authors: Luisa Piccarreta (Servant of God) · Maria Valtorta (Gospel visions; placed on the Index in 1959 — Index abolished in 1966 —, Cardinal Ratzinger's 1985 letter, no approval) · Saint Annibale Maria di Francia (apostle of the evangelical Rogation)