Sola Scriptura

One of the common things I hear from American Protestants is that they are “Sola Scriptura.” If it’s not in the Bible, it’s not part of their Christian belief, and should be shunned. According to this school of thought, the Bible is the foundation of all Christian belief and practice.

In this article, I’m going to explore the roots of scripture, the roots of the Christian faith, the origin of the sola scriptura belief and why it’s in error. If your belief system makes you uncomfortable with dealing with actual history and facts and reconciling them to what and how you believe, then you should stop reading right here.

What is the Christian church, and what is its origin? Scripture is very clear; Christ established his church specifically in Matthew 16:18. In the book of Acts and the various letters we see many accounts and references to how the church was structured, with episcopoi (Bishops) being responsible for multiple congregations, presbuteroi or presbyters (translated as elders in many English texts, and the root word for today's "priest" in English) being responsible for a given congregation, and diakonoi or Deacons being responsible for assisting Bishops and presbyters. This was the church that Christ established, and which was promoted by his apostles. Christ didn’t establish multiple churches, and we're admonished from thinking divisively like that in 1 Corinthians 1:10-15. We're taught by Paul that the Church is literally the body of Christ, and that we are all members of one body. 

So the question every Christian must ask is, “Am I a member of the Church that Christ established, and in communion with that earliest of churches?” Another way of looking at this is to examine your line of apostolic succession. Christ taught his Disciples, who accepted his teaching and passed it on to their students as Christianity spread. As generations passed, each generation had its Bishops who had learned their faith from the generation before, and who agreed with it. Yes, there were heresies, and some taught a faith that was not what they had been taught. The church had a mechanism for such problems in the ecumenical councils of Bishops, where questions regarding the faith were discussed and resolved by the body of Bishops. In this way the church stayed true to its roots for more than a thousand years, until the Great Schism of 1054 – which was more about politics and egos than it was about dire matters of faith.

If your faith is based on scripture alone, then how can you be in communion with the Early Church, which couldn’t have been based on scripture, as the church was thriving and growing for decades before the first Gospel was written and for centuries before the canon was finalized? The church that Christ established is not, cannot be based on scripture. Rather, scripture is based on the Church that Christ established. If you see the Bible as the blueprint for your church, I’m afraid you have it quite backwards.

The early church didn’t operate in a vacuum. It maintained a rich heritage of scholarly works by its elders. The Bishops of the Early Church loved to write to one another and to the faith communities of their sees. To understand the Early Church, one cannot rely solely on scripture, because scripture is a particular type of record established for a particular purpose and was written within the framework and the frame of reference of the already established church.

What is Scripture?

What is scripture and why did the books that we have in the New Testament get into the bible and other contemporary writings get left out?

Before we discuss this, we need to acknowledge that the New Testament was predominantly written in Greek. From the time of Alexander the Great, Greek was the most common and widely used language in the world. Yes, the Romans governed that part of the world speaking Latin; the local common language was Aramaic; and the language of the Old Testament and the Jewish faith was Hebrew. But if you wanted to write something scholarly and get the widest distribution to the greatest numbers of people, you wrote in Greek. Greek was to the world of Christ what English is to the world today.

In the earliest days of Christianity, the faith was spread through word of mouth. People would gather to hear what someone had seen or heard. The eyewitnesses to the works of Jesus were rock stars and drew crowds wherever they went. But words are ephemeral, and subject to misinterpretation as they pass a series of Chinese whispers. As the Apostles established churches, they would move on after a time, and those churches would have to learn to operate independently. Of course, there were questions, which were posed back to the Apostles/Bishops in letters. Unfortunately, posterity didn’t preserve those queries, but only their responses, which we have recorded in the various letters and epistles found today in the New Testament. We’re quite confident that there were many more like these, but these were retained by their congregations as having particular significance.

The first Gospel texts date back to about AD 70. This isn’t a great deal of time between Christ and the appearance of the first gospels. Christ was crucified in approximately AD 32, only 38 years earlier. How many people alive today recall vividly the Reagan administration or the eruption of Mt. St. Helens? It’s not that far a stretch in living memory.

Peter was one of the more prolific evangelizers. Wherever he went, he preached about what he'd seen and heard. Unlike today, where we have TV and books, he repeated his stories over and over, always to new audiences. As anyone who’s told a story many times knows, you develop a pattern with practice. You learn how to best organize your account, convey your experience, and the difference between each telling of the story becomes less and less, until it’s almost like you’re reciting it by rote. This happened to Peter, to our advantage.

Peter had an acolyte, Mark, who was his scribe. Mark himself was an eyewitness to Christ, even though he was a teenager at the time. The evidence that Mark himself was a witness and a follower of Christ in person is in a clue in Mark 14:51-52, a reference that appears nowhere else in scripture. It’s widely believed that Mark was referring to himself in this passage.

Note for anyone reading the New Testament, in some cases the scripture refers to the author themselves. It was considered gauche to refer to oneself in the first person in a narrative, so we see patterns like in Mark, where he refers to himself as “a certain young man,” and many times in the Gospel of John, where he refers to himself in a pattern such as “the disciple whom He (Christ) loved.” Another literary mechanism that should be noted is Luke’s addressing “Theophilus” in the opening of Acts. Luke isn't addressing a person in this greeting, he’s addressing you and me. Theophilus means a lover of God, and this is Luke’s address specifically to you as the reader.

Anyway, Mark was at Peter’s side when he preached about what he had seen and heard and about Christ’s life, and he may have heard the story a thousand times. I can almost imagine Mark in the shadows as Peter addressed a new group of catechumens, mouthing the words to himself as Peter spoke them. Mark, as his scribe, had the idea that the message had become rote, and could be spread to more people through writing it down than one man could possibly address in a lifetime. So Mark wrote Peter’s account down. In many ways the Gospel of Mark is in effect the gospel of Peter.

Matthew preached primarily in Judea before taking his mission East or South. His biggest challenge in Judea was the faithful Jews, who were informed by scripture as to the nature of the Messiah. Jesus didn’t fit their preconceived notions. Mark’s Gospel was a godsend to Matthew, who took it and expanded on it, but did so in a way to tie the life of Christ to the many prophesies that referred to him in the Old Testament. Matthew’s Gospel was an argument to the Jews to demonstrate that Christ fulfilled the prophesies of the Old Testament. 

Luke may have been a gentile, or a Jew of Greek origin. What we know is that he was a physician and a companion or acolyte to Paul. As a scholar, he felt that the Early Church owed it to posterity to record the life of Christ and the history of the Early Church. Using Mark’s Gospel as the foundation, he conducted interviews, including with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and did a thorough scholarly investigation of this man whom he had never met. It was through his scholarship that many details of the early life of Jesus are preserved in his Gospel. His Gospel was the first of a planned trilogy that would teach future generations about Christ and the foundations of the Christian church. Unfortunately, his third book was lost or never completed, and all we are left with is his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which end before the executions of Peter and Paul.

John’s Gospel was written after the other three, and with no real connection to them. John is the only one of the twelve to die a natural death. His gospel is unique in that it traces a journey of discovery for the reader, to walk the path of discovery that John did. In this Gospel, the reader learns about Jesus the preacher, the rabbi (teacher), the Messiah, the Son of God and finally God incarnate. John’s gospel was written to lay to rest with finality the question of the identity of Jesus, and states unequivocally, proven through John’s journey of discovery, that Jesus was God, walking among us. Without this gospel of John, Christianity would be a much different faith than it is today.

Are these the only works written about Jesus by his followers? Of course not. Preserved for us today are copies of the Protoevangelium of James, the Gospel of Thomas, a Passion narrative that is said to pre-date Mark, a Signs Gospel that may have influenced John’s writing, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Apocalypse of Adam, and many others. Because these are not canonical, they often weren’t preserved as rigorously as the canonical texts, which had been duplicated in thousands of lectionaries, and thus allowed a historical cross-check.

What did it Mean to Be Canon?

The Bible we have today, on which the Sola Scriptura folks base their faith, is canon. What does that mean? To some people, it means that these books are true and accepted, and all others – the apocrypha – are not. This is incorrect. What these texts have in common is that they were – and still are – used in the conduct of the Eucharistic liturgy.

The Christian mass as conducted by the earliest Christians has a number of elements to it. If you want to experience the mass as the Early Church did, please attend an Eastern Orthodox Mass. The normal mass of the Eastern Orthodox is the Mass of St. John Chrysostom, the archbishop of Constantinople in the 5^th century. His mass is adapted from, with very few changes, the mass of St. James the Greater, the Archbishop of Jerusalem and Apostle of Christ. How much closer to the source of Christianity do you want to get?

As the letters from the Bishops and the Gospels became available, the churches would set aside a time in the mass to read from these works. This was done to reinforce the catechizing of the faithful, and to keep alive the history and record of belief. Each community had their own library of sacred writings that they would use during the mass, and they weren’t all the same.

In AD 325, Christianity had become acceptable in the Roman Empire, and the emperor Constantine was a friend of Christians, although not a baptized Christian himself until he was on his deathbed. The Christian community was facing a schism which threatened the peace between Christian communities throughout the empire as the Arians taught a doctrine concerning the nature of Christ that was considered heresy among the other churches. 

Up to this point, there had been ecumenical councils among the bishops, but they were all local affairs. Since the hierarchy of the church was egalitarian, no bishop considered himself to have the authority to call an ecumenical council of all of Christendom. Interestingly, it took the pagan emperor Constantine to exert his authority and call such a council, which convened in Nicaea in modern Turkey to resolve the question of the Arian heresy. As long as the bishops had all gathered together anyway, they took this opportunity to standardize a number of other things, including the creed of the church, which is still used in many traditional congregations today, even though it speaks of a universality that most of these churches eschew. They also set about to standardize the materials to be read during the mass throughout Christendom. This caused a great deal of consternation, because each congregation had their own peculiar books that they were fond of and took poorly to having outsiders tell them what they should and should not be reading during mass. After much argument and negotiation, a basic list of works to be read during the mass was established. This became the canonical list. It wasn’t set in stone just then and in fact didn’t actually become final until nearly a thousand years later.

The story that they stacked all the books on an altar and left it overnight, and those that were still on the altar the next morning were canon is just a myth.

This doesn’t mean that the rest of the rich library of Christian writings and history were to be consigned to the ash heap. They still formed the frame of reference for the church. The veneration of Mary the Mother of God in the Roman Catholic world, known as the veneration of the Theotokos (Christ-bearer) in the Eastern Churches, is practiced throughout every church in the world that can trace a legitimate unbroken line of apostolic succession to the twelve Apostles, from the Roman Catholic church, the Orthodox, Copt, Chaldean and even the Thomas Churches of India. It’s like the entire Eastern Church doesn’t even exist for the sola scriptura people. I’m sure the Orthodox Patriarchs in their sundry sees will be grateful to know that they only believe all that rubbish about Mary because the Pope of Rome commands them to do so. Likewise, the acceptance of the Eucharist as the literal body and blood of Christ is practiced in every church that can trace its origins back to the Twelve, yet it’s not explicitly taught anywhere in the Bible.

The point is that the Bible records the roots of Christianity but can only be properly interpreted within the frame of reference in which it was written – by Early Christians, who believed and practiced and taught the same doctrines that are practiced and taught by the root churches today, such as the Eastern Orthodox church.

Sola Scriptura

So where did this idea originate that everything you needed to know about Christianity is in the Bible? For this we need to look at the history of the Roman Catholic papacy, the advent of the printing press and the earliest days of Protestantism.

The idea of an infallible Pope being the head of all Christendom would have been a strange one to early Christians. The various Bishops were the heads of their particular patriarchies, but none claimed authority over another. The Bishop of Rome was considered to be first among equals, not by any hierarchy, but simply because he was proximate to the secular seat of power and therefore in a position to influence the secular government more than his brothers in more far-flung cities. Over the years this de-facto advantage of the Roman Bishop affected the relationship between Rome and the rest of Christendom. Rome regularly tried to assert ecclesiastical authority over the other patriarchies, who regularly told him where to stick it. Tensions grew high and in 1054, the Roman Bishop subtly changed the wording of the Apostle’s Creed without permission by an ecumenical council. The actual change was of little consequence in and of itself and would have made an interesting footnote in Christian history if it had actually been debated in council. But the Eastern Orthodox patriarchs and the Roman Bishop let it develop into a battle of ego and wills over whether the Roman Bishop had the authority to overrule an ecumenical council. Things spiraled out of control, and they ended up mutually excommunicating each other.

Western Europe was a feudal society and the kings ruled by divine right. Land was not privately owned, it all belonged to the crown, and the farmers and workers of the land were simply tenants who paid rent to the royalty who claimed ownership of the land. The linchpin to this absurd fiction was the kings ruled with the acceptance of the Church. There was some mutual backscratching which enriched the coffers of the Vatican, and for that the Church ignored the affairs of kings for the most part. Nevertheless, the Pope was the de facto ruler of Europe, with the nominal power to say who could and couldn’t sit on a throne.

This secular power was a commodity which was bought and sold by Italian nobility, and the office of Pope many times ceased to be a religious seat in all but name. There were some horrid popes, who looted the Vatican treasury for their own enrichment, who were morally depraved and who defiled the office with sexual scandals, prostitution, and murder. The Roman Catholic church became a caricature of religiosity and indulged in money-making schemes that preyed upon the faithful for the enrichment of those at the top of the church.

Bibles weren’t commonly available, as the only way of reproducing a Bible was by painstaking manual transcription. A single Bible was the product of years of work, and so only the wealthiest had personal access to one. Most Bibles were the property of the Church. The cycle of reading in the Roman Catholic church ensured that if you attended mass daily, over the course of three years you would have heard the entire New Testament read to you. Unfortunately, the practice of attending daily mass began to fall out of favor, so the exposure of the lay person to the scripture became somewhat problematic. This is the origin of the myth that the Catholic church sought to keep Bibles out of the hands of the lay people, promoted by John Calvin for his own propaganda purposes. 

When Martin Luther protested the abusive practices of the Vatican, such as selling indulgences, he disobeyed his vow of obedience to the church. He renounced the Papacy, and set about to establish his own church, faithful to the precepts of original Christianity, but without the authority that Rome and the Vatican had usurped. Had Martin Luthor been properly educated in church history, he would have found his home and what he was after in the Eastern Orthodox church, but as a product of his day and place, he knew nothing of eastern Orthodoxy except what the propagandists told him.

Martin Luthor’s movement was noticed by many other European congregations who disagreed with the excesses of the Vatican. One of the most influential was John Calvin. Armed with a personal copy of the Bible and a complete disregard for history and theology, Calvin declared anything not directly supported by the Bible to be anathema. In his righteous crusade to distance himself from the papacy, he threw out the entire church, keeping only the books that had been inspired by, written by, and interpreted by the church as his guide. In doing so, he divorced himself from the body of Christ, the Church. One can legitimately question whether the Roman Catholic church is the rightful heir of the claim to be the body of Christ. That claim may very well legitimately belong to the Eastern Orthodox church. But there is no logic on Earth than can be tortuous enough to make the case that a sola scriptura belief promoted by John Calvin that repudiated all of Christian teachings, tradition and doctrine for the previous 1500 years is an any way rightful heir to the claim of being the Church that was established by Christ, evangelized by the Twelve Apostles and other disciples of Jesus, and which wrote the very texts on which Calvin claimed to base his church.