The Bible and Ethics
In this course we'll be examining many different foundations for moral and ethical principles. Many of you who come from a religious background may be curious as to why we do not use the Bible as a basis for ethical principles. We address many of the problems with using religion as a basis for morality in the chapter in Rachels' text. However in order to shed more light on the issues involved we can also look at the findings of biblical scholars such as Bart Ehrman. The following sums up many of the points well known and accepted by scholars today and are widely taught at theological seminaries and divinity schools. In fact, your priest, minister, or pastor probably already knows about these points! Because of these, any claims based on the Bible need to be critically examined as well as the claims in the text itself. Without a firm grasp of these issues and the history of the text making claims based on the Bible is not philosophically sound.
As we consider some of these issues it might help to have a concrete context with regard to specific moral issues. So, ask yourself what does the Bible specificallysay about the following issues: genetic engineering, cloning, euthanasia, same sex marriage, abortion, drug addiction, global warming.
(Notice I said specifically, it may be possible to find some vague allusion which could fit a given moral issue but that is not helpful when it comes to addressing moral dilemmas).
(The points below are from Bart Ehrman's book Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible And Why We Don't Know About Them and relate directly to the New Testament but also apply to the Hebrew Bible as well):
We don't have the originals of any of the books of the New Testament.
The copies we have were made much later, in most instances many centuries later.
We have thousands of these copies, in Greek-the language in which all of the New Testament books were originally written.
All of these copies contain mistakes-accidental slips on the part of scribes who made them or intentional alterations by scribes wanting to change the text to make it say what they wanted it to mean (or thought that it did mean).
We don't know how many mistakes there are among our surviving copies, but they appear to number in the hundreds of thousands. It is safe to put the matter in comparative terms: there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.
The vast majority of these mistakes are completely insignificant, showing us nothing more than that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most people can today.
But some of the mistakes matter-a lot. Some of them affect the interpretation of a verse, a chapter, or an entire book. Others reveal the kinds of concerns that were affecting scribes, who sometimes altered the text in light of debates and controversies going on in their own surroundings.
There are flat-out discrepancies among the books of the New Testament. Sometimes these discrepancies could be reconciled if one worked hard enough at it with pious imagination; other times the discrepancies could not, in my judgment, be reconciled, however fanciful the explanation (Jesus dies on different days in Mark and John).
The differences related not just to small details here and there. Sometimes different authors had completely different understandings of important issues: Was Jesus in doubt and despair on the way to the cross (Mark) or calm and in control (Luke)? Did Jesus' death provide an atonement for sin (Mark and Paul) or not (Luke)? Did Jesus perform signs to prove who he was (John) or did he refuse to do so (Matthew)? Must Jesus' followers keep the [Jewish] law if they are to enter the Kingdom (Matthew) or absolutely not (Paul)?
The books of the New Testament were not written by the people to whom they are attributed (Matthew and John) or by the people who claimed to be writing them (2 Peter, 1 Timothy). Most of these books appeared to have been written after the apostles themselves were dead; only eight of the twenty-seven books are almost certain to have been written by the people traditionally thought to be their authors.
The Gospels for the most part do not provide disinterested factual information about Jesus, but contain stories that had been in oral circulation for decades before being written down. This makes it very difficult to know what Jesus actually said, did, and experienced. Scholars have devised ways to get around these problems, but the reality is that the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels (for example, the divine being become human in the Gospel of John) represents a later understanding of who Jesus was, not a historical account of who he really was.
There were lots of other Gospels available to the early Christians, as well as epistles, Acts, and apocalypses. Many of these claimed to be written by apostles, and on the surface such claims are no more or less plausible than the claims of the books that eventually came to make up the New Testament. This raises the question of who made the decisions about which books to include, and of what grounds they had for making the decisions. Is it possible that nonapostolic books were let into the canon [the word comes from a Greek term for measuring stick, or ruler; the canon of the New Testament refers to the criteria that the early church leaders used to select or deselect a particular book for inclusion in the corpus of approved writings] by church leaders who simply didn't know any better? Is it possible that books that should have been included were left out?
The creation of the Christian canon was not the only invention of the early Church. A whole range of theological perspectives came into existence, not during the life of Jesus or even through the teachings of his original apostles but later, as the Christian church grew and came to be transformed into a new religion rather than a sect of Judaism. These include some of the most important Christian doctrines, such as that of a suffering Messiah, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and the existence of heaven and hell.
As we consider some of these issues it might help to have a concrete context with regard to specific moral issues. So, ask yourself what does the Bible specificallysay about the following issues: genetic engineering, cloning, euthanasia, same sex marriage, abortion, drug addiction, global warming.
(Notice I said specifically, it may be possible to find some vague allusion which could fit a given moral issue but that is not helpful when it comes to addressing moral dilemmas).
(The points below are from Bart Ehrman's book Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible And Why We Don't Know About Them and relate directly to the New Testament but also apply to the Hebrew Bible as well):
We don't have the originals of any of the books of the New Testament.
The copies we have were made much later, in most instances many centuries later.
We have thousands of these copies, in Greek-the language in which all of the New Testament books were originally written.
All of these copies contain mistakes-accidental slips on the part of scribes who made them or intentional alterations by scribes wanting to change the text to make it say what they wanted it to mean (or thought that it did mean).
We don't know how many mistakes there are among our surviving copies, but they appear to number in the hundreds of thousands. It is safe to put the matter in comparative terms: there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.
The vast majority of these mistakes are completely insignificant, showing us nothing more than that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most people can today.
But some of the mistakes matter-a lot. Some of them affect the interpretation of a verse, a chapter, or an entire book. Others reveal the kinds of concerns that were affecting scribes, who sometimes altered the text in light of debates and controversies going on in their own surroundings.
There are flat-out discrepancies among the books of the New Testament. Sometimes these discrepancies could be reconciled if one worked hard enough at it with pious imagination; other times the discrepancies could not, in my judgment, be reconciled, however fanciful the explanation (Jesus dies on different days in Mark and John).
The differences related not just to small details here and there. Sometimes different authors had completely different understandings of important issues: Was Jesus in doubt and despair on the way to the cross (Mark) or calm and in control (Luke)? Did Jesus' death provide an atonement for sin (Mark and Paul) or not (Luke)? Did Jesus perform signs to prove who he was (John) or did he refuse to do so (Matthew)? Must Jesus' followers keep the [Jewish] law if they are to enter the Kingdom (Matthew) or absolutely not (Paul)?
The books of the New Testament were not written by the people to whom they are attributed (Matthew and John) or by the people who claimed to be writing them (2 Peter, 1 Timothy). Most of these books appeared to have been written after the apostles themselves were dead; only eight of the twenty-seven books are almost certain to have been written by the people traditionally thought to be their authors.
The Gospels for the most part do not provide disinterested factual information about Jesus, but contain stories that had been in oral circulation for decades before being written down. This makes it very difficult to know what Jesus actually said, did, and experienced. Scholars have devised ways to get around these problems, but the reality is that the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels (for example, the divine being become human in the Gospel of John) represents a later understanding of who Jesus was, not a historical account of who he really was.
There were lots of other Gospels available to the early Christians, as well as epistles, Acts, and apocalypses. Many of these claimed to be written by apostles, and on the surface such claims are no more or less plausible than the claims of the books that eventually came to make up the New Testament. This raises the question of who made the decisions about which books to include, and of what grounds they had for making the decisions. Is it possible that nonapostolic books were let into the canon [the word comes from a Greek term for measuring stick, or ruler; the canon of the New Testament refers to the criteria that the early church leaders used to select or deselect a particular book for inclusion in the corpus of approved writings] by church leaders who simply didn't know any better? Is it possible that books that should have been included were left out?
The creation of the Christian canon was not the only invention of the early Church. A whole range of theological perspectives came into existence, not during the life of Jesus or even through the teachings of his original apostles but later, as the Christian church grew and came to be transformed into a new religion rather than a sect of Judaism. These include some of the most important Christian doctrines, such as that of a suffering Messiah, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and the existence of heaven and hell.