Are You ‘Adding to the Bible’?

I can remember when I was a new Christian, as a teenager, hearing a speaker quote from the closing words of the book of Revelation: ‘I solemnly declare to everyone who reads this book: If anyone adds anything to what is written here, God shall add to him the plagues described in this book’ (22:18 in the Living Bible—the version I was given when I became a Christian). Scary stuff.

The speaker, naturally, took this text at face value—I say ‘naturally’ in the sense that the speakers we listened to in those days had zero theological awareness and relied on a combination of a ‘literal’ reading, the folk theology they’d imbibed over the years from speakers like themselves, and a bit of guesswork. But that was enough to scare us, as ‘biblical truth’.

Our speaker’s take-everything-at-face-value assumption was that ‘this book’ meant ‘the Bible’ and ‘adding anything to’ it meant imbibling any source of knowledge that did not come directly from or was not consonant with ‘the Bible alone’. Hence, it was important to distance ourselves from ‘worldly influences’, ‘secular’ science—for example, evolutionary theories that contradicted the Bible’s literal six-day creation account—and insidious egalitarian philosophies that undermined male ‘headship’. In fact, from secular ideas in general, things taught in ‘non-Christian’ universities and colleges that more spiritual people like our speaker would disapprove of.  

It’s from the roots of this backwoodsman fundamentalism that—without realising it—today’s conservative evangelicalism gets its anti-intellectual tendencies (albeit in a toned-down and slightly more selective version). It’s reflected in the popular evangelical trope contrasting ‘head knowledge’ (bad) with ‘heart knowledge’ (good)—and the trope’s inevitable popularity with those who don’t have much in the way of head knowledge to offer! It also, of course, serves as an implicit source validation for the gnostic ways of thinking that get regular airtime in popular charismatic evangelicalism.        

What we teenagers were blissfully unaware of at the time was that when those closing words were written, Revelation was not part of a book called the Bible (or even the New Testament); it was a stand-alone document. In fact, in the early Christian period, its very inclusion in the canon was disputed. It wasn’t until the mid-to-late fourth century that we see the first definitive list of the New Testament books as we know them now, in their current order. By the time printing began, in the mediaeval period, Revelation had become established in that tail-gunner position.

Now you may say, surely ‘the Bible alone’ as a source of authority is a central doctrine of Protestantism, in contrast to Catholicism, which places it in tandem with church tradition. That is true, but fundamentalist thinking swings the pendulum to the point of effectively denying the truth of anything that cannot be either sourced directly from (or at least substantiated by) something that can be found in the Bible—including science, history, culture, and ethics. And when I say, ‘something in the Bible’, I mean the fundamentalist ‘interpretations’ that are read into proof texts selected from the Bible.        

What we mean—or rather, should mean—by ‘the Bible alone’ as a source of authority is to contrast the canon with non-canonical sources such as the Apocrypha. Christians have generally seen those additional writings as ‘helpful’, but not ‘inspired’ in the 2 Timothy 3:16 sense. And, although church tradition is to be respected, it must ultimately bow to Scripture. 

This is all fine on paper until we face the tricky question of whose interpretations of Scripture we’re talking about, since there is no pure interpretation-free reading of Scripture; even what’s the ‘main and the plain’ depends on who you listen to. Catholicism finds an easy answer to that problem: the tradition of the papacy is granted hegemony. Protestantism—and hence, evangelicalism—has no equivalent. As someone once said, every evangelical is their own pope. And evangelical organisations pick and choose the traditions and traditional beliefs they want to grant authority to.       

The caption of this blog is Are You ‘Adding to the Bible’? I guess we’d all instinctively say, ‘No, of course not’. But every one of our Bibles has already done that for us. We are already guilty as charged. The earliest writings in the Hebrew Bible (our ‘Old Testament’) had no upper- and lower-case letter distinctions, no punctuation, no spacing between the words, and no sentence or paragraph divisions. Moreover, there were no vowels, only consonants. This kind of writing is called scriptio continua. Aside from the absence of vowels, the same is true of the New Testament Greek writings. So we have added all of those. 

Scholars will point to multiple instances where the absence of vowels and spaces separating words gives rise to uncertainty of meaning. It’s easiest to illustrate that with English examples. Take, GODISNOWHERETOBEFOUND. Is that saying, ‘God is now here, to be found’, or ‘God is nowhere to be found’? An example of the problem in having no vowels can be illustrated by a Hebrew word made up only of consonants, MLK. Depending on the vowels that we add, it could be either melek, meaning ‘king’; malak, meaning ‘a messenger’, ‘an angel’, or ‘a prophet’ (the name of the prophet Malachi derives from the same root); or molek, a pagan god (Molech).

You may say, isn’t this nit-picking, insofar as these matters are peripheral trivia when weighed against the ‘main and plain’ of Scripture? And that’s not unreasonable, to a point.   

But there is more. Our modern Bibles have added chapter breaks and verse numbers to those original Hebrew and Greek (occasionally, Aramaic) texts. Chapter breaks were first added by Stephen Langton, who was a 13th-century Archbishop of Canterbury. Some verse-like divisions were added to the Hebrew texts by Jewish scribes in the 6th to 10th centuries, but it was only in the 16th century that a French scholar and printer called Robert Estienne (also known as Stephanus) added the verse numbers as we know them today to his printing of the Greek New Testament.  

It’s certainly very helpful in terms of finding our way around the Bible. But it can also affect how we read the Bible. We’re programmed to assume that a chapter break reflects a subject change. For example, we should be reading 1 Corinthians 13 as the meat in the sandwich of a continuous narrative on the Gifts of the Spirit that spans chapters 12 through 14. Chapter 13 defines the goal for the Gifts and regulates how they are to be exercised. But thanks to the chapter break, it’s treated as a sidebar detour by Paul to provide us with a misty-eyed Bible reading for weddings (albeit a very helpful one so far as wedding planners are concerned).

Chapter and verse numbers can also cause us to read the Bible as a scientific document to be dissected and examined rather than a piece of literature or creative writing to be absorbed and reflected upon. After all, there is no equivalent (that I can think of) in other types of literature, save perhaps for academic books’ numbered footnotes or endnotes (which tends to endorse my point). Finally, treating every piece of biblical literature the same (dividing them into chapters and verses in the same way) obscures the diverse nature of the writings in terms of their genre.        

Since we’re talking about ‘adding’ to Scripture, we should make at least a passing reference to translations into modern languages. Producing Bibles in the vernacular has been a wonderful innovation. But let’s not think that translation is a neutral exercise; the act of translation is an act of interpretation. And this is not merely peripheral to Scripture’s meaning (and hence, its authority), since it impacts on what we think it’s saying ‘mainly and plainly’—at times, very much so. Simply compare different translations of certain verses side-by-side—and even certain words—and you will soon see what I mean.

The proliferation of multiple different translations makes it obvious even to the ordinary Christian reader that something called ‘biblical interpretation’ is unavoidable. As soon as we hear a popular speaker say, ‘The Bible says’, our first thought nowadays is, ‘Which Bible says?’ Which version is the authoritative version of what that verse says?  

Another difficulty that can flow from modern translations—especially paraphrases that seek to use not just contemporary language but also make use of modern idioms, metaphors and cultural equivalents—is that they are effectively laying the ancient world's biblical worldview onto our world today. They are leapfrogging the necessary ‘translation’ of what a verse or passage was saying in its context then, to what it may or may not be saying in our context today. In other words, they are (unwittingly?) rewriting it into today’s language while leaving its worldview unchanged. Its use of contemporary language will cause the biblical-era worldview (on subjects such as patriarchy or slavery) to come across as timeless.   

But perhaps most problematic of all are the headings and sub-headings that publishers add to our modern Bibles. This is a phenomenon of recent times. So why are they a problem? The first ‘Bible commentary’ that people ever read (and unconsciously absorb) is the headings. They are ‘priming’ us to read what’s coming next through a frame of reference that has already told us what it’s going to be about. It may be priming us to see something about a person—like the ‘Woman Caught in Adultery’ (or ‘Adulterous Woman’) in John 8—prepping us that the passage is all about a sexually promiscuous woman and her sinfulness, when what it’s really about is a sick bunch of misogynistic religious men and their sinfulness. Surprise, surprise, we never see THAT as a heading. Or, it may be priming us to see as ‘biblical’ a particular doctrine beloved of the publishing house—such as in 1 Corinthians 14, ‘Women Should Keep Silent in Churches’, or in Ephesians 5, ‘Wives Submit to Husbands.’

The problem is that we subconsciously absorb these headings as ‘biblical truths’ without even realising that’s what’s happening. Because the headings are IN our Bibles, and they look the same as the rest of the Bible, our brains read them as if they ARE the Bible.

Which is, of course, intentional on the part of certain publishers, trying to be ‘helpful’. The NASB and the ESV (as conservative Reformed translations) are particularly adept at being ‘helpful’ in that way—trying to ensure we don’t miss the ‘correct’ Calvinist doctrines in what we’re about to read.  

So if you’re reading online on BibleGateway.com and don’t want the benefit of such ‘help’, then consider turning off the headings in the Settings.  

And then, finally, there’s the question of whether the Old Testament, which we are also not to add anything to, refers to the Hebrew Masoretic Text version or the Greek version that’s known as the LXX, or Septuagint (dating from around 200 BCE). The New Testament writers quoted the LXX far more often than they did the Hebrew text (Greek was the lingua franca of the day). The LXX and Hebrew texts vary, at times quite widely (the key text of Isaiah 53, for example).

So, which Old Testament is it to be? If, as it seems, the LXX’s Greek translation of the Hebrew text most closely reflects the way that it would have been understood in the first-century ‘Christian’ world, is it not to be preferred? The New Testament writers appear to have thought so. Or is the Hebrew text to be granted hegemony because it’s older, and Hebrew?

Quite how all this fits with the simple notion of an original ‘authoritative’ text (the non-negotiable foundation for most evangelical assertions about Scripture), that should not be added to, is an interesting question. At a minimum, there should surely be a lengthy stream of footnotes.

NB Our English Bible translations generally follow the Hebrew text, with some making selective references to the LXX where they consider appropriate.