Ok, fair enough - but I never made a statement to say I doubted the authorship, only a question asking what catholicism believed, either who wrote it if not David, or what the passage meant if David wrote it.
I must apologise though - for reading my post again I can see that it could easily be interpretted that I personally doubted these things. I would never make a politician - I seem to have an uncanny knack of being ambiguous, which caused us great problems last year with someone. The opposition and media would probably jump on my words on a daily basis. (no comments about Dubya please). Anyway, apologies for my ambiguousness and the subsequent misunderstandings.
I was never doubting the “worthiness” of any scripture or that is was “word of God”. There wasn’t even a statement to say “I don’t believe David wrote this” (though I can see how that sort of thing would be assumed by the reader), just a question put out to Catholics more grounded in catholicism than I am as to what Catholicism believes as to who wrote it and what it means.
The trouble is, I only have one Catholic commentary on the Bible and thats New Jerome, which for regular devotional usage seems almost worse than useless, and for deep theological study seems to go out of its way sometimes to take liberal interpretations. Since it has the nihil obstat it claims to be free from doctrinal error.
If my nihil obstat Catholic commentary says the sort of things it does - why shouldn’t I wonder what Catholicism says about other Biblical issues? In RCIA we’ve been taught that there wasn’t a flood and Adam wasn’t real. Why shouldn’t I wonder these things?
Another question - how can someone grant this nihil obstat to their own writings? (as with this commentary). For something to be claimed as free of doctrinal error and for that claim to have been made by the author seems to be meaningless. Can I actually trust the words “nihil obstat”? Can I trust it when it is granted by the author of the book? Could Hans Kung do the same thing to his own book? (And if he can’t - why can Brown & Fitzmyer?) Ok, so that was several questions.
Is there a decent Catholic commentary on the whole Bible that believes, as most of the Protestant commentaries I have do, that the events described in Scripture actually took place and that where we read “God said to Moses”, God actually did say these things to Moses and Moses wrote them down as the Bible claims? Preferably a more in depth commentary than Jerome for devotional usage - New Jerome gets through 1Samuel1-3 in about one column of text which is an impressively small amount for such a big book.
As for Psalm142 - I’ve looked that up too now. And perhaps David was never in prison but this psalm says it was written “When he was in the cave” - that is, trapped, persecuted, probably hunted by armies and certainly imprisoned in a metaphorical way even if there were no bars on the cave. There was no way he could free himself and leave his cave prison without being killed. We don’t know which cave he was in at the time but don’t need to know. The cave is pictured as a prison. The only way he could escape was to be freed by Yahweh rescuing him. Hmm, that sentence sounds familiar in another context. Anyway, Psalm 142 does hold closely to the life of David - and to the title of the Psalm. (I wish the psalter/missal readings included the titles)
One question remains - does Catholicism generally agree that “psalm of David” means that David wrote the psalm. So far two people have responded. One says yes, the other says no. So far I don’t know if there is a generally accepted Catholic belief on this - which was the question originally asked.
Ach, gone on too long yet again.
Blessings & thank you yaqubos for your help.
Asteroid - who has just worked out that you may not be Catholic at all. Oops. There I go, making assumptions again! Maybe another apology is in order.
