The Bible is not a book of history as we moderns understand it. I think that may be part of the problem here.
For this part, it is important that we compare apples to apples. So the questions that we would want to ask here is first, how does it compare with other texts of the same period, and second, what is it a history of?
Job, for instance, is probably fiction. It contains a lot of teaching about faith in God, but does not record a historical event.
Yes, and Psalms are poems/songs, and Numbers is geneology. Many also believe that Genesis is a fictionalized account of some abstracted occurance (minimally, of God’s creation of everything and Man’s inherent sinful nature).
Nevertheless, most of the Bible can be read as pretty straighforward history as least relative to other sources. (Is there a better account of the development of the Jewish tribe and kingdom? Where else would a historian go to learn about Jesus?)
Even the New Testament is not history by modern standards.
But this is apples and oranges.
Yes, His history is important; we need His miracles and resurrection to prove that He was a supernatural being as well as a human one. But the primary message of the Gospels is what Jesus taught. Since He is God, His teachings are definitely inspired!
To be more precise, it is the best record of
what Jesus taught, not to mention what he did (death and ressurection, in particular).
And then we trail off into what “inspired” means. There are those who claim that every word in the Bible was “dictated” by God; that the human writers were just instruments (like typewriters) and had no (name removed by moderator)ut. That makes every single word inspired. That is not the Catholic belief. From the Catechism…Thus, it’s the intention of the teaching that is inspired. The ideas, the instructions to us, the morals…
This is, I think, more to the point of my question. Essentially, the Church draws inferences about God through the Bible. One might describe it as a wholistic process.
The question I want to pose is how is this process different from a historian drawing inferences about, say, Julius Caesar, through the records left behind.
What does it mean to say that the Bible is the Word of God and an inspired text. Is it merely the difference of subject, as a minimalist might infer? Or is there a claim that God was more involved in the writing of the Bible than, say, Julius Caesar? The maximalist model would be the typwriter version that you described, the BIble being composed of those books that God dictated. (That is how the Jews view the Torah, for example.)
Insofar as God was a passive subject of the Bible authors, I would call that the historical model, irrespective of the quality of the writing (even Job was an effort to describe God by someone we presume was closer than we are today, otherwise every fictional story about God would be added to the Bible).
Hope that helps. And I hope it’s clear; I’m a bit scatterbrained today.
Yes, I think it goes a long way toward getting the discussion on track to answering my questions.
