Scholar Says: “Don’t Take The Bible Literally”

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The author has a point about literal interpretation even of the Gospels.

Take the Gospel of Luke.

How did Luke or anyone hear the exact words of Zacharia’'s Canticle, or the Blessed Mother’s Magnificat, to write their words verbatim ? Luke wasn’t there and neither were any of the Apostles. Did the Blessed Mother repeat the words she said when visiting Elisabeth, to anyone exactly as Luke wrote ? Keep in mind that Luke a Syrian, who was not part of the 1s generation of Christians, never met the Blessed Mother and certainly not Zacharia.

A priest told me that there is a school of thought that although the words may not be exactly the Blessed Mother’s, but it’s what she would’ve said or how she expressed herself in ways that would’ve inspired the poetry the author of Luke wrote.

So, yeah the Gospel is beautiful, but to take it literally can really get you into trouble when trying to convince a non-believer in the good news of Jesus Christ.

The other issue is the Temptation of Christ. Jesus was supposedly alone in the desert. How did the author write the exact account ?

Jim
 
Genesis315 said:
Here’s a preview of Fortunatianus’ commentary in English. Just skimming through it, it looks like he is taking an “and/both” interpretation: the Gospels both being descriptions of historical events, but also those events have deeper meaning. This should be no surprise to Catholics.
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Is that ok with Catholicism?
 
Gorgias said:
Yes, it is. Literal meaning, as well as spiritual meaning(s). Perfectly good approach! 👍
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Yay! So there’s nothing that Fortunatianus of Aquileia wrote or believed, or that Houghton translated, that goes against our faith?
 
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Hope1960 said:
Yay! So there’s nothing that Fortunatianus of Aquileia wrote or believed, or that Houghton translated, that goes against our faith?
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No. It’s only the spin that some modern writers are putting on it that is weird.
 
JimR-OCDS said:
So, yeah the Gospel is beautiful, but to take it literally can really get you into trouble when trying to convince a non-believer in the good news of Jesus Christ.

Jim
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Just want to emphasize again the false dichotomy that results when using the terms differently than the Church uses them.

All of scripture has a primary literal sense, from which the other senses derive. We modern people distort the word literal by equating it to “factual” in a scientific and historic, or journalistic sense.
That’s not what the term literal means in this arena.
 
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Argh argh argh. I didn’t jump in earlier because I knew this article would be junk, but it’s worse than I thought.

In the Jewish tradition, you are supposed to read Scripture literally, and then also draw spiritual meanings and analogies and allegories out of it. Rabbinic texts are full of this stuff, and Jesus even has parables that work this way. Heck, the Road to Emmaus is all about Jesus explaining a second but unrecognized literal meaning to all the Messianic prophecies in the Bible.

So of course Christian teachers from the earliest times also taught that you read Scripture literally, and then you also read it figuratively for more meaning. All the early Christian commentators are like this.

Later on, you get various schools of Biblical study that focus more or less on certain techniques. But a lot of people studied literally in both schools. You would go to Antioch or Damascus to study the literal meaning of Scripture, and then you’d go to Alexandria to learn analogies and allegories and spiritual meanings.

(Alexandria was the home of the Jewish scholar Philo, who was very allegorical, as well as St. Clement of Alexandria and the prolific Origen, who were also very allegorical.)

Mentioning one side of things didn’t mean that you rejected the other side. Occasionally people would disagree with each other, and say the other person had gone too far or was teaching a commentary that was beside the point. But you often find the kings of literalism making allegorical points, and the allegorical types pull out facts and figures whenever they feel like it. Origen was all about the allegories, but he also did the Hexapla, an excruciatingly factual and physically huge scholarly comparison of six different Septuagint translation texts.

So it’s exciting that we have yet another early Biblical commentary. And the article about it is junk. The really sad thing is that Dr. Houghton probably had tons of interesting comments about the commentary text, but the reporter headlined some kind of silly side remark. (And since it’s a British newspaper, the quote probably isn’t correct, either.)
 
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Looked up some scholarly press releases from the University of Birmingham, and it turns out that the commentary uses a Vetera Latina (Old Latin) translation of the Bible, rather than the Vulgate version that Jerome translated later that century. (Which is what you’d expect, if the commentary was written by St. Fortunatianus.)

I love love love the Old Latin versions, because they have a lot of good stuff in them even when they aren’t quite as accurate. So this is fun news for me.

The SUPER news, which I had forgotten about, since the book came out last year, is that the translation is free for download by anybody, at the publisher’s website. (Since they got public funding from the EU to do the book.)

Here is the publisher’s download page for St. Fortunatianus of Aquila’s Commentary on the Gospels.
 
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Hope1960 said:
  1. are the events in the Gospels an historical fact,
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Yes, in the sense that the events did, in fact, happen. Most likely no to the sense that all the minute details line up exactly with how they are portrayed. For example, yes Jesus did heal lepers, but were there exactly two or just a single one or more? Were the Apostles out fishing when Jesus told them to cast their nets into deep water and fish again? Yes. Was the exact number of fish recorded in the gospel actually the amount they caught? Maybe, maybe not. Did Christ curse a fig tree? Yes. Was that fig tree outside of Jerusalem along the road? Maybe, maybe not.

In the end, all of the events happened. The primary action of the events (healings, prophecy, sermons, teachings, crucifixion, etc.) happened. This is undisputed.
Hope1960 said:
  1. did Fortunatianus of Aquileia think the Gospels are an historical fact or made up stories?
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I haven’t read the translated works, but knowing the theological atmosphere of the times, I think that Fortunatianus of Aquileia took the events as historical fact. It is implicitly understood. I believe that he is just attempting to explain the symbolic elements of the Gospels which had lost their widely understood meanings in the three hundred years since Christ. He did not need to speak to the historical accuracy of the Gospels because there was no doubt in the believers’ minds to begin with.

If Fortunatianus had explicitly said that the Gospels didn’t happen and they were just allegory, I would think that the author of the article would have quoted the text rather than dance around the subject and make generalizations.
 
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CRM_Brother said:
Yes, in the sense that the events did, in fact, happen. Most likely no to the sense that all the minute details line up exactly with how they are portrayed. For example, yes Jesus did heal lepers, but were there exactly two or just a single one or more? Were the Apostles out fishing when Jesus told them to cast their nets into deep water and fish again? Yes. Was the exact number of fish recorded in the gospel actually the amount they caught? Maybe, maybe not. Did Christ curse a fig tree? Yes. Was that fig tree outside of Jerusalem along the road? Maybe, maybe not.

In the end, all of the events happened. The primary action of the events (healings, prophecy, sermons, teachings, crucifixion, etc.) happened. This is undisputed.
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@CRM_Brother, and @Gorgias, So, are you both saying that what our Catholic faith teaches us is right and true, and I have nothing to worry about?
 
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Re: Latin, or Greek and Hebrew?

Fortunatianus of Aquileia was apparently a Latin speaker from North Africa who knew a little tad bit of Greek. This was a pretty common situation at that time in North Africa, which was mostly a Latin-speaking colony of Rome. (He also might have known a little bit of Carthaginian or Berber talk from home, but we have no indications of that.)

The rest of the Roman world was a bunch of Greek speakers, and even the city of Rome was mostly Greek speakers; but North Africa was mostly Latin speakers because the colonists had gone there when Rome was still mostly Latin-speaking. It was the Empire’s breadbasket, full of lush fields of grain and fruit orchards. (Thanks to good irrigation and careful land management.) So they didn’t really need to learn Greek if they didn’t want to, or were intending to live out their lives at home.

North Africa was seen as somewhat “conservative” and strict in speech and manners, but also as the home of hotblooded, stubborn, quick to act people. It has been called the “Bible Belt” of the Roman Empire. As native Latin speakers, they had an advantage if they chose to become Imperial lawyers (because Imperial law was written in Latin, even when courts were conducted in local vernacular tongues).

So when the good folks of Aquileia up in Italy got ahold of him and made Fortunatianus a bishop, they got a guy who spoke Latin, read Latin, and thought Latin. There is no evidence in his commentary that he knew the Bible in Greek or in Hebrew. He seems to be aware of famous ideas and interpretations by Greek-speaking theologians, but he seems to know them through Latin intermediaries. (And since Aquileia’s citizens were mostly Latin-speakers too, this worked out. They had Greek-speaking areas, though.)

There’s a very cool bit where Fortunatianus interprets the 99 whatevers as evil or imperfect, and the 100th sheep or whatever as heavenly, and related to Jesus judging the sheep on his left hand and his right hand.

This is because Roman finger-math was done on the left hand up until the number 99. It shifted over to the right hand at the number 100.

So yeah, he was very very very Latin-speaking and Roman-thinking.

It also turns out that some of the cooler sermons attributed to St. Chromatius of Aquileia were actually from his commentary!! So it turns out that I had already read him… and since St. Chromatius’ sermons are the reason why he’s called a Father of the Church, it would seem that Fortunatianus would be a Father of the Church.

Instead, there’s some question as to whether he was a saint, because St. Jerome’s “On Illustrious Men” says some bad stuff about him. But OTOH, other contemporaries said he was a great guy who was super-saintly. Also, there were a lot of Fortunatianuses around, so people wonder if St. Jerome was just confused about which one did bad stuff to a pope.

Lots of interesting issues; lots of stuff in play.
 
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Re: Aquileia, it’s important to remember that it used to be a big city of 100,000 people. The place shrunk dramatically when stuff went bad for the Western Empire, and then had its place taken by Venice. Being its bishop in antiquity was big stuff. It was an industrial city, an army city at a strategic crossroads and port, and a trade city.
 
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