ROUGHLY EDITED COPY
NEW TESTAMENT INTRODUCTION
NTQ14
AUGUST 2004
CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY:
CAPTION FIRST, INC.
P.O. BOX 1924
LOMBARD, IL 60148
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This test is being provided in a rough-draft format.
Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in
Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a
totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>> NICK: Here's something that's occurred to me. Christians
today have ready and easy access to the Bible. But what was it
like during the 1st Century?
>> DR. PETER SCAER: It's hard to imagine how things were so
different in older times. Now in many of our houses you will
find three, four, or even five Bibles. But at the time of
Jesus, Nick, things were quite a bit different.
At that time, the common mode of reading and writing was the
scroll. Each synagogue or house of prayer would presumably have
had a number of scrolls kept in a cabinet containing what we
know now as the Old Testament.
We know that Jesus, as was his custom, would enter into the
synagogue on the Sabbath, pick up one of the scrolls, unroll it,
and read from it. Now, these scrolls were expensive, and
Synagogues would probably have had a chest of scrolls which
would have been precious to them.
In that sense, these scriptures were not individually owned
as much as they were community owned. Likewise at first we may
think of the New Testament scriptures as ecclesial documents.
That is to say, they are books that belong to the church. They
are community-owned.
But at the same time with the New Testament came the impetus
for the *Codex, that is the form of the book basically that we
have now. Also from early on, many copies of the New Testament
were made for widespread distribution throughout the church.
Thus, for instance, when you take a class on textual criticism,
or read a book on textual criticism, you will see that there are
very many different copies of the New Testament, and often the
scribe or the write letter miss a word or two here or there,
usually the mistake is a spelling one, or dropping of a word,
and you wonder how could there have been so many "mistakes" in
the early New Testament documents?
And, again, these mistakes are minor. But the reason that
they were made is because the New Testament documents were so
quickly distributed throughout the world. You can imagine the
excitement of early Christians when Matthew, for instance, wrote
his Gospel, or how quickly the letters of Paul have been spread.
Now, a word here, then, about the audience of the scriptures.
In much of the New Testament literature that you read, there
will be a heavy emphasis on the writer writing to a certain
audience. For instance, Matthew is said to have wrote primarily
for the Jews. Luke, primarily for the gentiles. And John it is
said wrote for a sectarian community, a community that was off
by itself.
Again, we have the same sort of questions concerning the
letter of Paul's. Paul wrote, for instance, the letter to the
church, to a very specific place. At the same time we might
ask, were not these letters spread very quickly to the other
churches? And were the Gospels simply written for one community
over and against another?
Well, here I think that we need to remember, especially in
terms of the Gospels, that they were self-consciously written as
scriptures. Here, I would point you to the work, for instance
of Richard Balcom, who wrote "the Gospel For All Christians."
According to scholars today, and in much of what I have read,
the Gospels were self-consciously a continuation of the Old
Testament. In that sense, they recognized the Gospel writers,
as well as Paul, that their writings were not simply for one
community but they were for all Christians in all times and in
all places.
Matthew, for instance, understood that his Gospel would be
read not only in his generation, I think, but like the
scriptures before for generations to come.
The other thing to keep in mind concerning the scriptures at
this time, nut testament documents, is that the Christian
communities were not isolated. They were not off by themselves.
The Greco-Roman world was very much interconnected. There is a
type of Internet highway in the Greco-Roman world of roads, and
of shipping, and commerce which link the Greco-Roman world
together. Paul's own missionary endeavors show how one could
influence so many different congregations, and so many different
places.
In his greetings, which accompanied many of his letters, we
see that Paul's own members would transfer from one community to
another. Likewise, we have evidence that the Apostles not only
knew each other, but they were very familiar with each other's
work.
Peter, for instance, can say the letters of Paul are
sometimes hard to understand. In sum, we should think of the
New Testament writings as scripture written for all people.
People probably did not own their own copies of these works, at
least except for maybe the wealthiest of them. But churches
probably did.
And here I should say that in the early church it seems that
much of the church structure was either based upon the synagogue
or upon the house churches. That is to say, church would meet
in the home often of a wealthy patron who presumably could
afford to have the scriptures copied, and that wealthy patron
might hold the scriptures for the rest of the congregation.
Now, another point here, and this really touches upon your
ministry today, and that is the fact that these scriptures -scriptures means, of course, the written documents -- are
essentially also oral documents. Since not everybody owned
scriptures like they do today, they were written not to be read
primarily but to be read out loud. They were written to be
heard the Christian communities.
In that regard, I don't think that it's a coincidence that
St. Paul says, "Faith comes by hearing." Therefore, we should
encourage our people in the church who have good hearing to come
to church and to simply sit and listen to the -- and hear the
word as it is being read into the assembly.
I know that in many of our bulletins, for instance, we have a
little sheet in which we have the Bible passages written out.
Well, I would encourage you and your people that if you are able
to hear well put the sheet down and read it later. This is the
time for hearing the word of Jesus directly from the mouth to
the ear
And in that regard, too I think that it's important to note
your role as pastor. And one of the most important roles that
you have as pastor is the reading of the scriptures. I know
that sometimes this is done callously or carelessly in the
congregation, and this should not be. We do hell to heed Paul's
word to Timothy, "Take care in the reading of the scriptures.
Be diligent in it." That is to say not simply read them at home,
but take care the pronunciation, speaking out loud, so that the
people can hear the voice of the Lord.
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*
This test is being provided in a rough-draft format.
Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in
Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a
totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
*
*
*
*
*