I've always liked this particular painting because it provides a reminder that God's Word has been studied and honored and loved for a very long time. It also provides a warning: that any interpretation of God's Word should be attempted only in the deepest humility. As Pope Benedict has reminded us, "...the Word of God is the foundation of everything." To dare to interpret this eternal and all-encompassing creative Word, then, carries with it a responsibility of awesome proportions.
Now, in the opinion of some, the fact that I am not a scriptural scholar should keep me from commenting on the legitimate interpretation of Sacred Scripture. And yet I would hope we can all agree that Scripture was not written solely for scholars. It was written for all of humanity, for every single one of God's children: for the literate, the not so literate, and the illiterate. And because God's Word is the living Word, every person who reads or hears God's Word also interprets it as it speaks to him and leads him to the truth. As Catholics this interpretation must always, however, be made in light of the Church's teaching authority. To do otherwise only invites error, and error always leads us away from the truth. That being said, I'm just going to make a few brief comments on Scriptural interpretation and its fruits.
First, when it comes to the Old Testament and its interpretation, far too many scholars seem to believe that most of the events described never really occurred and that many of the people we encounter are nothing more than fictional or, at best, mythic characters. All of this has come about largely because of the misapplication of the historical-critical method. Among these scholars the usual approach seems to be, first develop an interesting theory and then create the "facts" necessary to validate the theory. Finally, anything in Scripture that contradicts the theory is simply tossed aside, labeled as mythical, or restructured to fit the newly manufactured facts. At the same time the theorists seem to ignore the many real facts that have resulted from the remarkable work of Middle Eastern scholars and archaeologists, facts that increasingly support the veracity of the Old Testament.
For example, many scholars consider Abraham a mythic figure, someone who really didn't exist. Why? Because there is no evidence for his existence except for the Genesis story. But since when does negative evidence disprove the existence of something? (In reality we do have evidence, the Bible itself.)
The distinguished Egyptologist, K. A. Kitchen, has written extensively on the subject of the truth of the Old Testament which he first addressed in his 1966 book, Ancient Orient and the Old Testament, and then expanded on with his massive 2003 study, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, both well worth reading. Instead of developing their theories based on the kind of real evidence that Kitchen references, so many modern scriptural scholars create theories without any evidence. For example, those who claim the existence of the Jahwist (J), Elohist (E), Priestly (P), and Deuteronomist (D) source documents do so without a single shred of documentary evidence. Indeed, most of these theories not only lack solid evidence, but their authors ignore (or are simply ignorant of) the contrary evidence that does exist.
This, of course, is not unlike the Q (Quelle) source document that supposedly provided the authors of Matthew and Luke with all that information about Jesus that wasn't already in Mark. The primary problem with the Q theory is the simple fact that the Q document apparently doesn't exist -- nice theory, but no documentary evidence. There are other problems, among them the way all these theories tend to denigrate the Gospels themselves, turning them into nice stories about a nice man but probably not written by those whose names (i.e., Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) the Church has attached to them from the very beginning.
As Pope Benedict has written in his wonderful book, On the Way to Jesus Christ, "...the figure of Jesus itself is becoming diminished...transformed from the 'Lord' (a word that is avoided) into a man who is nothing more than an advocate of all men. The Jesus of the Gospels is quite different, demanding, bold. The Jesus who makes everything okay for everyone is a phantom, a dream, not a real figure." [P. 8]
Later in this same book, Pope Benedict gets more specific when he addresses the many bizarre versions of Jesus (e.g., the Marxist Jesus, the New Age Jesus) that have arisen in recent years:
"But how do these images of Jesus come about?...one component is the analysis of the Gospel texts using the methods of historical criticism...It is assumed...nothing can take place in history but what is possible as a result of causes known to us in nature and in human activity...Divine interventions that go beyond the constant interaction of natural and human causes...cannot be historical; the historian must 'explain' how such notions could come about. He must explain, from literary forums and from the mind-set of a period, how such views could develop and must trace them back to their reasonable causes...According to this assumption, it is not possible for a man really to be God and to perform deeds that require divine power -- actions that would disrupt the general complex of causes. Accordingly, words attributed to Jesus in which he makes divine claims and the correspondng deeds must be 'explained'...Meanwhile, the conviction that 'scholars' today are telling us that everything in the figure of Jesus that transcends mere humanity is historically 'explicable', and thus not really historical, has emphatically impressed itself on the public consciousness and has made major inroads into the congregations of Christian believers in all the churches." [P. 61-62]
The Holy Father then goes on to address a second component of this disturbing approach to Scriptural interpretation: textual analysis. This leads the so-called "scholars" to decide in advance the kind of Jesus they want to emphasize and then highlight or discard those elements of the text that either support or contradict their Jesus. The Jesus of the liberation theologians is a beautiful example of misapplied textual analysis in action.
Thank God for our Holy Father as he battles for the truth of God's Holy Word.
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