What we believe about this book, and what others make of it

"Every scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the person dedicated to God may be capable and equipped for every good work." (2 Timothy 3:16–17, NET)¹

This is the verse most Christians reach for when someone asks what they believe about the Bible. It's a good verse to reach for. But look at how much it leaves open. "Every scripture": which scripture? Paul is writing to Timothy about the sacred writings Timothy knew from childhood, which means the Hebrew Bible, decades before anyone had bound the Gospels with the letters. "Inspired by God" translates theopneustos, God-breathed, and the verse doesn't say how. Dictation, prompting and superintendence have all been read out of that one word. And then, having made the claim, it turns immediately to what the book is for: teaching, correcting, training. It's a verse about origin and purpose, and it's silent on almost every question people fight about.

That silence is where this lesson lives. Lessons 8 and 9 gave you the history: which books, and which words. This lesson asks what to make of it. It says what this course believes about the Bible and why; it lays out the range of what Christians believe, in each tradition's own words, so that an inerrantist, a Catholic, an Orthodox Christian, a Presbyterian, and a scholar who taught the Bible at Yale could each read their paragraph and say "yes, that's mine"; and it hands you the sorting tool the course has used since lesson 1. It starts with the tool.

The tool: three kinds of claim

You've watched this course say history establishes, scholars argue, and we hold by faith in every lesson since the first. Time to name it as a method, because it works on claims this course never mentions.

Every claim about the Bible is one of three kinds.

Established by history. Things the evidence has settled and that experts accept whatever their religion. Paul's letters were written in the first century. A ninth-century inscription from Tel Dan names a "House of David". No record of the Council of Nicaea mentions the canon. You can look these up, and a Muslim, an atheist, and a Baptist will give you the same answer.

Argued from evidence. Questions where serious, informed people disagree because the evidence is real but doesn't settle it. Who wrote the Pentateuch, and when. Whether Mark was written before or after the Temple fell. How big David's kingdom was. Here the honest move is to give each side's case and say what would settle it.

Held by faith. Claims that evidence bears on but cannot decide, held on religious grounds. That the Bible is God's Word. That Isaiah 7:14 finds its fullest meaning in Jesus. That God acts in history at all. A Christian holds these, says so, and doesn't pretend they came out of a dig.

Here's the mechanism, and why the sort ends arguments rather than starting them. Most quarrels about the Bible are between someone asserting a faith claim as if it were history ("the Bible is God's Word, so Moses wrote it") and someone denying a history claim because of a faith disagreement ("the Bible is a human book, so David never existed"). Both have skipped the sort. Name which kind of claim is on the table, and the first person has to make an argument instead of an assertion, and the second has to look at the stele.

One caution before you use it. The categories aren't fixed for ever. A claim can move from argued to established when a stele turns up, as "a dynasty called the House of David existed" did in 1993. It can move the other way when a consensus cracks. And the boundary between argued and faith is itself sometimes argued: a Christian who thinks the resurrection is a historical claim with evidence behind it and a historian who thinks it lies outside what history can assess are disagreeing about which column it goes in. The sort doesn't settle which column the resurrection goes in. It makes the disagreement about the column visible, which is the disagreement they are actually having.

What we believe, and why

This is the one place in the course where we state our own view of the Bible in full. It's labelled, it's in the first person plural, and it's built as an argument rather than dropped as an assertion, because a faith claim is still a claim someone can ask you to defend.

We believe the Bible is God's Word: that in these books God speaks, and that what they teach is true. We hold that by faith. Here is why we hold it.

First, because Jesus did. Every Gospel shows him treating the Scriptures of Israel as God's own word and as authoritative for what he did and taught. On the road to Emmaus he says "everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled" (Luke 24:44, NET).² In an argument with opponents he says, in passing, that "the scripture cannot be broken" (John 10:35, NET).³ In the Sermon on the Mount: "until heaven and earth pass away not the smallest letter or stroke of a letter will pass from the law until everything takes place" (Matthew 5:18, NET).⁴ The argument is associated above all with John Wenham's Christ and the Bible, which this course has not opened; as the argument is commonly stated, a Christian's view of Scripture should start from Christ's view of Scripture, and Christ's view, on the Gospel evidence, was that it was true, authoritative, and from God.⁵ If you follow Jesus, you have a reason to receive the book he received, in the way he received it. That's the argument, and we find it strong.

It has two standard objections and you should have them. The first is circularity: we know Jesus' view of Scripture from the Gospels, so the argument leans on the books it is being used to justify. The reply is that the argument needs only the Gospels' general reliability as historical sources, which is a far weaker claim than inspiration and one many non-Christian historians grant; lesson 6 gave you the evidence to judge that for yourself. The second is accommodation: that Jesus spoke of "the book of Moses" the way his hearers spoke, without that settling who wrote it, in the same way he spoke of the sun rising. The reply is that some of his uses are not incidental but load-bearing, as when an argument turns on what the text says. Neither objection is silly, and the second bears directly on the Pentateuch question below, where this course does not treat "Jesus said 'the book of Moses'" as settling authorship.

Second, because the apostles treated their own writings the same way. You met 2 Peter in lesson 8, ranking Paul's letters with "the rest of the scriptures" (2 Peter 3:16, NET).⁶ The same letter says of the prophets that "no prophecy was ever borne of human impulse; rather, men carried along by the Holy Spirit spoke from God" (2 Peter 1:21, NET).⁷ And Paul, in the verse this lesson opened with, says scripture is "inspired by God".¹ These are the earliest Christian statements of what the Bible is, made from inside it.

Third, because the church has always received it so. This is one of the few things in this lesson that is established rather than believed, and you can check it in the documents. Athanasius, listing the books in 367, calls them "fountains of salvation" and says "in these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of godliness".³⁴ Trent, in 1546, receives the books "as having been dictated either by Christ's own word of mouth or by the Holy Spirit".³⁵ From Irenaeus to Luther, across traditions that agreed on little else, Christians have called Scripture inspired by God and authoritative for faith. What they meant by it in detail has varied, which is what the next two sections are about.

Fourth, because we have found it true. This is the least transferable reason and the most honest one. People who have read this book for years, and lived by it, report that it does what 2 Timothy says it does: teaches, corrects, trains. That's testimony, not proof. We include it because leaving it out would misdescribe why most Christians actually believe what they believe.

That's our view, said once. What follows is the range of what Christians mean by it, and then what people outside the faith make of the same book.

Four words, as the tradition uses them

The positions differ mostly in how they use four words, so take the words first.

Inspiration is the oldest of the four and the one every Christian tradition shares. It translates the Greek of 2 Timothy 3:16, theopneustos, "God-breathed". It says where Scripture comes from: God, through human writers. It doesn't by itself say how (dictation is one theory, and a minority one; most traditions say God worked through the writers' own minds, styles, and situations) or what follows for accuracy.

Authority says what Scripture is for: it's the rule. Christians disagree about whether it's the only rule (the Reformation's sola scriptura) or the supreme written rule alongside Tradition (the Catholic and Orthodox view), but every tradition says the church sits under it, not over it.

Infallibility says Scripture cannot fail. Fail at what? Here the word splits. In older usage it meant "cannot mislead", full stop. Since the 1970s it has often meant something narrower: Scripture cannot fail in its purpose, which is to teach faith and practice, and whether every incidental detail is accurate is a separate question. Fuller Seminary's statement of faith, adopted in 1972, says the Scriptures are "the written Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice".⁸ The Lausanne Covenant of 1974 says Scripture is "without error in all that it affirms, and the only infallible rule of faith and practice".⁹ Read those two side by side and you'll see why the word needs a footnote: Lausanne's "without error in all that it affirms" is read by inerrantists as their own position and by others as a deliberate softening, and both readings have been defended by people who were in the room.

Inerrancy says Scripture contains no error. It's the strongest word and the most recent as a slogan. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, drafted in 1978 by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, is its reference text.¹⁰

Which of these the church "always" held is itself a scholarly fight, and it's worth knowing because you'll meet both sides. In 1979 Jack Rogers and Donald McKim published The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach, arguing, on the standard account of a book this course has not opened, that the central Christian tradition from Augustine through Calvin held Scripture infallible in matters of faith and conduct while allowing that its historical and scientific details might not be precise, and that strict inerrancy was a later development.¹¹ In 1982 John Woodbridge answered with Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal, arguing that the historical record shows the older writers held the Bible wholly true, details included, and that the Rogers and McKim reading imposed a modern distinction on them.¹² The Chicago Statement itself takes Woodbridge's side in advance: Article XVI affirms "that the doctrine of inerrancy has been integral to the Church's faith throughout its history" and denies that it "is a doctrine invented by scholastic Protestantism".¹⁰

What can be said as established? Two things. The church has always called Scripture inspired and authoritative and trusted it as true. And the word "inerrancy" as a banner, with a council and nineteen articles behind it, dates from the twentieth century. "The church invented inerrancy in 1978" gets the second half right and the first half wrong; "the church always used the word" gets the first half right and the second wrong. Whether the older writers held the doctrine under other words is what Rogers, McKim, and Woodbridge were arguing about, and nothing since has settled it.

The range within Christianity, in each position's own words

For each, I've gone to the tradition's own statement and quoted it, so that you're reading what they say rather than what their opponents say they say. This course's own view, stated above, sits closest to the first two, and it is worth being exact about where. We hold the Lausanne wording, that Scripture is without error in all that it affirms, and we read "affirms" the way Chicago's Article XIII reads it: determined by genre, convention and purpose. That leaves us agreeing with inerrantists about scope in principle and agreeing with infallibilists that a great many things people take the Bible to affirm are not what it is affirming. We think the two positions are closer to each other than either is to the rest of the range, and that most of the heat between them comes from cases, not from the formula.

Inerrancy: the Chicago Statement (1978)

The Statement's Short Statement, point 4, gives the claim at full strength: "Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives."¹⁰ Article XII makes the scope explicit: it denies "that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science".¹⁰ That is the sentence that separates inerrancy from the positions below. It says the "without error" ranges over everything the Bible asserts, history and science included.

Two articles keep this from being what its critics imagine. Article X locates inerrancy in the original text: "inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy", and copies and translations "are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original".¹⁰ So an inerrantist has no quarrel with lesson 9; the variants are in the copies, and the position never claimed the copies were perfect.

That clause is doing more work than it looks. Take 1 Samuel 17 and 18, the David and Goliath chapters. The Greek text of Codex Vaticanus is about half the length of the Hebrew, lacking 17:12 to 31 and 17:55 to 58, and the difference is not cosmetic: in the longer Hebrew, Saul asks whose son David is at the end of chapter 17, one chapter after David has already been introduced to him and become his armour-bearer at 16:21 to 23. On the shorter Greek text that oddity is not there. So "the autographic text, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy" has to carry a real case, not a hypothetical one: two forms of a story, differing by half a chapter, both ancient. An inerrantist answers that the doctrine attaches to whichever form is the autograph and that textual criticism is the discipline for finding it. That is a coherent answer. It is not a costless one, and the honest thing is to show the reader where it costs something.

Article XIII does the most work. It denies "that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose", and it further denies "that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations".¹⁰ The Exposition spells out what that means for reading: "So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth."¹⁰ Article XVIII requires "grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices".¹⁰

So the inerrantist position, in its own words, is: everything Scripture asserts is true, and what Scripture asserts is determined by its genre, its conventions, and its purpose, not by a modern standard of precision it never aimed at. Genre first, the rule of lesson 3, is written into the inerrantists' own charter.

Two clauses stop that latitude from becoming a licence, and you have to read them with Article XIII or you will misuse it. Article XII's second denial rules out using "scientific hypotheses about earth history" to overturn "the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood".¹⁰ And the same council's follow-up document, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics of 1982, says in its Article XIII that it values genre criticism and then denies "that generic categories which negate historicity may rightly be imposed on biblical narratives which present themselves as factual", with Article XIV affirming that the biblical record of events "corresponds to historical fact".³³ So the rule is genre first, and the signatories decide which genres are on the table. "This was never meant as history" is not a move the statement leaves open.

Two articles the exercise will send you back to. Article I affirms that "the Holy Scriptures are to be received as the authoritative Word of God" and denies that Scripture "receives its authority from the Church, tradition, or any other human source", and Article II calls Scripture "the supreme written norm" and denies that "church creeds, councils, or declarations have authority greater than or equal to the authority of the Bible".¹⁰ Hold those next to Dei Verbum 9 below and you have the Reformation in two sentences. And Article XIV affirms "the unity and internal consistency of Scripture", which is the article the Kings and Chronicles question runs into.¹⁰

One more article matters for later in this lesson. Article XVIII also denies "the legitimacy of any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its claims to authorship".¹⁰ Hold that; it's the sentence that decides how an inerrantist reads Deuteronomy 34.

Infallibility: Fuller and Lausanne

The infallibilist position, as it's been called since Fuller Seminary revised its statement of faith in 1972, says Scripture is "the only infallible rule of faith and practice".⁸ Its holders would put it like this: the Bible cannot fail in what God gave it to do, which is to teach us who God is, what he has done, and how to live. It is entirely trustworthy for that. Whether an incidental number in Kings matches the number in Chronicles is a different kind of question, which they are content to leave to the historians, and they think the older tradition (the Rogers and McKim reading) was content to leave it there too. Many in this camp accept Lausanne's "without error in all that it affirms" and simply read "affirms" more narrowly than Chicago does: the Bible affirms theology and ethics; it uses, rather than affirms, the cosmology and conventions of its day.⁹

Inerrantists reply that "faith and practice" can't be walled off from history, because the faith is about things that happened, and that once you allow errors in the details you have no principled place to stop. Infallibilists reply that Chicago has to spend Article XIII doing exactly the sorting they're accused of.

Underneath that exchange is a disagreement about which way the inference runs when a detail looks wrong, and Chicago's Exposition says its half out loud: "It is not right to set the so-called 'phenomena' of Scripture against the teaching of Scripture about itself."¹⁰ That is, start from what the book says it is and read the difficulties in that light. The infallibilist's answer is that this makes the doctrine unfalsifiable by construction, and that the phenomena are the evidence of what kind of book God actually gave. Fifty years on, that is still where the argument sits.

Catholic: Dei Verbum (1965)

The Second Vatican Council's constitution on revelation, Dei Verbum, promulgated on 18 November 1965, is the Catholic reference text. Paragraph 11 first states inspiration in full: the books of both Testaments "in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author", and the human writers, "as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted".¹³ Then the sentence everyone argues about: "since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation."¹³

Read that last clause twice. Does "for the sake of salvation" limit which truth is without error (the truth that concerns salvation, leaving history and science open), or does it say why God put the truth there (his purpose was our salvation, and everything asserted is without error)? Catholics have argued this for sixty years, and the purposive reading has the earlier magisterium behind it: Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus (1893) and Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) both taught inerrancy without restriction, and Bea's argument was that a council does not reverse that in a subordinate clause.³⁶ The restrictive reading was held by Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer, two of the century's leading Catholic biblical scholars; the purposive reading was argued by Cardinal Augustin Bea, who was at the council, on the grounds that "salvation" in the Latin attaches to the verb "wanted put into the writings", not to the noun "truth". Robert Miller's 2016 survey in the Journal of Scriptural Reasoning, "For the Sake of Our Salvation", fifty years on, lays out both readings, documents that Catholics still disagree, and argues for the broader one himself.¹⁴ The Pontifical Biblical Commission returned to the question in 2014 in The Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture, which is where a Catholic reader should go next.³⁶

Two more things a Catholic would want said. Dei Verbum 12 requires attention to "literary forms": "truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse", and the interpreter must find "what meaning the sacred writer intended to express".¹³ Genre first, again, this time from Rome. But do not read that as making the literal sense the whole of Catholic interpretation, because it is not. The Catechism (paragraphs 115 to 118) teaches the traditional four senses, literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical, and quotes the medieval couplet that summarises them.³⁷ The literal sense is the foundation and the other three are built on it; they are the fathers' method and they are normal Catholic and Orthodox practice today, not a beginners' error. When Hopko says below that "everything in the Bible leads up to Christ and speaks about Him", he is describing the same figural reading from the Orthodox side. And paragraph 9 places Scripture within a larger whole: "it is not from Sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed", so that "both sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence".¹³ Paragraph 21 says the Church "has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord".¹³ That's the Catholic position: full inspiration, without error in what God intended to teach (with the scope debated in-house), read by genre, and read within the Church's Tradition and teaching office.

Orthodox: Scripture within Tradition

The Orthodox would begin somewhere else, and it's important not to fold them into the Catholic paragraph. For Orthodoxy the question "is the Bible inerrant?" is already framed in a Western way; the prior fact is that the Bible is the Church's book, and it lives there. Fr Thomas Hopko's The Orthodox Faith, the standard catechetical series of the Orthodox Church in America, free to read online, puts it this way: "For the Orthodox, the Bible is the main written source of divine doctrine since God Himself inspired its writing by His Holy Spirit", and "All parts of the Bible are interpreted in the Orthodox Church in the light of Christ since everything in the Bible leads up to Christ and speaks about Him."¹⁵ On interpretation: "The Bible lives in the Church. It comes alive in the Church and has the most profound divine meaning for those who are members of the community which God has established." And: "It is only within the living Tradition of the Church under the direct inspiration of Christ's Spirit that the proper interpretation of the Bible can be made."¹⁵ Hopko is careful to add that scholars "can offer much light to the words of the scriptures", and equally careful to say that "by themselves and by their academic work alone, no men can produce the proper interpretation of the Bible".¹⁵

So the Orthodox reader holds Scripture fully inspired and fully true, and would say the question of its truth can't be answered by a private reader with a critical apparatus, or by a statement with nineteen articles; it's answered in the liturgy, the Fathers, and the Church's continuous life, of which Scripture is the heart. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware's The Orthodox Church is the standard English account.¹⁶

Mainline: the Confession of 1967

The Presbyterian Church (USA)'s Confession of 1967 is the clearest short statement of what the mainline Protestant churches hold, and it is more often summarised than read. Here is what it says. "The one sufficient revelation of God is Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate, to whom the Holy Spirit bears unique and authoritative witness through the Holy Scriptures, which are received and obeyed as the word of God written. The Scriptures are not a witness among others, but the witness without parallel."¹⁷ Then: "The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding."¹⁷

Notice what that does. The Word of God, in the strict sense, is Christ. Scripture is the "witness without parallel" to him, "received and obeyed as the word of God written", and read with the critical tools because it's also human writing from particular times. Someone in this tradition would say they believe the Bible; what they decline to say is that its human authors' views of "the cosmos which were then current" are part of what it teaches. Inerrantists read "witness to the Word" as a step down from "is the Word" (Chicago's Article III denies "that the Bible is merely a witness to revelation").¹⁰ The Confession's defenders read it as putting Christ where he belongs. What sits underneath the Confession's wording is Karl Barth's account, on which Scripture is the witness through which God's Word comes to the reader rather than a text simply identical with it, and Article III was written against exactly that. Naming it makes the disagreement legible: it is about whether "the Word of God" is first a person or first a book, and both sides say both, in a different order.

An evangelical alternative: Enns's incarnational model

Peter Enns's Inspiration and Incarnation (2005; second edition, Baker Academic, 2015) is worth a paragraph because it comes from inside evangelicalism and accepts most of the critical conclusions you'll read below.¹⁸ His model is an analogy, and on the standard account of the book (which this course has not opened) he insists it is only that: as Christ is fully God and fully human, so Scripture is fully God's and fully human, and its human marks are not embarrassments to be explained away but part of what God chose. Those marks, in his account, include Genesis sharing the form of other ancient Near Eastern creation stories, real theological diversity between biblical books, and the New Testament writers reading the Old in ways a modern historian wouldn't. Inerrantists have replied that the analogy proves too much: Christ was fully human and without sin, so the analogy does not by itself license error. The second edition carries a postscript in which Enns answers his critics; this course has not read it and does not report what it says.

What all of them share

Line the six up and count what they share. Every position above holds that Scripture is inspired by God. Every one holds that it was written by human authors using the forms and conventions of their day. Every one says you must read it by its genre: Chicago's Article XVIII, Dei Verbum 12, the Confession of 1967's "literary fashions", Hopko's Church-read Bible, Enns's human marks. Every one holds that it is authoritative for what Christians believe and do.

The disagreement is narrower than the noise suggests. It's about what "without error" ranges over: every assertion, history and science included (Chicago); what God intended to teach for our salvation, with the scope debated (Rome); faith and practice (Fuller); the witness to Christ (the Confession); or a question that only makes sense inside the Church's Tradition (Orthodoxy). Christians divide on other grounds too, over baptism and church government and the sacraments. But when the argument is about the Bible itself, it is usually about scope.

Two traditions outside Christianity that hold a doctrine of these books

Christians are not the only people with a doctrine of this library, and a lesson called what others make of it owes you more than the academy.

In traditional Judaism the Torah is Torah min HaShamayim, Torah from Heaven, given to Moses at Sinai, and it comes with an Oral Torah of the same origin, so that written text and rabbinic interpretation are not two authorities but one. The books are the Tanakh, in their own order, and the order carries meaning: it ends with Chronicles and the call to go up to Jerusalem, not with Malachi looking forward to a messenger. Nothing in that arrangement is waiting for a New Testament. A Jewish reader is not reading an Old Testament at all, and lesson 4 gave you one case (Isaiah 7:14) where the two readings part on the text itself.

Islam holds that God gave the Tawrat to Moses and the Injil to Jesus, that both were genuine revelation, and that the texts Jews and Christians now hold have been altered in transmission, which is why the Qur'an is needed and supersedes them. That is a claim about this book, made by a tradition that has thought about it for fourteen centuries, and it is not the same claim as the sceptic's.

Both are stated here in one paragraph each, which is not enough to do them justice. The neutral school's World Religions treats both properly and from inside.

The critical view, in its own terms

Now the view from outside the faith, or rather from outside the question of faith, which is a different place. This course promised you'd hear it at full strength from its own teachers.

Hayes opens her course by saying what it is. "The Bible is not a book with all that that implies, that it has a uniform style and a message and a single author... It's a library."¹⁹ Then the stance: "Religious faith simply isn't the topic of this course." "No one in this course wishes to undermine or malign religious faith any more than they wish to promote or proselytize for religious faith." "Our approach is going to be necessarily academic; and especially given the diversity of people in this room, that's really all that it can be, so that we have a common ground and common goals."¹⁹ If a student raises a question that rests on a belief, she says, "I'll most likely respond by inviting you to consider the article of faith that lies behind that question... I'm not going to be drawn into a philosophical or theological debate over the merits of that belief."¹⁹ Her interest, she says, "will be centered on the culture and the history and the literature and the religious thought of ancient Israel in all of its diversity rather than questions of faith and theology".¹⁹

Dale Martin's New Testament course at Yale says the same thing in its description: "Although theological themes will occupy much of our attention, the course does not attempt a theological appropriation of the New Testament as scripture."²⁰ It treats the documents "as ancient literature and as sources for historical study".²⁰

So the critical view, stated as its holders state it, is this. The Bible is a library of ancient documents, written and edited over centuries by many hands, and it can be read the way any ancient library is read: for its sources, its seams, its development, its setting among the other literatures of its world. Whether God speaks in it is a question the method neither asks nor answers, because the method is built to give a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, and an atheist in the same lecture hall "a common ground". That's the method. It is not a claim that the Bible is false. It's a decision about which questions a university classroom can answer.

That is the method, and it is not the whole of what critical scholars conclude. It would be dishonest to leave you with the disclaimers and none of the results, so here are the results, in the form a critical scholar would state them. The book of Isaiah has at least two authors writing centuries apart. Daniel was written in the second century BC and not the sixth. The Pastoral letters and 2 Peter were written in the names of men already dead. The Gospels were published anonymously. The exodus and the conquest did not happen in the way Joshua describes them. Those conclusions are argued rather than established, and this course takes the other side of several of them; lesson 6 and Hard Questions do that work. But they are the conclusions, and some scholars hold that they count decisively against any doctrine that calls this book God's Word. Bart Ehrman is the best known of them, and if you want that case you should take it from him at full length rather than from a summary written by people who disagree with him.

Three things follow, and the misconception list below depends on all three.

First, "critical scholars are atheists" is simply wrong as a description. Raymond Brown, whose Introduction to the New Testament (1997) is the Catholic critical standard, was a priest.²¹ Enns writes from inside evangelicalism. Hayes is a scholar of Judaism. The method brackets faith; it doesn't require its absence.

Second, critical scholars disagree with each other at least as much as they disagree with the church, and they say so. Hayes, on the documentary hypothesis that is the method's most famous result: "It needs to be remembered that the documentary hypothesis is only a hypothesis. An important and a useful one... But none of the sources posited by critical scholars has been found independently." And: "Most biblical scholars today do accept some version of Wellhausen's theory... though... not... tremendous confidence in some of the finer details."²² That is the field's most famous result, described by one of its own teachers with the confidence she thinks it carries.

Third, the results the method produces sort into the same three columns as everything else. That Paul's letters are first-century is established, and Hayes and Ehrman would say so with any evangelical. That the Pentateuch is built from four written sources is argued, and Hayes calls it a hypothesis. That God does or doesn't speak in the book is a question the method has declined. A critical scholar reading this paragraph should find their view as they hold it, including the humility.

Worked example 1: the mustard seed

Take a case where every position above agrees, because knowing where the six agree tells you which quarrels are about the Bible and which are about something else.

"To what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable can we use to present it? It is like a mustard seed that when sown in the ground, even though it is the smallest of all the seeds in the ground... when it is sown, it grows up, becomes the greatest of all garden plants, and grows large branches so that the wild birds can nest in its shade." (Mark 4:30–32, NET)²³

Read badly, first way. A sceptical reader stops at "the smallest of all the seeds". Orchid seeds are smaller. So Jesus, or Mark, made a botanical error, the Bible contains errors, the conversation is over. This reading assumes the sentence was making a claim in botany.

Read badly, second way. The harmonising reading takes the sentence as botany and sets out to defend it as botany: perhaps Jesus meant the smallest seed sown in Galilee; perhaps "of all the seeds in the ground" already narrows the field to what a farmer plants; perhaps a first-century mustard variety was smaller than ours. Some of those may even be true. But notice that the defender has accepted the sceptic's framing: that the sentence is a claim about seed sizes that stands or falls on a ruler.

Read well. Ask what kind of sentence it is. It's a parable, spoken to a crowd, using a proverbial contrast (tiny seed, big shrub) that its hearers used every day. "The smallest of all the seeds in the ground" is the way a Galilean would say "the tiniest thing you plant", the same way you say "the whole town was there". The sentence asserts something about the kingdom of God: it starts small and ends large enough to shelter the birds. It asserts nothing about the ranking of seeds.

Now watch every position handle it. The Chicago inerrantist points to Article XIII: "observational descriptions of nature" and "the use of hyperbole" do not negate inerrancy, and the Exposition says hyperbole must be treated as hyperbole.¹⁰ The Catholic points to Dei Verbum 12: find "what meaning the sacred writer intended to express" in his "contemporary literary forms".¹³ The Presbyterian points to the Confession's "literary fashions of the places and times".¹⁷ Enns says the human marks are the point. And Hayes would say, without any theological stake at all, that reading a first-century parable as a botanical claim is bad reading of an ancient text.

Six positions, one reading. Genre and the ordinary conventions of human speech are common ground across the whole range, and the sceptic who thinks the mustard seed refutes inerrancy has refuted a position the Chicago Statement does not hold.

Worked example 2: the death of Moses

Now a case where the positions divide, because the sort has to earn its keep on a hard one.

"So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab as the Lord had said. He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab near Beth Peor, but no one knows his exact burial place to this very day." (Deuteronomy 34:5–6, NET)²⁴

"No prophet ever again arose in Israel like Moses, who knew the Lord face to face." (Deuteronomy 34:10, NET)²⁴

"These were the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king ruled over the Israelites." (Genesis 36:31, NET)²⁵

The tradition, Jewish and Christian, calls the five books of the Pentateuch the books of Moses, and the Bible elsewhere speaks of Moses writing: "and Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord" (Exodus 24:4, NET).²⁶ Yet the last chapter of Deuteronomy narrates Moses' death, adds that nobody knows his grave "to this very day", and says no prophet like him "ever again arose" in Israel, which is the voice of someone looking back across a stretch of time. And Genesis 36:31, listing the kings of Edom "before any king ruled over the Israelites", reads like the sentence of a writer who has seen Israelite kings, which on any dating means centuries after Moses.

These verses have been noticed for a very long time, and not first by critics. The Talmud already asks who wrote the account of Moses' death and gives two answers: Rabbi Yehuda held that Moses wrote the Torah up to that point and Joshua wrote the last eight verses; Rabbi Shimon held that Moses wrote them too, at God's dictation, since a Torah scroll could not be missing a single letter.³⁸ So the editorial answer that conservatives give today is the older of the two options, not a modern retreat under pressure. Hayes's lecture on the method names Spinoza in the seventeenth century among the early critics who built on the same verses.²² What matters for you is how each side uses them now.

The critical reader. For Hayes and the tradition running from Julius Wellhausen's classic statement of 1878, these are two among many seams: doublets, shifting divine names, contradictions in detail, and passages that presuppose a later time.²²

Here is one seam you can see for yourself, since a seam described is not a seam understood. In Genesis 6:19–20 Noah is told to bring "two of every kind" of living thing onto the ark. In 7:2–3, a few sentences later, he is told to take "seven pairs" of every clean animal and one pair of the unclean. Read straight through, the instruction changes between the paragraphs. The critical reading is that two accounts of the flood have been woven together and this is the join, with the seven pairs belonging to the account that cares about clean and unclean animals and the single pair to the other; the same doubling shows up in the durations and in the announcements. The conservative reading is that the second passage specifies the first: two of every kind is the general rule, and the clean animals are then given their number because they are needed for sacrifice after the flood, which is exactly what happens at 8:20. Both readings are available on the words. Which one you find natural depends on how you read the whole pattern, which is the argument this section is about. The explanation is that the Pentateuch was composed from earlier written sources, classically four, called J, E, D, and P. Hayes gives the classical dates: J "about the tenth century", E "composed in the northern kingdoms about the ninth century", D "late-seventh century", P "the exilic period, the period after the fall of the Southern Kingdom in 586".²² Since Wellhausen the field has divided. The neo-documentarians, Joel Baden at Yale among them (The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis, Yale University Press, 2012), defend four continuous sources on purely literary grounds, dropping Wellhausen's theory of how Israel's religion evolved.²⁷ Supplementary and fragmentary models, strong in Europe, see a core text expanded in layers rather than four documents spliced. Nearly everyone agrees there's a distinct Priestly stratum; beyond that the map is contested. And, as Hayes said, no source has ever been found as a separate document.

The conservative reader. Moses is the substantial author of the Pentateuch, as the Pentateuch itself (Exodus 24:4), Joshua, and Jesus (Mark 12:26, "the book of Moses") say, and the books reached their final form with later editorial updating: a death notice added by a successor, "to this very day" and "before any king ruled" added by an editor bringing old text up to date, place names modernised. Tremper Longman's phrase for this is "essentially Mosaic", and it's the mainstream evangelical position, held across the seminaries.²⁸ On the doublets and name patterns, conservative scholars (Cassuto, Kikawada and Quinn, Garrett) argue they are literary features of a unified composition rather than seams between documents.²⁹ And they argue that the critical reconstruction rested on a nineteenth-century theory of how religion evolves from simple to priestly that the archaeology of the ancient Near East hasn't borne out.

So does an inerrantist have to reject the editorial reading? No. Look at Article XIII again: inerrancy is not negated by "a lack of modern technical precision" or "the topical arrangement of material".¹⁰ Nothing in the Statement requires that Moses wrote his own obituary. What Article XVIII denies is "any... quest for sources lying behind it that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its claims to authorship".¹⁰ So an inerrantist can accept an editor's hand in Deuteronomy 34 and cannot accept a theory on which Moses is a legend and the books are a post-exilic composition claiming his name. The line is drawn in Article XVIII by the inerrantists themselves; it isn't conceded on their behalf.

The sort. This question is argued. The critical position is the majority in universities; the conservative position is the majority in evangelical seminaries; each has serious scholars and real evidence. What would settle it? A manuscript of J, or an external ancient reference to Moses writing. Neither exists, and nothing available now will decide it. Hayes calls the theory "only a hypothesis"; Longman says "essentially Mosaic". Both phrases are chosen to claim less than a slogan would.

What we hold. We hold the Pentateuch to be "essentially Mosaic" in Longman's sense: Moses the substantial source, with later editing of the kind Deuteronomy 34 shows. We hold it as a judgement on argued evidence, informed by Jesus' way of speaking of "the book of Moses", not as something history has established. And we say plainly that a Christian who accepts a source-critical account, as Enns does and as many Catholic and mainline scholars do, has not left the faith; they've taken the other side of an argued question. Chicago's Article XIX says as much about its own doctrine, denying "that such confession is necessary for salvation" while denying in the same breath "that inerrancy can be rejected without grave consequences, both to the individual and to the Church".¹⁰ They mean both halves: not a test of salvation, and not a small thing.¹⁰

What archaeology has and hasn't done

The other question the course deferred is the historicity of the Old Testament's story. This lesson doesn't need it, but you'll be asked, so here is the sort, done in three sentences per column with the evidence attached.

Established. A dynasty called the "House of David" existed: the Tel Dan stele, an Aramaic inscription found in fragments in 1993 and 1994, names it in the ninth century BC.³⁰ The priestly blessing of Numbers 6 was in use in the First Temple period: the Ketef Hinnom silver scrolls, found in 1979, carry a form of it from the late seventh or early sixth century BC, the oldest surviving biblical text.³¹ The Babylonian exile happened, and the return: the Babylonian Chronicles record Nebuchadnezzar's capture of Jerusalem, and the Cyrus Cylinder records the policy of returning deported peoples and restoring their sanctuaries.³⁹ And Pontius Pilate governed Judea: a limestone inscription found at Caesarea in 1961 names him as prefect.³²

Argued. The scale and date of the exodus, whether the conquest of Canaan happened as Joshua describes it or by slower settlement, the size of David's and Solomon's kingdom (the "maximalist" and "minimalist" camps, which are scholarly self-descriptions, not insults), and the historicity of the patriarchal narratives. On each, serious archaeologists and historians disagree, and the disagreement doesn't track religious commitment as neatly as you'd expect: the maximalist and minimalist camps over the united monarchy divide over how to date pottery and building levels at Megiddo and Gezer, and both camps contain believers and unbelievers.

Faith. That the events happened as Scripture describes where archaeology is silent, which is most places, since most events leave no stone. A Christian holds this on the strength of the book's trustworthiness where it can be checked and of the reasons given earlier for trusting it at all. That's a faith claim, and this course makes it as one.

So "archaeology has disproved the Old Testament" is false (look at the columns above), and "archaeology has proved the Old Testament" is also false (look at the second column, and at how little a stele can carry). What archaeology has done is establish a set of specific things, leave a set of specific things open, and say nothing about the rest. Hard Questions and Faith and Science go into both. This lesson needed only the sort.

What people get wrong

"Inerrancy means reading everything literally." Article XIII and the Exposition refute this in the inerrantists' own words: hyperbole as hyperbole, poetry as poetry, round numbers as round numbers.¹⁰ That is a description of the statement circulating at second hand, and the text does not support it.

"Non-inerrantist Christians don't believe the Bible." Read the Confession of 1967 again: "received and obeyed as the word of God written... the witness without parallel".¹⁷ Read Dei Verbum 11.¹³ Read Hopko.¹⁵ They believe it. They differ from inerrantists about what "without error" ranges over, and that difference deserves an argument, not a verdict on their faith.

"Critical scholars are atheists." Brown was a priest; Enns is an evangelical; Hayes says nobody in her course wishes to undermine faith.¹⁹²¹ The method brackets belief. Some who use it believe, some don't, and the method can't tell you which.

"The church invented inerrancy in 1978", and its mirror, "the church always used the word." The banner is modern; the trust it names is not. Whether the older writers held the doctrine under other words is the Rogers and McKim versus Woodbridge question, and it's argued.¹¹¹²

"Archaeology has disproved the Old Testament", and its mirror, "archaeology has proved the Old Testament." Neither. Four things established, a list of things argued, and silence on the rest. The stele proves a dynasty; it doesn't prove the exodus, and it doesn't disprove it either.

"The Bible was written hundreds of years after the events." No mainstream position holds this for the New Testament. The whole critical range puts every New Testament book between about AD 50 and 120, and Paul's undisputed letters within twenty-five years of the crucifixion. Four centuries is nobody's position. For the Old Testament the gap is real and larger, and this course says so rather than pretending otherwise: the oldest substantial copies are from the last centuries before Christ, and much of what they describe is centuries older again. Notice that the sceptic and the apologist mis-sort this one in opposite directions, which is what makes it the best test of the tool.

Practice

Connections

This lesson closes what lessons 2, 4, and 6 opened. The timeline's historicity (lesson 2), the authorship of the Pentateuch deferred from the law lesson (lesson 4), and the dating of the Gospels (lesson 6) all come back here and get sorted. Lesson 8's canon and lesson 9's text were the history; this was what to make of it.

The three-kind sort is the course's method for every claim about the Bible, and the final test asks you to use it. Genre first (lesson 3) turned out to be the ground every position shares; that's why it was taught before any of this.

Two lessons remain, both practical: choosing a translation (lesson 11) and a way of reading you can keep (lesson 12). The questions this lesson couldn't settle go to Faith and Science (Genesis 1 and origins) and Hard Questions (Bible difficulties, Old Testament violence, and the historicity debates in depth). The neutral school's World Religions describes this same faith from outside, which is a useful thing to read after a course that described it from inside.

Go deeper

• The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), in full with its Exposition. Twenty minutes. Read it before you argue about it, on either side.
• Dei Verbum (1965), at vatican.va. Short, and the whole Catholic doctrine of Scripture in one document; then Robert Miller's "For the Sake of Our Salvation" (2016) for how Catholics argue about paragraph 11.
• Christine Hayes, RLST 145, lectures 4 and 5, Open Yale Courses. The historical-critical method taught as method, free, with transcripts. The critical position from its own teacher, limits included.
• John Wenham, Christ and the Bible, 3rd ed. (Wipf & Stock, 2009). The argument that a Christian's doctrine of Scripture starts from Jesus' own, made carefully and at length.
• Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2015). The strongest case from inside evangelicalism for accepting the critical results and keeping inspiration; read it with the Chicago Statement open to see where they part.

Sources

1. 2 Timothy 3:16–17, NET. "Every scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the person dedicated to God may be capable and equipped for every good work." All scripture in this lesson is quoted from the NET Bible, netbible.org, read via the bible.org API. Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NET) are from the NET Bible® copyright ©1996, 2019 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. All rights reserved. See Editorial Standards 4.7 for why this course uses the NET.
2. Luke 24:44, NET. "everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled."
3. John 10:35, NET. The clause "the scripture cannot be broken".
4. Matthew 5:18, NET. "until heaven and earth pass away not the smallest letter or stroke of a letter will pass from the law until everything takes place."
5. John Wenham, Christ and the Bible, 3rd ed. (Wipf & Stock, 2009). The argument that the case for Scripture's authority rests on Jesus' own view of it as true, authoritative, and from God, and that Christ's view should be the Christian view. Publication details confirmed from the publisher's listing.
6. 2 Peter 3:16, NET. Paul's letters twisted "as they also do to the rest of the scriptures". As read for lesson 8.
7. 2 Peter 1:21, NET. "no prophecy was ever borne of human impulse; rather, men carried along by the Holy Spirit spoke from God."
8. Fuller Theological Seminary, Statement of Faith, "What We Believe and Teach" (fuller.edu). "All the books of the Old and New Testaments, given by divine inspiration, are the written Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice." The seminary's page states the current statement was approved by trustees and faculty in 1972.
9. The Lausanne Covenant (1974), section 2, "The Authority and Power of the Bible", at lausanne.org. "We affirm the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both Old and New Testament Scriptures in their entirety as the only written word of God, without error in all that it affirms, and the only infallible rule of faith and practice."
10. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, 1978), full text with Exposition at bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html (the ETS archive PDF returned 404 at draft time). Quoted: Short Statement point 4; Article III ("merely a witness to revelation"); Article X (autographs; copies and translations "to the extent that they faithfully represent the original"); Article XII (denial that inerrancy is "limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science"); Article XIII in full; Article XVI (integral to the Church's faith; not "invented by scholastic Protestantism"); Article XVIII (grammatico-historical exegesis; "quest for sources... rejecting its claims to authorship"); Article XIX ("such confession is necessary for salvation" denied); Exposition, "So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth."
11. Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (Harper & Row, 1979). The thesis that the central tradition held Scripture infallible in faith and conduct while allowing imprecision in historical and scientific detail. Title and thesis confirmed from publisher and review listings; the book not opened.
12. John D. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (Zondervan, 1982). The reply that the older writers held the Bible wholly true, details included. Title, publisher, and year confirmed from publisher and bookseller listings; the book not opened.
13. Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, 18 November 1965, English text at vatican.va. Paragraph 9 ("it is not from Sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed"; Tradition and Scripture "accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence"); paragraph 11 in full, including "as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted" and "teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation"; paragraph 12 on "literary forms"; paragraph 21 ("venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord").
14. Robert P. Miller, "'For the Sake of Our Salvation': Interpreting Dei Verbum, Art. 11, Fifty Years Later", Journal of Scriptural Reasoning 15.2 (November 2016). The restrictive reading (Brown, Fitzmyer: inerrancy limited to what concerns salvation) against the purposive reading (Bea: "the idea of salvation is no longer directly linked with the noun 'truth,' but with the verbal expression 'wanted put into the writings'"). Read at jsr.shanti.virginia.edu. It is a single-author article in a special issue, not a symposium, and Miller argues for the broader reading himself, concluding that everything in the Bible is inerrant "in all those matters that are asserted by the human authors".
15. Thomas Hopko, The Orthodox Faith, vol. 1, Doctrine and Scripture, Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), sections "The Bible" and "Interpretation". "For the Orthodox, the Bible is the main written source of divine doctrine since God Himself inspired its writing by His Holy Spirit"; "All parts of the Bible are interpreted in the Orthodox Church in the light of Christ"; "The Bible lives in the Church"; "Only within Christ's Church, in the community of faith, of grace, and of truth, can men filled with the Holy Spirit understand the meaning and purpose of the Bible's holy words"; "It is only within the living Tradition of the Church under the direct inspiration of Christ's Spirit that the proper interpretation of the Bible can be made"; scholars "can offer much light" but "by themselves and by their academic work alone, no men can produce the proper interpretation of the Bible".
16. Timothy Ware (Kallistos), The Orthodox Church (Penguin, rev. ed.), chapter on Holy Tradition. Scripture as the heart of Tradition, read within the Church. As recorded in SOURCES.md; not re-read at draft time.
17. The Confession of 1967, Presbyterian Church (USA), Book of Confessions 9.27–9.30, section "The Bible", text at creeds.net. Note for a reader who opens the PCUSA's current edition instead: its Inclusive Language Text reads "words of human beings" where the original reads "the words of men", which is the wording quoted here. "The one sufficient revelation of God is Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate, to whom the Holy Spirit bears unique and authoritative witness through the Holy Scriptures, which are received and obeyed as the word of God written. The Scriptures are not a witness among others, but the witness without parallel."; "The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding."
18. Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2015). The incarnational analogy (Scripture fully divine and fully human, offered as an analogy, not an identity); the three problems (ancient Near Eastern parallels, theological diversity, the New Testament's use of the Old); the second edition's postscript on the first edition's reception. Publisher description and reviews consulted; the book not opened at draft time.
19. Christine Hayes, RLST 145 Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), Open Yale Courses, lecture 1 transcript (oyc.yale.edu). "It's a library"; "Religious faith simply isn't the topic of this course"; "No one in this course wishes to undermine or malign religious faith any more than they wish to promote or proselytize for religious faith"; "Our approach is going to be necessarily academic; and especially given the diversity of people in this room, that's really all that it can be, so that we have a common ground and common goals"; "I'll most likely respond by inviting you to consider the article of faith that lies behind that question... I'm not going to be drawn into a philosophical or theological debate over the merits of that belief"; interest "centered on the culture and the history and the literature and the religious thought of ancient Israel in all of its diversity rather than questions of faith and theology".
20. Dale Martin, RLST 152 Introduction to New Testament History and Literature, Open Yale Courses, course description (oyc.yale.edu). "Although theological themes will occupy much of our attention, the course does not attempt a theological appropriation of the New Testament as scripture"; the documents "as ancient literature and as sources for historical study".
21. Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (Anchor Bible Reference Library, 1997). The Catholic critical standard, by a priest. As recorded in SOURCES.md.
22. Christine Hayes, RLST 145, lectures 3, 4, and 5, Open Yale Courses (oyc.yale.edu). Lecture 3, "The Hebrew Bible in Its Ancient Near Eastern Setting: Genesis 1–4 in Context" (Genesis 1 read against Enuma Elish). Lecture 4, "Doublets and Contradictions, Seams and Sources: Genesis 5–11 and the Historical-Critical Method" (the two flood accounts, "interwoven instead of being placed side by side"; Spinoza named among early critics). Lecture 5, "Critical Approaches to the Bible: Introduction to Genesis 12–50": Wellhausen's "classic statement of biblical source theory" in 1878; J "about the tenth century", E "composed in the northern kingdoms about the ninth century", D "late-seventh century", P "the exilic period, the period after the fall of the Southern Kingdom in 586"; "It needs to be remembered that the documentary hypothesis is only a hypothesis. An important and a useful one... But none of the sources posited by critical scholars has been found independently"; "Most biblical scholars today do accept some version of Wellhausen's theory... though... not... tremendous confidence in some of the finer details." Lecture 4 video: YouTube GK2PBAG3064, channel YaleCourses, confirmed via YouTube's oEmbed endpoint.
23. Mark 4:30–32, NET. The ellipsis in the quotation stands where the NET runs verse 31 into verse 32 with a dash.
24. Deuteronomy 34:5–6 and 34:10, NET.
25. Genesis 36:31, NET.
26. Exodus 24:4, NET. "and Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord." Mark 12:26 ("the book of Moses") as recorded in SOURCES.md, Contested question 2.
27. Joel S. Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis, Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library (Yale University Press, 2012). The neo-documentarian defence of four sources on literary grounds. Title, series, publisher, and year confirmed from the publisher's and journal review listings; the book not opened.
28. Tremper Longman III and Raymond B. Dillard, An Introduction to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Zondervan, 2006). The Pentateuch as "essentially Mosaic": Moses the substantial source, later editing allowed. As recorded in SOURCES.md.
29. Umberto Cassuto, Isaac Kikawada and Arthur Quinn, and Duane Garrett, as named in SOURCES.md, Contested question 2, for the conservative literary reply that doublets and divine-name patterns are features of a unified composition. Not opened at draft time; the fact-check should confirm the specific works.
30. Avraham Biran and Joseph Naveh, "An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan", Israel Exploration Journal 43 (1993), and "The Tel Dan Inscription: A New Fragment", IEJ 45 (1995). Fragment A found July 1993, fragment B June 1994; the phrase "House of David". As recorded in SOURCES.md for lesson 2.
31. Ketef Hinnom silver scrolls, found 1979, late seventh or early sixth century BC, carrying a form of the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24–26; the oldest surviving biblical text. As recorded in SOURCES.md.
32. The Pilate inscription, Caesarea Maritima, found 1961, naming Pontius Pilate as prefect of Judea; Israel Museum, Jerusalem. As recorded in SOURCES.md. Photograph: Wikimedia Commons, "Limestone Inscription with Name of Pontius Pilate, Caesarea, 26-36 AD (42500903014).jpg", Gary Todd, 2018, CC0; licence confirmed via the Commons API at draft time.
33. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics (International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, 1982), full text at defendinginerrancy.com/chicago-statements/ (fetched 2026-09-08). Article XIII affirms that "awareness of the literary categories, formal and stylistic, of the various parts of Scripture is essential for proper exegesis, and hence we value genre criticism as one of the many disciplines of biblical study", and denies "that generic categories which negate historicity may rightly be imposed on biblical narratives which present themselves as factual". Article XIV affirms that "the biblical record of events, discourses and sayings, though presented in a variety of appropriate literary forms, corresponds to historical fact". Note for the research file: SOURCES.md records this clause as Article XXII; it is Article XIII of the 1982 statement, and the correction has been made there.
34. Athanasius, Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter (367), as recorded in SOURCES.md from the New Advent text read for lesson 8. "These are fountains of salvation... in these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of godliness."
35. Council of Trent, Session IV (8 April 1546), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures, as recorded in SOURCES.md from the papalencyclicals.net text read for lesson 8. The books received "as having been dictated either by Christ's own word of mouth, or by the Holy Ghost".
36. Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus (1893), and Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943), both teaching inerrancy without restriction and both at vatican.va; and the Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Inspiration and Truth of Sacred Scripture (2014). Cited here as the magisterial background to the Dei Verbum 11 debate, which the Catholic side of that debate rests on. Dates and titles are standard; the documents were not read in full for this lesson.
37. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 115 to 118, on the literal sense and the three spiritual senses (allegorical, moral, anagogical), with the medieval couplet. As recorded in SOURCES.md with its url, under the standing instruction that no lesson may present the four senses as a beginners' error.
38. Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 14b to 15a, read at sefaria.org 2026-09-08. The baraita that "Joshua wrote his own book and eight verses in the Torah, which describe the death of Moses"; and the dispute that follows, in which Rabbi Yehuda holds that "Moses wrote the entire Torah until this point, and Joshua wrote from this point forward", while Rabbi Shimon objects that a Torah scroll cannot be missing a single letter and holds that Moses wrote them at God's dictation.
39. The Babylonian Chronicle (ABC 5, the Jerusalem Chronicle, British Museum) for Nebuchadnezzar's capture of Jerusalem, and the Cyrus Cylinder (British Museum) for the policy of returning deported peoples and restoring sanctuaries. As recorded in SOURCES.md for lesson 2; cited here because the exile entry in the established column was the only one without a source.