How Authoritative?

Last week, my dad posted on Facebook a link to a blog post titled “10 Things This Christian Doesn’t Believe About the Bible”. I was interested, yet a little bit wary of it as the title seemed meant to attract attention. The author of the blog is John Pavlovitz, a pastor and author who seems to have a fairly large online following. His article came from a place of progressive Christianity, as the gist of the article was that he believes the Bible was created by humans (not God) and is not a very good guide for dealing with contemporary issues. Reading this blog post along with our assigned class reading (Rewriting Scripture in Second Temple Times by Sidnie White Crawford), I began to think about how different communities have different standards and ideas about the authority of texts.

When studying rewritten texts like Jubilees and the Genesis Apocryphon, Sidnie White Crawford places them on a spectrum of authority. At one end of the spectrum we have texts that are recognizably authoritative, and at the other end is where a base text is recognizable, but authority is not derived from it. The texts in between the extremes that create new texts based off of older scripture, like Jubilees, are not easy to definitively categorize. Based on the findings at Qumran, one can assume that the community there saw Jubilees as authoritative. This authoritative status could have also been carried on into the early church based on references to it by early Christian leaders, yet it does not appear in our current bibles.

Today, Jubilees is considered canonical by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and pseudepigrapha by other Christian denominations. Another example of differing ideas surrounding authority is how the Catholic bible includes texts that the Protestant bible leaves out. Within the Christian tradition as a whole there is not a consensus regarding what texts are authoritative. Which brings me back to Pavlovitz’s blog post. What kind of authority does the Bible have in his mind? In explaining one of his points he says this: “Rather than a Sola Scriptura perspective, which makes the Bible the ultimate, singular resource for encountering and understanding God, I believe as the ancestors of the faith believed: that all areas of life speak the language of the Divine; nature, prayer, community, reason, and the Holy Spirit’s direct voice to each of us”. In his personal belief system he minimizes the authority of the bible in favor of what he experiences around him.

I find the varying degrees of authority that is given to the bible by different communities and individuals fascinating. From the rewritten scriptures of the second temple time period to the opinions of individuals today, different communities and individuals within the same tradition can disagree on what is considered authoritative.