Deuterocanonical Books

[homeschoolmom]

Someone told me that there are historical errors in the deuterocanonical books and therefore they cannot be inspired. I'm sorry, I can't remember which, but it was about King Nebecanezzer being sited as king of Assyeria rather than Babylon. Is that so? And if so, how can this be explained? Are there other "errors" in inspired Scripture?

(wow, too many hard to spell words and no spell check! )

[Adeodatus]

Dear homeschoolmom,

The problem is not in the Bible but in the people who treat the Bible as though it came fresh out of heaven, as though it is a DIY manual from God. I haven't come across any alleged "historical inaccuracies" in the deuterocanonicals, but there are some of them in the protocanonicals! It all depends on why you take some bits of the Bible as pure history. We have to remember that the Scriptures are divinely inspired (God-breathed), and were written by human beings in a particular cultural context over a particular time. So the Bible contains the "lively oracles of God" and these are presented in a human medium, with human expressions and idioms, different genres, etc. The Scriptures are truly God's Word, but written by human beings, not dictated word-for-word by God.

So for example, Genesis (especially the first 11 chapters) was not written as a purely historical account, and St Thomas Aquinas warned us 800 years ago that people who read it literally were going to make Christians the laughing-stock of the world.

It may help to read the following extract from the Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (April 15, 1993).

"Fundamentalism is right to insist on the divine inspiration of the Bible, the inerrancy of the word of God and other biblical truths included in its five fundamental points. But its way of presenting these truths is rooted in an ideology which is not biblical, whatever the proponents of this approach might say. For it demands an unshakable adherence to rigid doctrinal points of view and imposes, as the only source of teaching for Christian life and salvation, a reading of the Bible which rejects all questioning and any kind of critical research.

"The basic problem with fundamentalist interpretation of this kind is that, refusing to take into account the historical character of biblical revelation, it makes itself incapable of accepting the full truth of the incarnation itself. As regards relationships with God, fundamentalism seeks to escape any closeness of the divine and the human. It refuses to admit that the inspired word of God has been expressed in human language and that this word has been expressed, under divine inspiration, by human authors possessed of limited capacities and resources. For this reason, it tends to treat the biblical text as if it had been dictated word for word by the Spirit. It fails to recognize that the word of God has been formulated in language and expression conditioned by various periods. It pays no attention to the literary forms and to the human ways of thinking to be found in the biblical texts, many of which are the result of a process extending over long periods of time and bearing the mark of very diverse historical situations.

"Fundamentalism also places undue stress upon the inerrancy of certain details in the biblical texts, especially in what concerns historical events or supposedly scientific truth. It often historicizes material which from the start never claimed to be historical. It considers historical everything that is reported or recounted with verbs in the past tense, failing to take the necessary account of the possibility of symbolic or figurative meaning."