It’s often said that the Bible is not a book, but a library. As much as we see in it a unified message of God’s love for creation, this message is communicated in a variety of different voices: it’s a complex symphony, not a simple melody. As such, when we read a given passage, we never read it on its own. Instead, it will be informed by other passages, just as it will inform our readings of those passages. Different parts of Scripture are always in dialogue with each other. That is the point of the ‘big question’ we’ll be looking at today: What else do the Scriptures say about this?
Understanding what else the Bible says about a theme won’t often determine what we think a text means (though it might in the case where a text is ambiguous while others are clear, or where it relies on how we understand other texts), but may significantly impact how we interpret and apply it. Let’s look at a few kinds of interactions among texts.
Agreement
The easiest kind of relationship to manage is agreement, where there is a consistent message among texts. For example, a few years ago, we saw that it wasn’t just Acts 5.27-32 that calls the crucifixion our idea, not God’s, but all of the Acts sermons. So we can get a pretty good sense that this was an important part of the original Christian proclamation. We’ve also seen that there’s a consistent message, across both Testaments and multiple different genres — including Law, Prophets, Wisdom, and Gospel — about what it is God requires of us: Love for God and love for neighbour (or, keeping the commandments, which amounts to the same thing in these passages).
Where things get more complicated is where different texts don’t agree. This can be the result of an evolution of perspective over time, Christological supersession, or simple disagreement. Let’s look at examples of all three types to see how we might manage them.
Evolution of Perspective
Living traditions are never static. Ideas and reflection beget more ideas and further reflection, so beliefs and values naturally shift over time. This is even more true of something like the Bible, which was written across a vast swath of human cultural history, recording the beliefs and experiences of anything from nomadic desert pastoralists to cosmopolitan Roman urbanists. So often when the Bible disagrees with itself it’s a matter of evolution of thought, generally moving from a narrower to a broader perspective.
The classic example of this is the evolution of ideas about God that we see in the Old Testament, from what has been called a personal mystery-and-magic understanding of God that focuses on the kin-group (which we largely see in the Abraham stories), through a national power-and-majesty understanding of God that focuses on the state or ethnic group (which is the predominant image in the Old Testament), to a universal ethical monotheistic understanding of God (which emerges in the Prophets and Wisdom literature and dominates the New Testament). The biggest change in these ideas is the scope of God’s concern. We see a concomitant shift in thinking in the change from Deuteronomy to Isaiah on the issue of eunuchs (Deuteronomy rejects them as being unable to worship in the Temple; Isaiah imagines God offering them welcome and a lasting legacy), and from the Torah through the Prophets (in theory) and New Testament (in reality) about God and those outside the people of Israel. All this is part of the wider ‘prophetic critique’, with its more expansive understanding of God requiring a greater ethical standard; the old strategies to deal with sin, like sacrifices, aren’t good enough unless they’re accompanied by a genuine commitment to reform and justice.
This is the same kind of shift that we see in Jesus’ teachings. The best example of this is his famous “You have heard it said … but I say to you …” teachings, where he literally contradicts the letter of the Old Testament Law in order to push it further.
Christological Supersession
This last example ties into the next type of disagreement among texts. As Christians, we believe that the teaching of Christ is a revelation that supersedes — not replacing so much as interpreting, clarifying, and expanding — the teaching of the Law and the Prophets. I often say that the New Testament writers saw the world through ‘Christ-coloured glasses’ — he became the lens through which they understood the whole world, including their received religious traditions. So, if we perceive a difference between Jesus’ teaching and something we see elsewhere in the Bible, we follow Jesus every time.
By definition, that’s what makes us Christians: If we understand Jesus to be the fullest revelation of God in and for the world, then his teaching informs and interprets any other teaching.
A related consequence of the Apostles’ ‘Christ-coloured glasses’ is their use of typology to understand the Old Testament (e.g., Paul’s discussion of Isaac and Ishmael in Galatians 4). In these examples, the New Testament understands something in Christ’s life or the Gospel as fulfilling a story, theme, or prophecy from the Old. It can be a temptation for Christians to allow these typological readings to completely overwhelm the meaning of the Old Testament story itself. But it needs to work the other way around: In order for the fulfillment to have meaning, we first need to properly understand the ‘type’, so in these situations it’s actually more important, not less to give the older text its proper due. The greatest example of this to my mind is how the New Testament refers to Christ’s death in terms of the Old Testament sacrificial system. Basically the last five hundred years (arguably the last thousand years) of the West’s thinking about the cross has been grounded in ideas about sacrifice that are not consistent with how the Old Testament actually talked about it! In order to have a more accurate understanding of what the cross means, we need a more accurate understanding of how sacrifice functioned.
Actual Disagreement
Most troublesome for our interpretation are passages where the kinds of evolution in thought involved in the previous two aren’t in play, and they just disagree with each other. Here are four famous examples:
- The timelines of the two creation myths in Genesis
- The timing of the Last Supper differs within the Gospels, with Matthew, Mark, and Luke framing it as a Passover meal, while John says it happens before the Passover, framing Jesus as the Passover lamb.
- Ezra-Nehemiah taking a harsher view on Gentiles than the Prophets
- Paul proclaiming women’s and enslaved persons’ equality and full personhood while also reinforcing their subjugation to free men
While the previous two types of disagreement don’t really need to be ‘resolved’ — we just need to understand where the text we’re considering is in the broader narrative of the Scriptures — these ones do need to be resolved in some way. This is particularly true for biblical literalists who require the Bible to be completely accurate in everything that it says, including timelines. For those of us who don’t have this need, the first two examples aren’t serious: The creation stories are simply different stories written at different times for different purposes, and teach theological rather than historical truths. The third and fourth examples are trickier and we need to find some way of understanding them. One thing that comes to mind for me is that the more restrictive texts are about order and discipline while the more permissive texts are about theology and values. There can be no doubt that figuring out how to actually apply our beliefs in real life is always tricky. The question for us is, when left with something like this, which story do we choose to follow? Do we go for the bigger theological story, even if it risks disrupting social and religious norms? Or do we prefer a more incremental application of big ideas in the name of protecting the reputation and even safety of the community?
The point of all this is that it’s important with any text to understand how it relates to the broader canon of Scripture. There are fascinating and unexpected through-lines among texts, as well as equally fascinating and unexpected differences. It’s important to recognize this and be able to situate our text— and therefore how we interpret and apply it — within this bigger picture of Scripture.
Reflection Questions
- Using a concordance or your online Bible of choice, do a search for the word “faithful” or “faithfulness”. Peruse the results and reflect on how similar or different the messages in the texts seem to be.
- It is often said that unclear texts should be interpreted through clear texts. How would you discern which text is ‘clear’ and which is ‘unclear’?
- Think through your beliefs about differences or contradictions within the Bible. Do they concern you? Why? Why not?
Matthew Root 
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