[Scripture verses]
Dear Donagh, What’s your favourite Scripture verse? Joanne
Dear Joanne,
This looks like an easy question, but it isn’t at all. It’s like asking ‘What’s your favourite note in Mozart’s Brandenburg concerto?’ The musical notes were not meant to stand alone, and neither were Scripture verses.
In the early 13th century the Scriptures were divided for the first time into chapters as we have them today; but it was not till the 16th century that chapters were divided into verses. This was useful for reference, but there’s a serious downside to it. It tended to fragment the Scriptures: people began to see Scripture verses in isolation from the whole picture, in this way losing much or all of their meaning.
The original meaning of a Scripture verse can be discovered only in the context of the whole of Scripture – and of everything that can be known about the world in which it came to be written. Like archaeology. Archaeologists are very careful to catalogue exactly where every object was found. They have to place and date every detail. Otherwise the story is lost. Likewise, real Scripture scholars will tell you that a bible verse makes sense only in the context of the whole of Scripture. If you want to follow this up, read some of Raymond Brown’s (+1998) work. If someone, not an archaeologist, were to dig up ancient potshards and statuettes and use them, say, as ornaments for the mantelpiece, it would be seen as a desecration of history. Likewise, isolated verses of Scripture would be rather like isolated trinkets, or like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Once Scripture was divided into verses in the 16th century, people with literal minds, lacking imagination, began to quote verses without context – but often with malicious intent. This became a lethal practice in times of religious controversy: the Scriptures were weaponised, used like a magazine of deadly one-liners for taking out the enemy. Some Christian Churches still use the Scriptures in this way, but it is no longer mainstream. Isolated verses don’t remain isolated for long: they begin to be part of some other narrative, one that may have little to do with the original meaning. My father used to tell of a brutal teacher long ago who used Luke 18:16 as a justification for beating children. In older translations it read, “Suffer little children to come unto me.” (In Early Modern English, ‘to suffer’ meant ‘to allow’.) That, alas, was far from being the only example in history of scriptural verses being used to justify violence. They have been used to justify, among other horrors, war, slavery, capital punishment, anti-Semitism, and the unrestrained accumulation of wealth – the so-called ‘prosperity gospel’….
Why settle for a single verse—a soundbite—when you can have the full text? You can find the whole story with a few taps on your keyboard. Ask for bigger helpings: ask, for example, for the parable of the prodigal son, or for Jesus’ conversation with the woman at the well, or the Resurrection appearances of Jesus…. It’s all yours.
But now I want to enter a qualification. If the purpose of selecting a single verse of Scripture is to aid prayer, then it has a meaning that is in continuity with its original meaning. Imagine, for example, how many times Christians have prayed the words of the Our Father (Matthew 6:9-13). Yes, it is more than a single verse, but you can use any phrase from it as a mantra. And imagine how many times people have prayed the Hail Mary, the first half of which is straight from the Scriptures (Luke 1:28; Luke 1:42). Think too of those Taizé chants: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42), etc. Simplifying a Scripture passage and repeating a key word has long been seen as part of a Christian’s prayer life. See, for example, the 14th-century little classic, The Cloud of Unknowing. The anonymous author, who was passing on an older tradition, called this ‘meditatio’ (not to be confused with what we call meditation today).
I hope this was of some help to you, Joanne.
Donagh