Weighing the Authority of the New Testament on Restoration Scales

In modern Christianity, when one speaks of authority, one usually refers to several interrelated issues associated with the New Testament text. The questions include to what extent we can view the New Testament doctrines, commandments, and covenants as authoritative—that is, as issuing from a divine source; to what extent statements in the biblical text accurately reflect God’s mind and will; how statements in the Bible comport with history; which biblical authors possess authority; when the New Testament canon was being formed, how the authority or authenticity of a biblical book was determined; how the principle of authority relates to the belief in the idea of biblical inerrancy; and whether there are texts and writers outside the biblical canon who possess authority.

Locus of Authority

The Apostle Paul declared that “there is no authority [Greek, exousia] except by God” (Rom. 13:1).¹ Because authority in the New Testament was closely associated with “power” (though the two terms were sometimes differentiated),² the King James Version often renders exousia as power—“there is no power but of God.” But the principle is the same: all authority and power are vested in and emanate from God, who delegates to his Beloved Son, and to other human beings through his Son, aspects and degrees of authority. This observation is demonstrated in the New Testament.

During his mortal ministry, Jesus said of his life that “no one takes it from me, but I lay it down from myself. I have authority [exousia] to lay it down and I have authority to receive it again. This command I received from my Father” (John 10:18).³ Later, Jesus claimed that all authority in heaven and on earth was given to him by his Father (John 17:2; Matt. 28:18). After the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was recognized by “the crowds” as teaching with authority, his own authority, and not as the scribes who appealed to the authority of other teacher-leaders in Judaism (Matt. 7:28–29). During that same sermon, Jesus presented his instructions as the omniscient God he truly was: “You have heard that it was said by them of old time, . . . but I say unto you . . .” (Matt. 5:21–22, 27–28, 31–34, 38–39, 43–44). All the sayings that Jesus attributed to the ancients came from the law of Moses. Such statements as these indicate that Jesus’ teachings were intended to supersede the teachings of Moses, the great lawgiver.

That Jesus bestowed aspects of his own authority on others is well documented. To his Apostles, he gave “power [Greek, dynamis] and authority [Greek, exousia] over all the demons and to heal diseases” (Luke 9:1).⁴ He also gave them the authority to forgive sins (John 20:33). To prophets and apostles, Jesus gave the authority to speak as though they themselves were the Lord: “Thus saith the Lord . . .” Stunningly, Jesus even permits Satan to have authority, but that is temporary, and it is only by his allowance that the adversary has any control (Rev. 2:10).

Thus the words and acts of Jesus of Nazareth carried foremost weight and authority for Christian disciples in terms of what they were to believe and how they were to conduct their lives. So it is today. Yet nothing about his life was written by him, so far as we know. He did not personally compose any of the books comprising the New Testament canon. That was largely left to his close followers—Apostles who were eyewitnesses of his life and teachings.

To be sure, there were other eyewitnesses to some of Jesus’ activities. But as Ronald Heine notes in his study of classical Christian doctrine, these other witnesses “were not on a par with apostles as eyewitnesses, because the apostles were those closest followers who had been with him continually throughout his ministry.”⁵ They had witnessed his deeds and heard his teachings firsthand from the beginning of his ministry. Latter-day scholars are in agreement but would emphasize that it is not just longevity of their firsthand association with Jesus that is critical. Rather, it is that the Apostles were chosen, ordained, and sent forth by Jesus to be special witnesses of his divinity and reality to all the world (Acts 1:8; D&C 107:23). At any rate, Heine, following many other scholars, also asserts that the Apostles “constituted the highest court of appeal when it came to authenticating what Jesus had done or said. When the words and deeds of Jesus began to be written down, it was natural for the Christians to treat these accounts as Scripture in the same way they treated the writings of Moses and the prophets.”⁶ After Jesus’ Ascension, authority was vested in the ordained Apostles. The apostolic witness was of prime importance.

Heine goes on to provide a helpful paradigm for understanding how scriptural authority was determined and understood anciently. Heine turns to the Apostle Paul to illustrate. The latter recognized three sources of authority. First was the developing Old Testament—the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms (Luke 24:44; see also John 1:45). “The main authority of the Hebrew Scriptures for Christians was the testimony that they were understood to bear to Christ.”⁷ Paul used various scriptural texts to support his message about Jesus. As he explained, “Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction” (Rom. 15:4, NRSV). Second, Paul knew and drew upon “sayings of Jesus as a source of authority.”⁸ Sometimes he got those teachings from other Apostles (see 1 Cor. 15:3–8; Gal. 1:18–19).

Third, Paul considered the office of Apostle itself to carry authority. Heine cites the example of Paul’s teachings on marriage in 1 Corinthians 7. “Paul carefully distinguishes the teaching of Jesus on the subject of marriage from what he himself says on a further matter about which he knows no teaching of Jesus. But it is quite clear that he expects his own words, as those of an apostle, to carry authority as well.”⁹

Authority and Canon

Apostolic authority greatly influenced the formation of the New Testament canon. The word “canon” comes from a Greek term that means a standard or rule for measuring accuracy. The New Testament canon is that collection of writings judged by early Christian leaders of the first three centuries AD to accurately and authoritatively present the life and teachings of Jesus the Messiah. Eyewitness proximity to Jesus was the standard by which to measure which writings should be included in the authorized collection. This meant the Apostles. Thus “apostolic authorship appears to have been one of the chief means of determining canonicity.”¹⁰ As an example, the works of the Apostle Paul, the earliest Christian writings we know of to have circulated soon after their composition, “were readily accepted as canonical” by the Christian community because of his eyewitness testimony of Jesus’ living reality.¹¹

Statements from some early church fathers confirm the importance attached to the teachings and writings of the Apostles. Clement of Rome (died c. AD 99) stated, “The Apostles received the Gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus the Christ was sent from God. The Christ therefore is from God and the Apostles from the Christ” (1 Clem. 42.1–2).¹² Irenaeus (c. AD 130–200), bishop of Lyon, France, spoke of the martyr Polycarp (c. AD 69–155) as “having always taught the things which he had learned from the apostles, and which the Church has handed down, and which alone are true.”¹³ Ignatius of Antioch (died AD 140), known as the “God-bearing,” spoke with reverence regarding the two greatest Apostles of early Christianity while traveling as a prisoner to Rome: “I do not order you as did Peter and Paul; they were Apostles, I am a convict; they were free, I am even until now a slave” (To the Romans 4.3).¹⁴

There were exceptions to the primacy of direct apostolic witness of Jesus’ life and teachings, the Gospels of Mark and Luke being examples. But apparently the “chain of authority could not reach any further away than immediate disciples of apostles. They had, at least, known the eyewitnesses and had heard their teachings.”¹⁵ Luke’s Gospel seems to have been granted canonical status on the basis of the “author’s relationship to Paul.”¹⁶

Authority and Inerrancy of Scripture

Views on the authority of the Bible have been significantly influenced by the idea of biblical inerrancy. In its simplest formulation, biblical inerrancy is the belief that the Bible “is without error or fault in all its teaching.”¹⁷ This belief is rigidly upheld by various adherents of American evangelical Christianity, some of whom equate inerrancy with biblical infallibility, a step up in expressing the view that the Bible is without a single mistake.

Biblical inerrancy was officially formulated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy by an international conference of evangelical leaders in Chicago in October 1978 and signed by nearly three hundred evangelical scholars. It was obviously designed to defend the absolute authority of scripture against less literal, more liberal interpretations of the biblical text. The core of the statement avers that “Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact,”¹⁸ with the stipulation that “inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture.”¹⁹ Of course, there is no “autograph” of the biblical text or even an original composition of any biblical book. We possess only copies of copies. In a grudging acknowledgment of the lack of original copies, however, the statement goes on to declare, “We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs.”²⁰ Furthermore, the autographic text of scripture “in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy.”²¹

The concept of biblical inerrancy certainly emphasizes the fact that “the authority of Scripture is a key issue for each generation of believers and in every age.”²² However, it is a controversial idea and has been called into question for a number of reasons by both Protestants and Roman Catholics. These reasons need not detain us here except to say that even some influential evangelical scholars disagree with the sweeping and unanswered critical questions flowing out of the Chicago Statement itself.²³ In our view, biblical inerrancy as articulated in the Chicago Statement and subsequent discussions does not harmonize well with Restoration scripture and modern prophets.

It ought to be acknowledged up front that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints regards the Bible with reverence. We place great authority in it. And we agree that, when it first came forth, “it contained the fulness of the gospel of the Lord, of whom the twelve apostles bear record; and they bear record according to the truth which is in the Lamb of God” (1 Ne. 13:24). Indeed, as Nephi indicated, the original apostolic witnesses were crucial to substantiating the authority of the Bible. But after scripture went forth by the hand of apostles and disciples of Christ, from the Jews unto the Gentiles, “many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord” were “taken away from the gospel of the Lamb” (1 Ne. 13:25–26).

Thus The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believes “the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated [and transmitted] correctly” (A of F 1:8) precisely because errors were made. Historical records confirm this point. An example comes from St. Jerome, the famous biblical translator who formulated a plan to produce a new, more trustworthy version of the Bible (later known as the Vulgate). Jerome sought to correct the problems existing in the Old Latin manuscripts of the biblical text then in circulation. In a letter to Pope Damasus in AD 383, Jerome described the challenge with existing Latin manuscripts of just the New Testament: “For if we are to pin our faith to the Latin texts, it is for our opponents to tell us which; for there are almost as many forms of texts as there are copies. If, on the other hand, we are to glean the truth from a comparison of many, why not go back to the original Greek and correct the mistakes introduced by inaccurate translators, and the blundering alterations of confident but ignorant critics, and further all that has been inserted or changed by copyists more asleep than awake?”²⁴

Jerome recognized that at the very least a revision, if not a restoration, was needed in his day. Similarly, in these latter days, a doctrinal restoration was needed and has occurred. Latter-day Saints aver that for all its merits, ultimate authority does not rest in the King James Version, or in any other version of the Bible, or in any of the thousands of biblical manuscripts that exist in the original languages of Hebrew and Greek (from which, according to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, the autographic text of the Bible can be recaptured). Ultimate authority is vested in the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, and the words of modern prophets.

In fact, a statement from the Church’s First Presidency seems crafted to respond directly to the assertions put forward by proponents of biblical inerrancy: “Unfortunately, no original manuscripts of any portion of the Bible are available for comparison to determine the most accurate version. However, the Lord has revealed clearly the doctrines of the gospel in these latter days. The most reliable way to measure the accuracy of any biblical passage is not by comparing different texts, but by comparison with the Book of Mormon and modern-day revelations.”²⁵ For Latter-day Saints, ultimate authority resides in “the most correct of any book on earth,” the one book by which a person “would get nearer to God . . . than by any other book”²⁶—the Book of Mormon—as well as in those reservoirs of scripture that present the very words of the Lord in modern times without having to be translated from an ancient language.

If we go back to the foundational principle that proclaims where ultimate authority is located, and that all, or most all, Christians agree on, we must have the authentic words of God preserved in the text. “For Christians the ultimate authority is God, revealed in Jesus Christ and His redeeming work.”²⁷ In this regard, the words of the Lord addressed to Sidney Rigdon, at a time when the Prophet Joseph Smith was engaged almost daily in making his inspired revision of the King James Version, are truly arresting: “And a commandment I give unto thee—thou shalt write for him [Joseph Smith]; and the scriptures shall be given, even as they are in mine own bosom, to the salvation of mine own elect; for they will hear my voice, and shall see me, and shall not be asleep, and shall abide the day of my coming; for they shall be purified, even as I am pure” (D&C 35:20–21, emphasis added).

For members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, authority rests in the direct word of the Lord and in ordained, authorized servants who speak in his name: “Whatsoever they shall speak when moved upon by the Holy Ghost shall be scripture, shall be the will of the Lord, shall be the mind of the Lord, shall be the word of the Lord, shall be the voice of the Lord, and the power of God unto salvation” (D&C 68:4). The living oracles supersede the written text if a discrepancy should arise.

Regarding authority and authorship in the Bible, it seems fair and defensible to say that the Latter-day Saint scholars who are involved in the present commentary project have begun their work with the assumption that the authorship of books in the New Testament, as well as the authority ascribed to them, is accurate and proper, unless there is evidence to the contrary. In other words, a burden of proof exists on the part of those who deny the traditional attribution of authorship or who deny the authority traditionally ascribed to a biblical text.

Ultimately, our love of the New Testament, its fundamental sanctity and authoritative soundness, and our continual reflection on its content cause us to join our voices with that of the Prophet Joseph Smith: “We take the sacred writings into our hands, and admit that they were given by direct inspiration for the good of man. We believe that God condescended to speak from the heavens and declare His will concerning the human family, to give them just and holy laws, to regulate their conduct, and guide them in a direct way, that in due time He might take them to Himself, and make them joint heirs with His Son.”²⁸ And we are convinced that, to paraphrase the Prophet, whoever reads the New Testament “oftenest will like it best.”²⁹