Attacks on the doctrine of
Sola Scriptura (“Bible Alone”) are frequent and most of them come from members
of the Catholic Church. These attacks
come in many forms and we’ve addressed many of them here on this blog.
But yet another subtle attack
on Sola Scriptura comes from some Catholics’ interpretation of Nehemiah
8:1-8. This passage is about the
return of some of the Jews from Babylon to Jerusalem who had been exiled to
Babylon seventy years earlier.
In Nehemiah 8, the wall had
been rebuilt and a special solemn gathering of the Jews was called to read the
Book of the Law to the people. At this
time, several leaders were called on to help with this endeavor. Today’s enemies of Sola Scriptura focus on this
verse:
“So they read in the book in the Law of
God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.” (Nehemiah 8:8)
They’ll say, “You see! The common people needed a ‘magisterium’
here, an authoritative interpreter. They
needed leaders and teachers who could infallibly tell them what the Scriptures
said. They couldn’t interpret the holy
Scriptures on their own and they didn’t dare use ‘private interpretation’!”
Now, we don’t discourage the
role of teachers in the church today, since they are certainly a biblical
concept. Anyone saying that we don’t need teachers would be
misrepresenting Sola Scriptura. But there
is not a hint of the need for an “infallible magisterium” in this chapter in
Nehemiah, and it is not at all the purpose of this passage to condemn private
interpretation.
So, what’s the point of this
passage in saying that the leaders gave the people the “sense” of the meaning, “causing
them to understand” (v. 8)? Does this mean that the common people were
not allowed to interpret Scripture, but could only understand it from
God-inspired interpreters? No, it
doesn’t. Does this disprove the doctrine
of Sola Scriptura? Not at all.
Many years earlier, in Deuteronomy
31:9-13 Moses commanded a similar solemn reading of the same Law every
seventh year. But there was nothing
mentioned here about interpreting God’s
Word at that time. So why was there no
need to interpret for the people in Moses’ time? By contrast, why did Ezra have to interpret
the Scriptures for them in the book of Nehemiah?
We have to remember that for
Nehemiah and his people, it had been 70 years since the Jews had been in the
temple of God in Jerusalem, and the use of the Hebrew language by the Jews was
not as common in Babylon. No doubt, many
Jews had died within that time and a new group of young Jews existed which had
been raised in Babylon. The Jews had
assimilated into the Babylonian culture and language, and most of the Jews were
now speaking the Chaldean (Babylonian) language and/or Aramaic. But Ezra’s reading of the Law (in Nehemiah
8:8) was probably in pure Hebrew, to which many of the Jews were not
accustomed. Thus, the need for interpretation.
So, no, Sola Scriptura is not
refuted in Nehemiah 8:1-8 in the least.
This passage does not
demonstrate that an infallible magisterium (as the Catholic Church claims to
have) is necessary.
