IB World Religions 3.3.1. Key Texts: Old and New Testaments, Apocrypha, Encyclicals, Sermons Notes

3.3.1. Key Texts: Old and New Testaments, Apocrypha, Encyclicals, Sermons

The Bible as a library

1. Christians call their scripture the Bible, from the Greek biblia, meaning books. It is a library rather than a single work, gathered in two collections and read as one story.
2. The Old Testament holds the scriptures Christianity shares with Judaism. The New Testament holds the writings produced by the first Christian generations.
3. The collections are not the same size in every church. Protestant Bibles carry sixty-six books, Catholic Bibles seventy-three and Orthodox Bibles more again.
4. The writing inside is very mixed. Law sits beside love poetry, chronicle beside vision, and biography beside letters written to settle a quarrel in one town.
5. Chapter and verse numbers were added centuries later for convenience. They are why a reference such as John 3:16 finds the same words in every denomination's Bible.
6. All denominations treat these books as scripture. The encyclicals, confessions, sermons and devotional books described below carry a different and lesser kind of authority.

Old Testament key texts

1. The first five books, the Pentateuch or Torah, open the collection. Genesis 1 to 3 supplies the creation and the fall, and Christian doctrinal argument returns to those chapters constantly.
2. Exodus 20 carries the Ten Commandments. Many churches once painted them on boards behind the holy table, and Anglicans recited them at communion for four centuries.
3. The Psalms are the most used Old Testament book. Monks and nuns recite the whole psalter on a fixed cycle, and cathedral choirs sing them daily.
4. Isaiah supplies the passages Christians read as pointing to Jesus. They include the child called Immanuel in chapter 7, the son given in chapter 9 and the suffering servant of chapter 53.
5. The other prophets are read for their demand for justice. Amos calls for justice to roll down like waters, and Micah 6:8 asks only that people act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God.
6. Christians read these books as Christian scripture while recognising that Jews read the same texts as the Tanakh in their own right. Some Christian writers now prefer First Testament or Hebrew Bible to avoid implying that the older collection is superseded.

New Testament key texts

1. The four Gospels stand first, and the word means good news, from the Greek euangelion. Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican congregations stand to hear them read, as a mark of honour.
2. Matthew 5 to 7, the Sermon on the Mount, opens with the Beatitudes and contains the Lord's Prayer, the one prayer used by almost every denomination.
3. The parables carry much of the teaching of Jesus. Luke 15 gathers the lost sheep, the lost coin and the prodigal son into a single chapter about God searching for the lost.
4. The prologue of John identifies Jesus as the Logos, the Word made flesh. It supplied much of the vocabulary the later councils used to state the Incarnation.
5. The passion and resurrection narratives close all four Gospels and are read in full during Holy Week. Acts 2 then describes Pentecost and the first Christian preaching.
6. Paul's letters supply the doctrinal core: Romans on grace and faith, 1 Corinthians 13 on agape love, 1 Corinthians 15 on resurrection, and Philippians 2 with its hymn on Christ emptying himself. Revelation closes the collection with a vision of a new heaven and a new earth.

The Apocrypha and deuterocanon

1. Between the Testaments stands a set of Jewish books written mostly in the last two centuries before Christ. Catholics call them deuterocanonical, of the second canon, and most Protestants call them the Apocrypha, meaning hidden.
2. The Catholic list holds Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, also called Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and additional sections of Esther and Daniel.
3. Orthodox Bibles go further still. They add books such as 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151, and the exact list varies between Orthodox churches.
4. The books carry doctrinal weight as well as history. 2 Maccabees 12 includes prayer for the dead, which Catholic teaching cites in support of purgatory and which the Reformers rejected.
5. Anglicans took a middle path. Article VI of the Thirty-nine Articles says the Church reads these books for example of life and instruction of manners, but does not use them to establish any doctrine.
6. Most Protestant Bibles omit them or print them in a separate section. They stay familiar anyway, through the Hanukkah story in 1 Maccabees and through texts set to music by Handel.

Encyclicals and church documents

1. An encyclical is a circular letter from a pope to the bishops and, in modern practice, to all Catholics and sometimes to everyone. Each is known by its first two or three Latin words.
2. They have shaped Catholic social teaching. Rerum Novarum in 1891 defended a just wage and the right to form unions, and Laudato Si' in 2015 addressed climate change and the care of creation.
3. Others have shaped moral practice more contentiously. Humanae Vitae in 1968 restated the prohibition of artificial contraception and is still argued over among Catholics.
4. Encyclicals sit below scripture and below the definitions of councils. Catholics are asked to give them religious assent rather than the assent of faith owed to a defined dogma.
5. Other documents anchor other churches. The sixteen documents of the Second Vatican Council, among them Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church serve as Catholic reference points, while Orthodox churches look to the canons of the seven ecumenical councils.
6. Protestant equivalents are confessions. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 and the Westminster Confession of 1646 define whole traditions, and the Barmen Declaration of 1934 stated German Protestant resistance to Nazi claims on the church.

Sermons, hymns and books

1. Sermons became key texts once they were written down. The Paschal homily of John Chrysostom is still read aloud in Orthodox churches on Easter night, sixteen centuries after he preached it.
2. The collected sermons of John Wesley remain a doctrinal standard for Methodists, which means Methodist preaching is measured against them rather than merely inspired by them.
3. Charles Spurgeon in Victorian London and Martin Luther King Jr in the American civil rights movement both preached far beyond their own congregations, and their sermons are studied as texts today.
4. Some books have shaped devotion more than any council document. The Confessions of Augustine, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis and Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan have been read for centuries across the denominations.
5. Modern writers continue the line, among them Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose Cost of Discipleship was written before his execution by the Nazi state, and C. S. Lewis, whose Mere Christianity is read far outside his own tradition.
6. Hymns work as popular theology. Charles Wesley wrote thousands and Isaac Watts shaped English hymn singing, and many congregations learn doctrine through what they sing rather than through what they read.