Christians are often criticized for their controversial relationship with their sacred scripture, the

Bible. On the one hand, Christians do not read their Bible often enough according to the standards
expected of them. Or if they do, they are accused of reading it out of its expected context, supposedly
reading it selectively to justify their ideological interpretation of it. Additionally, Christians do not
appear to have a comprehensive understanding of the history of their religions scripture,
misunderstanding its relationship with the Church. And finally, and most importantly but also most
overlooked, is that when Christians do read the Bible, they do so inconsistently with message of Bible
itself. The purpose of this paper is to clarify and correct these criticisms within the framework of Eastern
Orthodoxy, the most coherent form of Christianity I am familiar with. I will contrast Orthodoxy with
Protestantism and Islam because I believe the former perpetuates a faulty image of scripture which
justifies the equally faulty criticisms of the latter.
We must correctly understand the history of the scripture that makes up the Bible. Christians,
particularly Protestants, despite their confidence in the sole-authority of the Bible, fail to understand
the limitations of it. Christianity emerged out of Judaism and only became a religion distinct from it as
both communities sought to clarify their theological disagreements. Christianity continued on to
become an increasingly cosmopolitan faith in the Roman Empire while Judaism remained a culturally
exclusive to the Jewish people. As such, Christians first scriptures were not the Bible, but what is now
known as the Old Testament. During the times of Jesus and even for a period of time there-after, there
were no documents now known as the New Testament. At best there existed a multitude of texts
relating to the messiah, Jesus, promoted by different sectarian cults. When the New Testament refers
to scripture, it is rarely referring back to itself, as such a collection did not exist at the time, but it is
referring back to the Jewish scriptures of the Old Testament and quoting from specific documents in the
New Testament, not representative of a wider established canon.
Emerging Christian communities then depended primarily upon the Old Testament and a
diversity of secondary gospels. At first, only the life and saying of Jesus were accepted as equal to the
authority of the Old Testament scriptures. Such gospels were primarily oral and were not limited to the
four gospels of the final Biblical canon. Moreover, the number of such gospels varied in numbers
greater or lesser than that of the Bible depending on the local canon of each Christian community. So
while Christians were more or less in agreement on the divine authority of the Old Testament, each
Christian group may differ on not only the number of supporting gospels but may follow completely
different gospels as well. But some Christian communities, such as Marcionists, even rejected the Old
Testament and any gospel of supposedly corruptive Jewish influence. Other Christian sects formed
equally radical theologies. Adoptionists believed Jesus divinity was adopted and not innate,
Apollinarists believed that Jesus had a material body but a divine mind, and Docetists held that Jesus
was divine spirit with an illusory body that suffered an equally illusory crucifixion. Arianists professed
that Jesus was simply a perfect prophet of God. Pnematomachianists understood the Holy Spirit as a
creature of the Son and Father of the Trinity while Sabellianists believed that the Son and Spirit were
simply different forms of God the Father. The Antinomianists held that the grace of God liberated one
from moral duty while the Donatists believed that the Church was limited to only those of moral purity.

The Donatists professed themselves as prophets of authority greater than the gospel authors and the
Gnostics believed that they were given secret divine knowledge.
With such a diversity of supposedly-divinely inspired scripture, Christians faced a crisis in the
early Church: what were the limits of the actual Scripture of the early Church. Because Christianity was
Jewish, albeit in an increasingly limited sense, it accepted Jewish Old Testament. The question was how
to establish the canon that would form the New Testament. This was motivated primarily by
Marcionism and Donatism; the former necessitating a codification of the Jewish scriptures and the latter
motivating a closure of the Biblical canon. The Orthodox Church rejected the heresy of Marcionism and
other anti-Jewish sects such as Gnosticism, making the Old Testament the foundation of its faith and
recognizing Jesus continuity with, and fulfillment of, its prophecies. In opposition to the Donatists and
Gnostics who believed that their authority was itself prophetic and superseded the authority of Jewish
scripture and gospel alike, the Orthodox Church closed the canon around apostolic succession. Initially,
scripture was considered divinely inspired if it was the word of Christ. But with a growing diversity of
sectarian contradictions, the Church centered its canon on apostolic origins. Only the scriptures of those
communities which could be traced back to the preaching of one of Christs apostles or of those
associated with them would be considered Orthodox. Subsequent Church councils would continue to
clarify the canon and its theology over time through consensus of Church authorities. Thus the Bible
was formed to codify scripture against erroneous heresy but the theology of the Church is not limited to
the Bible; it existed prior to the scripture of the New Testament in the Old Testament and oral traditions
and art of the Church and continued to be defined in subsequent councils and expressed in subsequent
art.
Consensus and unity of the Church motivated the closed canon that became the Christian Bible.
The Orthodox Christian seeks above all unity with God through Christ and in the Church. This mystical
participation of humanity in divinity is known as theosis or deification. For the Orthodox Christian, God
became human in Christ so that humanity may become divine in the Church and that God suffered
death in Christ so that humanity may live eternally in God. Thus of central importance to the orthodoxy
of the Church is the theology of the Trinity, incarnation and atonement of Christ, the Son of God. The
Church is inseparable from such a theology because it provides the mystical unity of the Church. Each
heresy against the Church contradicted this theology and contorted its unity, dividing Christians from
each other, from Christ, and thus from God. Marcionists and Montanists rejected the Jewish foundation
of the Church and the precedent they set for further understanding of the divine. Adoptionists,
Apollinarists, Arianists, Docetists, Gnostics and Pneumatomachianists rejected the unity of Christ with
God and thus the salvation of deification graced to humanity through him. Donatists and Antinomianists
divided the Church between saints and sinners and denied the moral synergy between humanity and
divinity. Finally the Gnostics divided the Church and God against the world, denying the deification of
the cosmos through the incarnation of Christ. The Bible does not speak of the Bible, but it does speak of
the Ecclesia, the Church, and protecting the message of the unity of the Church with Christ was the
purpose of the Christian Biblical canon. The Church as a whole is the revelation of God and unity within
the Church and between man and God forms the center of the Church.

This makes the Bible of Christianity comparatively distinct relative to the scripture of its Muslim
critics, the Quran. The Bible, unlike the Quran, is not a singular document formed in a relatively small
period of time by the recitations of its religious leader, Mohammed. It is instead a collection of
documents from multiple authors over a vast period of time prior to the life of its primary religious
leader, Jesus (Old Testament), as well as a collection of documents from multiple authors some time
after his death and supposed resurrection (New Testament). Furthermore, and possibly because of this,
the Bible, unlike the Quran, is not a self-conscious form of literature organized by its religious
figurehead. Jesus did not compose the Bible, and while Mohammed did not compose the Quran either
per se, he was personally responsible for the recitation of revelation received from the angel Gabriel.
The Quran often makes mention of itself as revelation, self-authenticating its divine authority. In
comparison, the Bible makes limited mention of its status as revelation, and because of its eclectic
nature, such assertions are limited in their scope. The Quran itself was believed to be divine Scripture
since its inception, with those who deviated from its authority considered heretical. In contrast, the
Bible was condensed together in response to heresy against the divinity of Christ acting through the
Church. Christians understood their Church in Christ as the fulfillment of Jewish scripture and while
Christians and Jews may differ in their interpretation of said scripture, they nevertheless remain loyal to
the same body of writing. In contrast, Islam, while claiming to belong to the same body of faith as
Judaism and Christianity through Abraham, does not abide by the same scripture due to their supposed
corruption, but follows that the Quran alone. In this Islam repeats many of the heresies experienced by
the early Church and for this reason Islam was understood as a heretical form of Christianity when first
encountered by the Orthodox Church.
The relationship between the Church and Bible of Christianity is drastically different than the
relationship between the Quran and umma of Islam. Whereas the umma formed around the Quran as
revealed by the prophet Mohammed, the Church of Christianity formed around the savior Jesus and in
response, produced the New Testament out of inspired reflecting on Jesus relationship to the Old
Testament of their native Judaism. In the former case, a prophet delivered revelation from God in the
form of scripture; in the latter case, God revealed himself as a prophet and inspired scripture to attest to
this. To compare the Bible (especially the New Testament) and the Quran is both inadequate and
inappropriate; it distorts the relationships within each religious community. A more adequate
comparison between Christian and Islamic scripture is the Bible relative to the Hadith, the secondary
Islamic literature based on the life of the prophet Mohammed. Jesus himself is the Christian equivalent
to the Quran. In Islam, the prophet Mohammed recited the revelation of God to form the Quran and his
life was reflected in the Hadith but in Christianity, God revealed himself in Jesus himself and his life was
recorded in what would become the New Testament. None of this is meant to point to the superiority
of Christianity over Islam, but simply to make a more adequate comparison of the two, and to
understand Christianity within its own historical framework.
Finally, there is the message of salvation through Christ in the Bible itself. For the Orthodox
Christian, humanity suffers under sin. Sin, amartia, is to miss the mark, to not reach the perfection of
God and falls into the hell of despair and guilt over such imperfection before the glory of God. God
came through Christ to unite man to God in life and beyond death through the life of his incarnation and

the death of his atonement. For those that accept the Church of Christ and seek the perfection of God
with ascetic discipline, the grace of deification is upon them and in death they will be restored to life in
the presence of God. But this process requires discipline and cooperation with the Church, for God can
be rejected once accepted by the Christian, and God does not overpower their will with His own but
graces them with the power to will their salvation in synergy with him. If this then, is the message of
salvation professed through the faithful in the Bible, it is startling how Christians understand the Bible so
utterly divorced from this context. Christians, particularly Protestants, tend to read the Bible literally and
infallibly, willfully ignoring or reinterpreting errors and limitations found within. But to acknowledge the
imperfections of the Bible is not to acknowledge the imperfection of Christs salvation, for Christ did not
come to form the Bible but came to form the Church of which the Bible is a part and its writers were
members. The authors of the Bible were themselves sinners struggling to find synergy with God through
Jesus Christ, and were struggling to understand and express the experience of the divine he revealed
and bestowed upon them. As sinners they would misunderstand God and may even deny the true
message of God in their witness to God in Christ. They did not turn to the Bible alone, nor could they as
authors of the Bible itself, but rather they turned to the Church as a whole, of which the Bible was but a
part of a process of realizing the divinity of God in the world.
The first Christians did not possess a complete Bible, and whatever fragment of the current
canon they did possess, was either predominantly oral or a single copy shared and studied by the
Church community together. The Orthodox Christian seeks community between humanity and divinity
in the Church in the Bible and the sacraments and liturgy. To deny the necessity and limitations of their
synergy with God, is to deny such synergy between humanity and divinity in Christ and it is to repeat the
heresies which threatened the salvation promised through His Church. In acknowledging the
imperfections of the Bible, we should not seek to erase them or replace them, thereby reimagining the
history of salvation within the Church and denying the form that it takes as a cooperative union between
man and God. Humanity struggles to understand its place in the cosmos; for those outside the Church,
this struggle may be against God, and for those within the Church it is with God, but it is nevertheless a
struggle. Neither the Bible nor the Church provide perfect clarity on all matters of life and it is folly to
think that it can read out of any finite text the infinity of the cosmos or that God would impose salvation
upon those that follow his scripture. What the Bible and Church provide is the hope amidst the
struggles of life, that one need not despair, and that if one is struggling to seek God, God has already
succeeded in Christ for the sake of your salvation. For the Orthodox Christian, all sins are open to the
forgiveness of God, save one: the sin blasphemy against the Holy Spirit of God, the sin of denying the
forgiveness of God itself. It would be such a sin to deny that God could not forgive the sinful limitation
of the Bible or the Church.