Transcription
Hi everyone, this is Dr. John Bergsma. I am Vice President of Mission at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, and this video is about seven verses that every Catholic should know.
Now, look, friends, I know I'm going to be mostly talking to Catholics watching this video, but maybe some Protestants will also be looking in on this. And let's be honest, Catholics have an inferiority complex when it comes to scripture. I know this well because for four years, I was a Protestant pastor up in Michigan, and I would go door-to-door evangelizing. And I ran into a lot of basically non-practicing Catholics. And when I would engage them in conversation and start to share with them about religious matters, if I started to quote some verses, they would freak out and think, "Oh gosh, I've got a Bible scholar here because he's quoting verses."
Now, my Catholic friends, look, when a Protestant starts quoting verses at you, that does not mean that they are a Bible scholar. It may be that they only have five verses of the Bible memorized, and those are the ones they quote to you. It does not mean that they have the whole Bible committed to memory. It is true that in the Evangelical Protestant world, there tends to be better scripture knowledge than you have among your typical, uh, you know, cross-section of Catholics at your typical parish. But, but there is frankly an abysmal lack of scripture education among both Protestants and Catholics. And so, if you are a Catholic watching this, I want to assure you, you can get up to speed with your Protestant brothers and sisters, and you can do that by memorizing, well, to begin with, seven verses. And if you're ready to quote them, you are going to look like a Bible scholar to your friends, acquaintances, and co-workers as well. So, let's get started on it.
The first verse that I would recommend, in kind of no particular order, is this one, and it is on the Church. This is from 1 Timothy 3:15. Now, the heart of the message is in verse 15, but I'm going to start with verse 14 to get the context, and it goes like this: St. Paul is writing to his proto-Timothy and says, "I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the Church of the Living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth." And it's especially that last phrase that we want to look at. Look at what St. Paul says here. He says, "The Church of the Living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth." Did you catch that? St. Paul identifies the Church as the pillar and the bulwark of the truth. And we can know from this clearly that St. Paul was not a Protestant. Why can we know that? Because no Protestant is going to say that the Church is the pillar and bulwark of the truth.
Now, in my personal experience, I read this verse probably several times growing up because my mother started me reading the Bible through in a year when I was 12 years old. So, I know that I've gone through the Bible many times in my adolescence. But when my Catholic friend at the University of Notre Dame pointed this verse out to me when we were engaged in a kind of back-and-forth about Protestant-Catholic issues, when I was about 30 years old, and by the way, I was at the University of Notre Dame getting a doctorate in scripture, okay? So, it wasn't like I was ignorant about the Bible at that time. I was doing advanced studying it. And again, my Catholic friend Michael pointed this verse out to me, and I looked at it, and I was like, taken aback. It was like I had never noticed it before. But again, I looked at it. It's like, "The Church of the Living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth." I thought to myself, "Gosh, I've never noticed this verse before." And I remember thinking to myself, "You know, no Protestant would say this." What is a Protestant going to identify as the pillar and the bulwark of the truth? Scripture, right? Because Sola Scriptura, the Bible alone. All that we need to be Christians is the Bible. So the Bible is the pillar and bulwark of the truth, right? No, that's not what St. Paul says. And since what St. Paul says is in the Bible, that's not even what the Bible says. So this is ironic. The Bible does not say that the Bible is the pillar and bulwark of the truth. The Bible says the Church is the pillar and bulwark.
Well, what does pillar and bulwark mean? Well, a pillar is a support of something. We have this, you know, this is the Greco-Roman world that we're talking about here, uh, that Paul is living in. And in that world, they built pillars to support roofs over for major buildings. So a pillar was a support, something that you would rest something upon that would bear the weight of, like, the roof. Like everybody's seen the Parthenon, for example, in Athens, right? That famous temple to, uh, the goddess of wisdom, and it's got those pillars, some of which are still standing. And then the roof was supported by that. So that would mean the Church supports the truth. And then a bulwark is like a defense, like a wall or something, some kind of protection that you build or construct around something that you are trying to preserve. So that would be the Church is the defense of the truth. Huh? So the Church of the Living God, the support and the defense of the truth. That is what St. Paul is saying.
Now, let's think about this a little bit more deeply. If it's true that the Church supports and defends the truth, then that means if you want the truth, you can go to the Church to find it. Like, if you can get to the Church, the Church is the entity in reality that is supporting the truth and defending the truth. So if I want to know what the truth is, I've got to locate the Church, and then I will find the truth there, being defended and supported. Okay, so all I've got to do is find the Church.
Now, think about what's implied here. If the Church is the pillar and bulwark, the support and defense of the truth, it implies, first of all, that there can only be one Church, right? Because if there are multiple claimants for Church, then I don't know which one to go to to find the truth. So if I've got Presbyterian over here, and I've got Baptist over here, and I've got Pentecostal over here, and I've got Charismatic over here, and I've got Lutheran over there, like, which one is it? Okay? Which one is supporting and defending the truth? Because they are all making mutually exclusive claims. So that cannot be a correct situation. You can't have multiple competing voices all being the support and the defense of the truth when they can't even agree on what the truth is. So this kind of Protestant denominationalism is clearly not the perspective that St. Paul has when he's writing to Timothy.
What St. Paul says entails or implies that there's only one Church. And secondly, that that Church is visible. If the Church is the support and the defense of the truth, that implies that the Church is identifiable. Okay? All right. I know that the Church is, is where the truth, where the truth can be found, where, where the truth is supported and defended. So I just got to get to the Church. But if the Church is invisible, like, where can I locate it? You know, and this is the problem with Protestant ecclesiology. And I speak from personal experience as a Protestant. In my Calvinist tradition, we did believe in the Church, but we did not believe that the Church could be visibly identified with any human organization on the planet. The Church was only the collection of the elect, okay? The community of those chosen by God for salvation. And it was known only to God. So the Church was fundamentally invisible. It was this group of believers that is in the mind of God, that God knows will eventually be saved. But you can't identify the Church simply with any denomination or any individual, or certainly not the Pope, etc.
Well, this is a real problem if the Church is supposed to support and defend the truth. If you can't identify it, if you can't find it, if you can't say, "There it is," and this person or that person speaks for it, okay, then it's of no help in supporting and defending the truth. So, again, coming back to this, "The Church of the Living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth," that's 1 Timothy 3:15. This implies what we call Catholic ecclesiology, that is, a Catholic view of what the Church is. That the Church is one, and that it is visible. So you can go to the Church, you can find the Church, it's distinct from other claimants, okay? And there you can find the truth being supported and defended. This is Catholicism.
The second verse is on the topic of tradition, and this is going to be 2 Thessalonians 2:15. St. Paul says to the Thessalonians, "So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter." Now, if you're a Protestant watching this, maybe you're like, "Huh? I don't recall that wording. And I, you know, I don't remember ever reading a verse like that talking about the need to hold fast to your tradition." Well, that might be because you're using, for example, The New International Version, which translates this verse very differently. And instead of "traditions" in 2 Thessalonians 2:15, look at The New International Version, and it reads, "the teachings which you are taught by us."
Now, there's an interesting backstory to this. And again, from my personal experience, when I went to the University of Notre Dame back in the fall of 1999, I made friends with this great Catholic guy named Michael, and we got into a lot of Catholic-Protestant controversy. And, you know, I pressed against him the fact that Catholics believed a lot of things that weren't in the Bible. And I was a Sola Scriptura, Bible alone, Protestant. And Michael did a good job defending a lot of Catholic beliefs from scripture. But he also came back to me and said, "Look, John, the Bible itself points to the fact that the Bible alone is not enough. We also need the Church's tradition." And I said, "Oh, the Bible doesn't do that. There's no verse in the Bible that that talks about the importance of tradition." And he said, "Yes, there is." And he went straight to 2 Thessalonians 2:15: "Brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions you are taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter."
And then Michael went on to say, "Look, John, this is a very pleasing example of the two sources of the Word of God. The Word of God is transmitted to us both by tradition and by scripture." And when St. Paul says, "the traditions you were taught by us, either by word of mouth," that's talking about oral tradition passed down by the apostles. "By letter" is talking about these epistles that the apostles sent out, and those were gathered together and have become part of what we call the New Testament. So they have become scripture. So, you know, to sum up this whole idea of holding fast the traditions by word of mouth or by letter are the two ways that sacred tradition, which is the Word of God coming from Jesus himself, is passed down to us, either by what we call, as Catholics, Capital T Tradition, which is tradition that comes to us from the apostles, and by scripture, you know, those traditions or teachings which were committed to writing.
Now, when Michael shared this verse with me, I was like, "Let me see that." And I grabbed his Bible and I looked at it. I'm looking at 2 Thessalonians 2:15. Sure enough, it reads like he says. And that's because he had a Revised Standard Version, and that's how it reads in the RSV. Now, I could not remember ever reading that verse in my life. So when I got home to my apartment, I got out my copy, or my translation, which is a New International Version. I looked up 2 Thessalonians 2:15. By the way, for my Catholic friends watching this, The New International Version, at least, was back in the day, the most popular version used by Evangelical Protestants. I don't know if it's been superseded by something because it's been, uh, 20 years since I was an Evangelical Protestant. But back in the late '90s and early 2000s, the NIV was very popular. It's what I used, um, again. And so I read in the NIV, and it said, "So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the teachings which you were taught by us." And I thought to myself, "Ah, this is why I never noticed this verse because it's translated differently in my Bible."
But I had a major in Classical Languages from my undergraduate degree. In other words, I could read Greek and Latin. So I'm like, "I wonder what the original reads." Now, we all know the New Testament was written in Greek. And so I had a Greek New Testament with me because I had gone to seminary and I had been a pastor and all that kind of stuff, trained to read the Greek New Testament. I busted out the Greek of 2 Thessalonians 2:15, and I read it. I'm like, I'm looking for the word that's being translated. And the word is *paradosis*, and that is the Greek word for tradition, for handing over something. It is the same word used in the Gospels for when Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for putting human tradition above, say, the Word of God. Now, I thought to myself, once I discovered that, "Huh, I wonder how many times this word is used in the New Testament, and I wonder how my New International Version translates the word." So I got out my Greek concordance and I found all the instances of *paradosis* in the New Testament. I discovered something very interesting. Every time *paradosis* is used negatively in the New Testament, my Protestant translation, The New International Version, rendered the word as "tradition." So when Jesus uses it negatively to criticize the Pharisees, they translate "tradition." Now, however, there are three times in the New Testament when tradition is used positively. They are all from St. Paul, and they are all times when Paul commends the early Christians for following Christian tradition. Those three times are 2 Thessalonians 2:15, 1 Corinthians 11:2, and 2 Timothy 3:6. And what I discovered is all three times when tradition is being used positively, The New International Version, which I grew up with, translates the term "teaching."
So you see what happens. For somebody who's raised on that translation of scripture, you get the impression from reading the Bible that there is no positive role for tradition in the Christian life. But that's not true of the original language. *Paradosis* is the word used in Greek. It's the word that Jesus uses when he's criticizing the Pharisees for following their tradition. But it's also the word that St. Paul uses when he commends the early Christians for following Christian tradition, which comes from the apostles and continues down through their successors. And we, as Catholics, continue to follow the teaching of Paul and the other apostles, including the orally transmitted teachings, which are tradition, down to the present day.
The third verse is on scripture itself, and this comes from 2 Peter 1:20. The heart of it is in verse 20, but I'm going to give verse 21 as well to fill out the context here. So, St. Peter says, "First of all, you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation." That's verse 20. And he continues, "because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God."
Okay, look at the heart of that. "No prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation." Again, you can see here that Peter is not a Protestant. Because sadly, in Protestantism, and I know this from personal experience, every passage of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation. Because the logical outcome of Sola Scriptura is that the Bible and you are all you need to be a Christian. Since Sola Scriptura rejects any interpretive authority that might come from, say, tradition or the Church or the Pope or the Bishops, etc., it leaves you in the situation of the Bible being your own authority. But then the question is, what does the Bible mean? And guess what? You can't have recourse to tradition because tradition's not dependable. You can't have recourse to the Church because the Church is not to be trusted. So it's all up to you. And it ends up with a situation in which really every individual Christian is their own Pope.
Now, look, some of you watching this, and if I got some Protestant friends tagging along on this video, welcome. I'm, I'm glad you're here, uh, with me. But I, I want to talk to you about this because it did not dawn on me when I was a young Protestant pastor that the logical outcome of Sola Scriptura was that every matter of interpretation was really up to the individual believer. Like, I did not connect the dots and realize that's where you end up. This is how it dawned on me. I had this unique experience where there was an older gentleman in my congregation who was an elder on our Board of Elders. And I was an elder too, by virtue of the fact that I was the pastor. So I knew this older gentleman quite well. And he was personal friends with a revered retired theologian who was living in the city where our church was located. And he shared this fact with me. He said, "Do you know that I'm friends with so-and-so?" And I'm like, "Really? He's that famous theologian who used to edit our denominational paper and had those prominent positions within our denomination?" And he says, "Yeah, I know him personally. Not only do I know him, but on Sunday afternoons, he has an open house at his home and he invites people over, like seminarians and pastors and so on, to talk theology with him. And, uh, would you like to go?" And I'm like, "Oh, would I like to go? I'd love to go to one of these open houses and be able to talk with this famous retired theologian."
So my older friend took me over there one Sunday afternoon, and we entered the house, and Mrs. Revered Theologian came out and gave us coffee and, you know, some cookies or something like that. And we sat down in the living room, and there were already about seven or eight other theology students and seminarians, and mostly young pastors, you know, gathered there talking with the revered theologian. So we took our place and began to listen to the conversation. And as the conversation unfolded, it got interesting, shall we say, because it came to light that Mr. Famous Theologian was no longer going to church except when his wife made him. And the rest of us weren't too okay with that. And we began to press him on the need to be part of a local congregation. And he said, "Oh, I don't need to be part of a local congregation. I don't need to be part of a denomination. I don't need to be under anybody's authority. I can be a universal Christian, like Billy Graham or the Pope." He said, and I heard that from him and I thought, "Wait a second. That's not a good analogy." First of all, Billy Graham is a very faithful Southern Baptist. I know he's loyal to his denomination. And then the Pope clearly has a denominational affiliation, and he's definitely united to a particular group. So this idea that I can be just a, a universal Christian, like it was John Paul II at the time, or, or Billy Graham, it's like that doesn't mean that you are free to not be affiliated or not be committed to any local group.
But you can kind of pick up the, shall we say, pride, maybe even arrogance, that was on the part of this retired theologian. And so he listened some more, and I, I got to be kind of irritated with him, you know, which was surprising to me because I expected to come and just like sit at his feet and accept his truth about everything and listen to his wisdom. But here I am, getting kind of annoyed with this guy. And finally, I screwed up my courage and I, I raised my hand for him to call on me, and, and he called on me, and I said, "You know what your problem is." You can tell I'd kind of gotten my Irish up, so to speak. Said, "You know what your problem is? You're making yourself your own arbiter of the truth." And I was very pleased with myself because I had used a big word. I had said "arbiter." You know, that means, that means a judge or, you know, an official who's going to decide what's right and wrong. So, so you're making yourself your own criterion or your own judge of the truth. And, uh, and so I thought, you know, I had said something very significant. But the revered theologian just looked back at me and without missing a beat, he said, "Well, that is the Protestant principle, isn't it?" Next called on somebody else. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here thinking, "Um, excuse me." While I put my jaw back in my mouth, because what he just said was something that had never occurred to me. I had not realized that the logical outcome of Sola Scriptura, or the Bible alone, is that everybody is their own interpreter. Everybody is their own Pope. Everybody is, as I had put it, their own arbiter of the truth.
But look at what St. Peter says in 2 Peter 1:20: "First of all, you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation." So St. Peter is ruling out the Sola Scriptura option. Well, it might occur to you, "Well, what then is our authority if it's not ourselves and our own interpretation of the truth?" Well, it's the apostolic authority. St. Peter is writing with the authority of an apostle. Earlier, in the previous verse, 2 Peter 1:19, we read Peter saying, "And we..." and when he says "we," he's talking about the apostolic college, uh, the communion of the apostles, "...we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed to which you will do well to pay attention." That is, the apostles have the meaning of the prophetic word of scripture through the gift of the Holy Spirit. They know the truth of scripture, and they can communicate it to the rest of the Church. Okay? So, great. So who do we go to for the interpretation of scripture? The apostles. Well, the problem is, if you're a Protestant, you're like, "Well, fat lot of good that does me because the apostles have all died and gone on to their heavenly reward." So what do I do? I'm just left here with scripture.
But as Catholics, we're like, "Oh, no problem." You know why? Because we've got the successors of the apostles. You see, in the Book of Acts, we see the apostles sharing their authority with a group of men that are variously called the *presbyteroi*, which means elders, becomes our word "priests," or sometimes they're called the *episcopoi*, which becomes our English word "bishop." So the apostles share their authority with the bishops and the priests in the Book of Acts. And that is passed down to subsequent generations of priests and bishops down to the present day. And we see that very clearly laid out in one of the earliest post-biblical writings of the Church, which is the First Letter of Clement, one of the early Popes. Where he devotes this entire letter, which was written to the Church in Corinth, the same church to which St. Paul devotes two letters, one of St. Peter's successors, Clement, writes to the Corinthian Church, and his entire letter is about apostolic succession, about how the apostles appointed others to take on their role of governance and teaching of the Church and invested them with authority. And the apostles did that while they were still alive, so the Church would have a chain of leadership down to the present day.
So we, as Catholics, read this, "No prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation." Okay, great. So I'm not to interpret the Word. Who is to interpret? Well, the apostles. Well, who do I go to in lieu of the apostles? Well, their successors, the Pope and the Bishops in communion with him, down to the present day. It all works.
The fourth verse that every Catholic should know is on the subject of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It is the Gospel of John 20:23. But I want to back up to get context. We're going to start with verse 21. Jesus said to them, "Again, peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you." And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."
Okay, you see what's going on here? Two sacraments are being established by our Lord. He is breathing and giving the Holy Spirit to the apostles, and that is constituting them as the priests of the New Covenant, that is Holy Orders. And then, along with that, is the faculty to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation, that is to say, to decide whether to forgive or retain the sins of other believers. And he gives them that in verse 23.
Now, you might ask yourself, how do Protestants understand this verse? I think to us as Catholics, we read, "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; retain, they are retained." That seems pretty straightforward. That means that other believers are going to go to the apostles to receive the forgiveness. Now, Jesus doesn't say that he's going to give the apostles supernatural knowledge of other people's sins. So apparently, other persons are going to have to tell the apostles what it is that they did, what it is that they sinned. That's going to be, you know, the basic form of confession. So you relate what it is that you did, and you admit that, and then the apostle is going to decide whether to forgive or whether to retain those sins based on what he perceives as your sincerity, your contrition, etc. So that sounds a lot to us like what we experience in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. And indeed, I think that is correct. However, how would we translate this as Protestants?
Well, I can tell you what I was taught in my seminary classroom. We got to this verse, and the professor gave us John Calvin's interpretation of the passage, which was this: The apostles were going to go out and preach, and those who accepted the apostolic preaching would have their sins forgiven, and those who rejected the apostolic preaching would have their sins retained. That's how Calvin interpreted this. But you can see there's nothing in these verses about preaching. Calvin imported that idea of preaching as the prerequisite for forgiveness or retention of sins. And that's an instance of what we call eisegesis. Jesus means reading something into a text that's opposed to exegesis, which means deriving the meaning out of the text. Now, in any good course on scriptural interpretation, you'll be urged to do exegesis, that is, to pull the meaning out of the text, and not to do eisegesis, which is to introduce meanings into the text that aren't there.
Now, John Calvin breaks his own principles with respect to this verse because he introduces into the passage the idea of going out and preaching. Now, certainly preaching is very important. It's commended in the Great Commission at the end of Matthew, in Matthew 28. But not here. This is about receiving knowledge from other Christian believers of what it is that they have committed as a sin against God, and then deciding, through a power that is given to them through the Holy Spirit, through Jesus himself, to forgive that sin. Not only that, but we also need to understand this verse, John 20:23, against its Old Testament background. We have to ask the question, in the Old Covenant, to whom did you go to receive forgiveness of sins? And if you do the research on that, you'll find out you did not go to the king, you didn't go to the prophet, you didn't go to the sage. If you wanted your sins forgiven in the Old Covenant, you went to the priest. Look at Leviticus 5, beginning in verse 5 of that chapter, and read down over the subsequent verses, and you'll find that if you sinned under the Old Covenant, you had to go to the priest. You had to confess what your sin was, and you had to bring the appropriate animal, and you had to confess to the priest, even though it's, it's may not be clear immediately in the text, but the context makes it clear that that's the one to whom you had to confess. Because the priest was responsible to ensure that you brought the proper animal that was commensurate with your income level and also the gravity of the sin that you had committed. And then the priest would take the animal from you, sacrifice the animal, and your sins would be forgiven.
So in the Old Covenant, it was the priests who administered the forgiveness of sin. And now, in the New Covenant, it's going to be the apostles and their successors who administer the forgiveness of sin. Do you see the connection there? That is a priestly prerogative. The forgiveness of sins was the responsibility of the priesthood in the Old Covenant. So what Jesus is doing is giving the apostles the priestly responsibility from the Old Covenant. In other words, he is making them the priests of the New Covenant. They are going to exercise that responsibility during their lifetime, and after their lifetime, that responsibility is going to be exercised by those they appointed while they were still alive to carry on their ministry. That is the point of the letter of First Clement, one of those earliest and most revered writings of the Apostolic Fathers.
The fifth verse that every Catholic should know concerns the Blessed Mother Mary. And I'm cheating a little bit here because it's really kind of three verses. It's Revelation 12:1 and 2 and 5. I'm going to read it here: "A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery." And then skipping to verse 5: "She brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne."
Now, I'm going to give you a little backstory on this. So it was the fall of 1999, and I was meeting weekly with my, my friend, my Catholic friend Michael, uh, to talk about Catholic-Protestant issues. And for the most part, Michael was getting the better of the argument every time that we met. And one Wednesday afternoon, we were sitting at the food court at the University of Notre Dame, and Michael had just defended, deflected, however you want to put it, two of my best scriptural attacks against the Catholic Church. And I was getting pretty frustrated. And I was feeling like I needed, like, a, a knockout blow in this kind of martial art of scripture, you know, verse exchange, okay? And, and so I, I was trying to get some inspiration. I was like, "What can I hit him with that he is not going to be able to answer?" And I was looking around for some kind of inspiration. And I saw an image of Our Lady, uh, with a crown. It was kind of a, kind of a deep relief, uh, sculpture, sculpture kind of thing that was hung on the wall. And, and around this image of the Blessed Mother with a crown was this title that said, "Our Lady, Queen of Heaven." And that gave me an idea.
And so I turned to Michael, I said, "Okay, I got one for you. Give me one verse in the Bible that gives any scriptural support for this almost blasphemous title of Mary, Queen of Heaven." And I thought I had him. And I sat back and I kind of relaxed, and I was like, "Okay, what you going to do with that, Catholic Wonder Boy?" But he didn't miss a beat. And that kind of unnerved me, 'cause I was expecting him to kind of crumple and, I don't know, fall to the ground or something like that with my great apologetic wisdom. And he didn't at all. Instead, he kind of leaned into me and he said, "Well, what about Revelation 12?" And I said, "Revelation who?" And he said, "Revelation 12. Have you ever read Revelation 12?" And I said, "Well, of course I've read it. I mean, I've read the Bible through many times in my life. You know, I told you my mother started me reading the Bible through when I was age 12, etc., etc." I like, "Well, why don't we take a look at it?"
So out came the Bibles, and, and Michael began to read this and interpret it. And, and we just read it so it's fresh in your mind. And he begins to explain this. He says, "Okay, John, we've got this woman, and she's clothed with the sun, and she's got the moon under her feet. So where is she?" And I'm like, "Um, the sky." He's like, "Can we say heavens?" I'm like, "Okay, all right. I'll grant you that, the heavens." And he says, "Okay, so we've got a heavenly woman." Like, "Yeah, okay." And then she's wearing a crown of 12 stars. And what kind of women wear crowns? I'm thinking to myself, "Princesses." It's like, "Can we say Queens?" Like, "Okay, I'll grant you that." So we've got this heavenly Queen. Okay? And then in verse 5, she brings forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. Now, who is that? Like, well, you know, that's the Davidic Messiah. That's clearly an allusion to Psalm 2:9: "Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, the ends of the earth your possession. You shall rule them with a rod of iron," or shatter them with a rod of iron, "smash them in pieces like a potter's vessel." And, okay, so the Davidic Messiah is Jesus. All right.
So Michael wraps it all up. So we've got this heavenly Queen who gives birth to Jesus. So do we know any other women in scripture who give birth to a Messiah? Like, okay, at this point, he's playing with me. I was like, "All right, score one for Catholics. I admit I did not see that one coming." So here was this verse that I had read many times in my life and never considered its implications. As Michael explained to me on that Wednesday afternoon in the fall of 1999, we have here a heavenly woman who's clearly a queen, and she gives birth to Jesus.
Now, I know many people are going to come back and say, "Well, she's merely a symbolic character. She just symbolizes, I don't know, the people of Israel or the Church or something like that." Really? Well, the other characters in this scenario that we have in Revelation 12 aren't just communal personifications. The child that she bears is an individual. That's clearly Jesus in the flesh. She also is struggling against a red dragon, who is described in the verses that we skipped over in verses 3 and 4. And that red dragon isn't just an amorphous personification. He is Satan, who is an individual consciousness and an individual person. So if the other characters in this little drama scenario in Revelation 12 are personal beings, Satan and Jesus, how can we rule out the possibility that the woman spoken of here is also an individual, namely, the mother of Jesus? The only person who gives birth to Jesus the Messiah in the rest of scripture. So I hold fast to the position that you cannot rule out this passage's applicability to the Blessed Mother. In fact, I think that is correct.
Now, I will grant you that there's more meaning in this text. It is the Blessed Mother, yes, but in her role as, as icon of the people of God. And that's not an unusual thing in the New Testament. It is the case in other places in the New Testament that individuals are not only historical figures but also kind of representative or symbolic figures. This is the case especially in John's writings, and the Book of Revelation is attributed to John. If you look at his Gospel, he does this all the time. For example, there is the Apostle whom Jesus loved, the so-called Beloved Apostle, who is John himself, and he recounts his own actions in the course of his Gospel, like leaning his head on the chest of Jesus and running with Peter to the tomb, etc. But John, in the Gospel of John, is not just just a historical person himself, but he also particularly calls himself the Beloved Disciple when he's doing things that are exemplary for all disciples to do. So the Beloved Disciple leans his head on Jesus's chest at the Last Supper. That represents the kind of affection that every good disciple, every disciple whom Jesus loves and is pleased with, should have towards the Master. Uh, likewise, at the cross, the Beloved Disciple takes the Blessed Mother into his home as his own mother, and that is an example for every disciple who would want to be loved by Jesus, who would like to please Jesus. So the Beloved Disciple has a symbolic role as well as a historical role in the Gospel. Mary Magdalene, likewise, you know, in the resurrection appearances, when she comes to perceive Jesus as her spiritual spouse, following the pattern of, uh, Song of Songs, chapter 3, verses 1-5, maybe you know that connection with John 20 there. Mary Magdalene is also in an exemplary role for all disciples.
So this passage of Revelation 12 is talking about the actual mother of Jesus and portraying her as a Heavenly Queen. But also, she is an icon of the people of God, who in various ways give birth to Jesus throughout history. That is to say, by making other Christs, that is, other Christians, through the sacrament of rebirth, which is baptism.
The sixth verse that every Catholic should know is on relics. And this is the only verse of these seven that we're going to take from the Old Testament. And this is from 2 Kings, chapter 13. And it's just after the famous Prophet Elisha has died. And we read 2 Kings 13:20: "Elisha died, and they buried him. Now bands of Moabites used to invade the land in the spring of the year. And as a man was being buried, lo, a marauding band was seen, and the man was cast into the grave of Elisha. And as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived and stood on his feet."
Now, this shows very clearly that God is able to use material causes to bring about supernatural results. In this case, he uses relics. He uses the remains of a body of a saint. That's what Elisha was. Elisha was a holy man, and Elisha's bones still retain that kind of spiritual power. And so when this dead man comes in contact with Elisha through what remains of Elisha's body, he experiences the power of God through this saint's remains, or what we call relics. After all, relics is just another word meaning remains. And he experiences divine healing. And so this practice of revering the relics of holy people who've passed on, because God can work through the physical remains of those who were dear to him to continue to bless his people in the present.
So not only this, but let me mention also a New Testament verse. In Acts 19:12, we read about how handkerchiefs and aprons that were pressed to the body of Paul and then taken and brought to the sick or the demon-possessed actually healed those afflicted persons. So this passage from Second Kings is giving us an example of a first-class relic, okay? A piece of the body of Elisha that is used to heal a man. And Acts 19:12 gives us an example of a second-class relic, that is, something that was in contact with the saint's body and then subsequently taken away and used for that healing purpose. And so the use of relics is actually attested within scripture itself.
The seventh and last verse of the seven verses that every Catholic should know is on the Eucharist. And you can almost, uh, anticipate where I'm going to go. But it's from John 6, and it's really John 6:53. But I'm going to read the surrounding verses as well. John 6:52: "The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat?'" Verse 53: "So Jesus said to them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.'" Verse 54: "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day."
Now, when I was first confronted with this verse by my friend Michael back in the fall of '99, when we were very intensely debating these Catholic-Protestant issues, I, I read that and I said, "Yeah, Michael, but that's just a metaphor for faith, okay? Eating and drinking the flesh of Jesus, it just means, you know, having a close relationship with him, believing in him, accepting him as your Lord and personal savior. It doesn't mean actually eating his flesh and blood."
But Michael pointed out something to me. He said, "John, is that the meaning that the first Christians who read this gospel would have gotten from this passage?" And I began to put myself back in the position of the first readers of the Gospel of John. And who were those first readers? Well, we believe that the Gospel of John, at least according to patristic tradition, the tradition of the Fathers, was written near the end of John's life, so maybe in the '90s, okay? Maybe around the year 92 or 93, near the end of the first century of our era. It was written at that time. John, we believe, died maybe around the year 96. So John's writing this in his old age, and then it was published and copied and distributed among the early Christians. And where was it read? Well, it was read when the Christians gathered to celebrate the Eucharist every Sunday. We know that that was when Christians met, and it was their most distinctive cultural practice. We know this from, say, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus and other early witnesses, that the early Christians were known for gathering on the first day of the week when the presider would read to them from the scriptures and then speak over the bread and the wine, which they would accept as the gift of God and as the body and blood, etc., basically celebrate what we as Catholics know and call Mass.
All right. So this is where the Gospel of John would be read in the early centuries, say, in the year 97 or the year 98, shortly after he died. So if you and I were living in a Christian area of the Roman Empire, like maybe Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, where many Christians, uh, lived, especially in those, uh, the major cities like the Seven Cities mentioned at the beginning of the Book of Revelation, that had large Christian populations from an early period. So say we're living in one of those, I don't know, say Ephesus, for example. And you and I are Christians, and Sunday rolls around, and so we go out very early, maybe before dawn, out to a place outside the city, uh, which is maybe safer, you know, because this is an illegal religion. And maybe we're gathered in a forest or something like that. And, and then there's the presider, you know, the presider from which we get the word priest, who is leading this gathering. As you and I and other Christians from Ephesus are kind of gathered in the dark and in secret here, and we've got the bread and the wine, and, and the presider says, "I, I have a copy of the Gospel of John, of John's account of Jesus's life." And we're all excited, like, "Wow, we've got a copy of this. We had heard that he had written one before he died, and here we've got a copy, and we're going to read from it."
And so the presider begins to read, and he's reading from John 6, and he's reading this account of how when Jesus multiplied the loaves and the fish for the 5,000, he said, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." Now, I ask you, who's watching this video, if you and I were there in the year 98 and were hearing the presider read from one of the first copies of the Gospel of John while we're gathered for the Eucharistic celebration, and there's bread there, and there's wine there, and we know that after the reading is done, in a few minutes, the presider is going to pray over the bread and over the wine, and he's going to call down the Holy Spirit to change it into the flesh of Jesus and the blood of Jesus, and then, and then the deacons are going to come forward, and they're going to take that and they're going to distribute it to me and to you and share that, okay? And that's what we're gathered to do. How do you think that would affect what we understood from John 6:53?
And let me put it to you a different way. How would you and I avoid coming to understand that Jesus was speaking about what we were about to do, and that to be obedient to Jesus, to eat his flesh and drink his blood, we were being called to participate in exactly what we were there gathered on that early Sunday morning outside of Ephesus in a forest, hidden for fear of the Roman authorities, etc., to celebrate the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus, which we would then eat and drink in order to have eternal life? I would suggest to you, and I would suggest to you this as a Bible scholar and as a New Testament historian, etc., one who has been involved in this academically for a long time, that the first Christian readers of John's gospel could not have avoided the Eucharistic interpretation of what Jesus says in John 6:53. That was probably the first thing that came to their mind when they read this.
And were they wrong? I don't think so. Do you not think that the Apostle John himself would have known that that's how they would understand this passage? Do you think that he just wrote this, that he recorded Jesus's words, and he didn't foresee that his Christian readership would see immediately the connection with the Eucharistic celebration? Oh, no. John saw that for sure. He wrote this and recorded our Lord's words knowing that his readership would see the connection and make the connection. And John the Apostle intended that connection to be made. And I would argue that is the most historically plausible reconstruction of the early context of the reading and the interpretation of the Gospel of John. This is talking about the Eucharist, and the Apostle's intent was that we hear the words of Jesus and understand that it means that for the sake of our salvation, we must participate in the Eucharist.
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