Today Jesus is not betrayed by kisses, but by interpretations. Usually Catholics are often criticized for not knowing the Bible as well as their Protestant brothers. Many Protestants are able to quote texts and to answer questions about anything with a line from the Bible. Poor traditional Catholics are not able to explain any lines of the Bible.

Recently the biblical knowledge of the average Catholic has increased during the past 25 years. Thanks to the Catholic Church’s encouragement of Bible translations from P.O.C. and different programmes of bible commission like Logos Quiz and study programmes.

Catholics and Protestants have different starting points for interpreting the Bible. We refer here three of these differences: concern about the literary form of a passage, the use of the Old Testament, and the context of Church tradition.

When Luther was cornered in a debate over Purgatory, his opponent, Johann Eck, cited 2 Maccabees against Luther’s position. Luther was forced to say that Second Maccabees could not be allowed in the debate because it wasn’t canonical. Later in the debate, Luther appealed to St Jerome for rejecting Maccabees (the councils of Carthage, Hippo, and Florence all included Macabees as canonical Scripture).  By appealing to Jerome, he also rejected all the other books Jerome rejected (Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, Tobit, Judith, 1st and 2nd Maccabees, Daniel 13, and sections of Esther). From then on, Luther and all Protestants have been trying to justify this removal. As a side note, Jerome rejected it because he thought that a Hebrew manuscript tradition, known as the Masoretic Text, was identical to the inspired originals and all other copies were made from this text. Since the Deuteros were not part of the Masoretic Text, he rejected them as not being of the canonical Scripture. What Jerome could not have known was that there were many different Hebrew manuscripts in circulation during the first century and that the Greek Septuagint, a translation made by the Jews around 200 BC, at least in parts, appears to be a very literal translation of a more ancient Hebrew text tradition that is now lost.

Many Protestants are fundamentalists, meaning in practice that they interpret each word or phrase in the Bible at face value, without reference to differences in culture from ancient to modern times, and without attention to the particular literary form of a passage. The main interpretive difference between Protestants and Catholics is where they locate authority. For Catholics…the true meaning of Scripture is a joint product of the biblical text and the church’s developing tradition of reading it.

Catholics are taught that the first step in interpretation of the Bible is the same as for other literature, to identify the literary form in the original context. In the newspaper that means: is it a report or an editorial, a straight commentary or a satire? For the Bible it might mean: is it a history or a parable, a Gospel or a psalm, is it spiritual or biological (which affects, for example, the interpretation of “born again”)? This applies also to phrases: are they literal or metaphorical (“She laughed her head off”)?

Catholics consider the whole Bible divinely inspired, but give a different weight to the Old Testament and the New Testament in matters of doctrine and spiritual guidance. The Catholic principle here is that revelation is progressive up to Christ. In other words, as the people of God moved through history, God worked with us according to our understanding, preparing us gradually for the full revelation in Jesus Christ.

Some Old Testament norms are not final and have to be read in light of the New Testament. An example would be Jesus’ statements in Matthew 5: “You have heard … but I tell you …”.

The most important norm in Catholic interpretation is the authentic tradition of the Church. The Bible was given to the believing community of Jesus’ disciples, not to individuals, and only the community, acting under the Spirit’s guidance through its appointed leaders, is empowered to define its teaching. The contemporary Church reads the Bible in the context of the tradition of interpretation through the centuries in order to locate the constants. For Protestants, the sola scriptura pattern of theological authority places the church and tradition in a ministerial position, rather than magisterial one; the church is fallible, not infallible. Sola scriptura means that the Bible alone authorizes doctrine, yet the Bible that authorizes is not alone, for the Spirit who speaks in and through Scripture does not do so independently of the church’s tradition and teaching ministry. For Catholics, the Church and tradition authorizes doctrine; for Protestants, the Bible alone authorizes doctrine.

Difficulties in discussing the Bible experienced by Catholics and Protestants may arise not from lack of Bible knowledge but from different approaches to biblical interpretation.