The familiar debate between science and religion is often described as a contest between two ways of knowing. Science, we are told, proceeds from evidence. Religion proceeds from faith.
The distinction has considerable value. But it can also conceal an interesting irony.
Many people who insist that claims about the biblical record must be supported by evidence nevertheless appear willing to assume a remarkable historical proposition: that the writings now collected in the Bible were originally composed to be Scripture.
That proposition should not be assumed.
It should be investigated.
A Simple Methodological Rule
Here, stated plainly, is the rule this article defends:
Canonical status is evidence of a community's reception of a document. It is not, without additional evidence, proof of the purpose for which the document was originally composed.
That rule neither affirms nor denies divine inspiration. It does not challenge anyone's right to regard these writings as Scripture. It simply preserves chronology.
First someone communicated. Then other human beings became custodians of the communication. What happened afterward cannot be allowed to determine, without independent evidence, what happened first.
Nothing in this argument requires us to assume that every biblical book was composed by a single identifiable author at a single moment. A writing may reflect one author, several authors, editors, redactors, oral traditions, or a long compositional history. The methodological point survives every one of those possibilities.
At each stage, claims about the purpose of composition must be supported by evidence appropriate to that stage. Later canonical reception cannot supply that evidence merely because it occurred later.
Biblical scholarship already recognizes much of the history behind this distinction. Source, form, and redaction criticism have distinguished stages of composition and transmission. Scholarship on canon formation and reception has examined processes by which writings came to be received as authoritative. Canonical criticism, approaching the matter from another direction, has deliberately attended to the significance of texts in their received canonical form.
This article is not a contribution to that technical literature. It asks a narrower, more public question:
What happens to ordinary reading — religious and secular alike — when we allow a document's eventual status as Scripture to stand in for its original communicative purpose?
Two familiar biblical accounts help show what may be at stake.
The Bible We Have Is Not the World in Which Its Authors Wrote
We encounter Genesis as the first book of the Bible. We encounter the Gospel of John as one of four canonical Gospels. We encounter both as components of an established sacred collection.
Their composers did not encounter them that way.
The physical and conceptual object we call “the Bible” did not exist when many of its constituent writings were composed. The collections themselves have histories. Writings were composed, communicated, copied, edited, preserved, transmitted, collected, accepted, disputed, classified, and eventually incorporated into bodies of literature regarded by particular communities as sacred.
At minimum, we should distinguish:
composition → communication → transmission → preservation → collection → communal reception → canonization → interpretation as Scripture
Each stage can provide evidence about a document. But evidence from one stage cannot automatically establish what occurred at another.
In particular, the fact that a community eventually regarded a document as Scripture does not, by itself, establish that the document was originally composed for that purpose.
Canonization is an event in the history of custody, not an event in the history of authorship.
That distinction is fundamental.
The Problem of Canonical Retrospection
We might call the methodological error canonical retrospection: projecting the eventual status of a document backward onto its composition.
It is remarkably easy to do.
Genesis is Scripture now. Therefore, Genesis was written as Scripture.
John is a Gospel now. Therefore, whoever composed John sat down intending to contribute one-fourth of a future canonical category called “the four Gospels.”
Neither conclusion necessarily follows from its premise.
This does not diminish the importance of either text. It changes the order in which we investigate it.
The later classification is historically real and enormously important. But it belongs to the history of what subsequent custodians did with the communication. It cannot simply be projected backward and converted into the intention of those who produced it.
Before Theology Comes Communication
Classification affects inquiry.
Once a document is classified as Scripture, we naturally ask scriptural questions:
What does this teach about God? What doctrine does it establish? How should believers apply it?
Those can be entirely legitimate questions. But historically they are not necessarily the first questions.
Before asking what a document means as Scripture, we should ask what those responsible for its composition were attempting to communicate.
Why was this written?
What problem was being addressed?
Who were the anticipated recipients?
What did the writer expect those recipients already to know?
Why was the account arranged in this particular way?
What distinctions did the writer preserve?
What information did the writer consider important enough to transmit?
These questions do not require faith.
They do not require disbelief.
They require attention to the communication.
Genesis Without the Canon
Consider what happens if we temporarily remove Genesis from its familiar position at the beginning of the Bible.
We do not discard its religious significance. We simply decline to let its later classification predetermine its original purpose.
We encounter an ancient human composition concerned with creation, order, human beings, authority, communication, prohibition, memory, transmission, temptation, and consequence.
Then something particularly interesting occurs.
An authoritative communication is given to one human being. Later, another human being states that communication differently.
The original prohibition concerns eating. In the woman's subsequent account, touching has been added. The addition strengthens the restriction.
The text does not tell us exactly how the difference arose. Perhaps the command was transmitted differently. Perhaps it was remembered differently. Perhaps some other process intervened.
We do not know.
That silence matters.
But so does what the text preserves: the communication is not identical in its two presentations.
We need not speculate about what the writer failed to tell us in order to examine what the writer did preserve.
Someone preserved the woman's altered formulation of the prohibition. Whether the difference was deliberately highlighted or simply preserved, it remains there for the reader to examine.
One does not have to believe Genesis is divinely revealed to observe the phenomenon. One does not even have to decide whether the underlying event occurred exactly as narrated before recognizing what the narrative places before the reader.
The narrative contains a problem of human communication.
That problem belongs to everyone.
John Makes the Problem Explicit
The closing chapter of the Gospel of John provides an even clearer example because it requires considerably less reconstruction.
Jesus makes a conditional statement concerning the beloved disciple:
“If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?”
Something then happens to the communication.
A saying spreads among the brethren that the disciple would not die.
John preserves both statements.
First comes the original communication.
Then comes the communication as it circulated within the community.
They are not the same.
And John does something even more important: he explicitly corrects the second by returning to the first:
“Yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die...”
The structure is remarkable.
We have the original communication.
We have the altered communication.
We are told that the altered communication circulated among the brethren.
And we have a correction accomplished by comparing what was being said with what had actually been said.
John's description of the altered communication as a “saying” should not cause us to dismiss it as an inconsequential rumor. Whatever degree of confidence individual members of the community placed in it, the saying had acquired sufficient currency to be preserved and explicitly corrected.
John therefore gives us something approaching a miniature case study in the life of a communication under human custody.
Whatever else John 21 may mean theologically, it preserves an elementary phenomenon of human civilization:
A communication can change while being transmitted by people who believe they are preserving it.
And its correction requires a reference point.
John does not correct the saying by inventing another statement. He returns the reader to the communication from which the saying had departed.
That lesson does not belong exclusively to Christians.
It belongs to humans.
Scripture May Be Hiding Human Knowledge in Plain Sight
This raises an uncomfortable possibility.
By treating these writings primarily as religious documents, both believers and nonbelievers may have overlooked some of the human knowledge they preserve — although they may do so in different ways.
The believing reader's version of the error is theological: assuming that a text's status as the authoritative word of God establishes, without further inquiry, that its human composer intended it as Scripture from the outset.
But divine origin and human scriptural intention are separate propositions. Evidence for one does not automatically establish the other.
The skeptical reader's version of the error is different.
Having rejected the supernatural claim, the skeptic may stop asking serious questions of the document itself, when declining that claim should, if anything, sharpen interest in the human beings who produced and preserved it.
The skeptic's error is not believing too much.
It is looking too little.
Both errors can converge on the same result: the original human communication goes insufficiently investigated.
But they arrive there by different roads, and it is worth being precise about which road a particular reader has taken.
The convergence becomes visible in Genesis and John.
A theologian may see in Genesis the doctrine of sin and in John questions of Christology and ecclesiology. A skeptic may see in both artifacts of religious communities making claims the skeptic does not accept.
But the texts also preserve something independently observable.
Genesis preserves a difference between an authoritative communication and its subsequent formulation.
John preserves the anatomy of a saying that departed from the statement from which it arose — and the method by which that departure was corrected.
These are not merely theological propositions.
They are information about us.
When Secular Reading Inherits the Canon
This is where the conventional distinction between evidence-based and faith-based knowledge deserves reconsideration.
The secular scholar or reader is entirely entitled to decline the theological claim that a biblical text is divinely inspired.
But having declined that claim, the reader should become more, not less, interested in the human communication that remains.
If Genesis is approached as a human document, then human beings composed it, shaped it, transmitted it, and preserved the distinctions contained within it.
Someone preserved Genesis 1 alongside Genesis 2.
Someone preserved the woman's formulation of the prohibition alongside the earlier formulation.
Those are observable features of the document whether or not one accepts any theological explanation for them.
The evidence-based question therefore cannot end with:
Are the theological claims true?
There is another question:
What were the human beings responsible for this document trying to communicate to other human beings?
To answer simply that they were producing “Scripture” risks importing a later religious classification into an earlier historical event.
There is a paradox here.
A secular reader can reject the supernatural claims of a religious tradition while continuing to inherit the tradition's later classification of its documents — and then unconsciously use that classification to determine what questions should be asked about their creation.
Rejecting theology does not require rejecting the documents.
It may give us a reason to investigate them more carefully.
Authorship and Custody
An author creates a communication.
Recipients receive it.
Other people remember it, copy it, preserve it, transmit it, collect it, classify it, interpret it, teach it, and apply it.
These are all important human activities.
But they are not the same activity.
They belong to the history of custody.
Later custodians may give a document extraordinary religious and cultural authority without acquiring the ability to determine retrospectively why it was originally composed.
This becomes especially important once a document acquires authoritative status. Its subsequent authority can become so powerful that the history of its custody overshadows the circumstances of its creation.
We begin reading backward.
The custodian's classification becomes the composer's supposed intention.
The canonical identity of the document is projected onto the communicative event that preceded it.
Chronology disappears.
And with it may disappear some of the information the communication originally preserved.
Recovering the Human Communication
We need not choose, at the outset, between believing the Bible and rejecting it.
There is an inquiry logically prior to both.
We can read these writings as communications.
We can ask what their human composers observed, selected, arranged, distinguished, and preserved.
We can examine how their narratives are constructed.
We can distinguish what the documents actually say from what subsequent communities have said about them.
And when later classifications are introduced, we can put them where they belong in the chronology.
Some of the writings that eventually became Scripture may contain insights that were never exclusively religious. They may subsequently have become Jewish or Christian Scripture and been subjected to centuries of theological interpretation. That subsequent history is itself worthy of study.
But it came afterward.
Before these writings could be canonized, they had to be preserved.
Before they could be preserved, they had to be transmitted.
Before they could be transmitted, they had to be communicated.
And before they could be interpreted as Scripture, they had to exist as human communications.
Canonization belongs to the history of their custody. It cannot, without independent evidence, tell us why they were created.
If we allow their eventual classification as Scripture to prevent us from investigating what the human beings who created them were attempting to communicate, something important may have been lost.
Not merely to religion.
To all of us.
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