Prophets, priests and a book

The question “who has authority?” runs through the whole history of the Church. To understand it, we need to see that it already arises in the Bible.

Before the book, people

In ancient Israel the will of God came first through people. The prophets spoke in his name: “Thus says the Lord”. The priests sought God on the people’s behalf (Numbers 27:21; 1 Samuel 14:36-42), administered justice (Deuteronomy 17:8-12; 2 Chronicles 19:8-11) and blessed (Numbers 6:23-27). Since Israel did not yet have a king, these men were at the heart of its spiritual and civil life.

Even when a written law exists, few people can read it. In a largely illiterate society, those who know the text remain the intermediaries.

The text read and explained

When Ezra reads the Law to the people (Nehemiah 8), Levites explain it. Authority is then shared: the text speaks, but those who explain it steer what the people understand. The same sentence can change meaning depending on the interpreter. The interpreter is therefore never neutral.

The threefold Torah of rabbinic Judaism

Rabbinic Judaism, which took shape in the first centuries of our era, fully accepts this reality. According to the Encyclopedia of Judaism, the Torah is expressed in it in three ways:

1. The Scriptures, the written Torah.
2. The oral tradition, put into writing in the Mishnah and then discussed in the Talmuds.
3. The rabbis, seen as “the human embodiment of the Torah”.

The teacher is not below the text: he is its living expression. His conduct becomes a model to imitate. Rabbinic Judaism is therefore not only a religion of the book, but also a religion of tradition, organised as a pyramid.

Jesus: the text and his own word

Jesus constantly refers to the Scriptures. He affirms that “scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35) and that he has not come to abolish the Law (Matthew 5:17). But he also speaks with an authority of his own: “You have heard that it was said… But I say to you…” (Matthew 5:21-48). The crowds are astonished that he teaches “as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (Matthew 7:29).

For his disciples, Jesus becomes a kind of living canon: the rule to follow, and the key to reading the Scriptures.

From the very beginning, then, authority is twofold: a text recognised as coming from God, and people who hand it on, explain it and sometimes go beyond it. The whole history that follows consists in holding these two poles together.