“Unlearned men” and the Christian’s responsibility to engage with Bible scholarship

A couple of years ago I was out on my bike and bumped into four Jehovah’s Witnesses giving out leaflets at the local train station. I stopped and asked them why it was that I had never come across Jehovah’s Witnesses in academic Biblical Studies (as students or lecturers; I have come across Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, etc.). They replied that it was a belief of their community that this was not right for a disciple because the original disciples were ‘unlearned men’ (Acts 4:13). It was a sincerely expressed position and my comment was not that it was wrong but that it was not the only choice for a disciple.

Jesus himself had engaged the scholars of his day as early as the age of 12 in the temple, and he debated with them from the Scriptures throughout his ministry. Further, he chose Paul, a highly educated Pharisee (Acts 22:3; Phil 3:5), as an apostle. I said to the Jehovah’s Witness that it seemed to me that a Christian community (i.e. some in that community) had a duty to follow the example of Jesus and engage those who misused Scripture at all levels, including those who would be regarded as the academics ‘of the day’; if, that is, they were to follow Jesus. He did not reply and I went on my way.

In this vein, someone remarked to me the other day that the Internet had made available to people far more and a greater level of sophisticated information on the Bible. Previously, new ideas, arguments, and doctrinal controversy were mediated through pamphlets, booklets, talks as well as books (a slow and controlled process). In the last fifteen years, since the 1990s, all of this has happened online, fast and in contexts other than the ecclesia—Twitter, Facebook, forums, e-mail, websites—as academic, non-academic and pseudo-academic writing.

There is now easy access to a vast amount of scholarship and theology online, all of it purporting to guide you in how to think about the Bible in one way of another. This is now being disseminated and refracted through the ecclesia (particularly the younger generations) as a matter of course. The Internet is, as they say, a ‘game-changer’, and particularly for the younger generation; it is a major factor in the loss of young people to the Truth. It may have been possible, say in the 1980s, to decide to run a magazine that was only simpler; it may be tempting now to put your head in the sand—the first would have been an unperceptive mistake in the 1980s and the second would be a mistake now. Indeed, both kinds of mistake are still around today. Instead, more of the ecclesia’s ‘apostles and elders’ need to look to Isaiah 40-48 or to Paul on Mars Hill and engage with the sophisticated arguments that draw people away from the Truth. It is not difficult but it does require work and effort on the part of speakers and writers.