What is a Bible Student?

If we ask what a Humanities ‘student’ is, an obvious answer is that s/he is someone who is devoting many hours to study each day in a given subject, writing essays, talking with their peers and working towards a goal of understanding and possibly a degree. It follows that a Bible ‘student’ also spends many hours each week studying the Bible, working with a concordance, lexicon and many other books, seeking to further their understanding of the Bible and sharing and checking their thinking with/against peers, except they are probably not working towards a degree. They are usually autodidacts. If you don’t spend many hours each week studying the Bible, then you are not a Bible student; you are probably a Bible reader instead.

A sure sign that someone is a Bible student might not be, sadly, a holy life; Paul warns that knowledge might exist without love. Equally, professional and lay speaking in the church is not a sign that someone is a Bible student. It’s easy to speak without much Bible study. Instead, the sure sign of a Bible student is the amount of time a person spends with the text, a concordance and a lexicon. The problem is that this happens in private and how do you get to know what someone does in private? You get to know that someone is a Bible student, not by asking, ‘How many hours do you put in each week?’, but by hearing the quality of their answers and contributions when they talk or write about the Bible; these people are rare across the community.

A Bible student is not necessarily a Bible scholar. A scholar spends most of his/her research time with scholarship, which might include Bible commentaries. What is important to them is the scholarship rather than the Bible. You can actually tell when a scholar is also a Bible student because they are able serve up original observations about the text as well as handle scholarship. Such people are few and far between in the academic guild, while scholars are abundant (particularly minor scholars). A scholar can be original with scholarship, particularly theology or history, but this doesn’t make them a Bible student. Moreover, scholars are often only able to handle the text through the lens of scholarly commentary, and this also shows they are not Bible students. In the same way that church tradition held back Bible understanding at the beginning of the Enlightenment, so too the historico-critical method and the last two centuries’ worth of scholarly tradition holds back Bible understanding today.

You don’t have to be scholarly trained to be a Bible student, but Greek and Hebrew are very helpful (especially Hebrew), as are the findings of other related disciplines to Biblical Studies such as Near Eastern Studies or Roman Archaeology. Nevertheless, an over-preoccupation with scholarship will have a negative impact on Bible study in the long run in the sense we are discussing – of becoming a master practitioner of Bible exegesis and exposition; this is because you will spend more time with the writing of scholars rather than the text of the Bible and they will condition your thinking. The danger in their writing is not false doctrine arising from the fact that they are members of orthodox Christian churches; the danger lies in the patterns of reasoning and attitude to the Bible (You will rarely see them acknowledge inspiration.) The best defence is always to place the Biblical text and intertextual study first.

If scholarship does not make you a Bible student, neither does popular writing on the Bible. Scholars do not consult/rate highly low-grade popular commentaries on the Bible or popular historical works on Bible Background or devotional and homiletical material (the sorts of books that Christian bookshops sell or that end up in some software packages); this is because they write these works for popular consumption. If this is where you get your information from, you are unlikely to be a Bible student. Bible students produce original text-based comments which arise from their own pre-occupation with the text.

Someone might say to all this, ‘So what?’ You don’t have to be a Bible student to be a Christian; but no-one is saying that this is a ‘be-all and end-all’ choice. The chances are that you don’t choose to be a Bible student, but rather you are driven to spend a lot of time in Bible study. Most people spend their time on ordinary things. Our point is that Bible students are rare and it is worthwhile noting who they are and listening to them or reading them. The recent ‘Big Conversation’ event in the UK estimated that numbers in the main fellowship had fallen from 12,000 to 8,000 in the last thirty years. We could add another thousand or so to these numbers to take into account the minority fellowships in the UK. The number of Bible students in the UK community in this time has probably only been a few dozens. Fortunately, some of these were (are) writers and have left articles behind in magazines and now on the Internet. One or two have also had books published.

If you want to be a Bible student, you might already be one because you have this desire; an absence of this desire is manifested in people’s preoccupation with the ordinary things in life which leads to there being only a few Bible students. However, maybe you want to be a Bible student but are just starting. In this case, the best advice is to read Scripture daily, make intertextual study your principal method of Bible study, work with your computer concordance and lexicon and begin collecting the best writing of the Bible students from past magazines and books. If possible, latch onto a Bible student mentor and ascertain from them who the best authors are from the past and where their best writing is to be found. Sadly, it isn’t as easy as just buying a selection of Christadelphian books or articles that have been published, since these have not all been written by Bible students by any means; many have been written by Bible readers. After this start, you will have to progress to the scholarship and learn how to handle this correctly. Not only will scholarship give you neutral information that will enhance your own findings; it will also challenge your thinking and force you to go deeper in explaining and justifying your interpretations.

In conclusion, so as to correct any imbalance in the foregoing, there is quite a lot to learn from scholars, and so knowing who to read and what to read is important. However, their writing is definitely secondary to the Bible (especially if we consider spiritual objectives) and it is essential to be discriminating and unintimidated. But, most people are not, nor ever will be, Bible students. No one is saying that they should be – the Body has many members and different roles.  This editorial is really just for aspiring Bible students.