CHAPTER 1
 
 
FAITH OF OUR FATHERS
 
What the Church Has to Work With
 
THE MINUTE YOU SAY “Tradition,” a lot of people think that you’re talking about things like holy cards, the Mass in Latin, long-habited nuns, and fusty old priests who always said you weren’t allowed to. But these are memories of culture, not faith; they’re matters of custom, and they don’t have anything to do with Tradition.
 
Tradition—with the capital?—isn’t something that you do. It’s something that you know. Tradition is the body of unwritten knowledge given by Christ to the Apostles and handed down by them to their successors, the Church’s bishops, who teach it to everybody else. It’s the first thing you have to know about the Church, because that’s how it all started. After all, Christ himself never wrote a word of his teachings, and during the first couple of generations after him the Apostles converted thousands by word of mouth—by Tradition—long before the Bible was assembled (see Gal 3:2, 1 Pt 1:24–25, etc.).
 
The New Testament is really only one of the many products of Tradition. St. Papias, who was himself a convert of the first post-Apostolic generation, reminds us that St. Mark “was neither a hearer nor a follower of the Lord; but … of Peter, who had no intention of giving a connected account of sayings of the Lord.… Mark, then, made no mistake, but wrote things down as he remembered them; and he made it his concern to omit nothing that he had heard nor to falsify anything therein.” And the so-called Muratorian Fragment, a document from the middle of the second century, notes that “Luke wrote in his own name from what he had learned when Paul associated him with himself as a companion of his journey; nor did he himself see the Lord in the flesh,” which is obvious from the Bible itself. The Fragment also mentions that John’s Gospel was a collaborative effort by Apostles who had heard Christ.
 
It’s not really surprising that there would be written and unwritten parts of Christian revelation, because that’s how revelation has worked ever since Genesis. The revelation to the Jews is embodied in Torah, which translates as “teaching” or “direction”, and this came in two forms, too. The written part is the texts that we know as the first five books of the Bible, and then there’s the oral tradition handed down among the priests and rabbis that was never written down—“the lips of the priest shall keep knowledge, and they shall seek the Law at his mouth,” as Malachi put it (2:7; have a look at Is 59:21, too). Naturally, this oral deposit of faith is referred to in other Jewish writings. The Talmud, for instance, the great body of rabbinical comment on Torah, spells out more than forty definite precepts “given to Moses on Sinai” that aren’t mentioned in the written Torah.
 
So, just as the Old Testament doesn’t record every bit of God’s revelation to the Jews, the New Testament doesn’t embody all of Christ’s revelation, either. It embodies an indispensable amount of it, of course—“ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ,” St. Jerome said, and the Church gives a resounding “Amen!” to that. But the Evangelists and the disciples who wrote Epistles made it clear that they weren’t writing down everything (check Lk 1:1–4, 10:16; Jn 16:12–13, 21:25, Heb 13:22, 2 Jn 12, 3 Jn 13, 14, etc.). And St. Paul, Pharisee that he was, would never have conceived of Christianity as a mere book religion. He knew plenty of direct quotations from Jesus that didn’t get written into the Gospels (like Acts 20:35).
 
That’s why the Gospels and the Epistles all assume that you’re familiar with Sacred Tradition, at least in its main lines. It isn’t always easy to see the relationships between the Tradition and the Bible, though; basically, the Church doesn’t hold any truth on the basis of Scripture without Tradition. But then, she doesn’t hold any truth on the basis of Tradition without Scripture, either.
 
Whichever way you look at it, you can’t take one without the other because Sacred Tradition is the only source of information about fundamentally important ideas like the Trinity, which isn’t explicit in the Bible. The same holds for the Old Testament, too. There are plenty of important doctrines like the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead that come from Jewish oral tradition, not from the written Torah, which is why the Sadducees tried to reject those ideas (Mt 22:23, Mk 12:18, Lk 20:27). And, apart from actual articles of faith, Tradition alone sets the framework for a lot of the basics in the ways that Christians worship. The commemoration of Easter, for example, and going to church on Sundays are still part of Christian life even in the separated sects, but they come out of Tradition, not out of the Bible.
 
One thing about the relationship is certain, though: you need to refer to Tradition if you want an authentic interpretation of the Bible. Without reference to Tradition, you can end up taking biblical passages out of context, or, really, you can end up taking the whole Bible out of context. “This, then, you must understand first of all,” as St. Peter cautioned, “that no prophecy of Scripture is made by private interpretation … in these Epistles, there are certain things difficult to understand, that the unlearned and the unstable distort, just as they do the rest of the Scriptures also, to their own destruction” (2 Pt 1:20).
 
What he means is that the Church has always relied on Sacred Tradition as the rule of faith, the touchstone that you use to test any insight, any directive, or any teaching, as well as any biblical passage (Acts 8:30–31 records an early instance). This runs along the same lines as the practices in Judaism, too, where the oral Torah served as a framework for the interpretation of the written.
 
(The story goes that a “heathen” came for instruction to the great rabbi Hillel, who died about the year 10, while Christ was a boy in Egypt. The heathen said, “I’ll believe you about the written Torah, but not about the oral. Take me on as a convert on condition that you teach me the written Torah only.” So Hillel took him on, and the first day, taught him the Hebrew alphabet. The next day, he taught him the alphabet again, but backwards. “You did it differently, yesterday!” the heathen objected. “Well,” said Hillel, “if you have to depend on me to teach you the alphabet correctly, how much more must you depend on me for the interpretation of the Torah.”)
 
There’s only one Tradition, but it has a different appearance, depending on when you look at it. There’s divine Tradition, given by God the Father before Christ’s coming or by Christ himself afterward. The next phase was apostolic Tradition, which is the expansion of Christ’s teachings given to the Apostles by the Holy Spirit (Jn 16:12–15). This is the Tradition that...