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While vacationing in St. Petersburg FL, I picked up and read a little book by William Barclay (born 1907, died 1987), entitled Introducing the Bible. I’d previously attempted to read one or two of his books on particular Bible books (because they are cited by folks like Herschel H. Hobbs), but lost interest. This little book nicely and concisely describes Barclay's philosophy. Barclay is blurbed on the back as "one of the world’s great biblical scholars." If he’s one of the greatest, then the sad shape of Christianity today is no surprise, in my opinion.
While I found much interesting and informative in Barclay’s book, his opinions on (a) the Pauline distinctive, and (b) the accuracy and trustworthines of the King James Version (KJV) aroused my keenest curiosity. Like so many scholars, Barclay walked right up to the doors of the obvious, and got slammed by them. Regarding the Pauline distinctive (page 54), Barclay writes:
The early Christian preacher never failed to mention the Resurrection. The Resurrection, as it has been put, was ‘the star in the firmament of early Christianity.’ And -- very surprisingly -- these early sermons do not connect the death of Jesus with the forgiveness of sins. The early Church was dominated by the resurrection faith, and by the experience of the Holy Spirit. It had not yet become, what W.D. Davies has called, cross conscious. The cruciality of the cross, as P.T. Forsyth called it, and the interpretation of the cross had to wait for the great mind and heart of the Paul.This is obvious, as Paul frequently refers the "preaching which is committed unto me" (Titus 1:3), and the "due time" in which it was proclaimed (2Tim 2:6) and how he was our forerunner (2Tim 1:16) in faith. Barclay finds this Pauline uniqueness "very surprising," but it escapes him to consider exploring further, or using as a sound basis for Biblical interpretation, so he immediately jumps onto his hobby-horse, the book of Revelation, in the next paragraph.
Regarding Bibliology, Barclay is one of the rankest of liberals, and he neatly skewers those who hold to weak notions of the inspiration of the Bible. Page 133 he writes "For a variety of reasons, it is not possible to hold... that the Bible is literally and, as it were physically, the word of God." Some of his reasoning is:
Mark makes Jesus remind the Pharisees of what David did in the days of Abiathar the high priest...[but] the priest in question was not Abiathar, but Ahimelech... Ahimelech was Abiathar’s son (2Sam 8:17)... the slip of the human mind is perfectly natural and completely unimportant, but such a slip is inconceivable in divine dictation.In other words, the original writers could and did foul up the very words of Christ, according to Barclay. I was appalled, but unsurprised. Barclay completely overlooks that Abiathar’s father was named Ahimelech (1Sam 23:6), and Abiathar apparently named his son for his slain father. Furthermore, the phrase "in the days of" refers to Abiathar’s lifetime which is utterly consistent with the holy record.
Of course, Barclay contradicts himself and condemns his own scholarship in writing this. The phrase "in the days of" is from the Authorized Version. However, Barclay declares the AV is "a monument of English prose... [but] it is no longer an adequate translation... For the purposes of study we must use the Revised Standard Version..." (see page 103 of his book). Instead of the expression "in the days of Abiathar..." the RSV offers this: "when Abiathar was high priest," which appears to imply error in 1Samuel (as does the NIV Study Bible’s verse note). (In fairness, Barclay says the New English is better than the RSV; perhaps the NEB says "in the days," but I don’t have a copy of that. Even the RSV can be lamely reconciled, as John W. Haley does in his book Alleged Discrepancies in the Bible, by suggesting that the phrase merely means that Abiathar was acting as a substitute high priest for his father at the time. Barclay doesn’t even offer this. At any rate, anything "one of the world’s great biblical scholars" doesn’t understand, or is too lazy to study, he labels erroneous. This is worse bungling than a novice programmer who attributes every problem to "compiler error." I’m sure Barclay’d find 1Sam17:7, 2Sam21:19, and 1Chr20:5 to be irreconcilable error (one solution: consider how Philistine sons might assume more than a father’s staff.)
Barclay is Barthian in Bibliology: it’s the message, not the medium. He further contradicts himself by declaring that "the word is no written page. God’s words are events" (page 141), yet on the next page he writes that "it may be claimed [typically by Romanists] that even without the Bible we would have the tradition of the Church [to tell us about Jesus]; but it is the Bible which prevents the distortion of that tradition." And how can the Church prevent distortions using an imperfect record? This is one of the reasons Romanists love to highlight "errors" or variations in the holy record: with an imperfect record, we must rely on the history and interpretations of the Church, which always leads back to kissing the Pope’s feet.
CONCLUSION: There is some profit in Barclay’s little book, if handled with care, but lots of chaff to sift through.
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Updated May 15, 1997