A Response to Dr. James White on the Korban Rule and Sacred Tradition

Prominent protestant apologist Dr. James R. White uses Jesus’ admonition of the Pharisees in Mark 7 to attempt to discredit Catholic teaching on Sacred Tradition. A basic overview of his arguement can be found here.  Here is the passage:

 

And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" And he said to them, "Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, "'This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.  'You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men." And he said to them, "You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother'; and, 'Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.' But you say, 'If a man tells his father or his mother, Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban' (that is, given to God)-- then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do."(Mathew 7:5-13)

 

This passage is often used by anti-Catholic apologists to suggest that all religious tradition is condemned as being opposed to the Scriptures.   The problem with this argument is clear: the condemnation is concerned only with religious traditions of men which make void the word of God.   Catholic Sacred Tradition, on the other hand, is taught to be itself a transmission of the word of God (Dei Verbum 9).  Many articles are available which address this issue.

 

However, Dr. White’s approach to this passage is slightly more refined and seems at first to be more problematic to the Catholic teaching.  He points out that the Corban rule, which Jesus condemns, is contained in the Mishnah, the written codification of the Jewish equivalent to Sacred Tradition.  The Jews regarded this rule as having come from God Himself.  However, Jesus makes it clear that it is a tradition of men that did not come from God.  Dr. White contends that just as the Jews regarded certain manmade traditions as being of Divine origin, so may the Catholic Church.  Catholics, he says, must check their traditions against the fixed and certain word of God in the Scriptures to determine if they are valid or not. 

 

The first problem with this argument is that the Mishnah was not finally codified until sometime in the third century.  There is no guarantee that the Pharisees actually did regard this as a Divinely given tradition.  It is possible, for instance, that the Corban rule was included in the Mishnah for the very reason that Jesus is recorded condemning it in the gospels.  If a Jew believed Jesus had spoken against a tradition of Divine origin, it would prove to him that Christ was not the Messiah.  In fact, Dr. White himself stated in a 2004 debate with Gary Michuta that there is a “tremendous amount of discussion [in scholarly works] as to what parts of that literature [the Mishnah] are actually reflective of the time when Christ was ministering.” It is therefore very tenuous to assert that because it was contained in the Mishnah, the Corban rule was accepted as a Divine tradition by the Pharisees.  It is not certain whether this is the case, but it is worth noting as a possibility.

 

Even if the Corban rule was regarded to be divinely inspired, the only thing that this passage tells us for sure is that at some point it made its way into the traditions of the Jews as they were handed down.  This does not prove that all of these traditions were falsely regarded as being of Divine origin, only that the Corban rule was. 

 

This presents another problem, because it means that the same argument used against Sacred Tradition could be used against the Scriptures.  As the Scriptures were copied and handed down from generation to generation over time, many variations crept into the manuscripts.  Some extra words and phrases, words and phrases of men, were placed in the Scriptures and were regarded as the word of God.  Dr. White would of course argue that this is different from the problem of Sacred Tradition in that these words can be tested by textual criticism, historical investigation, and so forth to determine what originally belonged in the text, whereas Sacred Tradition cannot be.  The problem with this is that this makes the accuracy of the word of God rely upon fallible human methods and efforts.  Another problem is that Sacred Tradition can be tested by such methods.  Whereas textual criticism and historical investigation are able to ascertain, to certain degrees of accuracy, what words and verses were in the original autographs of the Scriptures, by studying the writings of the early Church fathers, the men who lived at the time of and knew the apostles, one is able to determine which traditions were contained in the original body of apostolic Tradition as taught by the apostles. 

 

To counter this, it could be argued that when it comes to the Scriptures, it is possible to compare questionable verses with the rest of the Scriptures to see if they belong.  However, this becomes a circular argument and a meaningless exercise because it requires the assumption that the Scriptures one is comparing something to are in fact of Divine origin themselves, even though they may also be false additions.  This gets to the very heart of the biggest problem of Sola Scriptura, which is that without Sacred Tradition one cannot know which books belong in the canon of Scripture to begin with.  (Dr. White  has argued on more than one occasion that ‘God works with His people’ to reveal the proper canon, however one must wonder why it is, if Dr. White is correct, that He allowed the deuterocanonical books to make their way into Scripture for 1500 years when they in fact did not belong.) 

 

The ultimate end of this methodology can be seen in Martin Luther’s infamous removal of James, Jude, Revelation, and several other books from the Scriptures because they seemed to him to contradict the rest of the Scriptures.  (Obviously this begs the question as to why it was this set of books Luther felt were in error and not the ones he threw them out in favor of.)  On top of that, the Johanine comma, which is perhaps the most famous manmade addition to Scripture, actually agrees with the rest of the Bible.  Although this is only one example (and one which itself poses no major problems), it helps to illustrate the general invalidity of this argument in that by using this approach to verifying the word of God, one may very well deem a manmade passage to be inspired, and even consequently deem other manmade passages to be inspired by virtue of their agreement with the first. 

 

Finally, this argument falls short because it fails to take into account the new status of the Church as the “pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15), a status which was not granted to the Jewish religious establishment.  A bulwark is a fortification, a defense, a barricade.  A pillar holds something up.  The Church has been established by God to hold up the truth, and to be a fortification and defense of it.  If the Church were capable of  teaching error, she simply would not be a pillar and bulwark of the truth.  In fact, in instructing Timothy in how to avoid deceptions and stick to truth, Paul tells him to remember those things he has learned (tradition) and to appeal to the Scriptures (2 Tim 3:12-17)  In his instructions to the Thessalonians on avoiding deception and loving truth, he also points both to oral tradition and Scripture (2 Thes 2:9-15)  In each case, Paul is specifically addressing the issue of avoiding deception and clinging to truth, and in each case he mentions both Scripture and tradition.  This is not a coincidence.  The reason he is so confident that the Traditions will be preserved accurately is that he knows the Holy Spirit will guard them, telling Timothy:

 

“But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he [Christ] is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me. Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.” (2 Tim 1:12-14)

           

Here Paul specifically states that the “sound pattern of words” Timothy has heard from him will be guarded by Christ through the Holy Spirit.   This is just one of many places in the New Testament where this protection  may be evidenced.  Clearly, there is a difference between the authority Jewish religious establishment and the authority and protection of the Church given Her in a special way by Christ through the Holy Spirit.  It may be argued in opposition of this that the Jewish religious establishment also claimed authority, and that the Jews “were entrusted with the oracles of God.” (Rom 3:2)  It is true, this argument says, that the modern Church has authority, but that authority does not encompass any Sacred Tradition, because the Jews also had an authority, yet Christ condemned their traditions.  However, as it has been pointed out, it is not clear that the Corban rule was regarded as being of Divine Origin in Jesus’ time.  Furthermore, by the time the Mishnah was codified, the Jews had lost whatever authority they did posses in favor of the Church.

           

In summary, we see then that Dr. White’s objection fails for at least four reasons:

 

1         It assumes that the Corban rule was actually regarded as Divine in origin, and fails to consider the late date of the completion of the codification of the Mishnah and possible anti-Christian bias in the codification.

2         It specifically addresses only one Jewish tradition and extrapolates from this a general principle.

3         It presents an argument against Sacred Tradition which can also be used against the reliability of Sacred Scripture, while suggesting methods to ensure Scriptural reliability are also applicable to Sacred Tradition.

4         It fails to take into account the special status of the Church granted by God as compared to the Jewish religious establishment, and fails to consider the special protection of the Church’s teaching authority promised through the Holy Spirit.

 

God Bless

 

 

Shane Coombs 2006