This thing was not done in a corner, it is stated of Paul in Acts 26, concerning the passion of Christ. Effectively the whole world bore witness, although the tremors registered but faintly through the halls of worldly power. It is no different today. The image of the Crucified is a universal icon. Whether by divine foreknowledge or accident of history, this image and its surrounding narratives have become intrinsic to what we call the Western canon. They are in our face, so to speak.
It is ironic then that spiritual seekers – in ages past no less then today – disdain the transmission in plain view, and seek for knowledge in realms of the esoteric, the hidden or occult. The Bible cannot be trusted, it is claimed – it has been edited, expurgated and contrived in accord with a sinister agenda. At best its asseverations pertain to the shallow and exoteric, to the outer courts of conventional understanding and myopic religion. For the real spiritual meat one must enquire among hidden and secret documents, among spiritual lineages suppressed and persecuted, among Hermeticists and Gnostics, perhaps in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi texts, in the writings of the Essenes and the perennial lore of the Grail. Such is the claim.
While we might welcome this broader historic and cultural perspective, we know the essential claim to be false. Our biblical source documents, extant in thousands of manuscript copies, are remarkably consistent. Variants do occur, likewise in their thousands, but these are mostly transcription errors, such as the occasional word being omitted or misspelled. There is nothing to call into question the essential purport of the documents. Concerning biblical critics, one has the impression rather that such as seek to undermine the integrity of scripture are motivated by ulterior considerations. They are offended by its content – that content or purport, as they perceive it. As to the other claim, that of extra-biblical wells of the sublime and profound, one might ask what sublime and profound which is not also intrinsic to biblical scripture?
The problem here is that no-one understands the Bible, and the majority of would-be critics – here one thinks of the so-called new atheists – do not even know its content. The churches are beholden of their non-biblical creeds, and secular critics have the overt historic church in their sights, thus being twice confounded and removed from the spiritual heart of the matter. Concerning the biblical transmission then, the God of the Bible is indeed hiding in plain view. The biblical legacy is ‘out there’ in the public domain, its text ubiquitous in millions of copies. It is hailed, expounded, debated and derided. And yet ... its purport is a mystery. This legacy, this presence, is rather like a beacon or ensign. It is saying, here I am, here is something ... But beyond that all is conjecture and confusion, a melee of claims and counterclaims, of creeds and sects and cults and traditions – namely insofar as the public eye and mind is concerned.
Spiritually speaking, we assert hat God is hiding in his Word – that the Word (i.e. the canon of scripture) functions as a spiritual veil. The Word is also synonymous with the spiritual body – that is, through the sacrifice of the Word the spirit is released and God is beheld face to face. This is the significance of the atoning death of the cross, and of the new or spiritual birth. But, as the apostle further observed, there are none that understand.