In a 2009 lecture on Leviticus 21, Dennis Prager said: The concept of sola scriptura is untenable. You have to be guided. That’s why we have religion. Religion becomes unnecessary if we just have scripture. Everybody will read his Bible and do the right thing.
This is the reason Protestants have more denominations than any other religion.
Catholicism had the opposite — there is one way to understand holy scripture and that is through the Church. You would ask what are the Church teachings on this verse, then I will understand it.
In the 16th Century, you had Catholics who couldn’t read the Bible and didn’t have a Bible, and all the priests taught the Bible.
In rabbinic Judaism, the rabbis explained the text.
I met theologian Eliezer Berkovits in my youth. That’s a great story. Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits called the Orthodox world Karaites of the oral law aka rabbinic Judaism. What Karaites did to the Torah, the Orthodox do to the rabbis — unchanging, only one way to read it… End of issue.
