Why Biblical Scholarship in Church is Important

Proper Biblical scholarship within the Tradition of the Catholic Church is important to avoid two extremes in interpretation of the Biblical text. The first extreme insists on a literalist reading and interpretation of sacred scripture regardless of advances in scientific research. For example, certain fundamentalist Christian sects insist that the entire cosmos was created in 6 days. Others calculate the age of the cosmos to be some 6,000 - 7,000 years based on the written stories in the Bible and the genealogy of humans and their descendants from Adam to Jesus Christ some 2,000 years ago.
The second extreme is the free interpretation of the sacred text while demythologizing it from any miracles such as the widely known views of Bultmann in the first part of the 20th century or the subsequent extreme views adopted by members of "The Jesus Seminar." See Joseph Ratzinger's lecture "Biblical Interpretation in Crisis" in January 1988 here:
http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/ratzinger/biblical-crisis.htm

Thus the Pontifical Biblical Commission published its document "The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church" in 1994 which remains a guide to Catholic Biblical scholars today. See it at http://www.ewtn.com/library/curia/pbcinter.htm

With that in mind, the most authoritative contemporary document on the Bible comes from the fathers of the Second Vatican Council in the document Dei verbum. This document needs to be studied before any other document since it lays down the framework of understanding the development of doctrine in the Tradition of the Catholic Church. See it here:
http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html