THE OLD MSS. (Continued)
Some men stand out in history because of the good they have done. Some men stand out in history because of the evil they have wreaked upon humanity. Most of the time these are the same men; they are just being described by different people with different perspective and bias.
The Roman Emperor Constantine certainly fits this picture. Lionized by many as the man who freed Christianity from a cycle of apathy and persecution, he is also lambasted by many as the one who reinvented the spiritual churches of Jesus into a political image of his own making. None, however, can seriously argue that Constantine strides upon the scene of human history as one who crafted the structure of Western civilization. His embrace of Christianity in 312 A.D. set in motion the philosophical and social world we live in to this day.
It can be argued that, had Constantine not Christianized the Roman Empire, the long saga of the �Dark Ages� might not have fallen across Europe. The Crusades of the Middle Ages might never have happened had it not been for the influence of Constantine and the church he fathered. But, it cannot be argued that the world of today would be different had not Constantine given government sanction, and more importantly imperial protection, to the Christian churches of his day.
Through the influence of Constantine, the Roman Empire was Christianized. Much of the world was, in turn, Christianized by the influence of the people of that empire and her colonies. But, what sort of Christianity was it which Constantine created?
This is an important question to ask as we consider the transmission of the Scriptural record. Obviously, the official church sanctioned by Rome plays an important part in that story. As it is today, with our multitude of versions, paraphrases, and perversions, there were several competing traditions of Scripture available from which to choose as the �official� Bible of Constantine�s state church. Along with the pure, God preserved record, there were Bibles produced by sloppy workmanship and by various groups which had corrected the Scripture in their possession to conform to their doctrinal dictates.
McKingley (Why? The King James Version) argues that in order for Constantine to rule, politically, the people he sought to bring them all under a common religious system. As there were many pagans in the Roman world, Constantine needed a way for them to incorporate their doctrines into his political-religious system. He commissioned Eusebius to prepare fifty Bibles (remember that they were all hand-written!) for his cadre to use to teach the people. These Bibles were to be prepared in Greek.
Note the phrase above, ��for Constantine to rule, politically�� It is my contention that the conversion of Constantine to Christianity was not a spiritual conversion. I believe that this was simply a politically inspired ruse to consolidate his political power. Christianity had been gaining adherents. It had become a movement which Rome could not deny. Constantine may have reasoned that, by siding with these Christian people, he would have the backing of their faithful in his drive to gain political ascendancy.
Politics hasn�t really changed all that much. We see politicians pandering to their religious and philosophical base even today. They count on the old proverb, �He who is the enemy of my enemy is my friend,� to gain them the backing of political blocks of voters. I could write much about the cynicism of those who substitute faith in political leaders for a faith in God, but for now I just want to mention that this is a fact of human life. We seek the powerful to protect us from the perceived enemies of our social and religious convictions - even while loudly proclaiming that our faith is in God.
As we examined last week, there is no historical evidence of a Biblical conversion in the life of Constantine. There is no mention of repentance. There is no mention of trust in the shed blood of Jesus Christ. There is no mention of the remission of sins. The entire conversion seems centered upon a vision of an Egyptian Ankh. This may have resembled a Christian cross, but even if it had been a cross, it is not the cross which saves anyone. Salvation lies within the work of He Who died upon the cross.
Since Constantine�s vision gave the direction to �conquer in this sign,� or words to that effect, we are not given the picture of a religious experience. Rather we see the call to a political imperative. With this evidence we must conclude that the conversion of Constantine was no spiritual rebirth. This conversion was politically motivated.
With this in mind we must consider just what sort of Bible Constantine would favor for his newly minted state churches. After all, their purpose was to serve the purpose of the state, in uniting that state, as their reason for existence from a political standpoint. They could be as spiritual as they felt the need to be � so long as they served to unite the political state.
About the choice of Scripture, Fuller (Which Bible) rightly notes that Constantine�s ��predilection was for a type of Bible whose reading would give him a basis for his imperialistic ideas of the great state church with ritualistic ostentation and unlimited central power.�
Again, as we noted last week, the church founded by Constantine is seen as the true beginnings of the Roman Church of this day. Even to this day one can not enter into a Roman Church without feeling the sanctity of the Roman Empire�s glory. The symbolic architecture of these church buildings hearkens back to the glory that was Rome. The College of Cardinals seems a replacement for the old Roman Senate, while the Papacy, itself, seems a continuation of the ideals of the Roman Caesars.
It could well be argued that the old Roman Empire never really died. She conquered those who conquered her. She has continued her reign, albeit in a new way. Even as the philosophy of the ancient Greek civilization tempered the Romans, so has the religion of Constantine absorbed those who overthrew its territorial areas.
Fuller continues, �As the Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity, it became necessary for him to choose which of the Bibles (the Constantinoplian from which comes our Received Text, or the Palestinian of Eusebius and Origen, or the Egyptian) he would sanction. Quite naturally he preferred the one edited by Eusebius and written by Origen, the outstanding intellectual figure that had combined Christianity with Gnosticism in his philosophy, even as Constantine himself was the political genius that was seeking to unite Christianity with pagan Rome.�
Here, also, is a picture of humanity. We tend to embrace the best of the best, or ourselves. We do not readily accept the Best, which comes from God. That is simply a fact of our human natures. We do not look, first, toward God. Our human reasoning is blinded by the fall. We tend to follow that of the temporal (human) because we lack appreciation and understanding of the eternal (God).
To reason of the eternal would lead us to say that God has preserved His inspired Word. That would seem obvious. He has the power to do so. Is it at all reasonable to assume that He would not do so since He felt the message important enough to give to mankind in the first place?
Instead, we fall into the trap of viewing even the inspired Word of God from a naturalistic standpoint. We insist that everything touched by the hand of man must decay. There are two obvious fallacies to this line of reasoning. First, everything touched by man does not decay. The fact that we now cook with a microwaves machine rather than over a camp fire is but one illustration of the march of human civilization. We were created in the image of God. With that comes our innate ability to invent, create if you will, and improve. While our morals may often fall to new depths, this is the result of the sin nature which has rebelled against the leading of God. Our intellectual capacities are continually able to produce better utilitarian toys in the natural world.
Second, the Bible is NOT of human construction. The Bible comes to us from the Person of the God of Eternity. As such, the Bible is not subject to the decay of time, or the destruction of man. The Bible remains the unalterable, preserved Word of God.
That Constantine would procure a Bible for his state churches which was not the preserved Word of God does not mitigate against that preservation of the pure Word of God. This only means that the world is a system dominated by Satan and stands foursquare against the things of God. That they would accept a false Scripture is, spiritually speaking, simply to be expected.
The sad thing is that we see this process again beginning in the world in our day. Churches, and men, who would love the Lord and wish to follow Him are again being seduced by the siren song of trust in the intellect of man rather than in true faith in the God of the Bible. Many of these men are brothers in the faith with whom I would not argue any other point of doctrine. But, they are wrong when they forsake the pure Words of God for the polluted words of man.
As to the Bible chosen by Constantine, Fuller continues. �The type of Bible selected by Constantine has held dominating influence at all times in the history of the [Roman] Catholic Church. This Bible was different from the Bible of the Waldenses, and as a result of that difference, the Waldenses were the object of hatred and cruel persecution.�
God�s preserving Hand kept His Word pure in the Bible believing churches down throughout the history of the past two millennia since Jesus established His churches. Meanwhile, the Bible of Constantine was the Bible of the Dark Ages, the crusades, and the persecution of true believers. It is this same Bible text which underlies our newer translations and paraphrases. It is this same Bible which is again seducing men who otherwise honestly love the Lord and seek to live for Him.
Further, this Bible of Constantine, rather than seeking to exclude any error, sought to include error.
Fuller continues, noting that when Constantine commissioned Eusebius to make fifty copies of Scripture, Eusebius found that many copies had been corrupted by those who felt they were correcting Scripture. �When the warring sects had been consolidated under the iron hand of Constantine, this heretical potentate adopted the Bible which combined the contradictory versions into one, and so blended the various corruptions with the bulk of pure teachings as to give sanction to the great apostasy now seated on the throne of power.�
We see, once again, this same mindset among the critics of today. Everything must be consulted and nothing, even the obvious insertion and deletion, must be left out of the new eclectic texts. One of the ways this is done is by arguing that the �families� of texts, I like the term �text-type,� are all given, supposedly, equal weight in constructing the new text. This ignores the fact that the great bulk of the evidence is that of the Traditional Text. I would submit that when 85% - 95% of the evidence reads in one manner, this must be given consideration as the proper text. Not so with the modern critic who supposes that the great unanimity of evidence is a picture of tampering.
It is interesting to note that there is a text on the market, which claims to be a �majority text,� which has accepted this argument. Its majority is no majority since it considers nine out of ten witnesses as only one witness among the groupings!
This predilection, to assume tampering of the preserved text, means that the great bulk of this evidence is actually given less consideration when constructing the new texts. In this manner the great majority of the evidence is dismissed out of hand when considering the Words which God has preserved.
Wouldn�t it seem much more likely that the evidence of �tampering� would show up in a small percentage rather than the preponderance of evidence? While there are many counterfeit $20.00 bills; the great bulk of the $20.00 bills are true bills. We understand this on the natural plane but tend to ignore it on the spiritual plane of Scriptural evidence.
Of those Bibles produced by Eusebius, McKingley (Why? The King James Version) says that, Eusebius, who was a great admirer of Origen, used the Hexapla of Origen to prepare these Bibles. He quotes J. J. Ray (God Wrote Only One Bible) when he says that, �Several textual authorities believe that the Sinaitic and Vatican manuscripts are two extant copies of the 50 Greek Scriptures copied for Constantine by Eusebius in 331 A. D.�
These two are the bedrock of all of the modern translations. This is why we are spending so much time discussing Constantine and the religion he founded in the name of Christianity.
On this same subject, Fuller (True or False) weighs in. �The late Dr. Edward Vining of Cambridge, Mass., has gone thoroughly into this [that B and Aleph both derived from a common, corrupt source], and has produced evidence tending to show that they were copies (and carelessly made) of an original brought by Origen out of Egypt, where, as is well known, the Scriptures were corrupted almost from the beginning��
Gipp (An Understandable History of the Bible) continues on this same theme. The Alexandrian ��text went no further than southern Italy where the Roman Church found its unstable character perfect for overthrowing the true Word of God��
In about 312 A. D. the Roman Constantine adopted the religion of the Christians for political motives. That is our contention. Further, he commissioned fifty copies of these Scriptures to place within his newly minted state churches. The purpose of this Scripture, and these churches, was political.
In essence, this was a new form of persecution. No longer would the churches be burned, and her people killed, by the Roman authorities. Now those same authorities would destroy those churches from the inside. They would come with a �Trojan Horse� Bible wherein the churches very character would be altered. The churches would become the adhesive to hold the political culture of Rome intact.
If this is true, and I believe that it is, then we are being asked to accept Bible translations in this day which were prepared to promote a secular society rather than a spiritual rebirth among men. We are being asked to follow the same spiritual route of spiritual degeneration as were those early Christians who were seduced by the political protection of a pagan emperor.
It would be better, spiritually and eternally for our souls and our children�s souls until Jesus comes again, that we would accept the God preserved Traditional Text as the basis for our English, and other!, translations of the Word which God has inspired. To do less is to fail our mandate as Christians and our duty to both our Lord and our fellow man.
Next week we will take a look at some of the consequences of the political religion of Constantine.
14 April 2006
THE OLD MSS. (Continued)
It has been said that the evil that men do often lives on after them. Such is the case of Constantine. By any consideration, Constantine must be considered as one of the greatest influences upon Western culture. When he put the imprimatur of Rome over the churches of Jesus, he altered both secular and sacred history for nearly two millennia. But, in doing so he changed both the secular and the sacred in ways which might not have been expected.
I�d like to insert here that I am not attempting to attack the Roman Church. Still, I do see her institutional beginnings in the actions of Constantine. These beginnings were on a foundation of a mixture of the physical state and the spiritual church. I do believe that this has caused certain errors of dogma and policy to be brought into this church organization. I only dwell upon these factors because they do have a major influence upon the transmission and acceptance of some of the Scriptural text groups � and their hold on the men and women in both the pew and the pulpit, even to this day.
We must remember that the same Bibles we are being asked to accept in this day are, textually, those which were placed into the churches of Constantine. When the scholars tell us that there have been great discoveries in the days since the King James Bible was first published, they are correct. When they say that these discoveries have enriched our knowledge of the original texts, they are wrong. There have been no discoveries of new text �families,� or �reading groups,� in the last four hundred years. There has only been a concerted effort to return to the textual base of the Alexandrian copies of Constantine�s churches in, especially, the past one hundred and fifty years.
This has been happening along with an effort to jettison the Traditional Text which was the base text of the Scripture of the Protestant revolution � and of the churches which rejected Rome and her texts through the midnight of the �Dark Ages.�
As we consider the textual base, we must also consider the purpose which brought it forth from Egypt. Why did Constantine embrace Christianity? Many historians will argue that Constantine was converted to Christianity shortly before the Battle of Milvian Bridge. This is when he saw his famous vision of a �cross� and was told to �conquer in this sign.�
As we studied last week, there is scant evidence of any conversion experience on the part of Constantine. His vision was described as a �cross,� but he gave a description which more resembled an Egyptian Ankh than any sort of Christian cross.
Further, as any third year Sunday School student should understand, we are not led by the cross. We are subject to Him Who died upon that Cross. The Cross may be considered a symbol of the conquest of Jesus over Satan; but a more fitting symbol would be the empty grave. Besides this, the Christian is never told to conquer anything in the sign of the cross. We are told to defeat the forces of Satan in the power of the Holy Spirit.
The New Testament does not argue that we fight any sort of temporal battles in the Name of Christ. The New Testament does say that, �For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.� (Ephesians 6:12)
It would seem to be much more of an accurate description to surmise that Constantine used the vitality of the Christian churches as a means to unite the Roman Empire under his leadership. If this is the case, and I allege that it is, the purpose of Constantine was to mold a church which would be politically motivated as a power base to gain, and to hold together, his empire in the name of religion.
The churches, themselves should not be considered as completely without fault. They had suffered through a nearly three hundred year cycle of persecution, apathy, and occasionally mild tolerance. They were ready to accept the power of the Emperor as a bulwark against further persecutions. In this they began to take their eyes off the Savior cast them toward the state as protector.
In his commission of Eusebius to procure fifty copies of the Bible to place in the newly minted state churches, Constantine looked toward the Alexandrian texts of Origen and his school of scribes. These were rife with the humanistic reasoning of the Gnostics and of the Greek philosophers. While the Gnostic emphasis on the spiritual over the physical might have posed a problem in fashioning a state religion, the Greek philosophies would act as a counter balance as they would tend to value human order which would bode well for the state. The Gnostic influence, meanwhile, would tend to keep the churches from the temptation to consider any sort of rebellion.
The religion fashioned on this model became one which was a spiritual counterpoint of the Romans. The Caesar of Rome was mirrored by the Pope. The old Roman Senate was pictured in the College of Cardinals. There is no hint of either of these in the Scripture. But, the state was now the protector of the church. Some changes would naturally reflect that reality.
Fuller (Which Bible?) notes more of these accommodations to Rome which were made by the churches. Later, as political Rome was overthrown by the invaders from the North, these same invaders gave great reverence to the Church of Rome. They had been taught to submit to their pagan gods and, as they ��one by one � [s]ubstituted the saints, the martyrs, and the images of Rome for their former forest gods � the Papacy [knew it] must offer, as a record of revelation, a Bible in Latin which would be as Origenistic as the Bible in Greek adopted by Constantine. Therefore, the Pope turned to Jerome to bring forth a new version in Latin.�
Note that they wished to produce a Bible in Latin. This wasn�t done so the people from the North would have a Bible in their own languages. Latin was as foreign to their ears as was the Greek. Besides this, these people were not, in the main, a literate people. Either copy would have been as intelligible as the other to the great bulk of the invaders.
Had the Roman Church wished to produce a �Holy Language� edition of the Bible, they might well have taken the Hebrew of the Old Covenant. They may also have considered the Aramaic of Jesus and the Twelve. Or, they could have taken the Greek of the Gospel�s and Letters of the New Covenant. Instead they choose Latin. I believe that this was because the work of Constantine had been effective. Even as the physical Rome was overran, the �spiritual� Rome continued. The Caesars, elected by the Roman Senate, might have been overthrown, but the Empire continued with the Pope and the College of Cardinals.
Even the superiority of the language held sway in the new standard of Scripture. Latin replaced Greek in the day to day conduct of the churches even as Rome had replaced Christ as the protector of those churches.
Fuller continues when he notes that Jerome, in his translation, consulted the works of Origen.
�These manuscripts of Origen influenced Jerome more in the New Testament than in the Old, since finally he used the Hebrew text in translating the Old Testament. �the Hebrew Bible did not have the Apocrypha� Jerome admitted these seven books � [d]id not belong with the other writings of the Bible. Nevertheless, the Papacy endorsed them, and they are found in the Latin Vulgate� the existence of those books in Origen�s Bible is sufficient evidence to reveal that tradition and the Scripture were on equal footing in the mind of Origen.�
We see these spurious Books being offered in the newer versions in our bookstores. Is this not to be expected if, as I allege, we are seeing a return to the Bible of Origen and Constantine as a standard for our churches?
This week has been, for the most part, a simple history lesson with which you may, or may not agree. The important thing to learn is that the Alexandrian texts were the text of the middle ages. This is not a new set of texts which were only found in the middle of the nineteenth century. The basic textual base of the newer versions was also the textual base of the Dougy/Rheims Roman version of 1589. To argue that these readings were not available to the translating committee of the King James Bible is a falsehood.
As a quick aside, the first editions of the King James Bible did include the apocryphal books among its printing. But, and this is important, these books were not placed in the either the Old Testament or the New. They were placed between the Testaments and clearly indicated as non-canonical. They were never considered as part of the Scriptural record; they were only included as devotional readings much as we might read �The Pilgrim�s Progress� of Bunyan in our day. To argue, as I saw in one website, that the Protestant Bible contained eighty books until the mid 1800�s is inconsistent with fact.
Besides the above, we do not wish to have a Protestant Bible any more than we wish to have a Catholic Bible. What we desire is the pure Word of God as preserved in the Traditional Text.
Next week we will begin to look at the general mindset of some of the revisers of the Scriptural record.
21 April 2006
THE OLD MSS. (Continued)
We have looked at the Bible of Constantine. This week we will begin to look at the mindset of the revisers who are leading today�s church world back toward this textual tradition.
About these revisers of the text, Hills (The King James Version Defended) has argued that a history of the Age of Enlightenment skepticism regarding the text of the New Testament preceded Westcott and Hort. Even before Aleph and B were available, some critics argued that the text which underlay the King James Bible was corrupted by the copyist to serve sectarian aims.
We could go into all kinds of theories about why this is so. These theories range from conspiracy of the Jesuit order to undermine the Protestant Reformation to a perceived need for the church world to find something new to be in harmony with the newly proclaimed theory of Darwinian evolution.
Personally, I think it had more to do with man glorifying his own intelligence and research abilities. Man had come to the place where he had no more need, he falsely thought, in the guiding influence of a God in some far out Heaven. Man began to search out �flesh and blood� answers to the problems that plagued him and the forces that directed him. With his mind finding satisfaction in the natural he no longer sensed a need for the spiritual.
It short, it was a lack of faith in the goodness, and the power, of God to oversee His Word which caused men to search for a �lost� text rather than trusting God to have preserved a �pure� text. At its base the problem was spiritual rather than rationalistic.
Great publicity surrounded Tischendorf when he found an ancient text in the burning barrel of a monastery near the Sinai. The flames of fervor were only fanned when he announced that this �new� discovery was an ancient text which could provide clues to �correcting� the Bible as the people understood it to be.
I want you to understand the time-line here. Tischendorf did not search for ancient manuscripts with the expectation that these would follow the general text of the Traditional Text. Tischendorf expected that the older texts would be closer to the original because he believed that the Text of God had been changed by copyist error, and by doctrinal bias, down through the centuries. His purpose is searching for texts of antiquity was to confirm his belief that the text in current use was corrupt.
He found his great corroborative evidence in the burning barrel of a Catholic monastery. It is my contention that the monks, in this instance, knew something that he should have accepted!
We have already studied the contradictory nature, even within itself, of this manuscript. Sinaiticus is a flawed text. In a trash heap it was found; in a trash heap it deserves to remain.
Had this been a normally conducted search, the only conclusion to be reached would be that this was an aberrant text from antiquity. But, this was not an impartial search. This was a search with a preconceived notion that the Biblical text in current use was corrupt. Therefore, a text which did not agree would be an improvement.
I think that this is the place I would like to stop for this week. The next great issue to consider about the revisions to the text of Scripture comes from the work of Westcott and Hort in the 1881 English Revised Bible.
We have looked, in the person of Tischendorf, at the prevailing mindset of those who would revise the text of God�s Word. We will see this more fully in the work of the committee headed by Drs. Westcott and Hort. Their work remains the foundation of almost all of the new versions on the market in the English speaking world. If we find error in their work, and we will, then we must extrapolate this error into the modern versions which follow in the textual path of these men.
The important thing to understand, at this point, is that the new versions are not �commentary� upon the King James Bible. They are different Bibles. They do not have the same textual base.
This is important. To allege, as do these versions, that the text of the King James Bible was flawed is to allege that the text of God was somehow lost for over a thousand years. It is to allege that the churches of Jesus have been using faulty Scripture in their worship. It is to allege that the world is stronger than God in that it managed to lose, and keep hidden from His churches, the message that He had prepared for them.
These are serious allegations and must be addressed. Either we have a Bible that we can trust, or we do not. Either we have a preserved Word from God or we have a God Who we cannot trust in temporal matters such as the preservation of that Word.
If we can not trust Him with His Own Word in a time centric manner, can we possibly trust Him with our souls in an eternal manner?
28 April 2006
THE OLD MSS. (Continued)
There is an old proverb that the past is prologue to the future. The world view of some in academia that God is not powerful, or not loving, enough to preserve His Own inspired Word - the message He intended for mankind, spurred on the work of Hort and Westcott, et al, in their new �Revised Version� of 1881. Fuller (True or False) has noted that ��in the production of the �New Greek Text� of the Revisers [of 1881], they had departed from the Textus Receptus nearly 6,000 times.�
Was it true that the preserved text of God had this many mistakes within its pages? Where was the need to make this wholesale redaction of the Words of God? Fuller (Which Bible) asks the question. ��on what grounds [have] scholars � Set aside this large majority of manuscripts which contain a Greek text very much like that used by the translators of the A. V. of 1611? Why do they prefer other manuscripts with differing texts? What arguments do they advance for their views?�
Please note that this change was not confined to an updating of phraseology, as had been the mandate given for this committee on revision to operate in 1881. The change was made by them on the basic text which would underlie the new version. In this case the word �new� was an apt phrase. Not only were the words in the English, themselves, new. So also was the underlying text from which they were culled. New also, as a result of this tampering with the preserved Text of the Words of God, was this view of what the Word of God, Itself, was. New also was the view of the preserving power and loving transmission of the Message of God to mankind in His inspired Words as being nonexistent.
This gutting of the message was not due to a lack of evidence for the preserved Words of God. Fuller (Counterfeit or Genuine) notes the obvious when he says, �The number of manuscripts of the New Testament which are extant is staggering. There is no ancient document of secular origin which enjoys such overwhelming attestation. The problem is not whether or not we have the general teaching of the Scriptures but whether or not we have the very words.�
In my studies I have found that the estimate of evidence toward the God preserved Traditional Text will run from 85% to 95% of all the available textual citations, depending on which expert is consulted. There is an amazing amount of evidence from antiquity as to the veracity of the text which underlies the King James Bible. Yet, may �experts� will insist that we ignore this evidence and fixate on a very few manuscripts which disagree with the vast majority.
In any other endeavor this sort of myopic vision of change for the sake of change, with no regard to the evidence, would be laughable. Yet, in the matter of the Scripture which holds the message from the God of Heaven for the man of this earth, we are told to ignore the evidence and trust the critic. In my mind it would be better to ignore the critic and trust God. Would it not be reasonable to assume that the God of Power Who inspired His message to mankind would stand by that message with a preserving grace? Is it possible that humankind has thwarted the will of God by denying God the opportunity to hold His Own message throughout the ages of human experience? No!!!
Yet, we are told that new discoveries of the past four hundred years have given new insight into what the original writings of the Scripture might have been. Note that phrase, �new insight in what the original writings of the Scripture might have been!� With all of his trust in the skill and dedication of the critic the modern theologian can not assume to thunder forth, �Thus saith the Lord!� He must, meekly, acknowledge that he believes this is the words which God inspired � well, pretty close.
That is a very flimsy plank to walk upon as we step out above the tempestuous waves of the onslaught of Satan and society. We need to know that we can trust those Words of God to assure the eternal hope of our immortal souls.
This pronouncement about the new discoveries remains a lie. That there have been many new discoveries in the past four hundred years is certain. That there have been no new discoveries of new readings is equally certain. The fallacy is based on a conjectural theory that the new discoveries have bolstered the impact of already available divergent readings.
All of these divergent readings were available to the translating committee of the King James Bible. They rejected these spurious tid bits of evidence in favor of the great bulk of manuscript evidence which supports the Traditional Text. There was a difference between the Roman English edition of Douay/Rheims and the Protestant English Bible of 1611. The difference was in the choice of base texts. The Douay/Rheims accepted the readings of our modern English textual base while the Authorized Version rejected these readings in favor of the Traditional Text.
These really are two different Bibles. This applies to the base text, as well as the often mentioned apocryphal books. Yet, it is from the base readings of the Roman edition which our newer English Bibles nearly all spring.
About those new discoveries, Fuller, again (Which Bible) makes note of the place of those discoveries.
��all of our most ancient manuscripts derive basically from Egypt. This is due mainly to the circumstance that the climate of Egypt favors the preservation of ancient texts. � It is, therefore, most likely that the text on which our modern translations rest is simply a very early Egyptian form of the text whose nearness to the original is open to debate.�
And, yet, we are told that we are allowed no debate on the texts in question. It is �unscholarly� to doubt the words of the experts. Still, there are experts � many, who question these spurious texts. These latter experts are shouted down by the mantra of �the oldest is always the best.�
Last week we spent some time discussing the fallacy of this statement. The bottom line of this trust in �the oldest and best� is given by McKingly (Why? The King James Version) when he said, �The oldest manuscripts do not �prove� anything unless they come directly from and are in line with the original writings.� Since these newly discovered readings are often at variance with the preserved text, often in dramatic ways as we have seen previously, they do not offer proof to the linage of the original autographs of the Scripture. Thus, they are not trustworthy and may be rejected out of hand.
But, it is these which serve as the basis of our modern English renditions.
There has been much debate in the past few weeks over the discovery of an ancient text known as �The Gospel of Judas.� I fail to understand the excitement. As I stated in our �Ed�itorial section a couple of weeks ago, to any theologian with any knowledge of the texts of antiquity, this find is about as earth shaking as someone stating that he�d found that water is wet. It is a non issue. Irenaeus wrote about this text as a heretical tract early in church history. The so-called Gospel of Judas is simply a Gnostic heresy written by a forger.
This is just one more example that there were early efforts to dilute the true Words of God with the words of men who were trying to justify their own doctrinal bias.
Fuller (Which Bible?) tells us that, �It is generally known that the text was corrupted in the earliest centuries, sometimes deliberately by heretics. Students should be on their guard against considering as infallible any manuscript, no matter how old it may be.�
If a manuscript is old, it only means that it is old. It does not mean that it is correct. I have some old test papers from my college days. All of the red marks give ample evidence to the fact that they are not completely correct. This does not detract from the truth that they are, in my life time at least, very old papers.
Unfortunately, there are no teacher�s correction marks on these old manuscripts. We must deduce their error by comparing them with the template of the preserved Word of God. In this test they fail!
Fuller makes this point later in his book.
�Using the analogy of a stream, it is argued that the closer one gets to the spring or source the purer the water will be. This is normally true, no doubt, but what if a sewer pipe empties into the stream a few yards below the spring? Then the process is reversed � as the polluted water is exposed to the purifying action of the sun and ground, the further it runs the purer it becomes (unless it passes more pipes.)�
Soon after the Scripture was written people began to make copies to share with other churches. Scriptoriums, such as the ones at Antioch and Alexandria began to make copies - as did some Christian�s in the back rooms of their house churches. The sheer volume of copies served as a guard against error in the copies. An error in one copy would only infect its immediate children. Other copies would not contain this error. By comparing various copies, errors could be eliminated. That is why somewhere between 85% and 95% of the extent copies of Scripture, lectionaries and the writings of the �church fathers� contain the Traditional Text.
We�ve laid some groundwork this week in discussing the English Revision of 1881. We will continue this discussion next week.
One thing to keep in mind is that it is from the work of this translation committee of 1881, and their rejection of the preserved Words of God, from which we see our modern day English translations spring. The inherited trait of a lack of fidelity to the pure Words of God and the lack of trust in God�s goodness and power from which this lack of fidelity sprang, has been passed down to the offspring of faulty translation of faulty text.
We can trust the preserved Word of God as translated into the English in the King James (the Authorized) Bible. This is our guard against the spiritual storms which swirl about us because it is an accurate English rendition of the originally inspired Words of God.
Bible Study
April 2006