INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)
We left off last week with a question. Dr. David Otis Fuller (Counterfeit or Genuine) asked a very simple question regarding the inspiration of the Scripture: �If the text of the Scripture was not preserved, what was the need for having an inerrant original?�
An honest and heartfelt belief in the inspiration of the Holy Scripture, by the Powerful God of the Universe, should lead one to the logical conclusion that this God Who cared enough to, as the Hallmark cards say in their advertising about their product, �send the very best,� would not withdraw this care from the very people to whom He had initiated His correspondence in the first place.
The Hallmark people have a great company, and put out some very good cards, but I have to believe that God cares about us even more than do they.
In The Corruption of the Word, Kevin James writes:
�The idea that God watched over the transmission of His Word through the ages to ensure the purity of His revelation is called providential preservation. Providential preservation says that, although one copy will differ slightly from another, the differences are so minor that there will be no hindrance to the correct understanding of the text. The true text has always been available by the providence of God.�
In the newer translations, and sadly in many editions of the venerable King James Bible, we will find footnotes which question many passages. The entire ending of the Book of Mark is called into question on the basis of very little evidence to it not being in the original and a great preponderance of evidence as to its veracity. The incident of the woman taken in adultery in John, chapter eight, is questioned. She is denied her audience with the Master through the doubt of the modern critics more than from the weight of the evidence available.
Many more instances could be cited, and will be cited as we continue this study, as to the vast difference between the God Blessed King James Version and the �inspiration lite� elixir we are served from the purveyors of the many modern versions.
The underlying issue is not a �simpler and more easily understood� version of the Scripture; the issue lies upon that which underlies those �simpler and more easily understood� words.
I could probably make a very readable translation of any work in the French language. Well, I could except for one small problem: I don�t speak French. I would have no idea what the words in front of me were as I prepared my �translation.�
That is essentially the problem of the modern scholars who make these newer translations. They have abandoned the preserved Word of God in the Traditional Text and have substituted this Word for the word which they have decided is the words which God really had meant to be there had He not lost control of the process.
The unmitigated arrogance of this assumption!
Again, James (The Corruption of the Word) explains the mindset of those who deny that God was able to preserve His Word:
�Modern scholarship denies any role for providential preservation in determining the correct text to follow. The church [it is alleged] lost the true text sometime around A. D. 300... This true text was [supposedly] recovered around 1881 and is found in the modern versions.�
The date of 1881 is used above probably because this was the date of the infamous revision of the English Bible by the Hort and Westcott group. They had been commissioned to make revision and updates of the King James Version. Instead they forged an entirely new Greek translation based primarily on the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus manuscripts.
That these were two very old manuscripts is not called into question. What is called into question here is whether or not these were faithful copies of what the original manuscripts contained. Since there are over three thousand differences between the two in just the Gospels, it would seem rather obvious that one or the other, at the least was untrustworthy.
Another thing which calls into question the veracity of this new Greek edition of the New Testament is the fact that the two doctors, Westcott and Hort, had a long history of disdain for the Traditional Text upon which the King James Bible was grounded. The observation could easily be made that if one really has the predilection to search for trash, the landfill is a good place to start.
There were many, many editions of the Scriptures in antiquity which were the product of heretical groups. Many others were the work of sloppy copyists. The early church, energized by the Holy Ghost, would see that these copies were inconsistent with the true copies which they possessed. These flawed copies would end up in a landfill, or more accurately a fire most of the time!
It is interesting to note that one copy of the two, which remain the basis for almost all of the modern translations, was found in the burning barrel of a monastery while the other was culled from the back of the Vatican library where it had not seen the light of day for centuries.
Yet, we are reminded that we must trust the �assured findings� of the critics rather than retain the faith that God could preserve His Own Word.
Donald Grey Barnhouse (The Bible Under Attack) had this to say about trusting the opinions of those who do not trust the Word of God:
Many times the �assured findings� of the critic has been found to be wrong. Until his capital was found, with his name inscribed, critics assured us that Tiglath Pileser of II Kings 15:29 was a fable. Moses could not have written the Pentateuch, we were assured, as there was no such thing as writing in his day. However, tablets predating Moses by centuries have been unearthed - with writing on them! The book of John, we were assured by the scholars, was not written until the third century. It is fable and myth, we were told. �Then a mummy was found in Egypt. There was definite evidence that the funeral of the man thus mummified had taken place about the year A. D. 100. The body was encased in a shroud made of several layers of papyrus leaves. The outer layers were broad leaves; the inner layers were scraps glued together. Scholars at the Ryland Library in Manchester, England, carefully dissolved the glue that held the pieces of the mummy wrapping. Right in the middle was a large fragment from the Gospel of John - proof that the fourth Gospel existed as early as the last decade of the first century. John died about A. D. 90 or later, so this page from his Gospel dates within 10 years of his death.�
The experts can be wrong. These scholars will be wrong when they doubt the power and goodness of God toward His churches.
While there is nothing wrong with Scholarship, ability in this area is among the gifts of God to humanity, there is very much wrong with not trusting the Truth, Love, and Power of The Lord of Hosts!
We will return to this subject, trust in God as opposed to trust in man in examining the doctrine of the Preservation of the Scripture in next week�s session.
***12 August 2005
INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)
I wrote, in a letter to the editor of a local paper, a few weeks ago that there are two mindsets among people. One is that of the theist; the other is that of the secularist. They will both examine the same data and find differing conclusions due to their preconceptions about what the data must say.
The secularist will look at scientific data through his lense of secularism. He will base his findings on his belief that there is no possibility of any supernatural manifestation. Therefore, when confronted with the evidence of the hand of God in any area, he must find a way to rationalize away that fact because it is not consistent with his preconceived view of reality.
The theist, meanwhile, will envision a God Who stands outside of human history. He sees God at the Creative Force which stands outside our known and experienced scientific configurations. He will understand that God is willing to work in history because he will see evidence of this working of God in the past.
When it comes to the doctrine of the preservation of the Scripture, there will also be competing views by those who study the transmission of the inspired Word of God.
Fuller (Counterfeit or Genuine) makes note of this in an important context:
�Many Theologians such as Young and Skilton believe that the doctrine of preservation guarantees only that no point in doctrine had been affected. The fact is that there are passages where variant readings do make a difference to the doctrine. In I Corinthians 15:51, where Paul elaborates on the doctrine of the resurrection, the variants do make a difference to the doctrine. B and the vast majority of Greek manuscripts read: �We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.� But Aleph, A, D, F and G read: �We shall all sleep, but we shall not all be changed.� D adds to the variants: �We shall all rise, but we shall not all be changed.� The Chester Beatty Papyrus reads: �We shall not all sleep, nor shall we all be changed.� It is true that for the most part the differences are small and do not affect doctrine, but there are differences that do affect doctrine.�
The above is why we must assume, from all that we do know about God from His preserved Word, that He would not allow that Word to be lost to humanity and His Own churches. It is just too important a Word to have been lost and then rediscovered, mostly, by men who have an avowed disdain for the power of God to protect that which He has inspired.
In order to have a Word which is worthy of being trusted with the eternal destiny of our immortal souls, we must have a Word which God has not only inspired, but also a Word which He has preserved so that we know for a certainty that which He intended to communicate to us!
There are those who would argue that God has preserved His Word, but that we must search out all the manuscripts and find the one which He used to perform that preservation. Hills (Believing Bible Study) asks, if this is so, �Which one? Has it been found? Do we really have anything which we can trust now!�
We would argue that God has preserved His Word in that textual tradition which has been preserved in His faithful churches down through the centuries. That is, after all, the place where we would expect to find this Word if the Holy Spirit was working upon those churches.
That these churches did remain true to the Word of God must be considered a �given� since they were teaching the doctrine of the Apostles in regards to salvation, and general church policy, down through the ages.
While the great majority of the Western Church was under the spell of the Roman pontiffs and the Latin Vulgate of Jerome, there were many churches which held true to the revealed Word of God as preserved in the precious texts of the Traditional Text.
The Latin Vulgate of Jerome is essentially the text of the modern translations. It is Alexandrian in its base. When Constantine had his politically motivated �vision� of a �cross� to unite his empire, he commissioned Eusubius to procure fifty Bibles to distribute throughout his realm. These Bibles came from the scriptoriums of Alexandria. The Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus are believed to have been two of these Bibles so produced.
As the church accepted the protection of Rome, they also accepted the Bibles of heretics. What followed was an ever descending spiral of departure from the �Faith once delivered.�
The reformation, flawed as it was, was at least a return to a faith in the Bible, rather than the dictates of men, and the Bible of the faith - the Traditional Text which had been kept alive by churches that were persecuted by the Church partly for having the audacity to hold to the ancient Greek texts rather than the Latin which had been allowed, by Church decree, to supplant them.
A quick aside, and one that will probably get me into trouble with some of you: This is exactly the same sort of spirit which pervades many churches today. God gave His Word under inspiration in the original Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic of the Traditional Texts! He did not give His Word in English.
We can revere the King James Bible. And, we should; after all God has given His stamp of approval and blessing on this translation for over four hundred years. We can trust the King James Bible because it is such an accurate translation of the texts which God inspired. But, we cannot claim inspiration for the King James Bible. This was one of the errors of the Roman Church. She put her stamp of approval upon the Latin of Jerome rather than to continue to trust upon the Words which God has singularly inspired in those original manuscripts and the faithful copies of the Same.
We can continue to use the King James Bible. It is the record of the inspired text for the English reader. But, we must not fail to continue to trust in that which God did inspire. Although a good and blessed rendition in English, the KJB is not the originally inspired Word of God.
As we revere our translation, we understand that this is a step in the preservation of God�s Word to God�s people!
We should not, must not!, deny this manifestation of His Grace in allowing us to read and study accurate copies of His Inspired Word.
As for just trusting the �experts� who would undermine our faith that God has considered His Message for us to be important enough to preserve, Hill notes:
�...if it is right to ignore the providential preservation of the Scriptures in the study of the New Testament books, why isn�t it right to go further in the same direction? Why isn�t it right to ignore other divine aspects of the Bible? ... And why isn�t it right to ignore the doctrines of the Trinity and of the incarnation when dealing with the messianic consciousness of Jesus and the Son of man problem?�
To trust God is to trust that He has given us access to His Message. It must be so, if He considered His Message to mankind to be important enough to give in the first place, He must have given it via the medium of inspiration to insure fidelity to His Words. It must also follow, then that He would consider it necessary to preserve this Message. To have failed to preserve would mean that He counted the Message as unimportant. For Him to consider His Message as unimportant is to infer that He did not originally inspire that message.
To have failed to either inspire, or to preserve, would mean that He had allowed both mankind in general and His churches in particular to exist in spiritual darkness for hundreds of years.
Does that really sound like the God of the Bible? If God either did not inspire, or did not preserve, His Words, then this is a meaningless question. In such a case we can have no sure record of either just Who God is, or what He is like.
We trust the Traditional Text because it�s veracity can be traced back to the early days of His churches upon this earth.
We trust the Traditional Text because we trust God.
We will continue upon this same theme next week.
***19 August 2005
INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)
We would contend that the Word of God is sure. It is a Word which has been inspired by the Almighty God Who created the heavens and the earth. But, what good is this if it only applies to a lost set of �original autographs?� To argue such a case is to devalue the meaning of real Bible study to the level of the arcane medieval discussions over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
To ague that the Word is not now in its pristine inspired beauty is to lower our discussions to what might have been, if it was. Then again, maybe it wasn�t. Who can tell if we do not have a preserved Word from God? Without this preserved Word we have nothing upon which to base our doctrine and faith. Feelings are fleeting and changeable. Culture remains in flux and bows to the will of sinful mankind. Only a preserved Word can offer a bedrock of certainty about the important issues of the spiritual reality.
Only a preserved Word can offer anything more than the educated (and, sometimes uneducated!) guess work of fallible man. We need to know that the Words of God are as sure as the Word of God. Without this certainty we have nothing of value.
The theological liberal and the conservative fundamentalist who stands by the newer versions, based on an eclectic text from dubious sources, share a common belief in the reliability of the Scripture.
Back in the latter years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century there was a great debate on the Scripture by the �modernist� and the �fundamentalist.� This debate was about the very nature of the preservation of the Scripture. The modernist view was that the Bible is not the Word of God; it only contains the Word of God.
Hills (Believing Bible Study) argues that this view teaches that God did not preserve His Words. He merely preserved the essential teaching of His doctrine. This, it is said, is found in even the worst manuscripts.
The conservative of this day will deny that he believes it to be true that he only believes that the Bible only contains Word of God. But, when this same conservative argues that the Traditional Text of the Reformation was a flawed text and needs to be updated because of new archeological finds, his argument allows no other conclusion.
The Word is important because it is an accurate rendition of the Words which God inspired.
Consider this situation: A military unit has been forced from a firebase by the enemy. They draw back a few miles and regroup. Then, their commanders informs them that they are going to return to the firebase. How are they told? One commander may argue that, �Men, we are going to go back. You had better make your peace with God before we try this!� Another commander might say, �Gentlemen, we are going back. This time we are going to take our objective, and we are going to hold it!�
The same general information is given in both instances. But the message given forth is different between the two.
Brethren, we don�t want the information about God. We want the Words of God given by inspiration and transmitted to us by preservation. This is the only Word that will edify our souls!
This is what we have!
Hills, again, notes:
�Because the Scriptures are God�s revelation of Himself, eternal, forever relevant, and infallibly inspired, they have been guarded down through the ages by God�s special providence, preserved not secretly but in a public way.�
That public way of preservation is within the true churches of God. It is a fidelity to this Word which has kept the pure churches pure in their doctrinal base. It is a lack of fidelity to this Word which has allowed other churches, and great church bodies, to fall into rank heresy, superstition, and sin!
Look at Matthew 16:15-18. This is the great affirmation of Peter. We have looked at this before but it would be good to look once again.
�He [Jesus] saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.�
Once again I would caution you that Peter is not the Rock upon which Jesus founded His church. There is a Greek play on words in which Peter is identified as part of this Rock. It is very clear that the Rock to which Jesus referred was that confession that Jesus is �...the Christ, the Son of the living God.�
What made Peter part of that church which Jesus founded? It was his adherence to this great statement of faith. We, those of us who are born again in conversion through faith in the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, have every right to consider ourselves as �Peters� in this same sense. He is part of the church even as we are part of the church.
Although an important and active member of the early church, owing much to his status of apostle, there is no New Testament evidence that Peter was ever anything more than a partaker in the work of that church. He is never considered as a supreme authority. That honor, reinforced by the declaration of Peter, belongs only the Jesus Christ, alone!
But, what I want us to notice here is how Peter came to the understanding which gave birth to his great statement of belief. Jesus {verse 17) said, �...flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.�
It is not the pronouncements of ministerial committees and college professors, or even learned Bible critics, which reveals the truths of God to the churches, and by extension to the individual Peters of those churches. The revelation comes from the Father.
It was the Father who inspired the Words which make up the Word. To argue that those words have been lost, and the best we can do now is to study to make an approximation of what they once might have said, is to deny the leading of the Father. That is to, again by extension, cast doubt upon the leading, the goodness, the power, and the teaching of God. It is to say that He gave His Word to people back in Peter�s day, for instance. But today we must trust the men who try to reconstruct that Word.
Flesh and blood did not give us this Word. God did. It was not flesh and blood which preserved it.
God used human men, who wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost under the inspiration of God. (see II Peter 1:21) The men who wrote were mere mortal men. But the God Who inspired their writings is Supernatural and Powerful in that He could take these men and produce His Book.
Preservation, in a real sense, is no different. The copyists who faithfully made copy upon copy of this Word were mortal men. But the Holy Spirit worked to providentially preserve that which had been inspired.
About the men so involved in these great task we must note that these, while mortal men, were faithful servants of God. Other hands wrote other �scriptures,� so called. These false scriptures were rejected by the churches where men were led of the Spirit of God, through the true Words of God.
Notice that Jesus said, in the Scripture quoted above, that the �gates of hell� would not prevail against His churches. This has held true throughout the ages in those churches which have held true to that which has been revealed by God. Those churches which have not trusted this Word of God have been led astray by �flesh and blood.�
May we remain on guard, trusting in His True Word, even in this day.
***26 August 2005
INSPIRATION AND PRESERVATION (Continued)
Once again I have come across the statement that, �God could have preserved His Word, but it is evident that He did not.� Both times I have heard this statement it has been from the mouth and pen of Biblical �educators.� Once again I am drawn to the words of the Apostle Paul from the Book of I Corinthians, chapter two and verse fourteen. �But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.�
Now, I would not question the salvation of either man who said these things. I would not question that they may be committed to the things of God, as far as they understand them. But, I would call into question their understanding of the spiritual nature of this Book.
Gipp (An Understandable History of the Bible) made a rather obvious observation when he said, �It is always to be remembered that the Bible is a spiritual book which God exerted supernatural force to conceive; and it is reasonable to assume that He could exert that same supernatural force to preserve.�
I think it might be helpful to take a short detour from our study of the transmission of the Scripture and look, for a moment, at the spiritual mindset of the natural man and the mind which fully trusts the God of the universe.
To the natural man, and this includes those who name the name of Christ and yet deny the power of God in any area, this world is all that we can know and understand. It is reasonable for such a person to examine evidence and conclude that nature and culture are all we can access to understand our present situation.
This is the mindset of the evolutionary mode, be it of the species, the geological phenomena, or of the transmission of Scripture. �All things are as the natural laws have made them to be. They and will continue to be in flux in obedience to those natural laws.� This is his observation from the natural eye.
To such a one, this is the only logical consensus because that part of his mind which seeks to understand is of the opinion that the natural is all there is. There is no evidence, to him, that there is any force acting upon time which goes beyond the observable, natural laws of nature.
The Christian with this mindset envisions a God who sits back in His celestial easy chair and watches events unfold on His T.V. screen. He may have a great interest in what will happen, but He has just set the drama in motion and now eagerly watches to see what will happen next. This may not be their verbalized view. But, this is the simple extrapolation of their pronouncements on temporal matters.
The theistic mindset, which believes and trusts in the goodness of a Deity, will have another view of things. He will understand that the God Who stands outside the human view of history is, in fact, the Author of that History. The natural laws which we observe in the physical world about us are of His creation. As the Creator of those laws, he has the right, more importantly the ability!, to supercede His Own created laws at any point He sees fit.
This view understands that God loves the world enough to inject His Own purposes into the affairs of man so that man can come to an understanding of the things man needs to know in order to obtain a full life on this earth, and a home in heaven throughout eternity.
We may not understand all of His workings. They may be mystery to us. But we can observe that He has done so. (compare John 3:8)
The person of the natural mindset must, to preserve his self conceived proper order of things, seek to find a reason to rationalize away the supernatural since he cannot accept that this would have taken place. From such comes the �hard science� of evolution. This evolutionary mode is then applied to every sort of endeavor including the theological observations. To the Christian so blinded by the brilliance of human intelligence, this evolutionary mode extends even to his theology.
It is the pride of men who believe that they can understand all, and through extension manipulate all, which comes this statement, �It is obvious that God did not preserve His Word.�
To argue so, even when it comes via the pontification of great (well, large) so-called fundamentalist colleges and universities, is not a voice of studied reason. It is a voice of denial of the role of the supernatural in the real life of the real world in which we live.
Writing in the series of pamphlets on the fundamentals of the faith during the early years of the twentieth century, Bishop (Testimony of the Scriptures to Themselves, article in �The Fundamentals�) defined the mindset of the spiritual Christian:
�On the original parchment [lies inspiration]. Men may destroy that parchment. Time may destroy it. To say that the membranes have suffered in the hands of men, is but to say that everything Divine must suffer, as the pattern Tabernacle suffered, when committed to our hands. To say, however, that the writing has suffered - the words and letters - is to say that Jehovah has failed.�
In Matthew 5:18 Jesus made a very interesting statement. He said, �For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.�
Consider, for a moment, the importance of what He said there. How does this compare to our present discussion? This is important because the very hope which we have of Heaven lies in our response to this question.
Jesus said that �...one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law...� But, the �original autographs� of that law had already passed from the scene. They were gone. So, if Jesus had only taught the concept of �inspiration of the original autograph,� He would have been sadly mistaken on this subject.
If Jesus were mistaken on so important a concept as that of the inspiration of the Scripture, He cannot be Divine. If He is not Divine, He does not have the ability to be the substitute for my sin. Simple linear reasoning screams forth that Jesus cannot be the Savior of your soul if the inspiration of God is limited to the original autographs.
If God could have preserved His Word, �but chose not to do so,� then Jesus is not the Savior of the world. He is only a deluded religious teacher who was unable to understand the concepts of his own teaching.
Think about that! Either the faithful copies of the originals - which contain the same letters, words and phrases, would carry the same inspiration since they would contain exactly the same Words which God gave, were preserved by His power, or we must abandon the very core of our Christian belief.
The only other argument allowed is that Jesus was mistaken in His teaching in Matthew. This, of course, would lead to exactly the same conclusion.
Bishop continues to argue that God led His people to preserve the text in three ways. He makes note that there were many trustworthy copies of the originals made.
These trustworthy copies were then sent over the world as the churches shared these precious manuscripts with other churches of like faith. So, we would expect to find these texts scattered in the writing of men of God from diverse areas.
Second, Bishop continues, these copies were read and recopied by faithful Christians over the many years.
This copying simply means that there would be a linear progression of new texts which were the replicas of the old texts. The old texts may pass from history; but the new texts would continue the same Message. Thus, there would be a great unanimity of texts in all areas. This is unlike the great oldest and best texts of Aleph and B which disagree between themselves 3000+ times in the gospels alone!
Third, Bishop concluded, �...untrustworthy copies were not so generally read or so frequently recopied.�
These untrustworthy copies, in fact, were put aside and ignored while the true copes were used - and used up!
That is how the, so-called, oldest and best, were so well preserved. It is from these ignored copies that the modern Scripture writers try to reconstruct (as best they can) what they argue God was unable, or unwilling, to preserve.
Bishop, once again, summed up the reality of the situation, �The parchments, the membranes, decay; the writings, the words, are eternal as God.�
The reality of the situation is that we either have a preserved written Word which we can trust to give us the Message of God, or we have no Living Word to Whom we can entrust our eternal souls.