THE OLD MSS. (Continued)
As we continue to look into the work of the translating committee of the 1881 English Revision, Fuller (True or False) reminds us that the ��principle adopted by Lachman, and followed with well-nigh calamitous results by his successors, including Drs. Westcott and Hort � Is based upon the tacit assumption that there existed in the fourth century a Greek Text which was generally accepted, and which was also virtually pure. But it is now recognized that the very worst corruptions of the original writings are those which occurred prior to this time.�
I don�t need to go back and examine all the sources of error in some of these early texts. We have discussed copyist error and heretical alteration. We have also discussed how those eventualities were weeded out of the stream of textual evidence by the volume of manuscripts available. We have discussed the great attestation to the Traditional Text as the preserved pure text of the inspired originals.
We have also discussed the great divergence of witness between the Traditional Text and the text of the Alexandrian witnesses. We have seen this �family� of texts from Alexandria to be faulty.
Since this, the Alexandrian text type, was the stream in which the Westcott/Hort committee of 1881 fished to find their trout of texts, we must ask the same question as does Fuller, when he continues:
��if we are right in our view that the principle we are discussing [the reliance upon B and Aleph] is utterly unsound, is contrary to the rules of evidence, and is certain to lead astray those who submit to its guidance, we have taken the foundation completely from under the Revision Version of 1881 and of every other Version that rests upon the same corrupt Greek Text, or one constructed upon the same principles.�
The principle of a �pure� text back in the fourth century is a reasonable principle. It is true. But, to further argue that this �pure� text was lost is not true. This concept flies in the face of the power of God to preserve His Own message to mankind.
Was the pure text ever available? Of course. It was available in those much discussed �autographs.� Those original texts, inspired of God, were certainly pure. Of that there can be no doubt.
The question must be asked as to why God gave this message to humanity. The answer, of course, is that God cares for His creation. In the fall mankind had lost access to fellowship with God. Man had become a creature of sin. Since sin is abhorrent to God, man was no longer able to enjoy that Divine fellowship for which he had been created.
God wished to allow man to reclaim that rightful place as a special creation of God. In His message to man God would accomplish two things to facilitate this rapprochement. Man was shown that he was a fallen and sinful creature. Man was also shown the holiness and grandeur of God.
With these lessons learned, man would be prepared to accept the antidote for his sin nature, the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross of Calvary. Man could then become a fit vessel for the Holy Spirit to give full meaning and direction to his life.
But, there remained a problem. God would be teaching of things spiritual. Man was a creature of things temporal. There was no frame of reference for man to understand the spiritual truths which he would be taught. Through the use of parable and example God would be able to give a message which man could comprehend.
Still, it would be necessary to be very precise in His speaking for God to teach what it was that man would need to learn. Because of this need, God inspired His message to mankind. He used the very words and phrases which He knew would give mankind an understanding of that which God wished man to learn.
Following this reasoning, it is only logical to continue that God would so oversee His message as to insure that it would remain pure. This is an action of the same love which gave the message.
Since the Love of God is constant, there is no chance that He would ever withdraw His protecting hand from this message. The only way His message to mankind could ever be lost would be if someone were able to wrest that Word from His hand.
That is essentially what is suggested by those who would argue that there was a pure text in the fourth century but it was corrupted by the hand of man.
We are told that church councils, sloppy copyists, heretical additions and deletions, and even a page torn from the end of Mark�s Gospel, have distorted the message which God so lovingly gave to mankind. And, apparently, we are asked to believe that God was unable to prevent this from happening!
Now we are told that mankind, the same group of humanity which �lost� the pure text sometime after the fourth century, is going to restore what God has lost. Men may never get it right; but, they can certainly come closer to what God might have said in His original works. That is what we are told.
I would prefer to trust that the God Who holds my souls eternal destiny has the power to have preserved His Own Word! I would prefer to trust that the God Who sent His Own Son to die in my place has the love to have preserved His Own Word! I would prefer to say, �Thus saith the Lord,� because I know that He did say what He has preserved for me in His Word.
God is eternal. His Word is eternal as it flows from Him. Neither can be improved upon by even the best works of man.
We will pick up, next week, this theme as we look at these Alexandrian texts which were the basis of the Revision of 1881, and remain the bedrock of the newer English versions even to this day.
12 May 2006
THE OLD MSS. (Continued)
We continue to look into the work of the Revision Committee of the 1881 English Revised Version. The reason we come back to this revision is that the text which was developed as a base for this version remains the bedrock text of nearly all of the modern English versions.
This, itself, is based on a fallacy. The contention of the revisers of 1881, and their children and grandchildren of critical study, was that there was a pure text, the Alexandrian, in the fourth century. This pure text was then lost for over one thousand years. A corollary of this is the view that the Traditional Text, which was the basis of not only the King James Bible but also most of the national translations of the Protestant Reformation, is a flawed text.
This view will consider the Traditional Text to be an �official revision� of some early church council, or simply the product of thousands of copyist errors, which has gained acceptance but is not the pure text of the inspired record which God gave to mankind.
To repeat myself, once again, this is not a view of faith. Faith would dictate that God, Who gave His message to mankind because it was important - and inspired that message so as to guarantee the purity of the message, would not have either lost control of His Own message, or counted it so unimportant as to allow it to be lost to mankind.
The view of the revisers does not allow for the preserving power of the Hand of God in His message to mankind. Their apologist�s may argue that this is not the case. They may claim to find the true message in �all of the manuscripts.� This view argues that the true text of God is, actually, nowhere. It is not a text that one can hold aloft and say, �Thus saith the Lord,� because it has fragmented into many parts in various locations. Under this view the only way to find the true Words of God is to hope that man may do the best job humanly possible of reconstructing what God has lost. Followed to its logical conclusion, this view argues for the non-preservation of the message of God. Hence, we can not be rightly called �A People of the Book,� because we have no access to the sure rendering of the words of that Book.
Without that sure rendering of the words of that Book, we have no sure salvation or spiritual future because we have no sure picture of the God Who first gave the revelation of Himself. The only thing we can be certain of, in this view, is that God does not care whether or not we gain an unobscured picture of Him. He asks only that we consider His existence and Person on the basis of the natural revelation of nature.
Since nature, and natural means, has worked to obscure His Word, we must find nature to be superior to His care and revelation. Thus, we are left without a caring God Who loves mankind. We are left with a custodial God who set things in motion and now eagerly awaits the outcome of His work. We are left without a God of Eternity since His plan is only to be revealed, even to Him, in the workings of time.
This is the result of the mindset of the critics who hearken back to the texts of Egypt as they jettison the preserved Traditional Text. If we do accept the Alexandrian text we cannot accept the Traditional Text since the two are markedly dissimilar.
MacLean (The Providential Preservation of the Greek Text of the New Testament) addresses just one issue of variation between the two text traditions. This is, however, a very important variation.
�These two Mss. [Aleph and B] and a few others containing a similar text, present in a weakened form, many of the passages of Holy Scripture which speak most plainly of the deity of the Son of God. The trend of Biblical scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been towards a �humanitarian� view of the person of Christ. It does not surprise us that many modern scholars should welcome the support of these two ancient documents, but it saddens us to see so many earnest evangelical Christians ready to accept without question a theory so destructive to the faith once delivered to the saints.�
It is interesting to note this lack of support in the Alexandrian textual tradition for the deity of Jesus. When we consider some of the influences of both Origen and the religious scene of Egypt in the early days of the churches we can easily understand the weakening of this doctrine.
The doctrine of the deity of Christ was a very early doctrine of the churches. In Philippians 2:6 Paul, under inspiration, declares of Jesus, �Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.� The date of this Book is in the 50�s A.D. Rather than a late addition, imposed by some church council, the belief in the full deity of Jesus is one of the foundational doctrines of the churches.
However, Origen and the influence of the Gnostic sect in early Egypt, did not accept this doctrine. They sought to make the record of Scripture conform to their belief system. In short, they �cooked the books,� so to speak. Those manuscripts upon which the modern versions are based were altered so as to encourage doctrinal stances opposed to the apostles teaching.
The deity of Christ was opposed by some of these early sects. They wanted to make Jesus simply a man who was attuned to the spiritual forces of the cosmos. They might have been willing to accept a spiritualized Christ, but they did not want to consider the divine God/Man of Jesus, who was the Christ. He may have been considered a man who was endued with the Christ Spirit, or he may have been considered an ethereal spirit who masqueraded as a man, but they could not accept that Jesus was an actual human being while being God incarnate.
Thus, they changed the record. Sometimes they only changed the record slightly, so as to make it more palatable. But, change the record they did.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the divinity of Christ is under attack by theologians today who have been trained to accept these texts as the true message from God. We see this same error in popular culture of this day more than we would have in the past when the Traditional Text was accepted as the base of our Bibles.
It takes faith to accept these newer versions based on these corrupted texts. But, it is not a faith in God. It is a faith that in man. It is a faith that denies the possibility or a God preserved text and accepts the probability that man has neatly reconstructed a text which God either could not, or would not, preserve for His people and His churches.
Fuller (True or False) argues:
��the Author of Scripture is discovered to have furnished his household, the Church, with (roughly speaking) 1000 copies of the Gospels with twenty versions, two of which go back to the beginning of Christianity, and with the writings of a host of ancient Fathers. Why out of this 1000 mss. two should be singled out by Drs. Westcott and Hort for special favor, to the practical disregard of the rest, why versions and Fathers should by them be similarly dealt with, should be practically set aside in fact as a whole, we fail to discover.�
The answer to Fuller�s question is easily understood. Satan. When the Living Word of God walked this earth, Satan tried to cause Him to misstep. Satan could not do so. Now we have the Written Word of God in this world. Satan has shifted his attack to this Word.
Satan does not want mankind to trust God. That is why he asked Eve, �Yea, hath God said�?� in the Garden. That is why we have so many conflicting versions on the market in this day. Satan wants to spread confusion, to be sure. But, more than this, Satan wants to spread a lack of faith in God into the world. One way that he can do this is to move the faith of mankind from the God Who gave us the Scripture toward the man who has recovered the lost Scripture.
Man is displayed as more powerful than God. God could not preserve His Scripture. But, man has managed to recover what God could not control.
Man is displayed as more loving than God. God would not preserve His Scripture. But man has gone to the extreme of piecing together what God would not keep together. It is like a variation on the wedding vow: What God has put asunder, let man put back together.
Man is displayed as more intelligent than God. God could not keep His Scripture intact. Man has used his intellect to reconstruct the Words by which man must live.
In Revelation we read of the number 666. Three, in Biblical numerology is a number related to the trinity of God; six is the number of man. In theory 666 could be a picture of man making himself to appear as God. Don�t try to build doctrine on this paragraph! But, isn�t it interesting that here, at the end of the age, man has tried to replace God as the �author and finisher� of the Words of Life?
Fuller (Which Bible) also noted that, �God will preserve the text against permanent or destructive error, although He does not guarantee the accuracy of any one manuscript. It means also that Satan will do everything in his power to corrupt the text��
But, God has promised to keep His Word pure in the world of men. That is, after all, the reason that He gave it in the first place. Although man has corrupted some of the texts, God has seen that around ninety percent of the manuscript evidence still resides in the pure text of the Traditional Text.
19 May 2006
THE OLD MSS. (Continued)
In their work of constructing a new base text for their new translation of 1881, the committee of Westcott and Hort had to find a way to argue against the great bulk of evidence of the Traditional Text. Remembering that somewhere between 85% and 95% of the extant witnesses and translations of antiquity support the Traditional Text, it is easy to see their problem.
They did not want to retain the prevailing text. I, honestly, believe that the reasons for this were spiritual rather than historical. Man, in his natural state, chafes at the possibility that he must submit to the dictates of God. These are anathema to mankind because mankind, in the person of Adam, turned his back on, and walked away from, God in the Garden. Since that time mankind has been bound to the slavery of a sin nature which is alienated from God.
It takes the Spirit of God, working upon the life of the person who has accepted Jesus Christ as Savior, to bring men to the true understanding of spiritual realities.
In a master stroke of fictional belief motivated by a need to explain the unexplainable, Westcott and Hort made up a story that there had been a great revision of the Scripture during a church council. They blamed it on the work of Lucian in about 350 A.D.. This official revision was why the Traditional Text predominated the record. Only the pure text of Alexandria, and a few others, had escaped this revision.
Never mind that there was not a single piece of evidence to even suggest that this had happened. The committee had their smoking gun. Unfortunately, the smoke from this gun was just that, vapor and illusion. It only existed in the minds of this committee.
About the modern-day translations, James (The Corruption of the Word) makes the observation that although few modern scholars support a Lucian revision of the Greek Text, most do see the Traditional Text as an official revision, possibly of the 4th century.
�History provides no support for the above conjecture. No document from any century even hints that an official revision of the Greek New Testament ever took place. We do know the history of the revision of the Latin Vulgate, the Syriac versions, and the Georgian and American version. But the evidence for a church wide Greek revision is non-existent.�
As to this �revision,� Fuller (True or False) adds that Dr. Hort,
��invites us to believe that the mistaken textual judgment pronounced at Antioch in A.D. 350 had an immediate effect on the text of Scripture throughout the world. We are requested to suppose that it resulted in the instantaneous extinction of all codices like B [and] Aleph, wherever found; and caused codices of the A type to spring up like mushrooms in their place��
To accept this is a leap of faith. Or, should I say �Unfaith?�
After all, as Fuller (Which Bible?) again argues:
�If the Traditional Text was late and inferior, how could it have so completely displaced earlier and better texts in the usage of the Church? � Naturalistic textual critics will never be able to answer this question until they are ready to think �unthinkable thoughts.� They must be willing to lay aside their prejudices and consider seriously the evidence which points to the Traditional (Byzantine) Text as the True Text of the New Testament.�
Again, we must consider the purpose for which God inspired the Scripture. He did it so that humankind, specifically the born-again people of His churches, would have a Word from Him that was certain. He wanted a certain Word because He had a certain message. He was giving instruction in things spiritual to a people who were living in a material world. Thus, to make the understandings of these people clear, He had to make His message clear; He did this by the medium of inspiration through which He gave the very words by which He wanted to convey that message.
Only by preserving that message could He insure that it would remain pure. The role of the Holy Spirit in this was to lead the people of God�s churches into the truth of God�s Words.
If this were not accomplished, it would call into question the role of God in giving His message, the role of the Holy Spirit in the retaining of that message, and the role of the very message, Itself, if it were deemed so unimportant as to not be in current usage among the people of God.
For those very people to whom the message was given to vacate that message and absorb another in such a wholehearted manner is to raise those very questions.
This view, that there was an official revision of the Scripture but that there remains no hint of this event in history, also fails and a human level. To gain some idea of how hard it would be for an �official� text produced by the �leading religious professions� of the day to overtake the established text, consider what you are now reading. Consider the current controversy over an �official� text which the �leading religious professionals� of this day have produced in an effort overthrow the text underlying the King James Version.
Consider, also, the writings of the �Church Fathers� in relation to the heretics of their day. Would these men have remained completely silent in the face of an official revision? Would we not expect that they would have either defended or decried this event, had it happened?
Not only is it unlikely that there was any church council, or otherwise, revision of the Scriptural record which produced the Traditional Text, such an assertion flies in the face of both reason and theology.
Yet, the argument, basically, of Westcott, Hort, and the Revision Committee of 1881 - and followed by all of the revisionist critics of the ensuring one-hundred-and-twenty-five years, is that the text of the non-existent revision which produced the Traditional Text was so successful that it colored the face of nearly every piece of ensuring evidence.
These persons would also argue that the God inspired text was lost to history until men began to reclaim it from the dust bin of God�s forgetfulness and inattention.
To such a mindset, Fuller (True or False) has asked:
��if it be allowable to assume (with Dr. Hort) that for 1532 years, (vis. From 350 to A.D. 1882) the Antiochian standard has been faithfully retained and transmitted, it will be impossible to assign any valid reason why the inspired original itself, the apostolic standard, should not have been so faithfully transmitted and retained from the apostolic age to the Antiochian, i.e. throughout an interval of less than 250 years.�
The unspoken, although apparent, answer to Dr. Fuller�s question above is that man is deemed more capable of the preservation of a polluted template than God is allowed to be in retention of the pure words which He deemed important enough to inspire for mankind�s benefit. This is the mind of faith of the critic who decries the non-preservation which he sees in the transmission of the pure Words of God.
This, I submit, is not an evidence of a faith in God. It is an evidence of a faith in man! Man is, thus, deemed the keeper of the Book and the arbitrator of the message of that Book. God is deemed as either an uninterested spectator in the drama, or a facilitator who has not the power of man to control the message.
Either view borders on complete heresy!
I must disagree with Fuller (Which Bible?) when he says, �The main objection to be raised against the Westcott - Hort hypothesis of the Syrian recessions is that there is no record whatsoever in history of such occurrences.� This is certainly a major argument against that theory. But, I believe the main objection is spiritual. Is the Bible the Word of God? If it is, would He have the power to preserve His Own Word? If it is, would He have the purpose to preserve His Own Word?
I believe that the answer to both of those questions is, �Yes. Of course!� This is also the answer of history as we consider the great bulk of evidence in favor of the Traditional Text.
26 May 2006
THE OLD MSS. (Continued)
This week I�d like to consider some of the ancient witnesses to the true text of Scripture from among some of the early translations. These are quite illustrative.
One of the most oft repeated phrases among Bible critics who have decided to jettison the God preserved Traditional Text is that, �The oldest text is the best text.� We have spent weeks refuting this falsehood. The oldest texts are indeed the best if you are talking about the original autographs. But, the very next generation if it be copied by a sloppy copyist, or one who has a theological desire to correct what he deems to be, because of his own doctrinal stance, mistakes in wording or phraseology, may be quite impure.
Make no mistake. These things did happen. God kept control of His true text through the very volume of copies which were made. An error in one copy would not be made in other copies made by other copyists at other locations. An individual error, or series of errors, would only infect a small percentage of the manuscript base. Thus, when we have only from five to fifteen percent which disagree with our Traditional Text, it is easy to see in which text tradition the error lies.
Also, as to the �oldest� manuscripts, Fuller (Which Bible?) makes the notation that, ��we possess �versions� (or translations) which are older than any known MSS; and the writings of the early Fathers abound in quotation from the New Testament.� The fact of the matter is that the great majority of these translations agree with the Traditional Text.
I believe that the protecting Hand of God was upon those early translations. This is not to say that those translations were inspired. They were not. God only inspired His original written Words. To move the imprimatur from these originally inspired Words to the words of any translation would be to weaken the intent and purpose of original inspiration. This just is not reasonable.
I quote here from my own work, �The Tree at Marah:�
�I do know that God could have only given full inspiration to one set of writings - the Words of the originals. After all, He is a God of Power; He is not a God of absurdity. If God did, indeed, give His Word perfect and established forever, inspired in the words of the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, it had to be perfect.
�It could only remain perfect in exact copies of those originals. To allege that this perfection was moved from these Words to the words of any translation, even the KJB, is to say that God was mistaken in His assertion that the original inspiration was perfect. I am not ready to say that God was mistaken!
�The only other possible argument I could see, to claim inspiration for the King James Bible, would be that He had inspired the words of the KJB as well. Again absurdity raises its reasonable head. To inspire the KJB in such a way is to say that God had decided on an ending program for His first stab at an eternal Word.
�Again, this would bring into question as to whether or not God had made a mistake in His first try at a Scripture that was "...settled in Heaven." (Psalm 119:89)
�This also begs the question of how long our KJB would remain as the Word of God.
�This throws our entire concept of inspiration into turmoil. We have ripped from our faith that upon which our faith is founded: The Unalterable Word of God.
�Not only that but we are suddenly presented with a God Who is not the Unchanging One. He is become a vacillating Sovereign Whose pronouncements we can only trust for we know not how long. What is to become of the promise of our eternal salvation if God would change His mind on so important a factor as His very message to us?
�Worse still!, this sort of occurrence would bring into question the entire cosmology of Who we understand God to be. We understand God to be The God of Eternity. If He would choose to do away with His promise of an eternal Word in a time-centric manner, where does this place our understanding of Heaven, and of Hell, and of the very nature of God, Himself?�
This was speaking of the King James Bible; the concept follows over into other translations as well. Still, I believe that the translations, such as the King James Bible, which was made to faithfully represent the words of the originals, are blessed of God as representatives of His True Words in another language. Though they may not carry the weight of inspiration, they still - as they are true to the original Words which were given by God, carry the authority of His message to man.
J. J. Ray (God Wrote Only One Bible) has said, of the Peshitta, ��the Peshitta was translated from the Greek vulgate into Syrian about 150 A.D.� The words �vulgate,� here, simply means the common, ordinary words then in vogue. It is the words and speech of the common man which is represented. Extending this concept, we must consider that the Peshitta (A Syrian version) was translated from the text which was most common in its day.
Ray continues, ��the Peshitta, even today generally follows the Received Text� This is another proof that the foundations for the King James Bible are older and more reliable than the Codex Vaticanus which was elevated to the chair of authority by Westcott and Hort.�
If, as Westcott and Hort argued, there was an official revision in the fourth century which produced the Traditional Text, how was this version - which agrees with the Traditional Text - produced in the second century?
I might mention that many do not, today, accept this date for the Peshitta. They argue that it should be much later. I disagree. We�ll look at this conflict in a few weeks. But, for now, I would note that the main reason for assigning a later date for the Peshitta is on linguistic grounds - the argument is made that it too closely follows the Traditional Text to have been this early.
That sounds more like protecting ones reputation and core belief than it sounds like true scholarship!
Many do not realize that there were also Latin translations which were made prior to the work of Jerome.
Fuller (Which Bible?) says, of these,
�The Old Latin texts, like the other versions, are of two kinds; both the Traditional Text and the forms of corruption find a place in them. Augustine wrote, �In the earliest days of the faith whenever any Greek codex fell into the hands of anyone who thought that he had a slight familiarity with Greek and Latin, he was bold enough to attempt to make a translation.� The Old Latin evidence varies so much that it seems almost certain that several separate ancient translations from different Greek codices are represented by it. Much, but by no means all, of the Old Latin evidence is favorable to the Traditional Texts.� There is also small testimony ��of a very few manuscripts�� which favor the Vaticanus, the Sinaitic, the Vulgate (of Jerome), the Douay, and many of the modern versions. �So the present controversy between the King James Bible in English and the modern version is the same contest fought out between the early church and rival sects��
Some things never seem to change.
The important thing to note here, however, is that even among competing �brands� of translation into the Latin, the Traditional Text is the preponderant view. As to their majority, Fuller again comments.
�Since Italy, France, and Great Britain were once provinces of the Roman Empire, the first translations of the Bible by the early Christians in those parts were made into Latin. � Latin Bibles were well established before these churches came into conflict with Rome. �such translations [were] in existence long before the Vulgate was adopted by the Papacy.� These Latin Bibles followed the Syrian Text which we call the Textus Receptus.
Remember that it was the Textus Receptus, the Traditional Text, which was the basis for the King James Bible. The term, �Textus Receptus,� simply means �The Received Text.� We have simply received that which God has given - His Words to us!
The Waldenses also were a people of a pure Book. Of these, Fuller (Which Bible?) gives a short history.
��at the famous Council of Toulouse, 1299 A.D., the Pope gave orders for the most terrible crusade to be waged against the simple Christians of Southern France and Northern Italy who would not bow to his power. Cruel, relentless, devastating, this was war waged, destroying the Bible books, and every vestige of documents telling the story of the Waldenses and Albigenses.�
Fuller further quotes from Gilly (Waldensian Researches) who says,
���the opinions of the Waldenses were not new to Europe in the eleventh or twelfth centuries, and there is nothing improbable in the tradition, that the Subalpine Church preserved in its integrity in an uninterrupted course from the first preaching of the Gospel in the valleys.� There are many earlier historians who agree with this view (Allix, Leger, Gilly, Combra, Nolan). It is held that the pre-Waldensian Christians of northern Italy could not have had doctrines purer than Rome unless their Bible was purer than Rome�s��
Fuller also makes note that �The Waldenses of northern Italy � Were successful in retaining the torch of truth until the Reformation took it from their hands and held it aloft to the world.�
The point of these peoples is that God held, even through the darkest of the Dark Ages, a people for His Name. He did the same with His Word. When these Christians made copies of their Bibles available to the Reformation saints, that was the same Word which God had given to those Protestant Reformers.
We do have a Word we can trust because we have the God we can trust!
PRESENTS
Bible Study
for
May
2006