TRANSLATION METHODS (Continued)
The truth of the matter is that the translation committee of Drs. Westcott and Hort just dismissed all confidence in the Traditional Text as misplaced. Never mind that the Hand and Blessing of God had been displayed on the translations which reflected the Traditional Text; Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort assure us that the Traditional Text is a false text. Rather than even give any consideration to the Hand of God in the history of the churches which revered this text, we have the truth of the scholarship of Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort to the contrary.
Never mind that the Hand and Blessing of God had been displayed on the translations which reflected the Traditional Text; Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort assure us that the Traditional Text is a false text. These two authorities, and their Committee and scholarship are to be accepted above the leading of the Holy Spirit among individual Christians, churches, and movements in the Baptist and Protestant circles which had sought to bring faith to the masses by a trust in the preserved words of Scripture.
Never mind that the Hand and Blessing of God had been displayed on the translations which reflected the Traditional Text; Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort assure us that the Traditional Text is a false text. Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort assure us that all of the great societal changes in the several hundred years since there had been a general return to the Traditional Text as the underpinning for the vernacular translations were the result of God choosing to bless a reliance upon a false text.
Slavery among the Christianized world was nearly eradicated under the influence of those who held to translations of Scripture based on the Traditional Text. Democracy had come to be a driving force in the political lives of those who were under the influence of those who held to translations of Scripture based on the Traditional Text. The use of the Inquisition to force religious conversions had given way to the use of invitations to �walk the sawdust trail� to freely accept the gift of eternal life in Jesus Christ among those who held to translations of Scripture based on the Traditional Text.
Libraries, hospitals, general aid societies and the generally favorable view of philanthropy were in evidence among those who held to translations of Scripture based on the Traditional Text.
Everything was not perfect. June Cleaver did not meet �Wally and the Beav� at the door of every home with apple pie and milk. But, the general thrust of society was an effort the respect the worth of the individual. Religious, and even civil, authoritarianism was seen giving way to at least an outward display of civility and respect.
Sure, not all was great. The fact of sin was still in evidence. Man was still a fallen creature in need of The Savior. But the influence of the True Scripture which God had preserved for mankind was being felt throughout society.
Contrast this with the general direction of society in the fifty, or so, years since the modern language editions, and even the religious teaching of too many seminaries, have begun to erode faith in the Traditional Text and throw the entire faith culture onto the ice flow of the eclectic texts where those words which are allowed to be considered as the Words of God are only those which have been allowed to pass through the filter of men who lack to faith the accept a God who is able and willing to preserve His message to mankind.
When a person deliberately refuses to accept the Words of God we see people who display a weak faith. We no longer see a compulsion to stand for anything. The religion devolves into a stand against things. We see theologians and pastors who decry homosexuality as a sin against God. While we do this these same men all too often fail to see the homosexual as a person who God loves and wishes to call to repentance. We see those who rail against abortion and see this as a crime against the next generation of humanity. While we see this done we also fail to see the bulk of the �Christian world� go into the highways and hedges and seek the sinner in love - thereby spiritually aborting the next generation of children of the King! We are asked sign petitions to keep same sex marriage illegal. While this is done we see a general failure to woo the sinner that he might partake of the marriage supper of the Lamb.
When a church, or group of churches, refuses to accept the Words of God we see a loss of Spiritual vitality and outreach. We witness great symposiums and read scholarly papers which tend to tear down the faith of the average person in the pew. While this is done we see those who lament the lack of �baptisms� in their churches Sometimes this seems more because these are not allowed to collect the �tithes and offerings� of these new people who are not see won to a place in the pews of those churches. Sometimes this lament seems more over the problem this causes in building a political base for passing new laws to protect those churches and enhance endeavors of these ministries of the new eclectic texts.. Sometimes we witness those who do not even notice the lost and dying in the world as they keep their focus in the rarified air of the Protestant Monastery of Academia instead of the World in which Jesus walked.
When a society, as a whole, does not have the �spice� of the true Christian praying the influence of the Holy Spirit into that society, we have a society which is given over to the unholy spirit.
I believe that Jesus was speaking of Satan when he said, �The thief cometh not; but for to steal and to kill, and to destroy...� (John 10:10a) When the society and man is denied the Words of God, we see that society reverting to a Satanic condition. The newspapers were never filled with stories of the good things in life; that much I do understand. But, was there ever a time when the newspapers where so filled with murder and theft? Our personal home once witnessed fourteen break ins in a twelve month period.
Some of the murder is even glorified. Abortions and euthanasia are debated as individual rights rather than as violence directed at another of God�s creations.
Wars are fought in the name of religion rather than condemned as acts of oppression and brutality. This concept encompasses more than simply national wars. There are also class wars being fought in society and in the halls of legislatures. One side will argue that �Your beliefs have no place in this discussion.� The other side will argue that �My beliefs are more important than your beliefs.�
Both sides are speaking of moralistic beliefs which are based on their core ethical belief system. The one side will do this from their view of personal values while the other claims to do this from their understanding of Biblical principles. The problem with this is that the one who makes his claim from Scripture generally has no Scripture that he can honestly trust. His idea of Scripture is based on a belief, and a text, which argues that God could not, or did not, preserve His message to man. Therefore the claim of both is based on their own core value systems because he lacks a Scripture in which he can trust as the preserved Words of God..
It does make a difference what one believes about the preservation of Scripture.
In our next session we will return to our study outline and consider this dismissal of the Traditional Text from Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort.
11 May 2007
TRANSLATION METHODS (Continued)
In our last session we were beginning to address the fact that the core belief, and thus the translation method, of Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort was that God had not preserved His Word through the ages. They believed, and their scholarship reflected, that the Traditional Text of history was a flawed and compromised text.
I drifted in polemic last week. I believe that everything I said was true. But our purpose here is to look at the facts rather than simply opinions - even if they be my excellent opinions! (I rarely find cause to disagree with myself. I am joking here but I think that the evidence we�ve already covered, and that we will cover, will back my contention of the Spiritual superiority of the Traditional Text as a base from which to make translation into the vernacular. The case being made is that this is the Text given and preserved from the Hand of God.)
These men, Westcott and Hort, honestly believed that it would be best for the Christian world to have this Traditional Text overthrown. To that end they completely dismissed the Traditional Text as a base for their translation work.
Now we must ask whether this view of theirs was based on reality or perception. My writing last session was basically an editorial. I believe it to be completely true. I still do, for that matter. The point is that my writing stemmed from my understanding and bias about the situation among those who have chosen to dismiss the Traditional Text and the preserving power of God over this text.
The question arises as to whether Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort also appealed to their personal bias about the very same subject matter, or whether they sought evidence to support a theory which precluded the unbroken transmission of the Traditional Text as a sign of God�s Hand of preservation upon this text.
Fuller (True or False) argues that the dismissal of the Traditional Text by the translating committee of 1881, lead by Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort, had its genesis in a predilection to supplant the Traditional Text which colored their approach to whatever evidence was either allowed or disallowed.
�...Hort must have seen that to achieve his end [of supplanting the Received Text] he had to have a convincing history of the text - he had to be able to explain why essentially only one type of text was to be found in the mass of later manuscripts and show how this explanation justified the rejection of this type of text.�
The problem in trying to overthrow the Traditional (or Received) Text is that this is the text of history. This is the text type which is found in all areas of the Christianized world. This is the dominant text type. Almost all of the available evidence points to the Traditional Text type.
This presents a problem to any who would seek to dismiss the Traditional Text and replace it with another template.
We have discussed over the past several sessions that Westcott and Hort argued for an early church council which standardized the competing textual variations into a homogenized version from which our Traditional Text was born. This has been shown to be a fiction. There is not one word in history until the 1881 translation committee promulgated this story to even suggest such a church council. Besides this, there are many instances of early church �Fathers� who wrote using the distinctive readings of the Traditional Text before this alleged council is supposed to have occurred.
However, it is true that much of the evidence for the Traditional Text comes from later manuscripts. It is not as generally acknowledged, but still true, that much of the evidence for the Traditional Text also comes from very early sources to include manuscript, lectionary, and writings of those aforementioned �Church Fathers.�
The reason that much of the evidence comes from later manuscripts is simple to understand and varied. The cost in time and coin to copy the manuscripts by hand was large. A manuscript, once completed and authenticated as a true copy, would be used until it literally fell apart. Much as we do with our torn and tattered national flags, those worn manuscripts would often be burned. Others would have been confiscated by the authorities during the various persecutions and burned by those opposed to these readings.
The fact that much of the manuscript evidence is late is remarkable only in consideration of the preserving power of God that these manuscripts were still being copied from the same ancient template. Late manuscript evidence is not a monument to change, it is a monument to the preserving power of God and His Words to man.
The very fact that an ancient manuscript has survived is a caution flag to question the reason for its survival. When the surviving manuscript then is at great variance with the evidence preserved by the pious throughout the centuries, this is reason to doubt the veracity of the manuscript which was allowed to lie unused for so many centuries.
Is it reasonable to expect that God would have allowed the false to triumph over the true for so many centuries if the false were a perversion of His important Message to mankind? Can we really surmise that the God of Power and Love would allow His Own Message to be shunted aside in favor of a frail imitation?
To argue this is to question the argument that salvation is available through the substitutionary atonement of Christ alone. After all, have not other options toward salvation been given by men of good character and conscience in the past? If God would honor a false presentation of His Message, would it not follow that He would also allow a false presentation of salvation? If He has blessed one which supplanted His original intent with His favor and grace, would not He bless the other?
If it were possible that the Traditional Text was wrong, what are we to suppose would be the correct text? There were many spurious texts in the early days of the churches. Some were made by sloppy copyist. Some were made by heretics who sought to conform the Scripture to their teachings.
This, the multiplicity of false texts in antiquity, is one of the evidences of the veracity of the Traditional Text. All of the false were subjugated under the weight of the True, and God preserved, text of God�s original composition.
History records the existence of many false Christ�s, and many false Messiah�s, and many false religious traditions which often mirrored those of Christianity in those early years. All of the false were subjugated, even lost to the general memory of mankind, under the weight of the True. God has effected this same cleansing power on the transmission of His Word.
There were many competing textual streams. Only the true had any real possibility to gain the statistical preponderance which the Traditional Text has enjoyed in the history, and the geography, of the churches which name the Name of Christ.
Westcott and Hort argued that the Traditional Text must be dismissed because it was simply a homogenization of readings which were �pressed together� to make a text which would be acceptable to everyone. Fuller (True or False) questions how it was determined just what was added, and from where, and where it was �glued� together to make new template.
�...we have only the word of two scholars ... That they [Westcott and Hort] have been able [how, they do not explain, and presumably we should be unable to understand the process if they did) to resolve this composite Text into its original constituent elements.�
But, this argument must be conceded as fact if these men were to ask the entire church world to accept their theory that the Traditional Text were faulty.
Thus, the argument that the Traditional Text is false was a precondition to accepting that the �Revised� Text was true. What we have is an hypothesis built upon a preconceived opinion which is shown to be an unprovable flight of fancy. The King James Bible, and the Text upon which it is founded, is to be called false in this argument because the eclectic text of Westcott and Hort is said to predate it. The eclectic text is said to predate the Traditional Text because that Traditional Text is the product of a church council.
However, there is not a shred of evidence that this �church council� ever happened. Thus, the hypothesis built upon it is without foundation. This is shown to be a false hypothesis (the supposed superiority of the Revised Text) founded upon a fiction. This sort of reasoning might make for a good novel, but it is not indicative of the workings of the God of the Universe.
Fuller, again, points out the absurdity of the attempt to jettison the God preserved Traditional Text on the basis of the scholarship of Westcott and Hort.
�...we have only the word of two scholars ... That they [Westcott and Hort] have discerned that the Received text was formed by the �conflation,� or fusing together, sometime previous to the 4th century, of two primitive Texts of Scripture...�
This is no way to treat the Words which God gave man via the medium of inspiration. This is no Word which can be trusted as it presupposed a weak God Who did not, or could not, preserved His Own Message to humanity.
If it were true that God thought so little of His inspired Words that He allowed them to languish on the dust heap of history for hundreds of years, and at the same time bestowed His blessing on false Words which had been corrupted by sinful humanity, by what reason can we possibly trust the eternal destiny of our immortal souls to such a God and such a brittle and capricious word?
In our next session we will take a short look at the concept of �families� of textual variations.
18 May 2007
TRANSLATION METHODS (Continued)
In our last session we were discussing the need for Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort to downplay the Traditional Text. They were of the opinion that the Traditional Text was flawed. They hung their scholarly hats on a peg that said that the Alexandrian Text was reflective of the originally inspired text of God.
They had one major problem in this contention. Depending upon who is consulted, somewhere between 85% and 95% or the available evidence, the manuscripts, lectionaries and writings of the church fathers, reflects the readings of the Traditional Text. To make a claim that this vast weight of evidence was wrong must have seemed a daunting task.
One way that was used to downgrade this mass of evidence was to suggest that there had been a church council which had manufactured this text and given in the imprimatur of the �official� church. This was a ridiculous rouse, of course. First, there is no mention in history of any such council to officially revise the text at that point in time. Second, there is evidence available in the writings of the church fathers, for instance, where this officially manufactured text was quoted before the projected time of this fictional council. Third, many of the churches which held most tenaciously to the Traditional Text were not disposed to recognize any �official church.�
Another method used to lessen the influence of the Traditional Text in the eyes of the world was to use a methodology of text families. Fuller (True or False) speaks of this smoke screen.
�Hort felt that the genealogical method enabled him to reduce the mass of manuscript testimony to four voices - �Neutral,� �Alexandrian,� �Western,� and �Syrian.� Though such classifications have been generally �recognized� since Hort�s day, they have never been demonstrated to be valid.�
The idea of families of text types is that each of these four �families� stem from an original template from which a group of copies had been made. Thus the Alexandrian dated back to a template from Alexandria, the Syrian from Syria and the Western from Western Europe. It was claimed by Hort that the Neutral predated all of these and was a pure tradition unfettered by copyist error.
Two immediate problems arise from his classifications. First, Hort elevated B and Aleph to status of Neutral even though they disagree with each other quite often. Also, these two are really from the Alexandrian tradition so they could hardly be considered �Neutral.�
Second, Hort used the title of Syrian for the Traditional Text. This is a complete misnomer. The term �Syrian� tends to isolate this text to a geographical area. It is not a local text. The Traditional Text is a universal text which is found throughout the Christian world.
The argument of Dr. Hort, in his interpretation of �families of texts,� was that there were in reality only four voices of readings. Thus, in his mind, the 85% to 95% testimony of the Traditional Text was reduced to 25% with the 5% to 15% or the other three combined were elevated to 25% each. Since his Neutral text was actually of Alexandrian parentage, this Alexandrian voice was raised to a full 50% of the evidence even though it carried less than one tenth of the actual physical evidence.
Our political �spin doctor�s� of this day are amateurs when compared to Dr. Hort and his 1881 revision of a base text for translation work!
Although quite a few, Fuller was among them, dispute the idea of families of texts, I tend to accept the primary premise behind it. The various text types do point back to a copyist error, or a deliberate error introduced by a cult, or the very originally inspired text which God has preserved throughout history.
It stands to reason that either a copyist error or a deliberate error introduced by a heretical cult would tend to be a local production and be limited in its outreach and quantity. The scope of the true copies, being simply copies used by the various churches, would be universal - wherever were the churches there would be the Scripture - and dominate the amount of available evidence. The latter is the case of the Traditional Text. The former is the case of aberrations such as the Alexandrian and the Western text types.
In point of fact the �Neutral� text is the Traditional text. It is without mixture a copy of the originally inspired Words of God.
The idea of text families, when properly considered is useful in guarding against false texts. The �family� of the Traditional texts (which Hort attempted to degrade by labeling it as �Syrian!�) stands as the Rock of Gibralter against the tiny pail of sand of the Western and Alexandrian.
Fuller, again, illustrates the lengths to which the bias of Westcott and Hort that the Traditional Text was flawed, colored their reasoning and influenced their line of �evidence.� Westcott and Hort admit that �...a text practically identical with our Received Text, existed, and was �dominant� in Antioch and elsewhere, in and before the 4th century.� They [Westcott and Hort] also assume that two Texts, which they call �Western� and �Neutral,� predate this. �...of the two supposed primitive Texts, the �Neutral� was the purer text, and the �Western� the corrupted Text. ...how can we have even a conjectural opinion as to which of two supposed Texts was purer, when neither of them is known to have existed at all?�
It seems that the good Doctors had already made up their mind as to the unusefulness of the Traditional Text. All they needed was to find some evidence to discredit this Text. It also seems that they found this �evidence� in their own fertile minds.
Fuller (True or False) rightly notes the difference between Hort, the scholarly attacker of the Traditional Text, and Dean John Burgon, the scholarly defender of the Traditional Text. �Whereas Hort claimed to follow internal evidence and the �ring of genuineness,� Burgon used external evidence.�
The difference here is indicative of the �open mindedness� of the two paths. Hort relied on his intuition (read �bias�) while Burgon relied on the evidence to which he could appeal.
Many in our day do not accept, will not even consider, the idea that the Traditional Text is the Words of God. The �scholars� will often claim that we who defend the Traditional Text are simple minded and simply troublemakers. When we attempt to question their reasoning, or to defend our own, we are branded as schismatic.
This is interesting. I have just read of an incident in a church in which an expert on this subject had been invited to speak about his reasons for defending the Traditional Text. Led by a group of men with ties to a certain, so-called, fundamentalist college (I won�t name it; but the initials are BJU!), actually caused a split in the church because of their refusal to even listen to the evidence.
Who, again, is the schismatist?
Finally, Fuller (Which Bible?) distills the argument.
�It is commonly said that the older controversy around the Textus Receptus is dead, but this cannot be true; for if it can be shown that Westcott and Hort were wrong in their basic premises, then it will be necessary to go back before Westcott and Hort and to take up the study afresh. If the direction is wrong, further supposed progress only leads farther from the truth.�
Amen!
In our next session we will begin to take a look at some of the modern critics and their methods of Biblical criticism.
25 May 2007
TRANSLATION METHODS (Continued)
We have been discussing the truth that the methods which a Bible critic will use in his methods of translation are founded upon his core beliefs, and training, about the Scripture as a message from God.
Edward Hills (The King James Version Defended) speaks of a textual critic by the name of Richard Bently (1662 - 1742). Bently developed a three pronged ideal for textual criticism which is still in use to this day.
One of the things that Bently argued was that the New Testament text has nothing to do with doctrine as doctrine is essentially the same in �...even the worst manuscripts.�
To my meager mind this assertion is sheer lunacy. Although this man is one of the giants of theological circles while I have a long ways to go to reach pigmy status, I just can not disagree with this assertion strongly enough. Our doctrine must, if we are to claim status as �Biblicist Christians,� be based on the Scripture. To claim that we may not understand what it is exactly that the Scripture may be saying is to pin our doctrinal stance on �cabins in the sky.� There is no foundation except the Scripture. If that Scriptural message is uncertain then our doctrine is uncertain. To claim that doctrine is the same in even the worst of manuscripts is ridiculous!
There are manuscripts which were written to advance Gnostic doctrine, for instance. These may be the �worst manuscripts.� Are the doctrines the same in them as in pure manuscripts? No! No! No! The doctrine is not always the same in the inferior manuscripts. These were not inspired of God, or even owe their genesis to that which was inspired of God. They are, as a fun house mirror, false pictures of that which God wanted us to see..
It may sound reasonable and pious to make the claim that �all the manuscripts contain essentially the same doctrine.� But, the truth is far from this.
A �for instance� in our own day is that of the New International Version. It purports to be the Word of God. Not only is this version lacking much of the actual text as carried in the Traditional Text, not only is this version completely lacking the simple word �Hell� in the entire Old Testament, not only is this version founded on a weak and contradictory eclectic text, it is not even a translation. The NIV is a paraphrase.
The NIV does not attempt to give the English reader the �Words� of God. The NIV purports to relay the �ideas� of God. At its best this version is no more than a commentary. At its worst it is a fiction.
We could also access the �New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures.� This is the official translation of the Jehovah�s Witnesses cult. Every effort has been made to downplay the essential deity of Jesus Christ. He is portrayed as a sort of �created god.�
All Scripture is inspired of God. Not all purported Scripture is either inspired of God nor do they necessarily point toward Him and His Truths!
Hills does report that Bently allows, �...the New Testament text has suffered less injury by the hand of time than the text of any profane author.�
To that much I can add a hearty �Amen.�
However, it must be noted that the primary base manuscripts of the modern English versions of scripture (small case intended) is based on two manuscripts [Aleph and B] which disagree within themselves thousands of times in the Gospel accounts alone!
This suggests that there is some serious deterioration among the text of those two so-called �oldest and best� manuscripts!
This also stands in stark contrast to the near unanimity of witness among the vast bulk of manuscript evidence which is found in those manuscripts which support the Traditional Text.
Hills further notes the words of Bently on the attitude to be taken toward the New Testament text.
�We cannot begin the study of the New Testament text with any definite belief concerning the nature of God�s providential preservation ... we must begin our study from a neutral standpoint and then allow the results of this neutral method to teach us what God�s providential preservation of the New Testament actually has been.�
This sounds like Bill Clinton explaining what the meaning of �is,� is.
How can we, why would we, approach the Words of Scripture with any less than a reverential attitude of praise that God has kept for us a pure Word? These are the Words which, because of His Love and desire to impart a Message, God gave to mankind.
Should we doubt the rational for God giving His Word? If He did not preserve that Word it would follow that He is either a weak God (And we need not trust His Word.), or He is a God of inconsistent leadings (In which case we dare not trust His Word.).
It is inconsistent with the term �faith in God� to doubt His preservation of His message to humanity. Hills sums up the situation. �In other words [Bently�s plan seems to be that we] ...begin with agnosticism and work ourselves into faith gradually.�
The important thing to be garnered from this session is that Bently is one of the giants of the modern textual critics. His observations are foundational among those who would attempt to discredit the Traditional Text and, through it, the God blessed English edition of the King James Bible. It is from men who followed his direction that we have seen the present day rejection of the doctrine of the preservation of Scripture or, at the very least, a new definition of that doctrine to accept only thought and idea. The modern emphasis, when there is any, on the doctrine of the preservation of Scripture is that the Words are unimportant.
Brethren, without the Words we have no Message. Without the Words we have no real transmission of ideas. I would even assert that without the Words we have no Scripture upon which we can place our trust and hope for a home in eternity. We are become just another �religious tradition� which has no right to assert that, �Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.� (Acts 4:12)
This concept of a preserved Scripture is fundamental to our faith. Without this doctrine we have no basis for our faith. Even the witness of the Holy Spirit comes from our hearing of these Words of life!
We will pick up this same theme as it pertains to the recent history of Biblical criticism and translation work when we begin our next session.