| HOW WE GOT THE BIBLE by John Oakes |
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A REMARKABLE COLLECTION In this article we will investigate some of the most often-asked questions about the Bible. Where did it come from? Who decided what was going to be on the official list of accepted writings? How do we know if the Bible we read today is a reliable version of the original writings? Have any people or religious groups changed the Bible to reflect their own beliefs? Are all parts of the Bible equally reliable? Who wrote the books of the Bible, and how can I be sure about that? What about the different versions? If one can assume that the original writings are inspired, what about when we read translations? These are questions which are bound to come up for any thinking person who reads the Bible much at all. Some would say asking questions such as these shows a lack of faith. ?It says in 2 Timothy 3:16 that all scripture is inspired by God. For me that settles it. Why are you asking these annoying questions?? Unfortunately such an attitude will not make legitimate questions go away. In fact buried questions have a habit of resurfacing at the most inopportune times. A better approach would be to keep a good record of all significant questions, and systematically, one by one, over a period of time, to seek for reasonable answers to these questions. Many have claimed that the Old Testament contains a number of myths and legends which were created by Jewish writers in the two or three centuries before the time of Christ or soon thereafter. Others would claim that most of the New Testament was written well into the late second century AD by Christian apologists who were creating a Jesus very different from the historical person. They would claim that the gospels are not an eye-witness account at all. Another common claim is that the original writings of the apostles were radically edited by the Catholic Church in the period after the conversion of the Roman Empire, to reflect Catholic doctrine. These people would claim that the doctrines found in the New Testament are very different from the original teachings of Jesus Christ. Still others will claim that there were additional gospels written by the apostles which were excluded by leaders in the early church because of their bias against certain teachings. Do these claims have merit? What is the history of the writing and the collection of both the Old and the New Testament writings? How faithfully were the originals passed on? These questions will be answered in this chapter. It may seem logical to consider the origin and history of the Old Testament before the New Testament for the obvious reason that it was written earlier. However, for several reasons, we will consider the evidence for the New Testament first. The New Testament was written over a shorter period of time. It will be considerably easier to trace the origin of the New Testament canon. Besides, the manuscript evidence and the different versions provide an easier evidence trail to follow with the New Testament. Before considering the evidence for the origins of the New Testament, it will be helpful to define a few technical terms, some of which have already been used. manuscript For us, a manuscript will be any ancient document which contains all or parts of either the New of the Old Testament. The word literally means hand-written. Manuscripts may be in the original language or they may be a translation from the original language. The manuscripts are the basic materials available which can be used to attempt to reconstruct the original biblical writings. canon The canon of either the New or the Old Testament is the officially accepted list of books to be included in the scriptures. How the canon of the New Testament and of the Old Testament was arrived at is a very important question to be dealt with in this chapter. scroll A long piece of material, usually leather, which containes a number of pages of writing in rows, arranged in columns, designed to be rolled up and stored. This was the principal form of manuscripts before the time of Christ (2 Timothy 4:13). codex A long piece of either leather or papyrus, folded up in a format basically like a modern book. This was the most common form of manuscripts after about 200 AD. papyrus Papyrus is a reedy plant found mostly in the Nile delta. It was split open and rolled out. Horizontal and vertical layers were glued together to create a light and easy-to-use writing substrate. Unfortunately, papyrus is the least likely of the ancient writing materials to survive for long periods without disintegrating. vellum, parchment These are both specially prepared kinds of leather which were commonly used as writing materials. Parchment was made of sheep or goat skins, while vellum was made of calf or antelope skins. When papyrus became scarce in the early centuries AD, vellum became the chief material for creating manuscripts. uncial These are manuscripts which are written using all capital letters. The oldest Greek manuscripts are uncials. cursive These are manuscripts which use both capital and small letters, similar to a modern style of writing. The later manuscripts in Greek are usually cursives. THE NEW TESTAMENT TEXT ?All Scripture is inspired by God,? (2 Timothy 3:16) but how do we know that the words we read in our Bibles are the same as those which were penned by the writers of that Scripture? Over the years, many have attempted to undermine confidence in the Bible by claiming that what we read bears only a very slender relationship to the original writings. These same people will often claim that many of the books of the Bible were written many generations and even hundreds of years after the events recorded, casting doubt on their historical accuracy. In the case of the New Testament, some scholars have claimed that most of it was written in the second half of the second century AD. Others have pointed out that there are ?over two hundred thousand errors? in the manuscripts that we use to reconstruct the Greek New Testament text, implying that we can only guess at the original writings. Still others have claimed that the ?Catholic Church? made substantial changes to the Bible, especially in the fourth and fifth centuries to remove unwanted teachings and to add statements which would support their own peculiar doctrines. What is the history of the New Testament text, and is there any validity to these claims? Let us examine these questions. First, one must remember that the original books of the New Testament were written in Greek.[1] Producing an accurate New Testament means restoring the original Greek text. Do we have the original Greek text of the New Testament or a copy that is absolutely identical to it? The simple answer is no. The original letters of Paul, probably written on papyrus, have long since perished. The same can be said of the original gospel accounts. In order to give wider circulation of their teachings, the writings of the apostles were copied many times and widely circulated amongst the churches. Therefore the accuracy of our Greek text is dependent on how carefully the early Christians made copies. How can we be sure we have the original writings available to us? This question brings us to the manuscript evidence for the Greek New Testament. The most famous English translation of the Bible is the King James Version. This translation was originally published in 1611. The group of scholars who produced the King James (or ?Authorized?) version relied heavily on the translation made by William Tyndale about eighty years before. The full Greek text of the New Testament was only make available to the Western world by the work of the Dutch scholar Erasmus. His Greek New Testament was published in 1516. When Erasmus composed his text, he had only about five Greek manuscripts available to him, none of them older than the ninth century AD. It was certainly conceivable at the time that these manuscripts were significantly different from the original. Add a figure of either the Rylands fragment or pages from the Codes Siaiticus or both or etc. The case today is very much different. Scholars now have nearly ten thousand Greek manuscripts to work from in their efforts to reconstruct the original Greek text. This is to be compared to less than ten manuscripts available to Tyndale and Erasmus. Besides, some of these manuscripts are several hundreds of years older than those available to the first translators of the Greek text into English. Consider a list of some of the most important Greek New Testament manuscripts. 1. The Codex Vaticanus, or Codex B. The Codex Vaticanus is a vellum codex on 759 pages in uncial script. The manuscript has been dated to around 350 AD. It contains the entire New Testament, except Hebrews 9:13-end, I and II Timothy, Titus and Revelation. It also contains all of the Old Testament in Greek except the first few chapters of Genesis and several Psalms. The manuscript has been kept in the Vatican since at least 1481. 2. The Codex Sinaiticus, or Codex Aleph. The Sinaiticus manuscript received its name because it was discovered at St. Catharines Monastery on Mt. Sinai in 1844 by the biblical scholar Tischendorf. It was found in a basket of old parchments which were about to be thrown into a fire. This manuscript is now in the British Museum. Like the Vatican manuscript, it has been dated to around 350 AD. It contains much of the Old Testament in Greek, but most significantly, it has the entire New Testament in Greek. 3. The Alexandrian Codex, or Codex A. This is a fifth-century codex, containing most of the Old Testament and all the New Testament except a few pages of Matthew, two from 1st John and three from 2 Corinthians. This manuscript was found in Alexandria in Egypt, but was given as a gift to the king of England in 1621. The manuscript is now located on the British Library. 4. The Washington Manuscript. This manuscript from the end of the fourth century contains the four gospels. It is especially significant, as it contains Mark 16:9-20, unlike the three manuscripts already mentioned. 5. The Chester Beatty Papyri. This is a collection of a number of papyrus codex fragments, located in the Chester Beatty Museum in Dublin, Ireland. One of the papyri contains thirty leaves of the New Testament in Greek which have been dated to the late second or early third century (ie. around 200 AD). Another includes 86 of 104 leaves of the letters of Paul from around from the early third century. 6. The Bodmer Papyri. This is a group of manuscripts found in the Bodmer Library of World Literature. Included are a complete manuscript of Luke and John dated to 175-225 AD, as well as a manuscript of over half of the book of John which has been dated as early as 150 AD. 7. The John Rylands Fragment. This papyrus fragment contains only John 18:31-33 and 37,38, which would make it an insignificant find except that it has been dated to 130 AD. This fragment was copied within fifty years of the death of the apostle John. Many other important ancient manuscripts could be mentioned as well. The situation with the Greek New Testament today is very different from what it was when the King James version was translated. We have available entire manuscripts of the New Testament from less than three hundred years after the original writings. Besides, we have manuscripts of large portions of the New Testament from one hundred fifty years after they were written, and even fragments which were copied only about fifty years after the original was written?during the lifetime of some who had seen the original documents. Scholars who seek to produce a Greek text as close to the original as possible have thousands of manuscripts to compare. Besides, the manuscripts are not the only evidence supporting the text of the Greek New Testament. In addition, there exist a large body of letters written by the early church ?fathers? such as Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Iranaeus and others. These early Christian writers quoted extensively from every part of the New Testament. The letters known as the Epistle of Barnabus, the Didache and the Letter of Clement have all been dated from around 100 AD. These authors quote from Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts, Romans, I Corinthians, Ephesians, Titus, Hebrews, I Peter and others. The early church father Ignatius was martyred in 115 AD. In a set of letters he composed on his way to his execution in Rome, he quoted from nearly every New Testament book. Such evidence puts to rest any claims that these books were written in the second half of the second century AD, as some have claimed. One could continue by mentioning the much more extensive writings of Justin Martyr from around 150 AD, and those of Iranaeus, from near the end of the second century. Experts have claimed that using quotes from early Christian writers in the first three centuries, one could reconstruct virtually the entire text of the New Testament. Being able to compare the oldest extant manuscripts with the quotes from the first two or three centuries allows scholars to reproduce the original New Testament text with even greater reliability. The relatively small number of passages in the New Testament about which there is some doubt (see below) can have their validity tested by examining the letters of the church fathers. The evidence for our Greek text of the New Testament is so strong that one can say with great confidence that we have a virtually exact copy of all the original Greek writings. It is worth quoting Sir Frederic Kenyon, one of the most noted scholars of the Greek text of the Bible; The interval then between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.?[2] As already mentioned, some have attempted to date some of the New Testament books to the second century. In general, this has been done in order to support a theory that many of the miraculous events recorded in its pages are later inventions. For example, F. C. Bauer, a German theologian from the nineteenth century wrote a thesis in which he claimed that a number of the New Testament books were written after 160 AD. Most likely he came up with such a late date, not because of any real evidence, but because of a philosophical presupposition against the miraculous. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century such a conclusion, although very questionable, was at least still conceivable based on the evidence. However, to quote from Neil Lightfoot; ? the amount of such evidence available in our own day is so much greater and more conclusive that a first-century date for most of the New Testament writing cannot reasonably be denied, no matter what our philosophical presuppositions may be.?[3] The exemplary evidence to support the text of the New Testament is made even more obvious when one compares it to the manuscripts available in support of some of the other significant writings of the ancient world. Those who have questioned the accuracy of the Biblical manuscripts are legion, yet few have raised significant questions concerning the authenticity of the ancient manuscripts available for such important works as Homer or Julius Caesar, Herodotus or Tacitus. The fact is that the manuscript evidence for these works is extremely thin when compared to New Testament manuscripts; both in terms of numbers and of age relative to when the originals were written. For example, consider the most famous writing of Julius Caesar, Gallic War, with its famous ?Vine, vide, vice,? (I came, I saw, I conquered). This important historical piece was written between 58 and 50 BC. The oldest available manuscript in Latin (the original language) was produced around 850 AD?nine hundred years after the original was penned. This is to be compared to the New Testament, for which we have some evidence only fifty years after the original and significant manuscript support only one hundred and fifty years after the original. In all, there are only about ten ancient manuscripts of Gallic Wars, compared to about ten thousand in the case of the New Testament. As another example, consider the writings of Livy; along with Tacitus, the greatest of Roman historians. Livy lived from 59 BC to 17 AD. Of his original 142 books, only thirty-five survive in a total of only about 20 manuscripts. There is a fragment of Livy from the fourth century, but all the others are from hundreds of years later. In the case of Tacitus, who wrote for Roman emperors around 100 AD, four and one-half of his fourteen Histories survive, while manuscripts of twelve of his sixteen Annals have been found. These are from a total of only two manuscripts, one from the ninth and one from the eleventh century. Yet, when Tacitus is quoted from, who questions the validity of these manuscripts? The examples above are all Latin authors. What about ancient Greek writers? The Greek literature with the most manuscript evidence is the Iliad of Homer. This book was written around 800 BC. Over six hundred manuscripts have survived, including a fragment of the Iliad as old as 400 BC. However, the oldest complete manuscript to survive is from the thirteenth century?over two thousand years younger than the original. The two most important Greek historians were Herodotus and Thucydides. Both lived in the 400?s BC. By an interesting coincidence, both historians? writings survive in eight manuscripts. Each have as their oldest surviving manuscript around 900 AD; over 1,300 years after the original composition. Other examples could be mentioned, but the point is made. Unquestionably, the New Testament is by far the most well-attested of all ancient writings in the world. Few question the accuracy of the text of these other ancient writings, yet in every case they are supported by far fewer manuscripts which are much farther removed from the original date of authorship. One can concede that it is only reasonable to put the Bible under a closer scrutiny than these other books. This is only fair because, unlike Caesar, Tacitus and Herodotus, the writers of the Bible, claim it has authority over human lives. Nevertheless, the current Greek text of the New Testament will pass the most rigorous possible test of its accuracy as a representation of the original writers of the New Testament. Those who would question the integrity of the New Testament might interject at this point in the discussion to ask ?But what about those two hundred thousand errors in the Greek manuscripts? How can you claim you have an accurate record of the original if it is riddled with errors?? This sounds convincing at first, but let us consider the nature of these hundreds of thousands of scribal mistakes. First of all, this number is so large because there are so many manuscripts. Dividing two hundred thousand scribal errors by the more than five thousand manuscripts brings the number of mistakes into a more realistic perspective. And what are the nature of the differences between the available manuscripts? Do they reflect such differences as to draw into question the accuracy of our manuscripts compared with the original? A page from a typical Greek uncial manuscript is pictured above. The text of an uncial contains all capital letters, with no spaces between the words, and with no punctuation. In this type of manuscript, if the end of a line was reached in the middle of a word, the copyist simply went to the next line in the middle of the word. For comparison, consider the passage below in uncial-like script. NOTEVERYONEWHOSAYSTOMELORDLORDWILLENTERTHEKINGDOMOFHEAVENBUTONLYHEWHODOESTHEWILLOFMYFATHERWHOISINHEAVEN With this type of script, it is easy to imagine even the most careful copyist making a minor mistake such as dropping off a letter, interposing two letters, repeating a line, or skipping a line. The vast majority of the supposed two hundred thousand mistakes in the Greek manuscripts are just such scribal slips of the pen. These errors are very easily detected and corrected by the scholars who study the Greek text of the New Testament. They have absolutely no effect on the integrity of the Greek New Testament. By taking into account the large number of manuscripts and by eliminating very easily corrected slips of the pen from the list, the 200,000 mistakes are reduced to a couple of hundred variations between the manuscripts. What is the nature of these variations? These would include such minor changes as a single rather insignificant word such as an article being added or dropped by a copyist. These changes may have been made by the copyist either as a subconscious error or intentionally in an attempt on the part of the copyist to ?improve? the text. There are also some examples in which it would appear that a copyist detected a difference between parallel accounts, for example in the gospels of Matthew and Mark, and attempted to smooth the differences by making Matthew and Mark say exactly the same thing. Textual critics use some basic rules when comparing different manuscripts. For example, if the Greek manuscripts exhibit two variant readings of a particular passage in Matthew, and if one of the two readings is identical to a parallel passage in Mark, scholars will lean toward using the reading of Matthew which is different from that in Mark. They do this on the assumption that a scribe had tried to make the two passages identical in an unfortunate but well-intentioned attempt to ?improve? the text. Bear in mind that in almost every case like this, the differences are so minor that they have no significant effect on the meaning of the scriptures. For example, in Matthew 11:19, two slightly different readings are found in the Greek manuscripts. Some end with the phrase, ?But wisdom is proved right by her children.? Others end with the phrase, ?But wisdom is proved right by her actions.? In this case, the oldest and most reliable manuscripts, the Vatican and Sinai, have ?actions,? while most of the later manuscripts have ?children.? Despite the fact that a majority of manuscripts have the alternative reading, because the earliest manuscripts have ?actions,? most English translations use the word actions. Whether one uses ?actions? or ?children? in Matthew 11:19, clearly this represents a very minor difference in the text of the New Testament. The saying of Jesus has the same meaning in either case. This minor difference is typical of the supposed errors in our New Testament. When all the truly minor supposed mistakes in our received Greek New Testament are removed from consideration, the student of the Bible is left with only about a half dozen non-trivial variations in the Greek text. These would include; 1. John 7:53-8:11. The story of the woman caught in adultery. None of the earliest and most reliable versions include this passage. It is probably a very early tradition of the primitive disciples which was later inserted into John. Almost certainly it is a genuine story, but it was not part of the original book of John. This passage is not controversial because the story is so consistent with everything we know about Jesus. 2. Acts 8:37 and 1 John 5:7. These examples are listed together because the nature of the evidence is similar. In both cases, absolutely none of the earliest manuscripts include these passages. They are both rather transparent attempts by scribes to ?improve? the text to support orthodox doctrine. They found their way into the King James version because in 1611 only much later Greek manuscripts were available. None of the modern English translations include these passages, except in the marginal notes. 3. Mark 16:9-20. This is an account of Jesus? final words to his disciples. Virtually every Greek manuscript, including the Alexandrian, includes this passage. The problem with this is that the two exceptions are the Sinai and the Vatican codices. These two are universally considered the most authoritative manuscripts. Besides, the oldest version of the Syriac translation of the New Testament also does not include Mark 16:9-20. In the final analysis, one cannot say with absolute certainty whether this passage was in the original Mark or not. A couple of other similar but less significant examples could be mentioned, but that is it! Of the four examples listed above, only one is actually controversial. Of the 200,000 supposed mistakes in the Greek New Testament, we are left with only one significant passage which is truly controversial. Count them.?one! Of course, if the reader would like to check out this claim more carefully for herself by looking into a resource which covers this topic more thoroughly, that would be a great idea.[4] Sir Frederic Kenyon, the world famous Biblical scholar and former director of the British Museum for twenty-one years, sums up the evidence nicely. ?The Christian can take the whole Bible in his hands and say without fear or hesitation that he holds in it the true word of God, handed down without essential loss from generation to generation throughout the centuries.? THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON Before moving on to considering the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, a few significant questions regarding the text of the New Testament remain. How were the actual books contained in the New Testament chosen? How can we know these books are inspired? Were there any other writings which were inspired, but which were not included in the New Testament? These questions are all related. They all concern what is known as the canon of the New Testament. The word canon comes from the Greek word kanon which springs from the Hebrew word qaneh, which means reed or cane. The implication of the word is a measuring stick, standard or ruler. In other word, the canon of scripture is the standard list of books accepted by the main body of believers. In the case of the Old Testament, that would be the Jewish leaders, while in the case of the New Testament, it would mean the leaders in the early church. Some have made claims that church leaders in the fourth or fifth centuries AD chose the New Testament canon. These same people have claimed that such spurious works as the Gospel of Thomas (a second century Gnostic writing) were removed from the official list of scriptures at a late date. These attempts to cast doubt on the authenticity of the New Testament scriptures have one problem. They are not supported by the facts. The fact is that the authority of the letters of Paul, of the Gospels and the book of Acts, as well as the other books of the New Testament was established in the early second century by acclamation of the church. The New Testament books were chosen by the church as a whole on the basis of the fact that these particular books had apostolic authority. The data is conclusive that by about 150 AD a more or less fixed list of accepted writings was already circulating amongst the churches throughout the Roman world. There were minor differences in some of the lists, but these were worked out by about 200 AD. Writing in the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr described the customs of the church in his time. The ?memoirs of the apostles? and the ?writings of the prophets? were read to the people on the first day of the week. Apparently, a more or less fixed list of apostolic writings (?the memoirs of the apostles?) was already in existence at this time. For example, a small manuscript known as the Muratorian Fragment was found and published in the 1700?s. It has been dated to the latter part of the second century, or around 180 AD. It contains an early list of accepted scriptures. This fragmented list begins with Luke, but mentions it as the third gospel. The list mentions John, Acts, and all thirteen letters of Paul. In fact, all the letters in the New Testament are mentioned or implied except for Matthew, Mark, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter and 1 John. In the third century, the Christian leader Origin recorded the accepted list of letters. His list was identical to our New Testament, although he mentioned ?that Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 John and Jude were questioned by some. One can see that the books of the New Testament were collected together gradually in the late first and early second centuries. In every case apostolic authority appears to have been the key factor determining whether or not they would be included in the canon. In some of the earliest lists, other books were mentioned. The letters known as the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, were mentioned by some. These are non-apostolic writings from around 100 AD. The Muratorian Fragment specifically mentions that the Shepherd of Hermas could be read in public, but that it was not to be considered as part of the apostolic writings. One can see that other letters circulated, but that the dividing line between those that could be read for the encouragement of the church and those which were considered canonical was clearly based on apostolic authority. Even today it is not uncommon for excerpts from other spiritual books (the modern equivalent of the Shepherd of Hermas) to be read during a sermon. Of course there is always a clear line between such books and the Scripture. |