Category Archives: Bible

Should the Apocrypha be in the Bible?[1]

Tobit

By Spencer D Gear

What is the Apocrypha? The Apocrypha (the deutero-canonical books) refers to the extra books in the Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, that are not in the Hebrew canon of Scripture. Bruce Metzger wrote of the Apocrypha:

‘With the exception of 2 Esdras these books appear in the Greek version of the Old Testament which is known as the Septuagint, but they are not included in the Hebrew Canon of Holy Scripture’ (Metzger 1965:vii).

The books listed in the RSV edition of the Apocrypha (Metzger 1965:iii) are:

  • The First Book of Esdras[2]
  • The Second Book of Esdras[3]
  • Tobit
  • Judith
  • The Additions to the Book of Esther
  • The Wisdom of Solomon
  • Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach
  • Baruch
  • The Letter of Jeremiah
  • The Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men
  • Susanna
  • Bel and the Dragon
  • The Prayer of Manasseh
  • The First Book of the Maccabees
  • The Second Book of the Maccabees

In all of this discussion about the Apocrypha, it is important to understand why there is some confusion among Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christianity in discussing this topic.
Some of the confusion surrounds two traditions for the Old Testament canon:[4]

  1. The Palestinian Canon contains 22 books in the Hebrew (39 in English);
  2. The Alexandrian Canon contains 14 additional books (or 15).

The Palestinian Canon was the Hebrew canon that arose in Palestine and was acknowledged by the Jews. The Alexandrian Canon is the Greek list of OT books and is supposed to have arisen in Alexandria, Egypt, where the Hebrew OT Scriptures were translated into the Greek Septuagint (LXX) about 250 BC and following years.

It is considered by some that there were really two Old Testament canons.[5] There was the broader one that included the Apocrypha and the other was the more narrow one without the Apocrypha. This two-canon hypothesis is built around the fact that the earliest extant copies of the Greek Septuagint that we have are from about the fourth century AD and they contain some of the apocryphal books. On the other hand, the Hebrew Bible has only the 39 books that we now have in the Protestant English Bible.
This latter canon seems to have been the canon of Jesus, Josephus and Jerome. There is no quote from Jesus, to my knowledge, that is from the Apocrypha.

Added confusion: The Apocrypha in and out of the Bible

To add to the confusion, the Geneva Bible of 1560, produced by English Protestants taking refuge in Geneva, contained apocryphal books but there was an introduction that stated that these ‘bokes, which were not receiued by a commune consent to be red and expounded publikely in the Church’[6]. Note the spelling of antiquity!

F. F. Bruce states that this is a repetition and expansion of Jerome’s position that apocryphal books were not for the confirmation of doctrine, unless based on the canonical books, and were for the instruction of godly manners. Some who used the Geneva Bible did not appreciate the Apocrypha, so some copies of the 1599 edition printed on the Continent and in London ‘were bound up without the section containing the Apocrypha’. In 1640, an edition of the Geneva Bible was published in Amsterdam that eliminated the Apocrypha, with an explanation between the Old and New Testaments, giving the reason for its deletion. However, the Prayer of Manasseh was appended to 2 Chronicles. The Bishop’s Bible, published in London in 1568, also contained the Apocrypha, but unlike the Geneva Bible, it had no comment about distinguishing between the canonical books and the Apocrypha (Bruce 1988:107-108).

The English Bible that became the standard English translation was the King James (Authorised) Version, published in 1611, and it contained the Apocrypha. However, in 1615 the Archbishop of Canterbury who was a convinced Calvinist in theology, George Abbot, demanded that all Bibles must contain the Apocrypha. To refuse to include the Apocrypha would earn a year’s imprisonment. Why was this a necessary move? It seemed to be a measure to silence the growing influence of the Puritans who objected to the Apocrypha. In spite of this penalty, copies of the KJV without the Apocrypha started appearing as early as 1626. Since the Puritans were gaining influence, the Long Parliament in England in 1644 gave permission for the Apocrypha to cease to be read in Church of England services (Bruce 1988:108-109).

The Westminster Confession of Faith, drawn up in 1646 by the Westminster Assembly, consisting mainly of Church of England ministers, contained this statement in the chapter I.3, ‘Of the holy Scripture’,

The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the Canon of Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.

When was the Apocrypha written?

A variety of dates has been given. Matt Slick states, ‘The Apocrypha consists of a set of books written between approximately 400 B.C. and the time of Christ.  The word “apocrypha” means “Hidden”‘. R. Laird Harris is of the view that ‘the Apocryphal books were written in Hebrew during the period from 200-50 B.C., and yet they were not revered by the Jews of Palestine, who did revere the others’ (1969:138). F. F. Bruce calls the Apocrypha a ‘really varied assortment of Jewish literature of the period 300 B.C.—A.D. 100…. While none of these books is included in the Hebrew Old Testament, they do (with one exception) form part of the Greek Old Testament’ (1963:164).[7]

As for Josephus, in his Complete Works (1867) in the writing Against Apion (1867:607-638), he defines the Jewish canon as 22 books in Hebrew that correspond to our 39 books in the English Old Testament. He did not include the Apocrypha. This is what he wrote in Against Apion 1.8:

8. For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another, [as the Greeks have,] but only twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; and of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years; but as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life. It is true, our history hath been written since Artaxerxes very particularly, but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers, because there hath not been an exact succession of prophets since that time; and how firmly we have given credit to these books of our own nation is evident by what we do; for during so many ages as have already passed, no one has been so bold as either to add any thing to them, to take any thing from them, or to make any change in them; but it is become natural to all Jews immediately, and from their very birth, to esteem these books to contain Divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and, if occasion be willingly to die for them. For it is no new thing for our captives, many of them in number, and frequently in time, to be seen to endure racks and deaths of all kinds upon the theatres, that they may not be obliged to say one word against our laws and the records that contain them; whereas there are none at all among the Greeks who would undergo the least harm on that account, no, nor in case all the writings that are among them were to be destroyed; for they take them to be such discourses as are framed agreeably to the inclinations of those that write them; and they have justly the same opinion of the ancient writers, since they see some of the present generation bold enough to write about such affairs, wherein they were not present, nor had concern enough to inform themselves about them from those that knew them; examples of which may be had in this late war of ours, where some persons have written histories, and published them, without having been in the places concerned, or having been near them when the actions were done; but these men put a few things together by hearsay, and insolently abuse the world, and call these writings by the name of Histories.

The canon of Scripture

There are a significant number of reasons for accepting the Palestinian canon of the OT (without the Apocrypha). Here are a few:

  1. Some of the Apocryphal books have teachings that contradict the NT. Two of these teachings that were raised at the time of the Reformation are promoted in the Apocrypha but denied in the NT. The Apocrypha promotes praying for the dead (2 Macc 12:45-46) and salvation by works (Tobit 12:9). The Bible is against praying for the dead. See 2 Sam. 12:19; Luke 16:25; Heb. 9:27. The Bible is strongly opposed to salvation by works (see Gen. 15:6; Rom. 4:5; Gal 3:11).[8]
  2. Some of the apocryphal narratives promote non-biblical, fanciful stories. Take a read of Bel and the Dragon, Tobit, and Judith.[9]
  3. Philo, the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher, who lived from about 20 BC – AD 40, quotes extensively from the OT and even recognised the three-fold classification of the OT books, but not once did he quote from the Apocrypha as containing inspired books.[10]

There has been quite a battle among the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christians over whether the 14/15 books of the Apocrypha should be included in the Old Testament. The Roman Catholic Church canonised the Apocrypha with the other books of the Bible at the Council of Trent, 1545-1563. The Anglican Church and the Eastern Orthodox have given the Apocrypha a status between that of the Roman Catholics and the remainder of Protestants.

In the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on Jerome, it states,

“He never either categorically acknowledged or rejected the deuterocanonical books as part of the Canon of Scripture, and he repeatedly made use of them”.

That is not the view of the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Jerome and the Apocrypha (only the introduction to the article is available to me online) which states,

“The Septuagint was an important basis for St. Jerome’s translation of the Old Testament into Latin for the Vulgate Bible; and, although he had doubts about the authenticity of some of the apocryphal works that it contained (he was the first to employ the word apocrypha in the sense of “noncanonical”), he was overruled, and most of them were included in the Vulgate”.

My research indicates that Jerome argued against including the Apocrypha (he coined that term), deuteron-canonical books in the Bible. He denied the inspiration of the Apocrypha. Why? When he studied Hebrew with the Palestinian rabbis, they influenced his rejection of the Apocrypha BECAUSE they were not in the original Hebrew canon of OT Scripture. Yes, there were Jews in other parts of the world who accepted the longer canon with the Apocrypha. However, because of the decree by Pope Damasus and the Synod of Rome in AD 382 that favoured the longer canon, Jerome began to translate the Apocrypha, based on the Greek Septuagint text.

However, Jerome regarded the Apocrypha only “for example of life and instruction in manners” but he did not use the Apocrypha to “apply them to establish any doctrine”. In fact, he argued across the Mediterranean Sea with St. Augustine of Hippo on this very point. To begin with, Jerome refused to translate the Apocrypha for the Latin Vulgate, but he eventually did translate a few. After his death, the apocryphal books were all brought into the Latin Vulgate from the Old Latin Version.

The Roman Catholic Church did not officially admit the Apocrypha into the RCC canon of Scripture until the Council of Trent in 1546. This article from Roman Catholic resources states: “1546: Council of Trent: Apocrypha added to the canon, tradition, states the same authority with the Bible”.

In justforcatholics.org there is this brief response:

Jerome and the Apocrypha

Question: St Jerome was persuaded, against his original inclination, to include the deuterocanonicals in his Vulgate edition of the Scriptures. What are your comments?

Answer: True, yet he classed the Apocrypha in a separated category. He differentiated between the canonical books and ecclesiastical books, which he did not recognize as authoritative Scripture. This is admitted by the modern Catholic church:

“St. Jerome distinguished between canonical books and ecclesiastical books. The latter he judged were circulated by the Church as good spiritual reading but were not recognized as authoritative Scripture. The situation remained unclear in the ensuing centuries…For example, John of Damascus, Gregory the Great, Walafrid, Nicolas of Lyra and Tostado continued to doubt the canonicity of the deuterocanonical books. According to Catholic doctrine, the proximate criterion of the biblical canon is the infallible decision of the Church. This decision was not given until rather late in the history of the Church at the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent definitively settled the matter of the Old Testament Canon. That this had not been done previously is apparent from the uncertainty that persisted up to the time of Trent” (The New Catholic Encyclopedia, The Canon).

The practice of the Church up to the time of the Reformation was to follow the judgment of Jerome who rejected the Old Testament apocrypha on the grounds that these books were never part of the Jewish canon. These were permissible to be read in the churches for the purposes of edification but were never considered authoritative for establishing doctrine. The Protestants did nothing new when they rejected the apocrypha as authoritative Scripture. It was the Roman church that rejected this tradition and ‘canonized’ the ecclesiastical books.

Please read the following explanation from the Roman Catholic Cardinal Cajetan, a contemporary of Martin Luther:

“Here we close our commentaries on the historical books of the Old Testament. For the rest (that is, Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees) are counted by St. Jerome out of the canonical books, and are placed amongst the apocrypha, along with Wisdom and Ecciesiasticus, as is plain from the Protogus Galeatus. Nor be thou disturbed, like a raw scholar, if thou shouldest find anywhere, either in the sacred councils or the sacred doctors, these books reckoned as canonical. For the words as well of councils as of doctors are to be reduced to the correction of Jerome. Now, according to his judgment, in the epistle to the bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, these books (and any other like books in the canon of the Bible) are not canonical, that is, not in the nature of a rule for confirming matters of faith. Yet, they may be called canonical, that is, in the nature of a rule for the edification of the faithful, as being received and authorised in the canon of the Bible for that purpose. By the help of this distinction thou mayest see thy way clearly through that which Augustine says, and what is written in the provincial council of Carthage.” (Cardinal Cajetan, “Commentary on all the Authentic Historical Books of the Old Testament,” cited by William Whitaker in “A Disputation on Holy Scripture,” Cambridge: Parker Society (1849), p. 424)

The apocrypha are useful for edification, but canonical in the sense that they are the rule for confirming matters of faith, no!

Copyright Dr Joe Mizzi. Permission to copy and distribute this article without textual changes.

Here are “Some reasons why the Apocrypha does not belong in the Bible“. Here are examples of theological and historical “Errors in the Apocrypha“.

The Apocrypha and Scripture?

Geisler and Nix (1986:274-275) conclude with a responsible summary:

Whereas there is no doubt a devotional and even homiletical and historical value in them [the apocryphal books], yet they are not part of the theological canon to which the other thirty-nine books of the Old Testament belong because:

1. Some of their teaching is unbiblical or heretical.

2. Some of their stories are extra-biblical or fanciful.

3. Much of their teaching is sub-biblical, at times even immoral.

4. Most of the Apocrypha was written in the post-biblical or intertestamental period.[11]

5. Finally, all of the Apocrypha is non-biblical or uncanonical, because it was not received by the people of God.

Works consulted

Bruce, F F 1963. The Books and the Parchments: Some Chapters on the Transmission of the Bible, rev. ed. Old Tappan, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Company.

Bruce, F F 1988. The Canon of Scripture. Glasgow: Chapter House.

Geisler, N L and Nix, W E 1986. A General Introduction to the Bible (rev & exp). Chicago: Moody Press.

Harris, R L 1969. Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House.

Josephus F 1867. Josephus: Complete Works. Tr by W Whiston. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications.

Metzger, B (ed) 1973. The Apocrypha of the Old Testament: Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford University Press.

Surburg, R F 1975. Introduction to the Intertestamental Period. St. Louis / London: Concordia Publishing House.

Notes:

[1] For this brief article, I have gained considerable information from Geisler and Nix (1986). When I attended Summit Pacific College in 1975-1976, this was the text used for a subject on bibliology and I have gained great benefit from it since then.

[2] This was previously known as The Third Book of Esdras (Bruce 1963:163).

[3] This was previously known as The Fourth Book of Esdras (Bruce 1963:163).

[4] Geisler and Nix (1986:264).

[5] Ibid.

[6] Note the early English spelling. Today the quote would be: ‘books, which were not received by a common consent to be read and expounded publicly in the Church’.

[7] Surburg (1975:92) almost quotes F. F. Bruce (1963:164) word-for-word, but without bibliographical acknowledgement, affirming the Apocrypha’s writing over the period, 300 B.C. to A.D. 100. It reads like plagiarism to me as F. F. Bruce’s book was published in 1963 and Surburg’s in 1975.

[8] Geisler and Nix (1986:270).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Geisler and Nix (1986:272).

[11] The intertestamental period is considered to be the time between the close of the Hebrew Old Testament and the beginning of writing of the Christian New Testament.. This is the period from the writing of Malachi (ca. 420 BC) and the early first century AD. It’s a period of about 400 years. Surburg (1975:9).placed the intertestamental period between Malachi and the appearance of John the Baptist, a period of 400 years that some have called the ‘silent centuries’.

 

Copyright (c) 2013 Spencer D. Gear. This document last updated at Date: 7 October 2015.

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Is the Bible to be interpreted as literal or metaphorical?

By Spencer D Gear

(image courtesy cliparts.co)

One of the ways to put down those who interpret the Bible literally, the fundamentalists, and Bible-believing Christians is to say that we don’t interpret the Bible literally but metaphorically, allegorically or through some other deconstruction. Some add that it is the uneducated or uninformed who take the Bible literally and are perpetrating false views of the Bible.

This is how Robert Funk debunks such Christians:

As I look around me, I am distressed by those who are enslaved by a Christ imposed upon them by a narrow and rigid legacy. There are millions of Americans who are the victims of a mythical Jesus conjured up by modern evangelists to whip their followers into a frenzy of guilt and remorse—and cash contributions. I agonize over their slavery in contrast to my freedom. I have a residual hankering to free my fellow human beings from this bondage, which can be as abusive as any form of slavery known to humankind. I believe that such a hankering is inspired by Jesus himself, who seems to be untouched by religious bigotry and tyranny and unacquainted with the straightjacket of literalism and dogmatism.  Liberation from fear and ignorance is always a worthy cause. In the last analysis, however, it is because I occasionally glimpse an unknown Jesus lurking in and behind Christian legend and piety that I persist in my efforts to find my way through the mythical and legendary debris of the Christian tradition. And it is the lure of this glimpse that I detect in other questers [quests for the historical Jesus] and that I share with them (Funk 1996:19, emphasis added).

Robert M. Price is just as adamant in castigating fundamentalists and Christian supernaturalists for their foolish, inaccurate understanding of the Scriptures:

We are viewed as insidious villains seeking to undermine the belief of the faithful, trying to push them off the heavenly path and into Satan’s arms. But this is not how we view ourselves at all. We find ourselves entering the field as the champions and zealots for a straightforward and accurate understanding of the Bible as an ancient text. In our opinion, it is the fundamentalist, the apologist for Christian supernaturalism, who is propagating false and misleading views of the Bible among the general populace. We are not content to know better and to shake our heads at the foolishness of the untutored masses. We want the Bible to be appreciated for what it is, not for what it is not. And it is not a supernatural oracle book filled with infallible dogmas and wild tales that must be believed at the risk of eternal peril (Price 2005:15, emphasis added).

I came across this kind of issue in my blogging on Christian Forums, with  this perceptive question from one person: [1]

How do we know if certain passages [of the Bible] are metaphorical?

I’m wondering how can we know if certain biblical stories are literal or metaphorical? For example, the story of creation, exodus, the big flood, etc. I’ve always wondered that cause it seems to me there is a lot of disagreement in Christianity concerning this question. And recently I heard that there are some indications in original texts…different writing style or something? Thanks in advance and excuse me for my ignorance

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar took this line:

‘A classic example in both church and culture today is thinking that the truth of the Genesis stories of creation depends upon their factuality. This has led to disputes about “creation” versus “evolution,” “intelligent design” versus “random evolution,” and so forth. These disputes would not have occurred without the modern (Enlightenment) conviction that truth equals factuality. For many defenders of the “truth of Genesis,” the truth of these stories is dependent upon their factuality and evolution is a competing factuality. A parabolic reading of these stories would eliminate this conflict and place the issue where it belongs. To whom does the earth belong? Is it the creation of God and the gift of God, wondrous and calling forth awe, plenteous and calling forth gratitude and adoration, and intended for the whole of creation? or is it ours?” (Borg & Crossan 2006:219, note 19).

My response to the poster was: [2]

What is your understanding of the meaning of “history”?

This will be a starter from me. Often, “history” is understood two ways: (1) “Actual happenings in the real world”, and (2) “What people write about actual happenings in the real world” (Wright 1992:81). Wright notes that the second definition technically is the correct one and is the only meaning given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

In this understanding, which I accept, history is writing about events that happened. Wright goes on to say that history is not “bare facts” or “subjective interpretations” but is “the meaningful narrative of events and intentions” (Wright 1992:82). I agree.

The questions relating to your post include: Is Genesis 1 written about a meaningful narrative and intentions about what happened at the beginning of the world?

On the other hand, what is metaphor? My Australian Macquarie Dictionary defines ‘metaphor’ as ‘a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable, in order to suggest a resemblance, as A mighty fortress is our God’.

However, if we talk about a “literal” creation in contrast to a “metaphorical” creation, it does not help us to determine what went on at creation. Why? Because “literal” and “metaphorical” refer to the way words refer to things, but we are still left with what the metaphor refers to. It has not been defined.

Perhaps better language would be to use “concrete” and “abstract” instead of “literal” and “metaphorical”. When the OT and NT use the metaphor of “sleep” to indicate death, it is still referring to a concrete situation – death.

So, do Genesis 1 and 2 refer to what a person (Moses) has written about what happened in the real world (history), or has Moses written in the abstract, using a metaphor?

Another replied: [3]

Everything in the Bible is for your edification and even the metaphors are to be used to understand what God wants you to know.

My response was: [4]

The issue has many more serious ramifications. Let me explain:

This is what some have written in regard to Genesis 1 being metaphorical and not literal in what is known as the Framework Hypothesis of Genesis 1:

“The evidence that the Genesis cosmogony has been shaped by the employment of the Bible’s two-register cosmology thus demonstrating that the picture of the week of days is one element of a broader pattern in which upper-register realties are described through the metaphorical use of lower-register terminology” (The Great Debate, 185).

“The creation narrative is not to be taken literally but is kerygma-theological, and redemptive” (TGB, 218).

“The Framework Hypothesis regards the seven day scheme as a figurative framework” (JGD, 219). “While the six days of creation are presented as normal solar days, according to the Framework interpretation, the total picture of God completing his creative work in a week of days is not to be taken literally” JGD, 219).

Another has written:

Literal or Metaphorical: Even today there are very few biblical literalists who read Genesis 2 and 3 absolutely literally. They do not believe that God was literally “walking in the garden in the cool of the evening,” for instance. It is certainly good theology to distinguish between God and our metaphorical descriptions of God, but we don’t want to lose the beauty and drama of the biblical story. God is very much a participant in the drama of Adam and Eve. One of the reasons we know and love this story is because God is portrayed in such human terms. But once you acknowledge that the portrayal of God in this story is a metaphor, then there is no reason not to view the whole story as a metaphor. When we do so we find that this is a very rich and profound discussion about human life and happiness.

We lose much of the meaning of the story when we try to make it a historical account of the origin of the species. Remember that this was originally written for a bronze-age culture. If we get hung up on the question of whether Genesis 2 is a factual account, then we will lose the truths the story is trying to communicate, just like we could get a misleading understanding of God if we used these verses to declare that God has hands and feet.

This is how metaphorical / allegorical interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis is explained:

The literalness of the garden is questioned. Although ‘the tree of life and the knowledge of good and evil could have been literal’ and although ‘man faced a real historical choice between life and the knowledge of good and evil’, in fact ‘the language used to describe this choice … is metaphorical. The ‘paradise of Eden’ was taken by pre-Reformation commentators partly as literal and partly metaphorical.’

As for ‘the tree of life’, the ‘serpent’ and other imagery (in Gen.2), Forster and Marston see them as ‘pure symbolism (and not literally as well) in Revelation 20-22 and Gen.2-3’

Here’s another acceptance of metaphorical interpretation of Genesis 1-3:

If we all agree that the serpent is metaphorical, why push for literalism elsewhere in the Creation account? The story of the serpent is part of a larger apocalyptic (or, revelatory) tale — the story of the beginning. Thus, a consistent view of this Creation story is consistently metaphorical. The Creation-Days and their unusual numerology represent something. The Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge represent something. The consumption of the forbidden fruit represents something.

As long as we retain the essentials of the story — the meaningful images that convey to us God’s goodness, our fault, our dilemma, and our hope — there’s no reason to resist reading Creation metaphorically, and every reason to embrace what it appears was intended.

So did God create actual days or were they only metaphorical ways of expression of creation?

I take the view that this is factual history dealing with the reality of the creation of the universe.

Notes

[1] Wolf911 (#1)

[2] ozspen #2

[3] papaJP (#4)

[4] ozspen #5

Works consulted

Borg, M and Crossan J D 2006. The last week: The day-by-day account of Jesus’s final week in Jerusalem. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Funk, R W 1996. Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a new millennium. Rydalmere, NSW: Hodder & Stoughton (A Polebridge Press book).

Price, R M 2005. The empty tomb: Jesus beyond the grave. New York: Prometheus Press.

Wright, N T 1992. The New Testament and the people of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press

 

Copyright © 2015 Spencer D. Gear. This document last updated at Date: 28 June 2016.

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Cooch grass and a biblical view of sex

(cooch grass, public domain)

By Spencer D Gear

There is a pathetically inaccurate article in Newsweek, 6 February 2011, “What the Bible Really Says About Sex: New scholarship on the Good Book’s naughty bits and how it deals with adultery, divorce, and same-sex love”. As Christians, we cannot let this journalist, Lisa Millar, get away with such theologically liberal interpretations regarding the Bible’s view of sex.

Part of the article read:

The Bible is an ancient text, inapplicable in its particulars to the modern world.

In the Bible, “traditional marriage” doesn’t exist. Abraham fathers children with Sarah and his servant Hagar. Jacob marries Rachel and her sister Leah, as well as their servants Bilhah and Zilpah. Jesus was celibate, as was Paul.

Husbands, in essence, owned their wives, and fathers owned their daughters, too. A girl’s virginity was her father’s to protect—and to relinquish at any whim. Thus Lot offers his two virgin daughters to the angry mob that surrounds his house in Sodom. Deuteronomy proposes death for female adulterers, and Paul suggests “women should be silent in churches” (a rationale among some conservative denominations for barring women from the pulpit).

The Bible contains a “pervasive patriarchal bias,” Coogan writes. Better to elide the specifics and read the Bible for its teachings on love, compassion, and forgiveness. Taken as a whole, “the Bible can be understood as the record of the beginning of a continuous movement toward the goal of full freedom and equality for all persons”.

My response to Newsweek is Comment #64 (ozspen). I stated:

If I am looking for a manual on how to raise the best cooch grass for my Aussie front lawn, I don’t choose a guide for an alternative source, kikuyu grass. Lisa Millar wants to present the Bible’s view on sex, but she chooses another alternative – theological liberalism. Miller’s choice of books by Jennifer Wright Knust and Michael Coogan on the Bible’s view of sex, is like choosing ‘Christians’ who want to demolish Christianity and yet retain a Christian gloss.

If Millar knew the Bible, which she doesn’t, she would know the differences caused to the whole of the universe, including sexuality, by the fall into sin recorded in Genesis 3. The curse of sin has affected humanity and we see the aberrations of marriage throughout the Old Testament. Quoting Abraham does not denigrate the effects of sin on marriage.

Jesus Christ spoke on this subject when he was addressing the topic of divorce. ‘”Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Matthew 19:4-6 NIV). Monogamy of a man and a woman is God’s design. All other marriage alternatives are deviations.

The curse of sin has screwed up the universe, including God’s original intention for sex and marriage. Therefore, Millar’s effort to use theological liberalism to affirm a normative view of the Bible’s teaching on sex, is like choosing a kikuyu manual when a cooch handbook is needed.

Dr. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has written a challenging response to Lisa Millar’s article in, “What the Bible really says about sex … really?” I highly recommend that you read  it to see the bias of Millar’s views. On this blog site you can subscribe to email updates from Dr. Mohler. One of his special gifts is in cultural apologetics – addressing the issues of the day from a biblical perspective.

 

Copyright © 2011 Spencer D. Gear. This document last updated at Date: 14 October 2015.

Is Bible reading compulsory?

By Spencer D Gear

There’s a story in USA Today (17 January 2011) of the rate at which people are downloading a Bible to the iphone, Blackberrry, etc? See: “Okla. church’s popular Bible app takes faith to phones”. The article states:

The world’s most popular Bible program for mobile phones was developed by an Oklahoma church.

Since its introduction in 2008, 12.5 million people have downloaded the YouVersion Bible application and have spent 4 billion minutes reading the Bible with it, the designers calculate.

In an 11-day period in late December, a million people downloaded the app, which is available on iPhone, Blackberry, Android and other mobile phone platforms. Every 2.8 seconds, a new user installs the program and 12 people run it.

It ranked No. 7 in popularity last week among all 300,000 iPhone apps.

This raises the bigger issue of whether this will increase the number of people who will read the Bible. The article states that: “Studies indicate that today’s Americans are biblically less literate than past generations, and few hold a biblical world view”.

George Barna’s research has found that:

Here are the types of changes being forged by young adults:

  • Less Sacred – While most Americans of all ages identify the Bible as sacred, the drop-off among the youngest adults is striking: 9 out of 10 Boomers and Elders described the Bible as sacred, which compares to 8 out of 10 Busters (81%) and just 2 out of 3 Mosaics (67%).
  • Less Accurate – Young adults are significantly less likely than older adults to strongly agree that the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches. Just 30% of Mosaics and 39% of Busters firmly embraced this view, compared with 46% of Boomers and 58% of Elders.
  • More Universalism – Among Mosaics, a majority (56%) believes the Bible teaches the same spiritual truths as other sacred texts, which compares with 4 out of 10 Busters and Boomers, and one-third of Elders.
  • Skepticism of Origins – Another generational difference is that young adults are more likely to express skepticism about the original manuscripts of the Bible than is true of older adults.
  • Less Engagement – While many young adults are active users of the Bible, the pattern shows a clear generational drop-off – the younger the person, the less likely then are to read the Bible. In particular, Busters and Mosaics are less likely than average to have spent time alone in the last week praying and reading the Bible for at least 15 minutes. Interestingly, none of the four generations were particularly likely to say they aspired to read the Bible more as a means of improving their spiritual lives.
  • Bible Appetite – Despite the generational decline in many Bible metrics, one departure from the typical pattern is the fact that younger adults, especially Mosaics (19%), express a slightly above-average interest in gaining additional Bible knowledge. This compares with 12% of Boomers and 9% of Elders.

For the purposes of this research, the Mosaic generation refers to adults who are currently ages 18 to 25; Busters are those ages 26 to 44; Boomers are 45 to 63; and Elders are 64-plus.

In the year 2000, these were Gallup’s findings on Bible reading habits in the USA:

Although most Americans own a Bible, use of the Bible varies significantly. In a poll taken by the Gallup Organization in October, 2000, 59% of Americans reported that they read the Bible at least occasionally. This is down from 73% in the 1980s. The percentage of Americans who read the Bible at least once a week is 37%. This is down slightly from 40% in 1990. 3 According to the Barna Research Group, those who read the Bible regularly spend about 52 minutes a week in the scriptures. 4 Barna, “The Bible,” data is from 1997.
Which gender is more faithful at reading the Bible at least weekly? The prize goes to the women. Women (42%) are more likely than men (32%) to have read the Bible in the past week. What version do people prefer? As of 1997, those who read the Bible preferred the King James Version to the New International Version by a 5 to 1 margin.

Is Bible reading an important habit to develop for Christians? Personal Bible reading would have been impossible for most Christians in the early Christian centuries, not only because of illiteracy, but also because a Bible translation was not available to the populace. What’s the call on whether Bible reading is important today, or should more emphasis be placed on solid Bible teaching?

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Copyright (c) 2015 Spencer D. Gear.  This document is free content.  You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the OpenContent License (OPL) version 1.0, or (at your option) any later version.  This document last updated at Date: 20 April 2015.

But the Lord reigns forever, executing judgment from his throne. He will judge the world with justice and rule the nations with fairness…. The Lord is known for his justice” (New Living Translation, Psalm 9:7-8, 16a)

The King James Version disagreement: Is the Greek text behind the KJV New Testament superior to that used by modern Bible translations?[1]

Erasmus, courtesy Wikipedia

By Spencer D Gear

What moves a religious person to become a born again Christian? I was raised in the liberal Methodist church in Bundaberg, Qld., Australia and went to Sunday School and church religiously. But that religion didn’t change the parents and children in our sugar cane farming household.

The change came in 1959 when my parents attended a landline Billy Graham crusade rally at the Bundaberg Showgrounds. Billy was preaching in Brisbane and his voice was booming out of the loud speaker system at the showgrounds.

My religious parents were sitting in their old Ford Prefect utility in the arena of those showgrounds (called fair grounds in the USA). After Billy’s proclamation of the Gospel, he gave the invitation to repent and to receive Jesus Christ by faith. Both of my parents got out of the Ute and moved to the podium where trained people met them for counselling to receive Christ.

On that day in May 1959, a religious household became a Christian home where Christ dwelt. Of course, my parents had to grow in their faith and they shared Christ with the three children. I was the eldest of the children and received Christ as my Lord and Saviour in the early 1960s as a teenager.

As church goers, we had used only the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. All of my Bible reading and memorisation as a new Christian was from the KJV. I deeply appreciate the foundation to my faith that was bolstered by my reading and study of the KJV.

But this was not the language that an Aussie bloke spoke with thee, thy, thou lingo. It did not communicate with me and I felt hindered when I wanted to share my faith. It conveyed the idea that Christianity was assigned to a previous historical era (anachronistic) and out of touch with the ordinary folks.

When I went to Bible College in the early 1970s, a course in bibliology caused me to investigate Bible translations further. I am grateful for three resources that have helped me understand the Greek text behind the KJV New Testament and to assess it. The information below is gleaned from these resources:

D. A. Carson 1979. The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House.

Norman L. Geisler & William E. Nix 1986. A General Introduction to the Bible (rev. & exp.). Chicago: Moody Press.

Bruce M. Metzger 1992. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press.

In recent decades there has been an emerging pro-KJV debate that has been promoted by organisations and people such as the Trinitarian Bible Society and Gail Riplinger. There is a recognised “King James Only” movement.

On a practical level, I experienced two recent examples of the promotion of the KJV over other translations. The first was in a local church where I preach by invitation from time to time. I preached at this church on 26 December 2010. When I sent the order of service to the elder who reads the Bible in the service, with a copy of the Old Testament and New Testament in the New International Version, I was told that only the KJV or the New King James Version was allowed for public reading in that church. However, I could use whatever translation I preferred in my preaching. I preached from the NIV. This church obviously has a policy that supports the priority of the KJV Only view.

A second example was in a response to some blogging that I did on Christian Forums. In the thread, “Do any of you believe tongues is necessary?“, one response by JEBrady was, “Jesus never said anything about speaking in tongues, to my knowledge. Most of what you can find on the subject in the NT will be in Acts 2, 8, 10, 19 and 1 Corinthians 12-14. Recommended reading for you.”.[2] My response[3] was:

“For those Pentecostal/charismatic believers who accept that Mark 16:9-20 is in the Scriptures (these are generally KJV supporters), they could say that Jesus did speak about tongues in Mark 16:17: ‘And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues’ (NIV).

“I do not support Mark 16:9-20 as being in the oldest and best manuscripts of the NT”.

Then there was this reply by Alive_Again:

“That’s the problem with the Hort-Westcott translations. They’ve eliminated scripture. The Mark scriptures in question were quoted by early church fathers. Just because it was translated from an older copy doesn’t mean it was more accurate.
It’s not surprising that the 40 odd scriptures taken from the NIV and recent versions of the Word of God take out scriptures that demonstrate how to deal effectively with the devil and one of the most important demonstrations of the Holy Spirit – speaking with “new” tongues (new to you)”[4].

Another writer, Jimoh[5], wrote: “Problem is Oz, many other scriptures are not included in those same texts… like dozens of the Psalms and half the book of Hebrews”.

In light of the above details, I find it necessary to examine some background to the Byzantine text-type, the Textus Receptus behind the KJV, and the Greek text gathered by Erasmus. Is the KJV a superior Bible version and have the modern versions been corrupted by Westcott & Hort’s ideology of Alexandrian text-type in gathering NT manuscripts?[6]

clip_image003
A part of page 336 of Erasmus’s Greek Testament, the first “Textus Receptus.” Shown is a portion of John 18 (courtesy keypoint.com)

1. The first Greek text to be published was that by Dutch scholar, Desiderius Erasmus (ca. AD 1469-1536) of Rotterdam, Holland. This was published in March 1516 and there were hundreds of printing errors in it. He published it as a diglot – in two languages, Greek and his own rather sophisticated Latin.

2. To prepare his Greek text, Erasmus used several Greek MSS but there was not one of them that incorporated the entire NT.

3. None of his MSS was earlier than the tenth century.

4. Erasmus consulted only one MSS for the Book of Revelation and the last leaf was lacking, so the last six verses were omitted in that Greek MSS. So what did he do? He translated the Latin Vulgate into Greek and published that as the last 6 verses of the book of Revelation. Therefore, in the Greek of the last 6 verses of the Book of Revelation, it contains some words and phrases that have been found in no other Greek MSS.

5. In other parts of the Greek NT, Erasmus introduced words he had translated from the Vulgate. Just as one example, in Acts 9:6 are the words from the KJV, “And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” These words have been found in no other Greek MSS. It is possible that Erasmus assimilated something that paralleled Acts 22:10.

6. Erasmus’s Greek NT testament is behind the King James Version NT. Yet it is based on only half a dozen minuscule MSS and not one of them is earlier than the tenth century. Erasmus’s text was printed by a number of publishers, the most important being Robert Estienne whose surname has been Latinised as Stephanus. He issued 4 editions and the third edition of 1550 is the first critical edition of the Greek text. It was Stephanus who introduced verse numbering into the text. The second edition was the one that was used by Luther for his German Bible (Carson 1979:34).

7. Theodore Beza, the successor to John Calvin, published a Greek text in 9 editions that varied very little from that of Stephanus.

8. The KJV translators relied on Beza’s editions of 1588-1589 and 1598. (The above information has been gleaned from Carson 1979:34-37). Carson explains:

“In 1624, thirteen years after the publication of the KJV, the Elzevir brothers, Bonaventure and Abraham, published a compact Greek New Testament, the text of which was largely that of Beza. In the second edition, published in 1633, there is an advertising blurb (Metzger’s term) that says, in Latin … (“The text that you have is now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or perverted”). This is the origin of the term Textus Receptus (or TR, as it is often referred to): the Latin words “textum … receptum”  have simply been put into the nominative. The TR is not the “received text” in the sense that it has been received from God as over against other Greek manuscripts. Rather, it is the “received text” in the sense that it was the standard one at the time of the Elzevirs. Nevertheless the textual basis of the TR is a small number of haphazardly collected and relatively late minuscule manuscripts. In about a dozen places its reading is attested by no known Greek manuscript witness” (1979:36).

9. Up until 1881, the TR, only with a few modifications, was the basis of all European translations. The most prominent MSS of the TR were from the Byzantine family and these were the dominant MSS for 2 centuries. It is true that Beza had access to codex Bezae, which is a Western text-type, but it had such significant differences when compared with the others, that it was not used with any significance by Beza.

10. The TR is not in total agreement with the Byzantine family of texts as the Byzantine text-type is found in several thousand witnesses, while the TR only refers to about one-hundredth of that evidence.

11. It is common for defenders of the TR and the KJV, to speak against the textual critical theories of B. F. Westcott & F. J. A. Hort. This has been happening for about a century. Westcott & Hort had available to them the newly discovered codex Sinaiticus and by 1889-1890, codex Vaticanus, along with other MSS. Westcott, Hort & Bengel presented a case for following text-types and they found that the Byzantine tradition did not go any further back than the fourth century and that it was “a conflation of earlier texts” (Carson 1979:40). Westcott & Hort considered that the Alexandrian tradition (e.g. Vaticanus and Sinaiticus) was earlier than the Byzantine text-type, which only went back to about the middle of the fourth century.

Codex Vaticanus

Two columns of the Codex Vaticanus. Click for full-size image.
(courtesy Bible Research)

12. On this basis, the earliest text-type is not that of the Byzantine TR behind the KJV, but the Alexandrian tradition which is generally accepted today as being closer to the original manuscripts. Hence the RV, ASV, RSV, NRSV, NIV, NASB, ESV, NLT and other translations since 1881 (except the NKJV) are based on the Alexandrian text-type. Carson (1979:52) is convinced from the evidence that “the Alexandrian text-type has better credentials than any other text-type now available”. Part of his assessment is:

“Not only is the Alexandrian text-type found in some biblical quotations by ante-Nicene fathers, but the text-type is also attested by some of the early version witnesses. More convincing yet, Greek papyri from the second and third centuries have shown up, none of which reflects a Byzantine text and most of which have a mixed Alexandrian / Western text. The famous papyrus p75, which dates from about A.D. 200 and is perhaps earlier, is astonishingly close to Vaticanus. This find definitely proves the early date of the Vaticanus text-type (Carson 1979:53).

13. There have been various KJV editions. The 1631 edition omitted the word “not” from the seventh of the Ten Commandments and so obtained the reputation of being called “Wicked Bible”. There was a 1717 edition printed at Oxford that has the reputation of being called the “Vinegar Bible” because the chapter heading of Luke 20 read “vinegar” instead of “vineyard” (Geisler & Nix 1986:567-568).

The 1769 revision of the KJV, which we use today, differs from the 1611 edition in about 75,000 details (Goodspeed in Geisler & Nix 1986:568). Many of these are minor changes of spelling. See: ‘Changes in the King James Version‘ from 1611 to 1769. A copy of the 1611 edition of the KJV is currently available for sale as The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (Oxford World’s Classics).

Concerning what Erasmus did in omitting the Trinitarian statement of 1 John 5:7-8, Bruce Metzger explains:

Erasmus replied that he [Erasmus] had not found any Greek manuscript containing these words, though he had in the meanwhile examined several others besides those on which he relied when first preparing his text. In an unguarded moment Erasmus promised that he would insert the Comma Johanneum, as it is called, in future editions if a single Greek manuscript could be found that contained the passage. At length such a copy was found–or was made to order! As it now appears, the Greek manuscripts had probably been written in Oxford about 1520 by a Franciscan friar named Froy (or Roy), who took the disputed words from the Latin Vulgate. Erasmus stood by his promise and inserted the passage in his third edition (1522), but he indicates in a lengthy footnote his suspicions that the manuscripts had been prepared expressly in order to confute him (Metzger 1992:101).

Thus, there are many good reasons for regarding the Textus Receptus behind the NT of the King James Version as not being superior to that used by the modern Greek critical text.

Jemand wrote a helpful summary in this area:

Websites that militantly defend the absurd notion that the King James Version of the Bible, and it alone, is “the preserved word of God” willfully and deliberately misrepresent the truth to make it appear that all other versions of the Bible are counterfeits of the real thing. The New Testament portion of the New King James Version (NKJV) is translated from the same Greek text that the New Testament portion of the King James Version is translated from. Here is a brief summary of the origin of that Greek text (I wrote this summary myself for use in another thread):

The first printed Greek New Testament was printed in 1514 as part of the Complutensian Polyglot which was not yet ready for publication. In 1515, publisher Johann Froben entered into a business agreement with the Dutch scholar and humanist Desiderius Erasmus in which Erasmus was to prepare for publication a Greek New Testament, the first to ever be published. Froben wanted his Greek New Testament to be on the market before the Complutensian Polyglot, so Erasmus had to very hastily put his text together. Very much to his dismay, he was not able to find a Greek manuscript that contained the entire Greek New Testament; therefore he used several manuscripts, but mostly two 12th century manuscripts from a monastic library at Basle—one of which contained the four gospels and the other the Book of Acts and the epistles. This resulted in a manuscript for publication that contained corrections between the lines and in the margins. The published work, not surprisingly, included hundreds of typographical errors, causing F. H. A. Scrivener to comment that it was, “in that respect the most faulty book I know.”

Yet other difficulties plagued Erasmus in the preparation of his Greek text of the New Testament. He had only one Greek manuscript that contained the Book of Revelation. This manuscript that Erasmus had borrowed from his friend Reuchlin was incomplete—it lacked the final leaf that had contained the last six verses—and it had other defects. It included a commentary on Revelation and in places Erasmus was not able to distinguish between the text and the commentary. Therefore, in those places where the text was either missing or in doubt, he used the Latin Vulgate and translated it into Greek to complete his Greek Text. The result was that his Greek text of Revelation includes readings that are not found in any Greek manuscript and even a word that does not exist in the Greek language, but which because of superstition are still included in the so-called Textus Receptus, proving that for some people superstition trumps manuscript evidence. And translations from the Latin Vulgate are not limited to the Book of Revelation, but are found in other parts of his Greek text of the New Testament. This is the reason why, for example, the text of Acts 9:6 in the King James Version is very different from the text in other translation that do not rely upon the mistakes of Erasmus, including all of them that are translated from the Majority Text or the Byzantine Text type.

Acts 9:6 And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. (King James Version)

Acts 9:6 but rise, and enter into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. (Revised Version of 1881 and similarly in every standard translation since then)

The first edition of Erasmus’ Greek text of the New Testament was published in 1516 with a second edition in 1519. The reception was mixed—the 3,300 copies sold quickly but the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford (and some others) forbade their students from reading them. A very important and historical objection to these two editions of Erasmus’ Greek text of the New Testament came from one of the editors Ximenes’ Complutensian Polyglot, Stunica. This objection was that the Greek text for the last part of 1 John 5:7 and first part of 1 John 5:8 were missing. Erasmus replied that he had never seen a manuscript of the Greek New Testament that included those words but very foolishly and very much to his regret later made the promise that he would include them in the third edition of his Greek text of the New Testament if Stunica could provide him with even one Greek manuscript in which the words were found. To the dismay of Erasmus, Stunica, a man lacking the moral fiber of which Erasmus was made, provided Erasmus with such a manuscript—a manuscript that was apparently written in Oxford in 1520 by a Franciscan friar named Froy who translated the words from the Latin Vulgate and inserted them into his Greek manuscript. Erasmus kept his word and inserted the words into the third edition of his Greek text of the New Testament which was published in 1522, but included a lengthy footnote in which he wrote that he believed that the Greek manuscript supplied to him containing those words was probably written for that very purpose. That manuscript is now known as Codex Greg. 61 and the words are known as the Comma Johanneum. The King James translation of the New Testament translates those words as “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 8. And there are three that bear witness on earth:” During the nearly four centuries since Codex Greg. 61 was written, the Comma Johanneum has been found in only three other Greek manuscripts:

Greg. 88, a 12th century manuscript in which the Comma is found in a marginal note that was written in the 17th century

Tisch. w 110, a 16th century manuscript that is a copy of the Greek text of the New Testament in the Complutensian Polyglot

Greg. 629, a 14th century (or possibly 16th century) manuscript

Erasmus had now seen the Greek text in the Complutensian Polyglot and generously used it to revise his own Greek text, making changes to 90 passages in the Book of Revelation alone in his fourth edition of 1527. In 1535, Erasmus published his fifth and final edition in which he made only minor revisions of his Greek text.

Robert Estienne (also known by his Latin name Stephanus) published four editions of the Greek New Testament in 1546, 1549, 1550, and 1551. The Greek text in his third edition was very similar to the Greek text in the fourth and fifth editions of Erasmus. In his fourth edition, he introduced the numbering of the verses in the New Testament, the numbering system still employed (for the most part) today. The third edition, or Jean Crispin’s (sometimes spelled Crespin) much smaller reprint of it, became the textual basis for the New Testament in the Geneva Bible translated by William Whittingham and other English Protestants, the first English version to include variant readings in the margins.

Théodore de Bèze (commonly spelled Beza) published nine editions of the Greek New Testament and a tenth was published posthumously in 1611. Four of the nine included variations in the Greek text, those of 1565, 1582, 1588-89, and 1598. The editions of 1588-89 and 1598 were used to a significant extent by the translators of the New Testament portion of the King James Version, but the primary text used by the translators of the King James Version was the 1550 edition by Stephanus. The translators of the New Testament portion of the New King James Version consistently translated from the Greek text underlying the New Testament portion of the King James Version (Jemand, Bible Forums, ‘Is the NKJV corrupted?’ #106, 20 March 2009)

I know that this kind of post will not go down well with Textus Receptus and KJV Only supporters, but these matters need to be clarified.

I recommend the article by Daniel Wallace, “Why I do not think the King James Bible is the best translation available today”.

Appendix A

One of the finest histories of the Christian church is that by Kenneth Scott Latourette 1975. A History of Christianity (vol. 1, rev. edn.). New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Latourette states of Erasmus:

“He was ordained to the [Roman Catholic] priesthood…. He wished to see the Church purged of superstition through the use of intelligence and a return to the ethical teachings of Christ. He desired no break with the existing Catholic Church. He initiated no innovation in doctrine or worship…. He got out an edition of the Greek Testament [Textus Receptus] with a fresh translation into Latin” (pp. 661-62).

 

Appendix B

Bruce Metzger (1992:99-103) has summarised the situation:

Since Erasmus could not find a manuscript which contained the entire Greek Testament, he utilized several for various parts of the New Testament. For most of the text he relied on two rather inferior manuscripts from a monastic library at Basle, one of the Gospels … and one of the Acts and Epistles, both dating from about the twelfth century. Erasmus compared them with two or three others of the same books and entered occasional corrections for the printer in the margins or between the lines of the Greek script. For the Book of Revelation he had but one manuscript, dating from the twelfth century, which he had borrowed from his friend Reuchlin. Unfortunately, this manuscript lacked the final leaf, which had contained the last six verses of the book. For these verses, as well as a few other passages throughout the book where the Greek text of the Apocalypse and the adjoining Greek commentary with which the manuscript was supplied are so mixed up as to be almost indistinguishable, Erasmus depended upon the Latin Vulgate, translating this text into Greek. As would be expected from such a procedure, here and there in Erasmus’ self-made Greek text are readings which have never been found in any known Greek manuscript-but which are still perpetuated today in printings of the so-called Textus Receptus of the Greek New Testament.

Even in other parts of the New Testament Erasmus occasionally introduced into his Greek text material taken from the Latin Vulgate. Thus in Acts ix. 6, the question which Paul asks at the time of his conversion on the Damascus road, ‘And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?’, was frankly interpolated by Erasmus from the Latin Vulgate. This addition, which is found in no Greek manuscript at this passage (though it appears in the parallel account of Acts xxii. 10), became part of the Textus Receptus, from which the King James version was made in 1611.

The reception accorded Erasmus’ edition, the first published Greek New Testament, was mixed. On the one hand, it found many purchasers throughout Europe. Within three years a second edition was called for, and the total number of copies of the 1516 and 1519 editions amounted to 3,300. The second edition became the basis of Luther’s German translation….

Among the criticisms leveled at Erasmus one of the most serious appeared to be the charge of Stunica, one of the editors of Ximenes’ Complutensian Polyglot, that his text lacked part of the final chapter of I John, namely the Trinitarian statement concerning ‘the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth’ (I John v. 7-8, King James version). Erasmus replied that he had not found any Greek manuscript containing these words, though he had in the meanwhile examined several others besides those on which he relied when first preparing his text. In a guarded moment Erasmus promised that he would insert Comma Johanneum, as it is called, in future editions if a single Greek manuscript could be found – or was made to order! As it now appears, the Greek manuscript had probably been written in Oxford about 1520 by a Franciscan friar named Froy (or Roy), who took the disputed words from the Latin Vulgate. Erasmus stood by his promise and inserted the passage in his third edition (1522), but he indicates in a lengthy footnote his suspicions that the manuscript had been prepared expressly in order to refute him.

Among the thousands of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament examined since the time of Erasmus, only three others are known to contain this spurious passage. They are Greg. 88, a twelfth-century manuscript which has the Comma written in the margin in a seventeenth-century hand; Tisch. w 110, which is, a sixteenth-century manuscript copy of the Complutensian Polyglot Greek text; and Greg. 629, dating from the fourteenth or, as Riggenbach has argued, from the latter half of the sixteenth century. The oldest known citation of the Comma is in a fourth-century Latin treatise entitled Liber apologeticus (ch. 4), attributed either to Priscillian or to his follower, Bishop Instantius of Spain. The Comma probably originated as a piece of allegorical exegesis of the three witnesses and may have been written as a marginal gloss in a Latin manuscript of I John, when it was taken into the text of the Old Latin Bible during the fifth century. The passage does not appear in manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate before about A.D. 800….

Thus the text of Erasmus’ Greek New Testament rests upon a half-dozen miniscule [lower case script] manuscripts. The oldest and best of these manuscripts (codex I, a miniscule of the tenth century, which agrees often with the earlier uncial [upper case script] text) he used least, because he was afraid of its supposedly erratic text! Erasmus’ text is inferior in critical value to the Complutensian, yet because it was the first on the market and was available in a cheaper and more convenient form, it attained a far greater influence than its rival, which had been in preparation from 1502 to 1514….

Subsequent editors, though making a number of alterations in Erasmus’ text, essentially reproduced this debased form of the Greek Testament. Having secured an undeserved pre-eminence, what came to be called the Textus Receptus of the New Testament resisted for 400 years all scholarly efforts to displace it in favour of an earlier and more accurate text.

Works consulted

Carson, D A 1979. The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House.

Metzger, B. M. 1992. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption,and Restoration (third ed). New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Endnotes:

[1] By modern translations, I am referring to examples such as the New International Version, English Standard Version, New American Standard Bible, New Living Translation and the New Revised Standard Version. The New King James Version is not included because of its dependence on the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine text.

[2] #12 of the thread.

[3] I’m OzSpen, #147 of the thread.

[4] #148 of the thread.

[5] #149 of the thread.

[6] I provided some of this information in #153 and #154 of the thread.

 

Copyright (c) 2012 Spencer D. Gear.   This document last updated at Date: 31 March 2016.

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Is the Gospel of Thomas genuine or heretical?

Last page of Gospel of Thomas

(image courtesy Wikipedia)

By Spencer D Gear

Is the Gospel of Thomas, discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in December 1945, a representative sample of the writings of biblical Christianity? Is it an authentic gospel that should be considered for inclusion in the New Testament along with the four recognised Gospels? Or should it be rejected as heretical as some of the church fathers concluded (see below)?

On Christian Forums (December – January 2010-2011), there was this discussion on the Gospel of Thomas. The thread began with a post by Yoder777:

Mainstream Christians are often dismissive of Thomas as a Gnostic Gospel, without really trying to understand the history that surrounds it.

Scholars make a distinction between the Gospel of Thomas and Gnosticism. While Thomas’ focus is on restoring the nature of man as it was before the fall, Gnosticism is world-negating. Thomas is better seen in light of Jewish wisdom literature than Gnosticism.

Thomas was not universally rejected in the early church. For example, 2 Clement quotes from it. The Orthodox Christians of India and Mesopotamia trace their heritage to the Apostle Thomas. If he visited those regions, it could explain some of the Gospel’s eastern tinge.

Thomas can be a valuable resource for our spiritual lives, since it illuminates and expands on passages found in the canonical Gospels. It also goes into the deeper spiritual meaning of Jesus’ message, just as John does.

The following contain some of my (OzSpen) responses on this thread. DaLeKo (#15) wrote:

So girls aren’t in need all that grace and faith stuff to be saved, they just need to have an operation ..

114) Simon Peter said to Him, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life.” Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

I responded (OzSpen #36):

You have beautifully illustrated by this quote why the Gospel of Thomas is ‘another gospel’.


Nicholas Perrin in his assessment of The Gospel of Thomas, concludes that

The Gospel of Thomas invites us to imagine a Jesus who says, ‘I am not your saviour, but the one who can put you in touch with your true self. Free yourself from your gender, your body, and any concerns you might have for the outside world. Work for it and self-realization, salvation, will be yours – in this life.’ Imagine such a Jesus? One need hardly work very hard. This is precisely the Jesus we know too well, the existential Jesus, that so many western evangelical and liberal churches already preach (Perrin 2007:139).

Originally posted by Yoder777:

What if Thomas was available in a different geographical region, isolated from Matthew and Luke? What if, like John, Thomas was written independently of Matthew and Luke?

I wrote (OzSpen #53) that the church father, Origen, writing about AD 233, mentioned that

there is passed down also the Gospel according to Thomas, the Gospel, according to Matthias, and many others.

This seems to indicate that in the early part of the third century, the Gospel of Thomas, was known in the region where Origen lived.

After this time, it was labelled as heretical. Eusebius (ca. 265-339) includes the Gospels of Thomas, Matthias, and Peter in his list of heretical writings. See Eusebius’ greatest work, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.6, where he wrote:

But we have nevertheless felt compelled to give a catalogue of these also, distinguishing those works which according to ecclesiastical tradition are true and genuine and commonly accepted, from those others which, although not canonical but disputed, are yet at the same time known to most ecclesiastical writers— we have felt compelled to give this catalogue in order that we might be able to know both these works and those that are cited by the heretics under the name of the apostles, including, for instance, such books as the Gospels of Peter, of Thomas, of Matthias, or of any others besides them, and the Acts of Andrew and John and the other apostles, which no one belonging to the succession of ecclesiastical writers has deemed worthy of mention in his writings.

The church father, Origen, lived ca. 185-254. These are his views concerning other gospels than the four canonical Gospels accepted by the church.

From Origen’s Homily on Luke (1:1), according to the Latin translation of Jerome:

That there have been written down not only the four Gospels, but a whole series from which those that we possess have been chosen and handed down to the churches, is, let it be noted, what we may learn from Luke’s preface, which runs thus: ‘For as much as many have taken in hand to compose a narrative’ . The expression ‘they have taken in hand’ involves a covert accusation of those who precipitately and without the grace of the Holy Ghost have set about the writing of the gospels.

Matthew to be sure and Mark and John as well as Luke did not ‘take in hand’ to write, but filled with the Holy Ghost have written the Gospels. ‘Many have taken in hand to compose a narrative of the events which are quite definitely familiar among us’ . The Church possesses four Gospels, heresy a great many, of which one is entitled ‘The Gospel according to the Egyptians’, and another ‘The Gospel according to the Twelve Apostles’. Basilides also has presumed to write a gospel, and to call it by his own name. ‘Many have taken in hand ‘ to write, but only four Gospels are recognized. From these the doctrines concerning the person of our Lord and Savior are to be derived. I know a certain gospel which is called ‘The Gospel according to Thomas’ and a ‘Gospel according to Matthias’, and many others have we read – lest we should in any way be considered ignorant because of those who imagine that they posses some knowledge if they are acquainted with these. Nevertheless, among all these we have approved solely what the Church has recognized, which is that only the four Gospels should be accepted (emphasis added).

The earliest mention we have of the Gospel of Thomas is from Hippolytus of Rome who was a martyr and died ca. 236. It is in, “The Refutation of all heresies. Book V”. He states:

And concerning this (nature) they hand down an explicit passage, occurring in the Gospel inscribed according to Thomas, expressing themselves thus: “He who seeks me, will find, me in children from seven years old; for there concealed, I shall in the fourteenth age be made manifest.” This, however, is not (the teaching) of Christ, but of Hippocrates, who uses these words: “A child of seven years is half of a father.” And so it is that these (heretics), placing the originative nature of the universe in causative seed, (and) having ascertained the (aphorism) of Hippocrates, that a child of seven years old is half of a father, say that in fourteen years, according to Thomas, he is manifested.

Hippolytus of Rome is said to have been a disciple of Irenaeus.

The evidence from the early church is that the Gospel of Thomas was an heretical gospel. Perrin has made his doctoral dissertation on the Gospel of Thomas available to ordinary folks (Perrin 2007). I recommend it as an excellent assessment of the origin and value of this “other gospel”. Perrin states that

the Gospel of Thomas was a Syriac text written in the last quarter of the second century by a careful editor who arranged his material largely on the basis of catchword connection. As far as his sources, Thomas drew primarily on Tatian’s Diatessaron , but also undoubtedly drew on his memory of a number of oral and written traditions. It cannot be ruled out that Thomas preserves authentic sayings of Jesus….

Our author Thomas was inspired not only by Tatian’s gospel harmony but also by Tatian’s Encratistic theology, which saw Jesus not as Saviour, but as the one who can show us how to be saved. Through abstinence and vegetarianism, the moral soul could aspire to be reunited to the divine Spirit….

By so clothing Jesus in a deeply Encratistic and Hermetic guise, the Thomas community no doubt incurred the displeasure of the Edessean proto-orthodox Christians, who were on the cusp of formalizing their connection with Serapion of Antioch. While accepted by some soi-distant Christians, the Gospel of Thomas was rejected by many others, but not before attaining international status and popularity. It continued to be used predominantly among the Syrian-based Manichaeans who were sympathetic to its stripping away of the Jewish elements of Christianity (Perrin 2007:137, URL links added to the quote).

What type of Jesus is revealed in the Gospel of Thomas? Perrin’s view is that

the Gospel of Thomas invites us to imagine a Jesus who says, ‘I am not your saviour, but the one who can put you in touch with your true self. Free yourself from your gender, your body, and any concerns you might have for the outside world. Work for it and self-realization, salvation, will be yours – in this life.’ Imagine such a Jesus? One need hardly work very hard. his is precisely the Jesus we know too well, the existential Jesus that so many western evangelical and liberal churches already preach (2007:139).

This is in contrast to John Dominic Crossan’s associating the Gospel of Thomas with the authority of the apostle Thomas, known as “doubting Thomas”. Crossan wrote of Thomas, the apostle:

This is the figure here immortalized as Doubting Thomas. We know about his leadership and authority, and his competition with alternative figures such as Peter and Thomas, from the Gospel of Thomas 13 (Crossan 1994:188-189).

Crossan then quotes Thomas 13 (Crossan seems to have used his own translation):

13 Jesus said to his disciples, “Compare me to something and tell me what I am like.”

2Simon Peter said to him, “You are like a just angel.”

3 Matthew said to him, “You are like a wise philosopher.”

4Thomas said to him, “Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like.”

5 Jesus said, “I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that I have tended.”

6 And he took him, and withdrew, and spoke three sayings to him.

7When Thomas came back to his friends, they asked him, “What did Jesus say to you?”

8 Thomas said to them, “If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and devour you.”

In contrast to Perrin, Crossan believes the Gospel of Thomas ‘may have been composed in two major steps’, the first stage being dated to ‘the the 50s and 60s of the first century…. The second stage has many sayings special to itself, dates to the 70s and 80s of that first century’ (Crossan 1995:26-31). How could it be that two scholars arrive at radically different conclusions concerning the writing of the Gospel of Thomas. For Crossan it is in the mid-late first century while for Perrin it is written in the latter part of the second century.

Could it have something to do with their presuppositions?

Based on the evidence from the early church (e.g. Origen & Eusebius), the Gospel of Thomas is to be regarded as an heretical document, another gospel.

What is heresy?

In New Testament Greek, the term from which we get “heresy” is hairesis. Arndt & Gingrich’s Greek Lexicon states that hairesis means ‘sect, party, school’. It was used of the Sadduccees in Acts 5:17; of the Pharisees in Acts 15:5. Of the Christians in Acts 24:5. It is used of a heretical sect or those with destructive opinions in 2 Peter 2:1 (“destructive heresies” ESV).

The article on hairesis in Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Vol. 1, p. 182ff) states that its “usage in Acts corresponds exactly to that of Josephus and the earlier Rabbis” but the development of the Christian sense of heresy does not parallel this Rabbinic use. When the ekklesia came into being, there was no place for hairesis. They were opposed to each other. This author states that “the greater seriousness consists in the fact that hairesis affect the foundation of the church in doctrine (2 Pt. 2:1), and that they do so in such a fundamental way as to give rise to a new society alongside the ekklesia” (Kittel Vol I:183).

From the NT, we see the term, heresy, being used to mean what Paul called strange doctrines, different doctrine,
doctrines of demons, every wind of doctrine (See 1 Timothy 1:3; 4:1;6:3; Ephesians 4:14), as contrasted with sound doctrine, our doctrine, the doctrine conforming to godliness, the doctrine of God (See 1 Timothy 4:6; 6:1,3;2 Timothy 4:3; Titus 1:9; 2:1, 10).

References

Crossan, J D 1995. Who killed Jesus? Exposing the roots of anti-semitism in the gospel story of the death of Jesus. New York: HarperSanFrancisco.

Kittel, G (ed) 1964. Theological dictionary of the New Testament, trans. & ed. by G. W. Bromiley (vol 1). Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Perrin, N 2007. Thomas, the other gospel. London: SPCK.

 

Copyright © 2011 Spencer D. Gear. This document last updated at Date: 28 October 2016.

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Dilemmas surrounding Judas Iscariot’s death

Judas
ChristArt

By Spencer Gear

There are some alleged contradictions in the story of Judas Iscariot when we compare Matthew 27:3-10 and Acts 1:18-19. A friend has sent me the questions (in bold below). F. F. Bruce (1951:77) acknowledged that ‘the main problems are: (1) Who bought the field? (2) How did Judas die? (3) Why was the place called “the Field of Blood”?’

Was it Judas who bought the field or was it the priests? This is my first question. One text suggests the priests, the other suggests Judas.

Acts 1:18 does state that ‘Judas bought a field” and this field was called ‘in their language, Akeidama, that is field of blood’ (NIV). Most translations have Acts 1:18-19 as a parenthesis inserted by the author, Luke.

Matt. 27:6-8 says that “The chief priests picked up the coins and said, “It is against the law to put this into the treasury, since it is blood money.” 7 So they decided to use the money to buy the potter’s field as a burial place for foreigners.8 That is why it has been called the Field of Blood to this day” NIV).

On the surface it does sound contradictory, but notice the language of Matt. 27:6-8: The chief priests bought a potter’s field that was ‘a burial place for foreigners’, that was called ‘the Field of Blood to this day’.

F. F. Bruce in his commentary on the Book of Acts (Bruce 1979:49) states:

‘(According to Matt. 27:7, it was the chief priests who bought it with the reward of treachery, which Judas had had flung back in their faces. The common harmonization of the two accounts at this point –suggested, for example by E. Jacquier in Les Actes des Ap?tres (Paris, 1926), ad loc. – is that the chief priests, considering the thirty sheckles to be legally Judas’ property, bought the field with them in his name.) He did not live, however, to enjoy the fruits of his shameful act, for he swelled up and sustained a fatal rupture. (The Latin Vulgate harmonizes this account with Matthew’s by saying that “having hanged himself he burst asunder in the midst”; Augustine (Against Felix the Manichaean i.4) says “he fastened a rope round his neck and, falling on his face, burst asunder in the midst.”) It should be noted by the English reader that “in the midst” does not mean “in the midst of the field”, but refers to Judas’s body. The field was accordingly called by an Aramaic name meaning “the field of blood” (According to Matt. 27:7, it was the potter’s field, and was used thereafter to bury aliens in.)’

The other was how did he die? By hanging, or falling off the cliff headlong. Not that if someone hung themselves, it might appear unlikely that if the rope broke, that he would fall headlong.

Three things are stated of Judas and his death:

  1. Judas ‘hanged himself’ (Matt. 27:5 NIV), and
  2. He ‘fell headlong’ (Acts 1:18 NIV);
  3. ‘His body burst open and all his intestines spilled out’ (Acts 1:18 NIV).

Are any of these facts contradictory?

What does it mean that he fell ‘headlong’ (Acts 1:18)? ‘Headlong” is the Greek, pr?n?s. In Arndt & Gingrich’s Greek lexicon, it gives the meaning of pr?n?s as ‘forward, prostate, head first, headlong’ but admits the meaning, ‘swollen, distended’ as a possibility (1957:707). Therefore “headlong” is not the necessary meaning.

One of the greatest NT Greek scholars of all time, Dr. A. T. Robertson, wrote that the meaning is not ‘headlong’ but ‘”flat on the face” as opposed to kuptios on the back’ (Robertson 1930:16). F. F. Bruce (1951:77) in his Greek commentary on the Book of Acts states that ‘fell headlong’ is literally, ‘”having become prone”, i.e. falling flat’.

So if I follow these Greek authorities, it is easy to see that when Judas was released from whatever device hanged him, he fell forward, prostrate, flat on his face. So there is no contradiction between a person being hanged and his then falling prostrate on his face (‘fell headlong’).

I have no problem in understanding that a body that died from hanging and falls on its face can ‘burst open; and have the intestines spill open. Acts 1:18 provides information that is supplementary to Matt. 27:3-10 and not what is contradictory. It is reasonable to infer that the rope that hanged Judas snapped under stress or through somebody cutting it and that when it fell, it hit something that caused the body to burst open and the intestines to fall out.

Therefore, Matthew (probably written to a Jewish audience) and Luke/Acts (probably for a Gentile audience) are like two journalists describing the same event but from different angles for different audiences.

My concern is that in putting forth their message, it still doesn’t explain some seemingly contradictory facts proposed to make their point. Who do you believe purchased the field? How do you make sense of him falling headlong after hanging?

Who purchased the field? The priests did, but with 30 pieces of silver that legally belonged to Judas. So the priests bought the field, but Judas also did it as it was Judas’s money.

There is no problem in understanding that a person can be hanged and fall on his face or on his head when being cut down from the hanging device.

Acts 1:18 How did Judas die?

This is how some scholars see it:

While Luke’s description of Judas’s death is rather gory, Acts 1:18 would not be a problem were it not that Matthew seemingly has a different story. In Matthew’s account, “Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself” (Matthew 27:5). Matthew also reports that the chief priests used the money “to buy the potter’s field as a burial place for foreigners.” Aren’t the two accounts contradictory?

It is clear that Matthew and Luke have different concerns in mentioning the incident. Matthew is more interested in the purchase of the field, which he sees as a fulfillment of Scripture. He combines Zech. 11:12-13 (the thirty pieces of silver and the potter) and Jeremiah 32:6-12 (buying a field), perhaps with overtones of Jeremiah 18:1-4 (going to the potter’s house), and links them all under Jeremiah’s name.

Luke has another concern, which is that Judas got what he deserved, a horrible death. (A similar situation is reported in Acts 12:21-24, where the author narrates the story of Herod Agrippa I’s death.) The focus is not on the purchase of the field (which would have appeared a reward, especially to Jews for whom landowning in Palestine was important), but on his death in the field (which was ghastly).

Both authors want to point out that the field was called “The Field of Blood,” thus memorializing the deed. Acts appears to connect the title to Judas’s blood in his death, while Matthew ties it to the fact that the blood money paid for the field. It is hardly surprising that the same name might mean different things to different people.

A closer look at the two stories highlights gaps in the narrative that raise questions about the events. But the accounts are not necessarily contradictory. Acts is concerned that Judas’s money and name were connected to a field. Whether or not the chief priests actually purchased it, perhaps some time after Judas’s death, would not be a detail of concern to the author. His point was the general knowledge that Judas’s money went to the purchase, which resulted in the title “Field of Blood” being attached to the field. Another possible reason for the name, also a concern of Acts, was that Judas split open and his intestines poured out. Such a defacing of the body, probably with the concomitant result of the corpse being at least partially eaten by vultures and dogs, was horrible in the view of the Jews, for whom proper burial was important. In fact, they even valued forms of execution that did not deface the outside of the body (such as strangulation) over forms that defaced the body (such as stoning, the worst form in their eyes).

Matthew points out that it was a guilt-motivated suicide, accomplished by the most common means, hanging. Suicide in Jewish literature is most often connected to shame or failure. (So 2 Samuel 17:23; compare the other accounts of suicide in Old Testament history, which were normally to avoid a more shameful death.) However, since suicide by hanging was usually accomplished (at least by poorer people) by jumping out of a tree with a rope around one’s neck, it was not unusual (nor is it uncommon in India today) for the body to be ripped open in the process. I hesitate to say that this was exactly what happened, but it is certainly a plausible explanation.
Therefore, we will never be fully certain about what happened at the death of Judas. What I have shown is that there are certainly credible explanations as to how the two accounts fit together. I have shown how it may well have happened, not how it must have happened. In doing so we see that there is no necessary contradiction. Yet what is important in reading these narratives is to focus on the points they are making, not on the horrible death. With Matthew we see that Scripture is fulfilled even while those fulfilling it are driven by guilt and shame to their own self-destruction. And with Acts we see that sin does have consequences: Judas not only lost his office through his treachery, but came to a shameful end as well, an end memorialized in the place near Jerusalem named “Field of Blood” (Kaiser, et al 1996:511-512).

Gleason Archer (1982:349-350) provides his assessment of Acts 1:18 online HERE.

References

Archer, G L 1982. Encyclopedia of Bible difficulties. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Regency Reference Library (Zondervan Publishing House). Available online HERE.

Arndt, W F & Gingrich, R W 1957. A Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament and other early Christian literature. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Bruce, F F 1951. The Acts of the Apostles: The Greek text with introduction and commentary. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Bruce, F F 1979. Commentary on the Book of Acts (The New International Commentary on the New Testament – F. F. Bruce, gen ed). Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Kaiser, W C, Davids P H, Bruce F F & Brauch, M T 1996. Hard sayings of the Bible. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, citation located HERE. A copy of this book is available at Google Books, “Hard Sayings of the Bible“.

Robertson, A T 1930. Word pictures in the New Testament: The Acts of the Apostles, vol 3. Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press.

 

Copyright (c) 2014 Spencer D. Gear.  This document is free content.  You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the OpenContent License (OPL) version 1.0, or (at your option) any later version.  This document last updated at Date: 24 March 2014.

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Whytehouse designs

Who wrote the Book of Hebrews?

image

What is the evidence for Paul writing the Book of Hebrews?

Firstly, let’s observe that this book does not begin as a typical NT epistle. While the ending is like a regular epistle, the beginning differs in that there is not the usual greeting with names of the writer and the people to whom it is addressed. Throughout the epistle it seems to be addressed to a Christian community, but it is not named.

This epistle was known to Clement of Rome before the end of the first century (ca. AD 96) in a letter he wrote to the Corinthian church from the Roman church. See 1 Clement 36:1-5. Some of the language of Hebrews is interwoven in these verses from 1 Clement.

As for the author of Hebrews, I believe the best answer is that we do not know who wrote it. Clement of Rome gives not the slightest indication who the author was. There was an Alexandrian belief of Christianity from the East in the 4th century that Paul was the author. This seems to have influenced the view that people espouse that Paul was the author. Clement of Alexandria in Hypotyposes [quoted by early historian Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History 6.14.2] claimed that Paul wrote it in the Hebrew language and it was translated by Luke and then released for the Greeks to read.

We do have another early reference to the authorship of Hebrews from Tertullian (On Modesty, ch 20). He claimed that it was written by Barnabas. Look up the writings of The Muratorian Canon, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Gaius of Rome, as none of these regarded Paul as the author of Hebrews. The main early influences in pointing to Paul as the author of Hebrews came from Jerome (Epistle 129) and Augustine (On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins, and the Baptism of Infants 1. ch 50). Augustine supported the Eastern church’s view and the placing of the Book of Hebrews in the canon of the NT. Jerome said that there were 3 views of the authorship of the Book of Hebrews when he wrote about AD 414. The Epistle was written by Paul, Barnabas or Clement, according to him.

From the Synod of Hippo in 393 and the Third Synod of Carthage in 397, we have the statement, “Of Paul the apostle, thirteen epistles; of the same to the Hebrews, one”. At the Synod of Carthage in AD 419, we have affirmed “fourteen epistles” assumed to be ascribed to Paul. From this time forward, Hebrews was said to be from the pen of Paul in the Western church, but Clement of Rome or Luke as a translator or editor of the epistle were ascribed authors. Thomas Aquinas (AD 1225-1274) in his Preface to the Epistle of the Hebrews wrote: “Luke, who was an excellent advocated, translated it [Book of Hebrews] from Hebrew into that elegant Greek” (quoted in F. F. Bruce 1964. The Epistle to the Hebrews, Eerdmans, p. xxxix).

Therefore, assigning the authorship of Paul to the Book of Hebrews is questionable in my view. For me, the best view is that the author is unknown, but that the Book of Hebrews was an important book in the canon of Scripture from the early years of the Christian Church.

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Evidence for Jesus: Testing the transmission evidence

https://i0.wp.com/www.bible-researcher.com/vaticanus7.jpg?resize=315%2C707

(Vaticanus John 1:1-14a)

By Spencer D Gear

How do we know if the God-man, historical Jesus, existed and was the Jesus manifested according to the New Testament? On Christian Forums, I asked Hillard, “So what historical evidence will you accept to determine the date of Jesus’ birth?”(#16 of this thread). This was his response (#18 of this thread):

Historical evidence is all we need to tell us if there was a particular man named Jesus who was the leader of a group, a few words written thousands of years ago and passed down to us are not enough because too many things have happened in history that might have tainted or changed the writings, don’t forget, people throughout history could be killed for writing the wrong things also peoples opinions are not evidence they are only their opinions.

For all we know the stories in the Bible could have been written by the supporters of a Jewish left or right -wing political nationalist named Jesus who was trying to undermine the Romans, his supporters would write anything if they thought it would help their cause they might even give him a God like status, if all we had were the writings of Stalins supporters we might be misled into thinking he was a really nice man.

In my reply, I said that I take history more seriously than you seem to do and have written on this topic. In determining if the NT is a trustworthy and accurate document, historians use three tests: (1) The Transmission Test; (2) The Internal Evidence Test, and (3) The External Evidence Test.

The transmission test is an examination of how the documents reached us from when they were written. Since we don’t have the original documents, how reliable are the copies we have in:

  • The number of manuscripts (MSS);
  • The time interval between the original and the earliest copy

A.    NEW TESTAMENT

Transmission Test for Historical Documents (incl. New Testament)

Author/
Book 		Date
Written 		Earliest Copies Time Gap No. of Copies %
Accuracy
Hindu Mahabharata 13th century B.C. 90
Plato c. 400 B.C. A.D. c.900 1300 yrs 7 ?
Homer,
Iliad 		900 B.C.
(900-700 B.C.?)		 400 B.C. ? 500 yrs ? 643 95
Demosthenes 300 B.C. A. D. c. 1100 1,400 yrs 200 ?
Caesar,
Gallic Wars 		100-44 B.C. A.D. 900 1,000 yrs 10 ?
Tacitus, Annals A.D. 100 1100 A.D. 1,000 yrs 20 ?
Pliny Secundus,
Natural History 		A.D. 61-113 c. A.D. 850 750 yrs 7 ?
New Testament A.D.50-100 c. 114 (fragment)
c. 200 (books)
c. 250 (most of NT)
c. 325 (whole NT)		 c. +/- 50 yrs
c. 100 yrs
c. 150 yrs
c. 225 yrs		 5,366(Gk)
24,000+
(with other translations)		 99+
The chart above is a comparison of ancient manuscript totals (Josh McDowell, Christianity: Hoax or History? Tyndale House Publishers, 1989, pp. 50-51; Norman L. Geisler & William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible. Moody Press, 1986, p. 408)
B.    AN ASSESSMENT

I am in agreement with the late Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, formerly director and principal librarian of the British Museum, who wrote just before his death:

“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” [1]

  • These people who were used by the Lord to write the New Testament, were living in a hostile culture. The disciples could not afford to risk inaccuracies. They would dare not manipulate the facts because they would be challenged by those who wanted to discredit them.
  • A witness must testify of his/her own knowledge. When we apply this to the NT, we see clearly that we have primary evidence from eyewitnesses. I John 1:1 states, ” That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched–this we proclaim concerning the Word of life (NIV)”. [2]

Would you dare to suggest that the writings of Plato, Demosthenes, Caesar, Tacitus and Pliny Secundus are not accurate. The historical writings of the NT present superior evidence to all of these other ancient writings. These are assessments by eminent historians have reached these conclusions about the New Testament.

A.N. Sherwin-White, distinguished Roman historian, says this about Luke’s writings: “For [the Book of] Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming. . . Any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd.  Roman historians have long taken it for granted.” [3]

Luke is commended by classical historian, G.A. Williamson, for demonstrating “complete familiarity with the thought, expression, and habitual terminology of the speakers, and . . . what memories the people of that time possessed!–if not on written notes, which we have reason to believe were commonly made.” [4]

Thanks to the archaeological efforts of the late Sir William Ramsay, many of the critical views of the NT have been overthrown. Ramsay himself was converted from the critical view of liberal theology. He wrote:

“I began with a mind unfavorable to it [the Book of Acts], for the ingenuity and apparent completeness of the Tubingen theory had at one time quite convinced me. It did not lie then in my line of life to investigate the subject minutely; but more recently I found myself often brought into contact with the book of Acts as an authority for the topography, antiquities, and society of Asia Minor. It was gradually borne in upon me that in various details the narrative showed marvelous truth.”[5]

I suggested to Hillard that he become better informed about assessing historical evidence. His retort was (in #21): “It would seem to me that you have a lot of modern day opinions and not much more, I for one believe that Jesus lived, but again that’s only my opinion (and incidentally my hope)”. I came back with: “You don’t seem to care about the standards by which one judges whether a document is historical or not. Could it be that you are establishing your own “modern day opinions” for this topic?” (#22)

Professor of New Testament and Early Judaism at the University of Tübingen, Germany, Dr. Martin Hengel wrote:

“Ought we not rather to reckon that in the early period of the Gospel tradition, the roughly forty years up to the composition of the Gospel of Mark, the weight of the authority of the eyewitnesses was still very tangible and that oral traditions initially predominated, i.e. that in this stratum of the tradition we come very close to the remains of the preaching of Jesus himself? [6]

Notes:

[1] Sir Frederic Kenyon, The Bible and Archaeology. New York: Harper and Row, 1940, pp. 288f, in Norman Geisler and William Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible (Revised and Expanded). Chicago: Moody Press, 1968, 1986, p. 405; also in Josh McDowell, More Than a Carpenter. Eastbourne, Sussex, England: Kingsway Publications, 1977, p. 48.

[2] Suggested by John Warwick Montgomery, The Law Above the Law. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Bethany House Publishers, 1975, p. 88.

[3] A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963, p. 189, in Josh McDowell, More Than a Carpenter. Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications, 1979, p. 55.

[4] G. A. Williamson, The World of Josephus. London: Secker & Warburg, 1964, p. 290, in Geisler, Christian Apologetics, p. 326.

[5] William M. Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896, p. 8, in Geisler, Christian Apologetics, p. 326.

[6] Martin Hengel 2000. The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ. Harrisburgh, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, p. 173.

 

Copyright © 2013 Spencer D. Gear. This document last updated at Date: 1 September 2018

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The Bible’s support for inerrancy of the originals

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By Spencer D Gear

Introduction

How are the Christian Scriptures divinely authoritative? Evangelicals like myself have come to the conclusion that both Old and New Testaments are inerrant (without error) in the original manuscripts. How have I reached that decision? It did not come from an a priori assumption. I had to examine the Scriptures carefully and examine the teaching of the church throughout its history.

An example of a statement on inerrancy, representing many in the evangelical church, is The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), Section VI, which states:

“WE AFFIRM that the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration.

WE DENY that the inspiration of Scripture can rightly be affirmed of the whole without the parts, or of some parts but not the whole”.

Why is it necessary to include “down to the very words of the original”? Why include the original manuscripts (called the autographa) in a statement on inerrancy? Why is this important? Is there a chapter and verse in the Bible that states that “the originals” must by in an orthodox doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture? Why aren’t the various Bible translations authoritative and inerrant?

Are these translations inerrant? – The King James Version (KJV), New King James Version (NKJV), Jerusalem Bible (JB), New Jerusalem Bible (NJB), Revised Standard Version (RSV), New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), English Standard Version (ESV), Good News Bible (GNB), New American Bible (NAB), The Message (TM), New International Version (NIV), Today’s New International Version (TNIV), New English Bible (NEB), Revised English Bible (REB), J. B. Phillips translation (JBP), Living Bible (LB), New Living Translation (NLT), Douay-Rheims Bible, Contemporary English Version (CEV), the Revised Version (RV), the American Standard Version (ASV), and the New American Standard Bible (NASB).

These are but examples of some contemporary English Bible translations. Are the translations inerrant or does this status belong only to the originals (autographa).

I was responding on a Christian forum on the www and came across this post. AVBunyan asked and commented:

“Who Says Only the Originals Are Inspired?
“The issue seems to be inspiration – can a translation be inspired?
“Where in any Bible does it say ‘only the originals’ are inspired? Who invented this doctrine and ‘made it a fundamental of the faith’? Some folks are really hung up on this ‘original’ issue. There is no verse in any Bible that say ‘only the originals are inspired” – someone dreamed that one up – sounds really good – just not scriptural” (Christian Forums, Christian Apologetics, “All Scripture God breathed“, #11).

These are good questions that deserve biblical answers. Back in 1881, scholar C. A. Briggs, had similar questions about making the autographa (the original writings of Scripture) inerrant. He wrote:

“We will never be able to attain the sacred writings as they gladdened the eyes of those who first saw them, and rejoiced the hearts of those who first heard them. If the external words of the original were inspired, it does not profit us. We are cut off from them forever” (Briggs 1881:573-74).

In a summary of his chapter addressing the topic of the inerrancy of the original documents, Greg Bahnsen wrote: “While the Bible teaches its own inerrancy, the inscripturation and copying of God’s Word require us to identify the specific and proper object of inerrancy as the text of the original autographa” (Bahnsen 1979:150).

Yet Bahnsen also stated that “there is, as one would expect, no explicit biblical teaching regarding the autographa and copies of them (1979:161). Therefore, how can the doctrine of inerrancy in the autographa have any meaning without the original manuscripts? Is what we have in translations less reliable than the original manuscripts? How can we have an authoritative Bible when we only have copies and these could be centuries after the originals?

In about the year A.D. 180, church father, Tertullian, wrote that originals of the New Testament manuscripts (NT Scripture) could be inspected in churches of his day. These were his words:

“Come now, you who would indulge a better curiosity, if you would apply it to the business of your salvation, run over the apostolic churches, in which the very thrones of the apostles are still pre-eminent in their places, in which their own authentic writings[1] are read, uttering the voice and representing the face of each of them severally” (Tertullian n.d.)

Do we have any hints or direct statements in the Old and New Testaments of the original texts being authoritative or even inerrant? While the evidence is not extensive, “Scripture has scattered indications of interest in or recognition of copies and translations of God’s Word in distinction from the autographical manuscripts” (Bahnsen 1979:159).[2]

The Old Testament position on the original documents

There are four OT situations where the importance of the authority of the original documents of Scripture has some significance (based on Bahnsen 1979:165-166):

1. Exodus 32 and 34

We know from Exodus 32:15-16[3] that God himself wrote the first “two tablets of the testimony” (the law). These tablets were the work of God, but in his anger, Moses destroyed these tablets (32:19). So what did God do? God arranged for the rewriting of the original tablets (Ex. 34:1, 27-28) by whom? “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Write these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel” (34:27). In Deut. 10:2, 4, the Scriptures emphasise that the copy of the law contained “the words that were on the first tablets that you broke” (10:2) and were “in the same writing as before” (10:4).

This is a pertinent example of how copies were made of the original.

2. Deuteronomy 17:18

“And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by the Levitical priests” (Deut. 17:18). The original manuscript written by Moses was placed beside the Ark of the Covenant by the Levites (Deut. 31:24-26). But the copy of the original received the approval of the Levitical priests.

3. Jeremiah 36:1-32

Here the prophet dictated the word of God to Baruch who wrote it on a scroll. However, because the message was not beneficial to King Jehoiakim, the king cut it up and burned it. God moved upon Jeremiah: “Take another scroll and write on it all the former words that were in the first scroll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah has burned” (36:28). The standard was the original and this was a copy, but its words were “all the former words”.

4. 2 Kings 22 and 2 Chronicles 34

Here the Jews showed particular respect for the original text. The story relates to the temple copy of the Book of the Law during the reign of Josiah. The Book of the Law was already known as it had been placed beside the Ark of the Covenant for public reading (see Deut. 31:12, 24-26; 2 Chron. 35:3). It is possible that copies of the Law were with some priests and prophets (Keil 1970:478).[4]

5. Warnings

The biblical writers knew how to distinguish between the original manuscripts and copies. Deut. 4:2 states: “You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it”. In Deut. 12:32 is clear: “Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it”. From Proverbs 30:6 we have this command: “Do not add to his [God’s] word, lest he rebuke you and you be found a liar”.

For the Jews, the honest approach to the Word of God was to remain faithful to the originals.

So from the OT we can see some indications of the value of original documents for an authoritative Scripture. This led Bahnsen to state, “The sufficiency of a copy is proportionate to its accurate reflection of the original. Deviation from the autograph jeopardizes the profit of a copy for doctrinal instruction and for direction in righteous living” (1979:167).

The New Testament position on the original documents

The NT also coveted the value of the original manuscripts of an authoritative document. Perhaps one of the best known examples is:

1. Revelation 22:18-19

These verses counsel, “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book”.

While these verses particularly apply to the Book of Revelation, the originals as the standard are assumed.

2. Various NT emphases

The normative standard of the originals is assumed with these emphases:

a. In passages such as Matt. 15:6 and Col. 2:8, the originals were the principal standard when there was a conflict between tradition and the doctrines taught by Christ and his apostles.

b. In passages such as Matt. 5:21ff, the tradition of the OT text was not allowed to hide the genuine word of God (see mark 7:1-13).

c. What did Jesus do when the Pharisees altered the OT text? They were condemned in their teaching on hatred (Matt. 5:43) and divorce (Matt. 19:7).

d. Paul told the believers not to tamper with the God’s word (2 Cor. 4:2);

e. Only accept teachings that do not contradict the original apostolic message (see Rom. 16:17; Gal. 1:8; 1 John 4:1-6);

f. 2 Thess. 3:14 gives a warning to “anyone who does not obey what we say in this letter” (the apostolic message).

g. Believers are warned not to be troubled (“quickly shaken”) by “a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter” that was purported to be from the apostles but was not (2 Thess. 2:2);

h. Paul usually wrote his letters with the help of an amanuensis (see Rom. 16:2) which could provide an opportunity for forgery. To guard against this, he would sign with his own hand (see I Cor. 16:21; Gal. 6:11; Col. 4:18).

These emphases cause Bahnsen to

“summarize the attitude that the Bible itself displays to the autographa and copies in this fashion. The authority and usefulness of extant copies and translations of the Scriptures is apparent throughout the Bible. They are adequate for bringing people to knowledge of saving truth and for directing their lives. Yet it is also evident that the use of scriptural authority derived from copies has underlying it the implicit understanding, and often explicit qualification, that these extant copies are authoritative in that, and to the extent that, that, they reproduce the original, autographic text” (Bahnsen 1979:168-69).

While the evidence is scattered throughout both OT and NT, we can conclude that in Scripture there is a distinction between the original documents and copies. However, the authority relates to the original. This kind of emphasis is found in an oft-repeated statement in the Bible, “It stands written” or “it is written” (e.g. Isa. 65:6; Rom. 3:10).

Bahnsen notes that “Jerome maintained in his dispute with Augustine over this matter, [that] only the Hebrew text [of the OT] was strictly inspired” (Bahnsen 1979:170).

Does the Bible teach inerrancy?

Norman Geisler in his chapter, “Philosophical presuppositions of biblical errancy”, stated:

The doctrine of inerrancy is the only valid conclusion from two clearly taught truths of the Scripture: (1) the Bible is the very utterance of God; (2) whatever God affirms is completely true and without error. Anyone familiar with the basic laws of reasoning can readily see that one and only one conclusion follows from these two biblical premises, namely, whatever the Bible affirms is completely true and without error (Geisler 1979:310).

Let’s check out these two truths:

1.  The Bible is the very utterance of God.

This is what the Scriptures state:

  • 2 Timothy 3:16-17, “All Scripture is breathed out by God [theopneustos] and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (ESV). Theopneustos only occurs at this verse in the New Testament and indicates that the “author [Paul] is differentiating the writings ordained by God’s authority from other, secular works” (Schweizer 1986:454). Colin Brown states that this adjective, theopneustos, means literally, “God-breathed” and “it does not imply any particular mode of inspiration, such as some form of divine dictation. Nor does it imply the suspension of the normal cognitive faculties of the human authors. On the other hand, it does imply something quite different from poetic inspiration. It is wrong to omit the divine element from the term implied by theo-, as the NEB [New English Bible] does in rendering the phrase ‘every inspired scripture’. The expression clearly does not imply that some Scriptures are inspired, whilst others are not. The sacred scriptures are all expressive of the mind of God; but they are so with a view to their practical outworking in life (Brown 1978:491)
  • John 17:17. Jesus said, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (ESV). Lutheran commentator, Richard Lenski, rightly affirmed that “’Thine own word is truth’ [his translation] certifies the inerrancy and the infallibility of the Word excepting no portion of it. The holy garment of the Word is seamless; it has no rents of errors – or call them mistakes – …. ‘Thine own word’ signifies all of it, the Word of the Old Testament on which Jesus placed his approval again and again, plus revelation that Jesus added in person with the promise of its perfect preservation through the Paraclete (John 14:26; 16:13)” (1943:1149).
  • Psalm 19:7. “The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple” (ESV). While the “law” was originally associated with the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, but it eventually became associated with what we know today as the Word of God – Scripture. Please not that it is the word of Yahweh, the covenant keeping God. So God’s law, which comes from God Himself, God’s Word is perfect.

2.  Whatever God affirms is completely true and without error.

What is the nature of God in what he says and does? Here are a few verses to affirm the truthfulness (without error) of the nature of God.

  • Numbers 23:19.  “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it?
    Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” (ESV). Thus God’s very nature is that he will not lie, change his mind or refuse to do what he has stated.
  • Deuteronomy 32:4. “”The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he” (ESV).
  • Psalm 86:15. “But you, O Lord, are a God(A) merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness“ (ESV).

These are but samples of God’s attributes. He is the God of truth who cannot lie. He only does what is just, upright and without iniquity. To these attributes he is the God of faithfulness.

Therefore, we can conclude that the Scriptures affirm the two assertions: (1) the bile is the very utterance of God, and (2) Whatever God affirms is true, without error, without iniquity and completely just.

My son, Paul Gear, has summarised material from one of Wayne Grudem’s articles. Paul Gear wrote: Wayne A. Grudem, “Scripture’s Self-Attestation and the Problem of Formulating a Doctrine of Scripture”, in Scripture and Truth, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1992), argues decisively that Scripture itself gives Christians no option but to accept inerrancy.

Here are some quotes from his article (emphasis in the original in all cases):

God’s words, especially God’s words as spoken and written by men … are viewed consistently by the Old Testament authors as different in character and truth status from all other human words; … In truth status they are seen as being different from all other human words, for human words invariably contain falsehood and error (Ps. 116:11), but these do not; they are spoken by God who never lies (Num. 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:29). They are completely truthful (Ps. 119:160) and free from impurity or unreliability of any kind … (Grudem 1992:35)

Perhaps it has not been stated emphatically enough that nowhere in the Old Testament or in the New Testament does any writer give any hint of a tendency to distrust or consider slightly unreliable any other part of Scripture. Hundreds of texts encourage God’s people to trust Scripture completely, but no text encourages any doubt or even slight mistrust of Scripture. To rely on the “inerrancy” of every historical detail affirmed in Scripture is not to adopt a “twentieth-century view” of truth or error; it is to follow the teaching and practice of the biblical authors themselves. It is to adopt a biblical view of truth and error. (Grudem 1992:58-59)

To believe that all the words of the Bible are God’s words and that God cannot speak untruthfully will significantly affect the way in which one approaches a “problem text” or “alleged error” in Scripture. To seek for a harmonization of parallel accounts will be a worthy undertaking. To approach a text with the confident expectation that it will, if rightly understood, be consistent with what the rest of the Bible says, will be a proper attitude. (Grudem 1992:59)

I have looked at dozens of [“problem texts”], and in every single case there are possible solutions in the commentaries. If one accepts the Bible’s claim to be God’s very words, then the real question is not how “probable” any proposed solution is in itself, but how one weighs the probability of that proposed solution against the probability that God has spoken falsely. Personally I must say that the “difficult texts” would have to become many times more difficult and many times more numerous before I would come to think that I had misunderstood the hundreds of texts about the truthfulness of God’s words in Scripture, or that God had spoken falsely. (Grudem 1992:367-368; 59, n. 84)

The Bible’s doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture is based on its being God-breathed, theopneustos (2 Tim. 3:16). The ESV translates this verse as, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness”.

D. A. Carson, in “What is inerrancy?” wrote:

Obviously the Bible is made up of many different literary forms and genres, so sometimes the ways God discloses himself are very different than other ways that God discloses himself even in words. For example, through the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament, about six centuries before Christ, God gives Jeremiah certain words. Jeremiah dictates these words to his secretary. And his secretary writes them down. In the story, eventually some bad guys come along and pick up the manuscript – the only manuscript – and they start tearing it up and throwing it into the fire. As the reader, you are supposed to laugh because, after all, this was not a PhD dissertation by
Jeremiah; rather God gave this to Jeremiah. Do you really think God has forgotten what he has said? So God gives it to Jeremiah again. This example is plain dictation

In other passages, like Psalm 23, David can say “the Lord is my shepherd. I shall lack nothing.” David was not given that by dictation. He was expressing his own feelings and own understandings from his days as a shepherd boy. He thought this was a terrific analogy to talk about God. In both cases – Jeremiah and David – God used human individuals. This is true in other cases – some by dictation, some by visions and the like. In the case of Psalm 23, through the experiences of David, God produces a text that is simultaneously a text of the human writer and God’s own ordained, providentially-determined words.

However, the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture does not support the idea that God dictated all of his Word to all who were involved in the writing of Scripture. But all of Scripture is “breathed out by God”. That is not the case with the writing of C. H. Spurgeon, C. S. Lewis and others. Having a special gift from God for preaching, teaching and apologetics, is vastly different from Scripture that is breathed out by God.

I find it impossible to be convinced of the verbal, plenary inspiration of the Bible and support a dictation theory of inspiration in which God’s Spirit treated the Bible writers like a CD recorder. That kind of view would make the writers passive recipients or robots. If the Scripture were inspired through a dictation theory of inspiration, it would not make sense of passages like Luke 1:1-4 where Luke states that he depended on other sources:

1Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, 2 just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, 3it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught (ESV).

I also refer you to Thomas Watson’s article, “The Truth of God” and D. A. Carson’s, “What is inerrancy?“.

In conclusion: an illustration

People commonly say to me: But we don’t have the originals so it is pointless to talk about the inerrancy of documents we do not have. Do you think so? I have found R. Laird Harris’s explanation helpful in explaining the need to have authoritative original documents behind the copies, even though we currently do not have access to the originals (autographa). He wrote:

“Reflection will show that the doctrine of verbal inspiration is worthwhile even though the originals have perished. An illustration may be helpful. Suppose we wish to measure the length of a certain pencil. With a tape measure we measure it as 6 1/2 inches. A more carefully made office ruler indicates 6 9/16 inches. Checking with an engineer’s scale, we find it to be slightly more than 6.58 inches. Careful measurement with a steel scale under laboratory conditions reveals it to be 6.577 inches. Not satisfied still, we send the pencil to Washington, where master gauges indicate a length of 6.5774 inches. The master gauges themselves are checked against the standard United States yard marked on platinum bar preserved in Washington. Now, suppose that we should read in the newspapers that a clever criminal had run off with the platinum bar and melted it down for the precious metal. As a matter of fact, this once happened to Britain’s standard yard! What difference would this make to us? Very little. None of us has ever seen the platinum bar. Many of us perhaps never realized it existed. Yet we blithely use tape measures, rulers, scales, and similar measuring devices. These approximate measures derive their value from their being dependent on more accurate gauges. But even the approximate has tremendous value—if it has had a true standard behind it” (Harris 1969:88-89).

References

Bahnsen, G. L. 1979, “The inerrancy of the autographa” in N. L. Geisler (ed.) 1979. Inerrancy. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 150-193.

Briggs, C. A. 1881. “Critical theories of the sacred Scriptures in relation to their inspiration”. The Presbyterian Review, vol. 2, 573-74.

Brown C  1978. Graph?, in C Brown (gen end), The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, vol. 3. 490-492. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House.

Geisler, N. L. (ed.) 1979. Inerrancy. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House. Also available online at: Inerrancy.

Harris, R. L. 1957, 1969. Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House.

Keil, C.F. 1970. Commentary on the Old Testament, vol 3, 1 & II Kings, I & II Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Lenski, R C H 1943. Commentary on the New Testament: The Interpretation of John’s Gospel. Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson Publishers.

Schweizer, E 1968. Qeopneusto?, in G Kittel & G Friedrich, G (eds) 1968. Theological dictionary of the New Testament, vol 6, 453-455. Tr and end by G W Bromiley. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Tertullian n.d. De Praescriptione Haereticorum (The prescription against heretics), in P. Schaff n.d. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, ch. 36, “The apostolic churches the voice of the apostles”, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, available at: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf03.v.iii.xxxvi.html).

Notes

[1] Latin, “authenticæ”. At this point Schaff notes, “This much disputed phrase may refer to the autographs or the Greek originals (rather than the Latin translations), or full unmutilated copies as opposed to the garbled ones of the heretics. The second sense is probably the correct one.”

[2] For many suggestions and some content in this article on “the biblical attitude toward autographa and copies” (Bahnsen 1979:159), I am indebted to the insightful article by the late Greg Bahnsen (1979). “Greg L. Bahnsen (September 17, 1948 – December 11, 1995) was an influential Christian philosopher, apologist, and debater. He was an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and a full time Scholar in Residence for the Southern California Center for Christian Studies” (This biographical information is from the Preterist (Study) Archive, available at: http://www.preteristarchive.com/StudyArchive/b/bahnsen-greg.html [Accessed 21 March 2010].

[3] Unless otherwise stated, all Bible quotations are from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version 2001. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Bibles.

[4] Keil’s words were, “But it by no means follows from this that before its discovery there were no copies in the hands of the priests and prophets” (1970:478).

 

Copyright © 2010 Spencer D. Gear. This document last updated at Date: 14 September 2016.

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