A skeptic
may say of my blogs so far, “You’re using the Bible and we don’t know that what
we have today is what was written back then.
The Bible has been manipulated and changed over the years.”
How did we get the Bible?
How do you
imagine we got the Bible? Does it
involve a room with monks and one big book?
Perhaps one monk is at the front of the room dictating from the big book
to all the other monks who are writing what the first monk is reading? Is that how we got our Bible? If it was, then you can see how the church
could have manipulated the text. They
could have changed it here or there and made it say whatever they wanted it to
say, right?
Well, if
there was one ancient Bible, controlled by the church, then this would be
possible; however, this is a very inaccurate picture of the Bible’s
origins. You must know that in the first
century, the Jesus movement moved from a Jewish sect, and began to include
Samaritans and Gentiles. It also stopped
requiring Jewish observances such as circumcision and kosher dietary laws. During Jesus’s life, some synagogues could
put you out if they discovered you were a Jesus follower. During the first century in Antioch, Jesus
followers were first called Christians and eventually the Jesus movement
becomes Christianity.
If you
remember from the first blog in this series, Rome is in control and under Rome,
second-temple Judaism was tolerated, and Jews did not have to participate in
Emperor worship. However, at some point
both Judaism and Rome realized that the Jesus movement was no longer Judaism. The first official Roman persecution of
Christians was under Emperor Nero (c. AD 37-68) who ruled from AD 54-68. Prior to that, any persecutions were only
local and not state ordered. With
Christianity diverging from Judaism, they lost any toleration that Judaism
enjoyed and eventually became an illegal religion in the Roman empire. It remained an illegal religion until the Edict
of Milan in 313. Therefore, you can’t
think of Christians as having political power or influence during that first
280 odd years of its existence.
An anachronism is something that
belongs to one time period being attributed to a time period where it didn’t
exist. So, if I told you that my great
grandpa loved to play Nintendo when he was a kid, you could know that statement
was demonstratively false. Nintendo wasn’t
available in the US until the 1980s and my great grandpa was a kid in the
1850s. In the same way, during that 280
years and even afterwards, to think of monks copying the Bible inside of church
buildings and controlling what the text says is an example of anachronistic
thinking.
No church controlled all the texts.
Sometime
prior to AD 200 there were Latin copies of most of our New Testament (NT) texts
and those copies were used in the western part of the Roman Empire; however, in
the eastern part, the church, used Syriac copies. The Latin copies did not contain Hebrews,
James and 1& 2 Peter, whereas the Syriac copies did. Why? Because
those books were written to churches on the eastern side of the Empire.
Perhaps
you’re confused, wasn’t the NT written in Greek? So why are these collections of the NT in
Latin and Syriac? Yes, as far as we
know, the original NT writings were all in Greek with a few Aramaic words. As Christianity spread through the Roman
world, there was need to translate the NT texts into other languages and these
are helpful today as secondary sources in demonstrating the integrity of the NT
text.
So, think
about this: I have written these blogs on a computer, the originals are saved
on my computer. I have copied and pasted
them to the blog and you are reading them there. You can copy and paste them, and we know they
will still be the same (exceptions being spacing and font sizes). However, that’s not how a book in the ancient
world could be copied. They were copied
by hand, which took time and effort, but once they were copied, if you wanted
to change the text, then you’d need to control the original and the copies. But as I pointed out above, the western
churches didn’t have copies of certain books.
In order to change things, you are going to need to have control of all
the books and all the copies of those books.
But you’re also going to need to control all the translations of all
those copies as well.
Let’s think
of a more recent document, the Declaration of Independence. If I wanted to change the wording of the
Declaration of Independence, what would I need to do? I need to have access to the original, I’d
also need to have access to all the copies and today, all the photographs,
digital copies, translations and quotations.
So, would it be possible to change the wording of the Declaration of
Independence?
Let me give
you one last example. What are the
sources for translating the Old Testament?
The Septuagint (LLX), Greek copies of the Hebrew texts translated in the
2nd century BC. The Dead Sea
Scrolls (DSS), collections of Hebrew texts found in caves near the Dead Sea
beginning in 1946, many dating to before the time of Christ. The Masoretic texts (MT), Hebrew and Aramaic
texts that come down to us from the Masoretes, most dating from between AD
600-900. Finally, the Samaritan
Pentateuch (SP), which existed in at least the 3rd-century BC but
was not available to western Christianity until 1616. As well as Latin copies. Note that the Christian church has had access
to all these sources only within the last century. Had the church wanted to manipulate the
documents within its control, those differences would be evident today by
comparing the LXX and Latin texts with the DSS, MT and SP. The bottom line is, no one in church history
controlled all the NT texts or their copies.
If there were manipulations, those would be evident today by comparing
them to the older texts.
Next week, we’ll explore when the NT was written. Please join us.
Written by Pastor Ozzy
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