Monday, March 25, 2019

Spiritual Formation and Christ's Resurrection pt3


            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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