Re: Naked Bible 99: Debunking Greek NT Manuscript Conspiracies
The Bible is not God.
Would it shock you to imagine that God is able to work with His Elect even if all copies of the Bible ceased to exist on this earth? There was a time that happened in the history of Israel. During Manasseh’s reign, the existing text of the Old Testament up to that time had been completely lost. When his grandson Josaih took the throne, a copy of the Torah was discovered in the Temple, and they weren’t even sure it was real. It took a trusted prophet of God to confirm it was His Word.
Think about it: The Scripture was not the rule of faith for them. Rather, it was the Covenant. More to the point, it fell to a human anointed to speak for God under the Covenant. The net result was that it rested on the living relationship with God, a trust in His power to manifest Himself and guide His people. Today, it’s not just specially anointed individuals, but the entire Kingdom of God is made up of people able to hear from God directly in their hearts. This trumps any record of Scripture.
In the final analysis, you stand alone before God, accountable to Him personally. You can’t push it off onto Scripture any more than you could some other human you decide to follow as a spiritual leader. The life we live on this earth requires first and foremost that you stand before Christ all on your own. Yes, His Covenant demands that you come together into a household of faith with others and that you agree to follow some anointed leader in most things, but not so slavishly that you ignore your own convictions. Your ultimate voice of authority is in your convictions.
We use the Scripture as an indicator of how to think about the whole question of who Christ is and what it means to obey Him as Lord. Of course, we still have to delve into the Bible as a record of divine revelation up through the First Century. It’s quite a burden to unwind ourselves from where we are now in contrast to where people were in Jesus’ day. There’s a huge record of academic study on how the Hebrew people thought about reality. It’s not just the Bible itself, but a wealth of scholarship to understand what the Bible can tell us.
We’ve looked at the rich heritage of outside documents that indicate some of the background of Hebrew thought that wasn’t recorded in Scripture, but is indicated by what Scripture does say. And if that were not burden enough, we still have to wade through a vast collection of source material for the Scripture itself.
Today, there is a broad community of scholarship regarding just the text of Scripture itself. How should we approach the task of translating those source documents from, not just foreign languages, but foreign cultures? How do we capture what Scripture meant to the people who wrote it, and the people who were the initial audience for the writing, so that its impact is roughly equivalent to us today?
Herein lies the problem: The people doing the scholarship today are western people. They may well understand the Hebraic mystical mindset and how that mind communicates, but they must work alongside an academic establishment for which actual spiritual anointing is frankly potluck. Even Heiser has warned us that some people working professionally in Biblical Studies are hostile to genuine faith in Christ. They are allowed to work in that field because it’s all about the scholarship and intellectual pursuit, not about the faith that is supposed to be supported by that work.
This is part of the ongoing tension between Divinity versus Biblical Studies in Christian education. Biblical Studies is about the Bible itself, whereas Divinity seeks to apply the Bible, taking seriously what it demands of us. One has no faith while the other has no genuine grasp of the Bible. Thus, we end up with vast flocks of church folks whose shepherds don’t know the terrain nor understand the threats.
Heiser was trying, but he was still just a little too deeply wedded to the academic orientation. In the above linked podcast, he mocks the notion that Wescott and Hort were scoundrels. Let me unwind this. Wescott and Hort indicted themselves in their own private papers, fully admitting they committed fraud in their work, that it was slanted to spite the fans of the KJV. However, the whole field of Biblical Studies conceals a fair number of frauds and scoundrels because they have the intellect and certifications that give them a pass. That kind of discernment is verboten in Biblical Studies.
On the other hand, it’s true that 95% of the Scripture text is consistently the same across all the various document sources we have. Much of the remaining 5% is of no consequence. However, there are several passages in dispute that do make a substantial difference in doctrine. All the more so do they make a difference because many denominational disputes rest on quite a few passages that are frankly dubious. Those disputes are aggravated by the alienation between Divinity folks and Biblical Studies folks.
Most of the sheep have no clue what any of this is about. How many of you understand the debate between the Alexandrian versus Byzantine texts? Do you even know that those are? We have a system whereby this stuff becomes arcane because the folks who study these things have made it hard to grasp for those who don’t have the calling to specialize in such academic pursuits. Let me give you a hint: The rabbis certainly cared about texts and sources. The Apostles didn’t seem to care at all. We have no evidence that Jesus nor His followers paid much attention to the whole question.
Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, the Apostles used the Septuagint OT (often denoted by the Roman numeral “LXX” because the name “septuagint” means “seventy”, supposedly the number of scholars who were involved in making the translation). It is notably different from the commonly used source collections for translations of the OT into English, not just in a tiny few places. On top of that, the Apostles often “spiritualized” what they quoted from it in the first place. They took liberties in what to make of the wording of those quotes. Yes, I wrote a whole book on that issue, Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text.
On top of all this, we get the distinct impression there was quite a bit of oral lore on Christ that never made it into Scripture, never mind Hebrew oral lore and non-canonical sources connected to understanding the Old Testament. Don’t even mention this to fundamentalist Protestants, because they are hostile to the whole idea that anything important can be found outside their “infallible” KJV Bibles.
For Radix Fidem in general, and Kiln of the Soul in particular, our standard is that we are accountable to the Bible. Pick your favorite but never be so foolish as to believe any English translation is any better than just okay. That’s in part because the sources they use are all tinged with a small degree of uncertainty. And it really doesn’t matter because the question is whether you are following your convictions first.
