Which Bible 8
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Answering Questions
Dear brothers and sisters in
Christ. So far, we have covered the
first four of the following questions.
These questions aim at discovering principles to help us find a new set
of text criticism rules.
“Some suggestions about where the rules should be
headed. A few of the subjects we should
explore include:
·
What is an accurate
definition of Autographa and where are they located?
·
How were Autographa
historically accessed and how do we access them today?
·
Are the Autographa a single
collection of unchanging documents, or can they be changed? Are there possibly multiple Autographa?
·
What is Inspiration?
·
What is Inscripturation and
how does it relate to Transcription?
·
What is Canonization and
who has authority to Canonize? Is
Canonization fundamentally: an act of God, an act of the Jews, an act of the
Church, or an act of man?
·
How shall evidence be
handled?
·
How do we focus on real
translatable differences, and not on meaningless trivia, or on mere document
counting?
·
What Bible(s) can we
recommend to the Church?”
Before we move on to Inscripturation
and Transcription, let’s see if we can put a sharper point on Inspiration.
Mediate and Immediate Inspiration
When I was a very small boy I
thought that immediate and instant meant the same thing. I had no functional idea of a go-between, and
would not develop one for many years.
Even after I began to get a handle on the idea of an advocate, it never
occurred to me that this was very similar to a mediator: someone or something
that stands in the middle, someone who prevents direct contact between two
other persons or things, often adversarial to each other. Such mediation can obstruct, it can stop
fights; but usually it exists to enhance some sort positive of action, such as
making peace or reconciliation. Of
course Christ is our Great Mediator. For
another example, theologians discuss immediate and mediate revelation.[1]
When we speak of the special
knowledge of God, such as that found in the Bible it is common to find a sharp
distinction drawn between immediate and mediate revelation; immediate and
mediate inspiration. If we learn about
dirt from handling dirt, that is immediate.
If we learn something about God from handling dirt, that is mediate: the
dirt mediates between God and us. Everything
we learn about God from the created universe is mediate. If we learn something about God from handling
a Bible, that is mediate: the Bible mediates between God and us. There are some folks who insist that all
knowledge of God is mediated: God cannot be known outside of the Bible, the
church, saints, and so forth. Is this
true? Is there another way to know God?
Don’t let this use of the word,
know, throw you. God’s inner nature cannot
be known at all. We only know about
God’s inner nature because of what He has Created and Said: these two things
teach us what God is like. Here, we are
using the word, know, to mean something that is experienced, not something that
is absolutely understood. No matter how
intimate a relationship develops, we can never know any other person’s inner
nature. There is considerable doubt that
we can even know our own inner nature.
Only God Himself knows, and understands our inner nature. What we know is external: actions, behavior,
the trail of works that another person has done. All this is beside the point. The question we raise is, “Can it be possible
for ordinary Christians like us to know God, to experience direct or immediate communication
with God?” Many say, “No.”
Mad scientists occasionally
conclude that if one has conversations with secret invisible friends,[2] one is not rowing with
both oars in the water. This sort of
scientist overlooks how much of science is dependent on the invisible: atomic
and nuclear science for example. They
have forgotten about the philosophical immensity of human ignorance. For such short sighted scientists, God cannot
be seen, therefore He does not exist, they conclude.[3] They suppose it is scientifically impossible
for anyone to have the immediate experience of God: that which is not observable,
is not provable, hence not believed.
People that believe in God are in the advanced stages of lunacy, these
myopic scientists (fail to) think.[4] Such scientists have forgotten that in all the
universe, man is especially blind.[5]
On the other hand, theologians
sometimes conclude that it is impossible for anyone to have the immediate
experience of God. They reason that such
immediate experience was limited to the Apostles and Prophets: now that we have
a completed Bible, that ship has sailed, in their view. They have determined that we can only have
the mediate experience of God through the Bible. If we’re not careful, Sola Scriptura can be
pressed to mean that our knowledge of God is exclusively a mediate experience
of God through the Bible.[6]
Others have claimed that such
immediate experience was limited to them personally, or to their special
group. The Gnostics: for example claimed
to have a special inside knowledge of God, wherein one must become a gnostic to
receive their secrets. If we’re not
careful, the idea of a Magisteria
can be pressed to mean that our knowledge of God is exclusively a mediate
experience of God through that Magisteria.
We, on the other hand, are
claiming that the immediate experience of God in the gift of the Holy Ghost is
the normal experience of every Christian.[7] Moreover, we claim that such a gift is
available to the whole human race, just for the sincerity of asking.[8] However, this immediate experience of God
comes to us, only because Jesus Christ has risen from the dead, and we are
consequently made partakers of and are indwelled[9] by the Trinity;[10] so that we joyously cry,
“God became man, so that man might become god.”[11]
We are also claiming that the
mediate experience of God in the gift of the Bible is the normal experience of
every Christian. Moreover, we claim the
God is mediately known through history, sacraments, and the preaching of The
Church, which includes dogma.
Because this
immediate experience of God, in the gift of the Holy Ghost, is the normal
experience of every Christian, we also believe several corollaries:
·
The keys of the kingdom are
given to The whole Christian Church on earth, not to an individual, or class of
individuals.
·
The laity is the highest
ranking office in The Christian Church on earth: all other offices are offices
of humiliation and service.[12]
·
The Church is collegial in
its nature: the Spirit’s voice to the lowliest, uneducated peasant is equal to
that of the greatest theologian.[13]
·
Apostolic succession is an
important and treasured gift, it is not a license to lord it over a church.[14]
Inscripturation. What is Inscripturation?
The idea of Inscripturation is simple enough: it means
writing the Super-Ordinary Inspiration down for the first time, making the
Inspiration into the Autographa. That’s
easy enough to say. It was easy enough
to preserve too, for a mere eight hundred sixty years or so. The Israelites surely knew how to preserve
documents with oil and store them in sealed clay vessels. They also must have known how to repair
damage to precious documents.[15]
The problem is that we don’t know much about what ancient
scribes[16] used for writing tools:
tables, chairs, brushes, charcoal, chisels, pens, scribes (sharp needlelike
instruments); what they used for writing surfaces: likely velum, but no samples
have survived to the best of our knowledge; how surface preparation was
completed: possibly some sort of pumice or grain flour talcum; how erasure was
accomplished: probably scraping and washing.
We don’t know how they split and tanned the leather, or if it was
rawhide. We don’t know what inks,
paints, or other writing materials were used.
Worst of all we don’t know what their writing really looked like, or
what the Hebrew language was like in the days of Moses.
Inscripturation itself was a prodigious task: all done
manually. If Moses did all the writing
himself, he was a very busy man to complete five large books, all by hand, in
the space of forty years. Besides that
enormous pile of writing, he also had an ungrateful nation to run: he was
incessantly pestered to preside in judgment, even for trivial issues. Fortunately, Moses’ father-in-law had a
sensible solution for administrative problems.[17] In addition to all this, Moses had to defend
against Pharaoh, divide a sea, purify the water, feed two and a half million
people, organize spies, wage war with Amalekites, march around aimlessly, and
spend time with God.[18] Moses had an incredible work load.
This is the sort of problem we are trying to unravel in
search of a high quality archetype that is reasonably representative of the
Autographa. These Autographa, it would
seem, have now been moved to heaven, beside the throne of Jesus Christ. This presents another problem: for Jesus
Christ is the only one capable of opening and reading the Autographa.[19]
The Autographa, as Moses and subsequent Prophets wrote them,
were all lost or destroyed at the start of the Babylonian Captivity (586
BC). We have no idea how these came to
be the Scroll in Jesus’ hands. One
possibility would be that God took the Autographa with Him to heaven when the
Glory of God abandoned Solomon’s Temple, as Ezekiel tells us. This may also explain the disappearance of
the Ark, Decalogue, Mercy Seat, Urim, and Thummim. Such details present considerable and weighty
problems for us, but they are no problem at all for God.
We have no access to the Autographa in Jesus’ hands, so it
is absolutely impossible for us to verify a single manuscript shred from it.
Transcription. What is
Transcription?
Transcription is another concept that is simple to talk
about. Our mountain of ignorance
prohibits our knowing or saying very much.
Transcription is simply the process and technology of making and
distributing copies.
All the unknowable issues that apply to writing the original
also apply to making hand written copies, plus a few new ones. In one method, a scribe worked from a single
master,[20] copied what he saw, one
letter at a time. In another method, a
leader read from the master document, while any number of scribes copied what
they heard, one letter at a time.[21]
Both methods had the potential for introducing scribal
errors. As long as access to the
Autographa was possible the copies could be authenticated from the Autographa. Moreover, God was always present: any
unresolved questions could be settled with Urim and Thummim.
After the Babylonian Captivity (516 BC), when the Autographa
was gone from earth, such copies were used to reconstruct the basic Old Testament
text. Nevertheless, this text was not
the Hebrew of the Mosaic era: over the eight hundred ninety years since Moses’
death the Hebrew language transitioned, as all languages do. The Jews went to Babylon speaking a more
modern Hebrew than that of Moses; they returned speaking Aramaic.[22] The reconstructed text was what we know of
the Hebrew language written in Aramaic block letters. Some of the newer books, like Daniel, were
written directly in the Aramaic language.
The Glory never returned to the Second Temple and the reconstructed text
was never authenticated by God. Books
like Daniel were never laid up in God’s presence. In spite of this we have every reason to
believe that the scribes responsible for this reconstruction, labored
faithfully and produced a good but less than perfect archetype.[23]
Such transcription work, both before and after the
Babylonian Captivity, necessitates a rather large library operation. This would have been located near or even
within the Tabernacle or Solomon’s Temple.
As with any modern county seat, public records had to be filed,
maintained, researched, and copied. Some
of those public records were kept in Scripture.
Once the synagogue system developed, the demand for accurate copies of Scripture
only increased.
By no later than 132 BC the complete Aramaic Old Testament was
translated into Greek,[24] which is by now the
vernacular language of the Jewish people.[25] Scholars, scribes of the Pharisees and
Sadducees, no doubt retained command of the Aramaic, some perhaps even held
some knowledge of Hebrew. For the
ordinary Jewish peasant or proselyte, Greek was the first language. Then Latin became necessary for trade with
the Romans; but, even ranking Romans preferred Greek. Everybody remembered a few favorite words or
phrases from the ancient language. Most
likely, everyone learned the Shema.
However, several of the Dead Sea Scrolls are written in Greek, which
establishes common Greek use, if not dominance in Palestine.[26]
After the Crucifixion of Christ, the Apostles continued the
work of Inscripturation.[27] Christian scribes carried on the faithful
transcription of the Greek Old and New Testaments. The Jews, in their rejection of Christ, in
jealousy returned to the Hebrew language.
It is these transcriptions with which we must work. We do not have the Autographa, there is every
reason to believe they are in heaven with Christ. We do not have an archetype, this is
something which we must try to reconstruct from the evidence. What we have is these surviving manuscripts: written
in Greek, Aramaic, Latin, and numerous other languages. It is these manuscripts we must date,
evaluate, sort, and untangle: easy to say, hard to do.
When Adam was young, before he had a wife, the Lord paraded the animals in front of Adam
to see what he would call them. God did
not say to Adam, “This is this, and that is that.” What God said, in effect was, “Adam, Figure
it out.” This is the dominant question
that God has set before all mankind, “Figure it out.” This question lies behind all learning and
all science, “Figure it out.” When Jesus
promised the Holy Ghost to The Church, He will lead you into all truth, He did
not say, “Here it is. This is how the
cow ate the cabbage.” Rather, Jesus
showed us His ubiquitous presence in the Old Testament and said,[28] “Figure it out. The Holy Ghost will help you figure it out.”[29] The Truth of God does not come to us without
human sweat. To be sure, it is a gift of
which we are unworthy, an unattainable gift of which we are incapable. Nevertheless, God loves us and has given us
the Holy Ghost and that is all we need to begin. If we are failing, we need to pray more,
trust more, hope more, love more.
“Figure it out.”
If text-types truly exist we shall discover them in these
manuscripts, and in the manuscript history.
[1] This
distinction between immediate and mediate general revelation sets the stage for
where we are going. Knowledge of
creation may be immediate or mediate.
When we experience dirt by touching it with our bare hands, this is an
immediate experience. If we mediate by
examining the dirt with a microscope, we would not find great value in the
distinction. However, if we had no sense
of touch or sight, but learned all about the nature of dirt, second hand, from
the description of another person; that would be an important use of the term
mediation. http://www.ligonier.org/blog/general-and-special-revelation-reformed-approach-science-and-scripture/
[2]
Casper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casper_the_Friendly_Ghost and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casper_(film) Harvey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_(play)
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_(film)
[3]
How frequently have we heard the inane, “Prove to me that God exists.”
[4]
This is not thinking. Man’s scope of
observation is limited to the edge of the universe, which appears to be
growing. Every minute we can see more
deeply into this universe, because fresh light is arriving all the time. But we can never see outside of this
universe, so it is a scientific absurdity to draw conclusions about what cannot
be observed. We think we have discovered
the Higgs, and we may have learned one new thing. However, in learning that one new thing we
have uncovered thousand more of unresolved questions. We may have stumbled upon a new analogous
explanation of the ubiquity of Deity, but we have not by experimentation or
sight tripped over His Person. Why
should science stoop to idle speculation about that which is unknown? Why should puny man believe that he can scale
this larger than Everest mountain.
[5] http://swantec.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-absolute-existence-of-god-1.html,
and http://swantec.blogspot.com/2012/ 11/the-absolute-existence-of-god-2.html
[6] We
would contend that Sola Scriptura can never and has never meant this. For us, Sola Scriptura simply means that if
difficulty arises in a point of theology the final authority for human
arbitration must be the Bible. We are
not free to contradict the plain meaning of the Bible with some man made
dogma. Nevertheless, most dogma is easily
substantiated from the Bible, and it has stood the test of time: namely, that
Christians over many centuries, even millennia have believed most dogma to be
an accurate summary of what the Bible teaches.
[7]
Romans 8:16 for example, we cannot find one indication in the Bible that this
gift of the Holy Ghost has become inoperative, removed, or otherwise
closed. Luther in, On The Bondage
of the Will, takes great pains to emphasize the absolute necessity of
this gift: frequently asserting that he has it, while suggesting that his
adversaries do not.
[9]
God’s indwelling must be differentiated from God’s omnipresence or
ubiquity. First of all, ubiquity does
not mean that there is a little piece of God here, and another little piece of
God there, so that God is spread all over the universe in every rock, tree, and
star: that would be pantheism. Ubiquity means
that all of God is present at every point in the universe. God is always present in us. The difference between ubiquity and
indwelling is that with God’s indwelling, He initiates a developing
conversation, a friendship, a relationship with us. “God Himself is the Fountain of Truth. He is the Sole Source of all Light, Life, and
Love. Everything we are and have stems
from His relationship with us.” God has
repeatedly approached us, inviting this conversation: in creation, in the
flood, in the Law, in David and Solomon, in all the prophets, and now, finally,
in His Son (Hebrews 1:1-3). Those who
are turning to God will discover that He has never been far away.
[11] Theosis
or Glorification: Εἰρηναῖος (d. 202), Ἀθανάσιος (d. 373), and Augustine (d. 430) all taught this. We are probably indebted to Ἀθανάσιος for its fullest development. Not simply a future promise, but as Peter
notes, that of which we have already partaken.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinization_(Christian)
[12]
John 13:12-17, this means that we hear each other’s confessions, forgive, grant
absolution, and reconcile. Although the
process is carried out in reverse in the following example, it would have sent
the wrong message if done in the usual order: the victims did not need
cleansing, the priesthood did. In spite
of this we must applaud the act. This is
what leadership in The Church is about: humble service. We sincerely regret the circumstances that
prompted this act of humility and service: the circumstances are not the point
being illustrated. The humility of the
service is what is noteworthy here. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1359091/Irish-archbishop-Diarmuid-Martin-washes-feet-sexual-abuse-victims.html
[13] Amos
1:1; 7:14, What Amos shows is that the lawfully appointed leadership (see
Apostolic succession) were defective and derelict in their service, so God
sternly rebuked them using the voice of a peasant, called from outside of the
legal channels. We are reminded that God
is the Great covenant lawgiver, who speaks, even when normal legal channels
fail. It was necessary to rebuke Balaam
from the mouth of a dumb donkey, because he refused to listen to the messages
sent by angels (Numbers 22). God is not limited,
even to His own appointed instruments, such as those possessing Apostolic
succession.
[14] 1
Peter 5:1-4, unfortunately, The Church sometimes seems to have more bosses, than
it has shepherds.
[15]
The opposing assumption is ludicrous, this would mean that we cannot possibly
have any credible evidence of Moses or most ancients. The reality is that many artifacts remain
from 3000 BC, nearly 1500 years before Moses was born. We have writing from long before 2000 BC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_literature,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_buildings_in_the_world, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sphinx_of_Giza, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza
[18]
Exodus 14; 15:23-25; 16; Numbers 13-14; Exodus 17; Numbers 32:13; Exodus 33:11
[20]
There is also the possibility that a single scribe worked from more than one
master, producing a conflated text. This
presents us with still other problems.
Yet, at the first, we hope that there was only one master to copy
from. This is not necessarily true
either: for example, in the New Testament, circular letters may have been
customized for each receiving church. We
always have the possibility that the author issued a second edition as well:
this is what we believe to be the actual case.
One master document, one scribe, one copy is merely the simplest
possible copying situation. An even more
complex situation would exist for one master document, one scribe, making several
copies at a time: for example, a scribe making seven new documents could make
seven copies of page one before proceeding to page two. This appears to be the way Peter Paul Rubens
made paintings, so there is no reason to ignore the possibility of considerable
complexity in the copying process.
[21]
One master document and reader, several scribes, one copy per scribe is merely
the next to the simplest possible copying situation. Conflation and other complexities of copying
are possible here as well. Each
variation introduces a new set of potential errors and problems for us to
unravel.
[23]
The absence of the visible physical presence of The Glory from Israel between
the tears 586 and 4 BC remains among the most alarming and mysterious facts of
Biblical history. Obviously, The Glory
was invisibly and secretly among them in and after the exile or we would not
possess several books, such as Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, or Malachi. There is no evidence that The Glory ever
entered the Second Temple. When He
finally arrived in 4 BC it was to enter Herod’s Temple, and condemn it. Even more mysterious and significant is the
fact that the Temple, which concerns Him most, the most significant Temple,
which He enters, is the Temple of His own body, entered by incarnation. Seeking temples made of mere stone misses
God’s primary point.
[24] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint_manuscripts,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint, http://www.bibliahebraica.com/the_texts/septuagint.htm,
http://orthodoxwiki.org/Septuagint
[25]
The following article maintains that Greek was not favored by rural Jews, but
by metropolitan Jews. While the
politicians doubtless maneuvered their Greek alliances (see Simon), the
dominant religious force was Pharisaism, not known for its rural
character. The Jews of Galilee were
considered to be ignorant and uneducated, implying that they were not
especially religious, did not know the law, and failed to practice it. This suggests that they were more interested
in eking out a minimum survival and disinterested in fending off encroaching
Greek culture. The widespread evidence
of Greek names and words (συνέδριον, βασιλέως) used in the article favors a
Greek dominant culture. Note also the
blending of Jewish and Greek names (Alexander Jannaeus, Salome Alexandra). If this dominant Hellenization were not the
case for wide segments of the Jewish population, the Pharisees would not have
raised such a fuss over it. Philo (Φίλων,
20 BC-50 AD) the well-known Jewish scholar may not have known Hebrew at
all. The evidence supports the idea that
Josephus himself wrote in Greek and Latin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasmonean_dynasty, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_
Maccabeus, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Maccabaeus, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Maccabaeus,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hyrcanus, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristobulus_I,
http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Alexander_Jannaeus, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salome_Alexandra,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyrcanus_ II, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12116-philo-judaeus#anchor8,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus
[26] A
total of 132 documents; 4Q: fragments of Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy; 7Q:
fragments of Exodus, Epistle of Jeremiah; 8Hev: Minor Prophets; MUR: Christian
Liturgical Text (http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/explore-the-archive/search#q=script_language_en:'Greek',
http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/dss_video), http://www.auburn.edu/ ~allenkc/openhse/deadsea.html
[27]However,
the Dead Sea discoveries do not support the early dates that we maintain,
especially for the Gospels. Our stance
is dependent on Church tradition, and the internal testimony of the Bible
itself. http://www.bib-arch.org/ online-exclusives/dead-sea-scrolls-13.asp,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/portrait/ scrollmeaning.html
[29]
Luke 24:49; John 16:13
