The Preservation of the Bible
The Preservation of the Bible
Monday, May 3, 2010
This is an argument for Episcopalians and Anglicans.
During the 4th. cent the manuscripts of the Church were assembled into a single book which became the Greek New Testament. Lucian of Antioch assembled the teaching documents that the various Churches in Asia, Egypt and Macedonia, had been using for their training of priests and for use in the liturgy. The documents were all different because each of the apostles had his own understanding of the spiritual messages of The Master. Though the risen Christ had given the apostles the Comforter (Holy Spirit) to remind them of everything he had taught them during His ministry, each apostle verbalized his understanding in a personal way. In teaching the gospel of The Master to the disciples, each apostle used a different “picture” which he thought best expressed the truth revealed to him by the Holy Spirit. That is why, in the synoptic gospels, the same story is sometimes told with different emphasis, words, or explanation.
Lucian of Anticoch in the late 2nd. cent. conferred with the Bishops who had been given the ultimate responsibility of guarding the words of The Master. The Master had said to the apostles “keep my words” which meant guard them from any changes. In order to standardize the text of the NT, Lucian and the Bishops took the better readings of the various copies of mss. - those they thought best represented what the Church understood The Master to have taught the apostles. These edited mss. have been copied over the centuries and were used in the 15th. cent. to produce a “Received Text”, the best of the best readings, which was then translated into English for the King James New Testament. The English Parliament and the Church endorsed this English Bible and it was referred to as “The Authorized Version” i.e it was authorized to be read in the Churches in England.
Now the Old Testament that is included in the Holy Bible is taken from an 11th. cent. English translation of the Hebrew Tanakh, to which were added some of the books of the Greek Septuagint. These books were called Apocrypha (apocrypha is from a Hebrew word meaning “sacred” i.e not for public reading.)
The Roman Catholic Bible is slightly different in that the books of the Apocrypha are mixed in with the Hebrew Tanakh, and there are some differences with the AV.
Jerome, commissioned to translate the Bible into classical Latin, moved to Bethlehem to learn Hebrew. It was Jerome’s translation that eventually, after some modification by the Bishops of the Church, became the standard for the Western Church, the Latin Vulgate - the authorized Bible for the Roman Catholic Church. The Vulgate has been used by the Vatican ever since. In the Eastern Church - where Greek was spoken - the Latin Bible was not adopted. The OT of the Greek orthodox Church is the Septuagint, and the NT is from Greek mss. of the early Church.
What is so comforting to Christians in the West is that all these Bibles contain essentially the same words and teach the same theology. You can compare the English translation of the Roman Catholic Church Vulgate, (called The Douay Rheims version), and the Bible of the Anglican Churches, The King James Bible, and it becomes quickly apparent that they must have come from the same source. They did. William Tyndale an Oxford master, translated the Latin Vulgate into the two English Bibles which became the King James Version and the Douay Rheims version.
More than a Billion believers read essentially the same text.
The catholic Church has truly kept The Master’s words as He commanded, both in the New Testament and in the Old Testament.
Recommended:
King James Bible - New Editions
Several Bibles have been recently published that use the actual King James Text with improvements in readability, and hardly anyone I have talked to, is aware of this.
The Sword Bible - KJVER printed 2007
All the words of the King James (but no Apocrypha) and only the archaic word endings made modern. Easier to read as there are no “eth” endings. Good and comprehensive concordance.
ISBN1-60374-010-4
The Cambridge Paragraph Bible using King James text (2005) has now the most accurate rendering of the original 1611 Authorized Version text. This is an update of the Scrivener edition of the King James Bible c. 1830. The text is in paragraph format rather than verse format.The reading is easier. Approved to be read in Church.
The Master said to the Apostles:
John 14:26
“But the Comforter, who is the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”
and the Church confirmed:
Hebrews 10:15, 16
“15 Of this the Holy Spirit also is a witness to us; for after he had said before,
16 “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord: I will put My laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them;”
So the intent of The Master was that there should be a permanent source for instruction within each Apostle, and that this “comforter” would be in everyone whom God declares righteous. It is clear that The Master commanded the Apostles to disseminate His teaching to “all corners of the World.”
We know that tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of MSS were created for this purpose, for we have already found more than 10,000 remnants of them, some of them fragments but many almost complete gospels. So I would say that the Holy Spirit had indeed been at work with holy men to preserve The Master’s teachings as He intended.
For more than 1700 years, holy men in all parts of the world have believed in those writings and have taught more than one and a half billion people, from essentially identical texts.
After 1881, there were new translation of Greek codices discovered in the 1800s, and there was considerable excitement over these finds. The two codices were almost complete Bibles.
The one in the Vatican archives was in very good condition - it is called Vaticanus. It had been written in the 5th. cent, but had suffered from many revisions by several writers since then. It was an unusual translation and in many ways quite different from the King James. To begin with it contained a book The Shepherd of Hermas that is not included in the Catholic canon. Also it included letters from Clement of Rome that are not in the King James. Also the book of Revelation is not included. Another difference is that the Old Testament is not the Hebrew scripture that has been included in all Bibles translated before the 19th. cent., but is the Greek Septuagint.
Apparently no-one at the Vatican considered Vaticanus to be an important translation as it had been left on the shelf since at least the 11th. cent. Surely you can see the Holy Spirit at work here, putting out of the reach of man, texts that are in error.
In the 1800s Sinaiticus was discovered and thought by scholars to be most like the original Bible because, at that time, it was the oldest complete Some modern Bible use the translations from Sinaiticus.
During the 100 years since the printing of the Revised Version in 1881, the Holy Spirit has been hard at work getting rid of this translation, while continuing to preserve the King James Bible, for you can find the King James Bible in every bookstore sometimes by the hundreds on the shelves, but you will never find a Revised Version. The American Standard Bible that slithered in on the coat tails of the RV, was also abandoned by believers.
Another Bible, The Revised Standard Version based partly on Sinaiticus is in use by the Episcopal Church in the USA but is due to be phased out and replaced by yet another modern translation, the “English Standard Version”. The RSV is an unpopular translation, and I imagine that it will vanish into oblivion like other translations based upon the Sinaiticus codex. (I was right. I checked the shelves at BAM October 2009 and there was only one copy of the Oxford Edition annotated RSV, and none of the standard RSV Bibles).
That leaves the NIV Bible (and now the ESV) as the only popular Protestant Bibles based on the revised Greek text of Sinaiticus . In the USA the 1960‘s era NIV (300 million copies sold) has a slightly bigger market share than anything else.
But the KJV has sold “5 billion copies.” And
“The KJV is hardly lost in the thicket of translations, according to Robert Sanford, an executive at the Christian publishing giant Thomas Nelson. It annually ranks near the top of the company's sales.
This according to an article in the Huffington Post (3/2/11).
The Southern Baptist Convention's (SBC) resolution in opposition to the most recent New International Version (NIV) translation of the Bible is not surprising to many. By a more than a two-to-one margin, the convention representing a coalition of millions of conservative Baptists determined that 2011 NIV Bible published by Zondervan should not be used in churches or sold through its denomination-owned Lifeway bookstores. Huffington Post 9/21/11.
This spring (2010), I notice that the book shelves at Barnes and Noble and at Books A Million hold many more KJV copies, and fewer of the bibles based on the Sinaiticus codex. The new TNIV has not sold well and is on the discount table in most stores. The NRSV (gender inclusive text) is not very popular. The RV, ASV are nowhere to be seen.
There are several new formats for the King James, including reprints of the 1611 version, and versions written in paragraph format rather than verse format. A Version of the KJV that has modern spelling for archaic words The Sword Bible ($30) has recently appeared. Cambridge University Press have released an update paragraph King James ($80) which has been approved to be read in the Church of England.
So thanks be to God the Holy Spirit for keeping alive the words and teaching of The Master on which our Church has been dependent.
And thanks be to God that the writings of the Church Fathers and the commentaries of the greatest theologians are still as useful today - for their texts are based on the Bibles that have been preserved by the Holy Spirit.