In Part One we considered the dilemma raised, usually in the context of the “Catholic v. Protestant” dispute, about whether the Bible gave us the Church or the Church gave us the Bible. Neither of these, we argued, is correct, it is rather that God gave us both the Bible and the Church, or better yet that God gave the Bible to the Church. The alternatives that the popular either/or meme present contain two different versions of what is basically the same error, the error of interjecting an intermediary between God and an earthly authority that He has directly established. In the one, the Bible is interjected as intermediary between God and His Church, in the other the Church is interjected as intermediary between God and His Word. We saw that the Bible itself testifies to God the Son having given authority directly to His Church and to the governors He set over her, which authority was exercised before a word of the New Testament Scriptures was put down in ink. In Part Two we will consider the implications of our position for the question of what belongs in the Bible.
The
question of what belongs in the Bible has historically been treated as two
different questions, the question of canon and the question of text. The question of canon is the question of
which books belong in the Bible. Do the
books of Maccabees belong in the Old Testament or the book of Revelation in the
New Testament? These are examples of
this question. The question of text is
the question what words belong in the Bible.
In 1 Timothy 3:16, for example, the Authorized Bible reads “And
without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the
flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles,
believed on in the world, received up into glory.” The word “God” in this verse translates Θεός
which is found in most Greek manuscripts of 1 Timothy. A few have the relative pronoun ὃς (“who”)
instead, and a few others have ὃ (which).
Which word did St. Paul originally write? This is the question of text. It should be apparent that while there are
practical reasons for treating these as two separate questions they are really
two aspects of the same question of what belongs in the Bible.
It is important to recognize that canon and text are two
sides of the same question because this immediately exposes the fallacy that
has been at the heart of the critical approach to the question of text for at
least the last two centuries. This is
the idea that the original text of the Scriptures can be discovered and reproduced
by using the scientific techniques employed for similar purposes on other
ancient texts while disregarding or treating as of very low importance what the
Church has received and passed on as the sacred text. In the nineteenth century, textual critics
allowed the age of a handful of manuscripts, primarily the fourth century
uncials Codex א or Sinaiticus
and Codex B or Vaticanus, to persuade them to accept a large number of New
Testament readings that were found only in these ancient manuscripts and not in
the text that had been read as Scripture in Churches throughout the world for
two thousand years. In the twentieth
century, this exaggerated emphasis on manuscript age was dropped but replaced
by something worse, the eclectic theory which favoured an artificial text not
found in any ancient manuscript but cut and pasted post-modern style from every
manuscript text type. Imagine what the
results would look like if someone were to address the question of canon in
this way. The eclectic theory, if applied
to the question of the New Testament canon, would give you a New Testament that
excludes books from the homologoumena
(1), includes books from the pseudopigrapha
(2), and looks radically different from the New Testament historically accepted
as canonical throughout the Church. The
reason the question of canon is not treated in this manner is because the
concept of canon has no meaning apart from that of a list of the writings a
faith community has received as its authoritative Scriptures. Acknowledging that the question of canon and
the question of text are two aspects of one question is the first step towards
acknowledging that the “scientific” approach to the question of text is just as
nonsensical as such an approach would be to the question of canon.
If, therefore, the question of what belongs in the Bible,
both in terms of canon and text, cannot be answered by applying “scientific”
(3) techniques that are used for other ancient texts but only by what the
Church has traditionally received as Scripture does that not mean that the
Church did give us the Bible, that the Church is intermediary between God and
the Bible after all?
It does not. The
Bible is the Bible, the authoritative Word of God, because it was written under
divine inspiration. This does not mean
inspiration in the sense that any writer or artist may be inspired when the
idea for a creative work comes to them.
It means that Holy Spirit supervised the human writers of the Bible to
that their words were “breathed out by God” (θεόπνευστος, the word used by St.
Paul behind “given by inspiration of God” in 2 Tim. 3:16). The mechanics of this, the how, need not
concern us here. The important thing is
that it is this kind of inspiration, being words breathed out by God Himself,
which makes the Scriptures, the Scriptures.
The Church cannot impart this quality to whatever writings she so
chooses. She is the recipient of the
Scriptures, God is their Author. Again,
God gave the Bible to the Church.
As the recipient of the Scriptures, however, it belongs to
the Church to recognize them and to distinguish them from other writings
which, however excellent or not they may be, are not the very words of God. The principle involved here is that of “My
sheep hear my voice” (Jn. 10:27). This
raises the question, of course, of how the Church recognizes the voice of the
Shepherd in the Scriptures. That it is
through the ministry of the Holy Spirit as promised by Jesus in the Farwell
Discourse we can all agree on but this is not an answer to what the question is
really asking. Does the Holy Spirit
impart the recognition of the voice of God to each believer individually or to
the Church collectively?
That it is not individually is evident from the fact that
canon and text have been subjects of disagreement among Christians. Evident, that is, except to those who take
the borderline fanatical position that only those who agree with them are true
believers. The answer, therefore is that
it is to the Church collectively that the Holy Spirit imparts recognition of
the Scriptures. This still does not
completely answer the question of how, however, but it allows us to phrase more
precisely what it is that we are looking for.
How does the Church express her recognition of the Scriptures?
The history of how the canon of the New Testament came to be
accepted provides some illumination on this point. The canon of the New Testament is far more
settled among Christians than the canon of the Old Testament. Most
of the debates over whether such-and-such a book belonged in the New Testament
took place in the first three centuries of the Church before the first
ecumenical council and most of the New Testament was never seriously
contested. The twenty-seven books recognized
today have been pretty much unanimously agreed upon since the end of the fourth
century. While this was the century that
saw the first two ecumenical councils, that is to say, councils that spoke
authoritatively for the whole Church rather than just for a diocese, province,
or region, it was not these that settled the New Testament canon. A regional synod in Rome, held in 382 A.D.
one year after the second ecumenical council was held in Constantinople,
published a list of the books of both Testaments. Similar synods were held in Hippo in 393 A.D.
and in Carthage in 397 A.D. and these also published lists of the Scriptural
books. Even these acts, however, merely
acknowledged formally what the Church had already recognized as her New Testament
Scriptures by her reading of them as such liturgically in her services.
In the fifth century, St. Vincent of Lérins published a
canon – not a list of Scriptural books but a canon in the term’s basic meaning,
a rule or measuring stick – for determining whether an interpretation of
Scripture was Catholic, i.e., belonging to the true Church as a whole, or
heretical, i.e., erroneous and particular to a sect which in its error has
broken away from the whole or Catholic Church.
He wrote:
Moreover, in
the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken,
that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere,
always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest
sense Catholic, which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing
declare, comprehends all universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow
universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess
that one faith to be true, which the
whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no
wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously
held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if
in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations
of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors. (4)
While St. Vincent had the interpretation of Scripture in
mind when he wrote this his rule and tests apply remarkably well to the
Church’s recognition of her Scriptures as well.
Perhaps the two matters are not as distinct as we are accustomed to
think. St. Vincent was looking for a
rule to distinguish heretics from the Catholic faith and an important
disagreement between the two in the centuries before the first ecumenical
council was over canon. The heresiarch
Marcion of Sinope had published his own list of Scriptural books which rejected
the whole Old Testament and most of the New Testament and consisted of ten of
St. Paul’s epistles (nine genuine and a pseudopigraphon purporting to be the epistle
to the Laodiceans mentioned in Colossians 4:16 which was probably just another
description of the epistle we know as Ephesians) and a bowdlerized version of
St. Luke’s Gospel. The twenty-seven
books of the New Testament canon had been received as Scripture and recognized
and read liturgically as such, unanimously in the case of the twenty
homolougomena, generally but with disputes in the case of the seven
antilegomena, since the end of the first century (antiquity), by the Apostolic
and Catholic Church throughout the ancient world (universality), and the
acknowledgement of this by a number of local and regional synods from the end
of the fourth century on provided the final test (consent).
That the canon of the Old Testament has been much less
unanimously agreed upon needs some explaining as it is rather
counterintuitive. The Old Testament,
after all, consists of the Scriptures that the Church inherited from ancient
Israel. One might expect from that, that
there would be no dispute over them, because the Church had received an already
established canon. It was not as simple
as that, however. While Judaism today
has a canon for its Tanakh that is identical with the Old Testament acknowledged
by Protestants and the protocanonical Old Testament of other Christians except
that they are organized differently in the Tanakh, and counted as 24 books
rather than 39, (5) Israel was not so united on this matter at the coming of
Christ. There were numerous sects, one
of which accepted only the Torah or Pentateuch, the five books of Moses. This was the sect of the Sadducees, prominent
in the upper class of Israel. They justified
their rejection of the doctrine of a future resurrection on the basis of their
limited canon and in a famous incident recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus
answered them by proving the resurrection from the books they accepted. Interestingly, the story they told Jesus as
the beginning of the interview as the basis of the question with which they
tried to trap Him, seems to be a trimmed-down version of the book of
Tobit. The Scriptures that passed over
into the Church as the Old Testament were obviously more than the Readers’
Digest Condensed Version of the Tanakh used by the Sadducees. Furthermore, while Judaism had to redefine
itself out of necessity after the destruction of the Second Temple and this
redefinition meant that the new rabbinic Judaism was essentially made in the
image of a single Second Temple period sect, the Pharisees, difference as to
the canon persisted in Judaism long after this point. (6) This sectarian dispute within Second
Temple Judaism was not the only complicating factor, however.
Israel’s Scriptures were for the most part originally
written in Hebrew. The Babylonian
Captivity, however, had interfered with the generational transmission of the
Hebrew language, enough so that in the Second Temple period it was well on its
way to becoming a language of the specialist, of the scribes and rabbis. Aramaic, a dialect of the Syriac family of
languages, had become the vernacular tongue in Israel by the coming of Christ. Part of the book of Daniel was written in
Aramaic. It was for this reason that the
Targumim were produced. (7) Therefore,
even before the conversion of Cornelius and the first missionary journey of SS
Paul and Barnabas, when the Church’s membership was still entirely Jewish, it
was likely only a small minority which could speak or read Hebrew. The common tongue among the early Jewish
Christians was Aramaic and when the Gentile converts began swelling the numbers
of the Church the common tongue was Greek.
This is the language in which the New Testament, with the exception of
the no-longer extant original Hebrew or Aramaic version of the Gospel According
to St. Matthew, was written. Two
centuries before Christ a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into this
language had been commissioned for the Alexandrian library by Ptolemy II
Philadelphus of Egypt. This translation,
called the Septuagint or the LXX after the number of translators, is more often
than not what is quoted as the Old Testament in the New Testament. It was in this form that the Church inherited
the Old Testament from Israel. The LXX,
however, contained more books than what post-Temple Judaism recognizes as its
Tanakh. Ironically, among these are the
books of Maccabees which provide the historical account of the events behind a
major Jewish annual celebration, Hanukkah.
That the books which Christians and Jews share belong to the canon of
the Old Testament is as agreed upon among orthodox Christians as are the
twenty-seven books of the New Testament.
It is over these other Old Testament books that there is disagreement.
In the sixteenth century, two extreme positions were taken
on these books. The Roman Catholic
Church in the Council of Trent (1545-1563) declared certain of these books to
be of the same character of and on par with the universally recognized Old
Testament books. In response to the
Council of Trent, certain Protestants (the Reformed and the separatist sects),
threw the books out of the Bible altogether.
The Protestant error was greater than that of Rome because it was based
on the idea that the Roman Catholic Church in the Council of Trent had “added’
these books to the Bible in violation of the prohibition of Rev. 22:18. If that were true, however, the books would
not be found in the Bibles of any Church that had broken fellowship with Rome
before the Reformation. The opposite is
the case. The Bibles used by these
Churches include more of the extra books than the ones “canonized” by Rome at
Trent. The books “added” by Rome in
Trent are seven, Tobit, Judith, Baruch (which John Calvin frequently quoted as
Scripture), Ecclesiasticus, the Wisdom of Solomon, 1 and 2 Maccabees. Trent also gave the Roman Church’s
endorsement to the long versions of Esther and Daniel (the LXX and other old
translations of these books include additional material to what is found in the
standard Hebrew versions, for example, the stories of Susannah and Bel and the
Dragon in Daniel). The Eastern Orthodox Church, which broke fellowship with
Rome in 1054 A.D., includes these and also what it calls 2 and 3 Esdras (these
are what are called 1 and 2 Esdras in the Apocrypha section of the Authorized
Bible, what the Orthodox call 1 Esdras is what we call Ezra and Nehemiah) (8),
3 Maccabees, the Epistle of Jeremiah, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151. The Eastern Orthodox print these books as
part of the Old Testament in their Bibles like the Roman Catholics do with
their more limited deuterocanon. The
Eastern Orthodox do not view these books the same way that post-Tridentine
Roman Catholics do, however.
Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky writes:
The Church recognizes
thirty-eight books of the Old Testament.
After the example of the Old Testament Church, several of these books
are joined to form a single book, bringing the number to twenty-two books,
according to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. These books, which were entered at some time
into the Hebrew canon, are called “canonical.”
To them are joined a group of “non-canonical” books – that is, those
which were not included in the Hebrew canon because they were written after the
closing of the canon of the sacred Old Testament books. The Church accepts these latter books also as
useful and instructive and in antiquity assigned them for instructive reading
not only in homes but also in churches, which why they have been called
“ecclesiastical.” The Church includes
these books in a single volume of the Bible together with the canonical
books. As a source of the teaching of the
faith, the Church puts them in a secondary place and looks on them as an appendix
to the canonical books. Certain of them are so close in merit to the Divinely
inspired books that, for example, in the 85th Apostolic Canon the
three books of Maccabees and the book of Joshua the son of Sirach [this is
the same book as Ecclesiasticus, it is also often just called Sirach – GTN] are numbered together with the canonical
books, and concerning all of them together it is said that they are “venerable
and holy.” However, this means only that they were respected in the ancient
Church; but a distinction between the canonical and non-canonical books of the
Old Testament has always been maintained in the Church. (9) (10)
One of the oldest translations of the Bible is the Syriac
Peshitta. That it is the Bible of Syriac
Christians, whether they belong to the Assyrian Church of the East that
rejected the condemnation of Nestorius, to the Syriac-speaking of the Oriental
Orthodox Churches that rejected the Definition of Chalcedon, or Syriac
Christians in fellowship with either Rome or Constantinople, testifies to its
age. (11) The Peshitta includes the Eastern Orthodox
deuterocanon and some additional books as well such as 2 Baruch (also called
the Apocalypse of Baruch) and the Letter of Baruch (sometimes included as a separate
book sometimes as the ending of 2 Baruch), and the Psalms of Solomon.
Clearly, therefore, the Roman Catholic Church did not add
anything to the Bible in the Council of Trent.
If anything, it could be accused of removing books from the Bible. The additional Esdras books, 3 Maccabees, the
Epistle of Jeremiah, the Prayer of Manasseh, and the 151st Psalm are
found in the LXX, the form in which the Old Testament was known and received by
most of the early Church and in the Peshitta, the ancient Syriac version that
is the traditional Bible of the Christians who speak dialects of the
language-family to which the Aramaic of the earliest Christians belongs. Why did Rome not include these? Simply because they were left out of the
Latin Vulgate by St. Jerome.
Before St. Jerome the Bible had been translated into Latin a
number of times by individuals of varying degrees of competence. These translations are all lumped together
under the label Vetus Latina or Old Italic.
In the fourth century, Damasus I of Rome had given St. Jerome the task
of cleaning up the Latin translation of the Gospels and by the end of the
century this had expanded into revising the entire Latin Bible into what is now
known as the Latin Vulgate. He completed the work early in the fifth
century. When he turned to the Old
Testament he decided to translate directly from Hebrew into Latin rather than from
the LXX. St. Augustine of Hippo famously
took him to task for this and it was in the context of the debate over St.
Jerome’s controversial decision that the first real argument about the
deuterocanonical books arose. St. Jerome
wanted to translate the Old Testament directly from Hebrew because it was
originally written in Hebrew and he believed it better to translate from the
original than from another translation.
This meant relying either upon rabbinic Judaism or Origen’s Hexapla, two
columns of which were the Hebrew Old Testament in Hebrew characters and
transliterated into Greek characters, and while St. Jerome did consult Origen’s
magnus opus in the library in Caesaraa, he also sought out the rabbis,
believing them to the be the guardians of the sacred text. This belief led him to adopt the view, at
least for a period, that the deuterocanonical books did not belong in the Old
Testament (even though the rabbis were not of one mind on that subject, see
note 6). He was the first to misapply
the term apocrypha to these books. The
handful of others who shared his view that they were not properly part of the
Old Testament were more cautious in their terminology since these books had
been read liturgically in the Church since the earliest centuries and so called
them “ecclesiastical books.” Eventually
St. Jerome was either persuaded of his error or at least prevailed upon to
translate the deuterocanon and he did, at least for the books later named in
the Council of Trent.
Rome did err on this point at the Council of Trent, but it
was in the way in which she frequently errs, by imposing a dogmatic definition
where none was necessary and where it did more harm than good. The books she named had been part of the Old
Testament in the various versions such as the LXX and Peshitta in which it had
been received by Christians since the earliest centuries of the Church, along
with several books she did not name. The
Church had recognized and received them as part of her Bible all along but not
as being on the same level as the books universally accepted by both Christians
and Jews. There was no good reason to
eliminate the distinction between the two classes of Old Testament books and
her purpose in eliminating this distinction for some of the second tier of
books but not for others was that she was declaring the Latin Vulgate to be the
standard Bible for all Christians.
This was a foolish move on Rome’s part but the Protestant response of removing
the deuterocanonical books from the Bible entirely was much worse. The pre-Tridentine Protestant approach, while
not without its problems, was sounder and mercifully was preserved in the
Anglican Formularies. When the
Authorized Bible was published in 1611, the Eastern Orthodox deuterocanon
(except 3 Maccabees and Psalm 151) was included in a section entitled
“Apocrypha” between the two Testaments. (12) The title of the section is extremely misleading
and unfortunate. “Apocrypha” is from ἀπόκρυφος
which means “hidden away, secret, concealed” and in the early Church was
applied to texts which were not to be read liturgically in Church and which
Christians were discouraged from reading privately which was decidedly not the
case with the deuterocanon which were dubbed the “Ecclesiastical Books”
precisely because they were to be read in Church alongside the undisputed canon. In the same paragraph of his Easter Letter,
where a line excluding the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Judith, and Tobit
from the canon (as well as Esther – not just the Greek additions) that is often
cited out of context by Protestant apologists to claim him for their side, St.
Athanasius spoke of the apocrypha as a different class of writing altogether.
(13) The Book of Common Prayer includes readings from these books in its
lectionary for daily Morning and Evening Prayer. The Articles of Religion, the final version
of which was passed in 1571 less than a decade after the close of the Council of
Trent, while excluding the extra books from the canon of Scripture, says of
them “the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but
yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine” citing St. Jerome
(spelled Hierome in the article) as an authority, and listing the books. (14) Except that the Article’s wording could be
taken as making a nonsensical distinction between “The Bible” and “Scripture”
rather than between “canonical” and “non-canonical” books of the
Bible/Scripture, this is not that far from the Eastern Orthodox view as
explained by Pomazansky, (15) and the Eastern Orthodox view on this as on many
other matters is a good guide as to the actual Catholic or universal Christian
view prior to the Reformation. The words
“doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine” does not mean that the books
cannot be cited in support of a doctrine.
It means that they cannot be relied upon to prove a doctrine, i.e., you
cannot say “X is so, because Judith says X” if Judith is your only authority
for X. In other words, they cannot be
the first and only authority for a doctrine. (16)
Now that we have seen why there is ongoing disagreement over
the Old Testament canon even though the New Testament has been universally
agreed upon since the fourth century (which merely saw the formalization of
what had long been agreed upon in practice) let us apply the principles of the
Vincentian canon to the matter. The
books which Christians and Jews agree upon obviously pass the tests of
antiquity, universality, and consent.
They have only ever been disputed by heretics like Marcion and the
Gnostics. They have been clearly received
and recognized as Scripture by the Church.
The books which are found only in the Syriac Peshitta but not in either
the Jewish Tanakh or the LXX may pass the test of antiquity but clearly fail
the test of universality. The same can
be said of books that are unique to other regional versions of the Old
Testament, for example, the books of Jubilees and Enoch (17) in the Ethiopian
Old Testament, and the three books of Maccabees in the same which are different
books from those called by the same name found in other Bibles. The books which are called deuterocanonical
by the Roman Catholics, deuterocanonical or non-canonical (18) by traditional
Eastern Orthodox like Pomozansky, and Apocrypha by Protestants whether they
retain them in their Bibles (Anglicans and Lutherans) or throw them out (other
Protestants), however, seem clearly to pass all three tests. They belong to the translations in which the
early Church which could not speak or read Hebrew (even most of the original
Jewish members) received the Old Testament (antiquity), and were read
liturgically alongside the unquestioned books in the Church which is why even
those such as Rufinus who agreed with St. Jerome in excluding them from the Old
Testament proper called them “ecclesiastical” rather than “apocryphal”, and so
they are included in the Bibles of all the ancient Churches and not just the
Roman Catholic (universality) and in the ancient canon lists of local and
regional synods including those in which the Church’s recognition of the
twenty-seven books of her New Testament, long established in practice, were
formalized at the end of the fourth century (consent).
The sane principles for determining what the Church has
received and recognized as her Scriptures in terms of canon apply as well to determining
what she has received and recognized as her Scriptures in terms of text. While the only lingering dispute over canon
pertains to the Old Testament textual arguments tend to concentrate on the New
Testament. There is a superabundance of
manuscript evidence for the New Testament in its original tongue and while one
might think that would place the text beyond question, which is in fact the
case for the vast majority of the New Testament, it has exacerbated argument
over the small number of loci where it is otherwise.
Nineteenth century textual criticism and the theory that
informed it must be rejected. It
discarded the tests of universality and consent and tried to establish the text
of the New Testament based on antiquity alone.
This was the great scholarly temptation of the time. Constantin von Tischendorf had discovered
what is now called Codex Sinaiticus in 1844 in St. Catherine’s Monastery at the
foot of Mt. Sinai. This vellum codex
dated to the fourth century to the same period as Codex Vaticanus. Variant textual readings tend to occur
together in text types or families, of which there are basically three, the
Byzantine, Alexandrian, and Western.
While the vast majority of manuscripts have the Byzantine text type,
Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are Alexandrian.
This agreement of these two, which were a century older than the next
oldest comparable manuscript, Codex Alexandrinus which Ecumenical Patriarch
Cyril Lucaris had presented to King Charles I in the seventeenth century and
which was part Byzantine, part Alexandrian, persuaded Tischendorf himself and
other Biblical scholars of the day such as S. P. Tragelles that this text type
had to be closer to that of the autographa
than the Byzantine. B. F. Westcott and
F. J. A. Hort took this idea to the next level by claiming that the
Sinaiticus/Vaticanus text was not Alexandrian but “neutral.” This was their operating theory in preparing
their 1881 edition of The New Testament
in the Original Greek. Hort’s
introduction, published as a second volume the following year, outlines the
principles of their theory. Setting
aside universality and consent for antiquity alone, however, leaves you with
one out of three witnesses. Moreover,
that witness is one that will be shared by any text that passes all three
Vincentian texts. The Byzantine text
type is found in the New Testament quotations in the writings of the Greek
Fathers from the same period in which Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were written and
so at least matches their text-type in antiquity. While some conservative scholars in the
twentieth-century argued for a text derived from the Byzantine on the grounds
that the readings found in the majority of manuscripts are the most likely to represent
the original text one could argue that this is the same mistake as was made by
Tischendorf, Westcott, and Hort, merely substituting universality for antiquity
as the sole witness. (19) That being
said, the Byzantine is the text type that can pass all three Vincentian
tests. It is attested by ancient sources
(antiquity), is attested by the majority of Greek manuscripts and for the most
part by the Syriac Peshitta which is why Hort called it the “Syrian Text”
(universality), and it is attested in the writings of the Fathers, the ancient
lectionaries, and its ongoing use as the liturgical text of the Eastern
Orthodox Churches (consent). (20)
The reason that it is important that the text pass all three
Vincentian tests is because these tests tell us what the Church has recognized
as the text of the Scriptures God has given her. God gave the Bible to His Church and not to
academe and it is to the Church and not academe that He has given to recognize
His Word in both canon and text. To take
books out of the Bible that all the ancient Churches recognize as part of the
Bible and accuse one of those ancient Churches (Rome) of adding them even
though all the Churches that broke fellowship with Rome prior to the
Reformation have them and to do so on grounds that basically all reduce to “Judaism
doesn’t recognize them” on the naïve assumption that the reconstructed
post-Temple rabbinic Judaism that divorced itself from Christianity in the
first two centuries and redefined itself based on its rejection of Jesus Christ
accurately reflects the views of the Judaism of the Israel of the Second Temple
Period in which Christ came even though that Judaism was clearly not absolutely
settled on the matter a century after St. Jerome first tried to claim them as
an authority in this way is bad form. So
is substituting a New Testament text that has been reconstructed either on the
basis of the age of a handful of really old manuscripts or worse of a
post-modern eclecticism that provides a text not found in any manuscript for
that which has been in constant use in the lectionaries and lectern Bibles in
the Church since ancient times.
The Eastern Orthodox believe that the LXX is an inspired
translation of the Old Testament. (21)
The Syriac speaking Christians of various theologies and ecclesiastical
affiliations think the same of both Testaments of the Peshitta. The Roman Catholic Church more or less
dogmatically declared this to be the case of the Latin Vulgate in the Council
of Trent. All of these claims are treated
with derision by those who think the historical-critical method is the only
proper way of interpreting Scripture even though Jesus and St. Paul very
clearly felt free to ignore it in their exposition of the Old Testament and who
speak in the loftiest terms of the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture
while limiting this to the autographa
that we do not possess and denying it to the apographa which we do have. (22)
It would seem closer to the truth, however, to say that all of these
claims are true. At the first
Whitsunday, the birthday of the Christian Church, when the Holy Ghost descended
upon the Apostles and they spoke to the multitude gathered to Jerusalem from
throughout the Diaspora for Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, everyone heard the
Gospel they preached in their own languages.
Christ’s Church is Catholic, that is, universal, drawn from every
kindred and tribe and nation. This being
the case, it is hardly incredible that God in His providence would ensure that
His Church receive authoritative versions of His Word in all her major language
groups. On the contrary, this is
precisely what we ought to expect to have happened. It did not end with the Latin Vulgate,
however. Dr. Luther’s translation of the
Bible has been the definitive German Bible for five centuries. The Authorized Bible has been the same in
English for almost as long. Both of
these are classical Protestant Bibles, in which the Deuterocanon was removed
from the Old Testament but not from the Bible.
The New Testaments of both are translations of the Textus Receptus, a
term that refers to the editions of the Greek New Testament put out by men such
as the Christian Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus and the Genevan
scholar and rigid predestinarian Theodore Beza.
While Erasmus and Beza have been criticized by the later “scientific”
schools of textual criticism for the way they went about preparing their
editions the manuscripts they worked with at least contained a text
representative of that which had been in use in the Church.
This is why, although textual scholars may snipe at Erasmus,
Beza, et al. for such and such readings in their printed Greek texts, and
expositors may point out ways in which this and that verse of the Authorized
Bible might have been translated better, we do not need to answer each and
every one of these. For all their
criticism, however right or wrong, the Authorized Bible’s position as the English Bible is secure. None of the plethora of translations that we
have been inundated with over the last century or so have come close to
supplanting it nor can it be supplanted.
Just as there were multiple Greek Old Testaments (hence Origen’s
Hexapla) but one, the LXX, that was clearly authoritative and definitive, and
just as one definitive Syriac and Latin translation emerged after previous
inferior attempts, so translations from Tyndale, through the Great and Bishop’s
Bibles on the part of the Church, and the Geneva Bible on the part of the proto-Puritans
ultimately led up to the Authorized Bible which has shaped English language,
culture, and religion, Church and non-conformist alike, for four centuries and
which is clearly the only English Bible on par with the LXX/Byzantine Text,
Syriac Peshitta, Latin Vulgate and Luther’s Bible and the only English Bible
that will ever be on par with these. It is in Bibles such as these that God’s
Holy Catholic Church in her various provinces and tongues has recognized the
written Word which her God has given her.
Recommended Reading
Letis,
Theodore P. The Ecclesiastical Text: Text
Criticism, Biblical Authority and the Popular Mind. New York: Just and
Sinner Publications, 1997, 2018.
(2) “Falsely inscribed.” In the broader sense this term is applied to any writing that is recognized to have been written by someone other than the author to whom it is attributed. The Son of Porthos, for example, is a pseudopigraphon of Alexandre Dumas père. It was published under his name, but written after his death by Paul Mahalin. In the more specific sense that is relevant here it refers to works of this sort that purport to have been written by an Apostle or prophet but which have never been regarded as Scripture by the Church. Examples include the Gospels of Peter, Barnabas and Judas.
(3) I place “scientific” in scare quotes because some of these techniques are of dubious scientific value even when applied to other texts. There is, for example, the technique of conjectural emendation, in which all source manuscripts are regarded as corrupt for a particular reading and the critic supplies what he thinks the uncorrupted original might have been. It does not seem right to describe this as a scientific technique. For a less extreme example, consider the fifth line of the first book of Homer’s Iliad which reads "οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή”. This means “and all kinds of birds, and the will of Zeus was fulfilled.” The first part of this line completes the thought begun in the second half of the previous line, about how the “selves”, in this case meaning bodies, of the heroes who had been hurled down to Hades due to the wrath of Achilles, had become the spoil of dogs. Some think, however, that the word δαῖτα (feast) should appear in the line in the place of πᾶσι (all, every). This is unquestionably the better reading in terms of literary quality. This makes the thought read “and themselves the spoil of dogs and a feast for birds” rather than “and themselves the spoil of dogs and all kinds of birds.” In both English and Greek this is an obvious improvement. The metre of the verse does not indicate which reading is to be preferred as it is unaffected by the change. There is no direct evidence for the reading in extent manuscripts of the Iliad, however. There is indirect evidence in that Athenaeus of Naucratus, a Greek grammarian from the reign of Marcus Aurelius, criticizes Zenodotus, the first librarian of Alexandria, for including the reading in his edition of the Iliad (The Deipnosophists, Book I, Epitome, 1.21). There is also an apparent allusion to this passage of the Iliad in lines 800-801 of Aeschylus’ Ἱκέτιδες (Supplices – the Suppliant Maidens) that would seem to support the alternative reading. This is not very strong evidence. Athenaeus is criticizing Zenodotus for a reading that he takes to be Zenodotus’ emendation of the text. The allusion in Aeschylus is not a direct quotation. Preferring the δαῖτα reading on the basis of its literary superiority over the πᾶσι reading is therefore not quite as speculative as conjectural emendation, but evidence of this sort is not sufficient to overturn the reading in the actual manuscripts of the text, even though it predates the manuscripts (the oldest manuscript of the Iliad, the Venetus A, dates to the tenth century A. D.). It would be irresponsible to print the text with the δαῖτα reading, as at least one popular grammar of the last century did, without indicating the other, much better attested, reading. Should this illustration have inspired anyone to wish to learn more about what textual criticism looks like when applied to Homeric epic rather than Scripture I refer you to Martin L. West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, (Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur Verlag, 2001).
(4) St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 2.6. The translation is that of C. A. Heurtley in the eleventh volume of the second series of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace and originally published in Buffalo by Christian Literature Publishing in 1894.
(5) The Jews count the twelve Minor Prophets as a single book, a kind of anthology like the Psalms, rather than twelve books, and count Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra as single books rather than two books each as we do (in the case of Ezra the second book is what we ordinarily call Nehemiah). In ancient times, the Church counted these books the same way the Jews do, and Ruth was counted as part of Judges and Lamentations as part of Jeremiah, bringing the total down to twenty-two, a number considered to be significant because it is the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.
(6) The Talmud in a number of places cites the “book of Ben Sira” as authoritative Scripture. The Gemara of Chagigah 13a, which was composed in the fifth to sixth centuries A.D., is one such example. Ben Sira is the book that appears in the Christian Deuterocanon as Sirach or Ecclesiasticus. In Bava Kamma 92b14 it is quoted as belonging to the Ketuvim (Writings). The Ketuvim is the K in TNK, usually written as Tanakh. The T and N are the Torah (Law) and Nevi’im (Prophets). In Bava Kamma 92b14 the quotation from Ecclesiasticus is joined with quotations from Genesis and Judges (which is classified as Nevi’im by the Jews) so that all three sections of the Tanakh are quoted. Bava Kamma dates to the same period as Chagigah.
(7) A Targum was an Aramaic paraphrase of a passage from the Hebrew Scriptures combined with a midrash (commentary) on the passage.
(8) These books are not continuations of the narrative in Ezra/Nehemiah. The LXX contains two books named Esdras (Ezra), Esdras A and Esdras B. Esdras B is a straightforward translation of the Hebrew book of Ezra (Ezra and Nehemiah in most English Bibles). Esdras A is another translation of the same book that removes some things (namely Nehemiah) and adds others. In translation it is sometimes called 1 Esdras sometimes 3 Esdras. The book called 2 Esdras in the Authorized Bible and 4 Esdras in editions of the Vulgate that include it is called 3 Esdras in Eastern Orthodox Bibles and is the only extra book in Eastern Orthodox Bibles not found in standard editions of the LXX. There was a Greek version, and probably a Hebrew original, but they are not extant. It is radically different in genre from the other books, consisting of apocalyptic visions similar to those of Daniel/Revelation.
(9) Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, translated by Fr. Seraphim Rose (Platina: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1983, 2021) 32-34.
(10) Note the irony that by retaining the ancient way of counting the books acknowledged as canon by both Jews and Scriptures as 22 the Eastern Orthodox with 16 extra books from the LXX, rather than just the 7 recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, ends up with a total Old Testament book count that is one less than the Protestant which excludes all the extra LXX books from the Old Testament (although not from the Bible in the case of Lutherans and Anglicans).
(11) The testimony is not strong enough to support the traditional claim of the Assyrian Church of the East that the Peshitta New Testament is the original of which the Greek is a translation, a claim that while wrong has, as errors of this sort generally do, an element of truth in it in that Patristic testimony maintains that St. Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew by which the Fathers probably meant Aramaic. That St. Paul’s epistles to Greek-speaking Churches were originally written in Syriac, however, is hardly credible.
(12) Dr. Luther did the same thing with his German Bible, except that he used the shorter Roman Catholic deuterocanon for his “Apocrypha” rather than the longer Eastern Orthodox one.
(13) St. Athanasius, Letter 39, 7. This can be found in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2, Volume 4. Note that in his list of the 22 Old Testament books in paragraph 4, Baruch is mentioned as being part of the book of Jeremiah.
(14) Article VI “Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation.” The list of the books is of those that were later printed in the Authorized Bible, i.e., the Eastern Orthodox deuterocanon sans 3 Maccabees and Psalm 151. In the Article, however, unlike in the Authorized Bible, the canonical Ezra/Nehemiah are called 1 and 2 Esdras, and the books that are printed under these names in the Apocrypha section of the Authorized Bible are called 3 and 4 Esdras. The book entitled Ecclesiasticus in the Authorized Bible is called Jesus, Son of Sirach in the Article, the Prayer of Manasseh is spelled with final s instead of a final h, and Tobit is called Tobias. The difference between the Articles and the Authorized Bible in numbering the Esdras books is rather unfortunate because it further complicated an already quite muddled matter. The other differences are minor, although Tobit and Tobias are two different persons (a father and a son) in the actual book. The book is called Tobit, sometimes with an aspirated final dental, in the LXX, and Tobias in the Vulgate. Tobit, therefore, is the original name of the book. The son’s name is a variation of the father’s name and the distinction is eliminated in the Latin. The title, therefore, is probably still referring to the father, although it would make sense to name it after the son in that Tobias’ role in the story is much larger than that of his father. It is Tobias who with the help of the archangel Raphael, defeats the demon of lust Asmodeus, so that he may marry Sarah without dying. As the seven brothers whom she had previously married all had on their wedding nights. Almost certainly the seven brothers alluded to by the Sadducees who evidently did not know the full story and received from Jesus the rebuke that they knew not the Scriptures!
(15) It is even closer to the Eastern Orthodox view as expressed by St. Philaret of Moscow in The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox Church, Q. 31-35.
(16) The position taken by the Anglican Church in her formularies is further articulated and defended by Richard Hooker in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Book V, chapter 22 and by Bishop Christopher Wordsworth in the fourth of his lectures collected and published as On the Canon of The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament and of the Apocrypha (London: Francis and John Rivington, 1818).
(17) Enoch is quoted by St. Jude in the New Testament. That being quoted in the New Testament does not mean that something is itself inspired Scripture should be evident from the quotations from pagan poetry that St. Paul includes in his speech at Mars Hill in Acts 17.
(18) The idea of books that are “non-canonical” Scriptures is obviously contradictory if “canonical” is understood to mean “on the list of books that are Scriptures.” Hooker and Wordsworth, vide supra note 15, not wanting to complicate matters with multiple meanings of canon, spoke of the books in question as being part of the Bible, but read with Scripture rather than as Scripture. This, however, makes “the Bible” and “Scripture” two different things, which does not improve matters. “Canon” is a word that means “rule” or “measuring stick”. Applied to the Bible, it can mean the “rule” that says such-and-such a book belongs in the Bible, or it can mean such-and-such books as the “rule” that determines sound doctrine. There can be no “non-canonical” books of Scripture in the first sense. “Non-canonical” in the second sense, however, describes the Anglican view of these books which Hooker and Wordsworth held. Pomazansky et al., seem to be using it in an intermediate sense, indicating first that the books are not part of the Hebrew canon, that is, the Jewish version of the canon in the first sense, and secondly that their role in doctrine is a supportive one rather than primary. The tradition that doctrine is not established from the “non-canonical” or “deuterocanonical” books does not necessarily suggest that the books were viewed as less than inspired. Establishing doctrine has two sides to it, establishing the doctrines that are de fide for the Church as an in-house matter, and establishing doctrines in dialogue or dispute with others. Of the groups that Christianity has historically been in dialogue with, the only one for whom an appeal to Scriptural authority would mean anything would be the Jews, and these only recognize the “canonical” books of the Old Testament. Therefore there was a practical reason, at least when it came to dialogue with the Jews, for refraining from trying to establish doctrine with the deuterocanon. See, however, A Scholastical History of the Canon of the Holy Scripture by Caroline Divine Bishop John Cosin, found in The Works of The Right Reverend Father in God John Cosin Lord Bishop of Durham, Vol. III (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1849) for the Patristic evidence for understanding the lower status of these books as due to a difference in quality.
(19) Zane C. Hodges, “The Greek Text of the King James Version,” Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. 125:500 (Oct, 1968) 334-345 and “Modern Textual Criticism and the Majority Text: A Response,” JETS 21/2 (June, 1978), 143-155 and Wilbur Norman Pickering The Identity of the New Testament Text (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1978) are examples of arguments that majority principle leads to the most accurate text. While the theory is much sounder than the theory that postulates that the best text is found in a small handful of really old manuscripts it is incomplete.
(20) John William Burgon, who had been vicar of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford (the third after John Henry Newman) before his appointment as Dean of Chichester Cathedral, in 1876, was a textual scholar second to none in the nineteenth century. He argued for the Byzantine Text, or the Traditional Text as he called it, on multiple grounds, all centred on respect for the Scriptures as God’s Word as given to and preserved in His Church. He was working on a magnus opus that would fully articulate such a faithful, ecclesiastical, approach in response to text critical theory when he died. His manuscript was subsequently edited and posthumously published as two volumes, Causes of Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels (1896) and The Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels Vindicated and Established (1896). His earlier treatments of the subject including The Last Twelve Verses of Mark (1871) and a series of articles for Quarterly Review bound and published as the Revision Revised in 1881 are better known.
(21) “As its authoritative text for the Old Testament, it uses the ancient Greek translation known as the Septuagint. When this differs from the original Hebrew (which happens quite often), Orthodox believe that the changes in the Septuagint were made under the inspiration of the Holy Spirt, and are to be accepted as part of God’s continuing revelation. The best-known instance is Isaiah vii,14 – where the Hebrew says ‘A young woman shall conceive and bear a son’, which the Septuagint translates ‘A virgin shall conceive’, etc. The New Testament follows the Septuagint text (Matthew I, 23).” Timothy (Kallistos) Ware, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity, 3rd edition (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 193-194. Metropolitan Ware’s example concedes too much, in my opinion, to Jewish and liberal claims about the meaning of עַלְמָה in the Hebrew text. This word occurs several times in the Hebrew Scriptures. In all but one of these the person designated is clearly a virgin, in the one where this is not the case it appears as part of a compound word that is only found in this one verse (Prov. 30:19). The word itself is derived from a root which means coming of child-bearing age and this is what it primarily indicates about the woman it denotes. Virginity can be reasonably if not infallibly inferred from it. The LXX translators used both νεᾶνις (maiden) and παρθένος (virgin) to translate this word. While this indicates the word could mean “young woman” rather than “virgin” it also indicates that context determines which of these two meanings is intended. The context of Isaiah 7:14 supports the LXX’s translation as παρθένος. A young woman, who has come of child-bearing age, but who is not a virgin, giving birth, would not constitute a sign. The argument that if Isaiah had meant “virgin” he would have written הלותב does not really hold water. This word, while used more often for “virgin” than עַלְמָה is not more limited to this meaning and comes about it in just as roundabout a way. It is derived from a verb meaning to separate and originally indicated a young woman who has not been separated from her father’s house although even this was not literally the case with some to whom the term is applied in the Hebrew Scriptures, such as the maidens who had been collected for Ahasuerus’ harem in the book of Esther. This book still applies the term to them when they were clearly no longer virgins. This, and the fact that Moses needed to qualify the term in Genesis 24:44 to make sure it was understood as virgin, and that Joel used it of a bride mourning for her husband in Joel 1:8 (the term for husband indicates the marriage had taken place, this was not just an engagement) should suffice to negate the idea that this is the technical term for “virgin” in Hebrew.
(22) Autographa are the original manuscripts. Apographa, not to be confused with apocrypha, refers to copied manuscripts and so to all extent manuscripts.
