The Bible has an interesting history, in many ways a storied history -- but it is not
what those most desperate to defend it claim that it is. What do I mean? Well, to put
it simply, the history of the Bible is not what it appears to be, if you listen
to fundamentalists talk about it.
Fundamentalists today have changed little from their predecessors. The average
person, whether fundamentalist or not, when they pick up their copy of the Bible
to read it, does not ask from whence the books in it came -- the reality is however
that such a question is absolutely paramount. The assumptions of fundamentalism
rest on very uneasy ground here, and the ideas of literalism depend on a historically
established legitimacy that is entirely made up of whole cloth.
In 1892, writing for the American Sunday School Union, BB Warfield said:
| In order to obtain a correct understanding of what is called the formation of the Canon of the New Testament, it is necessary to begin by fixing very firmly in our minds one fact which is obvious enough when attention is once called to it. That is, that the Christian church did not require to form for itself the idea of a "canon" -- or, as we should more commonly call it, of a "Bible" -- that is, of a collection of books given of God to be the authoritative rule of faith and practice. It inherited this idea from the Jewish church, along with the thing itself, the Jewish Scriptures, or the "Canon of the Old Testament." The church did not grow up by natural law: it was founded. And the authoritative teachers sent forth by Christ to found His church, carried with them, as their most precious possession, a body of divine Scriptures, which they imposed on the church that they founded as its code of law. No reader of the New Testament can need proof of this; on every page of that book is spread the evidence that from the very beginning the Old Testament was as cordially recognized as law by the Christian as by the Jew. The Christian church thus was never without a "Bible" or a "canon." |
This argument is, as far as it goes, accurate -- kind of. The Jewish faith only recognizes
the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) as being fully inspired. The haf-torahs are
considered to be the writings of the Rabbis in interpreting the law. So in as much as the
canon of the Torah was recognized, a set of books may have existed in the earliest
Church, which was effectively a branch of Judaism, but those books would have been old testament books. As the Church spread abroad however, and spread among the Gentiles -- that canon was diffused, many
congregations (possibly all congregations) no longer used the Jewish canon as being exclusive and at the same time gospels and epistles began to multiply. Many, probably the vast majority of non-Jewish congregations had no books, or one book of what is now the New Testament, or one book that has now been discarded as non-canonical , and were based primarily on oral tradition.
Doctrines also were fractious at best in the early Church. By no means did everyone believe the same things. There were Gnostic and ant-Gnostic priests and congregations. There were tremendous struggles over the nature of Christ and of His relationship to God between different groups of clergy and different geographical areas. There were questions as to Christ's relationship to other "pagan" gods and serious questions over the nature of the Church. It wasn't until Emperor Constantine that these questions began to be answered, and that was primarily because Constantine demanded that the Church decide what it believed "or else." Even this intervention was caused by the factions in the Church, for the Arians and the anti-Arians had all petitioned the Emperor on their own behalves.
Thus came the great Councils. The Council of Nicea (Nice) in 325, which was the first of a group of great Councils that finally culminated in the Council of Trent (1545-1563). It was at Nice where the Nicean creed was hammered out by vote among the attendees, Trinity winning by a single vote according to some scholars, and other doctrines by little more -- at a Council that was poorly attended to begin with (less than 400 of 1800 bishops invited actually attended -- most simply refused, others were killed on the roads). The Council of Nicea and the Council of Carthage (397), where the canon of the Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria was finally accepted (more or less) as the whole New Testament Canon, were the most important two of the early councils.
There were changes, even after Carthage, and other canons of books continued in use. The Orthodox Churches of the Eastern traditions have to this day a different canon. Roman Catholicism to this day has books included that are absent from the Protestant Bible of the West. Perhaps more importantly, as late as the split of the Anglican Communion from the Roman one in 1549 there were books included in canon as received by the Anglican Communion that are now missing (as given in the Historical Documents Section of the Book of Common Prayer; Seabury Press; Page 868 -- the first and second books of Esdras were included as fully canonical -- although the third and fourth books of Esdras were counted among the Apocrypha.)
The slow congealing of what is now Christian doctrine, primarily at the Great Councils, and the gradual evolution of the canon of books are fascinating to watch. Never did these things precipitate out of the general conscious of the Church as a gift of God. Rather they developed slowly, over time -- and the various changes we can see in the past clearly reflect this process. The danger is that now, fundamentalists are subtly attempting to alter canon again -- or at least the wording of certain books -- in order to claim that the texts do not say things (errors and abominations primarily) that in fact EVERY legitimate scrap of historical evidence we have, and every fragment of original parchment -- indicates they do.
This becomes a problem not only because of its inherent dishonesty [particularly given the fundamentalist's professed view of scripture], but also because of its intent -- which is to defraud and lie to those that are "not yet" believers, and buttress scripture's apparent integrity, by making it appear much more accurate than it actually is. In any other field such activity would be called deception. It is likely that an accountant who treated a client's books similarly would be arrested. The patina of "godliness" with which they paint themselves cannot actually protect the translators of modern language bibles who change the word for Satyr (a creature of Greek myth, half goat, half man) into "wild goat," from such a label. The two are not the same, the few pitiful fragments we have seem to clearly indicate that the authors were talking about (and presuming the actual existence of) Satyrs, and since that's the way it was, that's the way it should be left. Likewise with the many other "corrections" that such translators are attempting to carry on quietly, bringing the text more "into harmony" with known facts, history, and science -- but denying the plain meaning of what record we have of the original texts. Translators who do these changes have many excuses and explanations, but there is not one shred of real evidence that what they are doing is anything more than lying to the public.
Watch out for this tactic, and if you do not own one and are interested, at least purchase an interlinear of the New Testament -- and preferably one of the Old Testament as well.
Most importantly of all, think!!!