just thought id add this tidbit of info, have fun learning!!
Evangelist: Brother, you're in trouble if you put your faith in science. Science can never give you absolute truth. Science is always having to correct its mistakes. Science can't save!
Heathen: You're probably right that science cannot give us absolute knowledge. But as long as it gives us information that is solid enough to stake our lives on, what more do we need? Anyhow, there doesn't seem to be any other source of information that's any more reliable - and lots that are much less reliable man science. As for saving, penicillin's record isn't too bad.
Evangelist: Friend, there is something more certain than science. There is a source of absolute, unfailing truth. You don't have to go with the guesses of science any more. You can go directly to the source of all knowledge.
Heathen: Really? What is it?
Evangelist: The Holy Bible, brother, the Book of Books!
Heathen: Which Bible is "the Holy Bible"? I mean, mere are lots of different Bibles floating around. There's the Koran -
Evangelist: Sinner, I'm talking about the Christian Bible, not the false Bibles of the superstitious heathens.
Heathen: Well, even if I admit that Christian Bibles are better than Muslim or Mormon Bibles, how do you know which Christian Bible is the correct one? The Catholic Bibles contain seventy-three books, the Protestant Bibles have only sixty-six.
Evangelist: The Catholics are in thrall to the Devil, brother. They have some false books along with the true ones. The true Bible is the King James Version - translated without error from the original tongues into God's own English. You don't think God would let the transmission of his own word to us fall into error, do you? The King James Version has been preserved inerrant to bring the message of salvation to sinners like us.
Heathen: No kidding? How do you account for the fact that some of "us" are Catholics? Why has god allowed the transmission of his word to Catholics to become corrupted? Why did god allow Protestants to be sold the first editions of the King James Version, which still contained all the seventy-three books found in the Catholic Bible?
Three Problems
True believers who wish to put all their faith in the Bible are faced with three problems: (1) How can one know which books are "inspired" and should be part of the scriptural canon? (2) How can one know which one - if any - of the existing contradictory manuscripts (MSS) of a given book preserves the "true" wording? (3) Assuming that one has the correct manuscript (MS) of a given book, how can one know what the particular Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic words mean? As we shall see, there is no way these questions can be answered with absolute certainty. At best, believers must trust to the probabilities - not certainties - that arise from a scientific investigation of the facts surrounding the biblical texts and traditions. Believers will have to face the fact that there is no way at all to know which Bible to believe - let alone what to believe in it. Believers still have to put their "faith" in other human beings.
Which Books?
As just mentioned, the first problem believers have to face is the problem of which books belong in the Bible, which ones don't, and how to decide. Actually, it is extremely rare for individuals to decide these questions on their own. Usually they inherit a set of "holy books" from the families they are born into. Catholic children inherit a somewhat ampler number than do Protestant children, and Jewish children get still fewer - thirty-four less than the Catholic kids do. Shortest-changed of all are Samaritan kids. They only get Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and - if they eat their lentils - Joshua. If to be "saved" one needs to have information found, say, in Revelation, 2 Paralipomenon, or Baruch, isn't it odd of god to let so many people be born into environments deficient in books needed for salvation?
How comes it then, that there is such diversity of opinion as to which books are "canonical," i.e., should be part of the official collection of "inspired" scripture? What divine principle has left the Samaritans with Bibles containing only five or six books, the Jews with thirty-nine, the Protestants with sixty-six, and the Catholics with seventy-three? Why did ancient Christians have even more books in their Bibles?
In the case of the Samaritans, the small number of books in their Bible reflects nothing more significant than the fact that the Samaritans, living in the northern part of Palestine, became split off from the main center of Jewish cultural evolution - the southern kingdom of Judah - before the prophets and other writings had come to be considered "scripture" by anyone.
To this day the pitiful remnant of believers calling themselves Samaritans claims all books outside the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible, the so-called Five Books of Moses) are uninspired and, therefore, uncanonical. A possible exception is the sixth book of the Bible, the Book of Joshua, which seems to be given quasi-scriptural status. Not only are the later books of the Jewish canon "unscriptural," in the Samaritan view even the Hebrew version of the Pentateuch (the "Masoretic Text," the so-called Textus Receptus or "received text" from which our King James (KJ) and later Bibles have been translated) is no good either. It differs from the Samaritan text in more than six thousand variant readings! But alas for the beliefs of the Samaritans and the Jews, the small size of the Samaritan Bible and the six thousand variant readings of the Masoretic Text are due to no discernibly divine principle of selection: They are merely accidents of political history - and warfare.
Throughout Jewish history up to the Council of Jamnia (held near the present-day city of Joppa, near the end of me first century A.D.), the list of books thought to "defile the hands" (i.e., were inspired) differed as a function of geography and political affiliation. By the time the Christian Church was formed, Greek-speaking Jews had accumulated quite a few more hand-defiling books than had their stay-at-home, Aramaic- or Hebrew-speaking cousins. When the Christians adopted the Greek "Old Testament" for their own (including the newfangled books that went with it), Palestinian Jews had to circle their wagons. At the Council of Jamnia, the Jews threw out such books as Baruch, Ecclesiasticus, and both Books of Maccabees. By a slender vote, they narrowly avoided throwing out Ezekiel, Proverbs, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. In the case of the Book of Daniel, the Jews threw out the last two chapters, settling for an even dozen. (The Catholic Book of Daniel still contains fourteen chapters.)
Figure 1. A page from E Kaine Diatheke, a Greek New Testament published by The British and Foreign Bible Society (© 1958), showing the "preferred text" and "critical apparatus" for Matthew 1:11, 16, 18.
A. The traditional text of verse 16 reads: "And Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, the [one] called Christ."
B. The beginning of the variant readings for verse 16, with symbols for the various manuscripts followed by their different readings.
C. The symbol for the Syriac (sy) Sinaiticus (s) manuscript, a third to fourth century document reflecting the state of the biblical text in the second century, before believers in the virgin birth myth had succeeded in altering all the gospel texts.
D. The greatly abbreviated Greek reads: "And Joseph begat Jesus, the one called Christ."
Just as the list of holy books differed from Jewish community to Jewish community, so the list of books considered holy among the early Christians differed from church to church, although Christians generally preferred the larger Greek Old Testament to the smaller Hebrew one. In addition to the Jewish scriptures, each Christian community developed its own "New Testament" scriptures, creating more than a dozen different gospels and an uncertain number of epistles and apocalypses.
It comes as no surprise to learn that no "Church Father" is known, who drew the line of canonicity in the same way as does the Fire-Baptized Full-Gospel Pentecostal Holiness Church of God in Christ of today.
The illustrious Irenaeus (b. ca. A.D. 130), for example, considered the Shepherd of Hennas to be inspired, but rejected Hebrews, Jude, James, 2 Peter, and 3 John. Clement of Alexandria (ca. A.D. 150-213) included the Apocalypse of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas in his Bible. Tertullian (b. ca. A.D. 160) - best remembered for his dictum, Certum est, quia impossibile est ("I believe it because it's impossible") - threw out all the New Testament books except the four gospels, Acts, thirteen "Pauline" epistles, Revelation, and 1 John.
As certain churches (such as those at Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople) gained in political power, each made strenuous efforts to stamp out "heresy," and church councils were convened (often by the Roman Emperor rather than by popes or patriarchs) to vote on which books were canonical - and to anathematize those who could not buy enough votes to be on the winning side.
The history of these councils is both bewildering and abominable. The Council of Laodicea (A.D. 363) included Baruch in the Old Testament, but barred Revelation from the New. The Council of Carthage (ca. A.D. 397) included Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, Tobit, Judith, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. The most recent infallible enumeration of the Catholic canon took place at the Council of Trent (A.D. 1563), in the midst of the German Reformation. The Greek Orthodox Church closed its canon sometime in the tenth century, when it finally admitted the Book of Revelation (although it still does not use quotations from this book in its lectionaries). The Syrian Orthodox Church grudgingly adopted Revelation a century later still.
Although not every church council debated which books belonged in the Bible, it is nevertheless true that issues decided by previous councils helped to shape the decisions that defined the canon. Contrary to the naive opinion that the deliberations of church councils were infused by the power of divine guidance, most of the councils - and their aftermaths - were pretty ghastly affairs.
The council of Nicaea, for example, was convened in A.D. 325 by the Roman emperor Constantine - the first Christian emperor. After being converted to Christianity, Constantine put to death his wife, his son, a nephew and his wife, and had Licinius (his coemperor) and his son strangled after promising them their lives. These chores out of the way, he convened the bishops and patriarchs of the realm to define the nature of the Trinity and decide which of the squabbling factions of believers should be given the royal patent for orthodoxy.
Christianity
The burning question of the council was the argument between Arius and Bishop Alexander of Alexandria. Arius claimed Jesus was essentially distinct from the Father, having been created ex nihilo by the latter. Alexander, however, claimed "as God is eternal, so is his Son - when the Father, then the Son - the Son is present in God without birth, ever-begotten, an unbegotten-begotten." By a packed vote, Arius was condemned as a heretic, excommunicated, and exiled. Three years later, however, Constantine went soft on heresy (or changed his mind as to who were the heretics) and recalled Arius to Constantinople. On the very day Arius was to reenter the Cathedral in triumph, his bowels suddenly burst out in a privy, obviating any need to redefine orthodoxy. The orthodox considered it a miracle; the Arians knew it was murder.
Figure 2. No virgin birth here! Part of the genealogy of Jesus in the Syriacus Sinaiticus manuscripts referred to in Fig. 1-C. (Printed text © 1894 by Agnes Smith Lewis, The Four Gospels in Syriac, Transcribed from the Sinaitic Palimpsest, Cambridge University Press).
Syriac reads from right to left. Asterisks mark the Syriac word 'wld, "begat." Underlines show names repeating in the formula: A begat B, B begat C, C begat D, etc. Verses fifteen to sixteen read: "Eliud begat Eleazar, Eleazar begat Matthan, Matthan begat Jacob, Jacob begat Joseph; Joseph, to whom was betrothed a young woman, Mary, begat Jesus [(l)yshw', the last name underlined] who is called Messiah."
Poison was not the only way to decide questions of theology. At the "Ecumenical" Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431), St. Cyril, the Pope of Alexandria, bribed enough bishops to be able to convene the Council before the arrival of the Patriarch of Antioch, whose opposition he feared. Without opposition from the delegation from Antioch it was a simple matter to condemn one Nestorius as a heretic, and to proclaim the Virgin Mary to be theotokos, or "mother of god."
At the Second Synod of Ephesus (A.D. 449), Dioscoros, the Pope of Alexandria (Cyril's successor), condemned Flavian, the Pope of Constantinople, and then kicked his rival in Christ so severely that he died three days later. Summoning a mob of monks and soldiers wielding staves, swords, and chains, Dioscoros convinced the bishops who had planned to vote for Flavian to vote "correctly."
Such were the means by which truth was determined in the orthodox Catholic Church. Among the Protestants it was every sinner for himself when it came to deciding which books belonged in the Bible.
Among the Protestant "reformers," opinions differing greatly from those held by Protestants today were common. Luther didn't think Esther belonged in the Bible, but he thought highly of 1 Maccabees and Sirach. He had a low opinion of Hebrews, and Revelation he thought to be of little value, being neither apostolic nor prophetic. The Epistle of James he termed "an epistle of straw."
The Swiss reformer Zwingli pronounced Revelation unbiblical. John Calvin denounced that book of ravings as unintelligible, and he forbade the pastors of Geneva to attempt to interpret it.
Heathen: You're probably right that science cannot give us absolute knowledge. But as long as it gives us information that is solid enough to stake our lives on, what more do we need? Anyhow, there doesn't seem to be any other source of information that's any more reliable - and lots that are much less reliable man science. As for saving, penicillin's record isn't too bad.
Evangelist: Friend, there is something more certain than science. There is a source of absolute, unfailing truth. You don't have to go with the guesses of science any more. You can go directly to the source of all knowledge.
Heathen: Really? What is it?
Evangelist: The Holy Bible, brother, the Book of Books!
Heathen: Which Bible is "the Holy Bible"? I mean, mere are lots of different Bibles floating around. There's the Koran -
Evangelist: Sinner, I'm talking about the Christian Bible, not the false Bibles of the superstitious heathens.
Heathen: Well, even if I admit that Christian Bibles are better than Muslim or Mormon Bibles, how do you know which Christian Bible is the correct one? The Catholic Bibles contain seventy-three books, the Protestant Bibles have only sixty-six.
Evangelist: The Catholics are in thrall to the Devil, brother. They have some false books along with the true ones. The true Bible is the King James Version - translated without error from the original tongues into God's own English. You don't think God would let the transmission of his own word to us fall into error, do you? The King James Version has been preserved inerrant to bring the message of salvation to sinners like us.
Heathen: No kidding? How do you account for the fact that some of "us" are Catholics? Why has god allowed the transmission of his word to Catholics to become corrupted? Why did god allow Protestants to be sold the first editions of the King James Version, which still contained all the seventy-three books found in the Catholic Bible?
Three Problems
True believers who wish to put all their faith in the Bible are faced with three problems: (1) How can one know which books are "inspired" and should be part of the scriptural canon? (2) How can one know which one - if any - of the existing contradictory manuscripts (MSS) of a given book preserves the "true" wording? (3) Assuming that one has the correct manuscript (MS) of a given book, how can one know what the particular Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic words mean? As we shall see, there is no way these questions can be answered with absolute certainty. At best, believers must trust to the probabilities - not certainties - that arise from a scientific investigation of the facts surrounding the biblical texts and traditions. Believers will have to face the fact that there is no way at all to know which Bible to believe - let alone what to believe in it. Believers still have to put their "faith" in other human beings.
Which Books?
As just mentioned, the first problem believers have to face is the problem of which books belong in the Bible, which ones don't, and how to decide. Actually, it is extremely rare for individuals to decide these questions on their own. Usually they inherit a set of "holy books" from the families they are born into. Catholic children inherit a somewhat ampler number than do Protestant children, and Jewish children get still fewer - thirty-four less than the Catholic kids do. Shortest-changed of all are Samaritan kids. They only get Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and - if they eat their lentils - Joshua. If to be "saved" one needs to have information found, say, in Revelation, 2 Paralipomenon, or Baruch, isn't it odd of god to let so many people be born into environments deficient in books needed for salvation?
How comes it then, that there is such diversity of opinion as to which books are "canonical," i.e., should be part of the official collection of "inspired" scripture? What divine principle has left the Samaritans with Bibles containing only five or six books, the Jews with thirty-nine, the Protestants with sixty-six, and the Catholics with seventy-three? Why did ancient Christians have even more books in their Bibles?
In the case of the Samaritans, the small number of books in their Bible reflects nothing more significant than the fact that the Samaritans, living in the northern part of Palestine, became split off from the main center of Jewish cultural evolution - the southern kingdom of Judah - before the prophets and other writings had come to be considered "scripture" by anyone.
To this day the pitiful remnant of believers calling themselves Samaritans claims all books outside the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible, the so-called Five Books of Moses) are uninspired and, therefore, uncanonical. A possible exception is the sixth book of the Bible, the Book of Joshua, which seems to be given quasi-scriptural status. Not only are the later books of the Jewish canon "unscriptural," in the Samaritan view even the Hebrew version of the Pentateuch (the "Masoretic Text," the so-called Textus Receptus or "received text" from which our King James (KJ) and later Bibles have been translated) is no good either. It differs from the Samaritan text in more than six thousand variant readings! But alas for the beliefs of the Samaritans and the Jews, the small size of the Samaritan Bible and the six thousand variant readings of the Masoretic Text are due to no discernibly divine principle of selection: They are merely accidents of political history - and warfare.
Throughout Jewish history up to the Council of Jamnia (held near the present-day city of Joppa, near the end of me first century A.D.), the list of books thought to "defile the hands" (i.e., were inspired) differed as a function of geography and political affiliation. By the time the Christian Church was formed, Greek-speaking Jews had accumulated quite a few more hand-defiling books than had their stay-at-home, Aramaic- or Hebrew-speaking cousins. When the Christians adopted the Greek "Old Testament" for their own (including the newfangled books that went with it), Palestinian Jews had to circle their wagons. At the Council of Jamnia, the Jews threw out such books as Baruch, Ecclesiasticus, and both Books of Maccabees. By a slender vote, they narrowly avoided throwing out Ezekiel, Proverbs, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. In the case of the Book of Daniel, the Jews threw out the last two chapters, settling for an even dozen. (The Catholic Book of Daniel still contains fourteen chapters.)
Figure 1. A page from E Kaine Diatheke, a Greek New Testament published by The British and Foreign Bible Society (© 1958), showing the "preferred text" and "critical apparatus" for Matthew 1:11, 16, 18.
A. The traditional text of verse 16 reads: "And Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, the [one] called Christ."
B. The beginning of the variant readings for verse 16, with symbols for the various manuscripts followed by their different readings.
C. The symbol for the Syriac (sy) Sinaiticus (s) manuscript, a third to fourth century document reflecting the state of the biblical text in the second century, before believers in the virgin birth myth had succeeded in altering all the gospel texts.
D. The greatly abbreviated Greek reads: "And Joseph begat Jesus, the one called Christ."
Just as the list of holy books differed from Jewish community to Jewish community, so the list of books considered holy among the early Christians differed from church to church, although Christians generally preferred the larger Greek Old Testament to the smaller Hebrew one. In addition to the Jewish scriptures, each Christian community developed its own "New Testament" scriptures, creating more than a dozen different gospels and an uncertain number of epistles and apocalypses.
It comes as no surprise to learn that no "Church Father" is known, who drew the line of canonicity in the same way as does the Fire-Baptized Full-Gospel Pentecostal Holiness Church of God in Christ of today.
The illustrious Irenaeus (b. ca. A.D. 130), for example, considered the Shepherd of Hennas to be inspired, but rejected Hebrews, Jude, James, 2 Peter, and 3 John. Clement of Alexandria (ca. A.D. 150-213) included the Apocalypse of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas in his Bible. Tertullian (b. ca. A.D. 160) - best remembered for his dictum, Certum est, quia impossibile est ("I believe it because it's impossible") - threw out all the New Testament books except the four gospels, Acts, thirteen "Pauline" epistles, Revelation, and 1 John.
As certain churches (such as those at Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople) gained in political power, each made strenuous efforts to stamp out "heresy," and church councils were convened (often by the Roman Emperor rather than by popes or patriarchs) to vote on which books were canonical - and to anathematize those who could not buy enough votes to be on the winning side.
The history of these councils is both bewildering and abominable. The Council of Laodicea (A.D. 363) included Baruch in the Old Testament, but barred Revelation from the New. The Council of Carthage (ca. A.D. 397) included Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, Tobit, Judith, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. The most recent infallible enumeration of the Catholic canon took place at the Council of Trent (A.D. 1563), in the midst of the German Reformation. The Greek Orthodox Church closed its canon sometime in the tenth century, when it finally admitted the Book of Revelation (although it still does not use quotations from this book in its lectionaries). The Syrian Orthodox Church grudgingly adopted Revelation a century later still.
Although not every church council debated which books belonged in the Bible, it is nevertheless true that issues decided by previous councils helped to shape the decisions that defined the canon. Contrary to the naive opinion that the deliberations of church councils were infused by the power of divine guidance, most of the councils - and their aftermaths - were pretty ghastly affairs.
The council of Nicaea, for example, was convened in A.D. 325 by the Roman emperor Constantine - the first Christian emperor. After being converted to Christianity, Constantine put to death his wife, his son, a nephew and his wife, and had Licinius (his coemperor) and his son strangled after promising them their lives. These chores out of the way, he convened the bishops and patriarchs of the realm to define the nature of the Trinity and decide which of the squabbling factions of believers should be given the royal patent for orthodoxy.
Christianity
The burning question of the council was the argument between Arius and Bishop Alexander of Alexandria. Arius claimed Jesus was essentially distinct from the Father, having been created ex nihilo by the latter. Alexander, however, claimed "as God is eternal, so is his Son - when the Father, then the Son - the Son is present in God without birth, ever-begotten, an unbegotten-begotten." By a packed vote, Arius was condemned as a heretic, excommunicated, and exiled. Three years later, however, Constantine went soft on heresy (or changed his mind as to who were the heretics) and recalled Arius to Constantinople. On the very day Arius was to reenter the Cathedral in triumph, his bowels suddenly burst out in a privy, obviating any need to redefine orthodoxy. The orthodox considered it a miracle; the Arians knew it was murder.
Figure 2. No virgin birth here! Part of the genealogy of Jesus in the Syriacus Sinaiticus manuscripts referred to in Fig. 1-C. (Printed text © 1894 by Agnes Smith Lewis, The Four Gospels in Syriac, Transcribed from the Sinaitic Palimpsest, Cambridge University Press).
Syriac reads from right to left. Asterisks mark the Syriac word 'wld, "begat." Underlines show names repeating in the formula: A begat B, B begat C, C begat D, etc. Verses fifteen to sixteen read: "Eliud begat Eleazar, Eleazar begat Matthan, Matthan begat Jacob, Jacob begat Joseph; Joseph, to whom was betrothed a young woman, Mary, begat Jesus [(l)yshw', the last name underlined] who is called Messiah."
Poison was not the only way to decide questions of theology. At the "Ecumenical" Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431), St. Cyril, the Pope of Alexandria, bribed enough bishops to be able to convene the Council before the arrival of the Patriarch of Antioch, whose opposition he feared. Without opposition from the delegation from Antioch it was a simple matter to condemn one Nestorius as a heretic, and to proclaim the Virgin Mary to be theotokos, or "mother of god."
At the Second Synod of Ephesus (A.D. 449), Dioscoros, the Pope of Alexandria (Cyril's successor), condemned Flavian, the Pope of Constantinople, and then kicked his rival in Christ so severely that he died three days later. Summoning a mob of monks and soldiers wielding staves, swords, and chains, Dioscoros convinced the bishops who had planned to vote for Flavian to vote "correctly."
Such were the means by which truth was determined in the orthodox Catholic Church. Among the Protestants it was every sinner for himself when it came to deciding which books belonged in the Bible.
Among the Protestant "reformers," opinions differing greatly from those held by Protestants today were common. Luther didn't think Esther belonged in the Bible, but he thought highly of 1 Maccabees and Sirach. He had a low opinion of Hebrews, and Revelation he thought to be of little value, being neither apostolic nor prophetic. The Epistle of James he termed "an epistle of straw."
The Swiss reformer Zwingli pronounced Revelation unbiblical. John Calvin denounced that book of ravings as unintelligible, and he forbade the pastors of Geneva to attempt to interpret it.