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The King & I

IS THE BIBLE RELIABLE?

NINETEEN

“Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” —Psalms 119:1

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I am concerned by our church's fanatical obsession

with the Authorized King James translation of the Bible to the exclusion of and hostility towards all others, and by a pervasive ignorance about the volume and how it came to be. When I ask them why they consider the KJV the “real” Bible, they really can't answer. Not one of these zealots can tell me, in even broad terms, how the KJV came to be. The most common reply is typically the most egregiously wrong, “The KJV is the most accurate.” The KJV refers to Unicorns nine times: Numbers 23:22, 24:3, Deuteronomy 33:17, Job 39:9, 29, Psalm 22:21, 29:6, 92:10, and Isaiah 34:7. The 1611 KJV has the following note in the margin at Isaiah 34:7: “Or, rhinoceros.” These renderings seem to be the result of the influence of the Greek Septuagint, which used “monokeros,” and the Latin Vulgate, which used “unicornis” or “rhinoceros.”

That's when I figured it out: apparently, these lovely people who, by the way, don't actually read this or any Bible, don't trust any translation written by people who could have possibly driven cars. The invention of the automobile seems the litmus test by which these folks can determine when a thing is holy. The pervasive trend among our Church Folk is an irrational mistrust of anything progressive or even contemporary; an irresistible tow towards Yestertime, as Yestertime represents for them The Incorruptible Good. The rule of thumb seems to be, if they can actually understand what the scripture is saying, they don't trust it.

I admit, I have recently fallen in love with the language of the KJV. It's taken me a long time to do it. For more than two decades I refused to read it, on the grounds that we as a people must move beyond the archaic language that befuddles most people and is totally alien to the young. I felt, and still believe, if God be God, then, surely, we can speak to Him in a language we actually understand. It both amuses and saddens me that, every Sunday, our great learned deacons stand before us praying— in the King James. In really bad King James. Lots of “thee's” and “thou's” and “O Mighty Father Wherfore's” and such. I think, if I were God, I'd be really ticked off. The respect is certainly nice, but the reversion to laughable attempts at Shakespearean syntax are wholly disingenuous and suggest God is too stupid to know what we are saying.

“And there came an angel of the Lord, and sat under an oak, which was in Ophrah, that pertained unto Joash the Abi-ezrite: and his son Gideon threshed wheat by the winepress, to hide it from the Midianites.”  
—Judges 6:11, Authorized King James Version

What the heck did I just read?! I read this as part of a sermon, and everyone's eyes glazed over, until I explained what the verse said, in modern language:

“The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in the winepress to keep it from the Midianites.”  
—Judges 6:11 New International Version

Oh. Why didn't you say that in the first place?! It's been my experience that, if Church Folk can understand the scripture you've just read, they will not accept it. If the translation is a modern one, they will be suspicious of it. They will take absolutely no comfort in the Word of God unless it is delivered in a somber tone and parsed in phrases of archaic language that they can barely understand. It's got to sound religious, or they won't buy into it. I'm sure if I read from the Latin Vulgate, that would have more authority to them than The Living Bible.

It is high on a very long list of what's wrong with Church Folk and how religion has absolutely failed us. The notion that something being old makes it somehow less prone to error and corruption is absolutely laughable. But, that's the goods we've been sold: the KJV is nearly 400 years old, so it must be correct. It is the only version without error. It is the definitive version of the Bible. The men who translated it didn't own cars. It's the Bible the Disciples used.

The irrational, uninformed devotion to this translation of the Bible is the high water mark of ignorance, the Ostrich Method of Historical Theology, a terrifyingly blind faith in an archaic manuscript which was, ironically, created for the purpose of modernizing the Bible into contemporary language of the day. This KJV-Only!” mentality contradicts the wishes of that Bible's own translators, who wrote in the introduction, “...variety of Translations is profitable for the finding out of the sense of the Scriptures.”

For me, God's Word is Holy in any language and in any translation. In spite of the many problems that arise upon any reasonable study of how this Bible came to be, I prefer to keep my eye on the ball: the essence, purpose, and meaning of God's Word, the intent of the authors in preserving and defending it, and it's value to us as children of God.



The Gospel of Mark taken from The Greek New Testament edited by Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, Carlo M Martini, Bruce M Metzger & Allen Wikgren. Note that it provides lots of information on the textual variants and their relative degree of certainty which are needed for the translation than the Novum Testamentum Graece Cum Apparatu Critico Curavit, by Erwin Nestle and Kurt Aland. [3]

But, how did it get here? In the most benignly optimistic vision of how things happened, the Bible came to be by inspiration of God, was passed down through generations unaltered and inerrant, in Hebrew (the Torah, or Old Testament), Greek (Septuagint, 285 BC, The Codex Alexandrinus, 425 AD), Latin (Vulgate, 400 AD) and others. The Bible was finally struck in English in 1380 by John Wycliffe and in 1530 by William Tyndale, who was martyred in retaliation for bringing the Bible to the common man. The Bible was recorded in quantity with the advent of Gutenberg's press in 1450, and The Word continued to be held inviolate for generations after that, until it was finally translated in 1611 into the Authorized King James Version, undoubtedly the standard-bearer of all Bibles today. Many of my friends consider the KJV the definitive and unaltered Word of God, exactly as it was conceived during the Apostolic Age. Believing this, in this book, requires an enormous leap of faith and a childlike naiveté, as well as a blind eye and deaf ear to an even reasonable investigation into historical theology.

Most Christians assume the Bible is an inviolate, exact record of scripture, meticulously preserved from the day of The Apostles. While the Torah, our Old Testament, was indeed preserved over the centuries in the Greek Septuagint, the more controversial Masoretic Text, the Latin Vulgate and other corroborating documents, New Testament manuscripts, the foundation of the Christian Church, were handled many times over many centuries by mere mortals who, even those possessed of the very best of intentions, were prone to error, and prone to interpreting the scriptures to conform to doctrines and manuscript styles of their day.

Thus, we have the study of Manuscript Tradition. Every handwritten copy of a book is textually unique, revealing things about its author or copyist. Manuscript Tradition involves establishing the relationship of every transmitted copy of a text and comparing it to other copies of the work, and other works of the manuscript author, to determine the work's authenticity. A critical examination of any given document's Manuscript Tradition provides clues as to when and where it was written, if not by whom. And these clues go a long way to authenticate or discredit documents presented as scriptural text. 

The earliest attempts to assemble the scattered sacred writings and Gospels into some form of a Christian canon, a “New” Testament, may have been 200 CE. The version of the New Testament we know today was canonized by the Catholic Church at the Synod of Carthage in 397 AD, nearly four centuries after Jesus' death and resurrection. Four centuries: four centuries of oral tradition and little pieces of papyrus floating around, being copied over, stacked in closets, used to prop up wobbly sofas. The potential for mischief with these documents is inestimable, as there's no unimpeachable chain of custody for the entirety of the 27 books of the New Testament. Instead, what we have is the most reliable guess these men could make: an averaging of hands raised and votes cast as to the meaning of words both divine and carnal.

From the Synod of Carthage to this modern era, we've seen lots of bickering over what is and what is not cannon. Revisions, re-translations, church splits, reformations— lots of men deciding for you what is and what is not the Word of God.



There were and remain seven “disputed” books in the Christian Canon (The New Testament): Hebrews (once attributed to Paul, but nobody believes that anymore), James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation. Accredited to St. John The Divine, most Biblical scholars do not believe, based on its Manuscript Tradition, “the Disciple whom Jesus loved,” his half-brother John, actually wrote the Apocalypse from his exile on the isle of Patmos. There is grave doubt that he wrote 2 and 3 John, or that he had much to do with The Gospel of John at all, a book a growing number of Biblical scholars consider to be too inaccurate and inconsistent with other accounts of Jesus' life and words to have been anything more than a kindly, poetic and certainly dynamic and moving fiction.

At the Council of Trent (1563), the Catholic Church chose to endorse these disputed works as deuterocanonical (of, relating to, or constituting the books of Scripture contained in the New Testament but not in the Christian canon), including footnotes and cautions about the reliability of these documents.

The Gospel of Mark taken from The Greek New Testament edited by Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, Carlo M Martini, Bruce M Metzger & Allen Wikgren. Note that it provides lots of information on the textual variants and their relative degree of certainty which are needed for the translation than the Novum Testamentum Graece Cum Apparatu Critico Curavit, by Erwin Nestle and Kurt Aland.

Reportedly a man of faith, James, a Scottish king who became King of England, encouraged the Church to get the Word of God into the hands of the common man. In 1536, the Catholic Church burned William Tyndale to death for distributing the Bible and it was displeased with King James' authorization of a Bible in English. Roman Catholic Nicolo Molin, an Ambassador said, “...he is a Protestant...The king tries to extend his Protestant religion to the whole island. The King is a bitter enemy of our (Roman Catholic) religion... He frequently speaks of it in terms of contempt. He is all the harsher because of this last conspiracy (Gun Powder Plot) against his life... He understood that the Jesuits had a hand in it.”

King James said this in Basilicon Doron, “Now faith...is the free gift of God (as Paul sayeth). It must be nourished by prayer, which is no thing else but a friendly talking to God. Use oft to pray when ye are quiet, especially in your bed...” [1]

Commissioned at the Hampton Court Conference of January 14-16, 1604 by King James I, The Holy Bible (as it was titled) was created in an attempt to create a modern language, sleeker and more accessible version of the Bible, “An act for the reducing of diversities of Bibles now extant in the English tongue to one settled vulgar translated from the original.”

While it is certainly a magnificent and historic document, the King James Version of the Bible is by no means a perfect, unaltered record with a verifiable custody chain back to Apostolic times. 




The KJV New Testament is based upon The Received Text
The Received Text is not a single text. It is a tradition of printed texts published during the time of the Protestant Reformation, that is, the 1500's and early 1600's. It includes the editions of Erasmus, Estienne (Stephens), Beza, and Elzevir. These texts are closely allied, and are all mostly derived from Erasmus 1516. They are based upon a small number of late medieval manuscripts, often called the Byzantine text-type. [6]

The earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts, such as The Alexandrian or “Neutral” Text, did not exist until seventeen years after the King James Version's debut. Much of the New Testament was, therefore, translated from whatever sources were available.

The Byzantine Text is largely regarded as less reliable than the Alexandrian Text, as the Byzantine Text does not appear to have existed during the time of the early church, while the Bodmer Papyri, discovered in the 1950's, lends credence to the Alexandrian Text having existed as early as 200 AD.



The KJV Old Testament includes translations from The Masoretic Text
The Masoretic Text is a controversial Hebrew text. The Masoretic Text is the traditional Hebrew Old Testament text of both Judaism and Protestantism. The Catholic Church, historically, used the Latin translation of Jerome based on the Greek LXX. Masoretic comes from the word “Masora” which usually refers to the notes printed beside the Hebrew text by Jewish scribes and scholars. KJV critics and other scholars believe this Hebrew text has been edited, changed, and in some cases rewritten entirely by the scribes, known as Masoretes, in an effort to discredit Christianity. Since the time of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the accuracy of the Masoretic Text, and, by extension, the KJV, has come under great scrutiny.




Do we toss it out?
By no means. But I believe the process that brought us the KJV was no better protected than that which brought us the New King James Version, the New American Standard Bible, or my preference, the elegant New International Version. Begun in Palos Heights, Illinois, in 1965, the NIV was the product of a transdenominational group of over a hundred Bible scholars working from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts (excluding the Latin Vulgate and Masoretic Text, which were considered in the translation of the KJV). The Holy Bible, New International Version began as selected books of the New Testament and Psalms in 1973, and is now a highly respected rival to the KJV, although few people in my church accept it. They've got to hear a “thou” to get with the program.

Is any Bible perfect? I suppose that depends on your definition of “perfect.” Noted Theologian Charles C. Ryrie writes:

Basic Theology
A Popular Systematic Guide To Understanding Biblical Truth
by Charles C. Ryrie
“...the inerrancy of the Bible means simply that the Bible tells the truth. Truth can and does include approximations, free quotations, language of appearances, and different accounts of the same event as long as these do not contradict.” He concludes, “The Bible is inerrant in that it tells the Truth, and it does so without error in all parts and with all its words.”

To me, this “self-authenticating” argument opens the door to head-in-sand rhetorical stonewalling. Maybe I'm missing Ryrie's point, here, but he makes Christianity out to be a self-reinforcing delusion by side-stepping issues of authenticity and accountability.



So, what are we to do?
If our belief is based on the Bible, and the Bible could mean almost anything, given a minimum of fourteen centuries of handwritten transcription and another six or so of hands-raised-voting on the meaning and relevance of scripture, how do we now find God in any of this? How do we find the incorruptible amid the corruptible? The Truth in the midst of everybody's opinion? Bottom line: can we trust this thing, this book? 
I think the trick is to keep our eye on the ball: to figure out what we want from all of this. To find a personal space with Who and What we consider God. To take comfort and meaning and purpose from the intent of scripture: to connect us with something greater than ourselves. Do we excuse shoddy Biblical research? I hope not. I hope we are reasonable and prudent and prayerful, while not getting so hung up on minutiae and holding out for impossible standards of authenticity.

But, if God be God, couldn't He have protected His Holy Word so there is a valid chain of custody back to the Apostles? Of course He could. Why didn't He? I dunno, you have to ask Him. I tend to believe, perhaps like some of the men at the Synod of Carthage, that the intent of the work— in that it amplifies and enhances Scripture without contradiction— is a valid consideration. So I don't really worry about who wrote John, but take comfort in some of the greatest and most profound statements about Jesus ever committed to writing (while decrying John's frequently anti-Semitic tone; a tone that makes it seem unlikely the book was written by a Jew— John, the brother of Jesus).

Does having faith in a Christian God, in spite of the problems with textual criticism make me a loon? Probably. As I've said in other rants, I believe faith is a choice. A choice we make sometimes in direct conflict with our intellect, and our need for rational, detailed data and encyclopedic reference on Why This Is True.

At the end of the day, it may be impossible for many intellectuals (of which I am certainly not one) to find God, or to have a thriving spiritual life and relationship with a higher power. But, perhaps, at the very end of intellect and reason there is a precipice beyond which no rational thought exists. Perhaps faith involves leaping into that abyss and, in so doing, elevating our thinking beyond what we can prove on paper or websites. Without dismissing intellect and reason, we can evolve both and, in so doing, find that small piece of ourselves that we've been missing.

A friend who is a theological scholar put it this way:

AnonymousThe thing to remember is that most people don't put any thought into their religion at all. And the people who do, generally stop believing. Religion is by nature irrational absent some variety of what is generally termed “mystical experience.” St. Paul experienced such a phenomenon and went a bit nuts. (Or he just went a bit nuts if you don't believe his account of what actually happened.) The Apostles and St. Francis and Muhammad had mystical experiences. Otherwise it becomes a question for philosophers, and after the Cartesian Dilemma, philosophy is not that easy a hurdle to clear “I believe in God the same way I belief in water and television sets and my mother. He's a concrete reality which is just there all the time. The question of God's existence doesn't even make sense to me at some level. I see it as an academic question, like proving the existence of the self. (Of course, Descartes demolished the self...)"

“I believe in God the way I believe in water.” I like that. Maybe I could have saved us all a few hundred kilobytes of bandwidth by just having said that.

Christopher J. Priest
3 March 2002
editor@praisenet.org
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