The Schenck Paradox

I've had four classes this Spring where the issue of the text of the Bible was on the syllabus, and the question of the King James debate has come up. I suppose the "confrontation of cultures" between the Islamic and Western world has added to my desire to work against blind irrationalism in Christianity. As I've discovered even Augustine said in the 400's, mistaken beliefs can be harmless and indeed, even beneficial at times. So in general I have not taken a "frontal assault" approach to truth in the Christian religion. Feel free to disagree :)

But while I am happy for the older generations to continue with slightly mistaken understandings (if they are not harmful), I hope the next generation of conservative American Christians will be a little more informed than the last. Not to say that I have it all right. I hope the next generation will correct me on whatever issues I am wrong on. But I think I am fairly clear on what those issues could be. I think I know other issues where to be wrong would be for the very reasoning that leads me to step out of moving traffic would be in question.

So some brief comments on why it is irrational to think that the Greek and Hebrew texts behind the King James are closer to what Paul or some other biblical author wrote than modern editions of the Bible (unless some unprecedented cache of unknown manuscripts and evidence were to surface). Here is one where I believe you will have to turn in your "I'm a good thinker" badge if you persist in such a belief after investigating the evidence.

At the same time, I want to make it clear that the KJV is not a bad text, just not at all likely to be closest to the original text. And let me also say that the KJV is closer to the text the church used for most of its history (400's-1800's). So it must not be a bad textual tradition. You could argue that it is the textual tradition Christians should use for this reason--it is the church's text (or, if you would, the catholic text :).

A Warm Up: 1 John 5:7
This is an easy shot, since there would be other textual situations much more debatable. But KJV only people tend to take an "all or nothing" approach, so if their philosophy doesn't work at one point, then their entire case crumbles.

The NIV of 1 John 5:7 reads like this: There are three that testify.

On the other hand, the KJV reads: For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.

I wish the KJV was original here, for this would be a great statement of the Trinity! Indeed, it would be the clearest statement on the Trinity in the whole Bible.

And let's make it clear that the overwhelming majority of translators of the modern versions--the NIV, TNIV, NASB, Jerusalem Bible, NLT, ESV, NEB, NAB...--believe in the Trinity. It is completely mistaken to think that modern versions have or don't have various verses because of some lack of faith on the part of the translators. The decisions on how to word or what to include are strictly matters of ancient copies of the text and what they read in conjunction with a few common sense principles that apply to the copying of documents.

And now let me suggest that a book that came out a few years ago--New Age Versions of the Bible--reflects wholesale ignorance and irresponsibility on this topic. It is so off, so consistently, that its humor sometimes brings gladness to my soul...

(like when the author doesn't know that metaphysics is a branch of ancient philosophy and so thinks Hort was a new ager. If I forget for a moment that this book was swallowed up by masses of ignorant fundamentalists, I get a good kick out of reading it. As another example, the NIV is evil because an 1800's textual scholar who had no direct connection to it drank alchohol. This, my friends, is why so many non-Christians think Christians are stupid).

But on a more serious note, this author goes so far as to imply that Alzheimer's disease and other misfortunes on the part of NIV translators was a consequence of their faithless translation. But let's be clear that the NIV translators consistently translated the text more orthodoxly than is actually clear in the Greek original.

Two examples: The NIV translators of Philippians 2:6 translate a Greek phrase "form of God" as "very nature God." This is quite an enhancement of the original statement, reflecting faith in the divinity of Christ. Similarly, the NIV translates "firstborn of all creation" in Colossians 1:15 as "firstborn over all creation." Again, the NIV does this to make it clear that Jesus is not a part of the creation. These two examples are a small indication of the faith of its translators. So anyone who suggested they were trying to "take the blood of Christ" out or anything of that sort is vastly mistaken.

So back to 1 John 5:7. Why don't modern versions have this magnificent trinitarian statement?

For every reason:

1) only eight of the over 5000 Greek copies of the Greek NT have the reading. None of the places where it occurs date before around 1500 (for example, there might be one manuscript from the 1300's where it is written by a seventeenth century hand in the margin). In other words, there is no evidence among the Greek manuscripts for this verse until 1400 years after 1 John was written.

2) the editor of the Greek text behind the KJV (Erasmus) writes in his memoirs that he did not think it was original and only put it in under pressure from Catholic Church officials. By the way, Erasmus was a Roman Catholic humanist who argued against sola scriptura and against Luther's withdrawal from the Catholic Church. I say this because most KJV only people are virulently anti-catholic.

3) It makes perfect sense that a copyist would put this verse in. The surrounding verses might easily make a person think of the Trinity, and the church became soundly trinitarian by the 500-600s. But it is really hard to imagine why someone would take it out or why copyists would leave it out of all Greek manuscripts until it was reintroduced into Greek by Erasmus in the late 1400s. It did exist in the tradition of the Latin Vulgate from an earlier period, first appearing I think in the 400's in that tradition.

4) But the most convincing bit of evidence of all is the fact that in the heavy debates over the Trinity in the first few hundred years of the church, leading up to the Councils of Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381) and Chalcedon (451), the verse is never mentioned. Imagine that, the most trinitarian verse in the entire Bible never mentioned in intense debates over the Trinity! This particular bit of evidence is definitive. It is simply unthinkable that the most trinitarian verse would go unmentioned int he whole of these debates.

In short, to argue that this verse was in the original of 1 John requires a feat of immense irrationality. A person who would argue for its originality is clearly not interested in the truth but in supporting an emotional attachment they have to a tradition.

The Schenck Paradox
Hebrews 1:6 says, "When God leads His firstborn into the world He says, 'Let all the angels of God worship him.'" If your Bible has a cross reference on this verse, it will point you to Deuteronomy 32:43.

But if you go to Deuteronomy 32:43 in most versions (I'll use the KJV), what you'll find is something like this: "Rejoice, O ye nations, with his people: for he will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries, and will be merciful unto his land, and to his people."

We look a little puzzled. Why did my cross reference point me here? Is this really the closest verse in the OT to the quote in Hebrews 1:6.

The answer is that the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament on which all but the most recent translations are based read differently from the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint) and the Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts at this point (NRSV is perhaps the translation that most takes the newer Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts into account). When we take them into account, we find that the KJV text of Hebrews quotes the original OT text more accurately than our KJV OT does. The problem is with the Hebrew copies of the OT on which the KJV OT was based.

But here is a difficult problem for a KJV only approach:

1) The science of textual study has resolved a problem with the text for me. A NT text is accurate to the OT original if I allow that the text that persisted in the Middle Ages was not as original as texts we have since discovered. I can only affirm the accuracy of a NT text in the KJV if I affirm that God did not always allow the OT text of the KJV to be accurate to the original.

2) But to be consistent, we would then need to allow that the NT text of the KJV might not always be accurate to the original also and we would allow for the same science of textual study to work on the NT text. And once we allow for these things, there is little reason to continue to be a KJV only person. We could no longer base our insistence on it because of some theology that says, "God wouldn't have allowed a text to persist through the centuries that wasn't exactly like the original text." We have already allowed that this is not the case for the OT of the KJV.

So once again, the KJV only position turns out to be based on irrational factors rather than on a real interest in the truth.

May the next generation of Christians be a better witness in their thinking than this.