Monday BCS (Bible as Christian Scripture) 2.1

2.1 The Issue
For the last two centuries, the question of Bible translation has largely centered on the question of what the "original manuscript" of a particular book of the Bible said. In the English speaking world, the King James Version of the Bible had reigned supreme from the 1700's on.[1] It was based on a Greek text put together in the late 1400's using about a dozen medieval copies of the New Testament.

But as much older copies of the New Testament were discovered in the 1800's, it became fairly clear to the leading scholars in the field that in fact this text did not represent the most original reading of the New Testament. For example, the oldest Greek copies of Mark did not have 16:9-20, mirroring comments long known by early church figures like Jerome and Eusebius. Increasingly, editions of the Greek New Testament provided notes with the text to indicate where new manuscripts differed from the "received text," as the Greek text behind the King James had come to be known.

It was not until the Greek New Testament of B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort in the late 1800's that the "received text" was placed in the notes and a text reconstructed using the older manuscripts appeared as the main text. Westcott and Hort largely did not invent the rules they followed to arrive at this reconstructed text. They simply collected and systematized principles that had come together over about a century by those studying the ancient manuscripts.

Of course this move met with great resistance in some circles, just as newer English translations of the Bible did in the late 20th century. An alternative school of "textual criticism" exists to this day, the branch of biblical studies that tries to determine the original wording of the Bible. But these scholars, as intelligent as they are, largely try to prove the Greek text behind the King James to be more original because it is important for their understanding of Christian faith, not because the evidence is at all likely in their favor.

The drive of textual scholars to determine the original wording of the biblical text was perfectly understandable. New, older copies of the New Testament were discovered, and scholars wanted to determine just what the biblical texts originally said. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 has provided a similar opening with regard to Old Testament texts.

This drive fit also with the spirit of the age, in which scholars wanted to dig as deep as they could in the biblical texts to discover what really happened, what the "historical" Jesus was really like, what the sources behind various biblical texts might have been. Unfortunately, such digging regularly hits a wall where we simply do not have enough information to do more than speculate--and scholars have done their share of speculation! In textual study, the wall has been the recognition that documents sometimes grew over time and were edited as copies were made even within an author's lifetime. It may make sense to speak of the original manuscript of Romans, but can we really speak of an original manuscript of Isaiah, a document that may have been edited and expanded well beyond the lifetime of the prophet himself?

We have further the fact that the New Testament authors did not always hear God's voice through the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, but through Greek translations of it that were made in the second and third centuries BC. These translations often differed somewhat from the original sense of the Hebrew text. Indeed, some rabbis in the second century AD had the Jewish Bible retranslated so that it would not allow for Christian readings that the earlier Greek translation had facilitated.

With regard to the New Testament, it is at least worth pausing to consider that the majority of Christians throughout the ages have used a text more similar to that behind the King James Version than to the original manuscripts. About the same time that the church was finalizing its understanding of the Trinity, the text of the New Testament was reaching something like the form it would have until the twentieth century. Presumably if God had a problem with it, He might not have let this form of the text prevail.

These matters raise a serious question. If the Greek translation of the Old Testament, sometimes called the "Septuagint," was the primary basis for the New Testament authors, does it not have a serious claim to be the Christian text of the Old Testament? [2] Indeed, to this day the Septuagint is the Old Testament of the Greek Orthodox Church. As we mentioned in the introduction, the same words can mean different things if they are read against different contexts. So the Jewish Bible is not the Old Testament unless it is read in the light of the New Testament and from a Christian standpoint. Following this principal out, we can understand why the Orthodox Church uses the Septuagint as its Old Testament.

Yet the same issue arises with the New Testament. The text of the Latin Vulgate became the Bible of the Western Church from the 400's to the present for Roman Catholics and till the 1500's for Protestants. The so called Byzantine tradition of the Eastern Church remains the New Testament text of the East till this day and was the basis for the received text behind the King James Version. These two texts are more similar to each other than to the likely original readings of the New Testament books, although we should not think the variation between all of these is greater than 7 or 8% of the text.

In the rest of the chapter, we suggest that when we read the Bible as Christian Scripture, the most logical biblical text for us to use is not the reconstructed original texts, although we accept as valid the science of textual criticism and its conclusions. But to read the Bible as Christian Scripture is to adopt a particular stance toward the text and its meaning that is not oriented around the original meaning or the original text. The most appropriate text for us to use as Christians is the Old Testament text used by the New Testament authors and the New Testament text that has been used by the majority of Christians throughout the ages.

[1] The King James, which was first published in 1611, did not immediately win the hearts and minds of the English Puritans, who preferred the Geneva Bible.

[2] Technically, the Septuagint originally referred to the translation of the Pentateuch. However, it is common parlance to refer to the entire Greek Old Testament as the Septuagint, as Jerome did in the 400's.