Back in January, I started once again to try to capture my hermeneutical journey. Reviewing what I wrote so far, I feel like it's turned out pretty well. I think I might now continue plugging through this journey on Mondays.
Thus far:
2.1 Adventures in Interpretation
2.2 Adventures in Jewelry
3.1 Beginnings of Context
3.2 Adventures in Hair
3.3 What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?
4.1 Keeping the Sabbath
4.2 The Sabbath as Conviction
4.3 The New Testament and Old Testament Law
_______________________
1. As I've mentioned, I grew up reading the King James Version. It didn't seem too hard to understand, although in retrospect I'm sure I would have understood a great deal more if I had been reading something like the New Living Translation (NLT) or The Message. Of course they didn't exist at the time.
The main alternatives in my youngest years were the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and the Good News Bible New Testament (GNB). In the late 70s, the full New International Version (NIV) came out.
The RSV was in a different social plane from mine -- Methodists and higher church folk. I wasn't exposed to it until seminary. It was the version used at Asbury Seminary when I went there in 1984. My grandfather Schenck so despised th GNB that he used it to even out his bed, I heard.
When the NIV came out, a friend of my family pitched it to the morning Bible study (it might have been a special afternoon meeting) at Frankfort Camp Meeting. Paul Sebree had gone to Frankfort with my mother. My dad returned from the session a bit disgruntled. In typical fashion, Sebree had suggested parents were putting their children's souls in danger to have them read the King James when something so much more understandable was available.
I believe my parents gave me my Thompson Chain Reference KJV as a high school graduation present in 1984. I took it to college and tried to read a chapter a day. It was fairly easy going until I would get to Exodus 21. Then what was obscure legislation commenced, cubits and all. The prophets were also tough sleding for me since I didn't know much about the context. I would read until I got to a verse quoted in the New Testament and then, suddenly, Jesus was there in a verse. Then it returned to the incomprehensible.
When I got to Exodus 21, I would often lapse in my daily reading for some time until I managed to push through Leviticus. I do believe I was attention deficit, although I was never diagnosed. It was excruciatingly difficult to hold my attention. I didn't discover the focusing effect of coffee until England, unfortunately.
In retrospect, Dr. Sebree probably had a point about the NIV, although he presented his case abrasively, as was his style, as I recall.
2. I remained a KJV advocate in college. My mother began to feed me resources, as she increasingly came under the spell of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale and its radio station. (Those were also the days of the rise of the Christian bookstore.) One was Edward F. Hills' The King James Version Defended. I also had a copy of Ted Letis' compilation on the Majority Text when it came out in 87.
This was the first of an unfortunate pattern where my mother would feed me fundamentalist literature that I was eager to receive but that eventually I came to conclude was not correct. She thought I was rebelling, but that was not the case. I remained uncertain for some time about many of these things. But eventually, you have to make up your mind.
I also didn't have a guide into this literature. I have often wished that I could go back in time and explain what I was trying to read to myself. I was recently complimented for having a gift at taking difficult concepts and being able to break them down so that they are more understandable to the uninitiated. I will take that compliment for it is born of the difficulty of trying to grasp so many hard things myself.
In my final year at Central Wesleyan College, Dr. Bob Black came. I think he was hands down the best professor I had at CWC, although I loved them all. I had him for the whole year for church history. In the fall of 1986, I wrote my final paper arguing for the corruption of the manuscripts (the handwritten copies) behind modern versions of the Bible.
3. I probably should take a moment to explain. We do not have any of the original copies of the Bible. All we have are copies of copies of copies. The oldest copies of New Testament books go back to the 100s and there aren't many of them, and none of them are the whole New Testament. The oldest copies of the Old Testament go back to the 100s BC.
This is nothing to worry about, in my opinion. Everything we know suggests that the manuscripts we have are pretty reliable. There are variations among these manuscripts -- handwritten copies, but they leave us with a relatively small degree of uncertainty. No doctrine is in danger (although the KJV of 1 John 5:8 would help a lot with the Trinity if it were original).
The majority of manuscripts date to the Middle Ages, AD900 and later. These all tend to read similarly and support the Greek behind the KJV. The Greek text behind the KJV is sometimes called the "textus receptus" or the "received text." Sometimes this tradition is also called the Majority Text because most manuscripts read this way. [1]
Case closed? Probably not.
The reason is that the oldest manuscripts tend to read a little differently than these medieval manuscripts. The reason modern versions of the Bible tend to agree against the KJV text is because most of them follow the older manuscripts. There's a famous rule of "textual criticism," which is the science of trying to determine what the original text said. The rule goes like this: "Manuscripts must be weighed, not counted." More on all this in a moment.
4. My thesis in Dr. Black's class was creative. The pro-KJV crowd likes to blame modern versions on two manuscripts from the 300s, "Codex Sinaiticus" and "Codex Vaticanus." [2] To be fair, Bishop B. F. Westcott and Fenton Hort in the late 1800s had effected a revolution in the text of the New Testament using these two manuscripts at the center of their arguments. I had read somewhere that these two manuscripts might have been part of an initiative by Eusebius under Constantine's charge to have 50 copies of the Bible made.
Here comes the creativity. Eusebius and Constantine argued for a compromise position on the Trinity at the Council of Nicaea in AD325. (By the way, this month and year is the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea) They suggested that perhaps Christ was of a similar substance (homoiousios) to God the Father, while the orthodox position would end up being that he is of the same substance (homoousios).
So, argued I, these "heretics" were behind Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Therefore, they were bad manuscripts. Therefore, modern versions of the Bible are bad. Brilliant!
I received an ever so kind note from Dr. Black on my paper. The problem with my argument is that the overwhelming majority of the variants in the manuscripts have nothing to do with theology (and absolutely nothing to do with the homoousios/homoiousios debate). The vast majority of variations are actually pretty mundane, like spelling errors or omissions because of eye skips. I had made a clever argument. Just not a good one...
[1] There is technically a difference between the Majority Text and the Textus Receptus. The story of the Greek text of the Textus Receptus is a fun one involving some clever entrepreneurship. This is specifically the text that was used in 1611 to create the KJV New Testament.
Although they are very similar in content, the concept of the Majority Text distances the debate from the historical particularities of the KJV story. More or less, the idea is that the majority of manuscripts have always been right. All we need do is count them, and we will know the text of the Bible that God chose to preserve. This sounds compelling at first, although I'll argue that, in the end, it just doesn't seem to be the same as the original text.
[2] A codex is a book form. Prior to this point in history, books tended to be on scrolls. However, it can be argued that the desire to have all the books of the Bible together caused a movement toward the book format.
No comments:
Post a Comment