Every once in a while I will read an article which impresses me. Some times that article develops into a message which is entirely my own. But on other occasions, there is little that I can add to what the author has said. And when that happens I don’t mind telling you that the ideas and sentiments, research and words belong to that other man – whoever he might have been. This message is one of those occasions.
My source for this message is Benjamin G. Wilkinson. David Otis Fuller highly recommends him, but I must criticize Fuller to some degree. He should have pointed out that in several ways Wilkinson was a heretic. I don’t want to leave you with the idea to accept all that this man says about everything. He may have possessed the true Word of God, but he failed in his interpretation of it. He was a Seventh Day Adventist. But after reading 50 pages of his defense of the King James Bible, I recommend him in this one particular area. My message tonight is my own edited version of Wilkinson’s material on the history of the Bible.
We start with Constantine.
Flavius Valerius Constantine became emperor of Rome early in the 4th century – in 312 A.D. If you know history – that date coincides with the approximate founding of the Roman Catholic Church. Constantine became emperor and embraced “the Christian faith” – not only for himself but for his newly won empire. As this so-called “first Christian emperor” took the reins of both the civil and spiritual world he made a deliberate choice to blend together aspects of his old paganism and what he perceived as “Christianity.” And part of that process included a paganized version of the Bible. He had at his disposal three types of Christian manuscripts, or Bibles, each vying for public attention. There were the respected Bibles of the oldest congregations which eventually became known as the “Textus Receptus.” But there were also the Palestinian or Eusebio-Origen manuscripts, and also Bibles of a similar nature called the Egyptian or Hesychian manuscripts. Generally speaking, the defenders of the Textus Receptus were of the humbler class – common people who were seeking to follow the teachings of Christ and the Apostles. Ah, but the intellectuals, the wealthy, the elite, leaned in another direction; which didn’t demand as much of their faith or their day-to-day lives. The Eusebio-Origen text was the product of the intermingling of the Word of God and Greek philosophy in the mind of Origen. Origen was an uncoverted Gnostic.
As the Emperor and leader of the new Christianity, Constantine chose an official Bible. And he preferred the one written by Origen and edited by Eusebius, perhaps because of their outstanding intellectual credentials. Just as the editors of the revised scriptures of the 19th century chose to edit their scriptures to match their denial of the deity of Christ, the editors of the revised scriptures of the 4th century did the same. In fact, the manuscripts of today’s modern versions are directly related to the former versions – edited to deny the deity of Christ and the incarnation of the eternal Son of God. Constantine chose the kind of Bible which helped to secure his political position over the churches. The philosophy of Origen was well suited to serve Constantine’s religious/political monarchy. and so Origen’s Bible became the official scriptures of the new Christianity.
It was from this type of corrupt manuscript that Jerome later translated the “Latin Vulgate.” The Vulgate became the authorized Roman Catholic Bible. The Latin “Vulgate,” the “Sinaiticus,” the “Vaticanus,” the “Hexapla,” Jerome, Eusebius, and Origen are all names linked to the early corrupt version of the Bible. The Bible selected by Constantine has been the dominating version of the Roman Catholic Church for about 1700 years now. But it was different from the Bible of the Waldenses, Donatists, Paulicians and other ancient groups. And as a result of this difference, those churches became the object of hatred and persecution. Those brethren wanted to worship the Christ of their Bible and to serve Him as they read of Him. The persecution those Anabaptistic peoples from the fourth century downward has basically been a persecution against their use of the pure word of God.
The Battle between truth and error.
Prior to Constantine there was a pagan Roman Emperor named Maximian, and before him was Diocletian. Emperor Diocletian unleashed the most vicious pagan persecution in history. Christians were slaughtered and scriptures were burned, until he came close to accomplishing his purpose of extermination. Christianity was nearly rendered extinct under the persecution of Diocletian. That warfare against the Christians had hardly subsided, when twenty years later Constantine began to wear the crown. Within twenty years, Christianity went from a crime to the most important religion in the empire. When this new Emperor said that he was a “Christian,” many of the Christian traitors and cowards came out of their pagan societies ecstatic at what they called “God’s great blessing.” They once again declared themselves to be “Christian”
even though a decade before they denied it. At the same time, the remnants of true Christianity more slowly emerged from their caves and dungeons. And those who remained true to the Lord, preaching the true Word of God, refused fellowship with the liberal Constantinian churches and their members.
Then when Constantine ordered the publication of the Bible, the corrupted versions of Origen began to fill the vacuum which Diocletain had created – but only among the traitors who had earlier forsaken them. Also, Constantine specifically commissioned the preparation of fifty copies of the Eusebio-Origen Bible. Remember there was no printing press then; each copy had to be laboriously prepared by hand. And in the case of those fifty copies only the finest materials and craftsmanship were involved. It is highly likely that one of the highly touted “Vaticanus” or “Sinaiticus” manuscripts is one of those fifty. The “experts” proudly declare that they were made somewhere around 325 AD. Those two documents formed the foundation for the manuscripts edited by Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Hort, the source of nearly modern versions– ASV, RSV, ESV, NIV and the rest.
One would think that the Bible which had received the promotion of Constantine, especially when he was the first emperor to show favor to the religion of Jesus… One would expect Constantine’s Bible to immediately hit the Best Seller’s list. But the opposite took place. Constantine’s Bibles flourished for a short time and then died of neglect. The span of one generation was sufficient to see it disappear from use – as if it had been struck by some invisible and withering explosion. I suppose that just as it is today, the liberal, insincere, unconverted “Christians” didn’t really need a Bible. Only the born-again, Christ-loving saint wants and uses a Bible. And in the 3rd and 4th centuries, those people never lost their Bibles under Diocletian’s persecution. They had fled to the mountains with their old Bibles. Scattered around the world they hid themselves while still worshiping Christ according to the Word.
The early Greek manuscripts of the “Textus Receptus” had been in use throughout Mediterranean from the time of the Apostles in the first century. By the second century it had been carefully translated into Latin, Syrian, early French and even Gallic. It was used by the Waldensian Christians in the Alps, and by Albigensians, Cathari, Paulicians and Novatians. This was a full century and more before the “Vaticanus” and “Sinaiticus” saw the light of day. When the missionaries of the Catholic Church entered those countries in later centuries they found the people using the local equivalent of the “Textus Receptus.” It was not without great difficulty that Rome was sometimes able to displace it with her Latin Vulgate.
The groups I just mentioned existed before Jerome edited his “Vulgate Bible.” And some of them were around when Origen edited his Bible. Those groups and churches were in opposition to the Church of Rome from its inception in the 300’s. Those churches used the “Textus Receptus” when its rivals – the Bibles of Constantine and the Church of Rome – were just beginning to see the light of day. And that battle of the Bible has changed only in the names of the versions used today. It is basically the “Textus Receptus” and the King James Bible in English against the manuscripts of Origen in the form of the “Vaticanus” and “Sinaiticus” followed by the RSV, NIV, ESV and nearly every other modern version in use today. The Church of Rome was built on the Eusebio-Origen type of Bible. But the Waldenian and Anabaptists churches were built on the “Received Text,” which they believed was the true apostolic Bible. And which I believe is the original Bible.
God preserved, as promised, His word among the saints.
As you know, it was at Antioch, the capital of Syria, where the believers were first called “Christians.” Over time, before the persecutions wiped many out, those true Christians numbered in the thousands. And the Bible which they used was translated from the original languages into the Syrian about 150 A.D. This version is known as the “Peshitto” and is the Syrian version of the “Textus Receptus.” Remember that the greatest of all early missionaries was a member of the church in Antioch, Syria. Paul, and others like him, carried this same Bible into Italy, Southern France, Spain and even to Great Britain. Those churches carried different names, but they might be generally classified as “Anabaptists.” Those “Anabaptist” churches used Bibles in various languages which were essentially like ours.
The type of Christianity which was raised to leadership by Constantine became of the Roman Papacy. But this was not the type of Christianity which first penetrated the mission fields of Europe. Southern France, the Alps, Scotland were evangelized by men carrying copies and accurate translations of the God-inspired scriptures.
History does not possess any record of heroism superior to the sacrifices and sufferings of the early Christians in what was then the pagan West. The first believers of ancient Britain held their ground when the heathen Anglo-Saxons swarmed over their islands. Then in 596 A.D., the Pope sent Augustine as his missionary to convert those Anglo-Saxons. But when he arrived he found Christians already there – Christians of the original Biblical variety. Augustine treated with contempt the early Christian Britons, and as a result his success in Britain was marginal at best. When he died, the true British Christians of Scotland remained. British Christianity did not come from Rome. The first true missionaries in the British Isles were descendants of the Apostles, not the Popes.
Since Italy, France, Spain and even Great Britain were once provinces of the Roman Empire, the first translations of the Bible used by the early Christians in those places were Latin. The early Latin translations were very dear to the hearts of these primitive churches, and as Rome did not send any missionaries toward the West before 250 A.D., the early Latin Bibles were well established before these churches came into conflict with Rome. When Catholicism did begin to arrive with their corrupted Vulgate Bibles, it was not well-received. It took centuries – nine centuries – before the Vulgate began supplant the old Latin Bibles in some parts of Europe, like the Alps. The old Latin versions were used the Donatists; the Albigenses, and Waldenses – in northern Italy, southern France, and Great Britain. The records of the first Christians in those areas disclose a Christianity which is not Roman but apostolic. Because the basis for their faith was laid upon the Word of God which they possessed.
When the Waldenses were driven by persecution to live in their mountain island in the midst of Europe, Catholicism began to take control of the rest of Christendom. The professing “Christians” of the low lands – of Italy, central France, Germany and much of the rest of Europe – became theologically corrupt through the Roman Catholic Church and its corrupt Bible. But the chief explanation for the purity of the mountain Christians was due to the uncorrupted scriptures which they loved, protected, copied and studied.
Throughout the Dark Ages, as Catholicism grew enormous in its religious and political power, there were churches and people similar to the Waldenses scattered across the world from Persia to Africa, from Spain to Scotland. They all possessed copies of the scriptures in their own languages which were carefully translated from the earliest Greek manuscripts and the pre-Vulgate Latin Bible. Those manuscripts, numbering in the thousands, are all in basic agreement – verbally and as a result doctrinally. When they are all put together and studied side-by-side, we call them the “Textus Receptus” the “Received Text.” And in the early 17th century, a number of the greatest scholars, linguists and Bible believers in England used that “Textus Receptus” to give to us the Authorized Translation of the Bible which we call the “King James Version.”
To the best of my knowledge every other version of the Bible extant today, come from translations and revisions of the Eusebio-Origen manuscripts. The NIV, ASV, RSV, Living Bible, ESV and all the rest, are not the Word of God. They are, in fact, more modern Satanic attacks upon the Word of God.