Our thoughts tonight are a corollary to the message of last Sunday night. The theme was and still is – “How we got our Bible.” It’s not how the Holy Spirit inspired God’s word. We know that “Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” Rather, how were those inspired words passed down through the last 2,000 years to us today.
There are a number of scriptures which teach, in one way or another, that God’s words are eternal. But those scriptures might be interpreted in several ways by the unbeliever. For example – “Verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” – Matthew 5:18. It might be argued this refers only to the Pentateuch – or its purpose will stand only until Christ fulfills it. That is not all that it means, but someone might argue that way. I Peter 1:25 – “But the word of the Lord endureth for ever.” Someone might say that since “word” is singular, it doesn’t necessarily refer to the Bible. They might suggest that it applies to the decrees of God. There could be arguments used against all of the scriptures which speak of the eternal nature of the Word. Isaiah 40:8 – “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” “Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in Heaven” – but not necessarily on earth. However other scriptures might be abused, Matthew 24:35 is pretty specific – “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” The Lord Jesus doesn’t say that God’s words or God’s will are guaranteed to be fulfilled. He says, “The words which I speak shall not ever cease to exist.”
No matter how some people look at the subject, I believe that God originally inspired His Word, and He promised to preserve His word. I further believe that God’s Word has been available to man throughout history. Thinking about the last 2,000 years, there has never been a period of time when the Word of God was not available to those who were seeking it. It may not have been in the language in which they were raised, but it was there for the person who truly wanted it. The Lord has never left Himself without a witness.
Where was God’s Word before John’s last “amen” at the end of Revelation 22:21?
In II Timothy 3:16 it is impossible to know exactly to what “scriptures” Paul referred. Did He mean the Book of Acts; did he confine it to the Old Testament; did he mean his own epistles? He clearly said, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God…” Sadly, even that verse is mistranslated in many modern versions. Personally, I think that in the previous verse Paul generally described the scriptures to which he referred. Timothy “from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.” I firmly believe that God revealed Christ Jesus in the pages of the inspired Old Testament. But it seems to me that to know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, one must have the help of the New Testament. Therefore, I think that II Timothy 3:15-16 is referring to scriptures from both testaments.
Only a few times do New Testament scriptures quote other New Testament scriptures, but they do. For example, there is I Timothy 5:18 – “For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, The labourer is worthy of his reward.” Paul’s statement to Timothy may refer to Deuteronomy. But considering Paul’s context, the Christian ministry, it seems more likely that he was quoting Christ in Matthew 10:10 and Luke 10:7. Another example of New Testament scripture making reference to New Testament scripture is II Peter 3:14-16. “Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless. And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.” Peter knew when he was giving us the scripture, and Paul knew it when he was. Furthermore, Peter knew when Paul was being used of the Holy Spirit to give us scripture.
I am convinced by faith and by logic, that by the close of the Book of Acts, many of those churches possessed the four gospels and many of the Apostolic epistles.
Then history shows that the earliest churches were studying the books of the New Testament.
Clement was pastor of the church in Rome toward the end of the first century. In his letter to the Church at Corinth, he quotes the Old Testament – which doesn’t surprise us. But he also quotes Matthew and Luke – chapters 13 and 46. And he shows familiarity with Romans, I Corinthians, Ephesians, I Timothy, Titus, Hebrews and I John. By “familiarity” I mean that he paraphrases or rewords the Apostles’ statements and arguments.
Someone named Barnabas wrote an epistle dated around 75 AD. It is filled with quotes from the Old Testament and at least two from the New Testament. When it quotes Matthew 22:14, “for many are called, but few are chosen,” it prefaced those words with “as the Scripture saith.” This Barnabas said that Matthew 22:14 was scripture.
The second century holds historical proof that the churches possessed and used our New Testament. In the “Didache,” a document written at about 100 AD, there are 23 references to both Matthew and Luke, and most are direct quotes. Polycarp, a disciple of the Apostle John, in a letter to Philippi, quotes Matthew, Luke, John, Acts and ten of Paul’s epistles. Following that he has no less than eleven references to I John. The writer of the Second Epistle of Clement quotes Matthew 9:13 and 21:13 calling them “scriptures.” Justin Martyr quotes Matthew 43 times, Luke 19 times, John and Mark. He shows familiarity with six Pauline letters, I John and Revelation. Irenaeus who died in about 192 AD quoted the New Testament about 1,800 times. He also quotes Gnostic publications, saying that they are not scripture. He states that there are four gospels – only four. Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian, who both died about 220 AD, both quoted the New Testament extensively – just as we have it in our Bibles today.
What I’m trying to say is that God’s churches have had the Word of God in both testaments from the very beginning. And those who have read the writings of these early preachers, tell us that what they had agrees with what we have in our King James Bibles. But of course, those scriptures were not in English.
From the second century onward, translations were being made from the Greek and Hebrew.
Not only do these ancient translations preserve God’s Word in new languages, but they define for us what the Word of God was to those people. They match what we possess in the “KJV,” and not what is found in the ASV, ESV, NIV etc. The first Latin version was made about 150 AD for use in Africa. At about the same time, the Syriac version was made for the churches in and around Antioch.
But of course, the churches in Greece and Macedonia didn’t need translations, because they spoke Greek. Interestingly, over time animosity arose between the Greek and Roman churches. They argued over the power of the Pope; they argued over dates on the church calendar. They argued over some things which we would consider unimportant and even heretical. And they also argued over the Word of God, because one group of churches read the Greek scriptures, and the other read Latin. The official text of the Greek Catholic Church is essentially what we call the “Textus Receptus.” The Greek churches did not go with the Gnostically polluted scriptures of Eusebius and Origen which were used by the churches headquartered in Rome. Undoubtedly part of the reason for that choice was their intimate familiarity with the original language. Here is an important quote, which becomes more important when we consider its source. “It is no wonder that the traditional Constantinopolitan text (the Bible of the Greek churches), whether formally official or not, was the Antiochian text of the fourth century. It was equally natural that the text recognized at Constantinople should eventually become in practice the standard New Testament of the East.” What the man says is that he isn’t surprised that the Greeks accepted the same Bible which was used by Paul’s home church at Antioch. It was natural that they should do so, and I agree. Who was the man I just quoted? Dr. Fenton John Anthony Hort, one of the two men who have so polluted the Bibles commonly used by liberals and neo-evangelicals today. Of course, he may have said what he said, but that didn’t keep him from rejecting those scriptures of the Greek and Syrian churches.
In the year 177 AD a group of Christians from Southern France were slaughtered by their heathen king. Some of the survivors wrote an account of their sufferings – which they then sent away to their friends. Their account wasn’t sent to the Pope in Rome, but to their brethren in Syria. Why there? Because that part of France had originally been evangelized by Christians from Antioch. And that explains why the Bible they used, the Gallic Bible of Southern France, was a translation of the Bible used in Antioch – the home church of the Apostle Paul.
As I said, last week, the first missionaries in the British Isles were from the original Christians. And the Bible they brought was the true Word of God. And when Augustine arrived in England from Rome he was pretty well stopped short by the presence of God’s Word.
In Northern Italy, from the 4th century onward, there were churches struggling to resist the heresies of Rome. Those churches were established in the first and second centuries long before the influence of Origen. As persecution arose against them, they moved back into the valleys of the Alps and the Piedmont. Why did they flee into the mountains, and how did they know that Rome was fully of heresy? How could they resist those heresies? Those pre-Waldensian Christians could not have had doctrines purer than Rome unless their Bible was purer than Rome’s. Their scriptures were not the same as Rome’s falsified Bible.
In 1655, a man named Leger, published a book entitled “General History of the Evangelical Churches of the Piedmontese Valleys.” Leger says that by means of the Vaudois, France in his day had the Bible in her own language. Olivetan, is the man credited with giving the world a French version of the “Textus Receptus.” In the preface of his Bible, he recognized with thankgiving to God, that since the time of the apostles, or their immediate successors, the torch of the gospel had been among the Vaudois (the dwellers in the Valleys of the Alps), and it had never since been extinguished. He was speaking of the Waldenses. In the fourth century, Helvidius, a scholar of northern Italy, accused Jerome of using corrupt Greek manuscripts to create a Bible in Latin for Catholic use. How could he have made that accusation if he didn’t have the pure Word of God to make his comparison?
One of the great blessings of the Waldensians of the pre-Reformation period, was their desire to spread the Word of God. When the bishops of Catholicism were reading Jerome’s corrupted scriptures, and the Roman masses were left without any scriptures at all, these Waldensian colporteurs were scattering across Europe with copies of the original Bible – at great risk to their lives.. Those Waldensian scriptures were then translated into German, Polish, and other European languages. As much as we might criticize Calvin, Luther and the other reformers, most of them must be congratulated on their acceptance and use of the “Textus Receptus.” Luther’s Bible, in what was then the current German, was the true word of God. Luther had before him the Tepl Bible, named after the city Tepl in Bohemia from whence it came. This Tepl manuscript was a translation of the Waldensian Bible into a form of German which was spoken before the days of the Reformation. But, by the way, Guttenburg’s Bible – the first printed with moveable type, was a copy of the “Vulgate.” Diodati, who succeeded Beza, the friend of Calvin, translated the “Received Text” into Italian. This version was adopted by some Waldenses, although there was in use at that time a Waldensian Bible in their own peculiar language. Sir Samuel Morland, under the protection of Oliver Cromwell, received from Leger the Waldensian New Testament which now lies in the Cambridge University library.
The translation of the King James Bible.
Waldensian influence, both from the Waldensian Bibles and from translations, were used by the translators of the King James translation of 1611. Those translators had before them four groups of Bibles which had come from Waldensian influences: the Diodati in Italian, the Olivetan in French, the Lutheran in German, and the Genevan in English. They also had access to at least six Waldensian Bibles written in the old Waldensian vernacular.
The translators of our Bible, did not have the thousands of manuscripts of the “Textus Receptus” that exist today. But they did have dozens of copies of the Bible in nearly a dozen languages. And they also had in their hands copies of Jerome’s “Vulgate” and a few other corrupted Bibles of the Catholics. They did not have the ancient “Vaticanus” or “Siniaticus” manuscripts which originally produced the “Vulgate.” But they didn’t need them, and they would not have used them if they had them. They consciously rejected the Catholic scriptures as falsified and spurious. They began their work with translations and versions in various languages which agreed with the Greek versions available at the time.
If the weight of evidence is worth anything at all, the translators used God’s Word in other languages to give us the Bible in our language. During the last 400 years, thousands of new manuscripts, bits and pieces of ancient Bibles have been discovered from beyond Syria to the shores of Britain. And the vast majority give evidence to the fact that the translators of the 1611 used the true Word of God. Our King James Bible is the Word of God.
But in the late 19th century, two men, Westcott and Hort, proposed the idea that since the “Vaticanus” and “Siniaticus” appear to be the oldest manuscripts of the Bible, they must be the true scriptures. But if we insist on truth, it must be recognized that those two manuscripts contradict each other. In a criminal court, if a hundred witnesses testify to a fact, the jury must consider their testimony. And if there are only two or even if there are twenty witnesses with a differing testimony, the majority should be considered more important. However, if those two witnesses disagree, then they shouldn’t be given any credence at all. It is harder for two liars to agree than it is for a hundred people who are telling the truth. That is the difference between the “Textus Receptus” and“Vaticanus” or “Siniaticus” manuscripts.
In our English language, the “Authorized King James Version” is the Bible. Those versions which have come from the two conflicting witnesses, shouldn’t be given the time of day. I am referring to the ESV, NIV the ASV and the rest of the modern versions.