Authentication of Scripture
Introduction
When a Christian is asked to prove the authenticity of his primary source document, we might find that standard of authenticity expected is for it to display upon it a verifiable intergalactic (or extra-universal) seal, something which convinces us that the document did not originate from the human mind. It is at its heart the same question as “if God exists why does he not show himself?” Both are valid questions, and the answer to both might be similar: God might not wish to authenticate his revelation in that manner, he might choose to employ a certain subtlety instead.
Headings
“If there is a God- Could the Bible be his Word”?
We argue for three pillars that lead us to believe that did God exist, the Christian revelation is his Message: the Content of the message itself, the Resurrection Event, and the fulfilment of Prophecy. The Fourth “pillar” would be miracles, which is hugely important, and present throughout the history of Israel and into the New Testament, and we would claim right up to the present day. I haven’t included it as a separate “pillar”, since the Resurrection itself, if it be true, is the greatest of all miracles, and the one with the greatest historical import in any case.
Miracles
Consider that for all the miracles through the history of Israel and into Jesus’ ministry, there seems to be no dissenting voice and uniform acceptance historically. This is hugely significant in itself. These are well known and we summarise the form of the OT miracles in a subsequent section.
The Content of the Message
If God exists, what would his word be like, and would it be anything like the Bible? What could God possibly want to communicate to us? Well, we could presume it would consist of both something about himself, and something about us. What would God tell us about ourselves? One would suppose it would have to be an affirmation of our creaturely state, since he had created it himself. And what is that creaturely state? It is one in which we experience ourselves in relation to others. All that we feel, our joy, our hope, our pain our grief, our sorrow all of it is felt in relation to other beings, and the strongest of those feelings is love, because love can bring to us the greatest of all the other emotions, both the greatest joy, the greatest pain and everything else in between. Sure enough, in the Bible we are called to love, we are told that we are loved, that we are called to love others, that we are not in competition for the affection of others, that we are not consumed through our affections of others, and so it is indeed true that “love never fails” Ἡ ἀγάπη οὐδέποτε πίπτει. Pipto really means to fall rather than to fail – “love never falls”. No matter how much you love, you have love and more to love with. Just like the children in Charlie’s Chocolate Factory, the Bible tells us that we are called and even expected to do that which we want to do most of all, which is to love unconditionally, to love so much that we are lost in that love, that we suffer loss in that love and yet are happy even in the loss of everything, counting all else, as St Paul says as “garbage” and “rubbish”. It is to know that the happiness that comes through loving is truly joyous, and not because of any physical sensation but because of Him whose Joy and whose life we share when we love, which is God. In abandoning ourselves to that deepest desire to be able love without restraint, we also know that God loves us without restraint himself, abandoning everything for us, for “he did not also cling to equality with God, but emptied himself…” (Phil. 2:6) In the Bible we have the reassurance that should we, in times of difficulty choose the loving option, it can never go wrong for us, even though the whole world were wrong and unloving.
We receive the assurance that somehow and in a way that we can never comprehend, that even though loving another involves loss and that loving another completely involves the loss of everything, yet, love conquers everything, the meek inherit the earth, those that hunger and thirst for righteousness, those that mourn shall be satisfied, the pure of heart will see God, …and theirs will be the Kingdom of Heaven.
In the very first three chapters of the a book the origins of which words are lost in the sands of time yet in those very archaic words man is told that right and wrong and not arbitrary, it is God’s prerogative exclusively, and so also is love not arbitrary, it is exclusive and absolute, that the love for one’s spouse that one vows to cherish and protect is absolute, and not conditional on the arbitrary, that “what God brings together no man puts asunder”, and that for this love “…a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh”. There is no conditionality or self-interest in this love, there is no condition under which love is compromised or not put before all else. And it is when the absolute morality of God is abandoned that sin enters, humans are afraid and ashamed, where none of this is present before, for without selfishness there is no fear, shame or sorrow. In one fell swoop the meaning of the sexes and therefore the meaning of humanity which exists as the two sexes and experiences itself in its sexuality is confirmed and affirmed.
And indeed God rejoices in us in this same nuptial manner, “as a bridegroom rejoices over the bride so shall your God rejoice over you” (Is62:5) Your maker is your husband, the Lord of Hosts is his Name (Is.54:5) God loves us with that same unconditional love that we feel for the deepest love of our lives, the one we share our lives with, our spouse, for whom we abandon everything, and for whom we want to abandon everything, whom we want nothing more than to love, and whom we want mothing from in return but the joy of loving them, which is its own reward- God feels the same way about us. But not only that, somehow the Bible makes this seem possible, for although it may seem that love on the earth is the weakest and most fragile of emotions, the one that is most easily hurt and injured, like a little child, being the one that is the most vulnerable by virtue of the fact that it is also the most exquisitely delicate and beautiful, and yet somehow it seems possible that it is also really eternal and forever.
Jesus always speaks in relationship, he dialogues with the Father, confesses his love and fidelity to the Father just as Father speaks lovingly in return of his “Beloved Son”. And love exists eternally, and if God can do nothing then love can do all things, and if God cannot move then love moves mountains indeed our God is Love. And neither also does the confession of love come to us in weakness, rather it comes in power, for in promising all this, the Bible itself contains a fulfilled promise, for in the Bible itself is seen the remarkable sequence of the fulfilment of prophecy. The messianic prophecies of the Bible are great as they are also mysterious, for the fulfilment of prophecy is not just a confirmation of wisdom but also themselves Revelation and the imparting of wisdom. The Bible defines prophecy, it is completely unique in its prophetic cycle and fulfilment. The pattern of its prophecy which is woven into the very fabric of the religious life and festival and tells of sacrifice, and of the coming of an eternal king with divine titles to free the people of God, and also a puzzle: a Messiah that is to suffer at the hands of his enemies and not lash out.
It is in Jesus in whom we have both, the one that would rule on God’s throne though not on the Earth, but one that by his sufferings on Earth would free those bound in slavery to sin, so as to rule with him in Heaven forever. Truly this is a divine fulfilment, “what no human mind has conceived” — the things God has prepared for those who love him” (1Cor2:9) And indeed most of all that power of the message comes in the glory of the Resurrection when “it is finished” and “everything that is written in Scripture concerning him are fulfilled” (Lk 24:44).
For me it is the message that is the greatest treasure that we have been given, because it is a confession of the undying covenantal love of God for his people “hesed” in the Hebrew. Isaiah 43:4″I love you” you are mine” Isaiah 43:1 “Do not fear, I am with you” Isaiah 43:5 “I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands” (Is 49:16) multiple times and pervading the Old Testament text, a fact that gets grossly under-represented in all the polemics, I’ve only presented a few of the verses here.
Imagine a father who is writing to their children, I have a friend who is now in his 70s, and his father was in the war, and he hardly even got to see him, you know. Think about such a father who is writing to their child. Maybe that child never sees him again but all he gets is al letter, you know like the letters that were pulled out of the uniforms of dead soldiers in the war and sent to their family. If you as a parent had one thing to say to you child, if you had three seconds to write or three words to write, what would you write apart from “I love you”. This is what we get in the Bible.
Not only that, our Father reveals his name to us, he deems that we be called this name and the name of his own family, as his own children, not as servants or slaves. This calling of the child by the name of the parent is the greatest act of solicitude by a parent, because it is the security and the identity of that child, we all know the brokenness of a child whose parents do not affirm and acknowledge them, and one has only to hear of the latest celebrity who refuses to acknowledge their child born of wedlock. A child that is not named, nor called by the name of their parents, is exposed to the world.
Personally I have had no reason to doubt the authorship. Why? Perhaps an analogy will help. Say someone is sent a letter from a grandfather who has died in World War II. It contains information about him he could not have known about personal details of life. But even were that letter to contain no such personal details, yet there is something about the letter that fulfils him, that fills in a gaping hole in his life, and gives him comfort for the future. It does what no other set of words could do even were they to contain the news of his winning the lottery or being given a lucrative job offer.
The Bible is like that…were it to have been a forgery, then somehow the forgers had stumbled unwittingly upon the truth, for all of the substance of the Bible proclaims what my heart yearns for in its deepest and innermost being and is screaming for the fulfilment of. Either that or the simplest answer is also true: that in spite of all the its difficulties, the Bible isn’t a forgery. Matthew, Mark Luke and John really did write the Gospels, Jesus really did mean that He is God, and God really was happy with the seemingly patchwork authorship of some of the books.
Prophecy
In the case of the OT, these witnessed events are responsible for the birth of the first known and only monotheism on our planet, events that are part of the history and fibre of a nation. This is the story of a nation taken from slavery into freedom miraculously through the working and visible manifestation of God.
Resurrection
In the case of the New Testament, these events caused the complete upheaval not only of that very monotheism, but itself became a world-dominant religion, something that the previous one never was.
The greatest testimony to the Resurrection is that of people’s lives. Christianity was spread not through force, rather through witnessing to the Resurrection, to the point of death. Why would anyone die for the sake of a someone who was already dead, except that they truly believed? That every crime requires a motive is a precept in every criminal investigation. In the murder of a woman, the husband is always suspect, being in the closest proximity to the victim. However if he were guilty there would usually be corroborative evidence either in the phone trail, or reports on the relationship from friends and neighbours, or the financial matters, and so on. If not for this, every husband would be guilty in an unwitnessed murder of the wives with no other obvious suspects. The price of proclaiming the new religion was truly great, for the Romans were truly ruthless and vicious overlords, prescribing the most painful death for dissenters, precisely those of flogging and crucifixion. It seems unscientific to hold the apostles guilty in the absence of any motive, merely, as in the case of the husband, “because they were there”. Not only can we not find a plausible motive for the apostles, but neither can we find one for Jesus’ himself- what did Jesus gain from all the grandiose acts and claims? But let’s not talk of Jesus himself here, since we take him as the source, the authenticity of transmission from which we are investigating. Imagine the offence of proclaiming Jesus as Son of God in the face of the Roman Emperor who had literally declared himself divine! This was on the 1 January 42 BC, nearly two years after the assassination of Julius Caesar on 15 March 44 BC, that the Roman Senate recognised Caesar as a divinity. He was therefore referred to as Divus Iulius (“the divine Julius”), and his adopted son Octavian styled himself Divi filius (“son of the deified one, son of the god”). And so it is that you can palpably hear the fear in the voice of the high priest Caiaphas who sentences Jesus to death “It is better for one man to die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed. (Jn.11:50), and in the apostles who are all hiding in a single room with the doors locked after the Crucifixion and so on.
This self-sacrifice, or the readiness for it, can be taken as proof of authenticity of the primary event in the case of eyewitnesses, and in the case of their followers who though not eyewitnesses, are early converts nevertheless, it at least proves authenticity of their own personal belief and trust in those eyewitnesses. Both these testimonies are then corroborated by the momentous events that follow the Resurrection claim: textually speaking, the miracles that are performed by the apostles themselves, and historically speaking: the rapid and paradigmatic change in second temple Judaism- the Sabbath, the Sacrifice, consensus in the early church regarding the Resurrection event, the Empty Grave- no body ever found.
The historicity of Jesus is not denied, even a great rival religion like Islam attests to the existence of Jesus and requires belief in him of its followers. Roman historians with no religious leaning toward Christianity attest to the historicity and death of Jesus (Tacitus and Josephus), but most of all it is those that converted to Christianity among the early Christians that are witnesses- their documented witness in the Gospels of Mark, Luke, John, Matthew, the letters of Peter, James, Jude, and the testimony in those letters to multiple witnesses to the risen Christ. Each document is transmitted down separately and is its own separate witness. The witness to the events of Jesus’ life are all “Eyewitness evidence”, which is the highest possible level of evidence. (Imagine if a murder in a crowded shopping mall in broad daylight. The trial conviction would not take very long at all!). In the book of Acts like Lydia, Dalmatius, Phoebe, Stephen, Timothy, Ananias all receive the faith through the apostles’ teaching.
Can We have Certitude in Faith?
What is the gold standard for religious accreditation? Is it possible that a true religion have a certain margin of error in the text? Is there any religious text that is without a single error? It is useful at the outset to consider the possibility of “certainty” with regards to faith in God. Indeed we call the practise of religion as “Faith” for the precise reason that it cannot. St Ambose of Milan (333-397 AD, On the Faith I:5,42) once said:“Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum.” (It is not the will of God to save his people through dialectics). St Thomas Aquinas says:
“…if we look at the certitude which arises from the extent to which the intellect grasps a truth, then in faith we have not such perfect certitude as we have of demonstrable truths, since the truths believed are beyond the intellect’s comprehension” (ST II-II, Q. iv, 8; de Ver., xiv, and i, ad 7) and again,“since the object to which the intellect thus assents is not its own proper object (…) it follows that the intellect’s attitude towards that object is not one of tranquillity” (De Ver., xiv, 1). Quoting St Thomas (cf. II-II, Q. ii, a. 9).
How then does a human being come to accept a truth? There are the following ways in which a proposition might be accepted by a human being. We are accustomed to accept truths that are “self-evident”, for example 2+2=4, form simple experience (eg. when one is given two sets of two apples, one ends up with four apples). However the intellect may be induced to assent to a truth solely because, though not evident in itself, this truth rests on grave authority — for example, we accept the statement that the sun is 90,000,000 miles distant from the earth because competent, veracious authorities vouch for the fact. This last kind of knowledge is termed faith, and is clearly necessary in daily life.
What we are saying is the following: “we can certainly assert “in faith”, “God exists”. This does not imply that our mind has performed all the intellectually steps that are necessary to arrive at this conclusion of the existence of God. Our mind cannot consider all the reasons why God must exist absolutely, how can we, for he does not comprehend that which he is reasoning toward.
God Himself the Revelation- Theophany!
The exceptation that the entirety of the essence of a religion is to be found bound up in a written volume, seems a symptom of a people who are used to digital downloads on their phones. The most important paradigm in Judeo-Christian Revelation, marking it off from all others and without exception is this: that the “Revelation” of God is precisely that- the Revelation of God. It is not the delivery of a book, nor the unveiling of a portrait or a statue. It God himself unveiled. The primary source of all the joy, excitement and evangelical zeal of Christianity is that God is “found” in that He has revealed Himself. A Christian has the sense of journeying with their treasure as much as toward it. Christianity does not have a dichotomy between “what” is revealed and “who” is revealed nor is there a dichotomy between the way to God and God.
The public theophanies given to ancient Israel were unique in the entire world, even at the time that they were given. They were as a result of being public, held within the community in which they were given. That Revelation began with God himself speaking to and interacting with Adam in the Garden itself and then in the manner that he spoke directly to the other patriarchs: Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. The public theophanies begin at the time of Moses upon Mt. Sinai, the visible Presence at the Tent of meeting through the desert years, through to the manifestation at the consecration of the First Temple of Solomon, but the continuing voice of God through the prophets, and lastly culminating with the Birth, Death and Resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Israel was a nation that followed a unique creed for a unique reason, and the reason was that the One God had moved in with them. The beginning of these theophanies was the birth of a new religion like no other at the time.
Christian revelation is not about God, rather it IS God. God who having revealed himself to us definitively in Mercy upon the cross and in Power in the resurrection, has nothing else to say. All that is left is for the writing and handing down of what is witnessed and heard. That Word being God himself cannot be written down even though it is a “Word”!. Rather it is spiritually received “What no eyes have seen nor ear heard nor human heart conceived … These things God has revealed to us through the spirit” (“no one can know God’s thoughts except God’s own Spirit… these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit”(1Cor2:11, 10- order reversed). St Paul is clear here that the definitive revelation is spiritual. But in a prayerful reading of the text, we authentically receive the true Word, Jesus “the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5… 6For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made His light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2Cor4:4b,6)
The Faith community “CHURCH” preserves the living Tradition of what is witnessed, and hands down the Faith: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2 this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us…” (1 John 1:1,2)
The church is founded through the person of Christ Even before the emergence of any writings. Christ being God is the sufficient condition for the establishment of the faith. The writings are emergent from the Church, not the other way round it is not as though the disciples examined what they had written before deciding to be Christians, that anointing was received, as was the beginning, we can all agree, at Pentecost.
In the meditative reading of sacred scripture and in prayer the believer is given that which is hitherto impossible for him/her …. an authentic yet obscure sense, the COMPREHENSION of God, in Christ “for who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor.2:15)
The letters on the pages of the Bible do not themselves constitute the Word (because the word is God himself) yet they are Word of God and as much as God himself intended an inspired them for our benefit, that read in prayer and under the guidance of the faith community, bring us to Christ, the WORD himself “… Seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor2:4) and “ the son is the radiance of gods glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Heb1:3)
The holy book of the Muslims, the Qur’an which contains multiple verses stating that God “sent down a book” (eg. Surah 15:9, 57:25, 3:64-71). The Judeo- Christian tradition is in striking contrast, as even in the Old Testament, the giving of the Law is accompanied by public theophany. God provides the answer to the question: “Why does God not show Himself?”, and He does so on His terms and in His manner of choosing. Would it not be truly ridiculous were God to visibly turn up at every arrogant demand for proof? So also does Jesus not “perform” for King Herod at his trial. Faith is not received through a book at all. A man does not convert to any faith purely by receiving a book, though there were none around him that were practising that religion. We do not receive the faith except through the community of faith, as did the great believers in the book of Acts like Lydia, Dalmatius, Phoebe, Stephen, Timothy, Ananias all receive the faith through the apostles’ teaching.
Falsifiability: Mode of Revelation
A claim can generally be said to be falsifiable if it consists of a testable assertion (s), which is the same as saying that the claim is “testable”. The Christian revelation is not primarily a “public/private hearing” but a “public sighting”, not a “this is what I heard in a dream” type of revelation. This is what makes it eminently falsifiable.To make the claim “we saw such and such…” in the presence of the very persons who were either also present, or those in their immediate social circles has the highest degree of objectivity. This is the reason that the miracles of Jesus are taken seriously, even the raising of the dead. I have represented the differences between the two types in the plate (1). The miraculous events surrounding other religious leaders like Buddha are lost in legend and obscurity, and lacking in manuscript tradition, while those of the Hindus in addition also align with every other pagan pantheon. The Qur’an on the other hand has an excellent manuscript tradition, while it’s source was never seen publicly, and further it’s own text thoroughly refutes the occurrences of any miracles whatsoever accompanying its delivery, in several places. This sort of information is now “unfalsifiable” because there is no means of verifying whether it is true. Jesus is a “local lad”- imagine you attended the funeral of your best friend, and then saw him alive again fresh as a daisy on the third day following. The credibly of public visual evidence is so great that the only means by which it might be falsely produced is either through illusion or delusion. This type of evidence possesses the certainty of a killing in the town square in broad daylight. This is why even the Quran while conceding the historicity of a visible Crucifixion event, rather alleges that it was an illusion.
In the very first chapter of his seminal work “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses”, Richard Baukham first describes the proximity of Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis to the Gospel events and uses this as a template and mirror to gauge the proximity of the evangelist Luke himself to those very events. He puts the death of Papias at 110AD and even by the most conservative estimates, not after 130AD. However he makes the important observation that the events that Papias is describing are previous events, he is not describing them as simultaneous with the time that he is writing his opus (that book itself is now lost and is only available to us in the form of fragments preserved by other writers, mainly Eusebius). Let us describe his findings.
Firstly Papias has a prologue to his work which is much like the one found in Luke. He states that he has verified (anakrisis) which is a legal term as when used for closely examining evidence and witnesses which can be seen from other writings of the time.
Hieropolis, which Papias is Bishop of, lies at the junction of major roadways connecting the early Christian cities in Jerusalem. He says he has examined the testimonies of followers of the elders, the elders themselves, and the followers who have heard directly from the apostles Peter and Andrew, and from Ariston and John (most likely John the Elder, not John the evangelist, two followers of Jesus himself. John the Elder is also reference by Eusebius. Therefore the time that appears Luke and Irenaeus are writing, is the time that the gospels are still being composed at least Luke and Matthew, in the presence of the living eyewitnesses of Jesus himself and his adage to followers who are therefore available for confirmation throughout this period of gospel writing which actually comes after the time of the writing of Paul’s Epistles. Although it is indeed a last link to living witness, yet it is significant that it is done within living witnesses, while the Gospels of Mark is done before, as is the Epistles of Paul. We can pin down two living witnesses, yet that is not to say that there are not more.
Further the word “tradition” as used by Paul is used in this sense , not necessarily a verbal handing down but whatever means, including the written form in which things were indeed handed down, and this is the senses in which the word is used also in other writings of the time.
The essential truth of an event can be perfectly preserved even in the presence of human error. In the example, there seems no reason to doubt that the tree was in fact felled by a lightning strike, even though there are some discrepancies in the accounts. Firstly, the actual event can be verified during the living memory by just going back to the source- this is confirmation. Second, the transmission is multifocal at eye-witnesses level- this provides the possibility of corroboration. This is true of public spectacles like the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, but equally also of the very teachings of Christ, since he is giving them to live audiences. There is something unique about the index event which caused it to be transmitted in the first place, a uniqueness that is not explained away by the discrepancies in detail. Worst come to worst, the index event if discounted, must be replaced by an equally unique event. This is why in the Case of the Resurrection event, alternative theories are put forward, like group hallucination, etc. “Nothing much happened” is not much of an alternative, since it does not provide an explanation for the subsequent change in the course of history.
Falsifiability: Content of Revelation
Without a doubt, the claims of Christianity are unambiguous, distinctive, and radically different from all other religious teaching. Christianity is a particular religion making particular claims quite apart from the general human sentiment of “there must be more to life than this” or “there must be something out there” and let’s call it God.
Were a murder witness to simply state “I heard something strange but cannot describe what”: one cannot tell if they were telling the truth or lying, as opposed to if they had said: “I heard a blood-curdling scream followed by a gunshot”– The latter can be verified from other witnesses and the material evidence. The claim “God exists” cannot be formulated into a scientific hypothesis, it is because there simply is not way to verify it. Same for a claim like: “Polly loves Nick”, both these are non-falsifiable propositions. This is why the claims of neo-pagan spiritualism are neither right nor wrong because there is not a lot that is claimed apart from a vague one-ness of all things.
Such uniqueness of scope and grand intent simply belittles the apparent documentary discrepancies that are observed, if present they are pushed to the periphery, as a peripheral consideration by the immensity of the events described, like the newspaper report of a volcanic eruption that seemingly errs on some peripheral detail in the number of persons at the scene. Prophecy is the prophecy of the God who is to come and the God who did come.
But the core of the Good News is “Jesus Christ rose from the dead”. We can state beyond reasonable doubt that this message was reliably passed on, if indeed this was the original message that was meant to be passed on, because there are not many ways in which one can get that wrong. To be clear, one could still question the validity of the message, however if that is what people today claim was being said, it seems beyond reasonable doubt that this was indeed what was being said, since there are only two possible relations of a person and their own death- either they remain dead or they do not, and there is no novelty in the former case, only the latter. In this sense we can have the conviction that the core Christian message was faithfully passed down, and even perfectly memorised, since it consisted only in 6 words, or only 5, if we use only one of Christ/ Jesus. What remains to be studied and ascertained is just who “Christ” was and why his rising from the Dead was an event of any importance for mankind. The Qur’an makes a passing remark that seems to refer to Jesus’ rising to Heaven alive in Surah 4:171, but says nothing further in terms of its significance. It is for Christians to ascertain what it was about “Jesus Christ rose from the dead” that led to the birth of a new religion. If the Christian can convince themselves that this was because Jesus is God, based upon the rest of Scripture and in spite of what textual uncertainties that those might contain, based upon the Traditional Faith of the Church handed down to him, and based upon the evidence that we can see of precursors in Judaism, then it would seem that he has adequate reason for believing. For example, were it untrue that Jesus were God, in contradistinction to what has been written in Scripture, because those were unreliable, then we are left unable to explain why “Jesus rose from the Dead” was handed down at all, as the reason for a new Religion. We would need to ask whoever told us “Jesus rose from the Dead”- “why did you tell us this thing?” This “Why” in in turn would have three ramifications, and all of which would require addressing- why did this led to a new religion, Why did Christians worship Jesus, and why did God raise Jesus from the dead? So you see, the Christian message is not a complex array of words and letters that has had to be passed down to us like the pieces upon chess of “Go” board that have been poised midway through a game that a scribe might do significant damage through clumsiness like a child scattering the pieces, rather it is an event with immovable material.
Infallible Protection of Interpretative Tradition
Revelation itself lays the foundation stone of an institution through which the original documents may be protected, and the correct interpretation of the specific meaning of that message can be handed down. The first witnesses knew how to interpret the verses, and the exact way in which the life that was called for by that document was to be lived. This interpretation is preserved and handed faithfully down as the “Deposit of Faith”. In the divinely ordained authenticity of that same institution, development of the teaching is possible that is faithful to the original revelation and yet necessary for its complete realisation and fulfilment as well as in its ability to respond to current issues in changing times. The Revelation of God is brought to us in the present day not only through infallible reading of his Word, but also through its being infallibly taught.
In the Christian tradition, God establishes a Church invested with his authority for the purpose of protecting the deposit of Faith. While it is certainly possible that such authority might be misused, at the same time one is forced to consider that there is no better protection against misuse other than a divinely established authority. It is much simpler for an individual to err than an institution where peer review and criticism is made possible with a degree of transparency impossible at the individualistic level (individualistic interpretation is not transparent by definition, of course). For divine revelation to be trustworthy, it must be reliable. In the Church, “sealed” with the “guarantee” of the Holy Spirit we are given it.
PART II: TEXTUAL CRITICISM
Can a multiplication of random falsehoods lead to a unified theme of the Holy Trinity of God and the Divinity of Christ. Could it indeed be possible that acts of random deceit might result in a product of indisputable depth and uniqueness? As Cardinal Newman points out in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine that a document with accumulated corruptions will always pull away and fragment with ever increasing divisions in line with the vested interests of its own adulterers, not come together in the manner of the Christian teaching, which is a teaching in which one also fails to discern vested interest being a self-sacrificial model that does not recognise societal classes as affording partial treatment. The manuscript evidence shows that in the original folios in various of the early dialects of the region, especially testable in the case of the NT, in the languages of Greek, Syriac, and Ethiopian among others, there is no corruption in major themes; any corruption in this case would require the unlikely working together of persons across those diverse cultures. The ministry of Jesus simply did not fit with the interests of the Judaic dynasty, and was therefore opposed by it, to the point of it being seen as a deadly threat and the death sentence being sought and obtained for Him.
Coerced vs Free Documentation, Multiplicity and Variants
Human beings saw and heard the very “things of God” and laboured in human fashion to commit those events to writing, events which encompassed a nation and the nations surrounding. Essentially this is how divine Revelation differs from the transmission of human material through printing and copying. Even the act of consigning it to writing, preserving and protecting it is part of the drama of Revelation and in what Revelation consists.
The authenticity of an event reported by multiple newspapers is not diminished by the fact of the minor variations of details in the accounts, rather this is a natural variation, and on the contrary lends credence to the historicity of the account. Variability of accounts is an inherent property in the reporting of momentous public events. Even with the level of technology that we have today this is an inescapable reality, how much more in the pre-technological era? That very multiplicity, along with the multiplicity of spurious accounts themselves indicate a freedom in documentation, that all were free to write what they wanted and for whatever reasons they might have wanted to. It cannot be denied that there is a complex interplay between popular media and the portrayal of world events that is not fully assuaged even in the present day and some might say it is in fact worsened. The problems of accuracy of documentation is not so simple as it seems at face value.
In fact, absence of such multiplicity with variation, rather then a marker of authenticity, would point more strongly toward censorship. An authentic document for posterity can arise within a culture of freedom (no state coercion was possible within the early Christian community since it was on the run form that very state!) Were there truly a monomorphic document circulating in a wide region with no discernible conflicting versions, this would point strongly to a political authority controlling the form of that document.
It would therefore seem not wrong to consider it possible that God intended that the “human element” in the Gospels be preserved in the form of the variations in accounts. When such an account is read many centuries later it is obvious that those who wrote it were writing their personal testimonies, as testifying to something truly wonderful that they saw and that made an impression on them, the same impression that Jesus wants it to make upon the present-day reader. In this sense the spontaneity of the original writers and the sense of wonder and even a degree of incomprehension of the unfolding momentous events is preserved in the very manner of writing.
The primary authentication of the Bible texts lies in the fact that the events therein are public events, documented and handed down by the community that they were witnessed in. The primary themes of the of the text are not complex oral forms, but these events that have become the very fabric of the history of a present day nation and culture, Israel. In terms of evidential weight this is the highest possible degree of authentication : eyewitness accounts. There is no nation or religion, very fabric and practise of which respectively are based on witnessed divine manifestations.
A document that of such great a scope and spans such a great expanse of history, is itself completely without equal, as is also the spiritual fruit it brings: an authentic solution for peace and joy to remedy the violence and hatred that plagues the human state and continues to do so today. This is achieved through the peaceful sacrifice of the one who stayed his hand, even while possessing all the power in the universe and more, and the one who did not open his mouth, who so doing made himself the guarantee of the meek. The Bible succeeds in bringing us the peace of a Man who had the power to destroy in an instant and yet stays his hand “not opening his mouth”, in doing so assures us that we have no need to raise ours, for it is his “right hand (that) holds us fast”
So do the seeming factual inconsistencies invalidate the Bible? This is answered on two levels. At a theological level, the theme of the Bible is incredibly consistent and shows an inspiring logical progression through history. On the matter for peripheral details, these in my view, as would be the view of most Christians can be put down to journalistic errors, and other complexities involved in the transmission of one of the oldest and certainly the most complex document in the history of the world, but a necessary complexity in the fruit that it brings and the ultimate fulfilment and unification of its narrative when it culminates in the birth of the Son of God. A bit like one does not complain about the length of Tolstoy’s War and Peace either, over a 1000 pages, depending on font and page size.
For a document that is written in complete freedom of style, approach and genre, those seeming inaccuracies seem more an anything else, the proof of authenticity of the freedom that is wrought by it rather than its contrary. The events of Revelation themselves are of a spiritual nature, and so is the revealing of them. God has a certain means of accessing the human heart and changing it, which is his primary purpose in that “Revealing”. There is no necessary hindrance to the ability of God to reach the human heart through that very imperfect human means of arriving at documentation. God reaches the human heart through means that are spiritual, not textual. Thus the events that are related through the text, effect the requisite change in the human believer, primarily through the means of prayer which is the only authentic spiritual vehicle. Through the fumbling efforts of human authors, the Holy Spirit brings to us his authentic message. He allows a message of unspeakable beauty to be framed in this seemingly unworthy manner.
Humans write in this seemingly disjointed fashion across time, with none of the authors seemingly aware of the whole picture or what is to come, simply trying to describe what he is given to see and hear in his time, so that at the end of the ages one beholding it might exclaim, “what manner of book is this! That written in a hand so human, it might preserve a message that is so divine!” God teaches not by words alone, but by the example of Jesus’ life directly communicated to the first believers in inspiring the birth of the Church, and through the direct action of the Holy Spirit. Through these means, in a manner that cannot be described, he writes his true Message on our hearts. That is the protection against misinterpretation and misinformation. “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” Jeremiah 31:33
So it cannot be said necessarily that God is constrained to deliver a perfectly documented book, this would be to presume on the wisdom of God. Rather it would necessarily be God’s aim, and of this we can indeed be sure, to write the Book that is suited perfectlu to its purpose: to make the perfect disciple. “it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:14-16)
That wording was never dictated verbatim in the first place, so there is no perfection in wording to be preserved. The Scripture has a history of compilation and development of doctrine that is contained within that very Scripture. This means that for 2000 years there was a demonstrably incomplete Scripture, so there is no question of textual “perfection” here- both text and dogma have always been in a state of development and unfolding and yet have always also been sufficient for the Salvation of the believer. Consider that that apart from the written books of the Law, there is no divine command to write Scripture from any of the prophets (possible exception of Ezekiel), and incredibly for some, Jesus says nothing about even putting pen to paper.
The vast majority of the Christian revelation is not dictated verbatim from the mouth of God, and this is what gives rise the multiplicity of accounts that we see with the inherent variations, even the Gospels can be seen as variants of each other! In the OT there is a possible process of additions, redactions (?to the prophets Daniel, Moses, Ezekiel…), and a variety of literary genres from reflective (Wisdom, Proverbs) and devotional (Psalm, Baruch, Lamentation, Song of Songs), allegorical (Some of Genesis? Esther? Judith? Jonah? Job?), prophetical, and biographical.
What is more, the Gospel accounts seem to draw on each other, copy from each other, and seemingly “build on the story” as they are recorded in subsequent decades of early Christian history. It is natural for a biographer writing several years after the initial events to draw on the writing of another recorder of the same events, since this is a way both of refreshing his memory as well of speeding up the writing process, especially if the main concern is not the originality of the actual writer’s account, but rather the accurate preservation and development of the message.
There is no indication in the Gospels that Jesus dictated the final form of the Gospel to be written down verbatim, nor did he make an explicit request that the Gospels be written down at all. It cannot be held as incorrect then to assume then that it was His intention that the apostles “compose” the Gospels based on their own experiences, with himself as God lending guidance “from above”. Not only are there counterfeit versions of Christianity, there are counterfeit versions of religion, and again for all the same reasons, these are emotive themes, and popular themes will always trigger the rise of intentional and unintentional forms of erroneous accounting.
When you read the Bible you can see that humans have struggled to describe the immensity of the events that have unfolded, as well as the immensity of the span of time across which they have taken place, across war and famine, slavery and deportation, the building of the Temple and its destruction even and even the loss at one point of the writings themselves. In among all there we are given a Man, one who really lived, and we are told of his life and his teaching. This is the “concrete” reality of God in Christianity, along with the real Presence of God with the Israelites.
Dan Williams, acclaimed New Testament scholar says that the abundance of NT manuscripts available for study, is indeed a sign of the richness of the faith tradition and its spread in the free world. He goes on to state: Were there only one available manuscript, there would be no variant at all. The more manuscripts that we have the more variants we will too. He quotes Richard Bentley in Remarks upon a Discourse of Free Thinking “if there had been only on copy of the Greek Manuscript at the restoration of learning two centuries ago, then we (would have) had no variant readings at all. And would the text be in a better position than now (…)? It is good therefore to have more anchors than one; and another manuscript to join the first would give more authority as well as security…”
How Styles of Writing varied in the past
In the ancient world, there were no laptops, nor any recording devices. This meant that in certain instances it would have been considered sufficient to convey the correct gist of the teaching rather than verbatim speech. Further even pen and paper were not easily available, rather one had to be frugal with what one used. The picture of the writer tossing crumpled up pages into a bin by his desk is a modern day luxury as is the 500-page pack of printer paper.
Some of these techniques are (1) paraphrase (2) thematic sequencing- verses with a similar theme are grouped together, for example Matthew’s extended discourse commencing with the Sermon on the Mount (3) telescoping- where actual events are compressed into a single narrative because they address a similar theme.
Manuscript Variants Specifically
It seems that in the process of documentation of this Book, God has allowed for a certain amount of uncertainty. This might be uncertainty of authorship of some of the books, possible editing by later scribes later stages, and even sometimes seeming discrepancy in some of the historic details. We know that the manuscript variants do not constitute a change to any of the doctrinal teachings of the Church. There are many types of variants and the vast majority of these are non-significant.
What we do have of the manuscripts today have come to us through the great persecutions of the Church. The greatest of these would be under the rule of the Roman Emperor Diocletian where the systematic destruction of Church manuscripts was mandated by imperial decree. The text of the Bible was preserved through all this, by a populace only 3% of which is estimated to have been literate, and copying had to be done by hand. Thus what we have of preserved the manuscripts we have at a great cost indeed, the very blood of martyrs.
“History tells us, however, that, so far from there being no major disruptions in the process of transmission, during the pre-Constantinian persecutions New Testament manuscripts were sought out and burned by imperial order. Fortunately, some collections of Christian books escaped Diocletian’s systematic program of destruction; one was the large collection at Caesarea, a library utilized by Origen, Eusebius, and even Jerome. But this too was destroyed later by Muslims in the year 638. The further spread of Islam in the seventh century meant that Christians in three of the five ancient patriarchates (Alexandria, Jeru.salem, and Antioch) came under the sway of Muslims and the Christian populations of North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia were greatly reduced, wkh corresponding effects upon o[the transmission of the Scriptures in those areas.” (pg220,Text of the New Testament Metzger, Ehrman)
There is written record of the copy of the epistle to the Hebrews in Aramaic at this library as also Origen’s (died 254 A.D.) own copy of the Hexapla, all the four Gospels laid out sided by side by him. What survived the persecution of the Romans is thought to have finally been completely destroyed after the Muslims takeover. Further the originals were written on Papyrus, a material that in the best conditions only has a life of 500 years, while in the damp and hot conditions that prevailed in Alexandria along with poor storage facility would have a shelf life of 150 to 200 years.
Those are the problems that the Church has faced in relation to textual criticism. However But God did not leave for his people primarily a book but rather a Church. It is not without premise that Muslims have said to be “where is the word Bible in the Bible?” Well in fact it is not said in the Bible “I will give unto you a book”, but rather “I will build…my church (ekklesia in Greek)”, a word that is used only twice by Jesus himself, both times in the Gospel of Matthew, and then abundantly in the letters. The text of the book has always been under discussion and compilation and even after the famous final compilation of the form of the book itself at the Church Council of Nicaea in AD325, the textual criticism has not stopped and is ongoing today.
What does the Church then say with regard to Scripture itself? Famously, in 1Timothy3:16-17 “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God[a] may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” From this the Christian can take heart that Scripture is indeed preserved in whatever manner is necessary for fully equipping the Christian believer for Salvation. It does not matter so much that there is some variance in the letter of Scripture, so long as the believer is within the remit of the Church which is the real instrument and channel of God’s grace.
Thus one has faith that at every point Christianity, the Church has possessed a volume of text that has been sufficient and appropriate entirely for its needs, whether in the early Church were only a single Gospel may have been available, or in the middle ages where the Jerome’s Latin Vulgate held sway in the Western Church and the Peshitta in the East, or the critical apparatus of the modern day accepted scholarly Greek text which is the Nestle-Aland version at present. Textual criticism is ongoing, and there is always the possibility that we will indeed one day be able to state “we do believe we have arrived at the original autographs”. However until that does transpire, I happy to maintain the present position.
I heard Dr. David Alan Black in a talk hold up the Greek text of the Bible at a talk and say “this is the Word of God, we haven’t lost a single word of the Greek New Testament. I’m just not sure whether the original is printed above the line or below the line. Above the line is the text, and below the line are the textual variants…in fact we have a 104% of the New Testament, I’m just not always sure whether the original reading is above the line or below the line.”
The Manuscript Evidence:
We have a standard Greek text which is used for all New Testament translations. All the textual variants are given in it. Catholics and Orthodox read a few more Old Testament books (NOT NT). This is not an issue of “variants” since the extra material is not missing/lost, nor is it a matter of censorship. The smaller canon does not exclude any “central” text. The Old Testament is the most wondrous book in the Universe, for there is no other book known to man that equals it.
Many books were left out of the Bible. . This is process is called “compilation”, not “corruption”. Some of the books left out were actually orthodox like Didache, epistles of Clement and Shepherd of Hermas, showing that the selection criteria were rigorous.
Originals are lost. Papyrus although convenient does not have great lasting qualities. Christianity suffered from state persecution more than 3 centuries since the time of its inception. Copying was extremely restricted and even dangerous. In spite of this the manuscript evidence for the Bible is unequalled in the history of manuscript evidence. This is part of the story of the text, and not a criticism of that story. A person who has suffered imprisonment and torture for years when released is not criticised for the poor state of his physique, his scars are part of his story. The history of the martyrs are written in the texts of the New Testament and their blood upholds it. So also are the difficulties encountered in preserving the Old Testament preserved in the writings of that very Testament. The transmission of these texts was won at a high and holy price.
Around 56000 Greek manuscripts from the first 1000 years of Christianity in partial or fragmentary form. Three complete copies of the Bible dating to the fourth century. Although many of these are fragmentary, the average size of a single manuscript is 450 pages, giving a total of about 2.5 million pages of documents, providing a rich field of study. Large collection of Old Testament manuscripts dating from 200BC- 0AD in the Dead Sea Scroll finds
* 5,000 in Greek, 10,000 Latin translations and 9,300 in other languages.
The above dates of origin are based upon recent scholastic trends, which now favoured earlier datings than were current in the early 1900s. Of course, if the documents had originated later, then the time lapse to the first known fragments would necessarily be even smaller.
The most famous of these are of course fourth century the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, the former of which was only discovered in the 17th century by Tischendorf, and sensationally so, making a significant impact upon New Testament scholarship at this point. But there are two sizeable manuscripts and subsequent finds that pre-date even these and are both second to third century namely the Chester Beatty Papyrii which is p46 containing one of the earliest copies of St Pauls letters (almost all of Paul’s letter except for the pastorals), of Revelations and p45 which again has a lot of all the Gospels and acts, even though it is fragmentary around the edges.
Reasons for not having better Manuscript evidence
Through Origen and especially the scholarly presbyter Pamphilus, an avid collector of books of Scripture, the theological school of Caesarea won a reputation for having the most extensive ecclesiastical library of the time, containing more than 30,000 manuscripts: Gregory Nazianzus, Basil the Great, Jerome and others came to study there. The Caesarean text-type is recognized by scholars as one of the earliest New Testament types.
Saint Pamphilus devoted his life to searching out and obtaining ancient texts which he collected in the famous library that Jerome was later to use, and established a school for theological study.[1] In the scriptorium, a necessary adjunct to all libraries of antiquity, he oversaw the production of accurate edited copies of Scripture. Testimonies to his zeal and care in this work are to be found in the colophons of biblical manuscripts. Jerome’s De Viris Illustribus (75) says that Pamphilus “transcribed the greater part of the works of Origen of Alexandria with his own hand,” and that “these are still preserved in the library of Cæsarea.”
Among other priceless lost treasures in the library was the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Jerome knew of this copy of the so-called “Hebrew” or Aramaic text of the Gospel of Matthew and Eusebius[2] refers to the catalogue of the library that he appended to his life of Pamphilus. A passage from the lost life, quoted by Jerome,[3] describes how Pamphilus supplied poor scholars with the necessaries of life and gave them copies of the Scriptures, of which he kept a large supply. He likewise bestowed copies on women devoted to study. The great treasure of the library at Caesarea was Origen’s own copy of the “Hexapla,” probably the only complete copy ever made. It was consulted by Jerome.[4] St Pamphilus was martyred in February, 309.[5]
The collections of the library suffered during the persecutions under the Emperor Diocletian, but were repaired subsequently by bishops of Caesarea.[6] Acacius of Caesarea and Euzoius, successors of Eusebius, concentrated on conservation.
It was noted in the 6th century, but Henry Barclay Swete was of the opinion that it probably did not long survive the capture of Caesarea by the Saracens in 638, and this claim is repeated, without citation, in a modern reference: the “large library survived at Caesarea until destroyed by the Arabs in the 7th cent.”[9] O’Connor says of this library, “The tradition of scholarship … was continued by Pamphilius (d. 309). By adding to the manuscript collection of Origen he created a library second only to that of Alexandria; in 630 it had 30,000 volumes.”[10] This number is based on Isidore of Seville’s estimate in his Etymologiae. For further information see the article on the Muslim conquest of the Levant.
In 642 AD, Alexandria was captured by the Muslim army of ‘Amr ibn al-‘As. Several later Arabic sources describe the library’s destruction by the order of Caliph Omar.Bar-Hebraeus, writing in the thirteenth century, quotes Omar as saying to Yaḥyā al-Naḥwī: “If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.
The major text types trace their beginnings to the Diocletianic persecutions and the Age of Constantine which followed. This seems paradoxical. But the period of persecution which lasted almost ten years in the West and much longer in the East was characterized by the systematic destruction of church buildings (and church centers), and any manuscripts that were found in them were publicly burned. Church officials were further required to surrender for public burning all holy books in their possession or custody. Although clergy who submitted to the demands of the state were branded as traitors and defectors from the faith, their number was by no means small. The result was a widespread scarcity of New Testament manuscripts (Transmission of the New Testament, Aland p65)
Examples of the Discrepancies
I do not here deal with the nature of the variants themselves but will return to it at a later time. However suffice to state that the vast majority of what qualifies as variants in NT manuscripts is to do with different ways a word can be spelled, and others to do with technicalities like word order, syntax and so on that do not in fact change the meaning of the text at all. He relates a simple example of how the simple phrase “Peter loves Paul” can be stated in 24 different ways by changing the word order due to the use of articles and declension in the Greek. All of these would count as different variants. There is a place where an NT writer uses two different spellings for the same word in the same passage”
My personal contention is that both perspectives are true when the variations are seen, for example when a basin is said to contain 2000 litres of water in one place and 3000 in another, the truth is that it indeed could contain the larger quantity, by virtue of which the smaller could also be contained. Similarly when a differing value is given for the number of the census, or soldiers in the army, or horses in the cavalry, the numbers could simply have been taken at differing times, or a differing means of measurement. In another place it is said that Abraham’s wife is called a concubine in a different passage. My contention would be that when you get to woman #8, is the time to start thinking what should really be the place of a “concubine”. Concubinage is a local custom and is not in the Law of Israel. Does any woman deserve such a lowly status as her lot, and are all women not only equal before God, but also have equal status before their man in the eyes of God? So the description of Keturah as “wife” and “concubine” are both accurate, if indeed she were intended only to be a concubine. Stretch this to the example of King Solomon who had 700 wives and 300 concubines and one can see why for men these titles are no more than political, for Solomon was marrying many of these as political alliances. In that sense was any of them really a “wife”, or should not all of them have been? So the situations we are describing are complex, often sinful, and therefore given to difficult terminology, which then produces the possibility of variation of description. An example is also given of a differing length of reign/life of one of the Kings of Israel, again in the same books of Kings/Chronicles, events that in the one version would have had to therefore occur following his death. I have not tried to investigate that one.
Compilation of the Bible, and a contrast with Quranic Transmission
The NJBC states in the commentary on 2 Thesselonians “many significant elements of the oral tradition of the gospel are found in (this) letter…according to the sender, “the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ (1;80)” demands obedience and respect since ” our Gospel” (2:14) has made known Jesus Christ’s and God the Father’s love to all those in the community (2:16)” (p.1730)
There is no event where canonical text is burnt. Even para-Biblical literature is present for modern day evaluation and management. The Bible in essence is presented to us with every possible blemish that has been accrued from the compilation process and through the considerable ravages of two millenia. What may be said by some to be allegedly “lost” from the canonical volume is present in non-canonical volumes. What may not have been present in some versions of what is intended to be a canonical volume, are present in that volume nevertheless with the mention of their status. Lastly, those books are in the canonical volume through common consensus, not through censorship.
Canonical units are scrolls, not scraps: The Bible although is comprised of scrolls and letters, and not of verses. The canonical units are therefore not thousands of verses, but a few tens of such scrolls which can be individually accredited or discredited, and further their prevalence of usage among the early community can be ascertained in terms of these units each taken as a whole rather then individual verses. Essentially, the decisions that were involved in the compilation of the Bible correspond to the number of books in question, not the number of verses, which reduces the number of potential errors a thousand- fold.
So Jesus lives, his closest followers write, the Church grows, then more than three centuries later the writings that are the basis of all that growth are compiled, the entire exercise is organic and lacks any attrition. The points of attrition in the period of early Christianity are related to the interpretation of these writings, not the writings themselves.
I once heard Nabeel Qureshi say it would be impossible to produce a change across the manuscripts that existed across several cultures and languages hence the difficulty of any change being produced “uniformly”, ie the chance that the manuscripts were all corrupted in the same places. Bart Ehrman, an atheist researcher and severe critic of Christianity himself admits that the variations present across these manuscripts do not amount to any significant doctrinal change in Christianity, something that the Church has always known.
Simple content: This is in stark contrast to the documentation of texts in other religious traditions like the Qur’an for example. The scope of the Quran is simple, and can be reduced down to the content of the shahada. Most of the rest of it consists of various prohibitions. There are no witnessed theophanies or miraculous events whatsoever, not even the event of Mohammed seeing the angel is witnessed. This text then is orally transmitted by Mohamed to his followers. Following his death there is an attempt to collate the sayings, followed by various attempts at eradicating variant recordings of the same document. That is the process much simplified, but you can see here that in principle it is quite straightforward in content and design.
In contrast the Christian and Judaic writers have very little which is directly dictated rather they are to grapple with obscure sounding prophecy and even the fulfilment of prophecy, miracles, miraculous theophany, the voice and the vision of God himself, and all this over 2000 years, and finally summarised and tied up in the last 100 years or so of writings during which they also required to elaborate upon the material theologically. It can be seen that that there is no similarity between the two modes of revelation. The Quran is like someone goes to a lecture, tries to reproduce it from memory, which is what you do. Christianity is…what I just said.
Translating the Text:
Today what we have is an abundance of New Testament manuscripts and unceasing scholarship with regards to its study and translation, and the attempt at ever more accurate resemblance to the original intent of the authors. This means that the wording of the text changes to some extent with every new edition, so there is not question of a perfectly preserved wording! Textual criticism and translation is a science which must develop, and there can be seen to be three elements in the textual criticism of a document in ancient Greek: arriving at the most faithful form of the original document itself, from manuscripts of varying proximity to that original text, according correct place of each manuscript in this study in the matter of importance and priority, and the translation of that text itself which is complicated by the fact that we lack today the cultural as well as the linguistic milieu in which that text was written, because remember that we are not merely translating from one European language to another, a process that itself would present complexities of cultural context and linguistic devices (“semantics”). These are seen in the translation of great human works like Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” which continues to receive updated translations but of course no translation will quite capture the excitement of the cultural milieu that the original Russian could. The original celebrated English translation by Constance Garnett long being superseded. But we are translation from a cultural milieu which itself needs investigation and reconstruction, for us to be able to ascertain the precise import of terms, phrases and myriad other linguistic devices. The Wikipedia article says of semantics: “the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning…The two main areas are logical semantics, concerned with matters such as sense and reference and presupposition and implication, and lexical semantics, concerned with the analysis of word meanings and relations between them”. Any student of language theory will know that language itself is probably the most complex and incomprehensible field for human beings, because it is the very thing that makes us human. I obviously cannot go into more detail here, but someone like Wittgenstein are in the recent past is regarded to have made the most seminal investigations into the use of language. Even his word is really impossible to understand, and there is more controversy than agreement regarding it in academic circles. My point in all this is that one must not underestimate the difficulty in accrediting or critiquing effectively language and its use in texts. Humans are not really equipped to comprehend the complexity of language anymore than they are equipped to comprehend the complexity of existence itself. The reason is that they are part of its complexity and fabric themselves, not in any way above it.
What is the perfection that is claimed of Scripture? It is that that very Scripture will convey in a perfect manner the authentic message of God for the correct guidance of the believer and this inspite of any “bumbling” in the wording of the text (usual reasons are scribal error, uncertainty in canon, losses, possible additions). There is no plausible reason why God cannot perfectly render the spiritual journey of the believer through the concrete experience of his Person. In such a situation, or in a religion of this nature, the exclusive reliance on a book cannot be presumed and indeed it is misplaced.
In conclusion: by Islamic standard of the perfect preservation of the word of Scripture, Christianity would fail the test of a true religion. However it cannot be proved that such a standard is anything but ad hoc. It would seem so especially given that Islam fails that test itself. The Bible is primary design and scope of biographical or journalistic account of unique witnessed events in world history, the interaction between God and the “ekklesia”, his people. That narrative reaches its fulfilment with the advent of Jesus, God in the flesh“ “in these last days God has spoken to us by his son” (Hebrews 1:12). It is this person of the Son which is the definite of revelation of God and Word of God himself .
Speech for Judgement Day for non-believers:
“Lord I knew you do exist, and in the Judeo- Christian faith I saw that indeed you even came down to Earth yourself to be a sign and a comfort for your creature. I saw in that Faith the sign and proof of your infinite Love and Mercy for us all….But I had trouble with the number of litres of water in King Solomon’s bathtub that were recorded.
I saw also in it publicly witnessed miracles wrought in your mighty Name, the like of which have never been nor ever will be. The mightiest of all these miracles could not ever have been conceived let alone performed, for it is the miracle of the Person of Christ himself, his Incarnation and his Bodily Death and Resurrection. As you yourself said, “For truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it…”…but Lord what about the longer ending of Matthew…?
You defeated the power of evil and the rule of the might not with anarchic assertion but with the gentleness of you charity which is more powerful than all the world’s armies, by it you brought love to those who could not see past their immediate fears, pleasures and securities
In all scrupulosity, I could not accept. We received instead from Mohamed a religion which by rejecting the practised form of both the Judaic as well as the Christian faiths removed from faith every prophecy, miracle and sign, and thereby everything in religion that is mysterious and obscure, bringing in its place clarity of language and meaning.
Theophany was replaced with a Book, and divine immanence (proximity) was termed blasphemy, and mercy- weakness and foolishness. You cannot be in this place Lord, you are too Holy for it, much less die in this place. You could never die for me, Lord. It was I who died for you.