Sola Scriptura, Part 8

Introduction

Live from Salt Lake City, Utah. This is heart of the Matter, where we do all we can to try and worship God in Spirit and in Truth.

I’m your host, Shawn McCraney.

Show 28 454 – Sola Scriptura part VIII
July 14th 2015

Announcements

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And with that, how about a moment from the Word.

(RUN INTRO HERE)

Acts 2:5 and its Implications

We are going through the Book of Acts in MILK on Sundays, and I came across a passage in my preparations that I had never really considered. It’s in chapter 2. Here Luke is describing who was present at the day of Pentecost. And this is what he says:

A Closer Look at Acts 2:5

Acts 2:5 And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.

That’s a simple enough verse, right? Especially the first three phrases:

• There were “dwelling/living/staying”
• At Jerusalem
• Devout men

(I think we can agree on all of this pretty readily, right)

And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now, this last line is up for some debate, isn’t it? When YOU read that there were devout men living in Jerusalem who were OUT OF EVERY NATION UNDER HEAVEN . . . how do you interpret this? Some will say:

“This means out of every nation under heaven that had Jews living in it who would have come to Jerusalem.”

A Bible literalist will refuse this interpretation and say, like they would with every animal being on the ark, that this means what it says and that OUT OF EVERY NATION UNDER HEAVEN there were Jews present there at Pentecost.

Then we have to look at different Bible translations of Acts 2:5. For example, one translation puts this verse this way:

“Now there were then staying in Jerusalem religious Jews from every country in the world.” (TCNT)

And of course Bible literalists (like the King James Onliests) will say we have to take what it says to mean what it says, that

“OUT OF EVERY NATION UNDER HEAVEN there were Jews present there at Pentecost.”

Now, we know that male Jews were commanded (according to the Law) to come to Jerusalem once a year for the high Holidays, so I think we could reasonably say that any Nation under heaven that was home to a Jewish male of age had a representative there. But to suggest EVERY NATION UNDER HEAVEN alone is outside the pale of reason. But here’s the thing that struck a note with me.

Joseph Smith taught in his Book of Mormon that the Americas were established by a family of Jews who left the Americas in 600 BC. By the time Jesus was on earth, they had grown into two great nations (under heaven as it were).

So a great question for the LDS (one I had never considered before) is: Was Luke correct in what he wrote in this passage? Because if he was, then there had to have been representative Jews from the Americas present there at Pentecost. Get it? I think that is rather novel. And since the Joseph Smith translation doesn’t address it, it is certainly worth asking the LDS Missionaries about.

And with that, how about a WORD of prayer.

PRAYER PRAYER PRAYER PRAYER

The Bible Before 500 AD

Last week we sort of listed the views the leaders had of the Bible up to 500 AD. The reason we covered this is to show that the idea that this beautiful GIFT we have access to here today was not completely set and settled upon for quite some time. Why is that important? To help prove that sola Scriptura is a misnomer and that OUR view of the place and purpose of the Bible (NOT the BIBLE ITSELF OR ITS CONTENTS but OUR use of the Book) has in many ways been in error – and needs to change in order for believers to not only appeal to the book in the Spirit that it was intended but not allow the contents of the book to divide followers of Jesus.

The Importance of Contextual Scripture Engagement

Christ. This will occur when we appeal to the Bible properly. In my estimation we have to remember a few things:

First, it is the Spirit that gives life but that the letter killeth. This means we do NOT have a new law in our appeal and use of the Bible but a wonderful tool to help us understand things of the Spirit. Second, we do not worship the Bible we worship God who is love and as worshippers of God we seek to love. If our use of the Bible is leading us to actions and attitudes of non-love we are applying the contents of the book incorrectly.

The Role of the Bible in Christian Life

I suppose I am suggesting that we see the Bible (and our use of it as Christians) like a medical doctor would view his medical books. Yes, they are filled with wonderful and insightful information, yes they assist in diagnosis of sick people, and yes they give great insight regarding treatment but doctors still have to walk in to an examining room, work and engage with people and use much, much more than book knowledge in dealing with human beings. Sola Scriptura, in the face of Christian love, has an ability to create Christians who do not see the need of a bedside manner – or the need to think outside the box at times.

Third, I think it is really important to stop romancing the Bible up with superlatives like inerrancy and infallibility when those terms are ALWAYS and ONLY assigned to the original manuscripts. Why do this? Because it’s true. And unless we speak and teach truth we will discover that our children will learn the truth from our critics and become unmoored.

So – let’s jump ahead from 400AD (when Jerome gave us the Latin Vulgate) which the Church controlled and few could read and which contained a number of books we would not agree with today) to 1380 when an Oxford trained professor and theologian named Wycliffe, an outspoken critic of the established church, took the Latin Vulgate and with the help of his followers (known as the Lollards) produced dozens of English language manuscript copies of the scriptures. Because the Vulgate were the only sources available to him he had to use it. The Pope was so infuriated by his teachings and his translation of the Bible into English, that 44 years after Wycliffe had died, he ordered the bones to be dug-up, crushed, and scattered in the river!

Historical Context of Biblical Translations

Was Wycliffes Bible what we use today? Remember, it was written in Middle English, it was a translation of the Vulgate and it not only included all of the deuterocanonical or apocraphal books from the intertestamentary period but also contained tirades against clerical abuses and Anti-Catholic views regarding their sacraments (Penance and Eucharist), their use of relics, and their demands for clerical celibacy.

1. In 1414-1418 a Catholic Council burned John Wycliffe and Jan Hus at the stake using Wycliffes Bibles for kindling.

In 1450 a man named Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press and the first book to ever be printed was a Latin language Bible, printed in Mainz, Germany. Nevertheless, the invention of the movable-type printing press meant that Bibles and books could finally be effectively produced in large quantities in a short period of time. This was an essential precursor to the success of the Reformation at its revolt again the Catholic church.

Then in the 1490’s another Oxford professor like Wycliff who was the personal physician to King Henry the 7th and 8th, a man named Thomas Linacre, decided to learn Greek. Now remember the year – 1490. The original mss were written by 100 and it took one thousand three hundred and ninety years for someone to step forward and give us something from the Greek other than the Vulgate. So what was happening to believers during those 1300 plus years? Oh, what they had – though it was disagreed upon and translated badly – sufficed? I WOULD AGREE! That is part of the point. Sola scriptura draws a line in the sand that was irrelevant prior to 1390! And God allowed it to be this way.

Anyway, after reading the Gospels in Greek, and comparing it to the Latin Vulgate, Linacre wrote in his diary, “Either this (the original Greek) is not the Gospel… or we are not Christians.” Can you believe this! I believe it happened but the implications are amazing. Linacre clearly shows that the Bible that had been taught and used for a thousand years was in serious error.

Erasmus and the Exploration of His Letters

In light of the Greek manuscripts he was consulting. Apparently, the Latin had become so corrupt that it no longer even preserved the essentials of the Gospel … AND the Church still threatened to kill anyone who read the scripture in any language other than Latin! Let this little fact put the timeline in perspective. A year or two after Linarce wrote this 1492 Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue and discovered the Americas.

Hearing of the discoveries of Linacre a scholar of enormous capacities stepped forward. Erasmus. Of all the reformers, I admire the life and work of Erasmus the most and we are going to talk about him now. I’m not going to go into how he got his name and all that but just know he was born in the 1460s in Holland. He received a high education in a series of monastic or semi-monastic schools. At the age of nine, he and his older brother Peter were sent to one of the best Latin schools in the Netherlands. In a daring step, the principle of his school decided to introduce Greek to the students – the first known time Greek was available at levels below university level. It is said that during this time he obtained a personal relationship with God.

He was ordained to the priesthood at the age of 25 but he never seemed to really live it due to problems with religious abuses he observed.

Analyzing Erasmus’s Personal Writings

It is believed, due to some letters discovered written in his hand, that he fell in love with another man named Servatus Rogerous when he was young but his approaches were rebuffed. Many Evangelicals resist this today and say it is used by the Gays agenda to legitimize their lifestyle so I thought I would let you decide for yourself by citing excerpts from letters written by Erasmus’s own hand. Because the letters are so long I’m including some of the more apparently convincing lines from the first seven letters.

The first letter's theme is all about how it was a shame that they couldn’t see each other more often, that at least they could exchange letters. And, do you love me? A direct quote from this letter: “If it were possible, I should have wished you might care for me as I do for you and that you might feel the pangs of love for me as sharply as I am constantly racked by my yearning for you.”

The Second letter could be summarized as, “I can see that you’re very upset; why won’t you tell me about it? And a quote from that letter: “It is my very special love for you, sweetest Servatius…” “Indeed, I suspect…that you have not yet become persuaded by my supreme love for you.” The third letter is all about: You said you’d write; why haven’t you? You should write. And a quote from it: “For every person who is at leisure is caught up in love’s longings, love being the ’sickness of an unoccupied soul’.”

The fourth letter can be summarized as asking, Why do you refuse to return my love, or even tell me your feelings? And a quote: “Considering that my affection for you is and always has been so deep, dearest Servatius,…" The fifth letter can be summarized as: I’m deathly despondent over your refusal to talk to me. The sixth letter is all about, “Thanks for the letter. I’m so happy. Please don’t be coy anymore. A quote from it says: “I beg you earnestly, O ’half my soul’, by that extraordinary love I bear to you, not to cast me down again into the pit of sorrows.” The seventh letter is a Sorry I haven’t written, letter with the line. “Farewell, and continue in your love for me.”

The Cultural Context and its Influence

The way people excuse these expressions away as not being homosexually driven is to say that we don’t understand the way men relate to each other back in that day. But . . . we do. We have other letters from men back in the day and they don’t say things like: “I am constantly racked by my yearning for you.” Erasmus was developing and practicing his writing style. Declarations of love between men were frequent in that culture and do not indicate homosexual intent. Admittedly, we don’t KNOW – and I only think it matters in relation to how we tend to want to frame the character of those who contributed to the Bible.

Anyway, due to his skill in Latin he was granted a special dispensation by Pope Leo the 10th to set his religious vows aside to pursue scholastic pursuits in

Erasmus and His Literary Pursuits

In 1499, while in England, Erasmus was particularly impressed by the Bible teaching of John Colet who pursued a style more akin to the church fathers than the Scholastics because he studied and appealed to the Greek. He was prompted to master the Greek language which would enable him to study theology on a more profound level and to prepare a new edition of Jerome's Bible translation. On one occasion he wrote Colet: "I cannot tell you, dear Colet, how I hurry on, with all sails set, to holy literature. How I dislike everything that keeps me back, or retards me."

Erasmus was a driven man. He preferred to live the life of an independent scholar and made a conscious effort to avoid any actions or formal ties that might inhibit his freedom of intellect and literary expression. Throughout his life, he was offered many positions of honor and profit throughout the academic world but declined them all, preferring the uncertain but sufficient rewards of independent literary activity. From 1506 to 1509, he was in Italy: in 1506 he graduated as Doctor of Divinity at the Turin University, and he spent part of the time as a proofreader at the publishing house of Aldus Manutius in Venice.

Criticism and Reform

He was soon exposed to a great deal of criticism from ascetics, academics and clerics who were hostile to the principles of literary and religious reform and the loose norms of the Renaissance adherents to which he was devoting his life. He felt called upon to use his learning in a purification of the doctrine by returning to the historic documents and original languages of sacred Scripture. He tried to free the methods of scholarship from the rigidity and formalism of medieval traditions, but he was not satisfied stopping there. His revolt against certain forms of Christian monasticism and scholasticism was not based on doubts about the truth of doctrine, nor from hostility to the organization of the Church itself, nor from rejection of celibacy or monastical lifestyles. He saw himself as a preacher of righteousness by an appeal to reason, applied frankly and without fear of the magisterium. He always intended to remain faithful to Catholic doctrine, and therefore was convinced he could criticize frankly virtually everyone and everything. Aloof from entangling obligations, Erasmus was the centre of the literary movement of his time, corresponding with more than five hundred men in the worlds of politics and of thought. So there is some background on the man, ways and life of Erasmus.

The New Testament Projects

The first New Testament printed in Greek was part of what was called the Complutensian Polyglot, named after the University where it came from and polyglot meaning a number of translations side by side in one. But it was not published first because those in charge were waiting for the OT to be completed. When word got out that it the Contemplusian Polyglott was finishing up Erasmus got wind of its eminent publication. He had been aggressively working for years on two projects – one was a collation of Greek texts and the other was a fresh Latin New Testament.

In addition to a passion for a fresh Latin revision of Jerome’s Vulgate Erasmus said this his Greek translation work: “But one thing the facts cry out, and it can be clear, as they say, even to a blind man, that often through the translator’s clumsiness or inattention the Greek has been wrongly rendered; often the true and genuine reading has been corrupted by ignorant scribes, which we see happen every day, or altered by scribes who are half-taught and half-asleep."

We might say that Erasmus sought to "synchronized" or "unify” the Greek and the Latin traditions of the New Testament by producing an updated version of either simultaneously. Both being part of canonical tradition, he clearly found it necessary to ensure that both were actually presenting the same content. In modern terminology, he made the two traditions "compatible." This is clearly evidenced by the fact that his Greek text is not just the basis for his Latin translation, but also the other way round: there are numerous instances where he edits the Greek text to reflect his Latin version. For instance, since the last six verses of Revelation were missing from his Greek manuscript, Erasmus translated the Vulgate's text back into Greek. He also translated the Latin text into Greek wherever he found that the Greek text and the accompanying commentaries were mixed up, or where he simply preferred the Vulgate’s

The Work of Erasmus and Its Impact

Erasmus said his work was "rushed into print rather than edited," resulting in a number of transcription errors. After comparing what writings he could find, Erasmus wrote corrections between the lines of the manuscripts he was using and sent them as proofs to Froben his publisher. His hurried effort was published by his friend Froben in Basel in 1516 and thence became the first published Greek New Testament. Erasmus used several Greek manuscript sources because he did not have access to a single complete manuscript. Most of the manuscripts were, however, late Greek manuscripts of the Byzantine textual family and Erasmus used the oldest manuscript the least because "he was afraid of its supposedly erratic text." He also ignored much older and better manuscripts that were at his disposal.

His second (1519) edition was used by Martin Luther in his German translation of the Bible, written for people who could not understand Latin. Together, the first and second editions sold 3,300 copies. By comparison, only 600 copies of the Complutensian Polyglot were ever printed. As mentioned last week the first and second edition texts did not include 1 John 5:7–8 which is known today as the Comma Johanneum.

Those verses say:
“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.”

Erasmus had been unable to find those verses in any Greek manuscript, but one was supplied to him during production of the third edition. That manuscript is thought to be a 1520 creation from the Latin Vulgate, which likely got the verses from a fifth-century marginal gloss in a Latin copy of I John. In June of 1927 the Roman Catholic Church decreed that the Comma Johanneum was open to dispute and it is rarely included in modern scholarly translations. But it’s in mine, by the way.

The Editions and Their Influence

The third edition of 1522 was probably used by Tyndale for the first English New Testament. It was also the basis for the 1550 Robert Stephanus edition which was used by the translators of the Geneva Bible and King James Version of the English Bible. Erasmus published a fourth edition of his translation in 1527 containing parallel columns of Greek, Latin Vulgate and Erasmus's Latin texts. In 1535 Erasmus published the fifth (and final) edition which dropped the Latin Vulgate column but was otherwise similar to the fourth edition. Later versions of the Greek New Testament by others, but based on Erasmus's Greek New Testament, became known as the Textus Receptus.

Erasmus dedicated his work to Pope Leo X as a patron of learning and regarded this work as his chief service to the cause of Christianity. What did you notice about all of that? What did you note about the condition of the Vulgate? What did you notice about the insights Erasmus had into its condition and the insights others had into the condition of the Greek mss they were using? What did you notice about the person of Erasmus – and the fact that it was his work that contributed greatly to the creation of the King James Bible in 1611?

The Bible in Modern Context

What did you notice about the Johannine Comma – which is the single most declarative statement on the Trinity in scripture? Is it part of the inspired word or was it added? The point is not to demean the Bible. The point is to help us see it for what it is which will help us use it and apply it properly in our lives as Christians today. His word is true. It is a gift. But it is not exhaustive, it is not without error in marginal ways, but it is the best we’ve got. When read with the Spirit of love it changes lives, renews the mind. But, like a medical journal, it must be used appropriately. We do not worship the Bible nor do we allow its contents to treat others badly.

Finally, these things about the Bible in no way justify man’s attempts to create another book of scripture like the Urantia or Book of Mormon – that is just foolishness. It is the single most remarkable book on the face of the earth and a direct gift from God. But like all things, it must be taken and used and understood properly or it simply becomes another means to manipulate and control others.

Introduction

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