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How the Bible Came to Us, part 5

Between the first and fourth century, the early church used the gospels and epistles as Scripture. They did not wait for any church council to establish the New Testament canon, because it was not in the authority of the church to determine this. The church could only bear witness to what God had done.

In fact, it was the responsibility of the church to say amen to what God was doing. Any failure to do so might deceive the people, but in no way did it undermine the validity of the word of God.

The main problem was that for the first few centuries each church was free to determine for itself which writings were inspired Scripture and which were not. There was no centralized authority to unify everyone with one opinion. When such centralized authority finally emerged, it took many years, with considerable heavy-handed tactics to bring everyone into conformity.

The Council of Nicea

It is said that the New Testament canon was settled at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. I have not seen any evidence of this, other than various claims that people have made without proof. That Council was convened mainly to deal with the controversy regarding the relationship between God and Jesus, Father and Son. Given the highly emotional nature of this issue, it seems doubtful that they would have spent time on the canon of the New Testament.

In the end, the church authorities themselves did not determine the canon. They bore witness to the general consensus of the churches themselves. They recognized that the four gospels and the epistles of John, Paul, Peter, Jude, and James had been used as Scripture from the earliest days of the church.

There were some writings, used by a few as Scripture, which most of the churches had rejected. Some were later writings by legitimate bishops, others writing in the name of an apostle or another famous person (known as the pseudepigrapha, “false writings”). The canon of the New Testament was largely settled by the fourth century, though some continued to debate certain writings to the present day.

For me, the bottom line is that the gematria of the current books of the New Testament prove divine authorship, regardless of what church authorities and scholars may believe. For this reason, Ivan Panin’s work in the early 1900’s, along with the work of his successor, Professor Gustav Hoyer, is of great value to us today.

(I met Dr. Hoyer in 1982 at a Pentecost conference. He was a professor’s professor, who, unfortunately, had to leave early to give a lecture on physics and astronomy to university professors in Ohio. Listening to him for an afternoon greatly enriched my life.)

Once the canon of the New Testament had been settled, the problem shifted to a new topic: translation.

Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (380 A.D.)

In the centuries before Christ, Italians were not unified politically or linguistically. Only a few in the district around Rome actually spoke classical Latin. There were many Greek colonies on the Italian peninsula which spoke Greek. In fact, southern Italy was known to them as Great Greece. At the founding of Rome in 453 B.C., men were sent to Greece to study the laws of Solon at Athens in order to adopt laws for Rome.

The conquests of Alexander the Great (334-323) made Greek the commercial language of Egypt, Asia (now Turkey), and Palestine as well as Greece itself. Italy itself was fully unified by 276 A.D. and by 189 Rome ruled Greece. Its “empire” phase had begun. Rome essentially adopted Greek culture and language. The first history of Rome, written about 200 B.C., was written in Greek.

In the first century, the common people of Rome spoke Greek as easily as Latin. Paul found no need to write any of his epistles in Latin, not even his “Roman” epistle. Though his epistle to the saints in Rome was addressed primarily to the British war captives in Rome, all of whom knew fluent Greek, Rufus Pudens, of the senatorial Pudentius family, also spoke fluent Greek.

However, with the rise of the Empire, Latin became more important. Tertullian, the Roman lawyer (160-220), informs us of an old Latin translation. This dialect of Latin was hardly influenced by Greek and was not the same as the polished Latin of the aristocrats, the politicians, and in the literary world. It was largely inadequate for use in Rome, because many of the words used in Carthage (North Africa) were unintelligible in Rome. Much of its grammar, normal in Carthage, was viewed as erroneous in Rome.

So about 380 A.D., Jerome felt the need to translate the Scriptures into a more scholarly Latin that would also serve the people of Carthage. In fact, there were many Latin dialects. But Jerome’s Latin Vulgate ultimately unified the Latin language in the same manner that the King James Bible unified the English language many centuries later.

The Latin Vulgate became the standard Bible for a thousand years in the Western Empire, though the Greek Scriptures continued to be read and studied in the East. When the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 A.D., the people looked to the church for leadership and guidance. Education became a luxury that only the rich could afford. Soon the Scriptures could no longer be read by the public and were read only by those of the clergy who were literate.

The Fall of Constantinople

The Eastern Roman Empire fared better from its capital, Constantinople. But with the rise of Islam in the seventh century, the empire dwindled in size over the centuries until Constantinople was finally conquered in 1453. This event changed Europe. Thousands of Greek-speaking theologians and priests fled into Europe, carrying their valued literature, both secular and religious. The secular literature sparked the Renaissance; the Greek Scriptures sparked the Protestant Reformation.

Within a few decades, universities began teaching Greek. In Milan, a book on Greek grammar was published in 1476—the first in a thousand years. In England, Oxford University began teaching Greek in 1484. Gerhard, the Dutch scholar, learned Greek at Oxford and became the Professor of Greek at Cambridge from 1509-1514. He adopted the Greek name, Erasmus, and published his Greek New Testament in 1516—the first of its kind ever to be published and sold to the public.

All of this was aided by the adoption of the printing press, which, in 1452, was used to print the Latin Vulgate edition known as the Gutenberg Bible. The printing press had been invented in China, and the technology was brought by the Mongols when they invaded the Mideast in the thirteenth century. Islamists refused to print their Holy Koran on such demeaning technology. But the West adopted it and soon the Bible was being printed for the common people to read.

The printing press created the need for translations of the Bible into the common language.

In 1526 William Tyndale attempted to translate the Bible into English but was driven out of England. He fled to Germany, where he met Martin Luther. Tyndale published his first English New Testament in 1526 and arranged to smuggle copies into England. Ten years later, in Belgium, on March 6, 1536 he was strangled and burned at the stake for his work. His dying words were: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”

His prayer was answered in an unusual way. King Henry VIII had a dispute with the Pope over his divorce and remarriage, ultimately causing him to break away from Rome. The Acts of Supremacy in 1534 made him the head of the Church of England, and he soon gave support to the new “Protestant” movement.

Meanwhile, Martin Luther had discovered the principle of justification by faith alone in 1517, and he soon translated his German Bible, publishing it in 1534.

The Geneva Bible and the King James Version

The 5-year reign of Mary Tudor (1553-1558) attempted to turn England back under Papal rule. She caused more than 300 reformers, pastors, and Bible translators to be burned at the stake, giving her the nickname, “Bloody Mary.” Because of the danger, some of the best Bible scholars gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, under the protection of John Calvin. They were later joined by John Knox, who had fled from Scotland.

Here is where the Geneva Bible was translated and published in 1560. It was the first translation by a committee in a cooperative effort. It was also the first English Study Bible, having marginal notes to assist the reader. In this they followed the example set by the Masoretes, who had done this with the Hebrew Old Testament (the Massoretic Text). This had also been done with the four gospels in Codex W, but these Geneva scholars did not know about that text.

The Geneva Bible quickly became the most widely used English Bible ever published. It was the Bible used by Shakespeare in the late 1500’s and early 1600’s. The Puritans in England used it, and the Pilgrims who sailed to America brought it with them as well. However, the marginal notes infuriated King James because it advocated “sedition” against the king if he should decree laws and commands that contradicted the laws of God. The notes also taught the priesthood of all believers, which reduced the importance of both Roman and Anglican priests.

For this reason, King James authorized a new Bible, one that did not contain any marginal notes. The King James Version was published in 1611 and became the “authorized” version—implying that the Geneva Bible was not “authorized.” In time, the KJV largely replaced the Geneva Bible.