Lower Criticism, Higher Criticism,
Modern New Testament Text Criticism
The Shorter Reading Is Preferred
The More Difficult Reading Is
Preferred
When in Doubt, Favor Tradition
Textual Work: the Ending of Mark’s
Gospel
Higher Criticism – The Historical
Critical Method
Origin of the Historical-Critical
Method
Ministerial versus Magisterial Use
of Reason
Classical Scholarship and Biblical
Research
Biblical Studies as a Toxic
Influence
The Luther-Centric Reformation
King James versus New International
Version
Arguments against the King James
Version Refuted
Quotations about the Scriptures
Many discussions about the Bible take place today without an understanding of the basic issues of interpretation. This introduction is not intended to provide a complete review of these issues, but to introduce the material in an attempt to inform orthodox Lutherans and curious outsiders. Lower criticism deals exclusively with the manuscripts of the Bible. Higher criticism (literary criticism, the historical-critical method) concerns itself with the content of the text. Translation issues concern both areas of interpretation, since the text and the translation of the text both reflect to some extent the doctrinal perspective of the individual. The Authorized Version, commonly called the King James Version, came into being because of doctrinal conflicts and the need for one, superior Bible in the English language.[1]
No one should consider this topic without realizing a basic and indisputable fact—the Bible is the most reliable ancient text we have. The Biblical manuscripts are quite numerous and precise, with very few problems. Most of the problems are from obvious causes, such as misspelled words, or lapses from confusing similar words and phrases. We hear similar lapses every day on TV, when someone reads from a text. His eyes wander ahead, since he can read faster than he can speak, and he blends two words together. When he corrects himself, and reads on, it is often easy to discover why he made the mistake. He may say “awful” instead of “often” because he is reading awful to himself in the next line. The initial lapse may sound like this: “This awful repeated sentiment has been expressed by the governor.” Not everyone catches his own errors, especially when we omit “not” or “un” from the spoken or written word. In the process of copying, the same kinds of errors creep into texts, although less frequently with works of great import and among scribes who work with great precision.[2]
Almost all the Biblical text problems fall into the categories mentioned above. Nevertheless, the total number of manuscript variations are quite small, a fraction of what we find in other ancient works. If the Bible has relatively few manuscript problems, in comparison with works of the same age, and most of those errors can be explained as copying mistakes, then we end up with a tiny fraction of the entire Bible having any word, phrase, or verse disputed. In the New Testament, one tenth of one percent of all the words are disputed. The text is 99.9% certain.
Lower criticism is a legitimate concern for scholars, but it should not be carried out in an arbitrary, capricious manner in order to support preconceived, political notions.
Those who previously scorned the precision of the Biblical texts were dealt a severe blow by the accidental discovery of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts in 1947. A boy threw a rock at an errant goat in a cave near the Dead Sea. He heard pottery crash, investigated, and stumbled upon the greatest Biblical find of the century. Previously, the most ancient Old Testament texts were dated about eight centuries after Christ. The Old Testament texts found at the Dead Sea site were dated at the time of Christ or before, older by 800 years. For example, how much did the Isaiah scroll from the Dead Sea area differ from the next oldest one? The difference was almost zero, showing that the zeal of the copyists, during a time of great stress for Judaism, prevented Isaiah’s text from being corrupted. When Hebrew texts were copied, every word and letter was counted to make sure the copy matched the master document. Anyone who has seen errors multiply in the printed page can appreciate the meticulous care required to preserve the Word in manuscripts for centuries.
Most scholars realize that the text of the Old Testament is extremely reliable. Some words remain a mystery to translators today. The language is so far removed from modern English that the exact meaning of certain phrases can be debated. If we can compare the same words and phrases in another document from the same era, the work is easier. The Old Testament has many ancient translations, which help us understand what earlier scholars thought. The Old Testament was translated into many languages, including Greek (the Septuagint) and Latin (the Vulgate). Early translations and paraphrases also introduce variations in the text, but they give us many more examples of the disputed words. The amount of actual data for the Old Testament text is quite remarkable, considering the relative obscurity of the language and the instability of the nation.
Most scholars have never looked at or touched an ancient manuscript. Notre Dame hired one professor, Gene Ulrich, who specialized in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He worked with the actual text (most likely through photographic images). The rest of the theology department did not, and that included New Testament Professor Elisabeth Schuller-Fiorenza, who founded a feminist theology journal and became a professor at Harvard University. Manuscript work is very specialized, so few academic positions are funded. Bruce Metzger at Princeton University was famous for working with the New Testament manuscripts. He enjoyed a near monopoly in that area.
For this reason, people should remember that few statements about manuscripts, whether from pastors, theologians, or church officials, are based upon actual experience with them. I took an interest in Biblical manuscripts and studied the issue for some time, but never worked with manuscripts or photographic reproductions, even while earning four degrees in theology.[3] Therefore, liberal claims about Biblical manuscripts are almost always based upon lecture notes, wisecracks, and light reading. To coin a phrase, an oral tradition has sprung up, mythological in origin, not entirely divorced from fact, but quite fanciful and misleading. Bits and pieces from lower criticism have been fashioned into a minor religion about all the manuscript errors in the New Testament.
Textual evidence from the New Testament era is vast and harmonious. The New Testament was written in Greek and completed no later than 100 AD. Liberals used to date the New Testament as late as 300 AD, to accommodate their theories about pagan influence upon the writers. John’s Gospel was a frequent target of the late-date theorists. However, the earliest physical evidence from the New Testament comes from John’s Gospel and dates that fragment no later than 100 AD, making it very difficult for the Gospel to have been written two centuries later. Decades after everyone knew about the fragment of John’s Gospel dating it as early as 100 AD, if not earlier, my Notre Dame professor said, “Liberals date the Gospel of John around 300 AD, while conservatives date it earlier.” A manuscript date should not be liberal or conservative, but as precise as possible.
Use of the Greek New Testament gave way to the Latin version, the Vulgate, in the Roman Empire, but Greek continued to be used in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Roman Empire gradually came unglued, so the western empire was ruled from Rome with Latin as its language. The eastern, the Byzantine Empire, was ruled from Constantinople, the Greek language and Eastern Orthodoxy dominating. The Greek New Testament was preserved by Eastern Orthodoxy and edited by Erasmus in 1516, just as the Reformation began. In fact, the printing of the Greek New Testament was a catalyst for the Reformation, for Biblical studies, and for the study of the Greek language. The text of the traditional New Testament is based upon the Majority Text because almost all manuscripts agree upon the wording of the New Testament books. Other names associated with the King James Version are the Received Text (Textus Receptus, sometimes abbreviated as TR) or the Byzantine Text (since the text was preserved in the old Byzantine, or Greek empire).
The miraculous spread of the Gospel was accompanied by many different translations of the text, as well as church lectionaries or pericopes for reading the appointed lessons. Our congregation has an old Missouri Synod lectionary, which preserves those King James texts for the entire church year, but nothing else from the Bible. The early church lectionaries were very much the same. Until lately, worship has been very traditional, so liturgical texts much later in date are considered very reliable, as if they were copied centuries earlier. That is because worship was very slow to change in ancient times. When people do not own books, they memorize great works. Memorization makes it difficult to slip changes into the Church. The Christian Church was not assaulted with a new slang translation and faddish theme every month.
Although the Christian Church has endured many persecutions, the manuscripts of the Bible were preserved. Some were scattered and burned. One of the best manuscripts was erased to make room for the writings of one Ephraem, since manuscript paper was rare and expensive. Ephraem is remembered now, not so much for his writings, but for the New Testament text underneath, which can be brought out through photography. The manuscript is named Ephraem Rescriptus (Ephraem re-written).
We can compare the care of copying the New Testament with the reverence given the Old Testament. Jews and Christians copied and kept their Scriptures diligently, in the face of many trials, travels, persecutions, sects, and heresies. Translations, versions, and paraphrases abounded. Old manuscripts were not tossed away when worn and old, but carefully preserved. This is difficult for our society to imagine, since anyone can have a huge library or obtain books for little or nothing at special sales. The apostolic church did not ask a new mission, “Do you have a building yet,” but “Do you have a Bible yet?” Their capital expense, borne by the mother church, was to get a copy of the Old Testament. Copies of the apostolic letters were sent around, copied, and read. Before the printing press was invented, hand-copied books were chained to the library shelves. The Bible was chained to the pulpit in Medieval cathedrals. Now the Bible is unchained and in the language of the people’s republic, but gathering dust on the shelf, unread and unloved.
The development of New Testament text criticism should be viewed in light of the new intellectual thrill of the era – evolution. Religious leaders thought in terms of the evolution of religion. Man evolved, they thought, from the primeval ooze and worshiped many gods among the creatures of the earth. Then he evolved into a monotheist. Later, Christianity emerged as an ethical system, although burdened by excessive interest in the Person of Jesus rather than the good works of Jesus. In time, Christians would give up their primitive worship of Jesus and once again worship as gods the creatures of the earth. Those happy fantasies have been fulfilled today.
In that light, it was impossible for these religious leaders to think of Jesus as anything other than a good person mistakenly (but with good intentions) preached as God incarnate. The liberal leaders looked upon Trinitarian orthodoxy as a perversion of Jesus’ original mission of teaching the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God.[4] They looked at Christianity as a core of humanistic truths covered with a veneer of Jesus worship. Liberals taught each other, and still insist, that the Church did not believe in the Trinity until 500 years after Christ! Although modern literary criticism of the Bible is often seen as the primary force in setting the Great Apostasy into motion, one might say that evolutionary philosophy sought and found its expression first in textual criticism and later in the historical-critical method.[5]
The same Majority Text manuscripts were used for the New Testament until a revolution, marked by two discoveries, took place. The Vatican published Codex Vaticanus officially in 1889-90. Vaticanus was catalogued in 1481 but has no history before that date. Erasmus knew of it and Napoleon carried it off to Paris for a time. Konstantin von Tischendorf (1815-1874) got to see the manuscript in 1843. He got into trouble for not obeying the Vatican’s rules about copying, but he was finally able to produce an edition in 1867. Tischendorf found another manuscript, which came to be named Codex Sinaiticus, in 1844 at a monastery on Mt. Sinai, The two are sometimes called the Egyptian texts, because of their origin. Codex means that the text was bound more like a book rather than rolled up. Although the two codices disagree with each other in many readings, they were hailed as superior to the Majority Text. The differences between the Majority Text and the newly discovered codices are illuminating when examined in the cool light of reason.
The two Egyptian manuscripts did not by themselves change the New Testament text used by modern translators. B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, both from Cambridge University, accomplished this by publishing a two volume work in 1881. They rejected the Majority Text in favor of the Egyptian manuscripts, especially Vaticanus. Their work vastly influenced the English Revised Version of 1881 and all subsequent translations.
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“The Westcott Hort text, along with the new translation, dealt the final blow to the old type of text (Received Text) upon which the King James Version is based.”
Neil Lightfoot, How We Got the Bible, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1963, p. 80.[6]
Many a novice text critic has been initiated in the rules of the science. It could be a science. The actual text does not need to be a philosophical issue. We are only asking, “What is the purest form of the original text?” Various rules have been promoted to determine whether one reading is better than another:
When we examine these rules, we can see that they are infinitely flexible and no more scientific than examining the entrails of sacrificial animals. The rules were first applied during a time when all ancient works began to be considered a patchwork by many different authors and editors.
One can guess the attitude behind this rule. Some people make their stories longer and longer, the more they tell them. Others abbreviate a story they have heard before, depending on the circumstances. As far as being a reliable guide for one reading or another, determining the better reading by length is no better than walking to the hardware store with arms outstretched and saying, “I need a door this wide.”
We should think over the implications of this single rule. It suggests an arbitrary attitude setting itself against the data. Implied in this rule and others is the notion that the Christian Church suppressed the true text, changing it with additions to express a Trinitarian orthodoxy foreign to Jesus and the apostles. It is more likely that heretics edited their manuscripts to fit their pet doctrines, introducing some variant readings easily detected. For example, one man was trying to prove his case at a church meeting. He read from a document in a loud and outraged tone of voice, but when he came to a section that reflected poorly on him, he skipped it entirely. Later, his friend read a transcript from an audio tape. Once again, when material came up not supporting their cause, it was omitted. In these two cases, the shorter version was the corrupt version.[7]
This rule abandons all pretensions of science, when considered thoughtfully. One question we must ask is, “Difficult for whom?” The answer is, “Difficult for believers.” This is a formula for replicating false doctrine. The Christian Church has determined through the study of the Scriptures that dozens of heresies are misinterpretations of God’s Word. One example would be an attack upon the hypostatic union of the two natures (divine and human) of Christ. Some deny the human nature of Christ. Others deny His divine nature. Still others are confused about the union of the two natures, as Zwingli and Calvin were. Applying this rule would mean that a reading denying the divine nature of Christ would be preferred to one affirming it.
The arrogance of this rule is amazing. It simply assumes that the very first Biblical texts taught the favorite heresies of the liberals. Then, they think, over a period of time, the copyists inserted a newly minted orthodoxy into the pure text. This was a massive and overwhelming conspiracy. Only a few manuscripts preserved the original, mixed up, heretical Christianity. Liberals can pick those few examples out, elevate them to a new status, and create another New Testament based upon them. That is exactly what Wescott and Hort did in England. They were asked to modernize the King James Version to some extent. They created a different Greek New Testament, a two volume work so massive that no one could easily supplant it with another. A country raised on Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Version rejected the new translation based upon their text, but their Greek New Testament persisted. Today, all modern translations of the New Testament reject the Majority Text and follow the trends of Wescott and Hort.
All modern translations, not some of them, but all of them, favor the Egyptian manuscripts and reject the Majority Text. The New King James Version, which is really a modest revision rather than a new translation, does not follow the Egyptian texts and argues against them. The New KJV does footnote variations, but that actually helps the reader see where the RSV and NIV omit verses. That is the issue. The new editions edit out a significant amount of the New Testament. The omissions are seldom noted, so the verses and words are forgotten. In time they seem foreign.
This rule may or not be applied. The radical scholars generally work against tradition. For instance, they dismiss the reliability of the New Testament, but they anchor all their dates in the Acts of the Apostles. This is a contradiction. However, if a scholar cannot fix a date in time, such as the trial of Paul, then he cannot date anything else.
What does “in doubt” mean? What does “tradition” mean? Obviously, if all three rules are applied at the discretion of the scholar, the resulting text may become anything he imagines it must have been. Because the Bible is ancient, many contradictory traditions exist about many different subjects. We have very late traditions (5th century) about the Assumption of Mary. Does that mean that the silence of the New Testament about the death of Mary implies her Assumption? The Church of Rome has read the Assumption of Mary into the “First Gospel” (Genesis 3:15), making Mary’s the foot that will crush Satan. The Church of Rome has used the text of Genesis 3:15 that says “She will crush his head.” Thus, Catholic art often shows Mary trampling the serpent. The Church of Rome has admitted the error in the translation, but I can go to any theological library and still find the error in print.
Liberals will argue correctly that there are almost no complete New Testament manuscripts. Every Greek New Testament published is a composite of the ancient witnesses. However, if the available manuscripts overlap, the complete New Testament is easily assembled. The composite argument works both ways. Every single printed Greek New Testament today is also a composite. It is not simply Vaticanus or Sinaiticus, but some of each, plus Majority Text readings. Various readings are graded, introducing even more subjective opinion into the discussion.
Let us look at a text and see what the manuscript evidence is. An ordinary Bible will not help. Footnotes mention some ancient witnesses, as if they were people. Details explaining the changes are missing. No explanations are offered. And yet, this is not a difficult matter to discuss.
I was told by my Harvard trained college professor, a Lutheran Church in America pastor, that the early Church noticed that the ending of the second Gospel was rather abrupt, stopping at Mark 16:8, so they made up another ending, Mark 16:9-20. Liberals said, “Thank God we now have better manuscripts than the King James Version had, so we can get rid of the manufactured ending and stop the Gospel at 16:8.” The liberals could not explain why anyone would end a Gospel with the word “for.” The Greek word gar (“for”) is never found at the end of a sentence, let alone the end of a book. One theory held that the Gospel was deliberately but mysteriously broken off at Mark 16:8, letting people imagine death, persecution, or perhaps an extended vacation. Given the value of written texts in the early Church, the abrupt ending is impossible to explain adequately.
My United Bible Society Greek New Testament (Aland third edition) has notes for the variant readings. Similar decisions are made about Shakespeare and all important authors, but most people are not aware of it. The Shakespeare Variorum is an enormous work, with variant readings of the dramas. The Yale Shakespeare, in one volume, is the result of many different editorial decisions. Although Shakespeare belongs to the modern age, scholars still argue about the authorship of the plays.
The Aland edition of the New Testament omits the traditional ending of Mark, supporting this reading with Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and a few additional witnesses. The traditional ending is supported by Alexandrinus, Epraemi Rescriptus, Bezae Cantabrigiensis, and many others. The position of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus looks very lonely, but aha, do not they agree with each other? Are they not better and earlier? Can we not find it in our hearts to forgive that forgotten scribe who added a few verses to Mark, just to improve the Gospel?
Vaticanus does not include the traditional ending of Mark, but the copyist left more than a column of space blank. That was long before the days of “this page intentionally left blank.” At the very least we can assume that the scribe knew of the traditional ending. That leaves Sinaiticus stranded. It is one thing to say that Mark’s Gospel ended abruptly, for no known reason, and that an ending was added. But, if two major witnesses against the traditional ending do not even agree completely with each other, then snipping off verses nine through twenty seems arbitrary, arrogant, and deceitful.
Now we have a great dividing line on this subject. Most of the conservatives have surrendered to Westcott and Hort, abandoning the Majority Text. And yet, an author who accepted the modern theories about the New Testament text, said this about the ending of Mark:
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“In favor of Mark 16:9-20 there are a host of witnesses: the Alexandrian Manuscript, the Ephraem Manuscript, Codex Bezae, other early uncials, all late uncials and cursives, a number of old Latin authorities plus the Vulgate, one Old Syriac manuscript, the Syriac Peshitta version, and many other versions. Besides, there is a plain statement from Irenaeus (early Christian writer) which clearly shows the existence of Mark 16:9-20 in the second century and the belief that Mark was its author. In brief this is the negative and positive data on the question. On one hand is the unparalleled reliability of the Vatican and Sinaitic Manuscripts; on the other hand is almost all of the other evidence. J. W. McGarvey wrote a capable defense of Mark 16:9-20 in his Commentary on Matthew and Mark. It was first published, however, in 1875, before the great work of Westcott and Hort on the Greek text was completed. Yet McGarvey’s, with a few minor modifications, can stand with credit today.”
Neil Lightfoot, How We Got the Bible, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1963, pp. 74f.
In light of the concessions made by Lightfoot above, the treatment of the traditional ending of Mark in the NIV is worth noting. After Mark 16:8, a line appears in the text, indicating a break. The following heading appears above Mark 16:9-20:
“[The most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses
do not have Mark 16:9-20.]”[8]
Someone who has not read the research on the ending of Mark, and this material is difficult to find, would conclude from the NIV that Mark 16:9-20 does not belong in the Bible. He would not know that the only major manuscript unambiguously omitting the ending is Sinaiticus and that this “most reliable manuscript” suddenly appeared without a so-called family of copies to back it up. Since Missouri Synod and Wisconsin Synod professors participated with the liberals and tongue-speakers of the NIV translation team, a conservative Lutheran would assume that the bracketed information is in harmony with orthodox Lutheranism. In fact, no other Bible is so brassy in disdaining the ending of Mark.
If a modern scholar’s training goes against the traditional ending of the Second Gospel, and he still supports the Majority Text conclusion of Mark, then the untrained person can see that the case against Mark 16:9-20 is very weak indeed. For the sake of comparison, consider what Westcott and Hort have done to millions of Christians. The Beck Bible published by Christian News has also omitted the traditional ending of Mark with a footnote, following Westcott and Hort. When a faithful Lutheran reads this Bible, after being exposed to the King James Version, he is led to believe that the Christian Church was deceived for centuries. Luther was wrong. Tyndale was wrong. All the Reformers were wrong. How can the average Christian check the facts? In front of him is the latest Bible printed by a conservative Lutheran. He has no way of discovering, apart from a theological library, that the manuscripts favored in the new edition have no history at all. If a farmer bred cattle or pigs without knowing their genetic heritage, he would be considered lazy or foolish. The ultimate result of Westcott and Hort enthusiasm planting doubt about the entire New Testament text.[9] Ironically, the Majority Text is rejected by liberals today because of its heritage, its careful preservation in the Christian Church, its thousands of witnesses, its consistency, its harmony in many different forms. Even the mysterious Vaticanus tips its hat to the Majority Text, by making room for the traditional ending of Mark.
The canon is also used by liberals in arguments against the Scriptures. Liberals declare that the Bible “did not come down from heaven.” That is a straw man logical fallacy, because no one has ever said that the Scriptures came down from heaven. Liberals assume a pose of being scandalized that various men made pronouncements upon what was Scripture and what was not. However, this information can be used to create a false impression. More than one liberal Lutheran has even said in a sermon that the Bible could have only 20 books in it or 100 books in it, since men made decisions about what should be included.
In the apostolic age, the canon included only the Old Testament. When Jesus spoke of what was promised in the Scriptures, He referred only to the Old Testament. The apostles wrote letters first and finally certain authors wrote down the Gospels. Of course, the spirit of the antichrist had already begun, and many false teachers arose to make various claims. Not surprisingly, false scriptures were created to counter the actual scriptures. However, not everything was written with evil intent.
After the Fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Old Testament canon was fixed at Jamnia, around 90 AD. The extra books of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, were not accepted as equal to the 39 that are accepted as inspired. Christians accepted the same 39 books as canonical, not by voting for which books were inspired, but by setting aside whatever failed to measure up. Later, when Jerome was asked to translate the Old Testament apocryphal books into Latin, he refused, stating that they did not belong with the inspired books.
I was in a group of Protestant boys who came upon an old Bible in the attic of a garage. We were filled with a sense of mystery we they ran across strange names we had never seen in a Bible: Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, and so forth. We ran home, telling our parents of this exotic Bible, only to learn that it was a Roman Catholic Bible and fairly common. The lesson reinforced the concept that Catholics were very different from the rest of the world. In fact, few people now read or refer to these books. The Reformation did not accept them as belonging with the 39 books of the Old Testament, having an equal status. However, Luther published the books of the Apocrypha in a separate section of the Bible. The Book of Concord accepts the Apocrypha as edifying and useful to read, but not equal to the canon. The books are uneven in quality. First Maccabees is valuable as a history. Second Maccabees is considered quite inferior. The Wisdom of Solomon is cited often.
The New Testament canon was gradually established over a period of time when the Christian faith was illegal and persecuted in the Roman Empire. The debates closed with the Easter letter of Bishop Athanasius in 367, when the 27 books we now have were accepted as the New Testament. They do not all have the same status in historical documents. Seven (James, 2 Peter, Hebrews, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, Revelation) were “spoken against” by some early church fathers as not being of apostolic origin. Believers should not be shocked by this. The origin of James, for instance, is obscure. Hebrews does not claim an author. Revelation is strange and difficult to interpret. Luther dealt with the arguments about Hebrews, considered that Apollos might be the author, and still referred to Paul as the author.[10] The effect of the Easter letter was to exclude those works falsely claiming to rank with the New Testament. This happened in a different way when a subway train had a crash in Chicago. Many people arrived at the site and climbed onto the train, hoping to share in the proceeds of a juicy lawsuit. They had to be excluded from all claims. Therefore, the first step was not voting on who was in the crash but getting rid of those who were not.
The spoken against (anti-legomena) books have fueled many silly arguments. The Christian Church has always recognized some New Testament works as more significant than others. Romans is the most important doctrinal epistle. Philemon is not. Yet Paul wrote both letters and both are found in the canon, Romans at the beginning of the list of Pauline letters, because of its doctrinal importance. In the Church, Matthew is generally favored over Mark and Luke, but not in the sense of excluding the second and third Gospels. Liberals have pitted one book of the New Testament against another and left many with the impression that the documents of Christianity are unreliable. For example, one ELCA pastor preached from the pulpit that the Bible could have 20 books in it or 100. “The books included in the Bible are purely a matter of human decision,” he claimed. The canonical issue has also encouraged professors to question whether Paul wrote the letters attributed to him, especially 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, called the Pastoral Epistles. Liberals consider the Pastoral Epistles too conservative and churchly to be Paul’s.
The Gospel of John has the greatest claims to apostolic authorship, but it has also been used most by heretics and scorned by liberals as inauthentic. John’s Gospel, in supplementing Matthew, Mark, and Luke, leaves out much of what we find in the synoptic (seen together) Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke. The synoptic Gospels have a relationship with one another, with a similar structure and many identical or nearly-identical verses. The relationships between the first three Gospels have been studied for 15 centuries. Nevertheless, one of the greatest New Testament scholars of this century, Nils A. Dahl, said at Yale, “I don’t think we will ever know how the synoptic Gospels were composed.”[11] We have four different Gospels about Christ, yet these four voices have the same message. The Gospels are remarkably different and yet they agree in substance and in detail, without conspiring to tell the same story verbatim, as liars always do.[12]
James has been the brunt of the anti-canon arguments of the liberals. Although liberals never pay attention to the main body of Luther’s works, they misquote him on this subject, fail to acknowledge the use of polemics, and try to make believers think that the New Testament is expandable and collapsible. Luther did call James a “right, strawy epistle” but he said that “compared to the others.” If we read James next to Ephesians, the second work is simply brimming with Gospel proclamation. In contrast, James is more of a letter admonishing the churches about their sinful behavior. James does not lack the Gospel but cannot compare to Ephesians. Luther also reacted to James because the work was misused by the Roman party to advocate salvation through works. Thus many were misled by the citation of James on this subject. Therefore, it is not shocking that Luther would “throw Jimmie in the fire.” Obviously, he did not. Critics of Luther and the Epistle of James would be well advised to study James as thoroughly as Luther did and watch their tongues.
The New Testament canon accepts only the Four Gospels, even though many more Gospels were written in later times. The knowledge of other Gospels is exciting to people, until they read a few, showing Jesus sliding down a sunbeam or killing childhood friends. False books were circulated to advocate doctrinal positions, so they were relatively easy to discern as being discordant. In addition, apostolic letters were preserved with great care. They were valuable as possessions, since so much time was expended upon copying them correctly. But they were valued even more for their inspired message. No one confused a letter from Paul with an ordinary message. In addition, messages were sent without the formality of an epistle. Not every letter was preserved. Not ever letter was considered Scripture.
Initial arguments against the Bible were used by the Church of Rome to make the pope the sole authority in matters of faith and practice. Liberals use the same kind of arguments to make themselves little popes in the Christian Church. Most of the Biblical scholars of Christianity reject the divinity of Christ altogether and teach their enthusiastic charges to speak about Biblical matters without believing in them. Some of this began developing through lower criticism, but reached its highpoint of apostasy through higher criticism.
One may practice a legitimate form of Biblical study, the historical-grammatical approach, or an illegitimate form, the historical critical method (often abbreviated as HCM). The historical-grammatical approach to the Scriptures seeks the clearest possible understanding of the Word of God, based upon our knowledge of the times and the language used. Liberals provided a great deal of energy for conservative studies of all areas related to the Bible, from archeology to textual criticism, simply by their constant promotion of old heresies. A student of the Bible--he does not need to be a Ph.D.--will face questions of apparent contradictions and errors in the Scriptures and address them.
Liberals whine that those who advocate the traditional approach to the Scriptures are engaged in begging the question. Believing Christian students of the Bible begin with the understanding that the Holy Spirit has inspired the Scriptures, that the Word is one unified truth, without any errors or contradictions. They allow the Scriptures to interpret the Scriptures and do not place any book by man above the Bible. They assume that difficult passages may be illuminated by the clearest passages, and that any difficulties are due to the limitations of the reader rather than the deficiencies of the Author.
One might be forgiven for thinking that a book written for faith might be understood best through faith. However, liberals cry out that they are scientific, rational, and interested only in finding out the truth. They begin with their own assumptions. The Bible is just a book created by men, they say. For that reason, they argue that the Bible tells us a lot about the individual authors but little about God. That is like claiming that Moby Dick is a book about whaling. Although the liberals dismiss traditional Biblical studies as prejudiced, they view the Old Testament as primitive, the Son of God as a bastard child, the entire Bible as mythological, and believers as pathetic stooges. And yet, the liberals do not blush to make a living from the Biblical piety of the American people. Their theories are riddled with actual contradictions rather than apparent contradictions. For instance, they agree that the Gospels began as preaching texts. They also claim that their historical-critical method will discover the original meaning of the text. Nevertheless, they admit that the historical-critical method is useless for the preparation of sermons. The only practical use seems to be the training of future professors. In fact, the method is sterile and fruitless, a fact being quietly admitted in academic circles. In the face of the new radicalism of seminaries, the historical-critical method seems rather tepid.
Higher criticism can be given many labels, including literary criticism. The new approach began in the Church of Rome shortly after the Reformation, as described by Martin Chemnitz.
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