Along with this comes the problem of the "inspiration" or lack of it as associated with the The New Testament writings. The New Testament and the inspired Apostles are silent on the subject and left the matter to serious doubts and disputations for many centuries: "There are no indications in the New Testament of a definite new Canon bequeathed by the Apostles to the Church, or of a strong self-witness to Divine inspiration," admits the Catholic Encyclopedia (Vol. iii, 274); that is, there is nothing in the 27 booklets which would lead to the suspicion of their "inspiration" or truth. There was then no Church for them to bequeath to, nor was the Canon settled, as we shall see. The Catholic Encyclopedia continues: "It was not until about the middle of the second century that these books were really written and that under the rubric of Scripture the New Testament writings were assimilated to the Old. . . . But it should be remembered that the inspired character of the New Testament is a Catholic dogma, and must therefore in some way have been revealed to, and taught by, Apostles! (lb. p. 275.)
Answer for yourself: Did you notice that the Catholic encyclopedia just admitted that the bulk of the New Testament writings were written not by the apostles and intimate followers of Jesus but were later written long after their deaths in in the "middle of the second century"? Of course this means "Gentile" authorship and this goes a long way to explain all the inaccuracies concerning Judaism and the Old Testament when mentioned in the New Testament. These Gentile writers were simply not conversant upon Biblical Judaism because they were not Jews!
Further, the dubious and disputed status of the sacred writings through centuries, and the ultimate settlement of the controversies by a numerical majority of the Council of Trent, in 1546 (after the Reformation had forced the issue), is thus admitted:
"The idea of a complete and clear-cut canon of the New Testament existing from the beginning, that is, from Apostolic times, has no foundation in history. The canon of the New Testament, like that of the Old, is the result of a development, of a process at once stimulated by disputes with doubters, both within and without the Church, and retarded by certain obscurities and natural hesitations, and which did not reach its final term until the dogmatic definition of the Tridentine Council. . . . And this want of an organized distribution, secondarily to the absence of an early fixation of the Canon, left room for variation and doubts which lasted far into the centuries." (Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. iii, 274.) The modus operandi of the Holy Council in ultimately "canonizing" Jerome's old Vulgate Version, and its motive for doing so, are thus exposed by the keen pen of the author of The Rise and Fall:
"When the Council of Trent resolved to pronounce sentence on the Canon of Scripture, the opinion which prevailed, after some debate, was to declare the Latin Vulgate authentic and almost infallible; and this sentence, which was guarded by formidable anathemas, secured all the books of the Old and New Testament which composed that ancient version. . . . When the merit of that version was discussed, the majority of the theologians urged, with confidence and success, that it was absolutely necessary to receive the Vulgate as authentic and inspired, unless they wished to abandon the victory to the Lutherans, and the honors of the Church to the Grammarians." (Gibbon, A Vindication, v, 2; Istoria del Consiglio Tridentino, L. ii, p. 147.) A number of these books were bitterly disputed and their authenticity and inspiration denied by the leading Reformers, Luther, Grotius, Calvin, etc., and excluded from their official lists, until finally the Reformed Church followed the example of the Church hopeless of reform and swallowed the canon whole, as we have it today, minus, of course, the Tobit, Judith, and like inspired buffooneries of the True Bible.
Such books and the vicissitudes of their authenticity are thus described: "Like the Old Testament, the New has its deutero-canonical [i.e. doubted] books and portions of books, their canonicity having formerly been a subject of some controversy in the Church. These are, for entire books: the Epistle to the Hebrews, that of James, the Second and Third of John, Jude, and Apocalypse; giving seven in all as the number of the N. T. contested books. The formerly disputed passages are three:
Since the Council of Trent it is not permitted for a Catholic to question the inspiration of these passages. (Catholic Encyclopedia, iii, 274.) Besides the forgery of the above and other books as a whole, we shall see many other instances of "interpolated" or forged passages in the Christian books.
"The Gospel has come down to us," says Bishop Irenaeus (about 185 A.D.), "which the apostles did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith. . . . For, after our Lord rose from the dead [the apostles] departed to the ends of the earth, preaching the glad tidings of the good things sent from God to us, who indeed do equally and individually possess the Gospel of God." (Iren., Adv. Haer, Bk. III, ch. i; ANF. i, 414.)
You need to set down for this because this will take your breath away. The Second New Testament, in response to Marcion's First New Testament, was given to us by Bishop Irenaeus. Both Bishop Irenaeus and Bishop Papias have both averred that the Christ lived to old age (even at late as 98-117 A.D.), flatly denying thus as "heresy" the Gospel stories as to his crucifixion at about thirty years of age (Wheless, Forgery In Christianity, p. 173). In any event, the Apostles, according to the record, scattered to the ends of the earth, preaching, orally, before they wrote anything at all.
Traditional Christianity and many of our Bibles attest that the New Testament was not written all at once, but the books that compose it appeared one after another in the space of fifty years, i.e., in the second half of the first century. That this last clause is untrue will be fully and readily demonstrated. This statement, too, contradicts Bishops Papias and Irenaeus, who are, positively, the only two of the second century Fathers who up to their times at all mention written Gospels or their supposed authors, as we have seen and shall more particularly notice.
And Catholic Encyclopedia says, as is true, of the earliest existing manuscripts of any New Testament books: "We have New Testament MSS. written not much more than 300 years after the composition of the books"; and it admits (though with much diminution of truth, as we shall see: "And in them we find numerous differences, though but few of them are important." (Catholic Encyclopedia xiv, 526.) In this Catholic Encyclopedia at another place, and speaking much more nearly the truth, contradicts itself, saying: "The existence of numerous and, at times, considerable differences between the four canonical Gospels is a fact which has long been noticed and which all scholars readily admit. . . . Those evangelical records (SS. Matthew, Mark, Luke) whose mutual resemblances are obvious and striking, and . . . the narrative (that of St. John) whose relation with the other three is that of dissimilarity rather than that of likeness." (Catholic Encyclopedia vi, 658.)
But the so-called "canonical" books of the New Testament are a mess of contradictions and confusions of text, to the present estimate of 150,000 and more "variant readings," as is well known and admitted. Thus Catholic Encyclopedia:
"It is easy to understand how numerous would be the readings of a text transcribed as often as the Bible, and, as only one reading can represent the original, it follows that all the others are necessarily faulty.
Mill estimated the variants of the New Testament at 30,000, and since the discovery of so many MSS. unknown to Mill, this number has greatly increased." (Catholic Encyclopedia iv, 498.)
Answer for yourself: Who, then, is "inspired" to distinguish true from false readings, and thus to know what Jesus Christ and his entourage really said and did, or what some copyist's error or priest's forgery make them say or do, falsely? Well one thing is for certain it surely is not the average Christian who has never studied these issues or read any scholarly books upon the subject. But fortunately not all the follower of Jesus are ignorant of such problems with the New Testament.
Of the chaos and juggling of sacred texts in the Great Dioceses of Africa, Catholic Encyclopedia says: "There never existed in early Christian Africa an official Latin text known to all the Churches, or used by the faithful to the exclusion of all others. The African bishops willingly allowed corrections to be made in a copy of the Sacred Scriptures, or even a reference, when necessary, to the Greek text. With some exceptions, it was the Septuagint text that prevailed, for the Old Testament until the fourth century. In the case of the New, the MSS. were of the Western type. On this basis there arose a variety of translations and interpretations. . . . Apart from the discrepancies to be found in two quotations from the same text in the works of two different authors, and sometimes of the same author, we now know that of several books of Scripture there were versions wholly independent of each other." (Catholic Encyclopedia i, 193.)
Bishop Victor of Tunnunum, who died about 569 A. D. and whose work, says Catholic Encyclopedia, "is of great historical value," says that in the fifth century, "In the consulship of Messala, at the command of the Emperor Anastasius, the Holy Gospels, as written Idiotis Evangelistis, are corrected and amended." (Victor of T., Chronica, p. 89-90; cited by Dr. Mills, Prolegom. to R. V., p. 98.)
Answer for yourself: What does all of this mean to me...the average Christian?
This would indicate some very substantial tinkering with Holy Writ; which process was a continuing one, for, says Catholic Encyclopedia, "Under Sixtus V (1585-90) and Clement VIII (1592-1605) the Latin Vulgate after years of revision attained its present shape." (Catholic Encyclopedia, xii, 769.) And the Vulgate, which was fiercely denounced as fearfully corrupt, was only given sanction of divinity by the Council of Trent in 1546, under the Curse of God against any who questioned it. Though this amendatory tinkering of their two Holinesses was after the Council of Trent had put the final Seal of the Holy Ghost on the Vulgate in 1546!
Let us not forget that as Protestants we have come from such people and their religious persuasions, and that being fact, are faced with the stark realization that we have inherited their religious documents as well.
Answer for yourself: What is the truth about the New Testament that has come down to us today from the Catholic Church...is it truly the Word of God or has it replaced the Word of God and I not know it? It is to these issues we turn in this series on "What Your Pastor Has Failed To Teach You About The New Testament."
More to follow.