Faced with the irrefutable truth that the history of the Protestant New Testament is one of mass of confusion, a die-hard fundamentalist, trying desperately to cling to his faith, might naturally be tempted to look at the forerunner of their New Testament, i.e., the Latin Vulgate, as a possible candidate for the "infallible" word of God. Even though such a claim is made by the Roman Catholic Church the truth is that their own history relates a different story.
Christian legend says that in the time of St. Jerome the bible then in use, which is now known as the Old Latin, was deemed to be in a mess. So hopeless was the situation that the pope himself prevailed upon the great St. Jerome to correct the situation by using the "original Greek" New Testament to produce a new translation (The New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 2, p. 441). This Jerome supposedly did. The editors of The Cambridge History of the Bible make the point essential to this study: "A natural question is: Can the 'old' Greek manuscript that Jerome used in the preparation of the Vulgate gospels be identified? The short answer is, No" (The New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 2, p. 529). However, as they point out, scholars are able to partially identify some of Jerome's work as being based on both the Alexandrian and Western families of text—which doesn't tell us a whole lot (The New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 2, p. 529). For instance it doesn't tell us anything about the "original" manuscripts or their origin, nor does it tell us how much of these Jerome used or indeed how many changes he made. To accept the Latin Vulgate as the "infallible word of God" one essentially has to place their faith in Jerome and equally in the numerous revisers that followed him. They also have to unquestionably accept the manuscripts behind the Vulgate.
Considering that all we really know of the Vulgate is that it is based on the Old Latin, then we need to examine this source closer, which is virtually impossible because it has an obscure origin. The only definite fact about the Old Latin is that the surviving fragments exhibit many variations, which means that they are far from being a candidate for the "infallible" word of God." On top of this almost all scholars seriously doubt that Jerome ever translated the entire New Testament, which tells us that the Vulgate, like the Protestant versions, is essentially nothing more than a composite work (The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. I, pp. 373-374). Jerome is essentially credited with translating the four-gospels. Short and to the point, these are the facts that are conveniently forgotten while Roman Catholics denounce the heresy of Protestant bible translations!
Answer for yourself: But what about the other sources for Jerome's work? What about the Alexandrian and Western texts, which scholars have identified as partial sources for the Vulgate, and which, by the way, are also employed by scholars for modern Protestant translations?
A “codice” is a manuscript volume containing the Scriptures. To further complicate matters for fundamentalist Christians the last few centuries have brought the discoveries of several so-called great Uncials, so designated because they were written in Greek capital letters. The Unicals are the oldest known extant manuscripts of the Christian New Testament and are as follows: The Codex Alexandrinus from the fifth century AD, the Codex Sinaiticus from the fourth or early fifth centuries; The Codex Vaticanus, the oldest, from the fourth century; the Codex Ephroemi, from the fifth century and the Codex Bezae from the sixth century.
One would think that the discovery of these MSS. would be a welcomed event in Christendom, hailed as a great advancement in the study of Christian scripture. It was not!
Answer for yourself: Why not for Heaven's sake?
This is because the great Uncials not only disagree with the present Christian bible, they show unmistakable signs of having been heavily edited.
Imagine, the oldest known MSS. of the New Testament show disturbing evidence of having been "worked over" by Catholic monks!
And, if these facts weren't bad enough, some of the great Uncials include the ancient and so-called spurious books of the bible. For example the Codex Sinaiticus includes the Epistle of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas—a fact that focuses one's attention on the infamous Christian councils and their disgraceful process of "canonizing" the New Testament, a subject that I will deal with shortly.
To completely understand why these oldest of all manuscripts are so controversial within fundamental Christianity we only need cite several examples.
In 1938 scholar T.C. Skeat examined the fourth century Codex Sinaiticus under ultra-violet light. Under the visible text he found the following verse, which had been erased: "Consider the lilies of the field: they neither card nor spin. " Biblical historian Robin Lane Fox writes, "the King James translators have beguiled us with a wrong version; there was growing, no toiling, in what the author wrote. Strictly, there were no 'lilies', because they are a very free translation of the Greek; however, the botanists' favorite candidate for the flower in question (a Stembergia) would spoil the flow of the saying" (Fox, The Unauthorized Version, pp. 140-141, referring to Matthew 6:28).
Another example is the story of Jesus' encounter with the woman taken in adultery. Manfred Barthel writes, "Two passages in this Gospel [John] are not included in the most reliable ancient manuscripts, and stylistic analysis confirms that they were added by another writer" (What the Bible Really Says, p. 232). Robin Lane Fox adds, "'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her"; “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more". The episode is missing from the surviving fourth-century codices which underpin the rest of the New Testament text; it is not known in an early papyrus or any quotation by an early Christian author, although the subject was relevant to so much which they discussed. Its style is universally held to differ from the rest of the fourth Gospel, and in its present place it interrupts the flow of the text" (The Unauthorized Version, p. 143).
Most Christians are unaware that there are two versions of the Acts of the Apostles. One is almost a tenth longer than the other. Again, Robin Lane Fox makes the relevant observation: "The shorter, usual text is based on one of the main Greek lines, the Alexandrian, whereas the longer alternative is best represented in a book-text, Codex Bezae, of the fifth to sixth century date which contains the Gospels and Acts in Greek and Latin. Its extra wordings and variant readings are sometimes reflected in early Christian quotations or in early papyrus fragments of Acts' text" (The Unauthorized Version, p. 141).
In just these few examples out of hundreds we can see why so many present-day ministers have denounced the great codices as corrupt—they present an embarrassing predicament. And these are simple examples and not nearly as serious as the inclusion or pagan doctrines as put into the mouth of Jesus and others in the New Testament [http://paganizingfaithofyeshua.netfirms.com]. Essentially, what we see in the most ancient extant Greek manuscripts is the evolution, if you'll pardon the expression, of the New Testament Gospel stories especially when compared to the present-day finished product. That this is exactly what these MSS. prove has caused no small embarrassment for countless theologians who, on more than one occasion, have said that it was unfortunate that these early MSS. survived to the present because by their contents they serve no useful purpose for the unity of the Christian faith.
Such embarrassment stands behind the following comment from Christian fundamentalist, Dr. D.A. Waite, in his book Defending the King James Bible. After relating the story about how Professor Konstantin von Tischendorf discovered the Codex Sinaiticus in a trash basket at St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, and buying it for several hundred dollars, Waite quotes a Dr. James Qurollo: "I don't know which of them had the truer evaluation of its worth—Tischendorf, who wanted to buy it, or the monks, who were getting ready to burn it!" Waite adds to this comment, "He had to pay for the trash. It really was that, because of all the heretic' changes"(Waite, Defending The King James Bible, p. 60).
Heresy, as Dr. Waite charges, is not the only transparent argument used against the great codices. Here is an even more radical excuse, which is offered by a Christian fundamentalist church: "The oldest extant copies [of the New Testament] are the most corrupt! . . . The oldest fragments of the New Testament are of the 'Western Text,' used by the early Catholic Church fathers in the first three centuries. This type of text is full of spurious additions, notable corruption's, deletions and contradictions. These 'oldest' fragments vary so from each other that there would be no way of knowing what constitutes the New testament! This 'Western Text' admittedly originated in Rome!"
Dr. D.A. Waite echoes this opinion: "Both Dr. Frederick Scrivener and Dean John William Burgon agreed that the greatest pollution of the stream of pure manuscripts was accomplished in the first 100 years after the New Testament was written! So some believe that the oldest are not necessarily the best! This is especially true since the heretics had their knives out "correcting" the Greek N.T. almost as soon as it was written" (The Four-Fold Superiority of the King James Version, p. 8). Waite follows this thought in his book, Defending the King James Bible, when he writes of the oldest codices: ". . . [they] had very little, if any, use by their owners. I believe this was true because the owners recognized them to be perverted texts, having been defaced and polluted by heretics and others . . . they are neither the best nor the purest. They were corrupted by heretics" (p. 59). With these biased, ignorant words ringing in our ears, let's touch on a very significant point.
Christian fundamentalists laud the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular the Book of Isaiah, as incontrovertible evidence that the Old Testament is the "infallible word of God." That is to say, because the Isaiah scroll essentially agrees with the now accepted book of Isaiah, or the Masoretic text of the Christian bible, it is proof; say the fundamentalists, of Isaiah's authenticity and God's hand in its preservation. This is a fine sounding argument if it weren't for one problem: Among those same Dead Sea Scrolls is a copy of the book of Jeremiah that is more in line with the Septuagint, which is the translation behind the Old Testament of the great Uncials. This fact has caused considerable controversy within many fundamentalist Christian circles, and it may well be one of the reasons that it took some fifty years before Christian scholars were finally forced lo make the Dead Sea Scrolls public.
But let us notice something: the same men who hold up the ancient example of the Dead Sea Scroll book of Isaiah as proving the authenticity of the bible, will not apply the same test to the oldest Greek MSS. of the New Testament. That is because when applied to the New Testament this comparison proves the opposite of what they are claiming, which is the doctrine of an infallible Christian bible. Hence they complain that the oldest are the most corrupt! This claim, by the way, is an unscientific principle, especially in the field of history where the closer one comes to the original source the nearer they are to the truth. At Qumran was discovered older Hebrew texts that differed considerably in unique places from the Greek Septuagint and which also predated it by some 1000 years. This is of importance because they also basically agreed with the oldest existing (up to then) Hebrew texts of 900-1000 A.D. These older Hebrew texts had differed also considerably with the Greek LXX and were basically discounted by Christianity as the more authentic because of their age as well as their "theological diversity" when compared with the LXX. But with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls the Jewish Palestinian Masoretic text was exonerated and now the question as to "theological diversity" falls squarely upon the Greek Septuagint which now appears to have altered in no small way the "theology" concerning atonement and the Jewish Messiah. Basically Christianity has been turned upside down with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (see http://bennoah1.freewebsites.com).
Perhaps the irony of the whole situation is that if the great Uncials had been in complete agreement with the present-day Christian bible, their discovery would have been hailed as one of the greatest events in Christian history! Indeed, most Christian fundamentalists blatantly display their hypocrisy in this regard by their consistent use of the earliest known fragments of the New Testament as proof of the New Testament's authenticity. In other words because of their age (the earliest dating from the second century AD) these fragments are lauded as proof that the New Testament was written by the men to whom later church lathers assigned authorship. However, what is conveniently forgotten is that these early fragments, like the great Uncials, are from the so-called Alexandrian and Western texts, meaning that they often disagree with the present-day Byzantine Text-based New Testament.
Even more to the point is that when compared one to another, these fragments are full of contradictions. First of all there are only some eighty eight pieces that date before AD 300, with only a few dating before AD 180. As to their conflicting readings we only need cite the example of two early papyri from the Gospel of John. They overlap across seventy verses and, as Robin Lane Fox notes, "even if the plain errors of their copyists are excluded, they differ at no less than seventy small places (Fox, The Unauthorized Version, p. 139).
However, none of the above information seems to deter the intellectually dishonest. Even with the history of the New Testament squarely in front of them they still make statements like this: "None of the modern [NT] scholars have thought to look at the bulk of later New Testament Manuscripts —95% of known Greek Biblical MSS. [i.e., the Byzantine Texts]—which the Greek people and its church have always used! These later MSS., copied century after century from earlier ones as they wore out, are the fundamental basis of the King James Version (KJV)."
As we have seen from the information already presented the author of this statement is being completely dishonest. Scholars have indeed "thought to look at the bulk of later New Testament Manuscripts", which is why there is such great confusion among the many different New Testament translations. Further, the manuscripts that the "Greek people and its church have always used" date back only to the seventh century AD, with complete texts preserved about 200 years later than this time. The author compounds this misinformation with the following: "The nearly 4,000 MSS. of this Byzantine or Official Text agree so perfectly with each other that the only work of the critic is to weed out individual scribal mistakes in the copying of each Ms. The text is not in question!' The author of the above never bothered to give any sources for his statements, which was wise considering the evidence would expose his dishonesty. Yet, I for one, as a former dedicated "the bible is the infallible word of God" advocate, would never have questioned such statements in the past. I would have read this statement in total agreement! Why? Because my fundamentalist background and natural life-long bias in favor of Christianity would lead me to accept without question such an argument—just like a born-Buddhist would accept the fundamentals of his faith without question. The fact is that like 99.99% of all Christians, I had never bothered to research the history of the New Testament. I was born into a Christian fundamentalist family, had grown up believing in New Testament infallibility, and that was good enough for me. My past attitude can be summed up in the little fundamentalist ditty so often quoted: "the bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it!"
What I sadly found out upon serious investigation is that nothing could be further from the truth, and because of believing such lies of biased non-Jews I lived the vast majority of my life opposing the God I loved both in doctrine and conduct because I had believed "in the New Testament" and patterned my life and thoughts after it. Thank God in Heaven that my eyes were opened to the beautiful truth of Biblical Judaism; the faith of Yeshua. More in the next article.