Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Summary - Attempted Murder of the Bible - Foiled!

 

PART TWO – The Greek New Testament Text Fraud

 

Brief Summary

            The second part is more like a hastily produced crime drama, not at all elegant or certain, because the narrative involves the attempted murder – of the Bible. The evidence abounds but the facts are disputed, the heroes defamed, and the criminals deified. A young man had a great future, but his parents died while he was in the university. He had to drop out. His name was Constantine Tischendorf. He was able to work his way back into the school by lecturing, but that only served to renew his ambition. As a young professor, he managed to lay claim on Ephraim Rescriptus, a manuscript of the Bible overwritten, after being erased, by the little-known Ephraim. Tischendorf claimed to have unusual eyesight which enabled him to produce the original. The future events developed slowly, but they were pivotal for the attempt on the Bible. Tischendorf had a papal audience, very unusual for a German Lutheran, and saw his ability to travel and make pronouncements increased. He seemed drawn to a particular location, a monastery called “St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai,” but really a Disney Mt. Sinai, with a long history and fake Biblical sights to see.

            The first evidence of Tischendorf’s criminal attempt is the fable of his discovery of Codex Sinaiticus (a bound book – codex – found there – Sinaiticus). He and his family told the same lie, time after time. He found sheets of parchment loose in a basket, ready to be burned, as many sheets had before, but he intervened to save them. The monks saved, repaired, and preserved ancient documents. The oldest and most obscure were valuable to the monks – and most importantly – to collectors. This was parchment – leather – and would stink in a fire and not heat anything. Constantine did not save but stole pages from the bound codex and presented the pages to a Roman Catholic ruler. He eventually stole the entire volume by promising to have it set in print in Russia, calling it Aleph, for the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet. He claimed it was over 15 centuries old and promoted it as the greatest find in Biblical history. This and his look at Codex Vaticanus made him the hero of 19th century text criticism, a role which he carefully crafted himself.

            Scholars, clergy, and laity may debate the histories and origins of Sinaiticus (Aleph) and Vaticanus (B). One thing is clear – both books are barren and have no descendants. Such books would have been read and copied to death, producing new ones to be used by the faithful. Worn-out parchment (leather) copies would be burned and the deluxe, costly leather copies used to produce accurate papyrus (paper) copies.

            The apostolic witness of the New Testament was preserved by the Christian Church and manuscripts in the thousands prove that to be true. The term Received Text comes from a phrase by Erasmus when he first edited a Greek New Testament. The 1100 years-old Byzantine Roman Empire - Greek-speaking, Christian, almost forgotten by historians - preserved the Majority Text, which is also called the Byzantine Text and the Traditional or Ecclesiastical Text.[1]

            Tischendorf promoted his heroics, which appealed to those who wanted the oldest witnesses to be quite different from the traditional text. Westcott and Hort took over the job of promotion and created their own Greek New Testament in secret for use in the 19th century revision of the KJV. They pushed it upon the groups of KJV revision scholars but did not publish their Greek text until the new Bible came out. Many were horrified by the liberties and unvarnished egos of Westcott and Hort, but this approach took over by the 1930s and now controls all new Bible translations. Their “modern, scientific, precise” translations are nothing more than cobbled-together, copy and paste jobs edited by the authority of the Bible book sellers.



[1] Steven edited the Byzantine Text, so that edition is called the Stephanus, which I use for all Greek New Testament citations in sermons, articles, and books.