THE WORD OF GOD

Bible Preservation

Bible Transmission

"The first stream which carried the Received Text in Hebrew and Greek, began with the apostolic churches, and reappearing at intervals down the Christian Era among enlightened believers, was protected by the wisdom and scholarship of the pure church in her different phases: precious manuscripts were preserved by such as the church at Peeler in Palestine where Christians fled, when in 70 A.D. the Romans destroyed Jerusalem;…These manuscripts have in agreement with them, by far the vast majority of copies of the original text. So vast is this majority that even the enemies of the Received Text admit that nineteen-twentieths of all Greek manuscripts are in this class…

"The second stream is a small one of a very few manuscripts. These last manuscripts are represented: (a) In Greek: The Vaticanus MS., or Codex B, in the library at Rome; and the Sinaitic, or Codex Aleph, its brother…(b) In Latin: The Vulgate or Latin Bible of Jerome. (c) In English: The Jesuit Bible of 1582, which later with vast changes is seen in the Douay, or Catholic Bible. (d) In English again: In many modern Bibles which introduce practically all the Catholic readings of the Latin Vulgate which were rejected by the Protestants of the Reformation; among these, prominently, are the Revised Versions." (3)

In the second century A.D., the second stream of manuscripts began its covert mission to replace the copies of the original manuscripts. Fifty years after John the Apostle died (circa 100 A.D.), Justin Martyr and his disciple Taitan began to introduce heretical doctrines into the Christian churches. Taitan's pupil, Clement of Alexandria, founded a school at Alexandria, Egypt, for the dissemination of Gnosticism. But it was Clement's pupil, Origen, who Fuller states, "did the most of all to create and give direction to the forces of apostasy down through the centuries." As a Gnostic philosopher, one having hidden or occult knowledge, Origen scorned the historical basis of Scripture, and maintained that: "The Scriptures are of little use to those who understand them as they are written." (4) Dr. Phillip Schaff observed, "His predilection for Plato (the pagan philosopher) led him into many grand and fascinating errors." (5) Origen had also studied under the heathen Ammonius Saccas, who was the founder of the occult school of philosophy called Neo-Platonism.

Origen produced a six-column Bible, the Hexapla, which he subtly permeated with Gnostic doctrine. Diocletian (302-312), the last in an unbroken line of pagan emperors, had furiously sought to destroy the Christian sect and pursued every copy of their Scriptures to destroy them also. Constantine succeeded him as Roman emperor and converted to Christianity in 312 A.D. Desiring to bring peace to the Roman Empire, Constantine looked for a Bible which would facilitate the amalgamation of pagan religion and Christianity. Dr. Fuller records his decision:

"Quite naturally he preferred the one edited by Eusebius and written by Origen, the outstanding intellectual figure that had combined Christianity with Gnosticism in his philosophy, even as Constantine himself was the political genius that was seeking to unite Christianity with pagan Rome . . . Eusebius in publishing the Bible ordered by Constantine, had incorporated the manuscripts of Origen . . . The Church of Rome built on the Eusebio-Origen type of Bible..." (6)

Origen had been pronounced a "heretic" by a number of general synods in the early Church period. (7) The Church also recognized that the Alexandrian manuscripts produced by Origen had altered the Apostles’ doctrine and rejected them as heretical. (8) Early Christians chose not to use them and they were abandoned in Rome in 500 A.D. However, Fuller describes the powerful influence of Origen on the Roman Catholic religion during the Middle Ages:

"One of the greatest results of his life was that his teachings became the foundation of that system of education called Scholasticism, which guided the colleges of Latin Europe for nearly one thousand years during the Dark Ages. Origenism flooded the Catholic Church through Jerome. ‘I love . . . the name of Origen,’ says the most distinguished theologian of the Roman Catholic Church since 1850. (John Henry Newman)" (9)

Which Bible? also chronicles the transmission of the Received Text throughout Europe and the parallel transmission of the corrupt Alexandrian manuscripts throughout the period known as the Dark Ages to the Renaissance, which immediately preceded the Protestant Reformation. Dr. Fuller identifies Erasmus as the pioneer of this epic period in Church history:

"The Revival of Learning produced that giant intellect and scholar, Erasmus. It is a common proverb that ‘Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it.’ The streams of Grecian learning were again flowing into the European plains, and a man of calibre was needed to draw from their best and bestow it upon the needy nations of the West . . . Erasmus, during his mature years in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, was the intellectual giant of Europe . . . Europe was rocked from end to end by his books, which exposed the ignorance of the monks, the superstitions of the priesthood, the bigotry, and the childish and coarse religion of the day. He classified the Greek manuscripts and read the early Fathers . . . But his crowning work was the New Testament in Greek. At last after one thousand years, the New Testament was printed (1516 A.D.) in the original tongue. Astonished and confounded, the world, deluged by superstitions, coarse traditions, and monkeries, read the pure story of the Gospels." (10)

Desiderius Erasmus divided all of the Greek manuscripts into two classes: those which agreed with the Received or Traditional Text and those which agreed with the corrupt Vaticanus manuscript. (11) He then presented the Reformation Christians a Greek New Testament based on the Received Text. Even the members of the later 19th century English Revision Committee would acknowledge the pedigree of the Greek Text issued by Erasmus:

"'The manuscripts which Erasmus used, differ, for the most part, only in small and insignificant details from the bulk of the cursive manuscripts -- that is to say, the manuscripts which are written in running hand and not in capital or (as they are technically called) uncial letters. The general character of their text is the same. By this observation the pedigree of the Received Text is carried up beyond the individual manuscripts used by Erasmus to a great body of manuscripts of which the earliest are assigned to the ninth century’…This remarkable statement completes the pedigree of the Received Text. That pedigree stretches back to a remote antiquity. The first ancestor of the Received Text was, …at least contemporary with the oldest of our extant manuscripts, if not older than any one of them." (12)

Erasmus restored the Textus Receptus to its previous exalted status in Western Europe and Luther translated the New Testament into German using Erasmus' second edition. From Erasmus' Greek Text also came many other translations, such as the Zurich (Swiss) Version (1529), LeFevre's (French) Bible (1534), the Olivetan (French) Bible (1535), Laurentius (Swedish) Bible (1541), the Christian (Danish) Bible (1550), Biestken's (Dutch) Bible (1558), de Reyna's (Spanish) Bible (1569), the Czech Version (1602) and Diodati's (Italian) Bible (1607). (13)

According to Dr. Fuller, "William Tyndale is the true hero of the English Reformation." (14) Tyndale studied Greek under Erasmus at Cambridge University from 1510-1514. Fluent in seven languages, he translated two-thirds of the Bible into English using the Textus Receptus. William Tyndale was determined to put the Scriptures into the hands of the common people and was eventually martyred for his labors.

The Counter-Reformation

When the leadership of the Reformation passed from Germany to England, the Catholic Church recognized that it must regain England if the English-speaking world would be Catholic. The Jesuits produced an English New Testament in 1582 which in 1609, upon completion of the Old Testament based on the Alexandrian manuscripts of the type used by Constantine, became the Douay Rheims Bible. During this critical period, England would be assaulted by Rome not only from within by the Jesuit English New Testament in 1582, but also from without by the Spanish Armada which was allied with Rome. Determined to meet the challenge, in 1588, the English fleet defeated the Armada which positioned England to become a world sea power. On the spiritual front, the English clergy were alarmed that the Jesuit Bible was poisoning the people with Roman doctrines and one thousand ministers petitioned the English monarch, James VI, "that there might be a new translation of the Bible, without note or comment." (16)

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Last modified: December 15, 1999