Canonization of the Bible

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Over the last several months we have looked into cults and how to effectively witness to them. Before we move on any further, I feel we should also have a time to examine what we believe about the Bible. Specifically the Canonization of the Bible.
What does the word Canon mean?
It means to “measure up”.
The word canon comes from the rods people in the Ancient Near East (Egypt, Israel, etc.) constructed from papyrus, which were then cut and marked at standard lengths to ensure consistent measurements. Essentially, a canon was a modern-day mathematic ruler, but instead of being made out of plastic it was cut from papyrus reeds.
The biblical canon, then, is the set of books which “measure up,” according to the inspiration and authority you would expect from the Word of God. The church’s task was not to grant authority and inspiration, but to discern which books already measured up.
One of the most common objections to the Bible is the claim that it was pieced together so late after the time of Christ, and there were so many other gospels and letters which were excluded.
What book was a major factor in this accusation?
The DaVinci Code.
The book was widely disliked by Christians because it accused the church of using political power to control people in some form or another. It also introduced the idea of other unbiblical heresies such as Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene and the promotion of Gnosticism.
This was a major accusation brought forth from The DaVinci Code, and it caught on because it’s so scandalous to say, “The Church grabbed political power to push out the people who belonged to a different ‘branch’ of Christianity.” But is this accurate?
Early Church Father and apologist, Irenaeus, wrote in his book, Against Heresies (circa 160 A.D.), “…those who are from Valentinus [the most prominent Gnostic-Christian theologian in the Early Church] are altogether reckless. They create their own Scriptures, boasting that they possess more Gospels than there really are. Indeed, they have gone to such a degree of audacity, as to entitle their comparatively recent writing the Gospel of Truth though it agrees in nothing with the Gospels of the Apostles so that they have really no gospel which is not full of blasphemy.”

The Marks of “Canonicity”

From the beginning, the Early Church used three criteria to discern which books measured up to what you would expect from the Word of God.

The books must be biblical

The New Testament must not contradict the Old Testament. Many of the Gnostic gospels were immediately dismissed from the canon because their teachings simply were not in line with biblical teaching, especially regarding creation and salvation. Much in the New Testament teaches how Christ fulfilled and expanded upon Old Testament teachings – but there are not contradictions. There is the continuity and agreement one would expect from God’s desire to unfold his plan for his people throughout history.

The books must be apostolic

There was early agreement that the teachings of the Apostles and other first-hand witnesses would be prioritized. For instance, Matthew was an Apostle who was present for most of what he wrote in his gospel. Paul was not technically an apostle of Jesus, but he had a direct encounter with him on the road to Damascus. Luke was not an apostle either, but he got his information from first-hand sources who walked with Jesus.
Just as in research today, primary sources give credibility.

The books must have been widely shared

There were many letters sent throughout the Christian world. We know that Paul wrote at least three letters to the Corinthian church, and yet only two of them carried marks of canonicity, because the other letters were not extensively circulated and have been lost in history. Gospels and epistles which carried authority inspired traveling Christians to make copies and take them to the various churches they encountered throughout their journey. These books became widely distributed, rather than only read within particular regions.
As books were considered for the canon, the church leaders’ job was made easiest because of this requirement: almost every church already recognized which books were authoritative, and frequently read those writings as they gathered for worship. Those gospels and epistles only read in certain areas were considered, but came up short because they demonstrated too much particularity and too little catholic/universal appeal to the people of God.
This leads us into another realm of dealing with how we got our bible today.

Biblical Texts

Hebrew Text

What is the name of the group of manuscripts that make up your Old Testament text?
Masoretic Text.

The term “Masora” itself can mean either “to bind,” referring to a protection for the scriptures, or “to hand down,” referring to traditions

How did we get this text?
What was the process?
Who compiled and developed this text?

From around AD 500–1000, a group of scribes known as the Masoretes held the responsibility of textual transmission for the Jewish people. Their primary task was to fix a final form to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament that was faithful to the text that they had received.

It received its final form in the 10th century AD under Aaron Ben Asher of the Tiberian Masoretes (Tov, Textual Criticism, 24.) It is currently best represented in the Leningrad Codex, which is the base text for the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) and the ongoing work of the Biblia Hebraica Quinta.

The Leningrad Codex is in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, Russia.
All of this leads us to discuss a very important topic.
What is Textual Criticism?

The name given to the critical study of ancient manuscripts and versions of texts, for the purpose of ascertaining a correct reading of the text. Textual criticism has been applied to both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament.

The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary Textual Criticism (Old Testament)

The goal of OT textual criticism is to analyze and evaluate the data representing the text of the Hebrew Bible and to trace in broad outline the history of this text. For that purpose it collects the relevant data from the Hebrew sources and reconstructs them from the ancient translations (versions).

What many people seem to believe is that there are a group of people who have a large number of manuscripts that compile them and then translate them into a TLDR ‘version’.
See many people think that they have a bible that is a recension of the biblical text.
A recension being a revision of either an edition or text.
That is not contents of the Masoretic Text.
Before 1946 this was a debated subject among scholars.
What happened in 1946?
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the Qumran Caves north of the Dead Sea.
These scrolls revealed that the Masoretic Text was not a recension of a text but the text itself.
Meaning that those texts were part of a collection of thousands of texts that had been copied and distributed throughout history.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls only further confirmed the biblical text of the Masoretic Text.
What scroll was the largest and most complete manuscript of the Old Testament books?
Isaiah.
The scroll measured about 10-10.5 inches tall, 24 feet long, and contains 54 columns on 17 sheets of parchment.
The Great Isaiah Scroll is the largest and best preserved of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the only one that is almost complete. It is written in ink on sheepskin that has been sewn together. The scroll dates from about 150 to 100 BCE and contains almost the whole Book of Isaiah. It is currently housed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
The Lexham Bible Dictionary Central Position of the Masoretic Text in Tradition and Research

Within the field of textual criticism, the Masoretic Text is usually considered the central text because it is the best-preserved text of the Hebrew Bible.

Almost every modern bible translation uses the Masoretic Text.
I would say that it is the most agreed upon text within biblical textual criticism.

Greek Text

There are several Greek texts that have existed, but I would narrow it down to two.
What two texts have been mostly used for the majority of the ancient and modern eras?
Textus Receptus
Alexandrian
What does Textus Receptus mean?
Hint: It is Latin.
Received Text.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) issued the first publication of the Greek New Testament in 1516. He began to assemble the manuscripts along with a publisher by the name of Johann Froben. His sources for the text were a number of manuscripts that were from the Byzantine texts from the Byzantine empire.
In any event, the fact that Erasmus had only a handful of manuscripts during his preparation of the 1516 edition is irrelevant in regards to the reliability of the text underlying the KJV. First of all, no scholar disputes the fact that Erasmus had studied variant readings of the New Testament throughout his life prior to publishing the Textus Receptus. In fact, the study of variant readings in the Greek New Testament did not begin with Erasmus but with scholars such as Thomas Linacre (1460-1524) and John Colet (1467-1519), and even as far back as Jerome (347-420). Although Erasmus spent only two years in front of a handful of Greek manuscripts to compose his first edition, his knowledge concerning the Greek New Testament and its variants did not come solely from looking at these few manuscripts in the two year period. Secondly, the KJV was completed in 1611 – almost a century after Erasmus composed his first edition of the Textus Receptus in 1516. The KJV translators most likely used the 1598 edition of Beza. At least three-quarters of a century of scholarship had gone into the Textus Receptus by the time of the KJV. Erasmus updated his Textus Receptus in 1519, 1522, and 1527. Stephanus also edited the Textus Receptus in 1546, 1549, 1550, and 1551. Beza edited the Textus Receptus nine times between 1565 and 1604.
Link: Is the Textus Receptus Based on Only a Few Manuscripts? - Text and Translation
The KJV translators were not ignorant of the body of manuscripts and variant readings. The 1611 KJV has marginal notes next to the following verses showing alternate readings:
Matthew 1:11, Matthew 26:26, Luke 10:22, Luke 17:36, John 18:13, Acts 25:6, Ephesians 6:9, James 2:18, 1 Peter 2:21, Peter 2:2, 11, 18, 2 John 8.
This shows that the KJV translators were not translating in a Textus Receptus vacuum. There were other manuscripts available to the KJV translators, and yet they used the Textus Receptus.
What is meant by the Byzantine Text?
Shortly before A.D. 400 the Roman empire was divided into two parts, the western Roman empire and the eastern or Byzantine empire. Within a century after this division the western empire came to an end, and western Europe sank into a state of near barbarism. The Byzantine empire continued, though often in a greatly weakened state, until A.D. 1453.
For about a thousand years, the Greek language was completely unknown in western Europe, but remained the official language of the Byzantine empire. During this time both portions of the former Roman empire contained many monasteries in which the monks were required to do a certain amount of work each day. One way to fulfill this work requirement was to copy manuscripts. In the western monasteries Latin manuscripts, including the Latin Bible, were copied and recopied by the monks. In the Byzantine monasteries Greek manuscripts were copied, including copies of the Greek Bible.
Some of these scribes were greatly interested in what they were copying, but for others the copying was merely an assigned task. In the course of copying, little mistakes invariably come in, so that no two manuscripts of the Latin Bible or of the Greek Bible are exactly the same. During this period, as visitors passed from one Byzantine monastery to another, and manuscripts were interchanged from time to time, the tendency naturally developed to bring the manuscripts into harmony with one another. Where early manuscripts differed slightly there was a tendency to combine the readings. Thus there developed a text which is found, with many variations, in the manuscripts copied in the Byzantine empire in the later middle ages.
The Alexandrian text is also known as the Critical text or the Codex Sinaiticus.
Some have claimed it came to be found in a trash bin inside the Vatican or inside a monastery library.
The truth is that Westcott and Hort who popularized the text were at worse unbelievers and at best very liberal leaning in Christendom. They were associated with the Anglican church which only stems from Catholicism due to its previous stance on divorce that aided Henry VIII.
There are issues with the text and its origins are debated.
What is certain is that no scholar can debate or deny that the Byzantine text or the Majority text makes up for over 90% of all the Greek manuscripts found or known to date.
So how many manuscripts are we talking about?
The Received Text is based on 5,210 out of 5,255 manuscripts according to Dr. Waite (remember the Critical Text uses 45 manuscripts).
Interestingly, even Westcott and Hort recognized the Received Text as being universally accepted and used by the churches from about 450–1850 AD.
Today there are 5,800 known Greek New Testament manuscripts that make up the Byzantine/Majority Text.
There are still only 45 manuscripts for the Critical Text. According to Google, there are only 30 surviving Greek New Testament manuscripts that make up the Alexandrian Text.
So of the manuscripts found, how many of them are apocryphal books?
17. The gospel of Thomas having the most manuscripts consisting of 3 manuscripts.
There were several reasons that the Apocrypha was removed.
Jesus never quoted from any of the books (some other writers did quote from them.)
Readers were confusing them with inspired scripture
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