Bring Ye Faith and The Word of God to the Masses, page 3

Hey DryBankRuta:

One of the biggest problems that "Fundamentalist Christians" (and Orthodox Jews for that matter) have when discussing "inspired scripture" and "the inerrant text of the Bible" is...EXACTLY what texts do they include in that description, and why...

Two immediate problems surface:

l. What list of books are to be included in this "Inspired Bible" and

2. What EXACT VERSION of these texts are the inspired ones, no two copies being exactly alike.

The list of books that went into the "bible" were the result of raucous councils of Rebbes (OT) and Bishops (NT), and there was no clear consensus for CENTURIES as to which books to include or not.

The 4th century "Codex Sinaiticus" for example contains books like the SHEPHERD OF HERMAS and I CLEMENT as "inspired holy Scripture" as part of its New Testament (NT) but these books are not part of "fundamentalist Christians' Bibles" today...

How did this state of affairs come about?

As you should know by now (I've certainly repeated it often enough in my posts !), "Jesus" (i.e. R. Yehoshua bar Yosef the Galilean) DID NOT have THE SAME OLD TESTAMENT that we know today (i.e. a single book between two covers).

Picture a corner of a room with 180 SEPARATE Rolls of Wallpaper standing up in a group, all of which were called SCRIPTURES during the lifetime of "Jeeezuz" (i.e. c. BC 12 to AD 36) and most of his immediate followers (i.e. AD 12 to AD 70).

The problem that people who claim to have a BIBLE is that of what books to include: since.....

The canon of Jewish Scriptures was not "officially closed" until the so-called council of Javneh (Jamnia) in AD 90, a full 55 years after the Roman execution of "Jesus". That was AFTER the Jewish War when 900,000 Palestinian Jews were slaughtered during the 1st Jewish Revolt (AD 66-72) and Rebbes such as R. Akiva and R. Hillel II had to trek all the way from Babylon to decide what books to put in their "scriptures" since they no longer had a temple standing---and had to re-arrange their worship patterns more to conform to a single AUTHORITATIVE BOOK rather than a sacred mount.

But when Iesous was alive, there had been no such council to decide such matters. The Jews had possibly 180 separate "sacred scrolls", if we are to go by the fragments of the Library at Qumran (i.e. the dead sea scroll library, e.g. in Cave 4 alone)

It is clear that the socalled Dead Sea Scroll Community (BC 165 to AD 68) copied out many hundreds of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek scrolls that later did not "get voted in at Jamnia in AD 90" i.e. they never eventually became officially part of the final list of books for the Old Testament, i.e. specific books which the Rebbes said: "these books defile the hands" i.e. were considered Sacred Scriptures, or the TaNaKh (Torah-Neviim-Ketuvim or "Torah, Prophets, Wisdom-Writings).

Some of these pre-Javneh (Jamnia) texts (i.e. ones which people living in the days of "Jesus" nonetheless considered Sacred Scriptures--nobody to tell them otherwise, least of all from representatives of Babylonian synagogues) included the books like:

I Henoch (the Scroll of the Book of the Words of Henoch the Righteous) ,
The Scroll of the Book of the Testament of Moses (Book of Jubilees),
the Wisdom of Ben-Sirach ("Ecclesiasticus"),
the Scroll of the Book of the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs, Being the Sons of Israel,
the Assumption of Moses,
the Wisdom of Solomon etc.

The earliest Chrstians (and even the 4 canonical gospels !) quoted freely from these texts as if they considered them to be Scripture or "inspired" e.g. Jude DIRECTLY quotes I Henoch in verse 14 ("as Henoch the Righteous, in the Seventh generation from Adam wrote...") as well the Assumption of Moses in v. 9 of Jude.

Sometimes the quotations are hidden : the Wisdom of Solomon in chapter 1 says: "Sorrowful Unto Death is the Man whose Best Friend Hath Betrayed Him..." cf: Mark's gospel when Iesous" noticed "Iudas" missing on the hill after he armed his disciples with swords ("And Iesous said, Behold the SON OF MAN is SORROWFUL UNTO DEATH..."), which suggests that the gospel writer knew the Wisdom of Solomon, and it was chapter one of that "non canonical book" which lay in the back of his mind when he was writing all that midrashic dialogue placed into the mouth of "Iesous" in his gospel...

Even the Gospel of John the Elder in chapter 4 with the Samaritan Woman at the Well Pericope quotes the Scroll of the Testament of the 12 Patriarchs (specificially The Testament of Naphtali chapter 13 verse 9: For the Salvation of Israel shall come from the Judaeans...") which means that the circle of John believed that "Jesus" thought that the Testament of the 12 was holy scripture, even though the Greek Text of John loosly mis-quotes it (it deliberately leaves off the reference to ISRAEL in the text to make it more universal sounding).

When you read phrases in the Pastoral Epistles ("all Scripture which is Inspired of God is useful..." ) such as we find in the curious non-Pauline Greek of Timothy, we cannot say that he is referring to anything in your New Testament, but refers to Jewish Scriptures---which were not FIXED until long after "Paul" died.

The so-called "Pastoral Epistles" were said to have been written by Paul--but more than 75% of serious biblical scholars doubt that every word came from Paul himself, but from someone who "lived at a time later than Paul lived.."

For example, if you compare alll the Greek versions of all the variant texts of those 3 letters (I and II Timothy and Titus) with the other 10 (the so-called "Genuine Letters of Paul") you should notice right away, even if you cannot read Greek in the original, that there are many gross stylistic differences in the three letters----and if you can read Greek you will espcecially notice all the NON PAULINE-HAPAX LEGOMENA foreign Greek words, language, diction, syntax, spelling, grammar and vocabulary throughout---all of which are not Paul's normative style as exemplified in the other 10 letters.

One wonders where Paul ended and his "amanuensis" began in these verbose documents.

In fact, large chunks of the material in Timothy and Titus seem to have been added to fragments of Pauline correspondence written at different times and from different places (i.e. what we read in the pastorals today possibly had grafted on to some genuine but shorter Pauline fragments of letters) by a later (Nazorean, i.e. non Pauline) writer who lived at a time later than that of Paul himself (died c. AD 64 during the Neronian Persecution), i.e. between AD 115 and AD 125 in their present form anyway)--and who pushed a more developed "Nazorean" agenda of Bishops, Elders and Deacons...

Which causes us to doubt that Paul even wrote "All Scripture which is God-Inspired is useful for teaching..."---but even if he would have agreed with such a statement, he could ONLY have been referring to the Old Testament Scriptures (and not the NT which was not written down during his lifetime) and to MANY MANY OTHER JEWISH "SCRIPTURES" that today are not in the Old Testament that was decided upon in AD 90.

You can file all of this rarely discussed information under "FACTS ABOUT THE FORMATION OF THE CANON OF "SCRIPTURE" NEVER TO BRING UP AT PARTIES WITH FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIANS STANDING AROUND"

It can just ruin their whole day...!