The Evolution and Development of the Bible

After discovering that God’s Name had been hidden and a new name for Satan had been added into the Scriptures, it became painfully apparent that there were some issues, even problems going on with the Bible that were going to be difficult to  deal with. However, it felt irreverent and borderline heretical to even entertain any questions about it because of my utmost respect for God’s Word.

Like most Christians, I realized logically that my Holy Bible did not literally arrive by FedEx® from Heaven, bound in a sturdy leather cover with a tasteful “KJV” stamped in gold on the front. However, it might as well have, because the strong feelings that were evoked when I reverently opened those gilt-edged pages made it feel like the contents had been handed down from the clouds.

To someone who has been raised as a Christian, the Bible itself represents a deep but holy mystery that instills an almost mystical perception of the Scriptures it contains. Some Christians will refuse to write in their Bible for fear that God might be angry at them for defacing the “Word of God”. Others are taught, as I was, that it is disrespectful to set anything on top of the Bible, because to do so would be akin to dishonoring God Himself.

While my church and Bible teachers indeed taught all kinds of very good lessons from the Bible, I learned very little about the Bible; where it really came from, and how it came to include the books that are within it today. Despite feelings of personal discomfort, I began to realize that it was time to better learn not only the history of my Church and faith, but also the history of my own most sacred spiritual treasure; the Bible.

 

The Bible’s Historical Roots

 

Historical records indicate that throughout the first through fifth centuries, Christians were writing and distributing all kinds of books and epistles detailing what they thought and how they believed. This was a way of recording the history they knew from what they had been told. Clearly, some of these writings were not in keeping with what Jesus the Messiah had taught, but many of them indeed were.

However, such methods of historical preservation combined with a lack of communication led to easy historical revisionism. As such, Gnosticism from Greece was brought into the Church along with other popular pagan beliefs from Rome, such as Mithraism and Solis (sun) worship. The people of these centuries had no real way of knowing who was actually telling the truth and who was simply repeating pagan tradition within Christianity.

By the turn of the late second century, the Roman Catholic leaders were not the only ones developing various lists of books that they considered inspired and authoritative. Leaders of other developing churches were also formulating their own lists of books they considered to be “canon”, or a standard. To Catholicism’s way of thinking, the development and solidification of a standardized list of “accepted” or orthodox books which could be read in church would go a long way in keeping those pesky heretics and their dogma out of the still developing but now state-sponsored Church.

The Council of Laodicea in c. 364 AD was the first official Roman Catholic Church Council to make a formal ecumenical attempt at solidifying their own orthodox listing of canonical books—some 30 years after Constantine’s death. One of the steps the Council of Laodicea took in dealing with other Christians it considered heretics was to decide what was and was not considered acceptable to read in church.[1] The Laodicean Council thus set the Church on a path toward ecumenical recognition of what would and would not be considered “orthodox” as canonical Scripture.

At the same time the Laodicean Council was establishing its official list of canonical books, it was also declaring broad changes to the Law of God. It even stated that Christians were no longer permitted to rest on the Sabbath, or keep the Passover with the Jews.[2]

By issuing these standards of Christian behavior, it became obvious that Rome’s catholic (universal) version of Christianity was having substantial difficulty dealing with non-Roman Catholic Christians, as these non-orthodox (heretical) Christians were indeed still keeping Sabbath and celebrating the Passover well into the fourth century!

 

The Developing Bible Canon

After the rabbis remaining at Jamnia had settled what would become the Hebrew canon (the Tanakh, what we generally refer to as the “Old Testament”) sometime before 100 AD, the church fathers in Rome added books from the Greek Septuagint to the established Jewish canon. It is important to note that the Septuagint itself was not a decidedly static collection of books either, but rather a loosely accepted collection of ancient Jewish writings that mainly included the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings along with other historical books and writings.[3]

To Rome’s official listing of Jewish books, the early church fathers also then added other current period books from men they thought prominent from less than 100 years prior (i.e., the 1st century). Imagine if our church leaders of today decided to add a book from Mary Baker Eddy to the Bible! This is exactly how many of these non-Roman Catholic Christians felt about Rome’s ostensibly inspired Bible canon!

The books Rome added to their canonical list included just four Gospels and the Marcion canon, which included most of Paul’s letters. Regarding the number of gospels selected, the Catholic bishop Irenaeus[4] declared:

“It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are, since there are four directions of the world in which we are, and four principle winds … The four living creatures [of Rev. 4:9] symbolize the four Gospels … and there were four principle covenants made with humanity, through Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Christ.[5]

By today’s scholastic standards, Irenaeus would be laughed out of the Church as a superstitious idiot if he presented this same kind of “empirical evidence”, “numerology” and vapid reasoning to specifically include four Gospels. Yet how many gospels do you find included in your Bible today? Four!

Irenaeus’ canonical list of “inerrantly inspired” books also included an early Christian writing called the Shepherd of Hermas[6]—a book that was later dropped from the canon by the also “inerrant and inspired” decision of later bishops of the Church.

In addition to dropping or adding additional books, the early Christian sectarians set about making alterations to the Scriptures. But just adding or changing a word here and there was not enough for early Christian sectarians—whole events, even entire chapters(!) were being added to the Bible. Conversely, many verses were being dropped from manuscripts that these period scribes and elders simply did not like.

Within the earliest, more reliable ancient manuscripts of the Bible’s books, the first two chapters of Matthew are missing. In other words, these chapters were later additions to the original book of Matthew! The Gospel of Matthew was originally written in either/both Hebrew or Aramaic, not Greek. Unfortunately, the only surviving manuscripts are much later Greek variants of the original Hebrew and Aramaic manuscript. The added chapters of the Greek manuscripts seem to serve no other purpose than to decidedly assert the Hebraic lineage of Joseph and “virgin birth” of Jesus.

At issue with the “virgin birth” story in the Greek versions of Matthew is that 1) the virgin birth account is an adaptation of Mithraic mythology[7] and 2) the references to Isaiah 7 as a prophecy of Jesus being born of a virgin are the work of terrible scholarship and a poor misinterpretation and mistranslation of the original Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14. In Isaiah 7:14, Bible scholars indeed note that the translation of the Hebrew does not indicate a “virgin”, but rather merely a young woman. Take note also that within the prophecy of Isaiah 7 the young woman is in fact Isaiah’s wife who is already pregnant! The editors of the CEV note:

Isaiah 7:14 virgin: Or “young woman.” In this context the difficult Hebrew word did not imply a virgin birth. However, in the Greek translation [of Isaiah] made about 200 (B.C.) and used by the early Christians, the word parthenos had a double meaning. While the translator took it to mean “young woman,” [the editor of the Greek version of] Matthew understood [totally misunderstood?] [parthenos] to mean “virgin” and quoted the passage (Matthew 1.23) because it was the appropriate description of Mary, the mother of Jesus.[8]

While the editors of the CEV seem to deliberately whitewash this deeply troubling issue, the fact of the matter remains that 1) the full and true context of this text in Isaiah is not speaking about a “virgin”, parthenos only means “young woman” and 2) whoever wrote these first two chapters of Matthew (it was not Matthew!) ignorantly and/or deliberately mistranslated Isaiah 7:14 as the means of attempting to support their need for a virgin birth story from within the Hebrew Scriptures. This section of Matthew is without question a later Roman Catholic addition to the original Matthean text. Other more accurate versions of the Bible, such as the UPDV, have completely removed the virgin birth story from the book of Matthew because it is clearly a later Roman Catholic addition and editorialization to the book.[9]

Few Biblical scholars will disagree with these facts. Furthermore, Matthew was not the only book to have been edited by Roman Catholic apologists. Another deeply troubling issue is the latter verses of the Gospel of Mark. The NIV notes,

The most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20.

This comment by the NIV translators should be alarming to any Christian! “What do you mean the most reliable manuscripts don’t have these verses?! So these verses come from unreliable manuscripts??” That is exactly what the NIV editors are saying. In reality, they only left those verses in Mark because devout believers are expecting them to be there, not because they actually belong there!

 

Elevating and Deprecating the Scriptures

Over a period of several hundred years, the subsequent various Roman Catholic Church councils added, edited and dropped books from the canon based on the decisions—official votes—of the period leadership in power.

Take note of the odd quandary that dropping a book presents to the mainstream modern Protestant doctrine of Biblical inspiration and inerrancy: dropping any book from the canon that had been added by a previously and ostensibly “inspired” and “infallible” church council meant that either: a) God was being expedient with the canon or changed His mind, b) the church had willfully ignored the will of God, c) the decision of whatever previous council was in error, or d) the various councils simply did whatever they wanted with the canon to serve the opinions of the people who were in the leadership them at the time.

No matter which way you prefer to look at the issue, the factual history of the development of the Bible canon does not lend very good support for the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, “scripture alone”, as being a sound foundation upon which to build an understanding of the Word, the Character, of God.

Can we imagine this same scenario happening today with the adding and dropping of books from the Bible? Imagine if as an Adventist Christian, you saw the vast Baptist denomination officially declare that they were dropping a random book from the Bible because that book unequivocally supported the keeping of the Sabbath Commandment and the Baptists wanted no part of the Sabbath because they wanted to go to church on Sunday? Would you as a Sabbath-keeping Christian really consider these Baptists “inspired” because their general conference voted to all but abolish and banish from the Bible any early Christian support of the 4th Commandment?! This is exactly what the Roman Catholic Church did when it effectively nullified the Gospel of the Hebrews[10] with a simple vote of its powerful (and much more popular) membership. Irenaeus’ “orthodox” list of books specifically excluded the Gospel of the Hebrews, most likely because it upheld the Sabbath, which many Christians were observing well into the 4th and 5th centuries!

Near the end of the 4th century, the Bible as a canon of Scripture (as decreed by the Roman Catholic Church) had been fully established. By this time, thousands of Latin copies of the Bible had been hand written and translated by various scribes, with some hand copies being better than others. This problem of many divergent copies prompted (“Pope”) Damasus I in 382 to commission Jerome of Antioch for a standardized Latin version that could be read to the people; hence the name Latin Vulgate, a Bible for the vulgar (common) masses.

Oddly, however, the Vulgate translation was not really for the “common” people. The only people who really spoke or read Latin were those mostly in and around Rome, those who were legal officials of Rome, or those who had a formal education—which only the wealthy could afford. While Latin might have been the official and legal language of Rome, it was not the common tongue throughout the majority balance of the Roman Empire. If you were a commoner with very little education living in the outer regions of the Empire, the chances of you speaking and understanding Rome’s Latin would be slim to none. Henceforth, the “language of the Bible” would be utterly lost to you.

A Latin-only version and the whole “Lucifer” translation issue weren’t the only problems Christians faced with the Bible canon. Jerome came into steep disagreement with Damasus over the canonical list of books itself! Jerome did not want to include the books that came to be known as the “Apocrypha” in his translation, but did so because he was ordered to do so by his superiors. The controversy surrounding these books raged for centuries. So great was the disagreement about the “inspiration” of the Apocrypha that in the 16th century Luther and other reformers made an informed (newly inspired?) decision to exclude (drop, de-canonize) them from the Bible canon that the Roman Catholic Church had well established via its “inerrant inspiration” a thousand years earlier. [11] In effect, they were saying, “We do not accept the authority of these books or the authority of the Church who insists that they are inspired.”

Whether we wish to admit it or not, the issue of the existence of the Apocryphal books presents a huge doctrinal enigma and a deep contradiction for the doctrine of Bible inerrancy, inspiration and infallibility that is held by various Protestant denominations. That contradiction is simply this: on the one hand we indeed claim God’s inerrant and infallible inspiration in assembling the books of the Bible; yet, on the other hand we also claim that the Apocryphal books that were originally inspired for inclusion are now “not inspired”.

As Christians we cannot have it both ways without becoming hypocrites of the highest order! The development of the Bible canon is not some unfathomable “mystery of God”. Its history is clear and its development well documented throughout the annals of Christianity.

True and total inerrancy, inspiration and infallibility would logically preclude any change (and indeed any editorialization) within the canon whatsoever. This quandary can easily be answered by simply recognizing that historically there have been many canons of Scriptures fostered by many factions and denominations of the early Christian Church. We must recognize that the Catholic Fathers and Protestant Reformers who changed and reorganized the current canon did so on their own authority with the best knowledge they had.

This is not to say that God did not participate in the inspiration and writing and assembly of the canon. In our fullest understanding of the assembly of the Bible canon, it would be absolutely imprudent, irresponsible and unwise for any reformer—ancient or modern—to declare that the Hand of God was or has been utterly absent in the assembly of the Bible canon. It is, after all, primarily the books of Matthew, James, Jude, parts of Revelation and even parts of Luke’s own Acts of the Apostles that indeed confirm the original unchanging standard of God’s true Law. It has also been in the consistent standard outlined by the content of these first century books, that we have been able to see and measure many of the deep contradictions of other writings included in the Bible canon by Rome.