Why the Inspired Biblical Writings Disappeared
2023 Chafer Theological Seminary Pastors’ Conference
#01 – Dr. Randall Price
www.deanbibleministries.org/chafer
I have the subject of why the inspired biblical writings disappeared. It’s always difficult to talk about something that’s no longer with us. I want to do that because we live in a time of crisis. (Shows cartoon showing what people wake up to every day.) If you listen to the news, whatever source you may use, you realize we are in a very conflicted age.
If you look toward the end of the age it becomes even more conflicted than ever. On every side we have problems. It’s hard to add to that the issue of the Scripture. One solution that’s been offered is a global reset. Let’s just reset everything. I would say that’s of course the elitists’ view so that’s a problem but when it comes to the Scripture, even in the evangelical community, there are those who want to do a Great Reset there, as well.
They want to change the norms and standards which we’ve known and they want to take not just what has been tradition but dogma and even more than that, doctrine itself, and upend it with new ideas and new modifications. That’s why these critical issues for understanding the Old Testament text are so important.
Answering every issue we have in this critical age of crisis and this time of conflict depends on knowing the Word of God. If you can’t trust the Word of God, if you can’t trust the text, then how can you give an answer?
I want to set a framework for us as we begin this whole time together. I want to start with a quote from my friend, Dan Wallace. He meant this in terms of some of the critical issues involving the New Testament. Our focus is the Old Testament but it’s just as apt. I know you come here and many of you have different levels of understanding and training and frankly, this material is more in-depth but it’s important that you grasp it because this is part of the conference.
Dan says this, “Those in ministry must close the gap between the Church and the academy.” The academy being the area of scholarship where everybody discusses these issues. “We have to educate believers. Instead of trying to isolate lay people from critical scholarship, we need to insulate them. They need to be ready for the barrage, because it is coming. The intentional dumbing down of the Church for the sake of filling more pews will ultimately lead to defection from Christ.”
Because if you don’t have an answer today when young people come and say, “Well I don’t understand all the violence in the Old Testament and what kind of God is this.” What do you do? You have to go to the text. The text is the only answer. You can’t use psychology or something else to explain it. If you don’t understand these critical issues and you don’t respect the text, you have no help for such people.
As we begin to talk about the inspired, infallible text, we go to a statement issued by the Evangelical Theological Society back in 1949. This is still the statement of the Society, “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety is the Word of God, written and therefore inerrant in the autographs.” Then you may say what are the autographs?
The autograph or the autographa is the term used for that original copy of the biblical manuscripts as it left the author who wrote it. Whether it be Moses who left us the five Books of the Torah or it be Paul in his Epistles being sent out to various individuals or churches as it came from their hand represent what we call the autographs.
As you know, and this is hopefully no great shock, we don’t have the autographs, the original manuscripts. We have what is called apographs. These are manuscript copies. The disappearance or absence of the original inspired manuscripts affects the issue of inspiration and inerrancy in relation to the Bible we possess which is why we have all kind of disputes among various evangelicals as to which version and I don’t mean the translation here. I mean Greek texts or Hebrews texts.
Which ones should we be using? What manuscripts are the best or the oldest? Or what should we do with these things and how do we handle it?
Now when we talk about the Old Testament in particular we have a question of textual integrity. At present we have, unlike the Greek New Testament of which we have some 25,000 manuscript witnesses and a million citations by the Church Fathers, with the Old Testament we have the Masoretic Text and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Before that and even between those we have nothing. Very few witnesses at all. Maybe some inscriptions here and there or some small witness to it but really, nothing. The difference that exists between the Masoretic Text, and Dead Sea text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the versions of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the Vulgate Ethioptic, and the Coptic and all these others all forms the debate on the integrity of the underlying Hebrew text of the Masoretic Text from which our English Old Testament versions are translated.
All of us should realize that the Bible you possess in the Old Testament came from manuscripts around the tenth or ninth century A.D., not B.C., but A.D., and we have very little that can help us before that except for the Dead Sea Scrolls. While you understand this, the average person does not. Most Christians, if they’ve ever thought about it, think there’s an original manuscript of the Bible from which our present English Bible was copied.
Maybe it’s enshrined somewhere in some cathedral or monastery, but it was just an older version of the ones we possess. They’re often quite surprised to learn that neither we Christians, nor Jews, nor Muslims, nor any existing religion possesses a text of their original sacred scriptures. The issues connected with this reality and the differences among our existing English translations may cause believers to doubt the accuracy and therefore the truthfulness of their Bible.
I want to say before we go further that let’s affirm that even though we do not have the autographs, they are inspired, inerrant, infallible, and comprise unique revelation that we have extant in the apographs we call the Scriptures.
That’s what Henry is going to talk about following my presentation explaining this. That’s very important. The Scriptures do not simply contain a witness to God’s Word. No. No. No. They contain God’s Word. They are God’s Word. We want to stress this because we have many people saying inerrancy is only in certain ideas or statements or story or the message and not in the text itself.
Let’s talk about the fact of inscripturation … we’re here together; these are all passages we well know, “All Scripture is inspired by God.” That’s 2 Timothy 3:16. Robby mentioned that as we started. We have PASA GRAPHE THEOPNEUSTOS, the term that says that. PASA GRAPHE simply means the totality of sacred Scripture.
Now in the context it refers to the entire Old Testament. People will say to me, “Well, I’m really a New Testament Christian.” I ask, “What about the Old Testament?” They answer, “I don’t know about the Old Testament.”
Now, I really like the Old Testament. It reminds me of the New.” That’s not original. It’s a quote from Will Kaiser. He invented that term but the fact is that when the New Testament is speaking about Scripture and all Scripture, it’s speaking about the Old Testament. That was the Bible of Jesus. That was the Bible of the Apostles. That was the Bible of the early Church.
It’s amazing how so many in the present Church want to discard that and they think it’s irrelevant. We do include the New Testament in Scripture. In 2 Peter 3:15 we have Peter say this about Paul’s writings, “Which we know are difficult to understand but those who don’t have a very clear mind distort them as they do the rest of the Scriptures.” Therefore, we know that’s included.
Now the term, THEOPNEUSTOS, God breathed, is the idea that the Spirit of God was in some way accompanying, superintending the author of sacred Scriptures so it was indeed sacred Scripture, not human scripture. Not human words. These are God’s words.
The next passage makes that clear. God’s involvement in the process of inscripturation in which the entirety of the Scriptures came into being demonstrates those Scriptures came from Him. That’s what this is saying. All Scripture and all from God.
You know the passage in 2 Peter 1:20–21 says, “Know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of the human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” I put both Greek terms up there. It’s the same term; just a different form of it. It’s hard to translate it into English, but the same idea that prophecy was made is the same word the Holy Spirit moved those who made it.
The term here PHEROMENOI is the idea of carried along. It gives the idea of someone in a sailboat who is simply there. The wind catches the sails and takes it to where it ought to go. That’s what God’s Spirit did. He came in such a way that even though He used their natural abilities, and to some degree, their understanding and language, He superintended what was said so it was what He wanted said. This is quite clear in that sense.
Now another passage, 1 Thessalonians 2:13 makes this very clear for us. Paul was writing to the Thessalonians. It says, “For this reason we also constantly thank God that when you received from us the word of God’s message, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe.” Now it couldn’t accomplish much work if it was simply human words. It has to be God’s word to do that.
We have a clear statement which we call an internal witness to Scripture that this is, indeed, from God. We can just summarize it this way. What Scripture says, God says. It’s that simple. When we come to Scripture we open up the book and say, “Okay, God, speak to me.” We know this is His word. We have that confidence.
That’s very important for belief because at the heart of the question what to believe about the autographa is the question of whether or not we can believe the Bible. If the Bible could be thought to have been changed or lost in part or to be missing part that tell a different story, why should it be believed? Faith is the absence of doubt. If the Bible is in doubt, faith in its message is conflicted, if not constrained.
However, even if the choice of some words in the Bible or the understanding of some events in the Bible are difficult for scholars to decide, after all, if it was men’s word it wouldn’t be so hard to understand. Because it’s God’s unfathomable truth we have to wrestle with that. So, when it says it’s shallow enough for a child to play in but it’s deep enough for an elephant to drown in, there’s a depth to Scripture.
The result is that even though we can’t decide some things, that doesn’t discount the whole of the Bible. We can trust it and we need to dedicate ourselves to it.
We come to a place in our society where there’s some change ahead. It’s been coming. Some of us have seen it. It’s affected our seminaries. That’s probably one reason Chafer Seminary exists rather than going to some other mainstream seminary. There are great changes that have happened and particularly in the area of the Old Testament.
John Oswalt wrote this in a book called The Bible Among the Myths. I recommend it to you. He says, “Old Testament studies have undergone a remarkable shift in the last fifty years … from arguing that the unique features of the Old Testament must presuppose revelation in some form …” That is, this is God’s divine revelation. It’s unique. There’s nothing like it. “To denying that there aren’t any unique features since we know that revelation is an impossibility.” God didn’t just speak into the void. No. Then in a cultural stream that they are a product of their age. They can’t know more than they know. They’re a pre-scientific age. What else can they do except just give what they can? So, God used that, okay, but obviously we have to understand it as it is, in the time in which it was given.
He goes on to say, “Nothing has changed from the biblical statements that earlier scholars found so radically different from those of Israel’s neighbors. Rather, it’s the conclusion that the biblical ideas must have evolved from the ancient Near Eastern ones. The biblical ideas cannot be essentially different but must be essentially the same with only superficial differences.”
When we talk about creation, they all have these creation myths and gods should be accommodated. We have this idea of a first man and woman. Scientifically this is impossible. Men have been here millions of years so we can’t have that, so we have to adjust the Bible and retool it to what we know is “fact.”
Then we have the problem of the Flood. Well, the Flood, if there was a flood, was a local event and this is pretty much now the uniform testimony across the board. Scholars at most seminaries teach this. Why is this? They say it’s because they have Near Eastern flood accounts. If you look at them, these were all global accounts, but nevertheless because they come from a mythical background they assume the Bible simply again accommodated the things they knew in their day and time.
These are big changes. What has happened? This is more my opinion than others but I’ve thought about this. What has caused a reassessment of a traditional evangelical view of inerrancy that we’ve seen in the last fifty years? Because we have people who affirm they are in error.
They don’t believe there was an actual creation. Or they don’t believe there was an actual Adam and Eve or there was a flood. They don’t believe even in the patriarchs or that there was a Moses or an Exodus, to be sure. Yet they claim inerrancy and they have their reasons for saying this. How is it possible?
The onset of postmodernism in evangelicalism has reduced confidence in the propositional claims of the Bible. In other words, we have foundational Bible truth. God said. It’s been our obligation to always believe what God said, not to question it or put it into another context or understand it in terms of scientific ideas. This is what God said and that would be biblical revelation. Something God revealed.
Today we have another aspect, another emphasis. Less exposition. More story telling. This has led to a cognitive dissonance and deconstructionism. If you don’t know what those terms are, it simply means you just kind of don’t think about these things any more. You’ve separated yourself from that in terms of your thinking and then you start looking at the Bible as something you can no longer believe as you used to believe.
People who deconstruct their faith start in stages, then they eventually say they can’t believe any of it. We had that happen not just with people in churches but we’ve had it happen with pastors of churches. Leaders of whole movements. So there’s something going on here. Part of this is the spirit of our age, the culture in which we live, and the emphasis being made.
Secondly, an increasing number of evangelical students graduate with doctorates in evangelical studies or theology from non-evangelical institutions. This is sometimes because of accreditation standards or they don’t want inbreeding among their school. They are encouraged to go to Ivy League school or continental schools and have the degrees which look good for accreditation standards. They take their best and brightest and send them off. While they are there, they assimilate non-evangelical perspectives such as higher criticism of the Bible and it results in a revision or modification of former views as they become professors in school.
I know this because I’ve talked to a lot of people like this who said they went off and studied at Cambridge or here and there and when they came back and were going to give their time to their seminary which was the agreement they made. Now they are teaching theology or archaeological or historical course and they don’t think the same way about it they used to. They think they know too much now. They can’t just wholesale discard things. Instead, they think it’s their obligation to modify or revise very time-tested truth of Scripture and some of the things that have happened.
Third, the exposure of evangelical laypeople to television programs, popular novels, movies based on nonbiblical worldviews, higher critical assumptions with very little or no reputation at the local church. What’s happened is you pastors have people for an hour, or maybe a little more if you’re fortunate, to give them God’s truth with the assumption they’re feeding themselves outside of the building.
How do you counter the media and the television and all the streams of all the things that are available now anywhere and everywhere to anybody? It’s so appealing. It’s designed that way and it’s all designed to subtly defame and demoralize and completely, how do I put it, turn upside down every biblical and moral thing you know. They don’t even tell it. They just do it and they just absorb that. If people grow up with that and the Church says nothing about it, then these people are set in their ways.
A couple of things that have happened recently. John Walton, along with Tremper Longman III, I’ll mention both of them, have done these books that question the historical Adam and Eve, the Flood, Creation. The idea being that it’s just an affront to scientific thinking that we should turn around and say that these things happened as the Bible says.
Or even the genealogies in the Bible are questioned. The chronologies, as Henry and others are going to present here. They say you can’t take those large number of licenses because it doesn’t fit at all. We have to accommodate things. This is the way in those days. That’s all they knew. It’s certainly a myth, but it’s okay. They all knew it was a myth and because they knew it was a myth and God gave it to them, it’s okay.
Well, you know what? They didn’t always know it was a myth. If someone originally knew that was a myth, which they didn’t, but if they did, they didn’t pass that interpretation on. People down through history have believed these things are true. Of course, they are true if you simply put them into a proper scientific examination or a historical context, like archeology. We do find the evidence that they are reliable and true.
But this is the difference. This comes out of, shall we say it, Wheaton College, Westminster Theological Seminary, things like this. These were the leaders that are giving us this interpretation. It’s very popular among people. Peter Enns is very much a part of that. He was a former Westminster Theological professor. He was a prolific author, still is. He’s the producer of home school Bible curriculum.
Dr. Enns now says he has outgrown evangelicalism. He encourages other people to do the same. He has a blog site you can go to. He believes right-thinking people should simply discard the history presented in the Bible by relegating it to the status of Israel’s national myth. Only then can they benefit from its rich storytelling.
It’s not all that historical stuff that’s in the Bible. It just doesn’t fit. It’s the message that comes out of the Bible that counts. But why should I trust the message if it’s given in a deceptive form? They counter that it’s not deceptive because they knew it wasn’t the truth. Then what purpose did it serve?
Strange, when it comes to the New Testament, they’re citing these things as though they were fact. Jesus certainly does. Peter certainly does. You look through the New Testament uses of the Old Testament, there’s no understanding there that these things were not fact. Jesus bases His own second coming on the truthfulness of Noah and his Flood. So if the Flood was a myth, then other things are myths. Right? That’s a problem.
Enns has some books, Inspiration and Incarnation, challenged conservative Evangelical methods of interpretation (especially inspiration and inerrancy). If that’s not shocking enough. This book was endorsed by leading evangelical scholars like Hugh Williamson, Bill Arnold, David Baker, and Tremper Longman III, and Joel Green. Some of you may know those names and others may not, but they are well-known scholars in their right.
Enns followed these works with other such as The Evolution of Adam which criticizes the historical Adam. Also The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Uneasy to Read It. So if you just give up defending Scripture and accept whatever message is there, you’ll be okay. But why? I mean, what kind of message is this?
These are some of the critical statements being issued. I’m not going in the time we have to treat these, but some of you who teach in biblically based churches ought to. Here they are
1. The Old Testament is ethically objectionable. Events that are morally wrong redefine the character of God such as the violence of the Flood, the Canaanite genocide, slavery, sacrifice. How do you explain to a modern audience these types of things? How can you be a self-respecting person and follow a book that teaches that?
2. All right, the Old Testament is culturally unacceptable. It deals with counter cultural ideas today such as traditional marriage, the role of women, racism. Israel a chosen people? Really! What about the rest? Where’s the equity in that? It’s homophobic, gender exclusive. What kind of book is this?
3. Then, the Old Testament is full of contradictions. Two accounts of creation, differences in genealogies, different numbers for the same event. God, in competition with the God of Israel because it’s mentioned that way. The Old Testament is considered scientifically inaccurate. There was no special creation or a historical Adam and Eve or a global Flood. Geology has disproven that.
And miracles. Who can believe in miracles? Everything we know of reality disproves that.
4. The Old Testament is full of inaccuracies. The claim is that archeology has disproven Israelite origins, the patriarchs, the exodus, the kingdoms of David and Solomon. They’re all legendary. By the way, this is mainstream thinking outside of some evangelical circles.
5. Then they say the Old Testament was refuted by Jesus. After all, Jesus says not to keep the Law. Jesus has mercy and love but if you look at the Old Testament God’s wrath and punishment is there. In the Old Testament it seems to be salvation by works but in the New Testament, it’s faith alone. How do you reconcile those things? Jesus says to forgive your enemies but we have imprecatory psalms that say to curse your enemies. Then the New Testament, they claim, changes the meaning of the Old Testament itself. Hosea 11, “Out of Egypt I called My son.” Look at that in Matthew 2 and see if you can make sense of it.
These are the kinds of challenges being thrown out there and I have to tell you. No one is really answering these things that are troubling people. People come Sunday morning. The pastor is preaching and the people are thinking about everything else but that. They compartmentalize. They’ve got these things in their mind which are totally nonbiblical and contrary to Scripture, but no one is addressing them.
They have another little compartment in their mind that listens to what they hear on Sunday. But embedded lies which come from all our media cause a doubt of biblical truth if they’re not addressed. Someone needs to bring these things up and deal with them. That’s one of the things we’re hopefully doing in this conference.
Now, Enns says the Old Testament cannot tell us what happened but only what we want to believe happened. Genesis is full of myths. Andy Stanley says that Christians must ditch the Old Testament from their faith. Other pastors say similar things. We don’t need the Old Testament. What can you do with that thing? It’s old anyway, right? No, it’s not. There’s more unfulfilled prophecy in the Old Testament than there is in the New Testament. We know it’s the Bible of Jesus. It is well, God’s Word. So how can you take ¾ of the Bible and rip it out and say we don’t need it?
This is what’s happening. How many pastors preach from the Old Testament? I know Robby does and others of you here probably do. You go to many churches and you’ve never heard anything outside the gospels in your life. Maybe now and then you hear it in a song, but very little because people don’t want to deal with it.
Now let me just give you a quick rundown as I’ve been mentioning this thing about the idea of myth in the context of when the Scriptures were given, the ideas of those who communicated the Scripture. Just quickly, I won’t go through much. We have the idea of continuity versus the idea of transcendency. Continuity is the idea of the basic mythical thinking. The gods are in the circle with men. They simply share in the material creation.
That’s why when you look at polytheism you have to have this because these are personified forces, natural ones around them. They all have their own thing but when you define them they all have the same characteristics and traits as we do. Look at the Greco-Roman gods in all they acted. They were incestuous and very much, shall we say, involved with humanity in an unclean and ungodly way.
Mythical thinking brings us into that kind of material world. It yields a very low view of humanity. Personality is not essential to reality. There’s no single standard of ethics and existence is somewhat cyclical. Everything is just in a circle and circles co-exist with everything else. That’s what you see in Ancient Near East if you look at all of their writings and how they define themselves.
When we come to Scripture, we see a very different picture. Here we have gone outside the circle. He encompasses all things. Inside the circle is humanity and nature and there’s an impenetrable boundary between man and God and between nature and man himself. All attempts to manipulate God through the world are doomed to failure. Whereas in the idea of continuity you can manipulate God to do what you want because He’s very much like you. He’s subject to the same passions and whims.
A biblical worldview is monotheistic. There’s one God and no other being in the same category with Him. As we look at this and we see that all you do is wait for God to reveal Himself to you in this whole process. God is personal and He’s gracious. He’s not self-serving in His nature. He’s unique. He’s holy. He’s outside of everything. He has a high view of humanity because He made us in His image.
Everything is sacred. Even sex itself is sacred in God’s concept. It’s not used to manipulate or to control. It has its own purpose to glorify Him. All this sex and magic or anything like this is forbidden so what am I trying to say? I’m trying to say that if we look at the Scripture we see this understanding. How in the world do you go from myth with its structure to this? You don’t. They’re totally opposite.
We know that if you start with myth, you can only become more mythical, not historical over time. These are two polar opposites. There’s no way you can say that the writers of Scripture who believed that gave us this. It’s not possible.
There are some books that can help you with this. John Oswald’s The Bible Among the Myths and a book Walt Kaiser has put out called The Old Testament Really Matters. Wayne House is the publisher of that. We’re grateful he did this for Walt. I have that book on the book table here. Y’all should get a copy of that because it answers all these kinds of questions that we raise.
Now let’s move on to our subject. What is the autograph of the Hebrew Bible? As I said the autograph of the Bible is the original copy or the original manuscript itself. When we talk about the Hebrew Bible itself, what are we talking about? While the process of textual development introduced changes to the original text so there’s a difference. When we talk about the New Testament we’re talking about maybe a 60-year period of time in which all the manuscript documents were produced. But when you come to the Old Testament you have a thousand-year span. This is not just a minor thing; it’s a big thing.
When Moses wrote the Torah he did so in a proto-alphabetic script, which as the Hebrew alphabet developed, had to be rewritten. The very process of it being rewritten introduces changes to the original. Just look at this for a minute. You have script changes, proto-Hebrew which is almost a type of hieroglyphic form to an early alphabetic form to a paleo-Hebrew and then to the Aramaic script we use in Hebrew today. All of those introduced some changes.
Then there are semantic changes. You have archaic pronouns and case endings. You still have those in the Bible. We have what is called early Hebrew poetry. In certain places like Genesis 14 you have narrative which has a lot of early stuff. Samuel has some early statements like this. You can see them. They left them.
For the most part language changed. We don’t talk Elizabethan English. We don’t talk in the older English like you found in Chaucer. It was English but you can’t even read it. Everything has moved forward and the same thing with this. Use of vowels. Consonants were one time used as vowels because they didn’t have a vowel system. It was implied, understood based on oral transmission. But now vowels were added along with vowel letters.
You can see this in the Dead Sea Scrolls. You have David which is spelled D-a-v-i-d in English. Take out the vowels. So it’s just D-V-D. In the Dead Sea Scrolls because there’s a problem in understanding that vav, which actually has consonantal and vocalic value. It becomes dalet vav yod dalet (DWYD) so you’ve added a vowel or actually a consonant which serves as a vowel.
There are name changes, older onomastic titles of places have to change because it makes no sense to a current reader if he’s reading something and the place no longer exists by that name. Geographical things change. These are called editorial updates.
Then we have additions to books, updates to figures or history. In Deuteronomy it says Moses was the most humble man on earth. Well, you know Moses didn’t write that. He couldn’t write that or he wouldn’t be the most humble man on earth. That was written by someone else. And his death was written by someone else. Those were additions.
What are to think of those kinds of things? You can see how the scripts change through time and how it was used. We have examples of some of these scripts archeologically and inscription forms, which are important inscriptions to help us to piece together certain things. These are all parts of Scripture in one form or another.
But we want to clarify the term autographa as well as canonicity. These two terms tie together. We talk about the Canon of the Scripture, the final form in which we believe God gave us His Word. Inerrancy plays a big role in that and what is the autographa or what changes that were made have to be explained.
The idea of autographa and canonicity are usually defined from the New Testament perspective. They don’t give sufficient attention to the development of the Hebrew text.
It’s necessary to fine-tune the understanding of how scholars articulate certain aspects of the doctrine of inerrancy and of inspiration of the Scripture in respect to the Old Testament to include these textual realities.
You may or may not agree with everything I’m going to say but there are only two options here. One is that when you come to these updates and additions to the Bible, they are simply human additions and updates and therefore we treat them like we do everything else in textual criticism, or there is more. God, Himself, sanctioned these and also inspired those recognized authorities or prophets who put them in there to update His word according to His will.
This is the idea. In theological discussions, the autographs may refer to an unchanging form of the text whereby the original document is identical with the final canonical form of a given biblical book. Given this understanding of the concept and owing to the significant role it plays in the inerrancy debate, the writings designated as autographa would not seem capable of being in flux or susceptible to change and since inspiration serves as the foundation for canonicity, changes to the original imply non-inspired acts.
That’s what I want to address. I’m leaning on some similar work from Mike Grisanti from Masters Seminary. You know him as an Old Testament scholar. I’ll read the statement he made in one of his JETS articles, “While inspiration primarily concerns the quality of the finished product rather than the process of inscripturation, the Divine-human authorship of the Scriptures raises the tension as to how the Scriptures came into being. … According to the customary definition and theological discussions, “autographa” refers to and unchanging form of text whereby the original document is identical to the final canonical form of a given Old Testament biblical book. In light of the understanding of the concept of the “autographa” and, as I mentioned, the role it plays in the inerrancy debate,” can be problematic.
“Unlike the New Testament books which were compiled over a 60-year period, the books of the OT canon were composed and compiled during a period of 1,000 years, assuming an early date for the exodus, cultural and geographic changes, to name only a few. The close of the canon was around 400 B.C.” But there are a lot of things that have happened. The potential for various significant changes of this kind gives rise to a question. Did this long compositional history and the many changes in the world of the Bible impact the process of the completion of the Old Testament canon?
Let me just go through this very briefly. We have these options. The traditional view is that all edits and updates are uninspired scribal glosses to the autographa, plural because each author of Scripture has his own autograph as part of the textual-critical debate. Or as Grisanti proposed, and I tend to favor this, he says we have inspired editorial update—that is all edits and updates are part of the inspired composition process that resulted in autographs recognized as canonical.
Now, let me explain some of that. Here’s what we’re saying. Any changes introduced to a biblical book before the close of the canon are regarded as “divinely inspired editorial updates.” After the close of the canon, any changes introduced to the biblical text are human variants from the inspired text and are not divinely inspired textual updates. Only a prophetic figure (having recognized credibility within the Israelite community as one “under divine inspiration”) would be able to introduce these modernizations into a given biblical text within the period of the history of textual composition, that is, before the close of the canon.
We have the process of inspiration of God’s Word through the period of composition. This is the styles in the period. The preliminary canonical form is what the inspired author gives us. But as we move through history, there are reasons to update or to maintain certain things within the text to make it clearer to those who receive and read it. At every point in this inscripturation process, God’s Word is inspired and inerrant and infallible, and trustworthy. That’s the idea of this view.
When you come to canonical final form, we have inspired editors who worked with inspired authors to bring about the final form of the autograph which we receive as the Word of God. As we said, there’s a dividing point here. When the Israelite community existed before the end of the prophetic period you have people who are inspired doing this textual updating and then there’s a dividing point with the close of the canon. I’ll explain where that happened and why.
After that, we have the domain of textual criticism, changes introduced to the text. We have the Ketiv, Qere, if you’re familiar with this—what is written, what is read to introduce those notes in the Masoretic Text or rabbinic corrections to Messianic text. These are important because when I come to talk about how the Dead Sea Scrolls will help us in our biblical studies, you’ll see that what we have in the Dead Sea Scrolls very clear messianic readings and interpretations that differ from what we have in the Masoretic Text. They may or may not agree with the Septuagint or Samaritan Pentateuch, but they’re there.
And they are a biblical text. What are we to do with that? Well, we have to say at some point the rabbis did something. Maybe right-thinking rabbis wanted to protect the Jewish community from a thousand years of Christian disputation over these various Messianic passages did some things to tweak it a bit so it wouldn’t mislead. At the same time, they changed the text. These are the things we deal with in textual criticism. Before that, it’s not an issue.
Let’s talk about the fact and act of canonicity. Canonicity is determined by the fact that a book is inspired of God. As God’s people recognize the canonicity of a given book by virtue of its identity with a prophetic spokesman, through whom the book was given, God’s people sought to safeguard the sacred Scripture.
We know that the Hebrew Bible as canonized exists in a tripartite form. We have the Torah, the Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim—the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Writings. This is there from the beginning. The first division of this, the Pentateuch, was canonized certainly sometime before the time of the exile of the Northern Kingdom. You see the Samaritan Pentateuch is the Torah form. It was all that they had of the Bible. They didn’t have the Major and Minor Prophets, which were written to Israel, in particular. So they had this form. But they accepted it and so that represents the close, at least of the canon of the Pentateuch.
We come to the prophets based on the statement that prophecy ceased with the conquest of Alexander the Great around 332 B.C. The second division of the prophets must have been completed before this time. There’s some issues with Qumran, who think that because they are at the end of the age, the prophetic period could be extended or was renewed. But in this case, it’s there. We come to Daniel. He predicts Alexander, not by name but by reputation, and his four generals are mentioned. This is something so it has to be somewhere in that period.
Then we have the Writings, the third division, which is closed by at least the beginning of the Hasmonean period of 167 B.C. because when we come to the Qumran community, we see how they received these as Scripture. They have a threefold canon that I’ll mention tomorrow. But we see Josephus. He’ll say here in his Contra Apion “we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another (as the Greeks have). We have twenty-two books, which contain all the records of all past times.” He breaks it all down. But this explains that “the four remaining books are hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life,” which would be the Ketuvim, the wisdom literature, among other things, the writings. So from the earliest period you see there’s already acknowledged the close of the canon.
We find this in the Dead Sea Scrolls. They talk about the book of Moses, the words of the prophets, and David and the chronicles of each generation. At Qumran it’s quite clear they had this, if not fully canonized, at least they recognized this and it soon became canonized. You have other scholars that say the Bible or the Old Testament was canonized in A.D. 90, the Council of Jamnia. This shows it was done much earlier. I want to say it goes back to Ezra.
It tells us in Ezra 7:10 that, “That he set his heart to study the Law of God, to practice or teach His Statutes and ordinances in Israel.” He was both a scribe and a priest. He had the job of, shall we say, reorganizing all of Scripture, of teaching the people, of explaining the text to them. When we come to something like the Apocryphal works such as Esdras, Enoch, or some of these others, Ezra in particular is the inspired scribe. He is described as a second Moses. He gives inspired understanding and knowledge to Israel.
Now this is not inspired material, but it does give insight from the time period when Israel shows how to regard Ezra as the one who God would use to restore Scripture. So we have this type of thing. When we look at it, the Old Testament canon, I think, was set up to reveal the Messiah. It was set up by Ezra in this way as an inspired author to give us the knowledge as we move beyond this period so that all of Israel could recognize what was already in the text.
By reorganizing it this way they had this understanding. I can’t go all of this in detail, but you have the tripartite division. You have certain verses in each of the sections. The Torah ends with “a prophet like Moses has not yet arisen among Israel.” And we’ve got the prophet who is like Moses being the Messiah. That’s spelled out in Deuteronomy 18, very clearly in the New Testament.
In Joshua 1:8 it says to think about this, to meditate on this. This Word of the Law shall not depart from your mouth. And it makes you think about the words you just heard. Messiah has not yet come.
We come to Malachi 4, which ends the prophets, what are we looking for? The one who is suddenly going to come to His temple. This is the Messiah. Psalm 1 starting the writings says “blessed is the man”. Who is that man? When you come to Psalm 2 it tells us that man is the one who is called God’s Son, who will sit on His throne, who will rule over the nations. So, is it the blessed man or is it just the blessed man who thinks on these things? It’s put together. Then with Chronicles it’s the picture of moving forward to rebuilding the Temple and that’s the task of the Messiah at the end of the age.
When we come to Matthew 1 the first thing we find is Jesus coming on the scene and the picture about Him being part of Israel’s whole genealogical history. God is with us throughout this. So, if we have an inspired Torah, meaning all the books, and it’s put together by inspired prophets with the purpose of giving us the Messiah, then you have a very clear understanding that the Old Testament contained that information.
Why is that important? Frankly, if you don’t have this you have a text that gives you nothing, that gives you no real information except historical information. That’s why we have people like John Walton say we can’t “identify a passage as Messianic if the Old Testament offers no such support for such an interpretation either conceptually or textually, and the New Testament suggests no fulfillment connections.” I don’t see anything about a Messiah in the Old Testament and Tremper Longman III says, “it’s impossible to establish that any passage in its original literary and historical context” that is in the Old Testament “must or even should be understood as portending a future messianic figure.”
That includes Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, and all the famous passages. It’s just not there, he says. Then how can Jesus come and say to them, “Your house is being left to you desolate because you have not recognized the time of your visitation?” “What visitation? We didn’t even know You were coming. We didn’t know who You are.” What do you do with that? This is one of the battlegrounds we’re fighting.
There are certain versions, translations, now that really minimize a Messianic understanding of the Old Testament and capitalize on the historical nature of it. These are things that are part of the debate so that’s why I introduced this.
Walt Kaiser tells us this, “But if it’s not in the Old Testament text, who cares how ingenious later writers are in their ability to reload the Old Testament text with truths that it never claimed or revealed in the first place? The issue is more than hermeneutics, it is authority and content of revelation itself.
“This issue of the interpretation of the Messiah in the Old Testament could be the defining moment for evangelical scholarship and ultimately for the Church’s view of the way we regard Scripture.” This is very important stuff. I would recommend a book by Michael Rydelnik called The Messianic Hope: Is the Hebrew Bible Really Messianic? He launched into this debate and has given a good answer for it.
I’ll skip a little bit here because my task was to talk about do we need the autographs and how they disappeared. Robby is looking very sternly at me about that so I think I should move on to that. Let me just say this, “Why we don’t need the autographs. While the production of inerrant originals was the necessary result of divinely inspired authors, their providential ‘loss’ may also be seen as divine intention.
“As difficult as it may be to believe, it seems that it was not expedient, nor even preferable, that the original manuscripts were preserved.” I want to walk you through this very quickly. God sovereignly determined that we don’t need original manuscripts. Because we don’t have them! Okay? Can God get His will in history? Yes, He can so we don’t have them because He did not expect us to have them. That’s the point. We don’t have them because He didn’t feel we needed them.
Second, if we had the most ancient manuscripts of the Bible, there’s no way we could determine if it was the original and not a copy. I mean, if tomorrow we found a cache of hidden manuscripts that could be the autographs, how are you going to know they are? Even if some author signed his name and how do you know it’s not a forgery? There’s no guarantee of this.
Experts could be fake, doubted. You know we’ve had the Dead Sea Scrolls discredited. Go to Washington, D.C. All those millions and millions of dollars spent on Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments we’re told they’re all fakes. This could be a fake, too. So this is an issue.
Also, if we had these originals we would not labor in the same way over the text. Ever thought about that? If we had the originals, we’d still have to do exegesis in the original languages in order to make interpretive decisions. But we would not have to labor the same way over the texts.
Doing textual criticism causes us to more diligently search the Scriptures in order to understand the text and make exegetical decisions necessary for exposition. Because textual variants were made by men, it may be that God has given men the opportunity to make corrections and restore the texts to greater purity.
Having textual variants that result in disputed passages also forces the student of the Word to a greater dependence on the Lord and on the rest of the Scripture to resolve textual questions, to accurately handle the Word of Truth. So, God didn’t want us to be lazy. He wanted us to work. Inspiration requires perspiration.
The originals would likely acquire a relic status and divide the Church. Did you ever think about that? If the original manuscripts existed in some form, it would be the most carefully guarded document in the world. History has revealed that people have not been able to resist venerating sacred relics. Look at what happened with Israel and the copper serpent. Hezekiah had to destroy it. As an archeologist it breaks my heart, but Hezekiah had to do that because people were venerating it.
Today one can observe an endless procession of the faithful visiting the reliquaries in the Vatican believing they have accrued some sense of merit from this. If the original Bible existed in history, it would have been impossible to prevent believers from the sin of bibliolatry (that’s worshipping the Bible alongside of God, violating the first commandment to worship God alone).
Who possessed this sacred relic would seem to have a divinely sanctioned status. It would divide the Church. This group would expect allegiance from others. You know, I’ve got this and you don’t. That sort of thing. Right?
Having the originals would neither increase faith nor reduce the differences in biblical interpretation because for most of Israel’s history biblical text was communicated orally to people by prophets, priests, and scribes. There never appears to have been a crisis of faith whether what they were taught was based on the original text or a copy, which existed in the form of scrolls stored in the Temple or later in synagogues.
However, the meaning of a text was often debated by religious leaders, over time they created different sectarian groups. That’s where we get the Pharisees and Sadducees. You know Pharisees were pretty conservative and orthodox. The Sadducees didn’t believe in the supernatural and angels. That’s why they were sad, you see?
We have the Qumran community. It’s one of these, too. It’s a break-off group. Now Judaism, let me just say, believes they have the original Torah. They tell us that when Moses finished writing these books, he put them in the Ark of the Covenant or beside the Ark of the Covenant. They were to be a witness against Israel.
If we could happen to find where that thing was hidden, those original autographs may still exist, but it doesn’t help us. We don’t know. Maimonides says it’s a fundamental principle that the Torah came directly from God. Moses received it in a process like taking dictation. It tells us it was written by the fingers of God.
Now Judaism believes it has the original Torah, but not the other books. Those are of a secondary authoritative status because they were not handed down letter by letter from Mount Sinai. But they believe this now is invested within the Masoretic Text because of the authority given to the Rabbis, the Nazarites, in this case. So they have a received text.
When you look at this text you have this version here or you have others. That’s considered the authoritative or received text, no questions asked. We don’t have that, or we don’t have that understanding.
Since the originals could not be distributed without receiving damage, it has always been necessary that copies exist to spread the word. What do you do? They didn’t have photocopy machines or things like that so someone had to write them by hand and copy them. As soon as you start copying something, because you’re a human being, an error can creep in. You can write a word twice. You can leave a word out. You can skip a line. All of these things are part of the understanding of textual criticism.
But the Israelite law required the Israelite king, when he sits on the throne, to “write for himself a copy of this law in the presence of the Levitical priests.” I think the reason for this is because people have shown that if you actually write by hand, the hand/eye coordination does something to the brain and puts that information into your brain in a very different and more effective way than if you’re looking at a computer screen or doing something else. This was the way a king was to internalize the Scripture.
Nevertheless, the king had to write a copy and copies were distributed to foreign rulers. They were taken into exile. Daniel was reading a copy from the prophet Jeremiah. He wasn’t reading an autographa. In the Apostolic Era, Gospels and Epistles were sent to individuals or local Church leaders, but they could only be shared with Christian communities if copies were made and sent out. You never hear anyone complain they didn’t have an original. No, praise God I have His Word.
That was what we have and that’s what Henry will explain. In many cases the copies were better than the originals. The materials were new. The script was cleaner. It was clearer, in that sense. Orthodox Jewry always preferred and held to be superior and more valuable newly produced copies rather than old and worn ones. They don’t destroy the old ones, but they give them a ceremony and put them away because it is the name of God and you can’t destroy that. But they recognize the newer ones are better ones. It seems to be the case in the early Church, as well because they were Jews and they followed the same process and belief.
In general, the Jewish community had integrity for the copies. Finally we have the originals preserved in manuscript copies. That’s what preservation is all about, understanding the degree to which and how we attain that understanding. That’s the goal of textual critics, to reproduce the originals. It’s very important.
I just want to end by saying this, that when we come to those copies and look at them compared to all the manuscripts that we have, as James VanderKam said, “The Hebrew Bible is a carefully annotated product of a centuries long tradition throughout which the sacred words were meticulously guarded, copied, and checked by Jewish experts.”
Or as Laird Harris said, “We can now be sure the copyists worked with great care and accuracy in the Old Testament. … Indeed, it would be rash skepticism that would now deny that we have our Old Testament in a form very close to that used by Ezra when he taught the Word of the Lord to those who returned from the Babylonian captivity.”
Or Bruce Waltke. He says, “Over 90% of the Old Testament is textually sound and uniformly witnessed to by major exemplars. The remaining 10% that exhibits any type of variation, extremely few are of such significance that they would involve any major doctrinal issues.”
So what can we say? We can say what Sir Frederick Kenyon said (by the way this is the father of Kathleen Kenyon who was a doubter and a minimalist who did a lot of damage, I think, in a lot of her understanding, particularly in Jericho. I should get an amen there from Henry) but Frederick Kenyon was a Bible believer. He said, “It is reassuring at the end to find that the general result of all of these discoveries … is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the Scriptures, and our conviction that we have in our hands, in substantial integrity, the veritable Word of God.”
So, you can trust it’s God’s Word. It’s inspired by Him. It’s preserved by Him. You have His Word on it. Thank you.