Chapter 9
The Manuscripts
Today there are available over 5,000 Greek manuscripts
of all or portions of the New Testament. When the Ottoman Empire captured
Constantinople in 1453, scholars of the Byzantine culture centered there
fled to western Europe, bringing with them ancient manuscripts of every
kind. It was the reading of these manuscripts that stimulated the
Renaissance which spread throughout Europe, opening the continent once
more to scholarly endeavors and dispelling the gross ignorance of the Dark
Ages, which testified to the consequences of Rome’s apostate influence.
Centuries of suppression of God’s Word had reduced Europeans to a race
of ignorant, illiterate, backward people. Vast areas of knowledge were
totally lost. Such is the result of apostasy.
Most precious among the Byzantine manuscripts rescued
from the attacking Turks and brought to the West were the manuscripts of
the Greek New Testament. The Byzantine era lasted longer than a
millennium, stretching from A.D. 312 until 1435. The Turks who founded the
Ottoman Empire were a fierce people from the steppes of Asia, north of
China in the region still known as Turkestan. Under their fierce and
ruthless leader, Tamberlane, they had ravished many lands including China;
others were destroyed along their triumphal march toward Europe.
Tamberlane the Great, as he was known, adopted a scorched-earth policy.
Every human, every animal was murdered, every dwelling, every building
destroyed, every aspect of vegetation removed. Eventually the Greeks were
overthrown in Asia Minor, only the Cypriot Greeks remaining as a remnant
of the once vast Greek civilization in that region, the civilization which
had dominated during apostolic times. In fact, nomadic Turks had been
infiltrating Asia Minor since about the seventh century.
Subsequently the Turks conquered as far as central
Europe, and on three occasions stood at the gates of Vienna, threatening
the very existence of the Holy Roman Empire. Remnants of those conquests
are seen in the communities of Moslems still found in significant numbers
in Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.
Tamberlane, who was born fifty miles north of Samarkand
of Turko-Mongol stock in 1336, conquered Persia by 1385 and Azerbaijan,
Armenia, Georgia and Mesopotamia by 1394. In 1398 he invaded India on the
pretext that the Moslem rulers were too lenient to Hindus, and he razed
Delhi to the ground. By 1401 he had overrun Baghdad and taken Syria, and
the following year he defeated the Egyptian army. Tamberlane, sometimes
known as Timur, died in 1405 while invading China. Some have ascribed the
arid Gobi desert to the scorched-earth policy adopted by his soldiers, and
certainly he was responsible for the almost total obliteration of the
strong Christian church in western China.
God in His infinite wisdom permitted the Turks to
overrun Constantinople to the frontiers of Greek knowledge. Scholars fled
Constantinople with all the Scriptures they could save. And thus Western
Europe, bathed in Catholic darkness, received the pure light of His Word.
His hand prevented the total overthrow of Europe, and thus preserved the
Christian flame. In those Greek New Testament manuscripts from
Constantinople lay the pure writings of the New Testament uncorrupted by
scribes and theologians in the West.
The known manuscripts consist of ninety papyrus
fragments dated between the second and eighth centuries, 270 uncial copies
dated between the third and the tenth centuries, 2,800 minuscules copied
between the ninth and sixteenth centuries, and around 2,000 lectionary
copies.1
The vast majority of these manuscripts, well over
ninety-five percent, are in such close agreement as to be to all intents
and purposes identical. The remainder, representing the Western stream of
manuscripts, are clearly defective. Yet it is these defective copies upon
which almost all modern translators place their trust. But the Reformers
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made no such error.
Enormous support for the majority text is found in
Armenian, Ethiopic, Gothic, Latin, and Syriac translations, some predating
the earliest Greek manuscripts. For example, in the nineteenth century,
following the texts of the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus, many
passages of the New Testament have been altered. But more recently
discovered papyrus fragments have confirmed the majority text.
Nineteenth-century biblical scholars claimed that much of the first
fourteen chapters of the Gospel of John was corrupted by scribes in the
later Byzantine Era. This claim was shown to be utterly false by the
discovery of Papyrus Bodmer II. Dated about A.D. 200, prior to the
commencement of the Byzantine Era, this Papyrus verified many of the
disputed passages attributed to late Byzantine copyists and demonstrated
that these passages were present in very early manuscripts.
Other sources of verification of the Byzantine Greek
Text are the writings of the early church fathers. These men frequently
quoted from Scripture and their writings, going back to the second
century, overwhelmingly support the majority text.
Even the chairman of the committee which produced the
Revised Version was honest enough to write:
The manuscripts which Erasmus used differ for the
most part only in small and insignificant details from the great bulk of
the cursive MSS. The general character of the text is the same. By this
observation the pedigree of the Received Text is carried up beyond the
individual manuscripts used by Erasmus. . . . that pedigree stretches
back to remote antiquity. The first ancestor of the Received Text
was at least contemporary with the oldest of our extant MSS, if not
older than any one of them. Bishop Ellicott, The Revisers of the
Greek Text of the N.T. by Two Members of the N.T. Company, 11-12
To denigrate the majority text, Westcott and Hort
introduced the Syrian Recension theory. They postulated that some time in
the third or fourth centuries the Syrian copyists had mutilated the
original New Testament, and that these mutilated texts became the basis
for the Textus Receptus.
One problem which Westcott and Hort faced was that the
ancient Peshitta Syriac translation, which undeniably predated the third
century, agreed essentially with the Textus Receptus and not with
the Codex Vaticanus. Westcott and Hort overcame this apparently
insurmountable objection to their postulate by declaring the Peshitta
Syriac translation to be of later origin (see Trinitarian Bible Society
Article number 13, The Divine Original).
But it is significant to record that earlier Westcott
had written that he had discovered
no reason to desert the opinion which has obtained
the sanction of the most competent scholars, that the formation of the
Peshitta Syriac was to be fixed within the first half of the second
century. The very obscurity which hangs over its origin is proof of its
venerable age, because it shows that it grew up spontaneously among
Christian congregations. . . . Had it been the work of a later date, of
the third or fourth century, it is scarcely possible that its history
should be as uncertain as it is. Westcott, The New Testament Canon, 1855
Apparently when it was found necessary to support his false hypothesis
concerning the accuracy of the Peshitta Syriac, Westcott altered his view,
for in his book Introduction to N.T. Greek, published in 1882,
Westcott placed the Peshitta Syriac in the latter part of the third
century or even in the fourth. Of a certainty the vast bulk of Greek
manuscripts confirm the accuracy of the Textus Receptus based upon
the Byzantine Greek manuscripts.
1 Uncial copies were written in
large letters, all capitals separated one from the other and within a
formal style. Minuscules were written in small Greek letters using
a cursive style (running writing). Lectionaries were Scriptures
divided into a system of lessons to be used for public reading. "It
is generally conceded that they preserve a text that is often much older
than the actual date of the manuscript might lead one to believe."
(Dr. Arthur Ferch, South Pacific Record, March 25, 1989). Papyrus
refers to the type of material upon which the manuscript was written. It
was made from reeds. <BACK>
|
