The Conservative Intelligencier points out a report on National Geographic’s Gospel of Judas. As you might expect, it is not as it appears, but I must ask what would it matter if it was as it appeared. What if a manuscript from 150-200 AD said Judas was a hero with noble motives? Would it really change anything? It would be fiction, even if old fiction.
The lesson, I think, is not about the Gospel of Judas itself, but about the character and motives of the people who promoted this translation.
It’s impossible to prove that part of scripture is fake (or a bad copy). Even if you find an ancient version that is different, it could have been an early bad copy or a work of fiction.
However, it seems there’s a large number of people who’d like traditional Christianity to just disappear. Y’all should take that as a compliment.
It’s impossible to discredit part of accepted Scripture because the ancient sources are so good. That discovery of Dead Sea Scrolls shows just how good our translations are. We are confident that all or at least 97% has been accurately recorded and preserved for us. The real problem with the Bible for modern English speakers isn’t historical accuracy but legitimate content.
Dan Brown and his sources want us to believe that Constantine said he liked a certain lot of writings and threw the others out, no matter what Christians, oral historicans, or anyone else thought. But of course, that’s silliness.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are evidence of fairly accurate transmission since their period. But given the emphasis during the 2nd Temple period on Torah study and the wide geographic distribution of Jews, I’d expect nothing else.
If parts of the Torah (= Pentatuch) were faked it would have been earlier, during the period of Ezra the scribe. We don’t know how many Torah scrolls the exiles were allowed to take to Babylon. We don’t know how many Torah scrolls were possessed by the poor who were allowed to stay in Judah. We don’t know how many Torah scrolls the returning exiles took back with them.
I don’t know the history of the Christian canon all that well. At what point was the Christian canon established? If the Church in X had a book they considered scripture prior to that, would the other Christians accept it? At some point Paul’s Epistle to the must have only been available to Christians in until it was copied.
That sounds right, and the whole Old Testament is a unified work. Christians will point to Jesus’ claim that the Scriptures as they were in his day were properly preserved from their original writing when he said the word of God would not pass away, not a jot or tittle would be removed from the Law or the Prophets. From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zacheriah, all would be preserved. That part of Scripture hasn’t changed since then.
As for the New Testament, I don’t know the dates. Lars may know them. As I understand it, Paul’s letter to the church in one city was copied and/or distributed to other cities as well. I believe Paul acknowledges this distribution in one of the letters. A few decades after they were written, many Christians valued them as holy. I think 1 Peter refers to Paul’s writing as being God inspired. There were other letters floating around too, and these were rejected by the same people accepting Paul, Peter, and Luke’s writing. In the 200s, I think the church at large had informal lists of which documents were inspired so by the time church scholars assembled to make an official canon, they only had six to eight letters or books to argue over. Jude was a hard sell, I think, b/c it has weird stuff in it. Revelation wasn’t readily accepted either.
But there were plenty of heretical documents which were clearly uninspired or written after the canon had been accepted. The Gospel of Thomas was a late one, wasn’t it, and it has some wild statements in it.
Phil: Christians will point to Jesus’ claim that the Scriptures as they were in his day were properly preserved from their original writing
Ori: True, but that argument requires faith in:
1. The divinity of Jesus
2. The accuracy of the New Testament
This means that it only works on Christians, who typically already believe in the accurate transmission of scripture.
Your point is well taken, Ori. It is interesting that people who celebrate skepticism seem to be willing to take up the most absurd conspiracy theories, if those theories undermine the Christian narrative. It parallels the credulity of many Christians (and many Christians are indeed credulous) remarkably.
Our view of Scripture is a matter of faith, but not merely on an emotional level. The Dan Brown/Jesus Seminar narrative involves (it seems to me) a very high level of historical skepticism, almost to the point of saying, “If the record says X, that is in itself proof that X is false, because all the historians were in on the conspiracy.”
And I think that harmonizes with your comment.
Does it require faith in the divinity of Jesus? Surely he is an authority on the Scriptures of his time, and his statements on its integrity would reflect his own and likely all rabbis beliefs about the Scripture they had.
Now on the question of whether Jesus said what the Bible records him saying, the burden of proof is on the skeptic to show what Jesus actually said. Pointing to letters written centuries after the facts or making up conspiracy theories doesn’t prove anything.
:I don’t know the history of the Christian canon all that well. At what point was the Christian canon established? If the Church in X had a book they considered scripture prior to that, would the other Christians accept it? At some point Paul’s Epistle to the must have only been available to Christians in until it was copied.
Officially or unofficially? There was a canon of usage long before Athanasius’ Easter Encyclical listed them out (sometime in the 300s). On the other hand, there is the Muratorian Fragment (ca. 170 is our oldest copy) which was published to combat the heresy of Marcion. This fragment lists out 22 of the 27 books of the NT as accepted and read in the churches. Similarly, Iraneus quotes from 24 of the 27 books in ways such as “Scripture says…” “The Lord spoke…” Tellingly, whenever he quotes from the apocrypha or pseudopigraphia, he never introduces the quote with anything nearing his Scripture says intros. Those are more like, “we see an example of this in the inspiring story of X”.
Phil: Does it require faith in the divinity of Jesus? Surely he is an authority on the Scriptures of his time, and his statements on its integrity would reflect his own and likely all rabbis beliefs about the Scripture they had.
Ori: Yes, but we already know what scripture looked like in Jesus’s time because we have the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some parts of scripture were already over a thousand years old at the time. The (Jewish) traditional date for the giving of the Torah is -1312. Unless Jesus had access to supernatural sources of information, his testimony doesn’t add to what we already know.
Lars Walker: It is interesting that people who celebrate skepticism seem to be willing to take up the most absurd conspiracy theories, if those theories undermine the Christian narrative.
Ori: True. I don’t know if faith has the power to move mountains, but it certainly has the power to make people ignore mountains moving in front of their eyes. Atheists can be every bit as dogmatic as the rest of us.
Here’s an article with many details of the story of how we received the Bible we have today. The writer Don Closson says early Christian leaders were focused on living by faith in the Lord, not on defining theology in writing. As heretics began arguing bad ideas, leaders defined Scriptural ideas more clearly.
Even though the history of this can be muddy, maybe even troubling to some, the essential principle here is one of faith. The Lord says he will preserve his Word even if the entire world is destroyed. If we believe that, then we don’t need to worry about missing revelation which was lost over the years or how decisions were made in the early church. Perhaps more relevant to us now, if we believe this we shouldn’t argue that the King James is the only properly translated Bible in English. Not that there can’t be poor translations in any language, but the idea that for English speakers God stopped preserving his Word back in 1611 is ridiculous.