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Minutes

This event marked the first time a student spoke for Socratic Club as Thomas Ordeman discussed "Perseverance of the Word: The History of Biblical Transmission." Dr. Gary Ferngren provided some follow-up discussion and commentary. Below, please find the main body of Mr. Ordeman's presentation, followed by a brief note-based summary of Dr. Ferngren's commentary.
Good evening fellow Socratics, and honored guests, and thank you for joining us this evening. As you know, Christianity is a religion based upon past events, the latest of which occurred near the end of the first century. Because of our separation from these events, Christianity and everything that goes along with it revolves around the Bible, which records the events which pertain to the social, economic, political, and religious history of the Hebrews from the beginning of the world until the middle of the first century, and the history and challenges of the early Christian church from around twenty-nine AD to the end of the first century.
Many people in this day and age question the relevance of such a book. In a world in which new ideas and new writings can be found and absorbed almost daily, people approach a two thousand year old religious document with skepticism. The Enlightenment established a trend in belief which dictates that text so old must have endured numerous editorial changes and reconstructions. How can a text so unreliable have any relevance to the lives of modern, educated people? While my duty tonight is not to establish the relevance of the Bible to the lives of modern, educated people, I intend to present evidence tonight which will demonstrate that assumptions of textual atrophy are unsubstantiated and, in fact, incorrect. Learned people have attempted for several centuries now to divorce the Bible from history, and as a student both of history and Christianity, I firmly believe this divorce to be impossible. I will present some of the reasons and examples to qualify that belief. In a few moments, I'll get to the brunt of my presentation, but first I believe it will be valuable to qualify my presentation with a bit of background on my personal viewpoint and philosophy.
I became a Christian during my freshman year of high school, and during my sophomore, junior, and senior years I was very privileged to study American history at West Albany High School under Everett Hartman. Mr. Hartman introduced me to a concept called pragmatism which, I feel, now goes largely unpracticed in the United States. While I personally opine that that directly citing a dictionary in a speech is cliché, I was forced to consult a college student's best friend, Mr. Webster, defines "pragmatic" as
"testing the validity of all concepts by their practical results." Pragmatism may seem a bit selfish by definition, as it stresses the consideration of what works in one's own condition. Pragmatism has taught me to look at life in a very practical way, and this has influenced my consideration of the Bible.
I've also been training as a historian now for four and a half years. I can speak for more than just myself when I say that historians pursue a definitive, factual record of the events of the past. As archaeology has a limited capacity, much of our knowledge of history comes from ancient historians and authors. Part of the task of any classical historian is gauging the accuracy of such sources. The accuracy of a source such as the Bible takes on new significance, as people have been basing their entire worldviews and religions on it for thousands of years. As a historical text, the Bible often receives greater scrutiny and harsher judgment because of the moral content contained therein than do other texts; this creates a double standard which, in the school of historical recording, can prove dangerous. As a Christian, I believe the Bible to be infallible; as a Christian historian, however, the Bible has to back itself up in order for my faith to stand strong.
Before I go on, I'd like to clarify a few of the terms which I'll be using this evening. When I refer to the Bible, I am referring to the sixty-six books in two Testaments which constitute the Protestant holy text. When I refer to historical transmission, I am referring to the process by which the texts of the Bible have been preserved and passed down over the generations for roughly thirty-two-hundred years. That having been said, I'd like to take this opportunity to outline my points of discussion for the evening. First, I will discuss the preservation and transmission of the Bible texts; following that, I will describe the process by which two major translations were made; finally, I will present examples in which independent sources confirm the historical accounts presented in the Bible.
A number of misconceptions are floating around in the world today regarding the recording of the Bible throughout history. One of these, Redaction Criticism, claims that the Bible, in particular the Old Testament, floated around in Hebrew oral tradition for several centuries before it was written down, and that during this time the stories contained in the Torah were embellished and exaggerated, turning ordinary occurrences into miracles. One of the evidences used to validate this argument was once the lack of Old
Testament texts dated prior to roughly 900 AD, and is now the lack of texts dated prior to the first century BC. However, this is not evidence of a loss of integrity in the Old Testament texts. In order to understand this, we must understand Jewish culture.
The Fourth Commandment states: "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates." We know not only from the Old Testament, but also from Jesus' dealings with the Jewish leadership in the Gospels, that some groups of Jews in the New Testament period, in particular the Pharisees had a very legalistic mindset. The situation which comes directly to my mind is found in chapter six of the Gospel according to Luke. In verses six through eleven, Luke writes:
On another Sabbath he went into the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was shriveled. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal on the Sabbath. But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said to the man with the shriveled hand, "Get up and stand in front of everyone." So he got up and stood there. Then Jesus said to them, "I ask you, which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?" He looked around at them all, and then said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He did so, and his hand was completely restored. But they were furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus.
Jewish cultural law was strict enough that a man who healed another man on the Sabbath was perceived to have broken the law; if they were this particular about legitimate actions and good deeds, then they were far more concerned with authentic breaches of God's law. The Third Commandment reads: "You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name." In order to keep from speaking the Lord's name in vain, Jews neglected to speak the Lord's name at all; this legality even extended to their copies of Old Testament. Jewish scribes copied their religious text with relentless accuracy. The copies were checked and rechecked and rechecked, and if a mistake was made in copying, the offending copy was immediately destroyed to keep it from being used as a master copy in the future. These checks were so exact that numerical values for the letters themselves were assigned, and then added up to ensure that each document had the same amount of each letter and added up to the same final sum.
The Jews were so particular about their holy texts, and held them in such high esteem, that when a copy had become to worn for regular use, it was actually interred in order to prevent it's use in profaning God's name, in accordance with the Third Commandment. They were first stored in a "hiding place," or "genizah," for a period of time before being taken to consecrated ground for burial and eventual decomposition. In this way, the Torah was preserved like a copy of U2's first album, Boy, which was originally recorded on an LP, then transferred to an audiocassette, then to a compact disc, and so on. Because of this, we know that the lack of texts dating back to the time of Moses is not proof of the claims of Redaction Criticism; in fact, there's good reason why we don't have older extant copies of the Old Testament.
In the late 1940's, the famed Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the Qumran region of Israel. These texts confirmed the authenticity of later copies, as they were dated around one thousand years earlier than the latest extant copies of the Hebrew Bible. The Dead Sea Scrolls also contained non-Biblical texts, including commentaries and related stories which were not included in the Bible. However, a comprehensive history of the formation of the canon is a topic for another evening. The important thing to note about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they predate our other most recent copies of the Hebrew Scriptures by a millennium, they remained completely undisturbed for two thousand years, and they were the same as
their descendant texts.
In comparison to the Old Testament and, indeed, most other ancient histories and pieces of classical literature, the preservation of the New Testament can be very reliably confirmed using ancient copies. If every copy of the New Testament written in something other than ancient Greek were to disappear, we would be able to reliably reconstruct 98 percent of the New Testament merely from quotations in surviving letters and documents from the first century in which the books of the New Testament were quoted. In addition to this, entire copies of the New Testament in Greek survive from the fourth century, a few survive from the third century, and fragments survive from the second century. As I will point out later, Jesus and his followers had a profound impact on the Roman Empire into which the early church was born.
An examination of the perception of the texts by those copying and reading them is also valuable. People have claimed many times in conversation with me that the Bible is unreliable, and have justified it by citing the game "telephone" in which people sit in a circle and whisper a phrase into each other's ear. People didn't consider the Old or New Testaments to be a game. When the information at hand is perceived as making the difference between life and death, or eternal life and death, people take the information more seriously and make a concerted effort to get things right. Records of ancient societies show us with great certainty that scribes were highly-trained individuals. They studied languages and writing for years before they were employed in their profession, and once employed they were as accurate as a computer is today. One of the dilemmas of history is that modern historians tend to perceive the past through a present-day-lens. Because of inventions like spell-checking software, Xerox machines, and typewriters, we have become accustomed to a culture of people with illegible handwriting who can't spell and don't understand grammar. Picture, if you will, a room full of twenty-five to forty-five year old men, all of whom
have at least a Master's degree in English, whose handwriting is as clear as a printed document. Eight hours a day, six days a week, their job is to record and copy texts, down to the letter. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the scribes of the ancient world. Because of their zeal, we can be confident of the preservation of the texts of the Bible.
Another common misconception is that the Bible has been retranslated numerous times. Many people believe that current versions of the Bible are six or seven generations away from the original text. This is simply untrue. While I can't speak for each and every edition of the Bible in existence, I've researched the translation process for two of the most widely used translations, the King James Version and the New International Version.
The King James Version, also known as the Authorized Version, was commissioned in 1611 by James, king of Scotland and later king of Great Britain. Under his leadership, a council of the finest linguists available were assembled. The group translated the Bible texts from Hebrew and Greek into English, using Latin as an intermediate language. While this sounds as if the Authorized Version is a third generation text from the original, we must keep in mind that the same men who translated the Hebrew and Greek into Latin went on to translate the Latin text into English. The best scholars available created King James' Bible.
I feel that it is necessary in this discussion to reference the translation process for one of the more modern translations. For my own use, I tend to rely on the New International Version, which was begun in 1966 and published in 1973. On many occasions, I have been informed by people who have a bias toward the Authorized Version that translations of the Bible since 1611 are merely redresses of King James' Bible. While the translators of the New International Version and all other versions of the Bible I've ever seen use the same format and layout as the Authorized Version, the preface to the New International Version clearly states that their translation was made using the best Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts available. This means that while a particular verse in the Authorized version will be largely the same as a verse from the NIV, they are arranged in the same way for ease of reference, not because the NIV is merely the Authorized Version with "updated" words. To my knowledge, only one translation of the Bible exists which is a rehash of the King James Version, and it's called the New King James Version. I use a pocket-sized copy of the New King James Version, and while I prefer the New International Version for readability, I have encountered no problems even with the NKJV, a third generation text.
Now, one of the best ways to confirm a historical account is to find a cross reference in a contemporary source. For example, a reading of "The Histories" by Herodotus is more valuable when paired with Plutarch's "Lives of the Greeks"; Appian's "The Civil Wars" is more informative when paired with "The Civil War" by Julius Caesar. Not surprisingly, people and events described in the Bible are confirmed in other sources. While these examples are numerous, I will only cite a few. I will break these down into two categories: sympathetic accounts, and indifferent or hostile accounts.
Of the first, two of the most notable come to us from the noted first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. In Book 18 of "Antiquities," he writes of John the Baptist: "Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod's army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John, that was called the Baptist: for Herod slew him, who was a good man, and
commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for that the washing [with water] would be acceptable to him, if they made use of it, not in order to the putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only], but for the purification of the body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness."
Also in Book 18 of "Antiquities," we find a record of Jesus. "Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, (9) those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; (10) as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day."
On the other end of things, we find references in two of the most notable surviving Roman Imperial histories. In chapter "The Annals of Imperial Rome," Tacitus says the following: "Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their
abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular."
Suetonius, who wrote biographies of the first twelve Roman emperors, wrote in chapter sixteen of his biography of Caesar Nero of the persecution of Christians, who he described as "a sect professing a new and mischievous religious belief.