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By Andrey Desnitsky You can often hear that the Christian Scriptures have been corrupted: supposedly the original has not reached us, Jesus once preached one thing, and His disciples (first of all Paul) added something of their own, different to His sermon. And the press periodically reports about the discovery of another “sensational” document presenting the Gospel story in a completely different light… So do we have the authentic text of the Holy Scriptures? Original or copies? The originals of the biblical books, that is, the manuscripts written by the prophet Moses or the apostle Paul in his own hand, have, of course, not reached us. The writing material at that time was papyrus – wide long sheets made from the stems of a plant common in the Nile Delta and some other swampy places in the Middle East, or, much less often, parchment – specially treated animal skin. But parchment was too expensive, and papyrus too fragile: rarely did a papyrus book survive for more than half a century. Essentially, all the originals of ancient manuscripts that have come down to us are fragments of personal correspondence and business documents that were once thrown into Egyptian garbage dumps (only in Egypt did the dry climate allow them to be preserved), as well as inscriptions on hard surfaces (clay tablets, stone). However, all ancient literary works have come down to us in later copies. The first known copies of Homer’s poems were made no earlier than five centuries after the death of their creator. A little more than six hundred manuscripts of the Iliad, the most widely read and most revered work in Ancient Greece, have come down to us, about three hundred manuscripts of the tragedies of Euripides, and the first six books of the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus have survived only in a single copy from the 9th century. For comparison: today there are more than five thousand manuscripts known containing various parts of the New Testament. The earliest of them were made on papyrus in Egypt at the turn of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, just a few decades after the death of the apostles. They, in particular, contain excerpts from the Gospel of John, written at the very end of the 1st century. But how do we actually know that a given manuscript really contains the original text of the Homeric poems or the Bible? In our time, a forgery can be detected relatively easily. Manuscripts are studied and compared – as far as the New Testament is concerned, this is done by an entire scientific institute in the German city of Münster. Moreover, a few manuscripts may turn out to be forged, but not a thousand. Even in cases where an ancient text has reached us in only one or two copies, its authenticity can be confirmed or rejected on the basis of a multitude of data. Does the author get confused in the historical details of the period he describes? Does he know the geography of the place where the action takes place well? In what language does he write, what words does he use? Is his testimony confirmed by independent sources? Is his book quoted by other authors, is it known to readers from a later time? So to distinguish a forgery is not at all as difficult as it seems at first glance. In the five thousand manuscripts of the New Testament that have reached us, there are some differences (we will tell you more about this later), but they do not contain any other message than the Gospel. In none of them is it written that Jesus was not the Son of God or that he did not die on the Cross. If all this is the result of the activities of some huge gang of forgers who worked throughout the Mediterranean world no later than the beginning of the 2nd century AD, then, obviously, in this world it was not possible to create any plausible history at all. The Bible – a book of the Church The Bible speaks not only about Christ, but also about itself in a way that is fundamentally different, for example, from the Quran. This is one of those obvious platitudes that people tend to forget. Muslims believe that the Quran is a revelation of God, sent to a single man – Muhammad, who wrote it down “by dictation” from God, without adding a single word of his own. Therefore, for them, any earthly text of the Quran is only a copy of the heavenly Quran – the true Word of God, above which there is, has not been and never will be anything higher on earth. First there was the Quran, and from it Islam emerged. Therefore, by the way, the Quran, from the point of view of Islam, is untranslatable: all its translations are only auxiliary means, and only the Arabic text can be considered authentic. For the Christian, however, the Word of God that came down to earth is first and foremost not a book, but a Person, Jesus Christ, Who existed from eternity and founded His Church on earth. It is said that once an Orthodox priest in the USA met a street preacher from a Protestant denomination. “Do you want me to tell you about the church that is founded on the Bible?” the preacher happily suggested. “And do you want me to tell you about the Church that is founded on the Bible?” “Who wrote the Bible?” the priest replied. And he was right, because Christ Himself did not leave us any written texts. Even the Gospel was originally transmitted as an oral narrative, and the epistles were written by various apostles (above all by Paul) as pastoral instructions on specific occasions. And by the time the last book of the New Testament, the Gospel according to John, was completed, the Christian Church had already existed for more than half a century… Therefore, if we want to understand the Bible, we must turn to the Christian Church, because it is the original one. Where does the biblical canon come from? But on what basis do we even consider the Bible to be Holy Scripture? Perhaps it is simply one of many collections of ancient traditions? Throughout history, there have been people who have called themselves prophets, messengers, and claimed to be Christ—so should we believe everyone and accept everyone’s writings as Scripture? A book can become Scripture only in the community of believers who recognize its authority, determine its canon (the exact composition), interpret it, and, finally, copy it. Christians believe that all this happened not without the participation of the Holy Spirit, who spoke through the authors of the biblical books and whose help is still needed today if we are to understand this book correctly. But the Spirit does not abolish the human person—on the contrary, He allows it to reveal itself in its fullness. And since this process develops in history, Christianity is alien to the understanding of a once and for all given Revelation, which all subsequent generations can only fulfill. No, but just as Christ is the incarnate Son of God, so Christianity itself is embodied in our earthly history, preserving its internal unity, but acquiring new features and peculiarities in each generation and in each people. That is why the New Testament canon – the list of books that make up the New Testament – did not take shape immediately. For example, in the East they have long treated the book of Revelation with some distrust, probably because of its mystical character, and in the West – to the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Hebrews, because in style and content it differs noticeably from his other epistles (although it does not contradict them). Moreover, as Christian theologians added, even if he did not write this epistle, it was in any case written by the Church itself. As for the Gospels, everything is simple here. From the very beginning, the Church knew those four Gospels that ultimately entered the canon of the New Testament, and in none of the lists that have come down to us are there any others. It was in them that the Church saw the familiar and beloved face of Christ – and she needed nothing else. Origen, as early as the beginning of the 3rd century, listed these four Gospels, “which alone and unconditionally are accepted in the Church of God”. And in the 4th century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem noted: “Only the four Gospels are included in the New Testament, and the rest bear false names and are harmful. The Manichaeans wrote the Gospel of Thomas, which, tarnishing the goodness of the name “Gospel”, destroys the souls of the simple-minded. Accept also the Acts of the Twelve Apostles, together with the seven conciliar epistles – of James, Peter, John and Jude; and as a seal on all of them and on the last works of the disciples – the fourteen epistles of Paul.” Of course, early Christians sometimes venerated along with them some other books written at about the same time and continuing the apostolic tradition, for example, the “Shepherd” of Hermas or the epistles of Clement of Rome. Today, such books, which are not included in the Bible, but are located, as it were, on its border, are usually called apocrypha. They fully correspond to the New Testament and do not at all pretend to present some sensational version of the Gospel story. The New Testament canon was finally formed only by the end of the 4th century, and for seventeen centuries it has contained the same 27 books in practically all Christian churches. This question has never been a subject of dispute anywhere (the only notable exception is the Ethiopian Church, which added several early apocrypha to it). By what criteria were these books recognized as canonical? After all, the Apostle Paul himself, for example, wrote the Epistle to the Laodiceans, and some Gospels rejected by the Church bear the names of the apostles Peter, Thomas, and Judas (not Iscariot) – why were they not included in the canon? And why, on the contrary, did the Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Holy Apostles enter it, although their author was not at all a witness to the earthly life of Christ? The thing is that the status of a given book does not depend at all on the status of its alleged author. In ancient times, “copyright” was generally treated more simply, by giving books written after the death of famous people their famous names. Thus, one of the earliest collections of Christian hymns is called “Odes of Solomon,” although, of course, no one thought that King Solomon himself could have written them. Therefore, the Gospels bearing the names of apostles may actually have been written by other people. The question is not about authorship – the Church has recognized as Holy Scripture those books in which it has recognized as in a mirror the most complete and true expression of its faith. And no external criteria can explain this choice. And with the Old Testament the situation is more complicated. Its canon differs in different Christian communities. Thus, the Russian Orthodox Church recognizes 50 books – approximately the same number (with minor differences) as other Orthodox and Catholics, who follow the tradition of the early Church. And the Jews, whose canon was finally formed towards the end of the 1st century AD, already after their separation from Christianity, have 39 books in their Tanakh (as they call the Bible). Protestants, since the time of the Reformation, have followed the Jewish canon in relation to the Old Testament, therefore their editions of the Bible do not include “Wisdom of Sirach”, “Tobit”, “Judith”, “Books of the Maccabees” and some others, which, however, fully correspond in content to the other books of the Old Testament. Catholics call these books deuterocanonical, Protestants – apocryphal, and Orthodox – non-canonical. However, in Orthodox editions of the Bible they are necessarily included, since the ancient Christians recognized them as part of the Holy Scripture. Sensational finds? Books that presented a different version of the biblical story and preached a different faith have existed for a long time – and no one has hidden this. But the Church has consistently declared them false or at least dubious and has not included them in the Bible. In addition to the apocrypha, which seem to stand “on the border” of the Holy Scriptures and are fully consistent with them (such as the epistles of Clement of Rome or Ignatius of Antioch – younger contemporaries of the apostles), since the first centuries of Christianity there have been “alternative sacred histories”, which often contradicted not only the Bible, but also each other. So Dan Brown (the author of the famous “The Leonardo Code”) is by no means the first. The canonical Gospels, for example, tell almost nothing about Jesus’ childhood; only Luke describes an episode when his parents lost him in Jerusalem and then found him in the Temple. But isn’t it interesting what happened to him from his birth to the moment he went out to preach? This is how the “Gospel of the Infancy,” attributed to the Apostle Thomas, was born. Here are excerpts from it: “After this, he was passing through a village again, and a boy approached him and pushed him on the shoulder. Jesus was angry and said to him, “You will not go any further” – and the boy immediately fell down and died… The teacher wrote the alphabet and asked him for a long time about it, but he did not answer. Then Jesus said to the teacher: “If you are a true teacher and know the letters well, tell me what “alpha” is, and I will tell you what “beta” is. The teacher became angry and hit him on the head. And the boy felt pain, cursed him – and he fell to the ground breathless. And the Boy returned to Joseph’s house. And Joseph was grieved and said to His mother: “Do not let Him go out, for whoever angers Him dies.” Does this “Jesus” resemble the One who persuaded and did not punish, who healed and resurrected and did not kill, who suffered beatings and did not strike down His enemies? Rather, we have before us a not very good magician who does not tolerate any objections. It is not surprising that the Church did not recognize Christ in such an image and rejected the book as unreliable. There were quite a few such texts in antiquity; they continue to be discovered or even invented today (including Dan Brown). Moreover, new works often simply repeat old ideas – for example, today’s theosophists often borrow motifs from the ancient treatises of the Gnostics. These books may have been popular at one time, but unlike the Bible or the Koran, they never became the Holy Scripture of any viable community. Even if they temporarily attracted people’s attention, they inevitably sank into oblivion. Of course, the canonical Gospels do not contain all the sentences and details of Jesus’ life. Even the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 20:35) quotes a saying of His that is missing from the Gospels: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Undoubtedly, there are also individual, completely reliable details in some apocryphal books. But if these books as a whole do not reflect that image of Christ that the Church knows, it is difficult to trust them even in their individual parts. What can be done, people are too easily tempted to use the Good News for momentary propaganda purposes. But the Gospel remains alive and active despite all these attempts and will always remain so, because it is the true Word of God. (to be continued) Published in: “Thomas” (Phoma) magazine, Oct. 2013, https://foma.ru
