The HIstory of the protestant bible ,and how error has been introduced

[Onesiphorus]

Colossians 2:8...from the Amplified bible

SEE TO IT THAT NO ONE CARRIES YOU OFF AS SPOIL OR MAKES YOU YOURSELVES CAPTIVE BY HIS SO CALLED PHILOSOPHY AND INTELLECTUALISM AND VAIN DECEIT (IDLE FANCIES AND PLAIN NONSENSE )FOLLOWING HUMAN TRADITION (MENS IDEAS OF THE MATERIAL RATHER THAN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD) JUST CRUDE NOTIONS FOLLOWING THE RUDIMENTARY AND ELEMENTAL TEACHINGS OF THE UNIVERSE AND DISREGARDING [THE TEACHINGS OF] CHRIST(THE MESSIAH)

2 Timothy 4:3 ,4

FOR THE TIME IS COMING WHEN(PEOPLE)WILL NOT TOLERATE(ENDURE)SOUND AND WHOLESOME INSTRUCTION,BUT,HAVING EARS ITCHING (FOR SOMETHING PLEASING AND GRATIFYING )THEY WILL GATHER TO THEMSELVES ONE TEACHER AFTER ANOTHER TO A CONSIDERABLE NUMBER ,CHOSEN TO SATISFY THEIR OWN LIKING AND TO FOSTER THE ERRORS THEY HOLD


Paul was fully aware of the dangers of philosophy ,and the profound effect philosophy had on Judaism and how the Hellenists were rooted in the philosophy of Philo an Alexandrian Jew who was of the school of Socratese ,we shall return to this a little later


As I said in my opening thread there are two versions of texts and two versions of Christianity .......We have the

Antioch version of Christianity

and

Alexandrian version of Christianity


The Antioch version based on scripture , the bible taken literally


The Alexandrian version ,based on philosophy and does not take the scriptures literally


SO for time ,I shall refer to these 2 as Antioch and Alexandrian


I will lay my cards on the table and declare that I am of the Antioch and believe in the inerrancy of the bible as the preserved word of God and also the Bible is the Word of God and to be taken literally ....e.g.creation , miracles etc ,I believe it is spiritually inspired by the Holy Ghost and that to undertstand it you have to be a new creation in Christ ,a member of the church the body of Christ saved by the Gospel of grace by faith alone .


The Textus receptus(TR) (what is it )

the inspired Word was given to those authors of the the scriptures and they were called :autographs" no autograph remain today , these autographs were eventually copied in manuscript from verbal preservation and textus receptus is a text of some 5000 manuscripts , although there is no complete manuscript around today just pieces . It is also known as The Traditional text ,The Majority Text ,Received ,Byzantine and Eastern .


For 2000years this text has been used by Christians ,and this text agrees with more than 95% of the Bible manuscripts which were written in the common (KOINA) greek of those days


Prior to the twentieth century , all English bibles were based on the TR

Tyndales New Testament

Miles Coverdale

Matthews bible

the great bible

The Geneva Bible

The Bishops Bible

The King James BIble

It is written that the protestant denominations are built upon that manuscript of the Greek New testament called the Textus Receptus .

During the dark ages when the only form of the bible was Latin ,the text was preserved in the Greek Church and was restored by the work of Erasmus , but the real author of the text was Lucian ,but the real authors of the Greek New Testament was the Apostles .

In the time of Lucian there was a systamticattempt to devastate the bible manuscripts and their theology and at this point Origen enters the story

Origen was of the Alexandrian college and made his editions and commentaries ,deforming then with error , philosophoies and gnostic beliefs which we will cover on another post


But why should we have a bible that is based on the TR

1..It is based on 95% of the Greek manuscripts available (5,300)

2...It is not mutilated with deletions ,additions and amendments

3....It agrees with the earliest versions of the bible
The Peshitta (AD150)
Old Latin Vulgate (AD157)
The Italic Bible(AD157)

These bibles were produced some 200 years before the Minority Text (like Vatican and Sinai)favored by the Roman Catholic Church

TR agrees with the vast majority of the 86,000 +citations from scripture by the early church fathers

It is untainted with Egyptian philosophy and unbelief

It upholds the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith ,....creation , the Divinity of Jesus Christ , the virgin birth , the Saviours miracles , his bodily resurrection , his literal return and the cleansing power of His Blood

It was and still is the enemy of all man made religion an important fact to carry over to the next post

[Onesiphorus]

I shall now begin to look at the two centres where the two versions originate and the main characters involved ,beginning with Alexandria

Alexandria was the main harbor of Egypt on the Mediterranean ,built by Alexander the great in 331 BC and on his death his empire was split between several rulers and one of his generals Ptolemy chose Egypt and by 200BC it was one of the largest cities in the world and became the centre for the worlds scientific and intellectual community .

Ptolemy built a university in Alexandria "The Great Library" and the library became the largest ever . It also became part of a research centre known as the Alexandrian Museum or Mouseion a word related to the shrine of te Muses which was a customary feature of the Greek schools that attributed philosophic and artistic inspiration to the Muses

THough built by Ptolemy the actual founder was "Demetrius Phalereus " a follower of "Aristotle"

The library was staffed be many famous Greek writers and scholars and contained over 700,000 scrolls and papyri and it was tradition that any book found in a ship that visited Alexandria , it was copied and and put into the LIbrary . Scientists and philosophers from all over the world were invited to study and enrich the University .

The library also encouraged translations and here in the third and second centuries BC the" Septuagint "was translated from the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek for the Hellenist Jewish Community in Alexandria


PHilosophy flourished in Alexandria with the expansion of the Roman Empire .Alexandria had its own philosophers such as
theodorus the Atheist , Hegassius the advocate of suicide , Religious philosophy was developed among the Jews ,Christians and more importantly by pagan philosophers

The library was destroyed by Bishop Theophilus on the orders of Rome in Ad 391 many believe the reason was to destroy the power base in Alexandria and to transfer the centre of Christianity ( Empirical Religion) to Rome .

We can now begin to look at the various characters and the effect these characters have on modern texts that are the bases for the modern versions of the bible

The first person we will discuss will be Philo of Alexandria

Philo was an Alexandrian Jew and folloed the Philosophical beliefs of PLato and Philo interpreted the scriptures accordingly ,what Philo did was to mingle the philosophies of Plato and the stoics with the truth of the Old Testament to form a new philosphy called Philoism

It was Alexandrian Platonism and therefore also Philoism that caused Greek philosophy to influence Christian writings and Gnosticism(which orinated from Alexandrianism and in Orientalism combined and it is also through the philosophical language of Philo that the septuagent was enabled

The early Philosophers such as Aristotle with his notions of conscience , ethics , and the ideas of citezenship over the individual resulted in the Stoic movement from Seneca leading to thoughts on morals .

We move on to PLato and his abstract philosophyand stoicism

Stoicism ..the world consists of a single substance .Reason and force both inherent in matter and describes the Active and the passive ,the passive can be any object and the "active" can be termed "AOYOS" , that is thought or will , and the Stoics came to attach a personality to the aoyos and so God might become a type of matter

I do not want to cloud the thread too much but I want you to get to see the influences that have affected the so called early translaters of the Alexandrian texts and I therefore have to include the philosophies .


PLato also believed that mind acting on matter is absolutely separate from it and the forming of the world ,the creative energy made the world and his agents performed the rest by which it became actual i suggest if you want to know more you should look up Dualism or monism ,and pantheism and most importantly panentheism

My next post will concentrate on Philo

[Onesiphorus]

In Pauls letter to the Colossians written from his imprisonment probably in Rome ,he warns of the danger of philosophy and vain deceit after the traditions of men ,after the rudiments of the world ,and not after Christ ,for in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily ...Colossians 2 : 8 ,9 .We can see how already we have heresies creeping into the early church with it resulting confusion ,so as early as the first century philosophy is eating away at Gods truth .

Anyone believing that philosophy is a a science is misled as Philosophy is inherently satanic and demonic because its sole point is to attempt to replace with what God has done with what mans mind thinks is what is reason .


It is clear from Colossians that there are certain teachings that refute the Gospel there and the main being

Refuting that the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in Christ Jesus

That the christians were complete in Christ

The christians had to do more than the Gospel required to suppliment what Christ Jesus did on the cross


It is at this point we must show how Jewish/Alexandrian philosophy of religion ,of which Philo gives us the clearest picture views theology


Philo did not view the Old Testament as a literal history ,but argued that it was also allegorical ,hence proving that it was essentially identical with the Greek philosophical theory called Stoicism ,which had been mixed with the philosophical elements of Plato ,and the fundamental idea from the platonic philosophy is based on the dualism of God ,and the world ,spirit and matter

It is not a concept that can easily be written here in a couple of lines ,but to follow the concept further

God and the world needed a mediator who was and yet was not God as well as world ,which he called "the Logos"however from the philosophical model used we can only conclude that the world was formed by Logos and not "created " and within this formed world man is regarded as a being of Divine nature according to his Spirit while in a material body which is of sin


Philos philosophy of religion had no appreciable influence on the first generation of believers in Christ ,however the development of religious ideas in the second century led to the same heretical views expressed by Philo in the works of Valeentinus and Origen .

Where the allegorical was placed above the literal and how these rules permitted alteration of the original text as in the Septuagent to promote meanings of a passage or in order to give a meaning to a sentence which appeared to the translator to be "unmeaning" or "offensive "

This is only Part one of this post

[Searchlight]

Looks like excellent work that is really well researched, led into truth.

[Steveg]

The Textus Receptus is a corrupt text and the KJV and other translations based on it are also corrupt. Some of the so called Greek that it is based on was back translated by ERasmus from the Latin Vulgate.

Here are some extracts from a site discussing the TR & the KJV (not a Catholic site) by Robert Nguyen Cramer

(The KJV's New Testament was based upon Erasmus' Greek text as modified by Stephanus and Beza. The NKJV's New Testament was based primarily upon Erasmus' Greek text as modified by Stephanus and Beza, but its translators also consulted the so-called Majority Text.) However unlike the original KJV, the NKJV does not include the Apocrypha. Though the NKJV provides a modern English rewording of the KJVwording, the NKJV still has all of the same errors that the KJV derived from Erasmus' Greek New Testament, which is plagued with corrupt readings, as explained in this article. Below are three examples of corrupt texts in the KJV and NKJV. In all three verses, Erasmus' Greek New Testament text was based upon copies of the Latin Vulgate, not on any ancient Greek texts. In other words, the corruption of these verses had no support in any Greek texts prior to 1516.


Truly major differences between the KJV and modern translations of the New Testament are primarily due to the inaccuracy of the so-called Textus Receptus [TR], the Greek text upon which the KJV's New Testament was based. According to Bruce Metzger (The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, Third Edition, Oxford University Press, 1992, pages 95-118), the TR primarily resulted from the work of a Dutch Roman Catholic priest and Greek scholar by the name of Desiderius Erasmus, who published his first Greek New Testament text in 1516. The first edition of Erasmus' text was hastily and haphazardly prepared over the extremely short period of only five months. (ibid., page 106) That edition was based mostly upon two inferior twelfth century Greek manuscripts, which were the only manuscripts available to Erasmus "on the spur of the moment" (ibid., page 99).

The Greek New Testament project was seen by its publisher, Johann Froben, as a considerable commercial opportunity. (ibid., pages 98 and 102-103) Accordingly Froben expeditiously negotiated with Erasmus, who had already nobly intended to produce a Greek-Latin parallel text New Testament for the primary purpose of allowing Latin readers to become better acquainted with the original New Testament text, which he wanted to approximate as best as possible. Froben rushed Erasmus' first edition text to market, in his attempt to get it into circulation ahead of the much more methodically prepared Complutensian Polyglot Bible, which was due to be published soon. (In contrast to the five months that Erasmus used to hurriedly put his text together and get it printed and circulated, the Complutensian text required eighteen years of careful preparation before its first edition appeared. Erasmus himself said in a letter in Latin in 1516 that this first edition had been "praecipitatum verius quam editum," -- more precipitated than edited.)

The TR was used as the basis for the KJV and all the principal Protestant translations in the languages of Europe until 1881, when the Revised Version [RV] was first published in England. The KJVtranslators most directly relied upon the 1598 Greek text by the Theodore de Beze of Geneva, but it also was virtually identical with Stephanus' 1550 and 1551 Greek texts, which were virtually identical with Erasmus' 1535 Greek text. Again, these all were noble efforts, but the editors of these editions did not have access to the current wealth of ancient documents and to today's more scientific knowledge of how those documents had been transmitted and partially corrupted over many centuries.

Due to the errors in the Hebrew and Greek texts from which the KJV were translated, the KJV contains some texts that are not consistent with Jesus' genuine teachings and other genuine New Testament teachings, as represented in the earliest Greek texts of the New Testament.

[Onesiphorus]

Just as a matter of interest do you know how many manuscripts the new versions are based or from what text the new versions are based on Steveg, and who declared that the textus receptus was corrupt , and what is the wealth of scientific evidence ,and ancient documents do we have that supports the Vaticanus or sinaiticus which are in the Alexandrian which are used in the NIV and all modern versions version compared to the Antioch version

[Steveg]

Just as amatter of interest do you know how many manuscripts the new versions are based or from what text the new versions are based on Steveg, and who declared that the textus receptus was corrupt

The quotes I gave are from a document on the web site www.bibletexts.com Unfortunately that site does not seem to be available at the moment whether temporary or permanent I do not know.

I have a page from it which I saved which gives this information. It was researched by Robert Nguyen Cramer.

He also says;

Erasmus' Greek manuscript basis. Erasmus' final 1535 edition still relied upon no more than six Greek manuscripts, the oldest (but least used!) of which was from the tenth century. Though Erasmus did in later editions of his work consult the Complutensian version of the Greek New Testament, Metzger is able to truthfully state:

Thus the text of Erasmus' Greek New Testament rests upon a half-dozen minuscule manuscripts. The oldest and best of these manuscripts (codex I, a minuscule of the tenth century, which agree agrees often with the earlier uncial text) he used least, because he was afraid of its supposedly erratic text! [Metzger, p. 102]]


Where does this figure that you quoted come from: It [KJV] is based on 95% of the Greek manuscripts available (5,300). I think this is a myth that is propagated by KJV adherents but has no substance in reality.

The page also lists the following:

Some English New Testaments that are based on more reliable Greek texts. The primary standard Greek texts for each of the most recent four periods are below.

1. 1869-1881 - The Tischendorf text (1869).
2. 1881-1898 - The Tischendorf text and the Westcott & Hort text (1881).
3. 1898-1956 - The Nestle text.
4. 1956-present - The UBS text and Nestle-Aland text, which are identical.

Versions with a reliable textual basis Date
American Standard Version 1901
Bible in Basic English 1949, 1964
Contemporary English Version 1995
English Standard Version 2001
God's Word 1982,1995
Goodspeed's Bible 1939
Holman Christian Standard Bible (if all bracketed text is excluded) 2004
The Jerusalem Bible 1966
Moulton's Modern Reader's Bible 1895, 1935
Moffatt's Bible 1954
New American Bible 1987
New Century Version 1986
New English Bible 1971
New International Version 1978
New Jerusalem Bible 1985
The New Living Translation 1996
New Revised Standard Version
1993 Phillips' New Testament 1957
Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha 1996
Revised Standard Version 1952
Revised Version 1881-1885
Rotherham's Emphasized Bible 1902
Schonefield's New Testament, Revised Edition 1985, 1998
Today's English Version 1976, 1992
The Twentieth Century New Testament 1904
Weymouth New Testament 1930

If you really want to follow this up I can email you the page I have – it is 188Kb

[Onesiphorus]

NO its Ok I know that information . I can if it is really necesarry Itemise the full list of 5300 documents used ,and compare that with the documentation of the Tischendorf ,W&H,Nestle and United Bible society ,and if you will bare with me I shall prove how the latter is influenced by Uniterian and Catholic influences which would want to deny the foundation of our Faith ,just be patient as the very 4 examples you have shown are the very reason why error and heresy has pervaded the Church, I will answer every one of your points before I have finished ,and it is interesting that in one post you have itemised everything that is wrong within the faith

[Steveg]

NO its Ok I know that information . I can if it is really necesarry Itemise the full list of 5300 documents used ,and compare that with the documentation of the Tischendorf ,W&H,Nestle and United Bible society ,and if you will bare with me I shall prove how the latter is influenced by Uniterian and Catholic influences which would want to deny the foundation of our Faith ,just be patient as the very 4 examples you have shown are the very reason why error and heresy has pervaded the Church, I will answer every one of your points before I have finished ,and it is interesting that in one post you have itemised everything that is wrong within the faith

I will await your posts with interest.

[Steveg]

Incidentally oneisphorus are you going to go into the theory that the synoptic gospels were originally written in Hebrew, and that they were rote translated into Greek? This theory also says that if you back translate into Hebrew you find the Greek has the Hebrew sentence structure and also that by understanding the Hebrew and the Jewish writings many of the words of Jesus that don't seem to make sense now do so in Hebraic terms.

It's very interesting, but perhaps off your topic.