Resources on the Reliability of the Bible

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There’s a great little article on this written by my friend Andrew Judd, who used to work at Barneys: Why Do Different Bibles Include Different Books in the Old Testament?

The Protestant tradition does not consider the 12 additional books found in the Catholic bible to be inspired Scripture. Andrew writes “While these Greek texts weren’t considered Scripture in Jesus’ time, they were sometimes written in the back of copies of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament). When Christians in the West translated the Septuagint into Latin they included some of these devotional texts ….Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin for the Catholic Church, knew they weren’t Scripture and clearly distinguished them as interesting but not authoritative. Despite this, people got used to seeing them there, and so one thing led to another and by the Council of Trent they are included in the Catholic church’s official list of Scripture.”

The most likely early complete source is Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, particularly the first letter to the Corinthians, written around 50–55 AD. In 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, Paul explicitly quotes a pre-existing Christian creed. Historians widely agree that this formula—which details Jesus’ death for sins, burial, resurrection, and appearances to witnesses—dates back to the mid-30s AD, just two to five years after Jesus’ crucifixion. Paul records that he received this tradition shortly after his own conversion, and he notes that many of the 500-plus eyewitnesses to the resurrected Jesus were still alive at the time of his writing.

Here’s what I wrote to Barneys earlier this year on this topic:

https://mailchi.mp/barneys.org.au/agmbooklet-5862932?e=[UNIQID]

The biggest one, I think, is known as the Johannine Comma. The King James Version includes the phrase in 1 John 5:7–8: “…in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth…” This is the most explicit statement of the Trinity in the New Testament; it’s also entirely missing from all early Greek manuscripts and was likely a marginal gloss added in later Latin manuscripts that eventually made its way into the printed Greek texts (the Textus Receptus). If the Johannine Comma were in the early Greek texts, a lot of early Christological heresy would have been short-lived – we would have ended up in the same place theologically, but a lot faster. And some sects like the JWs and Christadelphians would not exist.

This is a great question – it goes to something called ‘canon’ which comes from the Latin word for ‘rule.’  Basically, I find three responses helpful:  (1) These are the texts which the early church universally recognised as a continuation of the enscripturation of God’s word modelled by the Old Testament.  (2) These texts all arise out of the apostolic witness (if not each written by actual apostles), and it was this group whom Jesus specifically instructed to hand on his message.  (3) It’s important to understand that, if anything, the early church erred on inclusion (the ‘disputed epistles’ of Paul) rather than exclusion. There aren’t any competing gospels or epistles out there that were excluded (the so-called ‘Gnostic Gospels’ come from much later and were never in the running (like the Gospel of Thomas, late 2nd-mid 3rd century, a collections of ‘sayings of Jesus’ which tells us more about the early church than about Jesus!).

Wonderful question.  Firstly, I’ve come to realise how important what you put into yourself first thing in the day does to your whole framing. Don’t touch your phone till you’ve read your bible!  Secondly, on the other hand, I’ve become much more flexible. I will read whole letters in a sitting. I will listen to the Psalms. I will spend a month just memorising and delving into one little passage.  Thirdly, I’ve become more communal in my reading. The bible really isn’t designed primarily for one individual on their own. It’s written to be read together, ideally out loud.  Fourthly, I’ve realised that the bible is like manure. You spread it around, let it do its work. The goal is not a profound spiritual insight every morning. It’s long-term, slow and steady growth and transformation. I don’t need to go ‘wow, that was new/exciting/profoundly spiritual’ each time.

So, technically, hapax legomena (the plural of hapax legomenon) are words that appear only once within a defined corpus of literature, so it can refer to words which are used only once in the New Testament but which appear elsewhere in Greek literature. However, you are correct – not least because the New Testament is written in Koine Greek, often usually idiomatic rather than formal language – and even professional nautical terminology! – it includes a number of words which scholars have not found elsewhere. The meaning is not ‘guessed’ in the random sense – it is inferred from lexemes, context, etc. But ‘daily’ is a great example!

I think this is a common misunderstanding of how God is represented in the OT and NT. In the OT, we frequently hear the biblical authors marvelling at the patience and forbearance of God in the face of egregious evil. In the NT, Jesus’ disciples repeatedly comment on how harsh and demanding his teaching is. And Jesus says more about hell and judgement than any other speaker.

The standardized modern system of chapters and verses that we use today was introduced in the Latin Vulgate by a French printer called Robert Estienne. He created the system in 1551 and printed the text first in 1555.

Subject titles, on the other hand, vary in both content and location, from version to version.

Neither of these is treated by scholars or informed readers as ‘biblical’, in the sense of belonging to the inspired text. On the other hand, they aren’t ‘unbiblical’, in the sense of being in conflict with the text (except perhaps where chapter or verse locations are extremely poorly located), any more than the ink or paper may be said to be ‘unbiblical.’