The Da Vinci Hoax (10)

The Errors - Christian History

Constantine: Bible & Canon

Bible Alterations

Do references in our Bible to the divinity of Christ simply reflect the embellishments Constantine had made to the Gospel text? No. The integrity of the text of our Bible is proven by early fragments and manuscript copies that still exist and predate the Edict of Milan (AD 313), Constantine, and the Council of Nicaea, and by paraphrases and quotes of scriptural passages made in the writings of earlier Christian authors.

1. The Bodmer Papyrus II, discovered in 1956, has been dated to about AD 200, and contains fourteen chapters and portions of the last seven chapters of the Gospel of John. Also of import are the Bodmer Papyri XIV and XV.

2. The Chester Beatty biblical papyri, discovered in 1930, has been dated to AD 200-250 and contains portions of the four Gospels, Acts, Paul's Epistles, and Revelation.

3. From the Bodmer and Chester Beatty papyri we can construct virtually all of Luke, John, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Hebrews, and portions of Matthew, Mark, Acts, and Revelation. They confirm the integrity of our New Testament.

4. Among Greek manuscripts there are known to exist 97 papyri and 210 uncials. The papyri are the oldest, written before the 4th century, and the uncials the most important for textual critics. They confirm the veracity of our biblical texts.*

5. There are 36,000 patristic citations (paraphrases and quotes) of the New Testament surviving in the writings of the early Church Fathers. With their references alone, it is estimated, one could reconstruct all but fifteen to twenty verses of the New Testament from material written 150 to 200 years after the time of Christ (and before the time of Constantine).

* A new best-selling book also attacks the integrity of the Bible (Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, 2005). While more competently researched it too makes rather outlandish claims of theological tampering, basing itself on textual variances in ancient manuscripts. For Bible scholars these are not as problematic as the author would have us believe. Scholars have long known about variant readings in different manuscripts. One estimate is that there are about 200,000 variances scattered among the 4,288 manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. While this may seem like a staggering figure it must be remembered that 4,011 of these manuscripts are either lectionaries, meant for congregational reading, or minuscules that do not antedate the 9th century, and so of little significance. And most of the extent variants are simply changes in spelling, transposition of words, omission of lines, etc. Nor is any doctrine of the Christian faith or moral commandment completely dependent on an effected text. As Dan Brown plays upon popular ignorance of early heresies and their writings to sow seeds of doubt into the minds of readers, so Ehrman plays upon ignorance of textual variances within ancient biblical manuscripts amongst his readership for similar effect.

Canon of Scripture

Constantine did commission 50 copies of the Bible to be made around 325 AD. Only an emperor could afford the exorbitant cost of hand copying such a large document on parchment.*

But neither Nicaea nor Constantine ever formed the Scriptural canon. It was in the process of formation long before and for a while after Nicaea.

1. Twenty of the 27 books that now make up our New Testament were generally acknowledged without much controversy by early Christians but 7 books were more disputed.

2. The earliest known list of New Testament books dates from the late 2nd century (Muratorian Fragment, AD 170-190). It contains 22 of the books in our canon plus the Wisdom of Solomon and the Apocalypse of Peter ("which some among us would not have read in church"). Gnostic writings are not included. The second century Catholic writers Irenaeus, Polycarp and Clement of Alexandria are also in basic agreement with twenty or so of these same books, that appear in our canon.

3. Origen (AD 185-254), the most influential biblical commentator of the first three centuries, listed as the books acknowledged by all the churches as scripture: The four Gospels, Acts, the 13 Pauline epistle, I Peter, I John, and Revelation. The disputed books were II Peter, II John, III John, James, and Jude. Origen may have considered Barnabas, Didache, and the Shepherd of Hermas canonical. Once again, none of these are Gnostic works but orthodox writings of the early Church.

4. The first person to list the 27 books that all Christians today accept as the New Testament was not the Emperor Constantine but Saint Athanasius, the bishop and patriarch of Alexandria in Egypt, in a circular letter to all the churches in Egypt written in AD 367, forty-two years after the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea.

5. Local North African synods at Hippo Regius (393) and Carthage (397) listed as inspired the same books we have in our New Testament. Pope Damasus I is said to have endorsed the canon of Hippo but the records have been lost.

6. In 405, Pope Innocent I in a letter (to Exuperius) described a canon of the Old and New Testament that is identical to the present-day Catholic Bible.

7. As we can see it was not Constantine who determined the canon of the New Testament as part of a political power play but the Church, in the persons of its bishops.

* The Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus are the oldest nearly complete Bibles known to exist. Both are from about the mid-fourth century, shortly after Nicaea. Only portions of the Greek Old Testament, or Septuagint, survive in Codex Sinaiticus but its New Testament is complete. Included with the New Testament are The Epistle of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas - valuable early Christian writings but not included in the canon today. A large portion of the Old Testament has survived in the slightly older Codex Vaticanus but it is missing more of the New Testament. Vaticanus originally contained a complete copy of the Septuagint except for 1-4 Maccabees and the Prayer of Manasseh. The first thirty-one leaves of Genesis are lost (1:1-46:28a) and ten leaves of the Psalms (105:27-137:6b). In addition to the books found in the modern Jewish Bible are 1 and 2 Esdras, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, and the Epistle of Jeremiah. Most, but not all of these, are considered inspired by the Catholic Church. The extant New Testament of Vaticanus contains the Gospels, Acts, the General Epistles, the Pauline Epistles and Hebrews (up to 9:14) but missing 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon and Revelation.

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