The authenticity of New Testament books?

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steve
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The authenticity of New Testament books?

Post by steve » Thu Jun 06, 2013 12:57 pm

I received today the following inquiry by email:
Just read this (see below) from a guy named Marc Winter. Was curious what you think and if he's correct in this assessment:

"Read the New Testament with these thoughts firmly affixed in your minds. The ONLY authenticated and verified text, written by the authentic identified author in the New Testament is the original Pauline letters; 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians and Philemon. 1 Corinthians 14:33b-35 was inserted by a copyist, we have copies before and after showing its insertion.

"As in all the churches of the saints, 34 the women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak. Rather, let them be in submission, as in fact the law says. 35 If they want to find out about something, they should ask their husbands at home, because it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church."

"Practically all non fundie scholars agree that 1-2 Timothy and Titus were forged, written in Paul's name after his death, and that with spurious intent."

**
What's your response to this?

Keith
I will share my initial response (below). Feel free to add or correct:



Hi Keith,

These are not new or unusual claims to come from skeptics and from more liberally-minded scholars. The thing to bear in mind is that the scholars who make such claims are not better-trained, better-informed, or less agenda-driven than are a great number of other scholars, who, looking at the same evidence, reach opposite conclusions.

This sounds like Bart Ehrmann-type of stuff. He is a famous scholar, not because of his superiority over other scholars, but because of the controversial claims he makes about the Bible, and the media's love for quoting and promoting him. He actually is somewhat naive, it seems to me. If you read his story as to why he left behind his former evangelicalism, it is clear that his evangelicalism was of a rather unsophisticated and superstitious variety—easy to abandon, with the acquisition of a little knowledge of textual issues. What's is amazing about his story is that he claims to have gotten through both Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College before gaining an understanding of textual issues that a well-read teenaged Christian can easily acquire. He was a certain kind of fundamentalist, and what he learned disproved his variety of fundamentalism—which he mistook for a disproof of Christianity and the New Testament, in general.

I believe he is very mistaken—but not because of any failure on his part to look at the evidence. The evidence is out there for any scholar to see. The question is that of what prejudices the examiner brings to his assessment of the data.

My response is that the evidence can be made to fit more than one theory, depending on underlying presuppositions. If one presupposes that a sinister group of religious controllers of the manuscripts was motivated to foist tampered-with, or false, documents upon a naive and ignorant constituency, this guiding principle will certainly yield a cynical opinion about the origin of the documents.

On the other hand, if your beginning presupposition is that Christians are generally interested in honesty and in truth, and that those who preserved the scriptures in the earliest centuries actually knew who had written and passed them down to them, and that they had nothing to gain (but martyrdom) by promoting a religion they knew to be built upon falsehood, then the evidence is capable of yielding very different conclusions.

An age of cynicism and (justifiable) disillusionment with the institutional church has inclined unbelieving western scholars of this generation to take the more cynical approach, without compelling necessity. From the fact that the church has exhibited corruption and power-abuse for many centuries, they extrapolate backwards to a vision of the founders having the same evil intentions. They forget that, for the first three centuries (during which most of the New Testament canon was agreed upon), there was no opportunity for power-brokering in the church. The church was not in any sense politically "empowered" until the mid fourth century. This was to late for corrupt leaders to start introducing new forgeries into the canon. Those who were selfless enough to accept leadership of the flock, in those early centuries, were generally led themselves to the arena and the lions.

Blessings!

Steve

dwilkins
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Re: The authenticity of New Testament books?

Post by dwilkins » Thu Jun 06, 2013 2:15 pm

In the last 100 years archeological discoveries and engagement with groups previously frozen out of American Christianity have seriously challenged the assumptions on which the liberal arguments are made. These challenges are just gaining momentum and will not be incorporated into your average Bible college curriculum for a while. But, we can see where they will affect some assumptions and mistakes made by the Reformers and liberals who eventually pushed back against them, so that 100 years from now I think we'll have a more properly conservative and dependable version of Christianity.

The first example is the advancement of Gnostic studies after Nag Hammadi. It turns out that the old definition of Gnosticism (applied by Irenaeus and such and essentially unchanged in theology until the 1950s) is completely inadequate. After analyzing the writings found there over the last few decades, scholars now concede there is no such coherent definition of the term outside of Biblical Demiurge tradition (that the Jewish God is a lower, bad entity; that material creation is inherently flawed because the God who created it was a lesser God; and that salvation can be done individually and not corporately), itself started by disaffected Jews who were in the midst of reconfiguring their religion after the destruction of the Temple and Mosaic worship system. Outside of this subset of so called Gnosticism there is actually a dizzying and in many cases self contradictory cluster of groups who we call Gnostics, but who should be known instead by their proponent's name instead of as a general category. Seeing through this fog, and appreciating the actual chronology of the development of their doctrine (where Judaism and Christianity definitely came first, and the Gnostics intentionally stole from them, so that just because something is found in Gnosticism doesn't mean it is foreign to either of those religions), helps us understand the definition of terms like pneumas, translated into English as spiritual in most Bibles. We're just now starting to tap into the implications of this.

The second example is the engagement of the Syriac Church of the East by American Christians after the leadership of the COE was forced to abandon the Middle East due to Muslim persecution. When they relocated to America a dialog started that has very important implications for the history of doctrine and the success of the early church. As is pointed out by Soro in "The Church of the East: Apostalic and Orthodox"

http://www.amazon.com/The-Church-East-A ... +east+soro

it turns out that the debates over the hypostatic union might have been significantly more influenced by lexical differences in Greek, Latin, and Aramaic than has been accepted in the past. And, probably unsurprisingly, there was/is quite a bit of politics involved that might be keeping us from taking this very old Christian group seriously. If, however, we step back for a moment and look at what this church brings to the table, we have a very interesting answer to some of the issues of the canon. That church is adamant that the Syriac version of the New Testament that they use is the original version and that the Greek version was a translation made from it within the first generation. I know there is a lot of debate about this, but consider for a moment that they have all but five books of our New Testament embraced as authoritative by the end of the 1st Century (they leave out the last five because they weren't collected fast enough into the canon, indicating that their canon was closed before the fall of Jerusalem), and their version of Revelation (considered important, but not quite scripture) explicitly claims to have been written during Nero's reign. I'm not 100% convinced of Aramaic NT primacy, but the arguments are interesting and it's been at least conceded that Matthew wasn't originally written in Greek (which makes me wonder how hard the Greek Matthew text can be pressed for grammatical nuance while doing interpretation).

The third is the Didache and similar documents. The Didache was a 1st Century new believers guide that was possibly written as early as 50AD.

http://reluctant-messenger.com/didache.htm

It was highly thought of in the first few generations of the church and I'm not aware of any commentary from that period that would indicate there is any heretical or particularly misleading information in it. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend you do so (it takes about 10 minutes). If you compare the conception of the Christian's daily duty in that document to how you'd see it in your average evangelical lifestyle advice book I think you will notice quite a difference. There is no mention of having a "personal relationship with Jesus" as the central understanding of the Christian experience. There is a great deal of talk about doing the right thing and the assumption that you have the power to do so, which presents some serious challenges to the Reformed understanding of depravity and similar doctrines. The Didache wasn't discovered as complete document until a little over 100 years ago, but I suggest that if it had been as widely available to the Reformers as it was to the early church Protest Christian life would look a bit different.

All of these examples above, but specifically the second one, indicate to me that in the next 100 years we are going to be much less concerned with the authenticity of the New Testament that we embrace.

Doug

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Paidion
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Re: The authenticity of New Testament books?

Post by Paidion » Thu Jun 06, 2013 8:48 pm

I find the books and passages which have been excluded by Marc Winter are an unusual selection. I am unaware of serious Bible scholars who consider those portions to be non-authentic.

The Christians of the first few centuries doubted the authenticity of 2 and 3rd John ( which seem to have been authored by an elder named "John" rather than the apostle), 2 Peter (the writing style differs considerably from that of 1 Peter), Jude, and Revelation.

Mark 16:9-20 is believed to have been added to the gospel of Mark, and some early manuscripts have the following ending instead:

...and they promptly reported all these instructions to Peter and his companions, and after that, Jesus himself sent out through them from east to west the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.

Also the story of the woman taken in adultery to whom Jesus said, "Go and sin no more" is found in various parts of the New Testament and thought to have been added. Notwithstanding, it may have been a true account of what had happened, and had been repeated often, and thus been inserted into the text of John 8 as well as elsewhere.
Paidion

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