The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, January 1, 2025

A Red(neck) Tory

 The Kalends of January  is upon us once again.  Kalends, from which our word calendar is derived, was the day of the new moon and hence the first day of the month, for the ancient Romans like the ancient Hebrews followed a calendar in which the months lined up with the lunar cycles they represent.  We have gotten off that so the first of the calendar month no longer always lines up with the beginning of the lunar cycle.  The Kalends of January is a significant day in the Church Kalendar because as Hippolytus of Rome wrote in the second century, our Saviour was born eight days before.  Yes, the 25th of December was the acknowledged birthday of our Lord from far earlier in Church history than Modern gainsayers would have you believe and can in fact be deduced from St. Luke's Gospel.  The eighth day after the birth of an ancient Israelite male was, in accordance with the Abrahamic Covenant, the day he was circumcised and so the Kalends of January has long been the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ.  Far more recently it became New Year's Day on the civil calendar.


This is the day each year when, in accordance with a custom I picked up from Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel, I write about myself and where I stand.  I very much miss Reese's column, and for those who are unfamiliar with him, archives of his last few years can be found on Lew Rockwell's website.  If you are interested in his earlier columns and can get your hands on copies at least two collections were published as books, Great Gods of the Potomac and Common Sense for the Eighties.


Lets start with the basics.  I am a Canadian.  I was born a Canadian and I will die a Canadian.  Donald the Orange can take his obnoxious rhetoric about the "51st state" and insert it into a place that is proverbially bereft of sunshine.  I have lived in the province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada all my life.  I am a loyal subject of King Charles III as I was a loyal subject of his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II of blessed memory before him.  I grew up in rural southwestern Manitoba, on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, did my first five years of higher education at what is now Providence University College in Otterbourne, about a half hour south of the provincial capital of Winnipeg, to which I then moved where I have lived and worked for a quarter of a century since.  


I often use T. S. Eliot's famous description of himself as a "royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion, and classicist in literature" to summarize my own political-religious convictions and what I mean when I call myself a Tory. Tory is usually used to indicate a Conservative Party supporter.  I don't apply it to myself in this partisan sense and seldom use the word conservative even in the small-c sense anymore as that term has been co-opted for people whose political ideals of democracy and capitalism come from nineteenth century liberalism, although twisted beyond what an actual nineteenth century liberal would recognize as his own, and whose main political thought seems to be that the United States should be imposing democracy and capitalism in their evolving meanings on the world with bullets and bombs and boots on the grounds.  When I say I am a Tory, I don't mean anything like that, but rather that my convictions are those of Eliot's triad.


Before saying a bit more about these things, I should explain the adjective in the title.  In Canada, traditional Tories like the economist and humourist Stephen Leacock, the philosopher George Grant, and the historian Donald Creighton,  basically the people who Charles Taylor wrote about in Radical Tories, have sometimes been called "Red" due to their criticisms of capitalism having been perceived as indicating a sympathy with socialism.  This perception is based on a false dichotomy, that capitalism and socialism are each the only option to the other.  In Grant's case he sometimes said things that suggested he accepted this dichotomy. I don't.  Nor do I have any sympathy for socialism which I utterly detest.  I have said before and will say again, that socialism is essentially the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, practiced under the pretense of the greatest of the Theological Virtues, Charity or Christian Love.  I put  "Red" in the title of this essay to indicate that it is Leacock, Grant, Creighton, Eugene Forsey et al., who represent the tradition of Toryism that I claim as my own rather than the neoconservatives who think that this tradition  should be replaced by what is called "conservatism" in the United States (see previous paragraph).  The "neck" is added to indicate that I don't have any sympathy with socialism  nor with anything else that could be called progressive and leftist, but rather hold the anti-progressive attitude often associated with the word "redneck."  Think of the lyrics to Charlie Daniel's "Simple Man" for a picture of what that means.


As a Tory I am no republican big or little r but a "royalist in politics" as Eliot put it.  The entire universe is the kingdom of its Creator, God, the King of Kings.  The most basic unit of social organization, the family, traditionally reflects the order of the universe.  The husband-father is king, wife-mother is queen, and the children are subjects.  That is the way the family works best, despite all attempts by "experts" in the social pseudosciences, the progressive brainwashers who have taken over the schools, and the seditious anti-family revolutionaries who dominate the entertainment media to depict this model as dysfunctional and fascist and to try and sell us on alternative models.  The state traditionally reflected the order of the universe as well, and like the family, it functions best when it continues to do so, under the reign of a king.  The totalitarian movements of the last century hated kings.  Every Communist country was a republic and so was Nazi Germany.  By contrast, "Freedom", as the title of a Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing that I would like to see back in print and in the hands of all my countrymen says "Wears a Crown".  I respect Parliament, precisely because it is an ancient institution that is a traditional part of a king's government and not because it conforms to the Modern ideal or idol of democracy.


Turning to  "Anglo-Catholic in religion," the first thing I should say is that while Anglo-Catholicism does accurately denote what my theology has matured into, it does not mean that I think that the English Reformation was a mistake that should be forgotten or undone.  I think that the things which the Anglican Church shares with not just the Roman Catholic Church, but the Eastern Orthodox and all the ancient Churches, especially the Catholic faith confessed in the ancient Creeds, but also the episcopal polity, the priestly ministry, and Sacramental worship are more important than the things that identify us with the Lutherans, Reformed, and other Protestants.   This does not mean that I think the latter to be unimportant, quite the contrary.  When it comes to the two most important things the Reformers fought for, the supremacy of the Scriptures and the freeness of the salvation proclaimed in the Gospel, I am firmly a Protestant.  I have come to see, however, the importance of qualifying these with Catholic truths.  We must indeed hold the Scriptures supreme as the infallible written Word of God (with the Authorized Bible as published in 1611 with the deuterocanon included between the Testaments as the definitive English Bible) but as Hans Boersma and Ron Dart have frequently reminded us the way to listen to them is at the feet of the Church Fathers.  The Gospel does indeed proclaim a salvation that is freely given in Jesus Christ to all who receive it by faith, but the Gospel is the message of Jesus Christ, His death for us and His Resurrection, confessed in faith in each of the ancient Creeds and not the doctrine of justification which, important as it is, is a doctrine about the Gospel, rather than the Gospel itself, and while faith is the appointed means whereby we receive the saving grace of God, the ordinary means by which that saving grace is brought to us that we may so receive it is the Church's two-fold Gospel ministry of proclaimed Word and administered Sacrament.  I can very much do without most other things associated with Protestantism, especially the iconoclasm and the inclination to write off the Church prior to the Reformation.


I was raised culturally Christian in the sense that we celebrated Christmas and Easter and I was made acquainted with the stories of the Bible if not their theological significance.  My mother attended the United Church in Oak River, my father's family had been affiliated with the Anglican Church in Bradwardine which closed around the time I was born.  My paternal grandmother, received the Anglican Journal and the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon and I would read these whenever I visited her in Rivers.  It was through reading  Christian books from the library that I became aware of the significance of the events celebrated at Christmas and Easter.  In Bethlehem, the Son of God, Who with His Father and the Holy Ghost was and is and ever shall be, God, was born as a baby boy, having become man by uniting a true human nature to His eternal Person.  He did so, that He might save mankind from the bondage to the devil, sin, and death into which we had fallen in the infancy of our race by dying on the Cross for us, the innocent Lamb of God Who "taketh away the sin of the world" and rising again from the grave triumphant over His enemies and ours.  The summer before I entered high school I became a Christian in the sense of a believer who trusts and confesses Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.


At the time I had a rather low view of the Church as an institution.  Liberalism, in the religious sense of minimizing, explaining away, or outright rejecting such basic Christian truths as the deity and bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ in order to accommodate Modern notions, had made heavy inroads into the Anglican Church and all but completely taken over the United  which at some point around that time had elected an openly atheist moderator.  I had nothing but contempt for religious liberalism before becoming a believer and  had even less respect for it after.   For the first fifteen years of my walk as an active believer I attended non-conformist, mostly Baptist, evangelical and fundamentalist services, and thought that such things as church government were adiophora and the only thing about the organized  Church that mattered was the faithfulness of the sermon to the truths of the Christian faith.


When I joined and was confirmed in the Anglican Church, this was not because I had come to tolerate religious liberalism.  I remain firmly of the conviction that liberalism is not a defective form of Christianity but an entirely different religion altogether as J. Greshem Machen demonstrated in his Christianity and Liberalism a century ago.  Nor was it because the Anglican Church had expunged liberalism which sadly she has not, but because I had come to see that my earlier attitude towards  the institution of the Church was neither Scriptural nor supported by history.


Church government, I had come to see, is not adiophora.  The episcopal polity is not only the polity of the Roman Catholic Church, but of all ancient Churches that predate the Reformation, and furthermore, is clearly present in the Scriptures as the polity established by the Apostles themselves, the first bishops in the sense later attached to the word.  Nor was the soundness of the sermon the only thing that mattered.  Until the Reformation, the Sacrament of the Eucharist had been the central focal point of the service, at least as important as the sermon, and this was true not just of Rome but of all the ancient Churches.  


As for the soundness of what was preached and taught, I had come to appreciate that the best and fullest summary of the truths essential to the Christian faith was not the minimalist list of "five fundamentals" drawn up in controversy with liberals in the early twentieth century, or the Protestant confessions which are too narrow doctrinal statements to be considered the basic faith, but the ancient Creeds, especially the Nicene confessed by all the ancient Churches.  When I joined the  Anglican Church I joined a parish where I knew the teaching and preaching to be sound, but  I joined the Anglican Church because she had come out of the Reformation with her episcopal polity and its Apostolic Succession intact, confessed the ancient and Catholic Creeds as her basic faith, and had recovered the centrality of the Eucharist.  This is how I would say that I am "Anglo-Catholic in religion", although such things as the Coverdale Psalter sung to Anglican plainchant, crucifer led processionals and recessionals, clergy and choir in vestments, and candles and bells and incense all strike me as more appropriate to coming before a holy God than "praise and worship" songs in which the most used words are "me" "myself" and "I", which sentiment is what is more commonly associated with Anglo-Catholicism today. 


I would probably replace "literature" with "culture" in Eliot's "classicist in literature."    Classicism is the position that man's creativity as expressed in arts, literature and culture was given him to serve a higher good, that rules govern the exercise of that creativity and the achievement of the good of culture depends on those rules,  and the output is therefore susceptible to objective and not merely subjective evaluation. Classicism, of course, requires that there be such things as classics in works of art. literature and music.  That which is "classic" is regarded by those with Modern, progressive, forward-looking ideas as "old", but this is because in the shallow following of fad-and-fashion that passes for thinking amongst them they cannot distinguish between what is old and what is timeless.  Timelessness is the distinguishing quality of a classic and that is true in music, the visual arts, architecture and the stage as well as literature proper.  Of course it is the passing of time that in most cases reveals a work to have this quality and most often when a new work is instantly proclaimed a classic it is simply a publicity gimmick into which little to no thought has been placed into the meaning of the word.  Still, it is not impossible to recognize a work that will prove to be enduring when it is new.  If care, skill, and knowledge of the craft or art have gone into the making of it these are good indicators.  Better indicators are that the message in the book, song, painting or what have you is addressed to more than just those of the present moment, although it may make reference to the present moment as a medium for conveying the message.  War, for example, is an enduring theme because its danger is ever present even in times of peace.  A work may speak only to a specific war, in which case it will become dated and bound to its own period.  It can, however, by addressing the reality of an immediate conflict speak beyond it to the enduring theme.  The poem "In Flanders' Field" was written in World War I and this is the war of which it immediately speaks but the truths it speaks are enduring and when the poem is recited every Remembrance Day we understand the words to apply to the fallen of all past conflicts.  The best indicator is when the work says something important about the transcendentals, the qualities of Goodness, Beauty and Truth that the thoughtful and reflective have held important in societies and civilizations in all places and all times because they are the ends of created being, and about God in Whom these must ultimately be sought if man is to fulfil the end for which he is created.  Note that the views expressed in this paragraph are not a judgement of popular culture from the standpoint of highbrow culture.  Picasso's paintings and Schoenberg's music are highbrow but utterly devoid of aesthetic value, whereas popular culture, which is not to be  confused with "pop" culture the distinguishing characteristic of which is that it is factory produced for mass consumption, contains much that is good and has produced many classics.   The truths asserted in this paragraph apply to popular culture as well as to highbrow culture.  


These are the essence of my Toryism.  In the case of royalism I have been a royalist all my life, at first instinctually, later in a more informed manner.  I arrived at Anglo-catholicism through a long spiritual journey that started with an evangelical acceptance of Jesus Christ combined with a fundamentalist rejection of liberalism in religion, and while it may not seem obvious to others to me it is evident that the destination was set from the beginning for the acceptance of Christ implies acceptance of His Church and to fully reject religious liberalism one must reject its seeds in all reforms of the sixteenth century except those that were absolutely necessary.  As for classicism, I can say that I have instinctually loathed the opposite of it all my life, having despised non-metrical verse, avant garde art, atonal music and the like from the moment I first encountered it, although active pursuit of the higher and elevating in culture came later, after much resistance of those who encouraged  me in that direction, and in part out of sheer cussedness such as when having encountered Mark Twain's remark that "everyone wants to have read the classics but nobody wants to read them" I responded with "Sez you, Sam Clemens" and set out to read them.


Clearly my Toryism is not what calls  itself "conservatism" these days.  I am closest to today's conservatives when it comes to what they are against.  I oppose abortion and what is now called "Medical Assistance in Dying" because they are murder (as opposed to killing in self-defence, in defence of others and property, capital punishment, and for one's country in war, which are not).  That, however, may be something I have more in common with the conservatives of yesterday than those of today. I detest the courts turning violent offenders out onto the streets almost the moment they are arrested and making the public provide a supposedly safe supply of hard narcotics to drug addicts in the idea that this will reduce the harm they inflict upon themselves.  Ending "catch and release" is not enough, however, over a century's worth of progressive reforms to the idea of criminal justice needs to be undone and we need to get back to thinking of criminal justice in terms of making the offender pay his debt to society rather than helping the offender recover from the illness of crime.  As for drug policy, we need to fish or cut bait as the polite version of the saying goes.  Either go back to trusting people to make their own self-medication choices or eliminate the supply of illegal narcotics in a real, rather than half-ass, war on drugs.  Either approach would be a vast improvement to the public not-for-profit drug dealing that is the harms reduction model.


 I oppose illegal immigration, but unlike most conservatives go further and say that legal immigration is in need of serious reform as well, and the problems are not merely those of the last ten or twenty years or so, but go back to the sixties.   I think that the late French Catholic, monarchist Jean Raspail hit the nail on the head in his novel The Camp of the Saints which depicted post-World War II liberalism as leading the civilization formerly known as Christendom to an existential crisis in its enthusiastic preference of "the other" at the expense of its own as reflected in its enthusiastic embrace of immigrants and refugees in numbers too large to be absorbed without endangering the continuity of the civilization.  The point is not that racial or cultural "otherness" is an insurmountable roadblock to someone's becoming a true member of the community, society, country, and civilization they move to, that it is not is also illustrated in Raspail's book.  As Enoch Powell put it "it is a matter of numbers."


I detest radical feminism, the racial hatred of white people that goes under the name of "anti-racism", the Year Zero attempts to erase the past that go under the names of "anti-imperialism" and "anti-colonialism," the movement that in the name of "rights" is now demanding in the most totalitarian way possible that everybody not merely tolerate, not merely accept, but practically worship everyone who is other than cisgender and heterosexual and which insists that everyone pretend that someone who thinks he is a gender other than his biological sex, whether an actual gender or a make believe one, is what he says he is, and basically everything that the word "wokeness" has come to denote.  Where I would differ from conservatives is that their opposition to wokeness does not go much further or deeper than criticizing it for deviating from 1950's and 1960's, American liberalism.  My rejection of the vile race hatred of Ibraham X. Kendi does not mean that I am about to start pretending that Martin Luther King Jr. was a saint rather than a charlatan.   I  cannot stand the kind of idiot who in the name of feminism tells a neighbouring country that they should have voted otherwise in their last election because they owed it to the other candidate because she is a woman.  This is not because I think feminism to be a good thing of which he is a false representative.  Each successive wave of "feminism" has gotten crazier and crazier, because its real enemy from the first wave onward has not been the conspiracy of all men to oppress all women that has only ever existed in the fevered brains of those attached to this delusional movement but the reality of human nature that some people are men, others are women, that men and women are different, that these differences are not trivial but fundamental, "vive la différence" as the French say, and that trying to prevent this difference from expressing itself in social organization will inevitably increase rather than decrease the misery and unhappiness of both sexes.  "The personal is the political" was the motto of its second wave, a chilling statement that to these harridans there is no aspect of life that should escape the power of the state to remold it to their wishes.  For the best takes on feminism I refer you to Stephen Leacock's "The Woman Question" and to Dr. Johnson's observation  that "nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given her very little."


I am much further from "conservatives" when it comes to the things they are for.  I explained above the things that I as a Tory am for and these things, royal monarchy, Christ's One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church in its reformed Anglican expression, and classicism are all deep-rooted and ancient.  The things that "conservatives" say they are for are all Modern with roots no deeper than liberalism.  They are constantly changing because liberalism is constantly changing and to be a "conservative" today means little more than to be a defender of yesterday's liberalism against the changes proposed by today's. 


The most consistent things today's "conservatives" are for are capitalism and technological progress. With regards to technological progress while there have been undeniable benefits to developing newer and fancier tools that can do increasingly more things for us there are obvious detriments as well.  That we have given ourselves the ability to destroy ourselves and our world stands out.  Having technology do for us what we should be doing for ourselves is another downside that is becoming an increasing problem as technology advances into the AI stage.  Thinking is not something we should be outsourcing to machines.  The earlier stage in which computers took over the task of doing all calculations in economic transactions had the result that when the computers were down many of the people manning the tills in stores were unable to do the simple math required to make change.  A repeat  of that with other cognitive functions is most undesirable.   I regard the idea that we will eventually solve all our problems by technological advancement with the utmost skepticism.  The Scriptures say that idolaters, those who worship the works of their hands come to resemble their false gods (Psalm 135:18).  Faith in technological progress is a form of idolatry and it inevitably makes men and their societies resemble machines.  


Technological progress is an inseparable part of capitalism.  Capitalism is often confused with economic freedom but the two are not the same.  Economic freedom is a simple concept and a basic good that is far to be preferred to the universal slavery that is socialism, whereas capitalism is a complex system that developed by removing traditional restrictions on usury, applying technological progress to the production of industrial goods, and expanding international trade.  I talked about the downside to technological progress in the previous paragraph.  That large-scale international trade has its disadvantages as well as its advantages (comparative and absolute, in economic jargon) is obvious and until the 1980s, the element of liberal economic theory that conservatives rejected was that such trade should be unrestricted.  American conservatives have of late abandoned the free trade fetish they picked up in that decade.  Canadian conservatives would be wise to follow suit as the disadvantage of being too dependent upon trade with one's neighbour has become glaringly obvious.  Nevermind that the threat of crippling tariffs is attached to demands that we fix problems that we ought to be fixing any way, we should not be so dependent upon trade with the United States that its incoming leader can bully us around like that.  Add David Orchard's The Fight for Canada to the mandatory reading list.  As for usury, it undergirds and runs through the entire capitalist system, which is why that system is incompatible with a sound currency.  Sound money, is money that retains its purchasing power so that people can use it to save for the future, a quality that requires that the currency represents actual wealth, that is, real goods already produced.  Usury, however, turns a country's monetary system into a Ponzi scheme where the currency is backed by debt, wealth that has not yet been produced.  Since usury, like technological progress and international trade, is an essential element of capitalism, capitalism cannot escape this outcome.


Capitalism has been accused of evils of which it is not guilty, such as lowering the standard of living of workers (it raised it) and impoverishing the third world (the incompetent kleptocratic governments brought in by the decolonization and anti-imperialism that leftists love so much did that) but there are plenty of evils of which it can be justly accused. These include the uprooting of families, the decimation of rural communities, the disappearance of the family farm, urbanization and the accompanying evils of increased crime and erosion of trust and social capital that go along with it, the uglification of the countryside which is the real evil that those who claim to care for the earth and the environment ought to be fighting rather than the bogeyman of climate change, the reorganization of society so as to operate like an extended business rather than an extended family, a culture of throwing away and replacing rather than preserving and passing on, and dozens of others of a similar nature to these.  That socialism is an utterly unacceptable evil and economic freedom a good I have always held and always will maintain but this will not stop me from decrying these evils of which capitalism has been the engine and which conservatives, if they stopped for a second to think about what their chosen label implies, ought to realize that they should oppose too. 


The matter that probably best illustrates how I am closest to conservatives in what they oppose and furthest from them in what they are for is education.  Conservatives are opposed to the way schools from the earliest grades to universities have become indoctrination camps for pushing hatred of white people, hatred of Christianity, and hatred of Western countries and their history onto children and for exposing them to sexuality, and especially its more perverse forms, way too early.  I oppose this too.  Most conservatives promote STEM-centred education (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).  That these fields are immune to being turned into vessels for wokeness has of late been proven false, but were that not the case I would dissent from the idea of STEM-centric education because it is based on the idea that the purpose of education is to train children to be more successful cogs in the capitalist machine.  The purpose of education is to civilize children, for we are all essentially born savages and barbarians, so that they might be fit to be free subjects of the king and citizens of the state and for this there is no better education than the kind that starts with the basic trivium (grammar - Latin, Greek and first language, logic, and rhetoric), and builds on these with the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).  See Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Lost Tools of Learning."  Along with these, the seven classical liberal arts, history should be taught in a way that neither demonizes the builders of civilization and its institutions like "Woke" history, nor interprets the past as one long march towards liberal democracy in the present day like what Herbert Butterfield dubbed "the Whig Interpretation of History" but as John Lukacks' "remembered past" that contains the good and the bad, in which the builders of civilization are presented as they were, a mixture of both, and leaves us free to honour them for their accomplishments and the legacy they have bequeathed us and simply because it is the debt we owe to those who have gone before us, without conscripting them posthumously into the service of Francis Fukuyama's "end of history."  It is best if this is taught in a religious context, preferably with the Church in charge of education rather than the government.


Happy New Year

God Save the King!

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

The Bible and the Church Part Two: What Belongs in the Bible?

In Part One we considered the dilemma raised, usually in the context of the “Catholic v. Protestant” dispute, about whether the Bible gave us the Church or the Church gave us the Bible.  Neither of these, we argued, is correct, it is rather that God gave us both the Bible and the Church, or better yet that God gave the Bible to the Church.  The alternatives that the popular either/or meme present contain two different versions of what is basically the same error, the error of interjecting an intermediary between God and an earthly authority that He has directly established.  In the one, the Bible is interjected as intermediary between God and His Church, in the other the Church is interjected as intermediary between God and His Word.  We saw that the Bible itself testifies to God the Son having given authority directly to His Church and to the governors He set over her, which authority was exercised before a word of the New Testament Scriptures was put down in ink.  In Part Two we will consider the implications of our position for the question of what belongs in the Bible.

 

The question of what belongs in the Bible has historically been treated as two different questions, the question of canon and the question of text.  The question of canon is the question of which books belong in the Bible.  Do the books of Maccabees belong in the Old Testament or the book of Revelation in the New Testament?  These are examples of this question.  The question of text is the question what words belong in the Bible.  In 1 Timothy 3:16, for example, the Authorized Bible reads “And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.”  The word “God” in this verse translates Θεός which is found in most Greek manuscripts of 1 Timothy.  A few have the relative pronoun ὃς (“who”) instead, and a few others have ὃ (which).  Which word did St. Paul originally write?  This is the question of text.  It should be apparent that while there are practical reasons for treating these as two separate questions they are really two aspects of the same question of what belongs in the Bible.

 

It is important to recognize that canon and text are two sides of the same question because this immediately exposes the fallacy that has been at the heart of the critical approach to the question of text for at least the last two centuries.  This is the idea that the original text of the Scriptures can be discovered and reproduced by using the scientific techniques employed for similar purposes on other ancient texts while disregarding or treating as of very low importance what the Church has received and passed on as the sacred text.  In the nineteenth century, textual critics allowed the age of a handful of manuscripts, primarily the fourth century uncials Codex א‎ or Sinaiticus and Codex B or Vaticanus, to persuade them to accept a large number of New Testament readings that were found only in these ancient manuscripts and not in the text that had been read as Scripture in Churches throughout the world for two thousand years.  In the twentieth century, this exaggerated emphasis on manuscript age was dropped but replaced by something worse, the eclectic theory which favoured an artificial text not found in any ancient manuscript but cut and pasted post-modern style from every manuscript text type.  Imagine what the results would look like if someone were to address the question of canon in this way.  The eclectic theory, if applied to the question of the New Testament canon, would give you a New Testament that excludes books from the homologoumena (1), includes books from the pseudopigrapha (2), and looks radically different from the New Testament historically accepted as canonical throughout the Church.  The reason the question of canon is not treated in this manner is because the concept of canon has no meaning apart from that of a list of the writings a faith community has received as its authoritative Scriptures.  Acknowledging that the question of canon and the question of text are two aspects of one question is the first step towards acknowledging that the “scientific” approach to the question of text is just as nonsensical as such an approach would be to the question of canon.

 

If, therefore, the question of what belongs in the Bible, both in terms of canon and text, cannot be answered by applying “scientific” (3) techniques that are used for other ancient texts but only by what the Church has traditionally received as Scripture does that not mean that the Church did give us the Bible, that the Church is intermediary between God and the Bible after all?

 

It does not.  The Bible is the Bible, the authoritative Word of God, because it was written under divine inspiration.  This does not mean inspiration in the sense that any writer or artist may be inspired when the idea for a creative work comes to them.  It means that Holy Spirit supervised the human writers of the Bible to that their words were “breathed out by God” (θεόπνευστος, the word used by St. Paul behind “given by inspiration of God” in 2 Tim. 3:16).  The mechanics of this, the how, need not concern us here.  The important thing is that it is this kind of inspiration, being words breathed out by God Himself, which makes the Scriptures, the Scriptures.  The Church cannot impart this quality to whatever writings she so chooses.  She is the recipient of the Scriptures, God is their Author.  Again, God gave the Bible to the Church.

 

As the recipient of the Scriptures, however, it belongs to the Church to recognize them and to distinguish them from other writings which, however excellent or not they may be, are not the very words of God.  The principle involved here is that of “My sheep hear my voice” (Jn. 10:27).  This raises the question, of course, of how the Church recognizes the voice of the Shepherd in the Scriptures.  That it is through the ministry of the Holy Spirit as promised by Jesus in the Farwell Discourse we can all agree on but this is not an answer to what the question is really asking.  Does the Holy Spirit impart the recognition of the voice of God to each believer individually or to the Church collectively?

 

That it is not individually is evident from the fact that canon and text have been subjects of disagreement among Christians.  Evident, that is, except to those who take the borderline fanatical position that only those who agree with them are true believers.  The answer, therefore is that it is to the Church collectively that the Holy Spirit imparts recognition of the Scriptures.  This still does not completely answer the question of how, however, but it allows us to phrase more precisely what it is that we are looking for.  How does the Church express her recognition of the Scriptures?

 

The history of how the canon of the New Testament came to be accepted provides some illumination on this point.  The canon of the New Testament is far more settled among Christians than the canon of the Old Testament.   Most of the debates over whether such-and-such a book belonged in the New Testament took place in the first three centuries of the Church before the first ecumenical council and most of the New Testament was never seriously contested.  The twenty-seven books recognized today have been pretty much unanimously agreed upon since the end of the fourth century.  While this was the century that saw the first two ecumenical councils, that is to say, councils that spoke authoritatively for the whole Church rather than just for a diocese, province, or region, it was not these that settled the New Testament canon.  A regional synod in Rome, held in 382 A.D. one year after the second ecumenical council was held in Constantinople, published a list of the books of both Testaments.  Similar synods were held in Hippo in 393 A.D. and in Carthage in 397 A.D. and these also published lists of the Scriptural books.  Even these acts, however, merely acknowledged formally what the Church had already recognized as her New Testament Scriptures by her reading of them as such liturgically in her services.

 

In the fifth century, St. Vincent of Lérins published a canon – not a list of Scriptural books but a canon in the term’s basic meaning, a rule or measuring stick – for determining whether an interpretation of Scripture was Catholic, i.e., belonging to the true Church as a whole, or heretical, i.e., erroneous and particular to a sect which in its error has broken away from the whole or Catholic Church.  He wrote:

 

Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest sense Catholic, which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors. (4)

 

While St. Vincent had the interpretation of Scripture in mind when he wrote this his rule and tests apply remarkably well to the Church’s recognition of her Scriptures as well.  Perhaps the two matters are not as distinct as we are accustomed to think.  St. Vincent was looking for a rule to distinguish heretics from the Catholic faith and an important disagreement between the two in the centuries before the first ecumenical council was over canon.  The heresiarch Marcion of Sinope had published his own list of Scriptural books which rejected the whole Old Testament and most of the New Testament and consisted of ten of St. Paul’s epistles (nine genuine and a pseudopigraphon purporting to be the epistle to the Laodiceans mentioned in Colossians 4:16 which was probably just another description of the epistle we know as Ephesians) and a bowdlerized version of St. Luke’s Gospel.  The twenty-seven books of the New Testament canon had been received as Scripture and recognized and read liturgically as such, unanimously in the case of the twenty homolougomena, generally but with disputes in the case of the seven antilegomena, since the end of the first century (antiquity), by the Apostolic and Catholic Church throughout the ancient world (universality), and the acknowledgement of this by a number of local and regional synods from the end of the fourth century on provided the final test (consent).

 

That the canon of the Old Testament has been much less unanimously agreed upon needs some explaining as it is rather counterintuitive.  The Old Testament, after all, consists of the Scriptures that the Church inherited from ancient Israel.  One might expect from that, that there would be no dispute over them, because the Church had received an already established canon.  It was not as simple as that, however.  While Judaism today has a canon for its Tanakh that is identical with the Old Testament acknowledged by Protestants and the protocanonical Old Testament of other Christians except that they are organized differently in the Tanakh, and counted as 24 books rather than 39, (5) Israel was not so united on this matter at the coming of Christ.  There were numerous sects, one of which accepted only the Torah or Pentateuch, the five books of Moses.  This was the sect of the Sadducees, prominent in the upper class of Israel.  They justified their rejection of the doctrine of a future resurrection on the basis of their limited canon and in a famous incident recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus answered them by proving the resurrection from the books they accepted.  Interestingly, the story they told Jesus as the beginning of the interview as the basis of the question with which they tried to trap Him, seems to be a trimmed-down version of the book of Tobit.  The Scriptures that passed over into the Church as the Old Testament were obviously more than the Readers’ Digest Condensed Version of the Tanakh used by the Sadducees.   Furthermore, while Judaism had to redefine itself out of necessity after the destruction of the Second Temple and this redefinition meant that the new rabbinic Judaism was essentially made in the image of a single Second Temple period sect, the Pharisees, difference as to the canon persisted in Judaism long after this point.  (6) This sectarian dispute within Second Temple Judaism was not the only complicating factor, however.

 

Israel’s Scriptures were for the most part originally written in Hebrew.  The Babylonian Captivity, however, had interfered with the generational transmission of the Hebrew language, enough so that in the Second Temple period it was well on its way to becoming a language of the specialist, of the scribes and rabbis.  Aramaic, a dialect of the Syriac family of languages, had become the vernacular tongue in Israel by the coming of Christ.  Part of the book of Daniel was written in Aramaic.  It was for this reason that the Targumim were produced. (7)  Therefore, even before the conversion of Cornelius and the first missionary journey of SS Paul and Barnabas, when the Church’s membership was still entirely Jewish, it was likely only a small minority which could speak or read Hebrew.  The common tongue among the early Jewish Christians was Aramaic and when the Gentile converts began swelling the numbers of the Church the common tongue was Greek.  This is the language in which the New Testament, with the exception of the no-longer extant original Hebrew or Aramaic version of the Gospel According to St. Matthew, was written.  Two centuries before Christ a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into this language had been commissioned for the Alexandrian library by Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt.  This translation, called the Septuagint or the LXX after the number of translators, is more often than not what is quoted as the Old Testament in the New Testament.  It was in this form that the Church inherited the Old Testament from Israel.  The LXX, however, contained more books than what post-Temple Judaism recognizes as its Tanakh.  Ironically, among these are the books of Maccabees which provide the historical account of the events behind a major Jewish annual celebration, Hanukkah.   That the books which Christians and Jews share belong to the canon of the Old Testament is as agreed upon among orthodox Christians as are the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.  It is over these other Old Testament books that there is disagreement.

 

In the sixteenth century, two extreme positions were taken on these books.  The Roman Catholic Church in the Council of Trent (1545-1563) declared certain of these books to be of the same character of and on par with the universally recognized Old Testament books.  In response to the Council of Trent, certain Protestants (the Reformed and the separatist sects), threw the books out of the Bible altogether.   The Protestant error was greater than that of Rome because it was based on the idea that the Roman Catholic Church in the Council of Trent had “added’ these books to the Bible in violation of the prohibition of Rev. 22:18.   If that were true, however, the books would not be found in the Bibles of any Church that had broken fellowship with Rome before the Reformation.  The opposite is the case.  The Bibles used by these Churches include more of the extra books than the ones “canonized” by Rome at Trent.  The books “added” by Rome in Trent are seven, Tobit, Judith, Baruch (which John Calvin frequently quoted as Scripture), Ecclesiasticus, the Wisdom of Solomon, 1 and 2 Maccabees.  Trent also gave the Roman Church’s endorsement to the long versions of Esther and Daniel (the LXX and other old translations of these books include additional material to what is found in the standard Hebrew versions, for example, the stories of Susannah and Bel and the Dragon in Daniel). The Eastern Orthodox Church, which broke fellowship with Rome in 1054 A.D., includes these and also what it calls 2 and 3 Esdras (these are what are called 1 and 2 Esdras in the Apocrypha section of the Authorized Bible, what the Orthodox call 1 Esdras is what we call Ezra and Nehemiah) (8), 3 Maccabees, the Epistle of Jeremiah, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151.  The Eastern Orthodox print these books as part of the Old Testament in their Bibles like the Roman Catholics do with their more limited deuterocanon.  The Eastern Orthodox do not view these books the same way that post-Tridentine Roman Catholics do, however.  Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky writes:

 

The Church recognizes thirty-eight books of the Old Testament.  After the example of the Old Testament Church, several of these books are joined to form a single book, bringing the number to twenty-two books, according to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.  These books, which were entered at some time into the Hebrew canon, are called “canonical.”  To them are joined a group of “non-canonical” books – that is, those which were not included in the Hebrew canon because they were written after the closing of the canon of the sacred Old Testament books.  The Church accepts these latter books also as useful and instructive and in antiquity assigned them for instructive reading not only in homes but also in churches, which why they have been called “ecclesiastical.”  The Church includes these books in a single volume of the Bible together with the canonical books.  As a source of the teaching of the faith, the Church puts them in a secondary place and looks on them as an appendix to the canonical books. Certain of them are so close in merit to the Divinely inspired books that, for example, in the 85th Apostolic Canon the three books of Maccabees and the book of Joshua the son of Sirach [this is the same book as Ecclesiasticus, it is also often just called Sirach – GTN] are numbered together with the canonical books, and concerning all of them together it is said that they are “venerable and holy.” However, this means only that they were respected in the ancient Church; but a distinction between the canonical and non-canonical books of the Old Testament has always been maintained in the Church. (9) (10)

 

One of the oldest translations of the Bible is the Syriac Peshitta.  That it is the Bible of Syriac Christians, whether they belong to the Assyrian Church of the East that rejected the condemnation of Nestorius, to the Syriac-speaking of the Oriental Orthodox Churches that rejected the Definition of Chalcedon, or Syriac Christians in fellowship with either Rome or Constantinople, testifies to its age.  (11)  The Peshitta includes the Eastern Orthodox deuterocanon and some additional books as well such as 2 Baruch (also called the Apocalypse of Baruch) and the Letter of Baruch (sometimes included as a separate book sometimes as the ending of 2 Baruch), and the Psalms of Solomon. 

 

Clearly, therefore, the Roman Catholic Church did not add anything to the Bible in the Council of Trent.  If anything, it could be accused of removing books from the Bible.  The additional Esdras books, 3 Maccabees, the Epistle of Jeremiah, the Prayer of Manasseh, and the 151st Psalm are found in the LXX, the form in which the Old Testament was known and received by most of the early Church and in the Peshitta, the ancient Syriac version that is the traditional Bible of the Christians who speak dialects of the language-family to which the Aramaic of the earliest Christians belongs.  Why did Rome not include these?  Simply because they were left out of the Latin Vulgate by St. Jerome. 

Before St. Jerome the Bible had been translated into Latin a number of times by individuals of varying degrees of competence.  These translations are all lumped together under the label Vetus Latina or Old Italic.  In the fourth century, Damasus I of Rome had given St. Jerome the task of cleaning up the Latin translation of the Gospels and by the end of the century this had expanded into revising the entire Latin Bible into what is now known as the Latin Vulgate. He completed the work early in the fifth century.  When he turned to the Old Testament he decided to translate directly from Hebrew into Latin rather than from the LXX.  St. Augustine of Hippo famously took him to task for this and it was in the context of the debate over St. Jerome’s controversial decision that the first real argument about the deuterocanonical books arose.  St. Jerome wanted to translate the Old Testament directly from Hebrew because it was originally written in Hebrew and he believed it better to translate from the original than from another translation.  This meant relying either upon rabbinic Judaism or Origen’s Hexapla, two columns of which were the Hebrew Old Testament in Hebrew characters and transliterated into Greek characters, and while St. Jerome did consult Origen’s magnus opus in the library in Caesaraa, he also sought out the rabbis, believing them to the be the guardians of the sacred text.  This belief led him to adopt the view, at least for a period, that the deuterocanonical books did not belong in the Old Testament (even though the rabbis were not of one mind on that subject, see note 6).  He was the first to misapply the term apocrypha to these books.  The handful of others who shared his view that they were not properly part of the Old Testament were more cautious in their terminology since these books had been read liturgically in the Church since the earliest centuries and so called them “ecclesiastical books.”  Eventually St. Jerome was either persuaded of his error or at least prevailed upon to translate the deuterocanon and he did, at least for the books later named in the Council of Trent. 

 

Rome did err on this point at the Council of Trent, but it was in the way in which she frequently errs, by imposing a dogmatic definition where none was necessary and where it did more harm than good.  The books she named had been part of the Old Testament in the various versions such as the LXX and Peshitta in which it had been received by Christians since the earliest centuries of the Church, along with several books she did not name.  The Church had recognized and received them as part of her Bible all along but not as being on the same level as the books universally accepted by both Christians and Jews.  There was no good reason to eliminate the distinction between the two classes of Old Testament books and her purpose in eliminating this distinction for some of the second tier of books but not for others was that she was declaring the Latin Vulgate to be the standard Bible for all Christians.


This was a foolish move on Rome’s part but the Protestant response of removing the deuterocanonical books from the Bible entirely was much worse.  The pre-Tridentine Protestant approach, while not without its problems, was sounder and mercifully was preserved in the Anglican Formularies.  When the Authorized Bible was published in 1611, the Eastern Orthodox deuterocanon (except 3 Maccabees and Psalm 151) was included in a section entitled “Apocrypha” between the two Testaments.  (12) The title of the section is extremely misleading and unfortunate.  “Apocrypha” is from ἀπόκρυφος which means “hidden away, secret, concealed” and in the early Church was applied to texts which were not to be read liturgically in Church and which Christians were discouraged from reading privately which was decidedly not the case with the deuterocanon which were dubbed the “Ecclesiastical Books” precisely because they were to be read in Church alongside the undisputed canon.  In the same paragraph of his Easter Letter, where a line excluding the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Judith, and Tobit from the canon (as well as Esther – not just the Greek additions) that is often cited out of context by Protestant apologists to claim him for their side, St. Athanasius spoke of the apocrypha as a different class of writing altogether. (13)  The Book of Common Prayer includes readings from these books in its lectionary for daily Morning and Evening Prayer.  The Articles of Religion, the final version of which was passed in 1571 less than a decade after the close of the Council of Trent, while excluding the extra books from the canon of Scripture, says of them “the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine” citing St. Jerome (spelled Hierome in the article) as an authority, and listing the books. (14)  Except that the Article’s wording could be taken as making a nonsensical distinction between “The Bible” and “Scripture” rather than between “canonical” and “non-canonical” books of the Bible/Scripture, this is not that far from the Eastern Orthodox view as explained by Pomazansky, (15) and the Eastern Orthodox view on this as on many other matters is a good guide as to the actual Catholic or universal Christian view prior to the Reformation.  The words “doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine” does not mean that the books cannot be cited in support of a doctrine.  It means that they cannot be relied upon to prove a doctrine, i.e., you cannot say “X is so, because Judith says X” if Judith is your only authority for X.  In other words, they cannot be the first and only authority for a doctrine. (16)

 

Now that we have seen why there is ongoing disagreement over the Old Testament canon even though the New Testament has been universally agreed upon since the fourth century (which merely saw the formalization of what had long been agreed upon in practice) let us apply the principles of the Vincentian canon to the matter.  The books which Christians and Jews agree upon obviously pass the tests of antiquity, universality, and consent.  They have only ever been disputed by heretics like Marcion and the Gnostics.  They have been clearly received and recognized as Scripture by the Church.  The books which are found only in the Syriac Peshitta but not in either the Jewish Tanakh or the LXX may pass the test of antiquity but clearly fail the test of universality.  The same can be said of books that are unique to other regional versions of the Old Testament, for example, the books of Jubilees and Enoch (17) in the Ethiopian Old Testament, and the three books of Maccabees in the same which are different books from those called by the same name found in other Bibles.  The books which are called deuterocanonical by the Roman Catholics, deuterocanonical or non-canonical (18) by traditional Eastern Orthodox like Pomozansky, and Apocrypha by Protestants whether they retain them in their Bibles (Anglicans and Lutherans) or throw them out (other Protestants), however, seem clearly to pass all three tests.  They belong to the translations in which the early Church which could not speak or read Hebrew (even most of the original Jewish members) received the Old Testament (antiquity), and were read liturgically alongside the unquestioned books in the Church which is why even those such as Rufinus who agreed with St. Jerome in excluding them from the Old Testament proper called them “ecclesiastical” rather than “apocryphal”, and so they are included in the Bibles of all the ancient Churches and not just the Roman Catholic (universality) and in the ancient canon lists of local and regional synods including those in which the Church’s recognition of the twenty-seven books of her New Testament, long established in practice, were formalized at the end of the fourth century (consent). 

 

The sane principles for determining what the Church has received and recognized as her Scriptures in terms of canon apply as well to determining what she has received and recognized as her Scriptures in terms of text.  While the only lingering dispute over canon pertains to the Old Testament textual arguments tend to concentrate on the New Testament.  There is a superabundance of manuscript evidence for the New Testament in its original tongue and while one might think that would place the text beyond question, which is in fact the case for the vast majority of the New Testament, it has exacerbated argument over the small number of loci where it is otherwise.

 

Nineteenth century textual criticism and the theory that informed it must be rejected.  It discarded the tests of universality and consent and tried to establish the text of the New Testament based on antiquity alone.  This was the great scholarly temptation of the time.  Constantin von Tischendorf had discovered what is now called Codex Sinaiticus in 1844 in St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai.  This vellum codex dated to the fourth century to the same period as Codex Vaticanus.  Variant textual readings tend to occur together in text types or families, of which there are basically three, the Byzantine, Alexandrian, and Western.  While the vast majority of manuscripts have the Byzantine text type, Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are Alexandrian.  This agreement of these two, which were a century older than the next oldest comparable manuscript, Codex Alexandrinus which Ecumenical Patriarch Cyril Lucaris had presented to King Charles I in the seventeenth century and which was part Byzantine, part Alexandrian, persuaded Tischendorf himself and other Biblical scholars of the day such as S. P. Tragelles that this text type had to be closer to that of the autographa than the Byzantine.  B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort took this idea to the next level by claiming that the Sinaiticus/Vaticanus text was not Alexandrian but “neutral.”  This was their operating theory in preparing their 1881 edition of The New Testament in the Original Greek.  Hort’s introduction, published as a second volume the following year, outlines the principles of their theory.  Setting aside universality and consent for antiquity alone, however, leaves you with one out of three witnesses.  Moreover, that witness is one that will be shared by any text that passes all three Vincentian texts.  The Byzantine text type is found in the New Testament quotations in the writings of the Greek Fathers from the same period in which Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were written and so at least matches their text-type in antiquity.  While some conservative scholars in the twentieth-century argued for a text derived from the Byzantine on the grounds that the readings found in the majority of manuscripts are the most likely to represent the original text one could argue that this is the same mistake as was made by Tischendorf, Westcott, and Hort, merely substituting universality for antiquity as the sole witness. (19)   That being said, the Byzantine is the text type that can pass all three Vincentian tests.  It is attested by ancient sources (antiquity), is attested by the majority of Greek manuscripts and for the most part by the Syriac Peshitta which is why Hort called it the “Syrian Text” (universality), and it is attested in the writings of the Fathers, the ancient lectionaries, and its ongoing use as the liturgical text of the Eastern Orthodox Churches (consent). (20)

 

The reason that it is important that the text pass all three Vincentian tests is because these tests tell us what the Church has recognized as the text of the Scriptures God has given her.  God gave the Bible to His Church and not to academe and it is to the Church and not academe that He has given to recognize His Word in both canon and text.  To take books out of the Bible that all the ancient Churches recognize as part of the Bible and accuse one of those ancient Churches (Rome) of adding them even though all the Churches that broke fellowship with Rome prior to the Reformation have them and to do so on grounds that basically all reduce to “Judaism doesn’t recognize them” on the naïve assumption that the reconstructed post-Temple rabbinic Judaism that divorced itself from Christianity in the first two centuries and redefined itself based on its rejection of Jesus Christ accurately reflects the views of the Judaism of the Israel of the Second Temple Period in which Christ came even though that Judaism was clearly not absolutely settled on the matter a century after St. Jerome first tried to claim them as an authority in this way is bad form.  So is substituting a New Testament text that has been reconstructed either on the basis of the age of a handful of really old manuscripts or worse of a post-modern eclecticism that provides a text not found in any manuscript for that which has been in constant use in the lectionaries and lectern Bibles in the Church since ancient times.

 

The Eastern Orthodox believe that the LXX is an inspired translation of the Old Testament. (21)  The Syriac speaking Christians of various theologies and ecclesiastical affiliations think the same of both Testaments of the Peshitta.  The Roman Catholic Church more or less dogmatically declared this to be the case of the Latin Vulgate in the Council of Trent.  All of these claims are treated with derision by those who think the historical-critical method is the only proper way of interpreting Scripture even though Jesus and St. Paul very clearly felt free to ignore it in their exposition of the Old Testament and who speak in the loftiest terms of the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture while limiting this to the autographa that we do not possess and denying it to the apographa which we do have. (22)  It would seem closer to the truth, however, to say that all of these claims are true.  At the first Whitsunday, the birthday of the Christian Church, when the Holy Ghost descended upon the Apostles and they spoke to the multitude gathered to Jerusalem from throughout the Diaspora for Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, everyone heard the Gospel they preached in their own languages.  Christ’s Church is Catholic, that is, universal, drawn from every kindred and tribe and nation.  This being the case, it is hardly incredible that God in His providence would ensure that His Church receive authoritative versions of His Word in all her major language groups.  On the contrary, this is precisely what we ought to expect to have happened.  It did not end with the Latin Vulgate, however.  Dr. Luther’s translation of the Bible has been the definitive German Bible for five centuries.  The Authorized Bible has been the same in English for almost as long.  Both of these are classical Protestant Bibles, in which the Deuterocanon was removed from the Old Testament but not from the Bible.  The New Testaments of both are translations of the Textus Receptus, a term that refers to the editions of the Greek New Testament put out by men such as the Christian Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus and the Genevan scholar and rigid predestinarian Theodore Beza.  While Erasmus and Beza have been criticized by the later “scientific” schools of textual criticism for the way they went about preparing their editions the manuscripts they worked with at least contained a text representative of that which had been in use in the Church.

 

This is why, although textual scholars may snipe at Erasmus, Beza, et al. for such and such readings in their printed Greek texts, and expositors may point out ways in which this and that verse of the Authorized Bible might have been translated better, we do not need to answer each and every one of these.  For all their criticism, however right or wrong, the Authorized Bible’s position as the English Bible is secure.  None of the plethora of translations that we have been inundated with over the last century or so have come close to supplanting it nor can it be supplanted.  Just as there were multiple Greek Old Testaments (hence Origen’s Hexapla) but one, the LXX, that was clearly authoritative and definitive, and just as one definitive Syriac and Latin translation emerged after previous inferior attempts, so translations from Tyndale, through the Great and Bishop’s Bibles on the part of the Church, and the Geneva Bible on the part of the proto-Puritans ultimately led up to the Authorized Bible which has shaped English language, culture, and religion, Church and non-conformist alike, for four centuries and which is clearly the only English Bible on par with the LXX/Byzantine Text, Syriac Peshitta, Latin Vulgate and Luther’s Bible and the only English Bible that will ever be on par with these. It is in Bibles such as these that God’s Holy Catholic Church in her various provinces and tongues has recognized the written Word which her God has given her.

 

Recommended Reading

 

Letis, Theodore P. The Ecclesiastical Text: Text Criticism, Biblical Authority and the Popular Mind. New York: Just and Sinner Publications, 1997, 2018.

 

 (1)   This term, from Eusebius of Caesarea, (Ecclesiastical History, 3.25.2) refers to the books of the New Testament the canonicity of which was never subject to serious dispute in the early centuries.  These include the four Gospels, Acts, the epistles of St. Paul, except Hebrews, and the first epistles of both SS Peter and John.  The seven other books which are acknowledged as canonical throughout the Church but which were seriously disputed in the early centuries, Eusebius dubbed the antilegomena (Ecclesiastical History, 3.25.3).

(2)   “Falsely inscribed.”  In the broader sense this term is applied to any writing that is recognized to have been written by someone other than the author to whom it is attributed.  The Son of Porthos, for example, is a pseudopigraphon of Alexandre Dumas père.  It was published under his name, but written after his death by Paul Mahalin.  In the more specific sense that is relevant here it refers to works of this sort that purport to have been written by an Apostle or prophet but which have never been regarded as Scripture by the Church.  Examples include the Gospels of Peter, Barnabas and Judas.

(3)   I place “scientific” in scare quotes because some of these techniques are of dubious scientific value even when applied to other texts.  There is, for example, the technique of conjectural emendation, in which all source manuscripts are regarded as corrupt for a particular reading and the critic supplies what he thinks the uncorrupted original might have been.  It does not seem right to describe this as a scientific technique.  For a less extreme example, consider the fifth line of the first book of Homer’s Iliad which reads "οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή”.  This means “and all kinds of birds, and the will of Zeus was fulfilled.”  The first part of this line completes the thought begun in the second half of the previous line, about how the “selves”, in this case meaning bodies, of the heroes who had been hurled down to Hades due to the wrath of Achilles, had become the spoil of dogs. Some think, however, that the word δαῖτα (feast) should appear in the line in the place of πᾶσι (all, every).  This is unquestionably the better reading in terms of literary quality.  This makes the thought read “and themselves the spoil of dogs and a feast for birds” rather than “and themselves the spoil of dogs and all kinds of birds.”  In both English and Greek this is an obvious improvement.  The metre of the verse does not indicate which reading is to be preferred as it is unaffected by the change.  There is no direct evidence for the reading in extent manuscripts of the Iliad, however.  There is indirect evidence in that Athenaeus of Naucratus, a Greek grammarian from the reign of Marcus Aurelius, criticizes Zenodotus, the first librarian of Alexandria, for including the reading in his edition of the Iliad (The Deipnosophists, Book I, Epitome, 1.21).  There is also an apparent allusion to this passage of the Iliad in lines 800-801 of Aeschylus’ Ἱκέτιδες (Supplices – the Suppliant Maidens) that would seem to support the alternative reading.  This is not very strong evidence.  Athenaeus is criticizing Zenodotus for a reading that he takes to be Zenodotus’ emendation of the text.  The allusion in Aeschylus is not a direct quotation.  Preferring the δαῖτα reading on the basis of its literary superiority over the πᾶσι reading is therefore not quite as speculative as conjectural emendation, but evidence of this sort is not sufficient to overturn the reading in the actual manuscripts of the text, even though it predates the manuscripts (the oldest manuscript of the Iliad, the Venetus A, dates to the tenth century A. D.).  It would be irresponsible to print the text with the δαῖτα reading, as at least one popular grammar of the last century did, without indicating the other, much better attested, reading.  Should this illustration have inspired anyone to wish to learn more about what textual criticism looks like when applied to Homeric epic rather than Scripture I refer you to Martin L. West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, (Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur Verlag, 2001).

(4)   St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 2.6.  The translation is that of C. A. Heurtley in the eleventh volume of the second series of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace and originally published in Buffalo by Christian Literature Publishing in 1894.

(5)   The Jews count the twelve Minor Prophets as a single book, a kind of anthology like the Psalms, rather than twelve books, and count Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra as single books rather than two books each as we do (in the case of Ezra the second book is what we ordinarily call Nehemiah).  In ancient times, the Church counted these books the same way the Jews do, and Ruth was counted as part of Judges and Lamentations as part of Jeremiah, bringing the total down to twenty-two, a number considered to be significant because it is the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet.

(6)   The Talmud in a number of places cites the “book of Ben Sira” as authoritative Scripture.  The Gemara of Chagigah 13a, which was composed in the fifth to sixth centuries A.D., is one such example.  Ben Sira is the book that appears in the Christian Deuterocanon as Sirach or Ecclesiasticus.  In Bava Kamma 92b14 it is quoted as belonging to the Ketuvim (Writings).  The Ketuvim is the K in TNK, usually written as Tanakh.  The T and N are the Torah (Law) and Nevi’im (Prophets).  In Bava Kamma 92b14 the quotation from Ecclesiasticus is joined with quotations from Genesis and Judges (which is classified as Nevi’im by the Jews) so that all three sections of the Tanakh are quoted.  Bava Kamma dates to the same period as Chagigah.

(7)   A Targum was an Aramaic paraphrase of a passage from the Hebrew Scriptures combined with a midrash (commentary) on the passage.

(8)   These books are not continuations of the narrative in Ezra/Nehemiah.  The LXX contains two books named Esdras (Ezra), Esdras A and Esdras B.  Esdras B is a straightforward translation of the Hebrew book of Ezra (Ezra and Nehemiah in most English Bibles).  Esdras A is another translation of the same book that removes some things (namely Nehemiah) and adds others.  In translation it is sometimes called 1 Esdras sometimes 3 Esdras.  The book called 2 Esdras in the Authorized Bible and 4 Esdras in editions of the Vulgate that include it is called 3 Esdras in Eastern Orthodox Bibles and is the only extra book in Eastern Orthodox Bibles not found in standard editions of the LXX.  There was a Greek version, and probably a Hebrew original, but they are not extant.  It is radically different in genre from the other books, consisting of apocalyptic visions similar to those of Daniel/Revelation.

(9)   Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, translated by Fr. Seraphim Rose (Platina: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1983, 2021) 32-34.

(10)                       Note the irony that by retaining the ancient way of counting the books acknowledged as canon by both Jews and Scriptures as 22 the Eastern Orthodox with 16 extra books from the LXX, rather than just the 7 recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, ends up with a total Old Testament book count that is one less than the Protestant which excludes all the extra LXX books from the Old Testament (although not from the Bible in the case of Lutherans and Anglicans).

(11)                       The testimony is not strong enough to support the traditional claim of the Assyrian Church of the East that the Peshitta New Testament is the original of which the Greek is a translation, a claim that while wrong has, as errors of this sort generally do, an element of truth in it in that Patristic testimony maintains that St. Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew by which the Fathers probably meant Aramaic.  That St. Paul’s epistles to Greek-speaking Churches were originally written in Syriac, however, is hardly credible. 

(12)                       Dr. Luther did the same thing with his German Bible, except that he used the shorter Roman Catholic deuterocanon for his “Apocrypha” rather than the longer Eastern Orthodox one.

(13)                       St. Athanasius, Letter 39, 7.  This can be found in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2, Volume 4.  Note that in his list of the 22 Old Testament books in paragraph 4, Baruch is mentioned as being part of the book of Jeremiah.

(14)                       Article VI “Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation.”  The list of the books is of those that were later printed in the Authorized Bible, i.e., the Eastern Orthodox deuterocanon sans 3 Maccabees and Psalm 151.  In the Article, however, unlike in the Authorized Bible, the canonical Ezra/Nehemiah are called 1 and 2 Esdras, and the books that are printed under these names in the Apocrypha section of the Authorized Bible are called 3 and 4 Esdras.  The book entitled Ecclesiasticus in the Authorized Bible is called Jesus, Son of Sirach in the Article, the Prayer of Manasseh is spelled with final s instead of a final h, and Tobit is called Tobias.  The difference between the Articles and the Authorized Bible in numbering the Esdras books is rather unfortunate because it further complicated an already quite muddled matter.  The other differences are minor, although Tobit and Tobias are two different persons (a father and a son) in the actual book.  The book is called Tobit, sometimes with an aspirated final dental, in the LXX, and Tobias in the Vulgate.  Tobit, therefore, is the original name of the book.  The son’s name is a variation of the father’s name and the distinction is eliminated in the Latin.  The title, therefore, is probably still referring to the father, although it would make sense to name it after the son in that Tobias’ role in the story is much larger than that of his father.  It is Tobias who with the help of the archangel Raphael, defeats the demon of lust Asmodeus, so that he may marry Sarah without dying.  As the seven brothers whom she had previously married all had on their wedding nights.  Almost certainly the seven brothers alluded to by the Sadducees who evidently did not know the full story and received from Jesus the rebuke that they knew not the Scriptures!

(15)                       It is even closer to the Eastern Orthodox view as expressed by St. Philaret of Moscow in The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox Church, Q. 31-35.

(16)                       The position taken by the Anglican Church in her formularies is further articulated and defended by Richard Hooker in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Book V, chapter 22 and by Bishop Christopher Wordsworth in the fourth of his lectures collected and published as On the Canon of The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament and of the Apocrypha (London: Francis and John Rivington, 1818).

(17)                      Enoch is quoted by St. Jude in the New Testament.  That being quoted in the New Testament does not mean that something is itself inspired Scripture should be evident from the quotations from pagan poetry that St. Paul includes in his speech at Mars Hill in Acts 17.

(18)                       The idea of books that are “non-canonical” Scriptures is obviously contradictory if “canonical” is understood to mean “on the list of books that are Scriptures.”  Hooker and Wordsworth, vide supra note 15, not wanting to complicate matters with multiple meanings of canon, spoke of the books in question as being part of the Bible, but read with Scripture rather than as Scripture.  This, however, makes “the Bible” and “Scripture” two different things, which does not improve matters.  “Canon” is a word that means “rule” or “measuring stick”.  Applied to the Bible, it can mean the “rule” that says such-and-such a book belongs in the Bible, or it can mean such-and-such books as the “rule” that determines sound doctrine.  There can be no “non-canonical” books of Scripture in the first sense.  “Non-canonical” in the second sense, however, describes the Anglican view of these books which Hooker and Wordsworth held.  Pomazansky et al., seem to be using it in an intermediate sense, indicating first that the books are not part of the Hebrew canon, that is, the Jewish version of the canon in the first sense, and secondly that their role in doctrine is a supportive one rather than primary.  The tradition that doctrine is not established from the “non-canonical” or “deuterocanonical” books does not necessarily suggest that the books were viewed as less than inspired.  Establishing doctrine has two sides to it, establishing the doctrines that are de fide for the Church as an in-house matter, and establishing doctrines in dialogue or dispute with others.  Of the groups that Christianity has historically been in dialogue with, the only one for whom an appeal to Scriptural authority would mean anything would be the Jews, and these only recognize the “canonical” books of the Old Testament.  Therefore there was a practical reason, at least when it came to dialogue with the Jews, for refraining from trying to establish doctrine with the deuterocanon.  See, however, A Scholastical History of the Canon of the Holy Scripture by Caroline Divine Bishop John Cosin, found in The Works of The Right Reverend Father in God John Cosin Lord Bishop of Durham, Vol. III (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1849) for the Patristic evidence for understanding the lower status of these books as due to a difference in quality.

(19)                       Zane C. Hodges, “The Greek Text of the King James Version,” Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. 125:500 (Oct, 1968) 334-345 and “Modern Textual Criticism and the Majority Text: A Response,” JETS 21/2 (June, 1978), 143-155 and Wilbur Norman Pickering The Identity of the New Testament Text (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1978) are examples of arguments that majority principle leads to the most accurate text.  While the theory is much sounder than the theory that postulates that the best text is found in a small handful of really old manuscripts it is incomplete.

(20)                       John William Burgon, who had been vicar of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford (the third after John Henry Newman) before his appointment as Dean of Chichester Cathedral, in 1876, was a textual scholar second to none in the nineteenth century.  He argued for the Byzantine Text, or the Traditional Text as he called it, on multiple grounds, all centred on respect for the Scriptures as God’s Word as given to and preserved in His Church.  He was working on a magnus opus that would fully articulate such a faithful, ecclesiastical, approach in response to text critical theory when he died.  His manuscript was subsequently edited and posthumously published as two volumes, Causes of Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels (1896) and The Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels Vindicated and Established (1896).  His earlier treatments of the subject including The Last Twelve Verses of Mark (1871) and a series of articles for Quarterly Review bound and published as the Revision Revised in 1881 are better known.

(21)                       “As its authoritative text for the Old Testament, it uses the ancient Greek translation known as the Septuagint. When this differs from the original Hebrew (which happens quite often), Orthodox believe that the changes in the Septuagint were made under the inspiration of the Holy Spirt, and are to be accepted as part of God’s continuing revelation.  The best-known instance is Isaiah vii,14 – where the Hebrew says ‘A young woman shall conceive and bear a son’, which the Septuagint translates ‘A virgin shall conceive’, etc.  The New Testament follows the Septuagint text (Matthew I, 23).” Timothy (Kallistos) Ware, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity, 3rd edition (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 193-194.  Metropolitan Ware’s example concedes too much, in my opinion, to Jewish and liberal claims about the meaning of עַלְמָה in the Hebrew text.  This word occurs several times in the Hebrew Scriptures.  In all but one of these the person designated is clearly a virgin, in the one where this is not the case it appears as part of a compound word that is only found in this one verse (Prov. 30:19).  The word itself is derived from a root which means coming of child-bearing age and this is what it primarily indicates about the woman it denotes.  Virginity can be reasonably if not infallibly inferred from it.  The LXX translators used both νεᾶνις (maiden) and παρθένος (virgin) to translate this word.  While this indicates the word could mean “young woman” rather than “virgin” it also indicates that context determines which of these two meanings is intended.  The context of Isaiah 7:14 supports the LXX’s translation as παρθένος.  A young woman, who has come of child-bearing age, but who is not a virgin, giving birth, would not constitute a sign.  The argument that if Isaiah had meant “virgin” he would have written הלותב does not really hold water.  This word, while used more often for “virgin” than עַלְמָה is not more limited to this meaning and comes about it in just as roundabout a way.  It is derived from a verb meaning to separate and originally indicated a young woman who has not been separated from her father’s house although even this was not literally the case with some to whom the term is applied in the Hebrew Scriptures, such as the maidens who had been collected for Ahasuerus’ harem in the book of Esther.  This book still applies the term to them when they were clearly no longer virgins.  This, and the fact that Moses needed to qualify the term in Genesis 24:44 to make sure it was understood as virgin, and that Joel used it of a bride mourning for her husband in Joel 1:8 (the term for husband indicates the marriage had taken place, this was not just an engagement) should suffice to negate the idea that this is the technical term for “virgin” in Hebrew.

(22)           Autographa are the original manuscripts.  Apographa, not to be confused with apocrypha, refers to copied manuscripts and so to all extent manuscripts.