Introduction to the New Testament: Understanding the Greek Influence on Early Christianity

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The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.

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It’s of some interest that the New Testament church soldiered on for some 20 years before anyone wrote down anything that has remained for us to look at. One of the reasons, of course, is if they did write anything in that period of time, it was on papyrus, and papyrus in that part of the world just didn’t survive. It fell apart after so many years because of the moisture, the climate, and so forth. Now, what is your best guess, looking at the Bible that you may have right there in your house, as to which of the New Testament books was written first? Matthew, perhaps, because after all, it’s the first one written in the New Testament. No, as odd as it seems, the first of all the New Testament documents that we have in hand was Paul’s letter to the Galatians. And it was written in the early 50s A.D., 20 years after the ascension of Christ. And Galatians probably would not have been written if the problem had arisen while Paul was there. If he’d been there, he would have just handled the problem in person. But he had gone and got word of it, and the only way he could address it was in a letter to the Galatian church. So he sat down, wrote them a letter, and it was rather an unusual letter, Paul suggesting that it was written with his own hand. Usually, he used a scribe. So that’s how it comes that we have the book of Galatians at all. Now, it’s hard to explain why this was so, at least from a 20th century point of view. One reason may have been their expectation of the imminent return of Christ. I think we can safely conclude that none of the people who wrote New Testament books imagined for a moment that they would be read 2,000 years off into the future. And so, because they didn’t expect that, and because they thought they were doing what they were supposed to be doing, which was spreading the gospel orally, the first gospel to be written wouldn’t appear for another 10 years after Paul’s letters to the Galatians and to the Thessalonians. And you can place them sometime in the decade of the 60s, 30 years after the ascension of Christ, before the first gospel account was written down. Now, that may begin to explain, that is, the decade in which they were written, may explain why they were finally written down. The nation was headed into crisis, and by this time there had been quite a few martyrs to the faith. They may have decided that they needed to record their witness before it was too late. They had to recognize they were getting older, and sooner or later they were going to die off. And if Christ hadn’t returned, it was essential that they put down their witness for others to read. But for a moment, I want to return to the first of Paul’s letters, Galatians, and then 1 and 2 Thessalonians. These letters were both written in Greek. as was the entirety of the New Testament. There exist no early manuscripts of any New Testament books that are not in Greek or known to be translations from the Greek. There were some very early versions translated into Syriac. Everybody knows that they were translations of the Greek. They’re not a candidate in any way for the original language. Now, this is a fact incontrovertible. I mention it only because there are a handful who claim that one or all of the New Testament books were originally written in Hebrew and then translated into Greek. There is almost no evidence for that having been the case with any New Testament book or letter. I say almost because an early historical source said that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew and translated into Greek by Matthew. If so, it’s largely irrelevant because we don’t have the Hebrew Matthew in any early version. I think the earliest version of a Hebrew Matthew is 9th or 10th century. And these actually are written by Jews who are arguing against the book of Matthew. And so we really don’t have anything to base that on. The same thing, by the way, has been said of the book of Hebrews, but again with no evidence at all. There are no Hebrew manuscripts, no early Hebrew manuscripts of any New Testament book. And so you can pretty well lay that idea aside. So it appears that the entire New Testament was written in Koine Greek, that is, Common Greek. Now why would that have been so? Koine Greek may have arisen among the ranks of the armies of Alexander the Great. These soldiers conquered and colonized the entire known world. They didn’t just defeat people. They moved in and stayed. And their language, Common Greek, Soldier Greek, if you will, became really the lingua franca of the whole known world from Egypt to the borders of India. As it happened, it made possible the widest possible distribution of the gospel. Hebrew was not spoken, not even widely used in Palestine. Aramaic was preferred. So Greek, which was spoken nearly everywhere, it was a one language, it was a language of commerce, is the only language in which the gospel could have effectively been transmitted throughout the known world. Greek was so widely spoken that in the years following Alexander’s death, a momentous event took place. Seventy-two Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Torah from Hebrew into Greek. The Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch. The work was commissioned by one of the Greek rulers who held Egypt after the death of Alexander. The work went on. Other books were added piecemeal to the documents, finally forming what is called the Septuagint version of the Bible. It’s named that because the word Septuagint means the 70, and it’s a reference to the 70 translators who actually put the thing together. Some sources say that the Septuagint was held with great respect in ancient times. Philo and Josephus both ascribed divine inspiration to to the authors of the Septuagint, that is, the translators of the Septuagint. It formed the basis of the old Latin version and is still used intact within Eastern Orthodoxy. And why not? That Greek is their language, and so here is the Old Testament in their language. Of special interest, though, is the Septuagint differs from the standard Hebrew text from which virtually every Bible you have is translated. Now, let me digress for a moment to talk about that text. The text of the Jewish Bible, the text of your King James Version, the Old Testament text of all the modern translations, basically they come from the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Scriptures. The oldest known manuscript, though, of the Masoretic text of the Old Testament dates to the 9th or 10th century A.D. Now, why is that so? Why would they all be so late? The answer is pretty simple. The worn-out scrolls were destroyed. They were used until ready to fall apart, and then they did not leave them to rot or to mold. Out of respect for the Scriptures, they burned them so that only the new copies or the current copies were maintained. Because of the care with which those copyists worked, the manuscripts are remarkably consistent. It was apparent, though, that the Septuagint had some variation from the Masoretic text. They’re not that important in terms of what they say. They are just different enough to make people wonder. Some of them were attributable to the translator’s decisions. We’re translating it, and we put it this way instead of that way, but not all of them. But then, starting in 1947, a series of dramatic discoveries were made. A nomad boy, a Bedouin boy, was throwing stones into a cave and heard them hit pottery and break pottery inside. He went in and found the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Over the years that followed, all the caves around there were excavated and more scrolls were found. Now, what’s of special interest for what I’m talking about right now is… that there was a remarkable agreement between the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Old Testament and the Masoretic text, but there was something else. In those few places where the Dead Sea Scrolls disagreed with the Masoretic text, standard Hebrew, strangely, it agreed with the Septuagint. Now, this has led some scholars to conclude that the Septuagint was translated from texts of a different manuscript tradition from the Masoretic text. In other words, there were two schools that maintained manuscripts of the Old Testament before Christ. and that the Septuagint came from the other school from which the Masoretic text came from. Now, this is not earth-shattering, but it sent shockwaves through the scholarly community. Now, don’t worry. None of these variations have anything to do with undermining the authority of the Bible. But the fact is, they actually establish the existence of independent traditions of the text of the Old Testament, which in a strange way strengthens the case for its origins. Why? Because no one society had it under their control to do with it as they please. When you think that through, you will begin to realize how crucial it was that the Old Testament never was under one single authority. Stay with me. I’ll be right back, and we’ll look further at this matter.

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Most Christians have no idea how the greatest of Jewish holidays became the greatest of Christian holy days. Ronald Dart’s second book, The Thread, God’s Appointments with History, is now available at your local bookstore or directly from borntowin.net. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44.

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Just to reiterate, scholars have now pretty well determined that prior to the development of the New Testament, the Old Testament existed in at least two significant manuscript traditions. It’s important because it demonstrates that there was never any one society of people who had the Old Testament entirely under their control. Now, why is that important? Well, because people assume that they could rewrite it to suit themselves. You know, they could rewrite it to eliminate women or to change women’s rights however they want to do them. And, of course, all of that undermines the divine authority, the divine inspiration, the divine gift of the Holy Scriptures. Problem is, you can’t do it because you can’t demonstrate that anybody ever had the Old Testament under their control. Now exactly the same situation prevails with the New Testament manuscripts. Some people say that most of the quotations of the Old Testament that you find in the New Testament come from the Septuagint. That’s not surprising because the New Testament was written in Greek. Why would you go looking for a Hebrew version to translate and put into your Greek writing? The truth is, citations by Paul and others as they wrote came not from a text. but from memorization, which was very likely from the Septuagint. In fact, as you do the study, if you have a Septuagint, if you have your New Testament, you can make your way through it and determine that very often these citations are coming from the Septuagint. Some scholars have pointed out, well, it’s not exactly the same. It’s not verbatim from that, so therefore maybe it’s not. But you have to understand how Paul actually wrote most of his letters. Galatians is an exception. He says he wrote it with his own hand. Most of his letters Paul wrote walking up and down, pacing probably, dictating to a man sitting on the sidelines trying to write down everything Paul said as fast as he could. So when he wanted to cite an Old Testament scripture, he just cited it from memory. And that memory may have included one word or excluded another word, depending upon what point Paul was trying to make. He was honest with it, but he was working from memory. Now, you could have read your Bible for years without any of the knowledge I’m telling you here, and you could come to know the God of the Bible. But there are areas of understanding and misunderstanding that can often be cleared up when you have a knowledge of the background of the times. And for people who really understand the background of the New Testament, movies like The Da Vinci Code become absurd because they know better. They know the facts are against the theories advanced in that book. Now, there’s another body of literature arising in this period following the establishment of the canon. The prophetic office had ceased, but history went on and needed to be recorded. The time period I’m talking about is that period between the Old and the New Testament. The books arising in this period are termed the Apocrypha, which means of doubtful authority. There being no prophet to attest or to validate, they can only be taken as any other history would be taken. You’ll find them in some Bibles. You will not find them in others. The period between the Testaments has been called a period unrivaled for religious wavering and confusion. And that’s pretty natural in a period of time when there was no leadership. So, in all reality, we would not expect to find in the literature of the period any kind of a bridge between the Testaments. Indeed, as I observed last time, Luke begins his story at the point Malachi left off, with the prophecy of an Elijah to come. Everett Harrison, in his Introduction to the New Testament, makes this observation, and I quote, “…far from being a mere collection of books, the Bible possesses a unity that makes it possible for the reader to move with comparative ease from Malachi to Matthew.” The translation of the Old Testament into Greek facilitated this transition enormously. Because many of those who would be reading the Bible from the New Testament forward would not know Hebrew, but they would surely know Greek in that world. The writer of Hebrews began his book by saying, God, who at sundry times and in diverse manners spoke in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds. It is the same God in whatever language and at whatever time he speaks. Now, it’s a strange thing to consider, but Alexander the Great actually paved the way for the distribution of the gospel. How did he do it? By spreading the common Greek language over the entire known world. So, Paul wrote the letter to Galatians, and he wrote it in Greek. How did we end up with it? Well, the letter was copied probably three or four times immediately. We don’t know who copied it, but we know it was because it has ended up in several locations in the Middle East. To understand what happened in the early days of the New Testament, one needs to get certain facts firmly in mind. One, and this is obvious, but let’s say it, there was no printing press. All manuscripts had to be copied by hand. And the implications of this are obvious to anyone who’s ever tried to do much copying. A problem was on the way. In the earliest years of the church, everyone was fully occupied in living the life and telling the story. You can read a pretty good description of what it was like in the book of Acts. It was the telling of the story, the good message, which we call the gospel, that was the one big thing. The twelve apostles, who were witnesses of all that Jesus did and said, who were witnesses of his death and resurrection, were in great demand to testify as to what they saw. The story was told over and over again. In the best Jewish tradition, it was memorized. They tell us that the invention of the printing press resulted in a degrading of human memory. Human memory went downhill after that. I suspect the reason for this is that the techniques used in memorization were lost. They fell into disuse. Why work at memorization when all I have to do is pick up a book? Scholars of the New Testament text hypothesize the existence of a fifth gospel writer who preceded the four we have in our New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They have dubbed this gospel Q, that is, the letter Q. The reason they think Q existed is the similarities between the first three gospels called the synoptics. They think that things were borrowed from Q in common from all these gospels, and that’s the reason why they are so much the same. I think what they call Q was the memorized gospel of the first century church. They told that story over and over and over again, and they heard it so many times that that they had, in the modern term, internalized it. Just as the Jews carefully memorized and passed on the Oral Torah, so the church, which was composed of Jews, did what good Jews did. They memorized their story deliberately and with considerable effort. This went on for some 30 years before the first gospel was written, and in the same time frame of less than 20 years, the same decade, the Spirit moved four men, all witnesses, to write the story down. Now we have to understand one more very important thing about the New Testament. The New Testament is the testimony of witnesses of real events. Now there are a lot of theories about the inspiration of the Bible, all designed to establish the authority of the Bible. But there is a problem. We’ll talk about that. But first, grab a pencil and a paper. I want to give you a phone number and listen to this short message.

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For a free CD of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only. And request the program titled, Introduction to the New Testament, number 3. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. That’s 1-888-242-5344. I’m not going to run down the list of all the theories about the inspiration of the Bible and biblical inerrancy and so forth.

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Because I feel that all of them tend to lead a person down the wrong path. The doctrine of inerrancy may illustrate what I’m talking about. This idea may lead you to believe that there are no inaccuracies in the Bible in its original form. But then, if you’re a careful reader, you’ll come across inconsistencies in the order of events from one gospel to another. You can’t help it. They’re right there looking at you on the page. If, for example, Luke records three events, A, B, C, and then you’re reading in another gospel, maybe parallel with it, it records the same three events in the order A, C, B, you could stumble over that. Now, examples like that do exist in the New Testament. There are books out somewhere that tell you all the things that are wrong with the New Testament, all the inconsistencies and all the problems. Those examples do exist. What are we to make of them? Well, to start with, the apostles did not have word processors. It was no simple task to cut and paste and reorder a document. Second, many of the New Testament documents were dictated to a scribe. We even know the name of the guy who took down Paul’s dictation into the book of Romans. So there are also in many manuscripts editing notes in more than one handwriting that somebody actually looked at this thing and says, no, no, that’s not what I said, and put a marginal note in it. And they did not operate on the editorial standards and values of modern publishing. To Luke, the order of events in time may have been what’s important. He says, this is the order in which they actually took place, one after the other, and I feel I should put it down that way. Another author might have considered the significance of the events as more important in their order than the time. For even though these men wrote in Greek, they probably thought in Hebrew or Aramaic. Now, a modern English writer writing out a story will be inclined to put the most important thing he has to say near the end of his document. He will do what is called a climax. A Hebrew writer was inclined to put the most important thing, the climax, squarely in the center of the document. So you kind of have to look at a document, these old documents, in a little different way from what we would. You have to consider that the order in which events are described may have more to do with the importance of the item in question than of its order in time. So we have to lay aside modern views of accuracy. The writers of the New Testament had different standards. They did not use the Chicago Book of Style or anything like it. To them, the important thing was the truth of their testimony. Now let me illustrate what I’m talking about in a different way. Imagine yourself in a courtroom as a member of the jury. Three witnesses are called to tell us what they saw when a shooter entered a classroom and shot the teacher. Witness number one is on the stand. He testifies that the shooter slammed the door open, shouted obscenities at the teacher. He shot the teacher, waved the gun toward the class, but then left, slamming the door behind him. Okay, vivid picture, isn’t it? Witness number two, though, comes in and testifies. The shooter opened the door. walked over to the teacher’s desk while waving the gun toward the class. He shouted that he hated the teacher and then shot him. Witness number three now comes in and testifies. The shooter was in the open door shouting at the teacher. He strode across the room to the window, looked back at the teacher, still shouting, I don’t remember what he said. Then he walked to the desk and shot the teacher in the face. pointed the gun straight at me, and then walked out, closing the door behind him. Now, how accurate are these stories? Well, obviously, they can’t all be perfectly accurate because they differed in various ways. But here’s the question. Are the witnesses telling the truth? Obviously, yes. Do you think the witnesses got together to get their story straight? No way. The variations in their stories establish their independence, don’t they? Will you convict the shooter on the testimony of these witnesses? Or would you consider the minor differences in their stories to say, well, we don’t know what really happened, so we have to let him go? I think, I hope, you would convict the shooter, and you wouldn’t take very long to do it. The variations in their stories are not inaccuracies. They are different perspectives on the truth of what happened. Now look at the gospel accounts. In the same way, there are some who would like to believe that the Holy Spirit dictated the Bible, and that it’s therefore inerrant in all of its parts. But the evidence is against that, and so is logic. Why, for example, do you think that Jesus didn’t write his own book? The answer to that lies in a very old biblical principle, the principle of witnesses and testimony. In Deuteronomy 19, it says, Then there’s this from the New Testament in Matthew 18, verse 16. You’ve gone to your brother to talk to him about his sin, but if he will not hear you, take with you one or two more that in the mouth of two or three witnesses, every word may be established. There’s more, but it’ll have to wait until next time.

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