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  CORRUPTION OF THE NT
  by Hl Hastings
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Hastings's examination of the textual transmission of the New Testament,
discussing how ancient manuscript copies in various languages were discovered,
compared, and used to verify the accuracy of printed texts and establish the
reliability of the biblical text.

  Chapters: 17

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. CNT-02 How Old is the English Bible?
    2. CNT-03 OLD BIBLES IN OTHER LANGUAGES.
    3. CNT-04 UNCIAL AND CURSIVE MANUSCRIPTS.
    4. CNT-05 VARIOUS READINGS.
    5. CNT-06 THE MOST ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS.
    6. CNT-07 THE VARIATIONS IN DIFFERENT EDITIONS
    7. CNT-08 Various Readings in the Sermon on the Mount
    8. CNT-09 THE PRESERVATION OF THE MANUSCRIPTS.
    9. CNT-10 NO RECORD OF APOSTLES’ DEATH.
   10. CNT-11 WHAT, THEN, ARE OUR CONCLUSIONS?
   11. CNT-12 GENUINE AND SPURIOUS BOOKS
   12. CNT-13 EUSEBIUS ON THE SACRED CANON,
   13. CNT-14 THE TESTIMONY OF ORIGEN ON THE CANON.
   14. CNT-15 THE MURATORIAN FRAGMENT ON THE CANON.
   15. CNT-16 THE DISPUTED NEW TESTAMENT BOOKS.
   16. CNT-17 THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS.
   17. CNT-18 THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER.

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  CHAPTER 1: CNT-02 HOW OLD IS THE ENGLISH BIBLE?
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Everything which passes through human hands is liable to be altered, corrupted,
and vitiated; and sacred books form no exception to this rule. The integrity of
a book may be impaired every time it is copied. In copying any writing, bad men
might make alterations, careless men might make mistakes, and good men might
seek to change and improve the things which they were copying; and so, in one
way or another, the integrity of the document might be seriously impaired. This
no intelligent person can deny.

Now it is well known that the New Testament is not a recent production. Skeptics
and Christians agree that it has been in existence for a long time. Some affirm
that it was compiled, in its present form, by the Council held at Nicea, AD 325;
and according to this statement, currently made by various skeptical writers in
infidel books, the New Testament is more than 1550 years old. But dur­ing the
vicissitudes of 1550 years, many books have per­ished, and others have been
purposely or accidentally corrupted. What certainty, then, have we of the
authen­ticity and the integrity of the New Testament books; to say nothing of
their truthfulness or inspiration? Is not the whole matter involved in too great
doubt to com­mand the confidence and respect of prudent, intelligent, and
thinking men? In examining this subject, let us commence with the facts which
are nearest to us, and within our reach, and first let us inquire:

HOW OLD IS THE ENGLISH BIBLE? On the 17th of May, 1881, was issued, in London,
the Revised New Testament, for which one London publisher had advance orders for
more than a million copies; and of which their agent in New York, where it was
issued May 20th, sold 365,000 copies before the end of the year. It was
immediately reprinted in America, in some fifty editions, one of which had a
circulation of 100,000 copies, and another a circulation of 65,000 copies,
before January, 1882. Probably, within one year from the date of its is­sue,
three million copies were bought in Great Britain and America. On comparing this
book with King James’ translation, we find numerous changes, most of which are
so unimport­ant that ordinary people wonder why they were made. In many
instances, one word has been changed for an­other of exactly the same meaning.
In some cases a deli­cate shade of difference can be detected; in other
in­stances, the grammatical construction varies slightly; oc­casionally a
sentence or word is omitted; but the ordinary reader, taking the book and
reading it through, would detect few essential differences. No one, so far as we
have been informed, has changed one article of his faith or one iota of his
practice, and no sect has lost or gained a member, in consequence of the changes
which have been made. The same facts are stated, and the same doctrines taught
in both books. We have, therefore, substantially the same book that has been in
circulation through­out the English-speaking world since 1611; the same book of
which, during the present century, more than two hundred translations have been
made,—thus placing it within the reach of the great majority of the inhabitants
of the globe.

We may now go back further, and we find that this New Testament is, in all
essential particulars, the same as that published by Tyndale in 1526, and
substantially the same as the translation made by Wycliffe from the Latin in
1380. The difference between any of these copies does not affect the general
integrity of the book; and what­ever variations there may be in them are mainly
due to occasional misapprehensions of the meaning of certain passages by
translators, or to changes in the meaning of English words, which render some of
the old expressions obsolete and unintelligible to the present generation of
English readers. Our language has changed, but the book is substantially the
same.

We may then safely say that the English New Tes­tament has existed, with no
essential variations, for the last five hundred years; manuscript copies of
Wycliffe’s Testament of that age being still in existence; Wycliffe’s English
New Testament not having been printed till it was more than four hundred years
old. Of course there have been numerous typographical errors in the different
printed editions of the New Testa­ment. We sometimes find a letter turned upside
down, or a word misspelled. One edition of the Bible is called the “Vinegar
Bible,” because in one instance the word “vinegar" is printed where it should be
“vineyard.” Such variations as these are easily corrected, and mislead no one.
Other more important, and in some cases inten­tional, errors have occurred, the
authors of which have sometimes been severely punished; but these instances were
few, and the more important the errors, the more sure they were to be speedily
detected and corrected.


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  CHAPTER 2: CNT-03 OLD BIBLES IN OTHER LANGUAGES.
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OLD BIBLES IN OTHER LANGUAGES.

Printed copies of this Book, equally ancient, also exist in other languages. I
have in my library a copy of it in Latin, printed in the year 1501, every line
of which is as readable as when it came from the press. But the Book is older
than the art of printing, for the first vol­ume of importance ever printed was
the Latin Bible, 1450-1455, several copies of which are still in existence; and
these are substantially the same book as we now have in English. But these
Testaments in English or Latin were origi­nally translated from the Greek; and
there are also an­cient translations into other languages, which claim a much
greater antiquity than any printed copies. All these New Testaments, in the
various languages, are traced back to manuscripts written in the Greek lan­guage
many years ago, hundreds of which manuscripts, transcribed before the art of
printing was discovered, still exist. During the dark ages these manuscripts
were hid­den in libraries, and copied and re-copied by devout men; till printing
superseded this tedious labor.

Before that time manuscript copies of the New Tes­tament were exceedingly
expensive. Copies of Wycliffe’s English Testament sold in 1420 for four marks
and forty pence, equal to about $14.50,—which, allowing for the difference in
the value of money, would be equiva­lent to $200 at the present time. Greek and
Latin manu­scripts were, of course, proportionally valuable, until the art of
printing was discovered, and the sacred books were scattered far and wide over
an awakening world.

Since that time, the old manuscripts have only been needed to verify the text,
and correct the translations and printed editions. When an error is found in a
printed book, the same error will be found in every other copy in the whole
edition. But though ten men copying one book would all be likely to make
mistakes, no two would be likely to make the same mistakes; so one manuscript
copy would serve to correct another. Hence the great advantage of having
numerous manuscript copies of the New Testament, and the earlier and more
numerous the manuscripts the better.


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  CHAPTER 3: CNT-04 UNCIAL AND CURSIVE MANUSCRIPTS.
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UNCIAL AND CURSIVE MANUSCRIPTS.

There are two kinds of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament; the oldest class
being written in capital or “uncial” letters, so called from the Latin word for
inch; perhaps because the letters were first made of that length. The oldest of
these manuscripts have hardly any punctu­ation; and the words are not separated
by spaces, the letters being run together in solid lines. This style of writing
was used down to about the tenth century; after which a “cursive” or running,
hand was adopted, in which manuscripts were written from the tenth century to
the time when the art of printing was discovered. The “cursive” manuscripts
were, of course, the most accessible, being the most numerous; and so they were
mainly used in printing the earliest editions of the Greek Testament, and in
preparing the various English transla­tions, down to that of King James,—only
two of the five oldest and most valuable “uncial” manuscripts having been at
that time known to scholars to be in existence, and those having been little
used by them; though some of the “cursives” which they did use may have been
copied from, and so may represent, very ancient “uncials.” The number of New
Testament manuscripts, complete or fragmentary, now known, exceeds seventeen
hundred, dating from about AD 330 to 1500. Of these probably seventy or eighty
are over one thousand years old. Dr. Scrivener makes record of 158 uncials and
1605 cursives; some of them being Lectionaries, or Service-Books, con­taining
only the Scripture lessons read in the churches;—and the number is increased
from time to time by explorations in ancient libraries, especially in the East.
The cursive manuscripts, dating from about AD 800 to 1500, number between nine
and ten hundred. Some are beautifully illuminated; some being written on linen
paper, which was first used in the twelfth century; others upon cotton paper,
which was used as early as the ninth century; others, like the older uncial
manuscripts, being written upon parchment and vellum, which have been in use
from before the Christian era. Some thirty of these manuscripts contain the
entire New Testament; others contain only portions. Manuscript books being
bulky, the New Testament was for convenience transcribed in sev­eral volumes.
Hence the manuscripts preserved are mostly of separate portions, rather than
entire New Tes­taments. Of manuscripts containing the four Gospels there are
more than six hundred; of the Acts of the Apostles and Catholic Epistles there
are more than two hundred; there are about three hundred manuscripts of the
Epistles of Paul, and about one hundred of the book of Revelation; besides more
than four hundred Lectionaries, containing the Lessons for public reading. Of
the more ancient uncial manuscripts of the New Testament the number is naturally
much smaller; but there are sixty-two manuscripts of the Gospels, fifteen of the
Acts, seven of the Catholic Epistles, twenty of the Epistles of Paul, and five
manuscripts of the Apocalypse—a total of eighty-three manuscripts; according to
the list prepared by Dr. Ezra Abbot in 1883 for the pages of Dr. Schaff’s
“Companion to the Greek Testament and English Version,” (p. 101.) In this
account some seventy uncial Lectionaries are not included, their great antiquity
being less certain.


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  CHAPTER 4: CNT-05 VARIOUS READINGS.
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VARIOUS READINGS. Of course, the earliest printed editions of the New Tes­tament
were issued before most of these hidden manuscripts were discovered and
compared; and hence con­tained slight errors of copyists, which could only be
de­tected when other copies were collected and collated. Since that time, a vast
number of such manuscripts have been discovered, and compared, word by word, and
letter by letter; and every real discrepancy in the sense, as well as every
little error in spelling or copying,—like the failure to dot an i, or cross a
t—has been noted and reported, thus making up the vast number of “various
readings,” about which skeptics talk,—ninety-nine out of a hundred of which are
of no consequence whatever. Obviously if there were but one manuscript of the
New Testament in existence there could of course be no vari­ous readings; but
the more manuscripts discovered, the more of these “various readings” there will
be; and as there are ten times as many manuscripts of the New Tes­tament as of
any other ancient book, of course there will be ten times as many “various
readings;” and whenever any new reading of importance is discovered, then it is
necessary to look through the best ancient manuscripts, and see what is really
the true reading of the passage. No existing manuscripts of Greek or Roman
classics can compare with those of the New Testament in number, or antiquity and
authenticity. Of Herodotus, the oldest and the most important of the classic
historians, there are extant about fifteen manuscript copies, most of them
written since AD 1450. One or two may date back to the ninth or tenth century.
There are still fewer manuscript copies of the writings of Plato. One of the
earliest bears date AD 895. And the text of these ancient writers is far less
correct than that of the New Testament manuscripts. Take, for example, the
Comedies of Terence, who was born at Carthage 195 BC The learned Dr. Bentley
asserts, in his reply to Collins (Part I., § 32), that the oldest and best
manuscript copy, now in the Vatican Library, has “hun­dreds of errors;” and
remarks, “I myself have collated several, and do affirm that I have seen twenty
thousand various readings in that little author, not near so big as the New
Testament; and am morally sure that if half the number of manuscripts were
collated for Terence, with that minuteness which has been used in twice as many
for the New Testament, the number of variations would amount to above fifty
thousand.” From the hundreds of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament which
have been carefully examined, critics have collected perhaps 150,000 various
readings; most of which are simple differences in spelling, such as are found in
printed books today; as we see by consulting any good dictionary, where we find
“traveller” and “trav­eler,” “worshipped” and “worshiped,” “labour” and
“la­bor.” Only about 400 of them perceptibly affect the sense; an average of
less than one error to a manuscript. And of this 400 only about fifty are of
much con­sequence. From the writings of Milton, Bunyan, and Shakspeare, though
they are little more than two hun­dred years old, and have been printed, instead
of being copied by hand, there could doubtless be culled more various readings
than all that have been gathered from the multitudes of different manuscripts of
the New Testa­ment that have been examined.

Says a writer in the North American Review, in an article on Prof. Norton’s work
on the New Testament, “It seems strange that the text of Shakespeare, which has
been in existence less than two hundred and eight years, should be far more
uncertain and corrupt than that of the New Testament, now over eighteen
centuries old, during nearly fifteen of which it existed only in manuscript.
.... With perhaps a dozen or twenty exceptions, the text of every verse in the
New Testament may be said to be so far settled by general consent of scholars,
that any dis­pute as to its reading must relate rather to the interpreta­tion of
the words than to any doubts respecting the words themselves. But in every one
of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays there are probably a hundred readings still
in dispute, a large portion of which materially affect the meaning of the
passages in which they occur.”


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  CHAPTER 5: CNT-06 THE MOST ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS.
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THE MOST ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS. The style of writing indicates the age of
manuscripts. Recently, certain manuscripts recovered from the ruins of
Herculaneum have been unrolled and deciphered with the utmost care, and fifteen
folio volumes of them have been published. Now we know that Herculaneum and
Pompeii were overwhelmed in the year AD 79, by an eruption of Vesuvius; and
hence there can be no dispute in regard to the age of the manuscripts rescued
from these ruins. They must be more than 1800 years old. But these manuscripts
are written in “uncial” letters, very nearly resembling the letters used in
those manuscript cop­ies of the New Testament which have been universally
es­teemed the most ancient. This style of letters has not been used for many
centuries; hence the antiquity of these manuscripts is proved beyond a
possibility of dispute.

Among the “uncial” manuscripts, five are generally distinguished from the rest
as of primary importance. Of these, the Alexandrian,—known as Codex A, was
orig­inally discovered at Alexandria, and was sent to King Charles I., in 1628,
seventeen years after King James’ version was printed. It is now in the British
Museum. The style of the letters indicates that this manuscript is of great
antiquity, and its date is fixed by critics at about AD 450. It is much
mutilated,—twenty-four chapters of the first Gospel, two of the fourth, and
eight of one of the Epistles being missing.

Codex B, in the Vatican Library at Rome, supposed to have been written between
AD 300 and AD 400, is said to be the oldest vellum manuscript known. This was
not allowed to be copied till 1868, when an edition was issued in facsimile
type, representing it line for line, and letter for letter. The condition of
this is much more perfect. A third manuscript is in the National Library at
Paris, whither it was brought by Catherine de Medici. This is called a
“palimpsest;” from a Greek word which signifies to rub or scrape again,—applied
to a parchment from which one writing had been erased to make room for another.
This manuscript is known as the “Codex Ephraemi.” Parchment being scarce and
valuable, in the twelfth cen­tury the original writing was sponged off, and some
pro­ductions of Ephraem Syrus written in its stead. Not­withstanding this, by
the careful application of chemicals the earlier writing has been brought out
again, so that the original manuscript has now been deciphered. This manuscript
is assigned to the early part of the fifth century. The fourth manuscript is
Codex Bezae in the Public Li­brary of the University at Cambridge, England, it
hav­ing been presented by Theodore Beza in 1581. This is the least valuable, as
it is quite incomplete. It belongs to the sixth century. The Codex Aleph, found
Feb. 4, 1859, in the Convent of St. Catherine near Mount Sinai, by Tischendorf,
and pub­lished by him in 1862, is the most valuable of the five, as it contains
the New Testament complete. This is judged to have been written between AD 300
and AD 400; and hundreds of corrections which critics had previously made in the
text by comparing other manuscripts, have been confirmed by this ancient and
independent witness, which had lain for ages in the library of that eastern
monastery. To these may be added, as especially valuable, Codex Claromontanus,
of the sixth century, which contains the Epistles of Paul. This was used by Beza
in 1582, and is deposited in the National Library at Paris.

These manuscripts carry us back very near the apostles’ days; for they might
easily have been copied from the originals, or from manuscripts that had been
copied from them; and by comparing these with the hundreds of other manuscripts,
Lectionaries, quotations, and ancient trans­lations, it is not difficult for
learned and studious men to ascertain whether the New Testament Books have been
seriously corrupted in being handed down to our own times. Of course any
corruptions or mistakes which have occurred during the last 1500 years are
excluded at the outset by the fact that we have manuscripts that date back as
far as that; and if these manuscripts, old as they are, have errors, they also
may, in rare instances, be cor­rected from later manuscripts which may have been
copied from manuscripts older than any which are yet discov­ered. From the
studies and researches of learned, able, and conscientious men who have minutely
examined many hundreds of these ancient authorities, have come…


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  CHAPTER 6: CNT-07 THE VARIATIONS IN DIFFERENT EDITIONS
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THE VARIATIONS IN DIFFERENT EDITIONS of the Greek New Testament, to which we
call attention. In 1550, Robert Estienne, or Stephen, published at Paris a folio
edition of the Greek New Testament. This edition was founded on comparatively
few manuscripts, and those mostly modern, and was prepared in the infancy of
criticism; but it was for a long time accepted as the standard text, on account
of the high reputation of its editor. It differs very little—and in the Sermon
on the Mount not at all,—from the Elzevir editions of 1624 and 1633, the latter
of which assumed the name of Textus Receptus, or “received text,” and has been
in common use for more than two hundred years. It also agrees sub­stantially
with the text from which our common English version was made. Since the
publication of Stephen’s edition, a vast number of Greek manuscripts of the New
Testament have been examined, many of them very an­cient; the old versions of
the New Testament in Syriac, Coptic, Latin, Gothic, Armenian, and other
languages, and the numerous quotations by ancient Christian writers, have been
compared with them, and all the differences noted. We have thus means of
correcting errors in the imperfect text of the early editions named,
incomparably superior to what we possess in the case of any classical author.

Now, that the reader may judge for himself as to this matter of the “various
readings,” we have taken for example the Greek text of the Sermon on the Mount,
according to the famous edition of Robert Stephen, as reprinted in Scrivener’s
Greek Testament, Cambridge, Eng., 1877, with the various readings of Beza, the
Elze­virs, Lachmann, Tischendorf, and Tregelles, to which we shall add those of
Griesbach, the manual edition of 1805, his latest critical text; and Westcott
and Hort, in 1881. Now what is the result of the examination of the variations
from the so-called “received text,” collated from all these sources by various
hands, and examined by these great, critical editors? How important are the
changes required by the new evidence? A careful analysis will show that
nineteen-twentieths of the various read­ings are of no more consequence than the
palpable errata in the first proof of a modern printer, and their origin as the
mere mistakes of the scribe is so obvious that no scholar would for a moment
regard them as having any claim to a place in the text. Of those which remain
and are more or less well-supported, probably nine-tenths are of no importance
as regards the sense; the differences being so trivial that they affect the form
of expression merely, or cannot be represented in a translation. Neither of
these classes concerns us. We will then go through the “Sermon on the Mount” as
it stands in King James’ translation, and give all the variations from the
so-called “received text,” which any one of the editors above named has adopted
as genuine, or has deemed worthy of any record; omitting only those which could
not in any way affect the sense of the translation. We can thus judge just how
much these “various readings," gleaned by learned men from all sources, through
three hundred years of critical study, amount to.

It will be observed that our selection of the Sermon on the Mount for this
comparison has not been made with a view to avoid any real difficulties, for
this pas­sage contains one of the few really notable alterations observed in the
later manuscripts, when compared with the earliest authorities, namely, the
addition in the text of “the Lord’s Prayer,” of the words, “For thine is the
kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.” Mat 6:13. This addition,
the origin of which is easily explained, it probably having been inserted by
some copyist who heard it used in connection with other prayers, and supposed it
belonged here, is of little im­portance, for we find the same ideas in many
other places in the Bible (Rev 5:12; Rev 5:14; 1Ch 29:11); but it is far more
important than most of the variations discovered.


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  CHAPTER 7: CNT-08 VARIOUS READINGS IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
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The following collection, prepared with much pains, and carefully revised and
corrected by Prof. Ezra Abbot, one of the American Revision Committee, exhibits
at a glance the VARIOUS READINGS IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.

Matthew 5 :

Verses 4-5—“Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted. Blessed
are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth.” In some MSS. these two verses
are transposed.

Verse 11—“Say all manner of evil against you falsely.” Some MSS. and editors
omit “falsely.” Some MSS. also omit the word rema, denoting “word" or “thing;”
but this does not affect the meaning or the translation.

Verse 13—“It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be
trodden under foot of men.” Some au­thorities read, “but, being cast out, to be
trodden under foot of men.”

Verse 19—“Whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great,”
etc. A few manuscripts read, houtos [with a long ’o’] for houtos [with a short
’o’], “Whosoever shall do and teach so, shall be called great,” etc.

Verse 20—“Your righteousness,” literally “the righteousness of you.” Some MSS.
change the order, reading, “Of you the righteousness,” making the “your”
emphatic.

Verse 22—“Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause." Some MSS. and
editors omit “without a cause.”

Verse 25—“Whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary
deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer.” Some MSS.
and editors read, “Whiles thou art with him in the way; lest at any time the
ad­versary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge to the officer.”

Verse 27—“Ye have heard that it was said by [or to] them of old time.” The best
MSS. and the critical editors omit “by them of old time.” It was added here in
the later MSS. from verse 21, where it is genuine.

Verse 30—“And not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” Some MSS. read,
“And not thy whole body go into hell.”

Verse 32—“Whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of
fornica­tion, causeth her to commit adultery.” Some MSS. read, “Every one that
putteth away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, maketh her an
adulteress.”

Some omit the clause, “and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth
adultery.”

Verse 37—“But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay.” Some MSS. read,
“But your communication shall be, Yea, yea; nay, nay.”

Verse 39—“Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek.” Some MSS. read,
“Whosoever smiteth thee;” some read “the right cheek” instead of “thy right
cheek.”

Verse 44—“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that
hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” The
oldest MSS. and other authorities read, “Love your enemies, and pray for them
that persecute you.” The words omitted in the oldest authorities were probably
transferred to this place in the later MSS. from Luk 6:27-28, where they are
gen­uine.

Verse 45—“That ye may be the children of [literally, “sons of”] your Father
which is in heaven.” Three MSS. read, “That ye may be like your Father which is
in heaven.”

Verse 46—“Do not even the publicans the same?” Some read, “Do not even the
publicans so?”

Verse 47—“And if ye salute your breth­ren only, what do ye more than others? Do
not even the publicans so?” Some MSS. read, “friends” instead of “breth­ren.”
The oldest and best MSS. read, “Do not even the Gentiles the same?” Others read,
“so” for “the same.”

Verse 48—“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is
perfect.” Some read, “Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is
perfect.”

Matthew 6 :

Verse 1—“Take heed.” Tischendorf, with some ancient MSS., reads, “But take
heed.—That ye do not your alms before men.” The oldest MSS. and the critical
editors read, “That ye do not your right­eousness before men.”

Verse 4—“Thy Father, which seeth in secret, himself shall reward thee openly.”
Some read, “Thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee.”

Verse 5—“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are.” Some
read, “And when ye pray, ye shall not be."

Verse 6—“Thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.” Some
omit, “openly.”

Verse 8—“Your Father knoweth.” Some read, “God your Father knoweth.”

Verse 12—“As we also forgive our debt­ors.” Some read, “As we also have
for­given our debtors.”

Verse 13—“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever,
Amen.” This is omitted by the oldest MSS. and other weighty authorities. Others
give the doxology in different forms. It was probably introduced in the later
MSS. from the ancient liturgies. Compare 1Ch 29:11.

Verse 15—“But if ye forgive not men their trespasses.” Some omit, ‘‘their
trespasses.”

Verse 18—“Shall reward thee openly.” Many MSS. omit “openly.”

Verse 21—“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Some read,
“For where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.” Some omit “also.”

Verse 22—“Is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single.” Some read, “is thine
eye,” and some omit “therefore;” some read “the eye” for “thine eye,” and some
have “is” for “be.”

Verse 24—“Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Some MSS. have “mamon.”

Verse 25—“What ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink.” Some read, “and" for “or.”
Hort brackets as doubtful, “or what ye shall drink.”

Verse 33—“The kingdom of God, and his righteousness.” Some read, “his king­dom
and righteousness,” and some “his righteousness and kingdom.”

Verse 34—“The morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.” Some read,
“The morrow shall take thought for itself.”

Matthew 7 :

Verse 2—"It shall be measured to you again.” Some omit “again.”

Verse 4—“Out of thine eye.” Some read, “from thine eye.”

Verse 8—“To him that knocketh it shall be opened.” Some read, “It is opened.”

Verse 9—What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a
stone?” Some read, “What man of you, of whom his son shall ask bread will give
him a stone?”

Verse 10—“Or if he ask a fish.” Some read, “and if he ask a fish;” some, “or
shall ask a fish.”

Verse 12—“For this is the law and the prophets.” Some read [houtos (with long
’o’) for hou­tos (with short ’o’)], “for so is the law and the prophets.”

Verse 13—“Wide is the gate, and broad is the way.” Some omit “the gate,” and
read, “Wide and broad is the way.”

Verse 14—“Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way.” Some read, “How
strait is the gate, and some, omit­ting "the gate," read, “strait and narrow is
the way.”

Verse 15—“Beware.” Some MSS. read, “But beware.”

Verse 19—“Every tree.” Some MSS. add, “therefore."

Verse 21—“He that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” Some add, “he
shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Verse 24—“These sayings of mine” [lit­erally, “of me"]. Some omit “these,” and
read, “the sayings of me,” i.e. “my sayings.” “I will liken him unto a wise
man.” Some read, “shall be likened unto a wise man.”

Verse 29—‘’And not as the scribes.” Some read, “their scribes.” Some add, “and
the Pharisees.”

Here, then, are the results of the researches of the ablest scholars in the
world, throughout a period of more than three centuries, and especially during
the present generation. After hunting old libraries, exploring musty
manuscripts, wearing out their eyes on faded parchments, and gathering up
everything they could find in the way of variations and discrepancies, in
hundreds of ancient man­uscripts, translations, and quotations, they have found
only such trifles as these, which in an ordinary writer would pass unnoticed,
and which would not pay for the trouble of looking them up, were it not that
they pertain to the utterances of Him who spake as never man spake, and who has
said, “He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth
him: the words that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last
day.”—John 12:48. This exhibit illustrates the utter emptiness of all the talk
about the corruptions of the New Testament, and the uncertainty of the Greek
text. No book on earth has ever stood the test of such searching criticism as
the New Testament; and after all that has been said and done, this book has
emerged from the flames of historic criticism, scathless as the Hebrews from the
burning fiery furnace. From all these facts cited, it most clearly appears that
the New Testament books must have been copied with scrupulous care, and that
special pains must have been taken to secure…


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  CHAPTER 8: CNT-09 THE PRESERVATION OF THE MANUSCRIPTS.
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THE PRESERVATION OF THE MANUSCRIPTS.

During the early persecutions of Pagan Rome, many copies of the New Testament
were doubtless destroyed in obedience to the imperial decree; as in the dark
ages many copies were lost through neglect, or burned through the malice of
persecutors. But though these books were bitterly hated, they were also ardently
loved, and hence most carefully guarded and preserved, even at the peril of
life. And there have been times when the might­iest monarchs rejoiced to do
honor to these sacred records, and took great interest in their preservation and
circulation. About the year AD 272, or, as some say, AD 274, was bora Flavius
Valerius Aurelius Con­stantine, who was the first Christian emperor of Rome.
Coming to the throne AD 312 and reigning until his death, AD 337, he was the
first Roman emperor who gave open countenance, toleration, and support to the
Christian religion, the influence of which at that time had come to pervade the
Empire.

There lies before me a “Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine,” in four books,
from AD 306 to AD 337, by Eusebius Pamphili, Bishop of Caesarea. This biog­raphy
of a Roman emperor—written shortly after his death, by an eminent Christian
historian and preacher, who was a personal friend of Constantine, and who only
survived him about three years—incidentally gives us important information
concerning the esteem in which the sacred writings were then held, and the means
taken to provide and preserve authentic copies of the same. In his account,
Eusebius writes as follows concerning Constantine’s care for the scriptures.

“Ever careful for the welfare of the churches of God, the Emperor addressed me
personally in a letter on the means of providing copies of the inspired oracles
. . . His letter, which related to the providing of copies of the Scriptures for
reading in the churches, was to the following purport:

“’VICTOR CONSTANTINE, MAXIMUS AUGUSTUS, TO EUSEBIUS:

‘“It happens, through the favoring of God our Savior, that great numbers have
united themselves to the most holy church in the city which is called by my
name. It seems, therefore, highly requisite, since that city is rapidly
advancing in prosperity in all other respects, that the number of churches
should be also increased. Do you this, therefore: receive with all readiness my
determination on this behalf. I have thought it expedient to instruct your
Prudence to order fifty copies of the sacred scriptures, the provision and use
of which you know to be most needful for the instruction of the church, to be
written on prepared parchment, in a legible manner, and in a commodious and
portable form, by transcribers thor­oughly practiced in their art. The
procurator of the diocese has also received instructions by letter from our
Clemency to be careful to furnish all things necessary for the preparation of
such copies; and it will be for you to take special care that they be completed
with as little delay as possible. You have authority, also, in virtue of this
letter, to use two of the public carriages for their conveyance, by which
arrangement the copies, when fairly written, will most easily be forwarded for
my personal inspection; and one of the deacons of your church may be entrusted
with this service, who, on his arrival here, shall experience my liberality. God
preserve you, beloved brother.’

“Such were the Emperor’s commands, which were followed by the immediate
execution of the work itself, which we sent him in magnificent and elaborate
volumes of a threefold and fourfold form. This fact is attested by another
letter, which the emperor wrote in acknowledgment.”—Eusebius, Life of
Constantine, Book 4, Chapters 34-37. From this account we see that during the
life of Con­stantine fifty magnificent copies of the sacred books were prepared
by the command and at the expense of the Roman Emperor, for the benefit of the
churches of God; the public carriages of the empire being used to convey them to
the Emperor for his personal inspection. These books, prepared under the
direction of the learned Eusebius, and at the expense of the Emperor, would, of
course, be carefully copied from the most authentic manuscripts, and, being
distributed among the different churches throughout Constantinople, the capital
of his empire, would naturally be preserved with care, and re­garded as
standards from which other copies would be made. And it is quite probable that
some of these very copies, made by the order of Constantine, are among the
ancient “uncial” manuscripts which have come down to us. Prof. Tischendorf
thought it not improbable that the Sinaitic manuscript was one of the copies
ordered for Con­stantine in 331, and that it was presented to the convent of
Mount Sinai by its founder, the Emperor Justinian. The time of Constantine was
not as distant from the time of our Saviour as the reign of the Emperor William
of Germany from the time of Martin Luther. Imagine the Emperor William deluded
into accepting, publishing, and circulating among all the churches of his realm,
a magnificent edition of some false, fabulous, and spurious writings, giving an
account of the Reformation under Luther and Melancthon, when no such things had
occurred, and the accounts were utterly unreliable. Imag­ine Queen Victoria
issuing her royal mandate for the production of fifty magnificent copies of a
series of books like “Gulliver’s Travels,” or “Jack the Giant-Killer,”
professing to relate events which occurred in the time of her predecessor, Henry
VIII., but which all the public monuments and documents demonstrated to be
utterly fabulous and deceptive. Imagine the President of the United States
ordering the publication and distribution in all the churches of the country,
for use in public worship, of a magnificent edition of a lot of utterly fabulous
books, containing false accounts of the discovery of America, the settlement of
Florida, the founding of Jamestown, the landing of the Pilgrims, and the origin
and establishment of the United States Government; while the original jour­nals
and documents of explorers and governors, together with the public records of
the nation, were all at hand, ready to give the lie to everything contained in
his books.

If such absurdities as these cannot be imagined, neither can it be imagined that
Constantine, the Emperor of Rome, a man of no mean scholarship, ability, and
eloquence, could be misled in this way into the publication of an edi­tion of
the Holy Scriptures, unless those books were known to be genuine, known to be
true, and susceptible of the strongest proof from the writings of historians,
the unin­terrupted traditions of the people, and the public records of the Roman
empire.

It will be borne in mind that after a reign of twenty-five years, Constantine
died in 337; about three hundred years from the death of Christ, and less than
two hun­dred and fifty years from the death of the apostle John. He was emperor
of that Rome under one of whose pro­vincial governors, Pontius Pilate, Jesus
Christ was cruci­fied. Under Nero, one of his predecessors, Paul had been
beheaded. In the Coliseum, which is still standing, hun­dreds and thousands of
Christians had been thrown to the wild beasts for avowing their faith in Christ.
At some eight or ten different times the sword of persecu­tion had been
unsheathed by imperial decree against the defenseless Christians, who had been
slaughtered by mobs, and butchered and burned by Roman emperors, whose successor
Constantine was. The soft tufa, or volcanic rock, beneath the city of Rome and
its environs for miles around, had been exca­vated by these hated, hunted, and
persecuted Christians; and there are now in existence hundreds of miles of
gal­leries, chambers, and corridors chiseled through this soft rock, where the
persecuted Christians of those days fled for refuge, concealing themselves from
persecution, bury­ing their own dead, and depositing the gathered frag­ments of
their martyred brethren in tombs and recesses which remain to this day. De Rossi
says there are about sixty of these Catacombs, and estimates the length of all
the passages to be five hundred and eighty-seven geo­graphical miles. Father
Marchi says they extend eight or nine hundred miles underground. They are from
fifty to seventy-five feet below the surface. For about two hundred and fifty
years from the time that the gospel was first preached, and Christians were
first persecuted in Rome, down to the time of Constan­tine’s Decree of
Toleration, AD 313, these Catacombs were the burial place of generation after
generation of the Christian population of Rome. De Rossi judges that the number
of bodies laid away in the Catacombs was not less than three million eight
hundred and thirty-one thou­sand; while Father Marches estimate is six or seven
mill­ions. Gibbon estimates the population of Rome under Theodosius at twelve
hundred thousand. Zumpt places it at two millions. But the imperial city in her
brightest days never boasted half as many inhabitants as there are Christians in
those dark Catacombs, waiting the sounding of the resurrection trumpet. This
noble army of martyrs, who had fought the fight of faith, and sealed their
testi­mony with their blood—whose doctrine had revolution­ized the Roman empire,
and whose bones were hidden in the Catacombs—were not unknown to Constantine,
the heir of the throne of the Caesars. The inscriptions on their tombs told of
their lives, their deaths, their faith, their hope, and their trust, and were as
legible as the in­scriptions on the monuments of the English kings in
West­minster Abbey, or on the grave-stones of the descendants of the Pilgrim
Fathers near Plymouth Rock. To the present day, the leading facts and doctrines
of the Bible may be found inscribed upon the walls of those gloomy, subterranean
sepulchers, which bear, not only the names and memorials of saints and martyrs
who died in the faith and sleep in the peace of Christ, with the dates of their
deaths, the memorials of their secular occupations, the palms and crowns
expressive of their hopes; but also numerous pictorial representations imaging
forth the great facts of divine revelation, and the common faith of the
universal church.

Among these representations, which are repeated again and again, we find Adam
and Eve, with the serpent and the forbidden tree; the expulsion of our first
parents from Eden; representations of Noah in the ark, with the return­ing dove
bearing the olive branch; pictures of Abraham offering up Isaac, of Joseph sold
into Egypt, of Moses putting off the shoes from his feet, receiving the Law, and
again standing with the baskets of manna beside him, or smiting the rock from
which the waters burst forth; of Job in his affliction; of Jonah cast into the
sea, where the fish is waiting to swallow him up, and again sitting be­neath his
gourd, which the worm is preparing to devour; of Elijah ascending to heaven in
the chariot of fire; of the three Hebrews in the furnace; of Daniel in the
lions’ den; and of various other occurrences which indicate an intimate
knowledge of scriptural facts and scenes. We also find representations of the
wise men from the East adoring the Savior; of Jesus in the temple disputing with
the doctors; of Christ baptized of John in the river Jor­dan; of the miracle of
the loaves and fishes, and the seven baskets heaped with fragments standing
beside the kneel­ing apostles; of the restored paralytic walking away with his
bed on his back; of the Savior talking with the woman of Samaria by the well,
opening the eyes of the blind, healing the woman who touched the hem of his
garment, blessing the little children, raising Lazarus from the dead, riding
into Jerusalem over the scattered gar­ments, and amid the waving palms, and
standing to be judged in the presence of Pontius Pilate. We also see
representations of the sower scattering his precious seed; the Good Shepherd
leading his flock, or bearing the lost sheep upon his shoulders; of the virgins
going forth to meet the bridegroom; of Peter denying his Lord; of Pilate washing
his hands; and of numerous other facts and doc­trines of the gospel; while on
every hand are found the symbols of a Christian faith, the anchor, the cross,
the olive branch, the lamb, and the dove.

These sculptured records lie scattered through subter­ranean galleries long
enough to reach from one end of Italy to the other; and Constantine and his
contempora­ries could not have been ignorant of their existence. The events of
Christ’s life occurred within less than three hundred years preceding the
commencement of his reign. The histories which recited them, and the public
records of the empire, containing the official documents, in which were
inscribed, no doubt, the account of the crucifixion of Christ himself, and all
the various im­perial edicts under which Christians had been persecu­ted, were
within the reach of the emperor, who had himself recently professed to embrace
the Christian faith, which, notwithstanding the persecutions of his ancestors
and predecessors, had overrun the Roman world, perme­ated all ranks and orders
of people, overthrown the idola­tries which had held sway for ages, and had come
to be the acknowledged religion of the mightiest empire on the globe.

Constantine had the means of knowing whether his friend Eusebius was stating
facts when in his Ecclesias­tical History (Book 2, Chapter 2) he wrote: “The
fame of our Lord’s remarkable resurrection being now spread abroad, according to
an ancient custom prevalent among the rul­ers of the nations to communicate
novel occurrences to the emperor, that nothing might escape him, Pontius Pilate
transmits to Tiberius an account of the circumstances concerning the
resurrection of our Lord from the dead, the report of which had been spread
throughout all Pal­estine. In this account he also intimated that he
ascer­tained other miracles respecting heaven, and having now risen from the
dead, he was believed to be a God by the great mass of the people. Tiberius
referred the matter to the Senate, but it is said they rejected the
proposition.” Constantine had the means of knowing whether Tertullian wrote
truly when in his Apology to the Rulers of the Roman Empire (§ 21), he spoke of
the darkness at the crucifixion and said, “You yourselves have an account of the
world-portent still in your archives;” and when after recording Christ’s
condemnation, death, burial, resurrec­tion and ascension, he said, “All these
things did Pilate do to Christ; and, now in fact a Christian in his own
con­victions, he sent word of Him to the reigning Caesar, who was at the time
Tiberius.”

Constantine knew whether Justin Martyr spoke truly when, in his apology to the
Emperor Antoninus Pius (chapter 21), he testified of Christ’s healing the sick,
cast­ing out demons, cleansing the lepers, and raising the dead; and added, “And
that he did these things you can learn from the Acts of Pontius Pilate."
Constantine was familiar with all these matters. The public records of Rome had
not yet been destroyed by barbarian conquerors, and were at his command. He was
nearly thirty years old in AD 303, when his pred­ecessor Diocletian published
his imperial edict command­ing them to tear down the churches of the Christians,
and burn their copies of the sacred Scriptures. He had witnessed the last
expiring throes of this heathenish dragon, which sought to subvert Christianity
by first murdering the men who taught it, and then by destroy­ing the writings
on which it was founded. He had access to the official records of the trials of
Christians, some of which are now extant, where the Roman commissioner said to
the bishop Paul, “Bring forward the Scriptures of the Law;” and where
inquisition was made whether any “Scriptures of your Law were burnt according to
the sa­cred law.” He knew the willingness with which some Christians handed over
certain “useless writings,” which satisfied the demands of the officers; and the
zeal with which they gathered and guarded the sacred Scriptures which were read
in their assemblies; and now he had pub­licly embraced the faith that had so
long been persecuted, and had made Christianity the religion of the empire.

Under these circumstances, it appears that the Roman emperor ordered made, at
the public expense, fifty splendid copies of the sacred writings which recorded
the life of Christ and the beginnings of Christianity, that they might be
distributed among the churches in the imperial capital, where they would be
publicly read every Lord’s day. The period of Constantine was one of literature,
art, refinement, eloquence, and poetry. Christianity had not been imposed upon
an unquestioning and sleepy age. It had been launched upon a generation marked
by men­tal activity. It had been assailed and ridiculed for centuries by the wit
and wisdom of the Roman world. Celsus, an Epicurean philosopher, had assaulted
the Chris­tian religion, and done his best to overthrow it. Jews and Gentiles
had combined to withstand and uproot the new faith; and still Christianity had
held its steady course, and triumphed over its foes. The history of Rome was as
well known to Constantine as the history of England is to Queen Victoria. He
could not have been imposed upon by a spurious religion or spurious records
thereof. It is utterly incredible that he should order the production of fifty
magnificent copies of a series of legendary tales and old wives’ fables, for
distribution and public weekly reading among the worshipers of Almighty God.

There were, doubtless, plenty of men living at that time, whose grandfathers
might have seen men who knew every fact, and had personal acquaintance with
every person mentioned in those books. And it is as impossible to suppose that
such books could have been published by the emperor and palmed upon the people
as genuine, au­thentic, and truthful documents unless there were suffi­cient
reasons for their reception, as to suppose that the governor of Massachusetts
would publish, for weekly reading in all the churches of New England, a book
which related that Christopher Columbus walked across the At­lantic ocean on
snow-shoes, and that Martin Luther, after being banished from Ireland for
causing the potato rot, Came to America in a steamship and founded the Dutch
Republic on Plymouth Rock.

Hence we are carried back, by authentic documents bear­ing the official sanction
of a Roman emperor, more than 1550 years, to the times of Constantine and the
Council of Nicea, at which period infidels admit that the New Testa­ment, as we
now have it, existed. From that point we have only to bridge a chasm of less
than 300 years, to clasp hands with the apostles, and witness the events which
they described. Can we span this chasm? Most certainly.

It would not have been difficult to have preserved the autograph writings of the
apostles until the times of Constantine. We have Egyptian manuscripts four
thou­sand years old; but these were kept from the air and damp in that rainless
climate, hermetically sealed in earthen or wooden vessels; or under mummy
coverings, deposited sometimes in tombs cut ninety feet deep in the living rock,
and also buried beneath the pure, dry, desert sands. But we have, also, numerous
printed and written books from three to five hundred years old; and if the
original writings of the apostles were preserved as long as that, we may have,
today, manuscripts copied directly from them. But times of persecution are
unfavorable to the preser­vation of relics, and solitary autographs are
specially ex­posed to danger from corruption and forgery. The church had no
central tabernacle or sacred ark like that in which the Law of Moses was
preserved; but where two or three were met in Christ’s name, He was in the
midst, and there his words still lived and were rehearsed. Hence the early
church could not depend for the integrity of their sacred books upon some
securely guarded manuscript, penned by apostolic hands, but rather upon
numberless trust­worthy copies, which when a book or epistle was once re­ceived
and duly authenticated, were so speedily tran­scribed, and so widely scattered,
that no human power could extirpate the sacred records, and no ingenuity of
malice could materially impair their integrity. But we are not entirely
dependent upon the testimony of Christians to establish the facts recorded in
the New Testament. Many of the facts in early Christian history are proven by
the testimony of enemies as well as friends. The writings of Josephus, Tacitus,
Pliny, Suetonius, Celsus, and others, bear witness to the truth; and even within
the present day new witnesses rise up to add their testimony. Amid the ruins of
old Pompeii, buried by an eruption AD 79, the explorer’s spade not only
discloses sculptures and records which tell of morals like those of Sodom and
Gomorrah, but also taunting caricatures and inscriptions deriding a crucified
God! And on the walls of one of Pompeii’s palaces, stands an unfinished
sculpture of a cross! Alas for guilty Pompeii! her glory perished in a day; but
after eighteen hundred years of silence her mute walls bear witness that so long
ago as AD 79, the shameless votaries of lust and pleasure scoffed at a
cruci­fied Redeemer as bitterly as they do today. But in addition to these we
have a chain of Christian authors reaching from the days of the apostles down to
the time of Constantine, who quoted, copied, defended, criticized, and commented
upon the sacred Scriptures, in such a way that almost the entire New Testament
is em­bodied in the writings of those ancient fathers.

Between the death of John, the last of the apostles, AD 100, and the time of the
Council of Nicea, a period of about 225 years, we have the writings of Polycarp
(AD 69-156), who was a disciple of the apostle John, and bishop of the church at
Smyrna; of Clement, bishop of Rome from about AD 91 or 92 to 100 or 101, whom
Origen identifies as Paul’s fellow-laborer (Php 4:3); of Justin Martyr, a
converted philosopher (AD 105-165); of Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, an eminent
Christian writer, born about AD 115, and martyred about AD 190; of Theophilus,
bishop of Antioch in Syria from AD 168 to 181 or 188; of Athenagoras, a
converted Greek philosopher, said by some to have been the first principal of
the great theological school at Alexandria (AD 161-180); of Clement of
Alexandria, who presided over the same school and died about AD 220; of Origen
(AD 185-254), the pupil and learned successor of Clement in the presidency of
the school, and a most eloquent and vol­uminous writer; of Dionysius, a disciple
of Origen, who was president of the same school AD 231, patriarch of Alexandria
AD 248, and died AD 265; of Hippolytus, bishop of the Port of Rome, AD 235; of
Tertullian, a presbyter at Carthage (AD 160-220), a learned and elo­quent
convert from heathenism; of Cyprian (AD 200-258), bishop of Carthage, who
suffered martyrdom under the Emperor Valerian; of Gregory (AD 210-270), bishop
of Neocaesarea; of Lactantius, “the Christian Cicero,” a distinguished writer,
and one of the most learned men of his time, who settled at Nicomedia as
professor of Latin eloquence, AD 301, at the invitation of the Emperor
Diocletian, became a Christian, wrote in defense of the new religion, and died
about AD 325. All these, and other writers of learning, eloquence, ability, and
intelli­gence, occupying high positions in society and in the church; men of
extensive travel and wide and varied in­formation; men who had renounced the
heathenism in which they were nurtured and accepted Christianity with all its
pains—many of them for the sake of Christ enduring banishment, imprisonment, and
death,—left behind them various treatises containing the records and memorials
of their faith, and the truth for which they suffered the loss of all things. A
large proportion of their writings have perished at the hands of persecutors and
in the wreck of ages; but those that still remain, when translated into English,
are suffi­cient to fill about twelve thousand octavo pages of the Ante-Nicene
Library. A number of these writers, such as Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tatian,
and Theophilus, wrote ably and acutely against heathenism and in defense of
Christianity, some of them addressing and dedicating their writings to the
persecuting Roman emperors, and defending their hunted brethren from the
outrageous slanders which were made a pretext for banishing and slaughtering
them. Writing thus to heathen who did not acknowledge the authority of the
sacred Scriptures, of course they would have little opportunity to quote largely
from the New Testament writings, though from time to time they refer to the
sacred books under various titles, and often quote largely from the words of
Christ; but Polycarp, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Hippolytus, and others,
wrote mainly for the benefit of Christians, and throughout their works, on
almost every page, quotations from the New Testa­ment are profusely scattered.
Those authors quoted the same sacred books which we quote, as the rule of their
faith and the guide of their conduct, appealing to these books as a standard by
which to test both doctrine and practice, and regarding them as unquestionably
the au­thentic writings of the apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ.

These sacred writings were prized, reverenced, copied, circulated, and read,
among all the Christians who were scattered throughout the known world. A
hundred years after the last of the apostles died, Tertullian, in whose
collected writings, still extant, are quoted eighteen hun­dred different
passages from the New Testament, besides a multitude from the Old, expressly
mentions “the Old Testament,” as well as “the New Testament,” containing “the
Gospels” and “the Apostles” In his work, “Against Heretics,” this eminent writer
says:

“If you are willing to exercise your curiosity profit­ably in the business of
your salvation, visit the apos­tolic churches, in which the very chairs of the
apostles still preside in their places; in which their very authentic letters
are recited, sounding forth the voice and represent­ing the countenance of every
one of them. Is Achaia near you? You have Corinth. If you are not far from
Macedonia you have Philippi and Thessalonica. If you can go to Asia you have
Ephesus; but if you are near to Italy you have Rome.” The original manuscripts,
carefully preserved, might have lasted hundreds of years. Of course, when
perse­cutions arose, and churches were scattered, the autograph writings of the
apostles would be likely to be lost or de­stroyed; or they might fade out as the
years rolled on. But the books were not lost. At an early date, probably long
before these originals had passed from existence, the New Testament was
translated into both the Syriac and Latin tongues, and both of these versions
still exist, and have been retranslated into English.

Besides, multitudes of copies of the New Testament books were made and
circulated, and publicly read to “all the holy brethren” in their weekly
assemblies. 1Th 5:27. And thus the people became so familiar with them that the
change of a word would have been detected instantly. Prof. Andrews Norton in his
“Gen­uineness of the Gospels” (1. 50-53), estimates that before AD 200 there
were not less than sixty thousand manu­script copies of the Gospels in
existence. To falsify books so widely diffused would have been impossible.

Besides, the martyr Polycarp, who was cast to the lions about AD 155, after
having served Christ eighty-six years, must have been, during some thirty years
of his long life, acquainted with the apostle John, whose disciple he was. In
his letter to the Philippians he quotes more than thirty passages from our New
Testament, and he must have re­ceived these books directly from the apostle
John, who wrote so large a proportion of them; and his Christian life must have
dated back to within some five years of the death of the apostle Paul, who was
martyred under Nero, about the year AD 65, Nero having died AD 68. In Polycarp’s
time there were churches scattered throughout the Roman Empire, in which these
sacred books were reg­ularly read on the first day of the week. And the
apos­tolic churches received the Gospels from those who wrote them; and the
Epistles were written and signed by men whom they knew. Paul wrote, “The
salutation of me Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle,
so I write.” 2Th 3:17; Col 4:18; 1Co 16:21. And as these Epistles were sent by
trusty mes­sengers to churches where Paul had lived, and preached, and labored,
for weeks, and months, and years, they must have been familiar with his
handwriting, and could not have been imposed upon with spurious
documents—especially as several of his letters were in answer to let­ters which
they had addressed to him. The Epistles of Paul must certainly have been written
before the death of Paul. The death of Paul occurred about AD 65,—or prior to
the death of Nero, at whose command he was slain;—and hence the books of the New
Testament which we have are traced back by un­broken chains of reliable
evidence, until we reach their au­thors, who were the personal friends and
acquaintances of the Lord Jesus Christ, and who testified of the things which
they had seen; and at the peril of their lives bore witness, not to theories,
dreams, or imaginations, but to facts and events which had come within their
observation.

These writers testified things which they knew. The apostle John does not say,
“That which we have dreamed, imagined, or guessed at, that thing do we declare
unto you;” but “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we
have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled,
of the Word of Life.” 1Jn 1:1. This was their testimony. They testified that
they saw Christ, in his life and in his death; that they saw him after his
resurrection, and felt his hands and feet, saw the nail-prints and spear wounds;
and knew and testified of these things.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 9: CNT-10 NO RECORD OF APOSTLES’ DEATH.
========================================================================

NO RECORD OF APOSTLES’ DEATH.

One thing is remarkable; though each of the four Gos­pels devotes whole chapters
to the minutest narration of all the particulars pertaining to the death of our
Savior, there is not, in the whole of them, a single account or hint of the time
or manner of the death of any of the apostles, with the exception of James, the
brother of John. Acts 12:20. Thus, for example, the book of Matthew does not
tell us what became of Matthew, nor of any other apostle; nor does the book of
John tell us what be­came of John. The Epistles of Paul do not inform us what
became of Paul; nor do the Epistles of Peter contain any intimation concerning
the time and circumstances of his death. The writings of John present him as a
witness of Christ’s life, and ministry, and sufferings; as banished to the Isle
of Patmos for the testimony of Christ; and as looking with fatherly love on his
younger brethren, and having no greater joy than that his children walk in the
truth. But they say nothing whatever of the close of his life, or the
circumstances of his death.

Peter, in his first Epistle, written evidently in his old age, describes himself
as an apostle of Jesus Christ, as one of those who “were eye-witnesses of his
majesty, when we were with him in the holy mount” (2Pe 1:10; 2Pe 1:18); as a
“witness of the sufferings of Christ;” and as “an elder” and one who must
shortly put off this taber­nacle, or die. But the Scripture gives us no record
what­ever of the time or circumstances of his death. And there is no reasonable
way to account for these facts, but to admit that the apostles were living when
these books were written, and that after they died no one presumed to add to the
writings they had left. In his second Epistle, Peter speaks of the writings of
their beloved brother Paul, as among “the other Script­ures,” and as containing
things “hard to be understood” (2Pe 3:16); and as no unauthorized manuscript
would have been admitted to such companionship, these books must have been
identified and authenticated before they could be received. This reference then
leads us back still further to the writings of Paul, the great apostle of the
Gentiles, whose numerous epistles give us frequent hints concerning his life and
his ministry. To the Corinthians Paul wrote that Christ who died and rose “was
seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain
unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.” 1Co 15:6. In the Epistle to the
Philippians he declares, “My bonds for Christ are manifest, in all the palace
and in all other places;” and he expresses his intention to send Timothy to
them, “presently, so soon as I shall see how it will go with me”Php 1:13; Php
2:22. In his Epistle to Philemon he represents himself as “Paul the aged, and
now also a prisoner of Jesus Christ.” Phm 1:9. And in his second Epistle to
Timothy, he speaks of having al­ready stood once in the presence of the emperor
to whom he had appealed, saying, “At my first answer no man stood with me, but
all men forsook me: I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge.
Notwithstanding, the Lord stood with me and strengthened me; that by me the
preaching might be fully known, and that all the Gen­tiles might hear: and I was
delivered out of the mouth of the lion”2Ti 4:16-17.

Here the Scriptures leave him; forsaken by Demas, hindered by Alexander the
coppersmith; deserted in the hour of trial by brethren who feared the wrath of
the imperial persecutor, and the fury of the fierce lions; yet saying, “I am now
ready to be offered and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a
good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; hence­forth there
is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord the righteous Judge
shall give me at that day; and not to me only, but to all them also that love
his appearing.” 2Ti 4:6-8. This is the last glimpse which we catch of Paul in
the pages of the New Testament. For the rest, we must de­pend on other sources
of information. Infidels complain that Deuteronomy is a forgery, because some
other writer, perhaps Joshua, added a few lines at the end telling of Moses’
death. But the writer of the Acts of the Apostles leaves Paul alive, and no man
dared to add a line to tell us when or how he died. The book closes thus: “And
Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and received all that came in
unto him, preaching the king­dom of God, and teaching those things which concern
the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man for­bidding him.” Now, if
this book had been written after the martyrdom of the apostle Paul, it would
most cer­tainly have contained an account of that event; but not one word does
it say on that subject. It traces the apostle Paul, from the stoning of Stephen,
which he sanctioned, and the persecution of Christians, in which he engaged, to
his conversion, and on through his ministry, giving an account of journeyings,
labors, mobs, imprisonments, and scourgings; telling how he endured stoning,
shipwreck, and trials of various kinds, until it leaves him a prisoner who has
appealed to Caesar, chained to a soldier in his hired house at Rome, teaching
the gospel of the kingdom of God unhindered. He must have been living when that
was written, and if so the book of Acts, as well as Paul’s Epistles, must have
been written within about thirty years of the time when our Savior died; and as
the first sentence in the book of Acts refers to a “former treatise” by the same
author, namely the Gospel by Luke, that book must have been written at a still
earlier date. The apostle Paul says, “Let the elders that rule well be counted
worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in the word and in teaching.
For the Scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the
corn. And, The laborer is worthy of his hire.”1Ti 5:17-18—Revised Version. Now
we read in the Law of Moses, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out
the corn” (Deu 25:4); but we only find the rest of this quotation in the Gos­pel
by Luke, who records that when our Lord sent forth his apostles he said, “Into
whatsover house ye enter ... in the same house remain, eating and drinking such
things as they give: for the laborer is worthy of his hire”Luk 10:5; Luk 10:7.

Here we see that Paul, in his first Epistle to Timothy, written about AD 65,
quotes the words of Jesus as re­corded in the Gospel written by Luke, joined
with a pas­sage from the book of Deuteronomy, apparently calling both “the
Scripture” and attributing authority to both; which seems to show that before
the year AD 65, Luke’s Gospel was classed among the Scriptures, as it is today.

And, moreover, Luke was not the first one who wrote an account of our Savior’s
life and ministry. For he commences his gospel with the statement that “many”
had already “taken in hand to set forth in order a decla­ration of those things
which were most surely believed” among Christians. Hence it appears that, within
twenty-two years of the time of the crucifixion, there were “many” writers who
had undertaken to record the great facts concerning the life and ministry of our
Savior. Most, if not all, of these unauthorized records to which Luke refers
have perished; but we still retain those which were written by apostolic
authority, and which were re­ceived and endorsed by the church from the earliest
ages.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 10: CNT-11 WHAT, THEN, ARE OUR CONCLUSIONS?
========================================================================

WHAT, THEN, ARE OUR CONCLUSIONS?

Briefly, the leading facts may be thus stated: We have hundreds of New Testament
manuscripts from five to fif­teen hundred years old, gathered from widely
different sources, which have been copied and transmitted to us with the
greatest care, and with an accuracy which is ut­terly unparalleled in any
department of profane literature. We have also translations of these same books
in other languages, which translations are more ancient than any existing
manuscripts of the New Testament, which strongly confirm the accuracy of our
existing copies.

We also find that more than fifteen hundred years ago fifty copies of these same
Scriptures were made by the authority of the Emperor of Rome, and placed for
public reading in all the churches of his capital. We find that his predecessor
was so well acquainted with these books, as the foundation of the Christian
faith, that he issued an imperial decree for their destruction. We find that a
series of Christian writers, reaching from the days of Constantine back to the
lifetime of the apostles, received, believed, read, and quoted the New Testament
so fully that there are not a dozen verses in the entire book but can be
gathered up from the extant writings of those early fathers. We find that the
apostolic writings were received from their authors, and handed down from
gen­eration to generation, as the authentic productions of the apostles, and
were regarded by all Christians as possess­ing divine authority.

We also find that the apostle Peter in his old age mentions the Epistles of
Paul; counting them among the “other Scriptures,” and describing them as
containing some things “hard to be understood.” We find that Luke, the writer of
the Acts of the Apostles, gives an account of the conversion and ministry of
Paul, leaving him yet living and a prisoner at Rome; and that he also com­mences
the Acts by stating that he had composed a “former treatise” giving an account
of “all that Jesus began to do and to teach;” which treatise was evidently the
Gospel by Luke. We find that the apostle Paul, in his first letter to Timothy,
quotes from this Gospel by Luke, “The laborer is worthy of his hire” and
declares that this passage was a portion of “the Scripture,” and it seems that
Luke’s Gospel, which was written after “many” others had undertaken the work,
was already recognized as “Scripture” before AD 65, when Paul’s death oc­curred;
which was five years before the destruction of Jerusalem. But the twenty-first
chapter of Luke contains our Lord’s great prophecy concerning the overthrow of
Jerusalem, and destruction of the temple, the calamities to come upon the Jewish
nation, their dispersion as captives among all nations, and the treading down of
Jerusalem by the Gen­tiles until the time of the Gentiles should be fulfilled;
which prophecies began to be accomplished almost imme­diately after the death of
Paul, and have been most wonderfully fulfilled down to our own day.

We may hence conclude, and assert without fear of successful contradiction, that
the books of the New Tes­tament which we have, were in the hands of the church
before the death of the apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is true that one
or two of the later Epistles were not immediately received by all. Those
churches would not be imposed upon. They had no such means of commu­nication as
we have; printing-presses and mails were un­known; hence books made their way
slowly through the world, and no book was admitted to that sacred num­ber until
it could be positively demonstrated that it had a right to stand among the
Scriptures of divine truth. But at last they were received, and have held their
ground; while numerous other books, written in the next succeeding age, were
rejected then, and have been rejected ever since, as spurious and unworthy of
the confidence of Christian men.

It is true that the statement has been currently made that the early Christians
rejected several books that are now received as parts of the New Testament. This
asser­tion is, to some skeptics, a sufficient evidence that those books were
spurious; and hence they conclude that all the other books bound up in the same
volume are to be re­jected with them. How they arrive at such a conclusion, is
not obvious to ordinary reasoners. Nevertheless the subject is important, and
will repay careful attention.

If, then, we be asked, “How can we be certain that the writings contained in the
New Testament are those which should have been preserved? Have not many of the
Apostolic Books been lost? How are we to know that these books which remain are
better than others which have perished, or than some which are now found in the
Apocryphal New Testament? What certainty have we concerning these matters?” The
answer in brief is, “The writings in the Apocryphal New Testament which bear the
name of the Apostles are forgeries, and the genuine and authentic Epistles and
other writings contained in that collection do not profess to come from the pens
of the apostles, but were the productions of other early writers, and so have no
claim to apostolic authority.” But this question is worthy of further
consideration, and hence it will be proper to devote some attention to the
evidences by which we distinguish between the Genuine and Spurious Books:


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 11: CNT-12 GENUINE AND SPURIOUS BOOKS
========================================================================

GENUINE AND SPURIOUS BOOKS which existed in the early ages, and were well known
to the primitive Christians.

Let it be remembered that to a certain extent the Gospels and Epistles of the
New Testament are independent of each other; and should half of them be proved
to be spurious, that would by no means invalidate the author­ity of the rest.
Should three of the Gospels be cast aside, the fourth, whichever it might be,
would furnish a firm foundation for a saving faith. So if two or three of the
Epistles were found to be destitute of apostolic authority, this fact would no
more invalidate the others than the rejection of an incompetent witness from a
courtroom would invalidate the testimony of a score of competent witnesses who
were ready to testify concerning every point in dispute.

Let us then devote a little attention to this subject. We find that Christians
in very early ages made a sharp and definite distinction between different
classes of relig­ious writings which were current among them. (1) There were
those which were undisputed, being universally received without question among
all Christians as genu­ine writings, having apostolic authority. (2) There were
books which were disputed, and which, while acknowledged and received by many,
were questioned by others, either because their authorship was unknown to them,
or else because, though they were known to the productions of good men, they
were not of apostolic origin. (3) There were books which all agreed in rejecting
as spurious; they being either forgeries, in the names of the apostles, or the
productions of persons who were destitute of apos­tolic authority.

These three classes of books we find described at a very early period. Of course
the fact that a book was dis­puted by some was not evidence that it deserved to
be rejected; but rather that those who disputed its authority had not yet
received sufficient evidence of its authorship to warrant them in accepting it.
Such evidence might be within the reach of others, and might subsequently be
brought to their notice. But in the absence of such evi­dence they were
warranted in suspending judgment, and declining to receive books for which they
had not the fullest warrant and authority. To examine the various authorities,
and exhaust this subject, would require volumes. But a few facts can be given,
which have a definite bearing upon the question before us, and we will commence
with a quotation from the Ecclesiastical History of the learned Eusibius.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 12: CNT-13 EUSEBIUS ON THE SACRED CANON,
========================================================================

EUSEBIUS ON THE SACRED CANON,

“Now, of the writings of John, in addition to the Gospel, the former of his
Epistles also has been acknowledged as undoubtedly genuine, both by the authors
of our own time and by those of antiquity; but the two remaining Epistles are
disputed. Concerning the Apocalypse, men’s opinions, even now, are generally
divided. This question, however, shall be decided at a proper time by the
testimony of antiquity.

“But now that we have arrived at this point, it is natu­ral that we should give
a summary catalogue of the writ­ings of the New Testament to which we have
already alluded. First, then, we must place the holy quaternion of the Gospels,
which are followed by the account of the Acts of the Apostles. After this we
must reckon the Epistles of Paul; and next to them we must maintain as genuine
the Epistle circulated as the former of John, and in like manner that of Peter.
In addition to these books, if possibly such a view seem correct, we must place
the Revelation of John, the judgments on which we shall set forth in due course.
And these are regarded as gener­ally received.

“Among the controverted books, which are nevertheless well known and recognized
by most, we class the Epistle circulated under the name of James, and that of
Jude, as well as the second of Peter, and the so-called second and third of
John; whether they really belong to the evan­gelist or possibly to another of
the same name.

“We must rank as spurious the account of the Acts of Paul, the book called The
Shepherd, and the Revelation of Peter. And besides these, the Epistle circulated
under the name of Barnabas, and the Teaching of the Apostles; and, moreover, as
I said, the Apocalypse of John, if such an opinion seem correct, which some, as
I said, reject, while others reckon it among the books generally received. We
may add that some have reckoned in this division the Gospel according to the
Hebrews, to which those Hebrews who have received the Christ are especially
attached. All these then will belong to the class of controverted books.”

Much more might be quoted from Eusebius, but this will suffice, and we will now
go back a century and examine The Testimony of Origen.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 13: CNT-14 THE TESTIMONY OF ORIGEN ON THE CANON.
========================================================================

THE TESTIMONY OF ORIGEN ON THE CANON.

He was one of the most learned and eminent of the early writers. He was born of
Christian parents at Alex­andria, about AD 185, and died at Caesarea or Tyre,
about AD 254, after a life devoted to Scriptural studies and literary pursuits.
Living as he did within a century of the time of the apostles, and inheriting
the traditions of his parents, whose recollections were still earlier; hav­ing
access to libraries and ancient authorities, and being himself a voluminous
critic and author, sometimes em­ploying nearly a score of ready writers and
copyists in his own literary labors;—the testimony of such a man, as to what
books were then received as authoritative by the Christian church, must be
especially weighty and conclu­sive. In his Sermon, or Homily, on Luk 1:1,
“Foras­much as many have taken in hand,” etc., we find the following:

“The phrase have taken in hand implies a tacit accu­sation of those who rushed
hastily to write Gospels with­out the grace of the Holy Spirit. Matthew and Mark
and Luke and John did not take in hand to write their Gospels, but wrote them
being full of the Holy Spirit.... The Church has four Gospels, heresies very
many, of which one is entitled ‘According to the Egyptians,’ an­other,
’According to the Twelve Apostles’… Four Gos­pels only are approved, out of
which we must bring forth points of teaching under the person of our Lord and
Savior. There is, I know, a Gospel which is called ‘According to Thomas,’ and
[one] ‘According to Mat­thias;’ and there are many others which we read, lest we
should seem to be unacquainted with any point, for the sake of those who think
they possess some valuable knowl­edge if they are acquainted with them. But in
all these we approve nothing else but that which the Church ap­proves, that is,
four Gospels only as proper to be received.”

Again, in his Homily onJos 7:1, Origen, in his characteristic style of allegory,
makes the falling of the walls of Jericho at the sound of the trumpets of the
priests an illustration of the effects of the preaching of the word of God, and
thus incidentally furnishes us a list of the New Testament books:

“So, too, our Lord, whose advent was typified by the son of Nun, when he came,
sent his apostles as priests bear­ing well-wrought trumpets. Matthew first
sounded the priestly trumpet in his Gospel. Mark, also Luke and John, each gave
forth a strain on their priestly trumpets. Peter moreover sounds loudly on the
twofold trumpet of his Epistles; and so also James and Jude. Still the number is
incomplete, and John gives forth the trumpet-sound in his Epistles and
Apocalypse; and Luke while describing the Acts of the Apostles. Lastly, however,
came he who said, ‘I think that God hath set forth us apostles last of all,’ and
thundering on the fourteen trumpets of his Epis­tles, threw down even to the
ground the walls of Jericho, that is to say all the instruments of idolatry and
the doc­trines of the philosophers.” But we go back much earlier than the period
of Origen and examine what appears to be the most ancient catalogue of the New
Testament books yet discovered, an anony­mous document known as The Muratorian
Fragment.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 14: CNT-15 THE MURATORIAN FRAGMENT ON THE CANON.
========================================================================

THE MURATORIAN FRAGMENT ON THE CANON. In 1740 L.A. Muratori published at Milan,
in his Antiquitates Italicae, a manuscript from the Ambrosian Library, more than
a thousand years old, which originally belonged in the great monastery founded
at Bobbio in northern Italy by Columban, of Ireland, about AD 612. The beginning
and end of the manuscript are missing, and it shows marks of ignorant
translation and transcription; but yet its contents are of great importance. The
date of this venerable document is fixed by the following passage, in which,
after he has described the various apostolic writ­ings, he refers to the
Apocryphal book called The Shep­herd, and says:

“Hermas wrote the Shepherd quite recently in our own times, while Pius, his
brother was occupying the chair of the Roman Church. And, therefore, it ought
indeed to be read: but it should never be used in the church pub­licly, neither
among the number of the prophets, nor among that of the apostles, to the end of
time.” This incidental remark defines the date of this writing as about the time
of the episcopate of Pius, bishop of Rome, which commenced about AD 140, and
concluded about the middle of the second century. As this writer speaks of the
episcopate of Pius as being in his own time, it is evident that this manuscript
could not have been writ­ten later than about AD 175, and that the recollections
of its author may have extended back to within twenty-five years or less of the
Apostles’ days. This then seems to be THE EARLIEST LIST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
BOOKS. The fragment commences abruptly, with a part of a sentence which
doubtless referred to the Gospel by Mark, as it goes on to state that the Gospel
of Luke stands third in order, having been written by ’Luke the physician,’ the
companion of Paul, who, not being himself an eye-wit­ness, based his narrative
on such information as he could obtain, beginning from the birth of John the
Baptist. The fourth place is given to the Gospel of John, a disciple of the
Lord; and the occasion of its com­position is thus related: “At the entreaties
of his fellow-disciples and his bishops, John said, ‘Fast with me for three days
from this time, and whatsoever shall be revealed to each of us let us relate it
to one another.’ On the same night it was revealed to Andrew, one of the
apostles, that John should relate all things in his own name, aided by the
revision of all... What wonder is it, then, that John brings forward each detail
with so much emphasis even in his Epistles, saying of himself, ‘What we have
seen with our eyes, heard with our ears, and our hands have handled, these
things have we written unto you!’ For so he professes that he was not only an
eye-witness, but also a hearer, and moreover a historian of all the wonderful
works of the Lord in order.” The writer also speaks of the record by Luke “of
those Acts of all the apostles, which fell under his own notice;” then follow
thirteen Epistles of Paul, including all but the Epistle to the Hebrews. He also
says, “Moreover there is in circulation an Epistle to the Laodiceans, another to
the Alexandrians, forged under the name of Paul, bearing on the heresy of
Marcion, and several others which cannot be received into the Catholic church;
for gall ought not to be mixed with honey. The Epistle of Jude, however, and two
Epistles bearing the name of John, are received in the Catholic [church] (or are
reckoned among the Catho­lic [epistles]); and the book of Wisdom, written by the
friends of Solomon, in his honor. We receive, moreover, the Apocalypse of John,
and Peter only, which (latter) some of our body will not have read in the
church. The omission of all mention of the Epistle to the Hebrews may be due to
the fragmentary condition of the manuscript, which begins and ends abruptly,
hence the writer’s statements concerning Hebrews may be lost; the same may be
said of the Epistle of James and Second Peter. With these exceptions this writer
gives an ac­count of the whole New Testament as it now stands, with the addition
only of a single book, the Apocalypse of Peter which the writer declared some
would not allow to be read in the church, and which has since been uni­versally
rejected as spurious.

Here, then, we have an author writing within seventy years of the death of the
apostle John, and while men were yet living who had seen the beloved disciple;
giving a list of the books which they received as apostolic and
author­itative;—admitting that one, the Revelation of Peter, was in dispute,
referring to others which were forgeries, and could no more be reckoned with the
genuine books than gall could be mixed with honey; and yet his list,
frag­mentary as it is, contains evidently the entire New Testa­ment as we have
it, with the exception of the Epistle of James, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and
Second Peter; and some of these may have been mentioned in the missing portion
of the manuscript.

Hence we see that the New Testament, as a whole, dates back to the generation of
the apostles. And if these three omitted Epistles were to be left entirely out
of the account, what doctrine of the Bible should we lose, or what necessary
fact of divine revelation would escape us?

Such, in brief, are the results of years of study, as em­bodied in numerous
volumes devoted to the discussion of this subject; and the more the matter is
examined, the more irresistible is the evidence that we have in the New
Testament the genuine, authentic, authoritative writings of the apostles of the
Lamb.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 15: CNT-16 THE DISPUTED NEW TESTAMENT BOOKS.
========================================================================

THE DISPUTED NEW TESTAMENT BOOKS.

We have seen that the church of Christ in the remotest antiquity recognized
three classes of writings current among them.

First, those which were received by all without dispute, as genuine, apostolic
writings. These comprehended the Four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the
thirteen Epis­tles of Paul, the first Epistle of Peter, and the first Epistle of
John. About the reception of these there was no ques­tion or dispute in the
earliest ages. They were received by orthodox and heterodox; they were read in
the churches; they were quoted by ancient Christian writers so fully that Dr.
Tregelles says of one single writer, Origen, “Although a very large number of
his works are lost, and many others have come down to us only in defective Latin
versions, we can, in his extant writings alone (I speak this from actual
knowledge and examination) find cited at least two-thirds of the New Testament.”

There were, then, asecond classof books which were indispute. They were not
rejected; on the contrary, they were received by many with as full confidence as
any other books. But some, for various reasons, stood in doubt of them. These
books were, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistle of James, the second Epistle
of Peter, the second and third Epistles of John, the Epistle of Jude, and the
Revelation. In thethird placethere were books which wereabso­lutely rejectedfrom
the sacred canon. Some, like the Epistle of Barnabas, the first Epistle of
Clement, Bishop of Rome, and the Epistles of Polycarp and Ignatius, were
regarded as the genuine writings of good men, and were counted worthy of
perusal, but regarded as not possessing apostolic authority. Others were
admitted to be the genuine writings of Christian men, but were full of errors
and puerile conceits. Others still were forgeries and falsehoods, as in the case
of the Acts of Paul and Thecla, of which Tertullian writes that “in Asia the
presbyter who composed that writing, as if he were augmenting Paul’s fame from
his own store, after being convicted, and confessing that he had done it from
the love of Paul, was removed from his office.” In discussing the corruptions of
the New Testament it is proper to offer some suggestions concerning the disputed
books which we have named. The fact that a book is disputed no more proves it to
be a false book, than the fact that a man is accused proves him to be a
criminal. As a man accused of crime is held innocent until his guilt be proved,
so a book bearing the name of any individual may be held to be his genuine work
until evidence to the contrary is adduced. The authorship of a forged or
spurious book can often be de­termined, as in the case of The Acts of Paul and
Thecla; or in the case of the Book of Mormon, which has been proved to be
substantially a romance written by a minis­ter named Spaulding, which came into
the possession of certain schemers, and was made the foundation of a new
religion. But no one has ever succeeded in establishing any other date or
authorship for the disputed Epistles of Peter, James, John, Jude, the Epistle to
the Hebrews, or the Apocalypse. They must have been written by someone; and if
they had been impostures the fact would naturally have been known, and their
true authorship would most likely have been ascertained.

Concerning these books we may remark—First: they were all written later than
most of the other books. The second Epistle of Peter was written in his old age,
near the end of his life; for he says, “I think it meet as long as I am in this
tabernacle, to stir you up, by putting you in remembrance; knowing that shortly
I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath showed me.
Moreover, I will endeavor that ye may be able after my decease to have these
things always in remembrance.” 2Pe 1:13-15. This Epistle also warns the church
of the presence of false teachers and apostates; which indi­cates that
sufficient time had elapsed from the foundation of the churches for apostasy and
decay to commence. The Epistle of James also notes the corrupting influence of
wealth in the church. The Epistle of Jude declares that certain men had already
crept in unawares, and turned the grace of God into lasciviousness, denying the
only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ. The book of Revela­tion was also
written at a very late date, near the close of the first century. Of course
writings could not be received until after they were written; and these books
were not written until long after most of the other apostolic writings had been
received. Paul’s thirteen Epistles must have been writ­ten previous to AD 65,
the time of his death; the Acts of the Apostles was written while he was yet
alive; the Gospel by Luke was a still earlier production; and pre­vious to this,
“many” persons had “taken in hand” to write accounts of the life and ministry of
Christ. Most of the undisputed books were well-known and universally re­ceived
long before these later productions appeared; and of course, as these made their
way slowly from hand to hand, and from church to church, being carefully
scru­tinized at every step, the lateness of their origin is a suf­ficient reason
for the hesitation with which they were accepted. They were received by some,
who knew their origin, with all confidence; others, who did not know the facts,
waited till their authority was established.

Second, most of these writings were not directed to any particular church. The
second and third Epistles of John seem to have been personal letters to friends.
The second Epistle of Peter is to “them that have obtained like precious faith;”
the Epistle of James is to “the twelve tribes scattered abroad;” while the
Epistle of Jude is to “them that are sanctified by God the Father, and
pre­served in Jesus Christ, and called.” The Epistle to the Hebrews has no local
address or superscription. When epistles were sent by trusty messengers to the
Corinthi­ans, the Ephesians, or the Colossians, it was only neces­sary to go to
those cities and consult the original docu­ments to decide the claims of the
writings. But these “catholic” or general epistles, which were of the nature of
circulars, or tracts, would not be so readily traced, and hence would naturally
require more careful scrutiny. The question would arise, Who first received this
epistle? Where does it come from? Who vouches for it as being a genuine
apostolic writing? To answer such inquiries would require time; and it was not
until these questions had been settled again and again, to the satisfaction of
different individuals and churches, that these books could be generally
received.

Third, in the case of the Epistle to the Hebrews, there was the additional fact
that it was sent forth anonymously, and of course this must have increased the
difficulty of establishing its apostolic authority. And yet, in spite of all
these difficulties, these books, at first received by few, were gradually
introduced to the ever-widening circle of Christian believers, and shortly made
their way to universal acceptance. This could not have been the case unless
there had been sound and sub­stantial grounds for their reception. There was no
lack of vigilance on the part of the early Christians. There were plenty of
spurious writings abroad which they did not hesitate to reject and denounce. No
central ecclesi­astical authority prescribed their faith, or commanded them to
accept one book and reject another. The whole matter was settled by evidence
which was convincing to the churches and individuals concerned. A few
suggestions concerning these disputed books may be appropriate. The second and
third Epistles of John, being apparently personal letters, could not, in the
nature of things, be expected to receive that early public recog­nition which
was accorded to his other writings. It was most natural that they should be
received with caution; and it would require considerable time to effect their
introduction among the genuine books of the New Testa­ment. We find, however,
that Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (AD 115-190), quotes the seventh and eighth
verses of the second Epistle of John, and that Dionysius of Alexandria (AD 231)
mentions the second and third Epistles as ascribed to John the apostle. The
Epistle of Jude, like these of John, is mentioned in the ancient Muratorian
Canon about AD 175, and Tertullian, AD 200, repeatedly cites this Epistle,
expressly saying that “Enoch possesses a testimony in the apostle Jude.” And
Clement of Alexandria (AD 185) also repeatedly quotes from this Epistle as
Scripture. The Epistle of James is expressly mentioned by Origen, AD 200. He was
a disciple of Clement of Alexandria, and there is a record of a lost work of
Clement which contained a summary of the Epistle of James. The Epis­tle of
James, being addressed to the Twelve Tribes scat­tered abroad, would most
naturally be early known at Alexandria. Irenaeus, speaking of Abraham, says, “He
was called the friend of God,” which seems to be a quotation from Jas 2:23. The
very ancient Syriac Version also contains the Epistle of James, though it lacks
some of the other disputed books, which may not have been written or known when
that translation was made. As this Epistle was addressed to the Twelve Tribes
scattered abroad, it would very naturally find its way among the Syrian
Christians, and be received by them at an earlier date than among the Greeks and
Latins. But in due time it came to be generally received, and even Clement of
Rome (AD 91-100) quotes, “Through faith and hospitality a son was given to
Abraham in old age, and by obedience he offered him a sacrifice to God; by faith
and hospitality, Rahab the harlot was saved,” apparently referring quite
distinctly to that justification by faith and also by works, as taught in the
Epistles of Paul, and in the Epistle of Jas 2:21-26. The second Epistle of Peter
was also a disputed book. This was written at a late date, and without specific
ad­dress; though it plainly purports to be the production of the apostle Peter.
It appears, however, to have been ad­dressed to the persons to whom Peter had
previously written his First Epistle (2Pe 3:1-2), and we know that the first
Epistle was addressed to “the strangers scattered abroad throughout Pontus,
Galatia, Cappadocia, and Bithynia.” We should not therefore look for the second
Epistle to be received earliest at Rome or at Alex­andria; but we should look
for evidence of its authority in the region to which it was sent.

About the year AD 256, Firmilian, who was Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia,
wrote a letter to Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, in which he charges the Bishop of
Rome with “abusing the blessed apostles, Peter and Paul, as if they had
delivered this doctrine, though they in their Epistles have execrated heretics
and admonished us to avoid them.” Now we find no mention of heretics or false
prophets and false teachers in the first Epistle of Peter; but the second
Epistle, in the second chapter, contains explicit warnings of false teachers who
were to arise and “privily bring in damnable heresies.” So, from Firmilian,
Bishop of Cappadocia, AD 256, we have an express ref­erence to this second
Epistle of Peter, which like the first Epistle, was written “to the strangers
scattered through­out ... Cappadocia.” Taking root in these fields, the Epistle
shortly spread and was finally acknowledged else­where and everywhere. The book
of Revelation was questioned by a few who did not accept the doctrines which it
taught; much as Mar­tin Luther questioned the authority of the Epistle of James,
because he, just emerging from darkness, did not understand how to reconcile its
teachings with those of Paul concerning justification by faith. Some have
claimed that the Apocalypse differs in style from the writings of John. But
style depends upon the subject; and there is no greater difference in the style
than there is in the themes of these different writings. But whatever doubts may
have crept in concerning the book of Rev­elation, two or three hundred years
after it was writ­ten, there is no record of such doubts in the earlier periods
of Christian history. Melito, Bishop of Sardis, one of the churches to which the
book of Revelation was sent, wrote about AD 177 a work On the Revelation of
John. Irenaeus, who was familiarly acquainted with those who had known the
beloved disciple before his death, not only accepted this book as the work of
John, but fixes its date, saying that the Apocalyptic vision “was seen no very
long time since, but almost in our day, towards the end of Domitian’s reign."

Justin Martyr, who lived within a few years of the time of the apostles, held a
discussion or dialogue with Trypho, “the most distinguished among the Hebrews of
the day.” In this discussion, which occurred at Ephesus, the seat of one of the
churches to which the Apocalypse was sent (Rev 1:11), and which was the last
abode of John, and the place of his burial; not more than fifty years from the
time of his death, and of course sur­rounded by many who personally knew the
beloved disci­ple, Justin says: “There was a certain man with us whose name was
John, one of the apostles of Christ, who prophesied by a Revelation that was
made to him, that those who believed in our Christ should dwell a thousand years
in Jerusalem; and that thereafter the general, and, in short, the eternal,
resurrection and judgment of all men, would likewise take place.” We may add
that Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch about AD 180, in his book Against the
Heresies of Hermogenis, makes use of testi­monies from the Revelation of John.
Numerous other witnesses might be cited, but if the testimony of Justin, the
learned philosopher and martyr, given on the very soil where John lived and
died, and within fifty years of the date of his death, cannot be accepted, it is
useless to adduce later evidence. The church at Ephesus, the home of John and
one of the churches to which the Revelation was sent, were competent witnesses
concerning the author­ship of that book. And Justin Martyr, testifying from
Ephesus, gives us ample proof concerning its apostolic origin and authority,
which indeed would never have been questioned had not later writers accepted and
taught doctrines different from those contained in the Apocalypse and believed
by the earlier generations of the church.

There remains one other book to be noticed among the disputed writings, and that
is…


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 16: CNT-17 THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS.
========================================================================

THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. This Epistle stands by itself, as the only specimen
of anonymous writing contained in the New Testament. It is also destitute of
local superscription or address; and hence can be referred to no particular
church for authen­tication and endorsement. It is not then strange that it was
received by some with hesitation, and that questions afterwards arose, not so
much regarding its authority, which was admitted, but regarding its authorship,
which had been purposely concealed. The fact that this document, without
superscription or signature, and containing the name of only one solitary
Christian, Timothy, was promptly received by a portion of the primitive church
as an authoritative exposition of Christian truth, indicates that those who
first received it must have known its origin. It must have been delivered by a
trusty messenger, and accompanied by sufficient in­timations of its authorship
to insure its acceptance. Of course it was not universally received at once. The
Latin fathers, down to the year 300, do not quote it as one of Paul’s Epistles.
Tertullian, AD 200, attributed it to Barnabas; and Cyprian does not admit its
Pauline origin. But the Epistle was not sent to the Latins, but to the Hebrews,
and, lacking the ordinary tokens of author­ity—the signature or salutation of
Paul—the Latins were perfectly justified in hesitating, and suspending their
judgment until they were fully informed of the facts in the case. On the
contrary, the Alexandrian fathers re­ceived it,—Alexandria being famed as a
center both of Hebrew and Christian learning—and the concurrent tes­timony of
most ancient writers was that this Epistle was written by Paul. The learned
Origen, in his Homilies on the Epistle to the Hebrews, after alluding to certain
points wherein it differs in style from Paul’s acknowledged Epis­tles, says, “If
I were to express my own opinion, I should say that the thoughts are the
apostle’s, but the diction and composition that of someone who recorded from
memory the apostle’s teachings, and sought to illustrate with a brief commentary
the sayings of his master. If, then, any church hold this Epistle to be Paul’s,
we cannot find fault with it for so doing; for it was not without good reason
that the men of old time have handed it down as Paul’s. But who it was who wrote
the Epistle, God only knows certainly.” Of course no one living in Origen’s time
could person­ally know “certainly” who had written a treatise a cen­tury and a
half before; but the evidence from antiquity was as clear as it could be, from
the nature of the case. And such testimony as this seems reasonably conclusive,
unless something besides mere opinion is brought to op­pose it.

It has been suggested that Hebrews may have been written by Barnabas, Apollos,
or Zenas. But would such a treatise have been accepted at the hands of Barnabas,
Apollos, or Zenas without the signature of the author or the endorsement of any
apostle? And would either of those men have been likely to write such a treatise
as this, and send forth the sole production of his pen, anony­mously? How could
such an Epistle ever have found acceptance among the churches? The epistles of
Barnabas and of Clement of Rome were received with much respect in the early
church, because their authors were believed to be fellow-laborers with the
apostles; but how could an anonymous letter gain admis­sion to the list of the
sacred writings of the Christian church, unless those who first received it knew
it to be the production of some one of the apostles?

There are modern writers who, from internal evidence, pronounce with great
positiveness against the Pauline origin of Hebrews. They declare it impossible
that Paul should have been its author. There are other learned men, however, who
draw opposite conclusions from the facts in the case; and who claim to see
similarities of thought and expression which indicate the Pauline origin of
Hebrews. And those who most strenuously oppose this view admit that the Epistle
was inspired by Paul, and that it contains and embodies his ideas; but they
as­sert that it differs in style from Paul’s writings, and that it exhibits
greater eloquence than can be observed in his acknowledged Epistles,

It is not probable that many of the readers of the origi­nal are sufficiently
familiar with the diction and style of Paul to pronounce an authoritative
judgment on such grounds. The mere fact of a difference of style is by no means
a conclusive proof of different authorship. The critic who should read The
Metropolitan Pulpit, The Treasury of David, and John Ploughman’s Talks, could
readily detect a very marked difference in their style; but he would be a bold
theorist who, on such grounds, would deny that Charles H. Spurgeon was the
author of either of these works. Nothing would be more natural than that an
anonymous writing should be purposely composed in a style peculiar to itself.
And it would be reasonable to suppose that a person writing anonymously a
treatise designed for general circulation, and destined, perhaps, to endure the
most searching criticism, should take much more pains in the construction of his
sentences than would a prisoner in writing a familiar letter to some in­dividual
with whom he was acquainted, or to some church for whom he felt a loving
sympathy. And as Paul in his acknowledged Epistles frequently joins with him
Timothy or Silvanus, they apparently sharing the authorship and responsibility
of the writing, it would not be at all surpris­ing if, in writing an anonymous
Epistle to the Hebrews, he availed himself of the aid of Apollos, Barnabas,
Timo­thy, or any other of his co-workers. An Epistle designed to be sent forth
anonymously would most naturally be subjected to careful revision; and he who
could say, “We speak wisdom among them that are perfect,” and who had shown such
eminent tact and adaptation in his addresses to Romans, Jews, and Athe­nians,
and in the presence of governors, rulers, and kings, would naturally produce a
treatise differing both in style and character from the briefer and less
elaborate produc­tions which had been written when chained to a Roman soldier,
while the burden of the churches lay upon his lov­ing heart.

There can be no doubt concerning the reception of the Epistle to the Hebrews by
the early Christians. Clement of Rome in his Epistle quotes or alludes to it
again and again. In his first Apology (Chapter 12) Justin Martyr speaks of
Christ as both “Son and Apostle of God the Father of all,”—a title of Christ
only found in Heb 3:1; the “Apostle and High Priest of our profession.”

According to Dr. Lardner, certain passages in the Epis­tles of Ignatius, about
AD 107, are thought by some to allude to the Epistle to the Hebrews. It seems to
be re­ferred to by Polycarp, in his Epistle to the Philippians, AD 108, and it
also seems to be alluded to in the ac­count of Polycarp’s martyrdom, about AD
150. It is quoted by Clement of Alexandria, AD 194. It is received in substance
as Paul’s by Origen, AD 230, and by Dionys­ius, Bishop of Alexandria, AD 247. It
is referred to by Theognostius of Alexandria, AD 285. It appears to have been
received by Methodius, AD 292, and by Pamphilius, AD 294. It was received and
ascribed to Paul by Alex­ander, Bishop of Alexandria, AD 313. It is often quoted
by Eusebius as Paul’s. It was received by Athanasius, AD 330; by Admantius, AD
380; by Cyril of Jerusa­lem, AD 347; by the Council of Laodicea, AD 368; by
Epiphanius, AD 368; by the authors of the Apostolic Constitutions about the end
of the fourth century; by Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory Nyssen, Didymus of
Alexandria, and Ephraem the Syrian, about AD 370; also by Diodorus of Tarsus, AD
378; by Hierax, the learned Egyptian, AD 302; by Serapion, Bishop of Thumis in
Egypt, AD 347; by Titus, Bishop of Bostra in Arabia, about AD 362; by Theodore,
Bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia, about AD 394; by Chrysostom, AD 398; by
Severan, Bishop of Gabala, in Syria, AD 401; and by the churches of Syria, as
well as by numerous other learned authors mentioned by Lardner, among whom are
Gaudentius, Bishop of Brescia, in Italy, AD 380, and Jerome, AD 390, who, while
referring to Hebrews as one of Paul’s Epistles, testifies that it was generally
received by the Greeks and Christians of the East, but not by all the Latins.

Let us now look at the Epistle itself, and see what in­formation it will afford
us. From a careful examination we reach the following conclusions:

The Epistle to the Hebrews was apparently written while the Jewish temple
remained standing; for the writer seems to speak in the present tense concerning
the priesthood, Heb 7:28; the holy places made with hands, Heb 9:24; the
sacrifices, Heb 10:13; the high priest’s ministrations, Heb 10:2; and the altar
and tabernacle, Heb 13:10-11;—in all these passages making reference to Jewish
forms of worship and service as still existing; and hence the Epistle might have
been written by one who died about AD 65.

It was written by one thoroughly familiar with the Old Testament and the Jewish
religion; and so would appropriately come from one who profited above many of
his equals in the religion of the Jews; who was brought up at the feet of
Gamaliel; who was an Hebrew of the Hebrews; according to the straitest sect a
Pharisee; and who was accustomed to reason out of the Scriptures.

It must have been written by one who felt the deep­est interest in the welfare
of the Jewish nation; and so might fitly proceed from him who said, “I have
great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart for my breth­ren, my kinsmen
according to the flesh.” Rom 9:1-4. And this Epistle, though specially adapted
to preserve the Jewish Christians from discouragement and apostasy, was also
fitted to be circulated among the “devout Jews,” to lead them to a knowledge of
the Messiah.

It appears to have been written by one who was not one of the first disciples of
the Lord, as was Barnabas, but rather one who could say that the “great
salvation which began to be spoken by the Lord” “was confirmed unto us by them
that heard Him” If this were written some thirty years after the death of
Christ, its readers would mostly be those who had not personally known the Lord;
and though Paul received his message and commission from the glorified Christ,
yet it does not appear that he ever attended upon his personal ministry on
earth.

This Epistle was written by one who felt himself an outcast from the Jewish
nation, and so deprived of any rights or privileges in the Holy City to which he
as a Jew might have been entitled before he embraced the gospel. After declaring
that Jesus, in order to “sanctify the peo­ple with his own blood, suffered
without the gate,” he says, “Let us therefore go forth unto him without the
camp, bearing his reproach; for here have we no continu­ing city, but we seek
one to come.” Heb 13:13-14. How appropriate this language for one who was in
perils by his own countrymen, who was hated, persecuted, and accused by his own
people, and who was emphatically a pilgrim and a stranger on the earth.

The Epistle was written by one who had been “in bonds,” and who had received the
sympathy of the Hebrew Christians while thus imprisoned. Thus he says, “Ye had
compassion of me in my bonds, and took joy­fully the spoiling of your goods.”
Heb 10:34. We know of one person who could say this truly, and that was the
apostle Paul. What evidence have we that any other of the supposed authors of
Hebrews could use this language?

The Epistle to the Hebrews was written by one who was so intimately connected
with Timothy, the only Chris­tian named in the Epistle, that he mentions him as
being now “set at liberty;” and he intimates that he himself at this time was
free, or had hope of speedy liberation, and hence was planning a journey with
Timothy for the fu­ture. Thus he says, “Know ye that our brother Timothy is set
at liberty, with whom, if he come shortly, I will see you.” Heb 13:22-23. We
know that Timothy was with Paul during his imprisonment at Rome, for he is
ex­pressly named at the commencement of the Epistles to the Philippians, the
Colossians, and to Philemon, all of which were written while Paul was in
“bonds.” Else­where, in writing to Timothy, Paul calls him his “own son;” 1Ti
1:2; 2Ti 1:2; but in writing of Timothy to others, he calls him “brother” (1Co
1:1; Col 1:1; 1Th 3:2), as does the writer of this Epistle.

This Epistle seems to have been written from Italy, for its closing words are,
“They of Italy salute you.” Some suppose it was written while its author was yet
in bonds, for he says, “Pray for us: for we trust we have a good conscience, in
all things willing to live honestly. But I beseech you the rather to do this,
that I may be restored to you the sooner.” Heb 13:18-19. Others suppose the
writer to have now been at liberty, and per­haps to have left Rome, thus writing
not from the capital, but from some other part of Italy.

Finally, this Epistle was written by one who chose to conceal his personality.
And this was not through mod­esty, as a youthful author sends out his first
production, not knowing what will befall it. The author of Hebrews was no
novice, moving with uncertain tread in an unknown path; he wrote in all the
majesty of an accredited mes­senger of the Most High. But why does he conceal
his name? Why should Apollos or Barnabas send forth such a treatise unsigned?

We can easily conceive why the apostle Paul might choose thus to write. One who
from being a furious per­secutor had changed to be a zealous Christian, and who
had thus incurred the fiercest hatred of his countrymen; who had been mobbed in
Jerusalem, where he had been trained at the feet of Gamaliel and honored with
high position; who had heard the shouts of Jewish zealots cry­ing, “Away with
him, for it is not fit that such a fellow should live on the earth;” who knew
that at one time more than forty men had sworn that they would neither eat nor
drink until they had shed his blood; who had been accused and assaulted by his
countrymen, who so hated him that to secure himself from assassination at their
hands he had appealed unto Caesar; a man who had of the Jews five times received
forty stripes save one; who had been persecuted and followed from city to city
by Jewish zealots, and whose name must have become a hissing and a curse among
them, throughout the world;—such a man, yearning over his erring countrymen, and
earnestly desiring to lead them to the knowledge of the truth, but knowing that
whatever he might say or do, the mention of his name could only awaken prejudice
and fill them with rage, and possibly cause the persecution and death of those
to whom his testimony was confided, might, in the exercise of only ordinary
wisdom, conclude that, after writing many Epistles in his own name, he could in
this instance best serve the cause of truth by suppressing his name, and setting
forth in an imper­sonal form those great truths which he so much desired that
his brethren according to the flesh should know.

Against the single objection that the style of this Epis­tle differs from Paul’s
usual style, we set, then, the facts that it was promptly received as an
apostolic production; that it was apparently written before Jerusalem was
de­stroyed; that it was written by one familiar with the Jewish religion and
deeply interested in the welfare of the Jews; that its author was not one of the
first disciples of the Lord, but was one who felt himself an outcast from the
Jewish nation; that it was written by one who had been in bonds, and who was in
close communion with Timothy; that it was written from Italy; and that, finally,
it was written by one who had such reasons as no other person could have had for
addressing the Jewish people anonymously. All these indications point to the
apostle Paul as the author of the book of Hebrews, and lead us to agree with the
learned Origen when he says, “It was not without good reason that the men of old
have handed it down as Paul’s."


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 17: CNT-18 THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER.
========================================================================

THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER.

We have stated briefly a few of the facts bearing on this subject. There is room
for but one conclusion. Christianity had a beginning. None of the writers of
remote antiquity mention it. Neither Homer nor Hesiod, Herodotus nor Manetho,
Plato nor Socrates, allude to Christ or his gospel. During the seventy years
from BC 50 to AD 20, we may scan the writings of Diodorus, Caesar, Sallust,
Cicero, Strabo, Livy, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, without finding the slightest
reference to the Chris­tian religion. The Jews, notwithstanding their isolation,
were known and noticed; but Christianity, in its nature aggressive and
expansive, was not mentioned—because it did not exist. A generation later we
find in the writings of Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, Trajan, and others,
distinct mention of Christ as the founder of Christian­ity, and of multitudes of
Christians scattered through­out the Roman Empire. Somewhere within this narrow
circle of a single lifetime, Christianity was established. If it had originated
at an earlier date some trace of it would have been found. Its origin could not
have been later, because all history agrees that it existed be­fore the year AD
65. When did it originate? Luke, in the third chapter of his Gospel, tells us
when it was. The books of the New Testament must have been written in the first
century of our era, because they are quoted in the second century, and have been
quoted in every century since; and thus, by following an unbroken stream of
testimony, we have followed the New Testa­ment writings back to: THE FOUNTAIN
HEAD.

Having thus traced the New Testament writings, step by step, for more than
eighteen hundred years, to the persons who wrote them, we at last reach their
fount­ain-head, and find a Man, a Teacher, a Carpenter; sur­rounded by a few
obscure, humble, unlettered Galileans. We find him claiming more than imperial
power, and utter­ing commands with more than imperial authority. He directs his
followers to go into all the world. He predicts that the message which he
entrusts to them shall be pro­claimed to all nations; and he makes to them the
strange and improbable declaration that wherever they go to do his work, He will
be with them alway, even to the end of the age. We see him again with them in an
upper cham­ber, where he breaks a loaf and divides it among them; he gives
thanks over a cup, and bids them drink of it, and he charges them to repeat that
act in remembrance of Him.

Suppose we could have sat that night as quiet specta­tors in the “large upper
room.” Suppose it had been said to us, “Before the morning’s dawn, this Galilean
Teacher will be betrayed by one of his disciples, denied by another, and
forsaken by all; and before another sun shall set will be condemned by the
priesthood of his own nation, mocked, and scourged, and crowned with thorns by
the Roman soldiers, yelled after by a howling mob, sentenced to death by a Roman
governor, led out and hung between two thieves upon a Roman cross, there to die
in shame and ignominy, and thence be carried, amid the tears of his despairing
followers, and laid in a stranger’s grave.

Suppose all this had been told, and then the question asked, “How many times
will these Galileans ever gather to break the loaf and drink the cup in memory
of their Master?” What would have been our answer? Should we not have said,
“They will probably never meet again”? Should we not have supposed that, at the
very latest, a few years would have eradicated the last trace of such an
en­thusiast’s existence from the minds and memories of men? But eighteen hundred
years have gone. Nations have risen and fallen; the city where they met has been
deso­lated, and of all its gorgeous buildings not one stone left upon another;
the Jewish nation has been scattered through all the earth—a race of wandering
exiles for eight­een hundred years—Imperial Rome has bowed her proud head
beneath barbarian yokes; civilization has lapsed into barbarism, and barbarism
has been raised again to civ­ilization; nations, and languages, and laws have
perished out of mind; the decrees of the Caesars are forgotten; the commands of
emperors are not worth the paper on which they were written; but probably no
week has passed for the last eighteen hundred years without witnessing the
obedience of His followers to the command He then uttered. In every quarter of
the globe, in lands then un­discovered, in nations then unborn, in languages
then unspoken, His servants and disciples have met; in magnifi­cent cathedrals,
in lowly cottages, in upper chambers, and in dens and caves of the earth;—with
streaming eyes and quivering voices they have rehearsed the story of his life
and death, and have broken the loaf and drank the cup in solemn memory of His
dying love. And in every land and nation today where this tale has been told,
and under every form of government beneath the sun, men keep this feast with
humble reverence, and with sympathizing love. From that mysterious Center, that
life which began in the manger of poverty, and closed upon the cross of shame,
there has gone forth not only a Book, which has enlightened the nations, which
has spread as no other writing ever spread, among all races, languages, and
tribes; but there have come down to us other memorials and monuments, striking
in their significance, and world-wide in their observance. The sacred baptism in
which we are “planted together in the likeness of his death,” the cup of
blessing, and the loaf we break, are not the only me­morials which tell us that
He has been here. Throughout the globe, which before his coming was dark with
the shadows of inhumanity and sin, has streamed the radiance of his life and
love. In a world where purity was but a tradition, his light and blessing has
restored in many a dwelling the happiness of an Eden which was lost; and instead
of a thousand gladiators hacking each other to pieces to amuse the populace in
the proudest and mighti­est city of the globe,—“Butchered to make a Roman
holiday,”—the good Samaritan now goes his way, lifting up the wounded and the
dying, and bringing comfort to the desolate and the sad. Instead of the public
shows, and pageants, and slaughters, of antiquity, we have what they knew
nothing of, hospitals, asylums, refuges, and reform­atories. Instead of the
magnificent temples of classic Greece, with their swarming prostitutes and their
licen­tious orgies, we have the church, the university, the col­lege, the
seminary, and the common school. Instead of slavery, we have freedom; instead of
cruelty, we have kindness; instead of darkness, we have light; instead of Satan,
we have Christ. And this change has not been through the slow pro­gression of
countless ages,—it has been a sudden, personal and radical change, by which old
things passed away, and all things became new. There are today, after all the
boasted progression of humanity, peoples where the gospel light shines not, who
are as brutal, as cruel, and as base as were the nations of antiquity.

Humanity has never civilized itself. Its redemption comes from without, and is
wrought by Almighty power. There are peoples on the globe today who within the
memory of man were as vile, as godless, and as blood­thirsty as were the
inhabitants of Babylon, Greece, or Rome. But today they are changed;—changed
with­in a few brief years, and are living as becometh the re­deemed and pardoned
followers of the Prince of peace. And the change that has so often transformed
races of savages and cannibals into followers of the Lamb of God, is wrought,
not by human progression, but by divine mercy; not in obedience to some subtle
energy, working through countless generations, but in accord­ance with the
mandate of Him whose gospel is “the power of God unto salvation,” and who,
eighteen hundred years ago, in the midst of poverty and shame and rejec­tion,
and with the cross of Calvary full in his view, de­clared, “This gospel of the
kingdom shall be preached in all the world, for a witness unto all nations, and
then shall the end come.”

There is no surer indication of power than is seen in the orderly execution of
the mandates of an unseen and ab­sent leader. Mighty monarchs, in the last hour
of life, when they had nothing more to give, and could neither reward nor
punish, have found that none would do them reverence, and have died neglected;
their own mercenary servants leaving them to their fate.

There are certain secret fraternities which sometimes are very efficient.
Invisible leaders direct their course of action, and terrible oaths, enforced by
horrid penalties, leave the members of these associations no choice but to obey
or die. But their influence is usually short-lived, and most of them soon pass
and are forgotten.

There is, however, today a brotherhood of men which has long existed in the
earth, and which is subject to a control more mysterious than any other of which
this world affords us an example. For eighteen centuries the members of this
fraternity have felt themselves bound by laws which were paramount to every
earthly obliga­tion. The ties of kinship, the charms of pleasure, the authority
of monarchs, and all the motives that sway the hearts of men from the highest to
the lowest, have given way to some more potent bond. Every earthly ambi­tion,
appetite, passion, desire, and hope has been made to yield to the power which
has swayed their souls. It has linked men together who were strangers and
enemies before; it has, in an hour, made them friends to those whose faces they
had never seen; it has bound in close sympathy persons of differing tastes,
customs, manners, habits, and education; and has sent men forth, relinquish­ing
their dearest ambitions and their highest hopes, so­journing as strangers in
lands unknown, and separated from the fellowships and kinships in which their
hearts had found delight. They have traversed deserts; they have crossed seas;
their feet have pressed the sands of every shore; they have made their homes in
far-off islands; they have climbed to Alpine heights; they have made their
dwelling among barbarians, savages, and canni­bals; they have gone forth from
abodes of luxury and ease, to lives of poverty and toil; they have braved the
terrors of the arctic circle and have sweltered beneath the burning heat of the
tropics; they have voluntarily consented to endure hunger, and thirst, and
hardship, and reproach, and poverty, and toil; they have allied them­selves to
suffering, and have endured scourging, and chains, and imprisonment, and death
itself. These men have not been reckless, nor indifferent to their own
inter­ests. They have been persons of wisdom, and under­standing, and culture,
fitted to grace the highest positions in society; they have sacrificed the love
of friends, and faced the fury of foes; they have left the delights of home for
the struggles of exile; and they have done this, not for honor, not for
grandeur, not for gain, not for fame.

They have endured without complaint; they have suf­fered without repining; they
have died without a mur­mur of disappointment or a word of regret. And this has
been going on for many, many centuries, and is going on today. There are
thousands still ready to lead a forlorn hope, and ten thousands more of their
comrades are standing behind them, ready to press forward and fill the broken
ranks whenever a hero falls. They have fought on thus for ages, and yet they
have not won wealth, nor honor, nor power. They have had a heritage of toil, and
conflict, and affliction; they have been hunted through life, hated and defamed
in death, and yet they have triumphed amid it all.

What mighty force has bound such a brotherhood together? What mysterious power
has launched them into the world, and held them steadfast through the roll of
passing centuries? Under whose command did they go? Under whose direction have
they acted? They spurn human authority in matters of the highest moment; they
bow to no ruler’s behest; emperors cannot awe them, kings cannot control them,
warriors cannot frighten them. What, then, is the spring of their action, what
the motive that has separated them from all earthly associa­tions, and made them
such a wondrous power in the world? Who is it that has spoken his commandment in
their ears? Is it an Alexander, who conquered a world? There is not a man on the
globe who cares for any law that Grecian conqueror made. Is it a Caesar, who
ruled the mightiest empire of his age? Who cares for a Caesar now? Is it a
Charlemagne, with the iron crown of Rome on his brow, or a Napoleon, with
obedient myriads at his feet? These men are dead; and from their tombs there
comes no voice of authority, no whisper which even a child would fear to
disobey. By whose command, then, are these men of varied nationality, character
and station, controlled? Whose word is it which severs every tie, and speeds
them on their mighty errand? At whose direction do they brave the fury of the
ocean and endure the terrors of the storm? Who bids them to cross the steppes of
the desolate North, and the burning deserts of the South? Who sends them
threading their paths through tropic jungles, or climbing snow-clad heights amid
the grind of glaciers and the thunder of avalanches? At whose word presses
forward that thin, wavering, bleeding, skirmish-line of heroes, who only fall to
make room for others as noble and heroic as themselves? Have they a commander?
Do they acknow­ledge and follow a leader? Who can it be? It is a Com­mander whom
they have never seen; a Leader whose voice they have never heard. And who is he?
One who had neither wealth nor prestige; a poor, despised Jew, trained in a
carpenter’s shop at Nazareth; a man whom no mortal eye has seen for almost two
thousand years; a person whose existence is doubted, whose authority is denied,
whose words seem to many as idle tales; but who promises poverty, who foretells
reproach, and who sets the loss of all things as one of the conditions of
fellowship with him. Standing on the slope of Olivet, nearly two thousand years
ago, he said to a few poor fishermen and lowly toilers, “All power is given unto
me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching
them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and lo, I am with
you alway, even unto the end of the world.” Mat 28:18-20. This solitary command,
uttered ages ago, is the obli­gation, and warrant, and encouragement of this
mighty fraternity. It is this command which has held the elect of God steady in
their allegiance, and devoted to their Master’s service. It is, to doubters and
scoffers, the mandate of a dead Jew, the word of an impostor who has not been
seen for nearly two thousand years;—a dream, a fancy, an idle tale. But somehow
that word has power. Millions of men who never saw that Leader, are ready today
to peril life itself to obey his commands. No emperor that ever lived had a sway
so grand and glorious as that of the lowly Nazarene.

How is it that every great conqueror of earth has gone to the grave of
forgetfulness, and no one heeds their wishes or their words, while this man,
without position, without power, without authority, without law, or force, or
wealth, or fame, has yet issued commands which are respected in every quarter of
the globe, and which will live when nations die, and have a force which the
de­crees of monarchs never had? What manner of man is this, whose secret
whispers are heard through all the ages, and whose mandate, spoken in the ears
of a few lowly dis­ciples, rolls its reverberations down to time’s remotest
hour, penetrates the heart, convicts the conscience, con­trols the judgment, and
rules the lives, of unnumbered myriads of the sons of men? Surely, a power like
this must have a higher than human source. Surely, one whose words are mighty as
these words are, must be clothed with an unearthly energy, which demonstrates
him to be not merely like the first man, “of the earth earthy,” but like “the
second man, the Lord from Heaven.” Not long since, three little children, a boy
of ten years, with his two little sisters, one seven and the other four, living
in Klum, in Eastern Prussia, wished to go to Sedalia in the state of Missouri,
to join their parents who were already settled in America. None of their
relatives were so situated as to be able to accompany them, and hence they were
under the necessity of taking their journey alone. An aunt in Berlin furnished
each of the young travelers with a little Book, on the first page of which she
wrote the name, age, birthplace, and destination of the bearer; Writing below in
large letters, in German, and English, and French, a single sentence taken from
that book. And she told them whenever they found themselves in any trouble or
difficulty, to just stand still and open those little books, and hold them up
before them. The children started from their German home, traveled until they
reached the seaport, embarked on board the steamer, crossed the great Atlantic,
landed in America, traveled by rail more than a thousand miles westward into the
heart of Missouri, showing their little passports when needful, to all with whom
they came in contact; and in no case did they fail to obtain every kindness,
ten­derness, and protection which could be given, every heart warming with love,
and every hand being stretched forth in helpfulness to the little ones who were
thus cast upon the kindness of passing strangers whom they had never seen before
and would never see again, but through whose kind assistance they safely reached
the far-off home of their grateful and rejoicing parents.

What little book was this, which proved to them such a precious passport? Was it
a volume of the decrees and laws of an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Charlemagne?
Was it an ukase of the Russian autocrat, or a decree of the emperor of Germany,
which made for them a way over land and sea? No! It was none of these. It was a
copy of that same New Testament which has been so wonderfully preserved through
these eighteen hundred years. And what was the sentence, in German and En­glish
and French, which commanded the attention, the respect, and the service of
strangers, of whatever na­tionality? Was it a passage from an Eastern Veda? a
maxim of Confucius? an utterance of Buddha? a com­mand of some high and mighty
potentate? a commenda­tion from some vast and influential brotherhood? No! It
was none of these. The sentence which opened their way and proved to them more
effective than the mandate of a monarch, or the safe conduct of an emperor, was
this: Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done
it unto me,’ saith Jesus Christ.” Are such words the vaporings of a vain
pretender, a hypocritical impostor, a mere dead and buried Jew? Do they not
prove themselves to be the words of a living, an Almighty Christ, who sitteth at
the right hand of the throne of God, and who has said, “Heaven and earth shall
pass away, but My words shall not pass away”? And shall not we listen to His
utterances which come with such eternal power, while He says, “He that rejecteth
me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have
spoken, the same shall judge him at the last day.”


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/hastings-hl-corruption-of-the-nt/
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