App
Carl Franklin—12/21/96
- PDF | Audio | [Up]
[speaking of Darrell Conder]: Some of you may have had contact with him; some have called and talked to him. I know his background is Worldwide, and I think he's been in the faith about 40 years. He went out and became disillusioned and angry with God because God wouldn't heal, wouldn't answer his prayers. The more you get into that attitude, the less God is going to answer.
Paul said that we're supposed to go to God with the spirit of thanksgiving, gratitude, humility and asking for God's mercy. We don't tell God what to do! We you supplicate God, don't get up in His lap in your prayer and punch Him in the nose! It doesn't work! He doesn't like it. It doesn't mean that you can't talk with God and reason with God, and pour your heart out. That's a different spirit altogether than the spirit that I'm talking about.
I really don't know much personally about this fellow, but I do want to learn more. He's writing now from Utah, before that I have no idea. He's gotten out of book publishing into publishing a magazine called Masada. Masada was the last defending of the homeland against the Roman Legion.
If I read Josephus right, he was one of those last men left who didn't commit suicide and wrote the book of Josephus. The last guy there was supposed to kill himself, and he didn't! I think that was Josephus.
I do have a copy of the book here in loose-leaf and that's from where I took the material. I like to keep in touch with the brethren and make phone calls, write people and encourage them. I have been in contact with brethren and they now inform me that ministers—long time ministers—who were supposedly solid in the teaching of Jesus Christ, and long-time members who were supposedly solid in the teachings of Jesus Christ—have been shook up to the point where they're 'jumping ship' over this book [by Darrell Conder].
It's pretty serious stuff, so keep your ear to the ground. Any of the brethren that are having trouble, reach out to them with a helping hand and help them. Help reassure them and arm them and let them know that what this man—Darrell Conder—has written is a lie!
John said that 'if you say that Jesus Christ is not the Messiah, you are a liar!' Everything in this man's book is a lie! Lies are always couched in—not always but many times—very clever words.
Paul had to face that in the beginning of Christianity, and now we're facing it today, in particular at the end.
I promised you that we would take a look at these assumptions. The two most important assumptions that we need to address is the fact of spoken Greek. It was spoken in Palestine going back to the time of Alexander the Great, 300 yearsB.C.
So, there's a 300 year history before Christ comes along that the Greek-speaking communities and the bilingualism in these areas is par excellance. Greek had been used for a long time. Greek is a very stable language and has not changed very much. And one of the reasons that Greek has not changed very much is because even though it was spoken in the Byzantine Empire for a thousand years it's still spoken in one form or another in Greece. From the time of Alexander the Great Greek has been defined by dictionaries, lexicons—a type of dictionary—and by grammars. Greek has a history of being well-defined. It has a great tradition.
When you have a language that is used with a great tradition that is well-defined, the language doesn't change that much in hundreds and hundreds of years. So, it's something that people can understand and it's passed on from generation to generation with no problem.
Case in point: the King James English was really written about 400 years ago by Tyndale, translating out of the Hebrew and Greek into the English in the 1520-30s. Most of the New Testament in the King James was brought over from Tyndale virtually word for word. So, from the 1530s to 1996 we can pick up a King James Bible and go back and read the King James that was written by Tyndale in the 1530s.
The language has been quite stable even though we do bring in 'lone words' as they call them from other cultures. It's a living language. However, the grammar, the syntax, the rhetoric, the oratory, the writing, the literature, the tradition of the English language is there.
So, we can know that we know whether a particular language is being used properly, and where it not being used properly. Whether it's fake or real! It's the same with the Hebrew and the Greek. We're not talking about the Hebrew now, but the Greek. That is part and parcel of any language. There's a history that goes back hundreds of years—and in some cases thousands of years like Hebrew—and it's within a certain family of languages.
You can go to literature of several hundred years ago and see that the literature is legitimate because it fits all the characteristics of that family of languages. It's not a fake piece of literature that someone just threw together.
I'll be referring to the material from the book: The Hellenization of Judea in the First Century After Christ by Martin Hengel. It was translated out of the German in 1989. It's a small book and the main thesis is only 56 pages, but it's small print and very tightly written; very nicely done. It's the most authoritative that I've found on the New Testament period, showing the use of the language written and spoken at the time of Christ. This carried down into the institutions of higher education, of commerce, industry, banking—you name it. He addresses everything here.
The last part of the book are footnotes, so it's well footnoted. He gives his comments on whether the scholars are right or wrong, and gives you added material. It's well worth your time. It's well worth the effort to have this in your library.
The other book is The King James Version Defended by Edward Hills. Again, it's a small book, but quite often many of your well-written better theses are in small books because they didn't fill the rest of it with three quarters 'dead wood.' They get right to the point, and the point is well taken in his defense of the Byzantine.
This man answers all the questions raised by Conder, concerning the ending in Mark, 1-John 5 and any all the other material he brings up to try and prove that the New Testament Greek is not legitimate.
Concerning the spoken language. Let me begin by defining the word Hellenized, Hellenism or Hellenizing.
We take this way in a cultural context. It's not relating to culture, but relating to language, the mother tongue. Hengel proves that in this book. Let me refer you to a couple of Scriptures to make a point.
The Hellenization of Judea in the First Century After Christ by Martin Hengel
Hellenizing or Hellenism: The primarily end in the first instance he noted an impeccable command of the Greek language. This also gives us first fairly clear criterion for distinction in this investigation.
Hellenistic Jews and Jewish Christians are, in the real original meaning of the word, those whose mother tongue was Greek.
The term is used by Luke in the New Testament. It's used by Luke in Acts 6:1 and 9:29. In Acts 6:1 you'll find the term 'juxtaposition' with the Hebrews, or the term meaning those who speak in their mother tongue, Aramaic!
Acts 6:1: "Now, in those days, when the number of the disciples was multiplied, there arose a complaint by the Greeks…"
These are on Greek Jews of culture, but by mother tongue. This is the point that he is making, and that's very important.
"…against the Hebrews…" (v 1).
The Hebrews here are not Hebrews because they're Jews or grew up in the Hebrew area, or that they converted to Judaism or the Hebrew religion. They're Hebrews in the sense that their mother tongue was Aramaic. We're speaking of those who have the two mother tongues, and it's interesting that Luke would juxtaposition the two there, and use those terms.
Luke's Greek is very precise. He uses over 400 medical terms in his writings. His Greek is classic Greek. So, it's the highest level of Greek that you can find, very tight, very well-written. Luke was able to write this way because Greek was His mother tongue because he was very well educated individually, he was very literate. God called men and women who were very knowledgeable and inspired them to record the New Testament for us in exacting detail. There's no question about that at all.
Acts 9:29: "Then he spoke and disputed with the Greeks, but they attempted to kill him"—Paul!
Here again, Grecians are those whose mother tongue is Greek. Concerning the use of Greek throughout the Middle East, let me make two more points concerning its widespread usage.
This is a quote taken from a book published in Jerusalem, written by—among others—Agalia Dean, the famous Jewish archeologist. I think he has since died. But he excavated with others some caves that contained letters of Bar Kokhba, the Jewish messiah, the false messiah of 132-135A.D., who rebelled against the Romans. The Romans came in a three years war defeated Bar Kokhba and then leveled Jerusalem and forbade any Jew to worship in Jerusalem, and no more worship at all.
The point I'm making here is that in caves the Jewish hero of 132A.D.—whom they thought would be the true Messiah—all the documents were written in Greek. The coins were struck in Greek of this revival of the Jewish kingdom. They were using Greek. They didn't use Hebrew or Aramaic.
If a Jewish messiah was getting back the purest idea of the kingdom of the Jews, and all the legal documents—they have marriage, banking, contracts and everything—is using Greek, are we to assert then that was not used by in Palestine itself 132 years earlier? Ludicrous! Ridiculous! It shows that even the Jewish messiahs were using Greek. Not the sacred Hebrews or the sacred namers.
The sacred name people insist that there's a sacred Hebrew underpinning the New Testament! There is not; it was written in Greek. But the author here states that Greek was 'lingual franca' of that region even at that time.
The earliest lone words that come into Scripture come in the 6th centuryB.C. in the book of Daniel. The Greek was beginning to influence the area, so in the Aramaic and the Hebrew of the book of Daniel we find words there that are brought over from Greece, from the Greek tradition.
Most of them have to do with musical instruments and with the coinage. Where commerce goes, language follows. You see what I mean? The connection is still this way today with English.
Hengel writes:
There was a constant lively interchange with all the centres of the Diaspora. Thus Herod first brought the priest Ananel from Babylonia and later the priest Simon, son of Boethus, from Alexandria to Jerusalem.
This is the time of Herod the Great! Both were presumably from the old Zodakite family of the --- the true line of the high priest that fled in 164B.C. with the Macabeeian dispute and rebellion. There were branches of the Levitical priesthood, the Aaronic priesthood that disputed as to which family should have the priesthood. They split three ways.
The Macabees stayed in Palestine, obviously. One branch went over toward the Dead Sea and followed the Dead Sea community. Another branch went to Egypt and founded the Zodakite family.
What they were saying was that when Herod brought these priests back from Babylonia and Egypt, in both cases their mother tongue was Greek, and at the time of Christ when they brought Him back into Palestine. So, there was around the temple a Greek secretariat. In other words, there was Greek used in the temple itself by temple employees and the priesthood, from the high priest on down; at the time, before the time and after the time of Christ.
This doesn't mean that we can assume that Greek was spoken among the families of these aristocrats who have returned. It will also be the case that Greek was no less established among the leading families of Jerusalem that in the scriptorium.
Where something would be written! They would go to a scribe and they would write it for you. Even in the common areas where you would go pay to have someone write a document for you. They were written in Greek. In fact, it was part of the legal system that if you divorced you wife, as a husband you had to write her a bill of divorcement, and it had to be written in Greek.
So, when you read in the New Testament Christ's reference to the husband's writing a bill of divorcement they were doing so at the time Christ was referring to it, they were writing those in Greek, not in Aramaic. Because the 'lingual franca'—the official language of the empire—was Greek. The legal language was Greek. The scribes used Greek.
The bazaars, the marketplace Greek was spoken, even at that lowest level of commerce. It was an important level, but at that level. The tables of the moneychangers in the temple were using Greek. The more you read this material, you'll find the Greek behind every tree. Everywhere you look there's Greek.
Around the middle of the second century before Christ, the Jewish Palestinian priest Upalanus son of John whom Judas had probably sent to Rome…
This was Judas Macabaeous!
…with a delegation in 161 B.C. composed in Greek a Jewish history with the title About the Kings of Judah.
This is about 120 years before Christ!
The Macabeeans came and began to restore Judah to the Jews and spoke Greek. That was the official language 200 years before Christ.
Tiberius by the Sea of Galilee was founded 20 years before Christ was crucified, somewhere in there. They had the best school/academy in teaching Greek in the Middle East outside of Alexandria and Antioch.
The area where Christ grew up, the area where Peter and his brothers worked as fishermen had one of the greatest academies teaching Greek—spoken, written, rhetoric and everything else—in the entire world. Just down the road from where the disciples worked, grew up and everything else.
What this author does—and he's mixing things back and forth in the book—is that when Josephus wrote, one of his competitors was a man by the name of Justus who was educated in Tiberius. Justus lived at the same time as Josephus lived. And Josephus admits in his own work—which he wrote in Greek—that his Greek was very poor compared to Justus, because Justus had been trained at the academy in Tiberius.
Yet, Conder will have us believe that they spoke Aramaic and they might have known some Hebrew, and that Greek wasn't spoken at all or known by them in the 1st centuryA.D.
That's why I raise this point, because it shows that is a false assumption and totally ludicrous.
{continuing in Hengel}
The most important center…
not the best
…of Greek language in Jewish Palestine was, of course, the capital Jerusalem.
Showing that right at the temple they had a Greek secretariat.
The larger cities, primarily Jerusalem, but also Sepphoris…
You don't hear of Sepphoris in Scripture
…in Tiberius. Sepphoris and Tiberius were very close together.
There's a good chance that Christ worked in Sepphoris to build it as a carpenter with his father Joseph. Sepphoris was built during the lifetime of Christ before Christ began His ministry. It was a city-state where the mother tongue was Greek, founded by the Romans.
Christ probably worked there as middle-class skill. Carpenters were not paid lower class people. Upper middle class as a trade, a craftsman.
It had Greek schools, which presumably went as far as elementary training and rhetoric. An institution like the temple must have had a well-staffed Greek secretariat for more than two centuries before Christ.
From the beginning, those trained in such schools with a higher social status gained particular significance with the Jesus movement. At the very moment Christ began to preach those with the higher education and social status who read and wrote in Greek, were attracted toward Christ as their Messiah.
Mathew, Mark, Luke, John—Luke was later—all of them, I'm convinced, could speak and write Greek, even though their native tongue was Aramaic, because their Hebraism was built into the Greek. I other words, their mother tongue was Aramaic in Semitic language. You wrote in Greek, your second tongue, the way you use the verb in relationship to the subject will be different.
Like Germans today, if you study German you will find that they invert the subject and the verb. They switch them around, so for someone who's mother tongue is German and writes in English, if they're not very careful they will invert those and put the verb first and it sounds funny and awkward.
Of course, it isn't our tongue; this is what Hebraism is in the Greek, so it proves that the Greek of the New Testament was written by those whose mother tongue was Aramaic, but who could also write and understand and speak Greek. It wasn't written by those whose mother tongue was Greek necessarily. Hundreds of years later, hundreds of miles away, showing that the New Testament Greek could not have been fake. One of the characteristics of language that's so important.
We may assume that Jesus Himself was a building craftsman, belonged the middle class—and even to a greater degree his brother James—was capable of carrying on a conversation in Greek.
The synoptic tradition presupposes without further ado that He could talk with the captain from Capernaum, Pilate, and the --- Phoenician woman (Mark 7:27).
The situation of His native Nazareth on the border of Galilee and five kilometers from Sepphoris…
That's less than five miles, because a kilometer is shorter! It was just down the road.
…the old capital of the region offered a variety of possibilities of contacts with non Jews. Possibly as a building craftsman, Jesus worked on the re-building of Sepphoris.
Judea, Samaria and Galilee…
So, not just Galilee, but Judea and Samaria; that pretty well covers it.
…were bi-lingual or better, tri-lingual areas. While Aramaic was the vernacular of ordinary people, and Hebrew the sacred language of religious worship and of scribal discussion, Greek had largely become established as the linguistic medium of trade, commerce, administration, etc.
As I mentioned before, Peter and his brothers were in the fishing industry right down the lake from Sepphoris and Tiberius. That was, in fact, the headquarters of the fishing industry for that whole region where Peter grew up. Of course, Matthew was a tax-collector; a well-educated Levite, who got your money.
The constant discovery of new inscriptions confirms this picture of Palestine.
This was translated in '89, so to this very day the more archeologists dig up, they find the Greek inscriptions on tombs, Greek records, Greek everything 200 years before Christ all the way down to where the settlements were forced out by the Romans, way down to the period of Christ. The same may be also true of Pella, where the Christians fled in 56A.D. when they were told to flee Jerusalem. Pella is right up there by Galilee.
The only city-state Voleis, founded by Antipas in Galilee (???) Tiberius and Sepphoris, they were completely encircled by the territories of the Hellenized cities of the (???), Tyre, and Sidon in the West and Northwest by (???) Caesarea Philippi (???) in the Northeast and Southeast, and finally by (???} and Gabba, a military settlement founded by Herod in the South.
So, you can't get away from mother-tongue Greek-speaking areas all around Christ, at the time of Christ, quite a few years before and during His lifetime, and after. There's no way to get around it.
Another Hellenistic city found by the Ptolemies, which disappeared when it was conquered by the Hasmoneans…
The Maccabeeans
…was (???) at the south end of Lake Tiberius….
the Sea of Galilee
…When Antiochus III captured it in 220 B.C…
They were Greek-speaking when they broke off from Alexander the Great
…it was as significant fortress. Because of it's Greek name (???) the Jewish Magdala, around four miles north of Tiberius on the same lake seems to have been a Hellenistic foundation as a center of the fishing industry.
This is what led me to the connection between Peter, the fishing industry in the Greek. There's Greek all over the place.
The best way to learn language is to hear language as you're growing up. In the home you know the Aramaic, and you go to school you may learn the Hebrew for the sacred language, but if you're out playing with kids in your neighborhood and they speak Greek, what are you going to pick up? Greek! The best time is when you're 3-6 years-old.
When we lived in a Spanish-speaking area in South Pasadena years ago our little kids started speaking Spanish and we thought, great, this is fantastic! But they were cursing! When we found out, we had to get rid of the Spanish. The point is, how easy it is for youngsters to pick up a language; that's the best time; it's natural. Kids pick up and mimic accents, nothing you can do about that.
In economic terms, Galilee was to a large extent dependent on a completely Hellenized Phoenician cities, especially (???) and Tyre. The cemeteries bear record of this between Nazareth and Haifa….
Haifa is on the coast
Greek inscriptions when Phoenician nobility is married.
We can also draw conclusions and go right through this background for the 'Jesus Movement.'
Among the twelve disciples of Jesus, two—Andrew and Philip—bear purely Greek names. In the case of two others, the original Greek name has been Aramized. That is, it's probably a short form for Theadoris or something similar. And Bartholomew derives from (???).
The blind beggar Bartomus, from (???) in Jericho, who becomes a follower of Jesus can also be mentioned in this connection. Such Greek names are often attested for Jews in Palestine and Egypt.
One of the reasons I'm reading so much is that this material won't be available to brethren, but if I can read as much as possible, then those who hear it will be able to go back over it and reinforce the points that are being made.
With exemplarity method, Garatison has been able to interpret Matt. 11:7 as a specific polemic…
that's an attack
…against Antipas. And as a support for the circle of John the Baptist by using coins minted at the foundation of Tiberius, and the reed depicted on them.
So, the very saying that Jews about the 'broken reed,' that His ministry would be such that He wouldn't break the reed, ties in with the very fact that Antipas was ruling at that time. The coin had that saying on it, and anybody writing, say a hundred years later, wouldn't have known this. Proving that it was written at that time, because Antipas was out of office by 38A.D. It had to have been written from 30-38—somewhere in there or earlier.
Another piece of internal evidence that the material was not fake, it wasn't written by pagans over in Greece, Egypt, Rome or anyplace else, but by Greek-speaking Jews at the time of Christ during His ministry and certainly after.
The Hellenized cities like Tiberius and Sepphoris play no part in the Gospels….
In other words, the term Tiberius is only used once; nothing significant.
…Tiberius appears only in the Gospel of John, which was written from a Jerusalem standpoint and sometimes has an almost aristocratic character.
Outside Galilee, according to Mark, Jesus visits only the regions of Tyre and Sidon lying outside the real city-states and the villages of the territory of Caesarea and Philippi.
The city by Philip is capital of (???) in place of the older Pinius.
According to the place names in the Gospels, Jesus avoided the larger cities. The larger cities were of Greek-speaking mother-tongue.
So, he says that Christ avoided those areas, and yet, He went through the small villages where they spoke their native tongue Aramaic, and also spoke Greek.
Yet, within two decades, primitive Christianity became markedly a city religion.
It had to have been written in Greek from the beginning, because those who only knew Greek as their mother-tongue knew it well.
The Christian movement picked up great currency in the cities of Greek-speaking areas within two decades of Christ's death.
It wasn't written in Aramaic and translated. It wasn't written in Hebrew and translated. It was written in Greek to begin with by the apostles. More proof! This really blew me away when I read this:
(???) for the primitive Christianity, however, was the amazingly rapid and intensive effort and effect of the new message of the Greek-speaking Hellenists in Jerusalem and the proclamation of the message if Jesus beyond the bounds of Israel, which began…
This is the proclamation of the message of Jesus, and this was a written proclamation.
…as early as the 30s as a result of this fact.
Of the fact that it was in Greek! So, by the mid 30s the father and mother of Timothy had the Gospel accounts in their home. I'll prove that to you in just a minute. They had written accounts of Matthew and some of the other original apostles shortly after the death of Jesus Christ. So, it began to spread in written form very early. It knocked everybody's ears out at home.
In all events Peter must have been bi-lingual otherwise he could not have engaged both successfully in missionary work outside Judea, from Antioch to Corinth to Rome.
It is remarkable that Luke does not know of Peter having any problems with language. Seeing connection with Cornelius, this arises for him only in the case of Paul before the crowd in Jerusalem and Tribune Claudius (???).
Then he goes on to refer to Philip who came out of the group around Stephen who preached in the coastal cities that were Greek-speaking. Brethren, we follow the New Testament and we just haven't seen it before, but it was there all the time.
Now I will get on to the written part of it. The assertion that it couldn't have been written because they didn't have the wax tablets. To show that was false:
2-Timothy 4:13—Paul speaking to Timothy: "When you come, bring the chest that I left in Troas with Carpus, and the books—especially the parchments."
This was written in 57-58A.D. and Paul was just about to get out of prison. He left the manuscripts in Troas, because that's where he was arrested by the Romans in 65A.D. three years earlier. So, he spent time in a Roman prison and is about to be let out. In fact, this appears from the New Testament experience, but before he disappears he writes Timothy and asks him to bring this material.
If Ernest Martin is right—and I think he is—the cloak here is not something you wear. It's like a briefcase, a securing case for the codices and parchments. It's like a briefcase, a special case to carry around this material to protect it.
The word for books is 'biblia' and it means book in the truest sense, a codices. It was not in scroll form, but they were sheets bound together in book form or were about to be bound together in book form. The word for parchments is 'membrana.' I don't know if I'm saying it right or not, but it's plural meaning something taken from an animal skin that is processed so you can right on it.
In 67A.D. Paul is saying to Timothy, 'We're gathering the epistles that we have,' that the risen Christ has inspired them to gather together and begin the form of the canon of the New Testament. The rest of it came from Peter—not entirely—but he writes at the same time from Babylon and then particularly he wishes the brethren to be placed in remembrance. As (???) pointed out, you cannot keep someone in remembrance unless it's written and do it right.
You couldn't keep someone in remembrance with oral form, but there's no reason for it being in oral form, oral tradition as opposed to being written.
So, they were writing on the pieces of animal skin… By the way, Pergamon in Asia Minor is an area where parchment was invented in 200B.C. Of course, the Pergamos Church was one of the churches listed in the book of Revelation. Concerning the book, the codex:
It was the invention of the codex in the 1st centuryA.D. …
Especially the parchment codex
…and made it possible to produce many or all the books of the Bible in a single volume. The role of the Christian Church and its development is of interest. It was the victory of the Church, which led to the dominance of the codex that had been used by Christians from the very beginning over the scroll format. From the very first they started using the sheets of parchment.
As far as ink, they probably used a non-metallic ink that was made from soot from the olive oil lamp and a solution of gum resin.
Some kind of oil! I was very easy to make the ink, very durable on parchment, which of course, was used.
As far as writing instruments, it wasn't like the feather that we see used in colonial times. It was like a draftsman's pen; where you use a little store of ink at the bottom where the quill would be split. When you draw with it, you get this incredibly consistent line that comes out of that little well in the instrument. That's what they were using. Where it was split, it was in a form that they could write with. They didn't go out and pull a feather out of pheasant and then write. This was very sophisticated stuff. They didn't carve in stone. It wasn't a waxed tablet that John's father Zacharias wrote on. It was parchment. Very sophisticated.
The formation of the text itself…
And this will tie in with 2-Tim. 3:13-17. This is actual beginning proof that it was written from the beginning, 26A.D. when Christ began to preach at the Sermon on the Mount. It's also proof that Timothy had this material from a child over in Asia Minor in Galatia.
2-Timothy 3:15: "And that from a child you have known the Holy Writings, which are able to make you wise unto salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for doctrine, for conviction, for correction, for instruction in righteousness so that the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work" (vs 15-17).
I've always assumed that this was Hebrew Old Testament. Not so! Paul is referring to the Greek New Testament that Timothy had known since he was an infant; that's what it means "…a child…"—since he was a baby but no longer nursed. A child that no longer at his mother's breast. From the time he was two or three years old, he knew of these Scriptures. He had knowledge of them.
The word for Scripture is 'graphe.' In the New Testament it only refers to sacred Scripture. It's very important, especially in this context.
Here's a translation by Ferrar Fenton and I think you will see what I mean. This is extremely important.
2-Timothy 3:8 (FF): "But in the same way as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, thus also these men of depraved mind, indifferent about the faith, resist the truth…. [as Darrell Conder does today] …But they shall not proceed very far; for their senselessness will become clear to all, as that of those became. But you [Timothy] followed my teaching…" (vs 8-10).
As you're referring back to Timothy following Paul's teaching from the time Timothy was a young man, and actually saw Paul come through on his first missionary journey in 46A.D. Paul is writing this in 67A.D. but he's referring back to Timothy's youth. Timothy is probably 34-years-old at this time, probably born during Christ's physical ministry or shortly after He was crucified and resurrected.
"…with the instruction, the guidance, the resolution, the faith, the forbearance, the love, the endurance, under the persecutions and in the sufferings which assailed me in Antioch…" (vs 10-11).
You Timothy are eyewitness of these things; you as a young man saw what I, Paul, went through. You as a young man know that I'm telling you the truth.
"…and in Iconium, and in Lystra… [Timothy was from Lystra] …from all which persecutions the Lord rescued and delivered me. But, however, all those who wish to live religiously in Christ Jesus will be persecuted; while depraved men and juggling cheats will progress towards what is worse—deceivers and deceived. But you remain in what you learnt and believed, knowing from who you learnt; and that from an infant you have known the holy scriptures, the power persuading your into salvation, through belief in the teaching of Christ Jesus.…" (vs 11-15).
The thing that Paul is telling us in writing to Timothy is that from the time that Timothy was an infant he had the sheets, the letters, the parchment that were the Gospel of Matthew or one of the other apostles. From the time he was an infant, Timothy knew of the teaching of Jesus Christ. You're not going to find the teaching of Christ in the Old Testament. Christ went to the Old Testament and taught it by Himself. But the doctrine of Christ was only revealed when He sat down on the Mount and began to teach and it began to be written and was passed around.
So, it's early as 333-35A.D. that the Gospels in Greek were in Asia Minor. Timothy's father was Greek and his mother was Jewish. The family wasn't proselytized by the Jews because Timothy had to be circumcised when Paul brought him into Paul's ministry and took him on the road on their missionary journeys. As a young man Timothy[transcriber's correction] was circumcised, probably in his late teens or early 20s.
We're not talking about a family who had a Hebrew tradition. We're talking about a Greek father, a Jewish mother, and when Timothy was a baby had the Gospels in their home and we're studying the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Timothy went with Paul; he was the one who was circumcised as a young man showing to verify the fact that this was not the Old Testament.
(Go to Track #2)
I ran across while translating Galatians recently, which is a very important book and is vital to understanding Romans.
I ran across something very profound in Galatians 3:1: "O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you into not obeying the Truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ, crucified, was set forth in a written public proclamation?"—for all to read!
It's very important to realize that Paul had been writing to the Galatians in 54A.D., and it's talking about the time in 46A.D. on their first missionary journey when they were first being converted, when they first heard the Gospel.
At that time they had the written Gospel of Christ's crucifixion before them. They were reading it. The phrase "…before whose eyes…" is very important. This is from:
From Nida in his Lexicon of the Greek New Testament in reference to Gal. 3:1:
It would be wrong to assume that the phrase refers to some kind of theatrical demonstration. The portrayal mentioned here was evidently a vivid verbal description.
The very fact that the word 'graphe' is used here in "…a written public proclamation" in the Greek shows that the verbal proclamation of Christ was coming from those who had written down an eye-witness account, and they got it from the writings. Paul left writings with them; first account writings of the early apostles in 46A.D.
Verse 8: "Now in the Scriptures, God seeing in advance that He would justify the Gentiles by faith…"
Same word—'graphe'—that Paul uses for the Scriptures. From the very second, the very minute, the very hour that both Gospel accounts were written down in Greek, they became sacred Scripture God breathed by God the Father! Of course, Jesus Christ was there for three years to edit and put it together before He was crucified and resurrected.
Even then He was there in spirit to guide them into the canonization and writing the rest of the New Testament in Greek! When I found out about this and it sent chills up and down my spine!
I won't belabor this point, but just to make a point about the Sermon on the Mount. The setting in Matt. 5 is 26A.D. and the following year around Feast of Tabernacles time. Christ was beginning His public ministry; He's sitting on the mount (v 1) to teach His disciples. This was just above Tiberius apparently, and up toward Capernaum. It was probably very close to Tiberius where the Greek academy/school was; very close to Greek-speaking Sepphoris, very close to where Christ grew up in Nazareth, right at the edge of the Sea of Galilee.
Matthew 5:17: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill."
We understand that it's His intent to teach the true intent of the meaning of God's purpose and plan that was partially revealed in the Old Testament and carries over into the New Testament.
Verse 18: "For truly I say to you, until the heaven and the earth shall pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no way pass from the Law until everything has been fulfilled."
Actually the phrase here covers the writings, not just the Law, but the Law, the Prophets and the Writings/Psalms; the entire Old Testament!
He would not have said, "…one jot or one tittle…" except the fact that it's referring to the Hebrew, not the Greek Old Testament. He uses the phrase "…jot or tittle…"
- jot—'jaht' in Hebrew
- tittle—an ornamentation in Hebrew
Some think it's a fancy ornamentation dressing up each consonant. But not so! If you're referring to the way it's pronounced, the pronunciation of the Hebrews, the accentuation of the Hebrew.
Christ is, in other words, saying that at that point in time in 26A.D. in the fall of the year, He was putting His stamp of approval on the Hebrew text that was complete. He wanted it be carried on down to our time.
The very city that preserved this Hebrew text from this point on was Tiberius, just a few miles down from the mountain from where He was speaking. So, He was also prophesying. He was also thrusting out of the picture the Septuagint, Old Testament Greek.
Bill Dankenbring and many others insist that Septuagint is the proper Old Testament to use. Christ could not have referred to the Septuagint in this context, because He used 'a jot or tittle' from the Hebrew.
Also, at this very moment that the New Testament is being written, as Jesus said these things, Matthew wrote them down. So, we had the beginning of the Greek New. We have the solidification of the proper text for the Old, and would go on forever until heaven and earth passes, and we have a blessing upon the Greek coming in now to complete the message.
As the Hebrew was brought together by Ezra and Nehemiah in about a 70-year period, the Greek was brought together in the New Testament within a 70-year period from 30-100A.D. God always works in those patterns.
As the Hebrew had a tradition and a history that developed over 300-400 years that solidified the text, the Greek would have the same thing in Asia Minor up until the end of the 4th centuryA.D. As the Hebrew was copied over and over in Tiberius up until the 1400s, so would the Greek be copied by Greek monks for a thousand years on Mt. (???)
See the parallels and patterns there that God has worked out. In other words, the Tiberian Nazarites became the printing press until the printing press was invented. Someone had to re-write the manuscript. It took about ten years to redo the Old Testament, and there were huge codices. I've seen a facsimile of one over at Andrews University. They're huge! The even let me check it out and take it home.
That's the Hebrew of the (???) of 1105 in Southern Germany. It took ten years to produce one of those and keep it going. So, for generations, families did this—political families—and were chased all over the world.
The Greek was preserved, not under duress the same way, in the Byzantine Empire because it was the logical place to preserve it, among those who were Greek-speaking. But a special thing happened among the Greeks. One of the criticisms that Conder has of the Greek is this:
He says that it's corrupt because these Greek monks were pagan bastards who didn't know God, didn't know this. He goes through the rhetoric and the adjectives and everything. Then he draws the conclusion that God wouldn't have these people preserve His text, because why would God use pagan's to preserve His text.
That's Conder's straw man! It has nothing to do with whether they did or didn't. The problem is that there 4,000 manuscripts of the Byzantine New Testament that all agree with each other except for a few points.
Conder tries to make you believe that the Greek manuscripts don't agree, and couldn't have been copied faithfully. That surely these monks would have introduced all kinds of pagan doctrine and continue the fabrication all the way down. So:
- How do we know that Jesus really lived?
- How do we know this is the Truth?
- How do we know anything?
So, everything is tossed up in the air and when our brethren come in contact with this book and read it, it's overwhelming at first.
Don't let it be overwhelming; it's not! It's a piece of junk in that sense. It's not well-written and the man is so confused that the confusion shows up in his writing.
I would hope that he would go away and leave us alone. I don't think he will, so we just have to stand up and combat it. Let me give us a few simple principles to show that the text was faithfully copied for a thousand years.
The monks who copied the text were not liturgical priests in the Greek Orthodox Church. The way the Greek Orthodox Church viewed and treated priests, their hierarchy was totally different than the way the Latin Roman Church viewed, founded and used their ministry. They were not teachers, they didn't enter into teaching, they didn't enter into any debate philosophically or any other way within the Greek Orthodox community.
All they did is copy manuscripts over and over again for a thousand years. If they had been teachers, there would be the tendency, as it was in the Hebrew, to bring in your teaching. That wasn't there with the Greek.
If they had been involved in using the Greek in their liturgy, well then, as the Church changed and the liturgy changed, they would be tempted to redo the Greek to match the liturgy. That pressure wasn't there in the Greek.
If they had been in the area where they were running from pillar to post, had been all over the place in this context, you would think that maybe something would be lost. But not so, nothing was lost. In other words, there was no incentive for them to do anything but faithfully copy as scribes the Greek New Testament down to the point of the invention of the printing press when Protestantism and the Reformation took over the Hebrew Old and the Greek New. It was printed from that printing and became the translation for the English Old and New Testaments through Tyndale and the German through Luther.
But the English is far more important. The Germans failed in that effort. That's one of the reasons why it wouldn't have change.
Remember when I said that the Greeks from the time Alexander the Great, the Greek language had been well-defined. The syntax, the grammar, the long history of writing, dictionaries and everything; that is extremely important in any language, to standardize the language.
There's another reason why the words wouldn't change over a period of years. Why the New Testament would need to be consistent. The Greek words didn't change, the meaning didn't change from one Greek word to another. Grammar didn't change, because they had the dictionaries and lexicons there.
What happens if you don't have it all, and you come in and look at the Greek like Origin did? Look like the Greek like Clement did? And the Alexandrian experience of 130, 40, 50, 60, 70A.D.
The very men who corrupted the New Testament that Conder talks about. They didn't have those dictionaries, didn't use them if they had them at their disposal. When Origin saw, for example the golden rule, he said that this was incomplete and didn't fit his philosophy, so he would go in and re-write it to complete the thought.
No respect for the Scripture at all! The Greek monks viewed the Scripture as Holy Scripture, sacred text, that was inspired and set from the beginning that they had no right to change!
Why were some of the dictionaries written in Lexicons in the 1st & 2nd centuryA.D.? The Greek works? To combat and address the very problem that these Gnostics were creating!
On the negative side is greater verification that the veracity of our Greek is truly good. It's something we can trust in, and we don't have to worry about it being something that we can't trust in.
Let must just sum up the basic periods:
26-30A.D.—the teaching of Christ; from the very beginning the apostles were writing. From the very time they were writing down the sayings of Jesus. In red letter Bibles they're the quotes. They are written by men who heard them with their ears and wrote them down. God breathed!
The events that were added in later about the life of Christ could only have been added if Christ's life was fulfilled. The very fact that Paul mentions the crucifixion and the teachings of Jesus Christ in Galatians and also in Timothy shows that from the very beginning the story of the crucifixion and the resurrection, the sayings and the life of Jesus were not fabricated hundreds of years later. They were circulating as soon as Christ was crucified.
They were written and passed around the Hellenistic Greek world. New converts, like Timothy's parents, had them in their homes all over Galatia, all over the world. They were spread about the entire Roman Empire and the Parthian Empire so that when the disciples were sent to Parthia—the 'lost' ten tribes—they were sent when Paul was sent to the uncircumcised, many of those documents were already there. They were reproduced by the hundreds and hundreds.
About 68A.D.—then we have the codification coming in from the death of Christ to the major codification under Paul and Peter. Bringing the books together to form most of the New Testament.
About 70A.D. Of course the Gospel of John and 1st, 2nd, & 3rd John were written later. That was added into it.
95-100A.D.—the book of Revelation finally sealed it off. Again direct quotes of Jesus Christ speaking—the risen Christ—and the very last thing that Christ said: If you add to or take away from any of this, then the curse is upon you!
100-400A.D.—there was the tradition of copying and re-copying until the traditional Greek testament of that area is what we see to this day, completed. It had been complete since 100A.D.
But for hundreds of years it has been used within Asia Minor. When the Greek Orthodox Church split away from Rome it was preserved in the Greek printing press in (???) for the next thousand years. All they did was print it.
One of the main questions I had, and one of the objections that Conder has, as well, I:
- How would these men know?
- How would there be a scribal tradition of preserving and passing on information within Asia Minor, if that's true, for the next 2-300 years?
This is what I think happened: Remember Paul teaching in the School of Tyrannus for two years at Ephesus?
What Paul had setup under the inspiration of Jesus Christ was an academy to teach those who were in Asia Minor who would be the redactors of Scripture; the preserving of the Scripture.
There's a purpose why Luke recorded. All Asia and the province of Asia Minor heard the message. There's a reason why Christ was pictured as being in the midst of the seven churches in Revelation. That theory is where the Ephesian text was preserved, what we call the Greek New Testament.
Paul was teaching those who would begin to reproduce and preserve the canon. The money was there, the technology was there, the zeal was there for the scribes to do so. Then when John came along in that area under Timothy, it continued on and was passed on for the next 2-300 years until the Greek Orthodox Church picked it up and sealed it for the next thousand years until the time of Tyndale and the printing press and the very Scriptures we have today.
There's a lot more that could be said. I know that a lot was said here, but time is short. We have a lot of enemies out there who are doing everything they can to bring us down and take us away from Jesus Christ.
At this time of the year it's wonderful to get together and reaffirm not only our beliefs, but arm ourselves and sharpen our swords so that we can go out and:
- fight the battle in defending Christ and God the Father
- fight the good faith
and come out of this depressing time of Christmas, as well! This time of the year is very depressing and it's good to get together with brethren and be reassured. I was 15-years-old when I gave up Christmas. I heard the broadcast and I remember walking in blizzard in Michigan with all the Christmas lights and songs, and I had to give up all this Christmas stuff. I almost flinched right there. I didn't and I'm not going to flinch now!
Conder, we're after you!
Scriptures from The Holy Bible in Its Original Order, A Faithful Version (except where noted)
Scriptural References:
- Acts 6:1
- Acts 9:29
- 2 Timothy 4:13
- 2 Timothy 3:15-17, 8-15
- Galatians 3:1, 8
- Matthew 5:17-18
Scriptures referenced, not quoted: Matthew 5:1
Also referenced: Books:
- The Hellenization of Judea in the First Century After Christ by Martin Hengel
- The King James Version Defended by Edward Hills
- Lexicon of the Greek New Testament by Nida
CF:bo
Transcribed: 7/4/21
