A speech by Theodore Letis

Introduction

I want to start off by telling you a little story that happened to me while I was in Berlin last week. I was there attending an academic conference at an ancient German university there, the International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, and I was addressing a session dealing with biblical manuscripts. Before I got to the meeting, I had to check into a very small, a obscure little hotel in what used to be East Berlin because of economic reasons I really couldn’t afford to stay in the big hotel with the big boys. Turns out I didn’t mind that at all because upon checking in, I met one of the most interesting people I’ve met in a long time. The desk clerk was a young Jewish German girl who, when I told her that my profession was as an historian, she just seemed to open up like a flower and began to talk at a very rapid rate of speed with a great deal of emotion and sincerity, and started telling me about the history of her family in Berlin. And I immediately perked up my ears because modern history is not really my specialty, but oral history is something I’ve done a great deal with, and this is what this woman was giving me. And she pointed out the window and she said, that house around the corner there that you can barely see, that used to belong to my relatives. And in the late 1930s, Hitler ran my family out of their home, and he took over their property. And she said, and then after the war, the Marxist Russians moved into the city, and then they took possession of her family’s property. And she said, it’s only now in the 21st century that her family is beginning to sort out all the details with the present German government to have to reclaim what was rightly her family’s property. One thing to read about something like that in a book, but to speak to somebody to whom it happened, and to have to point out the property to you. And the very locale word took place brings an immediacy of that historical experience into your own point of reference that’s unparalleled. And I thought about that the whole trip, and I was very thankful that I stayed in that very obscure hostel in what used to be East Berlin as a result of that exchange. And I thought as I was coming here this morning that it’s a kind of apt metaphor for what I want to talk about. Because most of us who were born in the 20th century have lived during a period of most unprecedented transition where the Bible went from being the legitimate possession of the church, broadly speaking, collectively speaking.

Commercial interests

The Bible went from being in the possession of the church as her birthright, as her covenant document, into the hands of commercial landlords. It was a very subtle movement that began at the turn of the 20th century and is now in complete full swing. And just as much as that German Jewish girl’s family had her property taken away from them and repossessed by illegitimate landowners, the Bible now has been illegitimately taken out of the church and is in the possession of commercial interest, particularly the English Bible. As a matter of fact, there is no parallel for this anywhere else in the world to speak of. It is a uniquely, not even a British phenomenon, it is a uniquely American phenomenon. And the reason that this has taken place is because American Christians have more disposable income than they know what to do with. And they have no sense of perspective on their disposable income, disposable income, because they don’t know how the rest of the world lives. They may watch a National Geographic program on television now and again, they may watch a history program, an anthropological study on television, or something, or read a National Geographic, but that’s as close as they come, most of them, to understanding how the Christian world operates in the rest of the world. And one of the results is that Christianity in America is held up to scorn and ridicule by the secular media.

Let me give you two examples. I don’t think that there are two more popular publications in America than Time Magazine and USA Today. This is a cover story from USA Today that came out in 1998. The title of it is The Bible Business. And the first line in the article says, for those who wonder whether the Bible has an answer to every question, there soon may be a Bible for every questioner. And on that cynical note, the article goes on to talk about the commercialization of Scripture and the multi-million dollars that are involved in the many, many, many, many different editions that are now being promoted and publicized. A year later, the theme was taken up again in Time Magazine, May of 1999, with a pithy little comment, again, very cynical. His way, your way. And it goes on to delineate the fact that there’s now a custom-fitted, tailored Bible for every niche of American society. Again, the article begins very cynically. In the beginning was the word, but these days it doesn’t seem to be enough.

And so, you see, we might be very comfortable with this situation. We may have been convinced by overwhelming advertising slogans and our friends and pastors and TV personalities and radio personalities that this situation is not bad. It’s actually good that there are so many possibilities in understanding the word of God in the English language. But I can guarantee you that the secular world has a better perspective on it. And when Jesus said that the lies of this world are wiser than the elect, I think this comes close to what he had in mind. That sets the situation.

How we got here

But what I’d like to do in a little bit of time I have here is give you a really quick panoramic sketch as to how we got here in the American church. How did we get to this situation?

Early church

I want to start by talking about the early church. And I like what our brother had to say about the fact that Jesus didn’t hang around with the religious establishment. He went to the rank and file. He went to the streets. The poor heard him gladly, Scripture says, because he was offering them the keys to the kingdom of God. And if you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose. And you’ve got everything to gain. And they heard him gladly, whereas the established religious orders did not. When he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, and he did, by the way, in spite of the fact that the New American Standard in the book of Luke omits that detail in its earlier editions, they censor corrected it. But when the New American Standard came out initially and for at least 20 years, if you turn to the book of Luke, there was no ascension. They left it out. But in spite of that, he did ascend. He promised his disciples, his followers, that it was very important for him to leave because if he didn’t go, he couldn’t send the comfort of the Holy Spirit. He promised that when the Holy Spirit was poured out would lead the church into all truth. And that is a promise that is absolutely assured as Christ promised that he will come back literally in the clouds as he left. The church has not failed to be led installably by the Holy Spirit right up to this moment in time. In spite of the fact of waywardness, in spite of the fact of error, in spite of the fact of hirelings and false shepherds coming into the church, the church has not failed to follow the path that the Holy Spirit has led her right up to this moment in time. And one of the assurances that we have that this has taken place is the fact that the Holy Spirit led the apostolic community to compile the actual words and the actual event of the life of Christ and put it in written form.

First three centuries

And for nearly 300 years, martyr after martyr after martyr shed their blood to make certain that the unbroken transmission of that account was kept in violence and was transmitted with all fidelity and all accuracy. So much so that Tertullian said it was the very blood of the saints of the martyrs that was the seed of the church. The more they killed the Christian believers, the more the church multiplied. And the more that those doctrines were believed when they were read in various gatherings and congregations, right up until about the fourth century. Now, during this time, however, there were all kinds of attempts to corrupt the text, the text that recorded to us the life of Jesus and his teachings. Church historian Eusebius tells us that a man by the name of Marcion, decimated the entire New Testament when he got a hold of certain of the manuscripts and didn’t accept any of the Gospels except for Luke, and Luke, he greatly abbreviated. That’s something we know that took place and we know that there were other heretical groups that when they got their hands on the Christian manuscript, the Christian sources, they altered them, they changed them, they added things. And when the Gnostic came along, they were so enamored with the success of Christianity that they tried to emulate their books, their sacred texts, their canon. And so that you have any number of Gnostic books that were composed during these first 300 years. Here’s a book dealing with the so-called Gnostic Gospels, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas. There’s a whole collection of them in the Nag Hammadi Library that was found last century, mid-century. You can check them out of the library and read them. They’re nothing like Scripture, but they have the apostles’ names attached to them. They’re all pseudoprography because of the false book, but it’s another form of an attempt to corrupt and lead the church astray. So you have heretics changing the correct text and altering it. You have heretics creating additional texts, trying to confuse and trying to lead astray. Not unlike what happened here in the United States, once it became founded as a country when you had various cults like the Jehovah’s Witnesses coming along, the Mormons coming along and creating their own texts, their own Bible, the Book of Mormons. It’s the same principle, cyclical, happening over and over again. Nothing new here.

But by the fourth century, something very, very important happened. The church ceased to be persecuted and the Roman state finally recognized Christianity. And three important things happened.

Number one, the canon of Scripture was defined for the New Testament. The Old Testament as well, but the New Testament is what I have in focus at the moment. The 27 books that we know were legitimized, ratified, and canonized by the fourth century so that there was no longer any dispute. If there had been prior to that and there was a fluidity to the canon up to then, that fluidity was passed, the canon was defined once and forever. 27 books, no more, no less.

The Council of Nicea met in the pressure cooker situation of the debate with the Aryans who challenged whether Jesus Christ was fully God or whether he was created and derived from God, God in some sense, but not completely fully God. A diminished kind of God. At the Council of Nicea, it was agreed upon. The church collectively said Jesus Christ is not only God, but absolute God, co-equal with the Father, full deity, and full humanity equally. Christ was defined once and for all that silenced the Aryans, that silenced the Gnostics, that aesthetic, that silenced every Christological error that had fermented 300 years prior to the Council of Nicea.

The third thing that took place in the fourth century at the cessation of persecution was the defining and the establishing of what was the correct text of the New Testament. Keep in mind that the canon was defined, 27 books, in Athanasius’ Easter letter, but the text of Scripture, the canonical form of each book was also ratified at this time. And how do we know that? We know that because from this period on, from the fourth century forward, with the cessation of persecution, one form of text emerged, one canonical form of every canonical book emerged, and was read in the churches of Asia Minor, read in the Greek Orthodox Church and throughout Byzantium for over 1500 years, one form of text. Every other rival form of text was marginalized, pushed to the side, was not reproduced in the Scriptoria throughout the Eastern Empire. Remnants of earlier experimental texts existed or preserved, but they were not copied in the ecclesiastical Scriptoria. One form of canonical text of the canonical books of the New Testament was perpetuated, and that text is found in the lectionary literature of Eastern Orthodox Church. It’s a well-defined text. In the Western Church, a very similar thing took place, the Rome commissioned by Pope Damascus, put together the Volgata Latina, the Latin Bible, and it was very, very similar to the Bible of the Eastern Orthodox Church. And that became the definitive canonical text in Latin for the Western Orthodox Church.

The 19th century

Now let’s move things up very quickly and bring it up to the 19th century. In the 19th century, just as some of these Gnostic books were found in the 20th century, in the 19th century, certain of these earlier experimental edited manuscripts that were produced prior to the 4th century were discovered.

One was found by Kant Von Tischendorf at a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, St. Catherine’s Monastery. Another was found in the Vatican Library, which folks had known about really since the 16th century. Even Erasmus knew about it. He had over 300 readings from that manuscript given to him by an associate working in the Vatican Library. They knew about the Vatican manuscript, but nobody followed it, nobody copied it, nobody regarded it as significant because it differed so radically from the ecclesiastical text, the canonical text that the Eastern Church had used from the very beginning of the 4th century. But a handful of scholars, some of them English, early on, however, early in the 19th century, German, Grisbach, looked at these two old and radical manuscripts and recognized that in the oldest gospel there was no resurrection account. And when they realized there was no resurrection account in the Gospel of Mark in these two old manuscripts, they decided that on that basis alone they must be seen as more authoritative. You probably wonder why did they think that? Why did they think because they were lacking the resurrection they should be more authoritative? Well, there was an incipient belief in the more liberal wings of the church in the 19th century, really going back to the 18th century during the English Enlightenment when the deists were running rampant all over England, that the supernatural Christ was basically created by the imagination of the church. Certainly he lived, certainly probably was a prophet, but the attending miracles and his resurrection was something that was an addendum, something that was added, an expansion added to who Jesus was on the part of the church. Now, finally scholars had evidence that this probably was the case because the two oldest manuscripts that had ever been discovered in the oldest gospel account, Mark, were lacking the resurrection. So this was proof positive to them that this was the earliest account of who Jesus was before there was an afterthought. Yes, certainly the resurrection still was found in some of the other Gospels, but they were later Gospels. Mark was the earliest and if Mark lacked that ending, that was tangible proof that it may well not have been there originally, that it was an afterthought appended on. So there was all kinds of discussion and debate, heated debate as to whether these manuscripts could now be used to produce an updated English Bible. And by the year 1881, just such an update took place, based primarily on these two manuscripts. There were a lot of conservative churchmen in England who resisted the impulse to do this, but for a hundred years it had been debated and finally the church of England, the climate was right and they caved, and they produced a new English Bible based on a new Greek text founded on these two fourth century manuscripts, lacking the resurrection account in the book of Mark. Now, as you can well imagine, the rank and file of Christians in Great Britain didn’t buy this Bible. I mean, a lot of people purchased it as a novelty, but they didn’t buy it spiritually. They didn’t accept it as authoritative, as substitutions of the Bible that the church of England had used since the 17th century, so-called Authorized Version, commissioned by King James.

American developments

But a counterpart was also produced here in America in 1901. It was called the American Standard Version because it was the American counterpart to this revised version that came out in Britain in 1881 in the New Testament. Again, the ASV, nobody took it seriously. It did not enter the purpose of the majority of the churches. Mostly the most progressive churches used it. The more liberal leaning churches used it. But the rank and file of the conservative, confessional Christians in America, whether they were Lutheran, whether they were Presbyterian, whether they were Baptist, whether they were Anglican, did not accept the RV, did not accept the ASV. But 50 years later, in 1946, what would become, eventually, the National Council of Churches tried one more attempt to put this critical text into the pulpits and into the hands of the rank and file conservatives and mainline churches in America, and so produced what came to be known as the revised Standard Version. I have a copy of it right here. The original revised Standard Version, the entire Bible, 1952. The New Testament came out in 1956. This is it. And true to form, if you can get a copy of this in a library someplace, if you’ll turn to the end of the Gospel of Mark, I’m not going to bother holding this up because you won’t be able to see it from there. You’ll have to take my word for it. But it ends at verse 9. The last 12 verses, dealing with the resurrection and the ascension, are reduced to the most minuscule size, italicized print at the bottom of the page in a footnote, almost illegible. I certainly can’t read it from here. And so the Gospel in the English Bible now is without a resurrection account at the end of the oldest Gospel. That, of course, is probably the most radical aspect of the revised Standard Version, but it’s not the one that caused the most difficulty or the most trouble. What caused the most difficulty was in Isaiah 714, where the committee that worked on this Bible decided that the Hebrew did not mean, behold, a virgin shall conceive, but rather it meant, behold, a young maiden shall conceive. In spite of the fact that Matthew interprets that same passage explicitly as virgin, the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament uses a Greek word that is absolutely explicit, Parthenos, which means virgin. It doesn’t mean young maiden. But that ended up making this probably the most radical and most exceptional Bible that had ever been produced in the English language.

And as a result, it’s sort of a tremendous amount of controversy and resistance from the most fundamentalistic branches of American Christianity. There’s even this wonderfully notorious story of one Baptist preacher holding it up in his pulpit, taking a blow towards to it, and burning it in front of his congregation. I certainly can appreciate his sentiment there.

One of the most interesting and promising developments that took place on the heels of the release of the New Testament portion of the RSV was the fact that the most learned Old Testament professor in the United States at the time, who also happened to be a confessional, Westminster Confession, Presbyterian Calvinist by the name of Oswald Thompson Allis, wrote a book titled, and perhaps you won’t be able to read this either, I had it blown up, but it’s titled, Revision Or New Translation?: a Revised Standard Version of 1946. And here’s a picture of the venerable Oswald Thompson Allis. I want to tell you very briefly a little bit about him, and I promise I won’t go long here. I’ll wrap this up quickly. But O.T. Allis, as he’s better known as, he was born in 1880, died in 1973. This is a very good long life. He got his bachelor’s of science from the University of Pennsylvania, Ivy League School. He got his M.A. from Princeton in 1907, and then he went over to Berlin. He was one of the few American scholars to earn a PhD at that point in American academic life. In 1913, he was awarded by the University of Berlin a PhD in Old Testament study. That absolutely certified him as a colossal in terms of Old Testament study. There was nobody who could stand shoulder to shoulder with OT Allis in terms of his command of Old Testament study. Now in this book, as you can well imagine from the two passages I cited to you, he came to this conclusion. He said:

If by a liberal version is meant a version which represents a lax and liberal attitude to the question of the plenary verbal inspiration and the divine authority of scripture, then RSV is clearly such a version. Sufficient evidence has been given in the preceding pages to show that it is governed by a very different conception of what is meant by an accurate version, from that to be found in the Authorized Version.

Well, that’s a pretty broad and sweeping statement to be made by a bona fide authority with a PhD from Germany. He is not a rabble-rousing fundamentalist. He’s a very careful and non-confrontational academic, and he writes a popular treatise meant to be read by Lehman in his day, came out in 1948, as well as academics, but it was meant to be read by Lehman like you when we were a more literate population which would read things like this. And he’s very forthright. He says, this is a liberal translation. And he gives you the reason throughout the study, and hopefully our institute will be reprinting Allis' book, because there’s been a development that has precipitated the need for O.T. Allis’s judgment to be rediscovered again on the part of a conservative Calvinist, because the very seminary that he taught at for most of his career, he left Princeton in 1929 when Princeton went liberal, and with J. Gresham Machen, he’d founded Westminster Theological Seminary, where I myself was a student for four long years. And it was while he was there that he wrote this treatise critiquing the RSV.

The ESV

Now, ironies of ironies, that institution, Westminster Theological Seminary, has, from its faculty, somebody who is on the committee of a new Bible that has just come out, titled The English Standard Version. Now, the irony that exists here is that the English Standard Version is a Bible that has already been in existence since 1946, or 1952, however you want to look at it. It used to be called the revised Standard Version, but now it is called the English Standard Version. It is the same Bible that O.T. Allis at Westminster Seminary gave an unqualified thumbs down to. It has now been produced by faculty members from Westminster Theological Seminary and is being promoted there very, very heavily. Now, mind you, they have tidied it up, which legitimizes their changing the title of it, so it’s no longer the Revised Standard Version. Frankly, I think they should have been honest and called it the Evangelical Revised Standard Version. That would have been a very honest thing to do, but of course, marketing is key here, and that would not have been as marketable, believe me, as calling it the English Standard Version. This is a bit presumptuous, actually, because what they’re saying is they want this to be the standard Bible in the English language, but if I have anything to do with it, it won’t happen. But if you have any doubts about what I’m saying, if you look on the copyright page, it says the Holy Bible, English Standard Version, is adapted from the revised Standard Version of the Bible, Copyright Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States. Now, what that means is every time we take some of our disposable income and buy one of these Bibles after being coerced by either one of our friends, by a pastoral associate, by some advertising material we receive through the mail, by some internet solicitation, some spam, every time we buy an edition of this evangelicalized RSV, we are supporting the National Council of Churches because they own the copyright to it. I held up to two clippings from Time Magazine and USA Today where the Christian Church is being ridiculed because they keep producing so many editions of the Bible in order to exploit the financial revenue of the Christian church. They see how absurd it is, but this irony is even more than I can handle. The fact that evangelicals, the conservative, confessional Christians should be supporting financially the National Council of Churches is beyond my &radar. I don’t know if you know what the National Council of Churches believes, but it’s an aggregate of churches that ordain women, think that homosexual lifestyle is normal, that advocates the ordination of homosexual, that thinks that abortion is not anything that’s prohibited in scripture, that’s the National Council of Churches. Those are the people who receive revenue every time you purchase this Bible.

So you see we’re living in extraordinarily confusing and perilous times. In our organization, we’re called the Institute for Renaissance and Reformation Biblical Studies, and what we see ourselves as being for the church is a kind of consumer’s advocate on these issues. There is no organization in the world that I know of who will attempt to give you the kind of information that will allow you to educate yourself on this kind of subject, so that you can learn the facts about the history of the transmission of the Bible and not be exploited by manipulative advertising slogans or multinational corporations. And I think it’s time that we have a boycott and quit stroking the egos of Christian faculty members who continuously work on these revision committees to crank out Bible after Bible after Bible. It’s bringing confusion and chaos into the church, and now it’s leading to the financial benefit and enhancement of the National Council of Churches.

I’m right now, forthrightly, right here and now calling for a boycott. Don’t spend any more of God’s money on another Bible. Read the one that you have. Read it carefully, contemplatively, and then read UCB’s history of the Christian church next to it, so you can find out what real Christianity was about when people were being burnt alive in Nero’s garden, because they didn’t want to relinquish copies of the Scripture and how far we are removed from that in this day and age.

Closing

At any rate, I will close by saying I do have a table over there on the way to the lunchroom with several books. This is a book that I’ve written on the subject that I’ve been talking about, not just this Bible, but generally the problem as it exists in the United States. The title of the book is The Ecclesiastical Text. I have a couple of other books, a little booklet here called A New Hearing for the Authorized Version, and I also have a postcard, a little postcard that when you stop by the table, if you want to have a chat with me, I’ll give you this beautiful postcard of Erasmus who gave us our first Greek text, which has our website on it, and I would hope that if this is the kind of subject that interests you, that you’ll come by and talk to me, and even you young people out there, it might be that some of you are going to be called by God to be a textual critic. Girl, boy, man, woman, you might be the one that God will call to go and learn Hebrew, or go and learn Greek, and possibly be another O.T. Allis in your day. And if you think that that might be something that might be a possibility for you, you talk to me because we’d like to encourage you in that direction. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to talking to all of you who have some interest in this subject. Thanks.