Category Image Another Indictment of Modern Academia


9.West sent me this e-mail the other day:

"I heard a Catholic radio show (on the local affiliate) in which the Orthodox were blamed by the good father for Protestants saying "for thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory, forever and ever amen."

I was driving and couldn't take notes but IIRC

1) The oldest bibles (ca. 300) don't have the phrase. The Vatican has these bibles.

2) The early church added it to the liturgy, not clear when

3) The phrase was added to a biblical text in Constantinople ca. 1200 (12th century?) The presumption is a copyist knew it from the liturgy and added it to a biblical manuscript.

4) With the fall of Constantinople to the Ottman Turks in 1453, the Byzantine Greeks scattered throughout Europe, taking these manuscripts with them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople

5) This/these manuscripts ended up influencing the KJV."

I assumed that this was a priest from Catholic Answers, but I've listened to several hours of programming spanning the last week or two, and haven't found the right program. So, perhaps this was some other program. My immediate reaction was that this was probably bogus, but I wasn't terribly concerned. The "why" I was not terribly concerned I'll address below. As it turns out, the accusation is false - just more of the dubious scholarship around things Scriptural. It seems that there are those who are only happy if they can come up with some theory that challenges Christianity and challenges the Church. Truth is not an issue, nor is it terribly important. The important thing is controversy.

I e-mailed a priest in Texas whose writings I've read for probably the last 10 years or so, and was probably instrumental, in many ways, in my conversion to Orthodoxy. A while back he had some blog entries that were to comprise an article he was writing on Bible translations. One of the issues he addressed was the love affair with the Alexandrian texts of the New Testament, because they represented the oldest manuscripts we had. I thought he might have some light to shed on this.

Of course, he did. He pointed out that there were quotes of the Gospel of Matthew that included the doxology that date back to the first century. The oldest is the Didache, which includes the following quote:

"2 And do not pray as the hypocrites, but as the Lord commanded in his Gospel, pray thus: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, as in Heaven so also upon earth; give us to-day our daily bread, and forgive us our debt as we forgive our debtors, and lead us not into trial, but deliver us from the Evil One, for thine is the power and the glory for ever." 3 Pray thus three times a day."

The Didache , of course, is usually dated to about the year 60, so its hardly a 13th century addition.

In addition, we find a similar doxology in the Apostolic Constitutions , which has a somewhat more vague date of somewhere in the 3rd to 5th century. However, this, too, is before the 13th century.

Finally, although I've not find the link yet, St. John Chrysostom has apparently used the doxology, as well, when quoting from the Gospel.

The reason, I suspect, that the Catholic Priest was espousing the theory that the doxology was a later edition, was that he, and whoever developed the theory, were guilty of the logical error that states that the oldest manuscript is necessarily the most accurate. At first blush, this seems a reasonable belief. However, Wilbur Pickering has proposed an interesting alternative to the prevailing theory. Although many scholars debate the validity of his theories, at the very least, a dispassionate observer has to question the validity of the Alexandrian texts.

The final question we need to pose, is why I wasn't overly concerned in the first. place. The reason is that I'm not Protestant. Protestantism has, as one of its 3 basic tenets, the notion of Sola Scriptura. Although the precise definition of this belief varies from denomination to denomination, all denominations agree that only doctrine derived from Scripture is to be binding upon the believer. This, then, would seem to require a pretty solid notion of precisely what is and is not, Scripture. Some of the above links don't exactly bring comfort to those seeking such certainty. Even those denominations who acknowledge that tradition plays a role in their doctrine, see tradition as something apart from Scripture (the somewhat mythical Anglican 3 legged stool sees tradition and reason as something apart from Scripture).

In Orthodoxy, however, we understand tradition to be Scripture "rightly understood" (I believe that is St. Irenaeus). Scripture and Tradition are part of the same thing. So, minor variations in the Scripture don't carry quite the same weight as they would for people who hold Scripture to be supreme. This is not to say that we don't regard Scripture very highly. We do. However, we look to the liturgical tradition, and the teachings of the Fathers, to understand what Scripture means. That pieces of the liturgy might make their way into copies of Scripture is no big deal, because we would use that same liturgy to understand Scripture, and so would know that Jesus Christ believed that God's is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. We would know, because, even if it wasn't in Scripture, it would have been passed down to the Church - which is, after all, both the pillar and ground of truth, and the very body of Christ.

Posted: Saturday - February 16, 2008 at 10:26 PM          

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