The elephant in the room

While the Bible is not specifically a document about history, it is a document rooted in history. This means that the writers may not have been very interested in documenting the history. But it also means that the historical events in there matter.
In addition, it means that the Bible itself is history. It is open to the same study as any other piece of history.
So open your Bible to the Gospel of John, Chapter 8, verse 3. It is a famous section of Scripture -- the woman taken in adultery ("He that is without sin among you, let him first cast the first stone" ).
If you have a good study Bible, take a close look at the beginning of the section. There will be a small angled bracket at the left -- something like this [
In the margin, there's a note that "this passage is not in the oldest and most reliable texts".

Conservative Christians have this mental picture. No one believes it, but everyone acts like they do. The story goes like this.
Moses took a book out of Egypt. It was a large blank journal-type book-- pages and pages of blank paper.
He opened it and wrote "In the beginning, God created...." and kept writing until he finished Genesis, Exodus, and the rest of the Torah. When he was on his deathbed, he handed the book to Joshua, who then wrote Joshua, and handed it to some historian who wrote Judges. It passed down through David, Issiah, and so forth, and ended up in the temple at Jerusalem. Upon the resurrection, someone -- maybe a converted priest? -- gave the book to Mathew, then it went to Mark, and eventually came back to John so that he could write the book of Revelation. When he put the last "Amen" in, it was on the last line of the last page of the book. The text was framed nicely, and fit the book perfectly. Then, the book was handed to the Pope (or someone) who put it in the basement of the Vatican, where it is today
We don't really believe this. But we sure act like we do.
What really happened is a little more ... well... "messy".

Someone wrote the Gospel of John. In truth, we really don't know who. Tradition teaches that it is St. John, the Apostle. But the gospel itself never says. And it's not like there's a signature. In fact, there were many people producing books that were supposed to have been written by the Apostles. There is a Gospel of Peter, one of Judas, one of Barnabas, and even one of Mary Magdalene. So all we really have is a *guess* -- perhaps a good one, perhaps a right one, perhaps an educated one, but still a guess. In fact, most non-evangelical Bible scholars expect that there are 3 authors, not just one.

After it was written, it was taken to Kinko's to get published. Only, then they realized that Kinkos was closed, so they manually copied it by hand. And then they did it again -- perhaps copying the copy. Someone sent the book around to different churches. The churches also made copies.

Time passed. In fact, 300 years passed. Sometimes Bible scholars take this time pretty loosely. They'll say things like "the early church believed...." If you asked "when?", they may say "the 4th century". But that's THREE HUNDRED years. It is like us making a comment on something that happened before Jefferson was born.

So 300 years later, the Roman Emperor Constantine had a problem. The Christians had broken up into several groups (two or three main ones with one or two smaller, splinter groups), and they were fighting.... really, fighting. The emperor had to call out the army a few times.
So the emperor summoned all of the people he considered leaders in the churches and locked them up in a building in a town called Nicaea. This is the group who came up with the famous "Nicaean Creed" ("we believe in God, the Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth..... etc").
One of their side-jobs was to produce/approve/complete/get a set of writings that the churches could all use to standardize this doctrine, so that these fights wouldn't happen any more -- and we see how well that worked ;-)
The Emperor didn't just order them to come up with a set of Scriptures, he offered to pay them for the scribes to copy it. Now, rather than copying from copies, these documents would all be scribed from one set of masters, by a group of professional trained Xerox machines with quills.
And out the other end of this came the Bible -- or at least what we now call the New Testament.

But there are a few problems. Perhaps the biggest is that this was THREE HUNDRED years after the events took place ("before Jefferson was born", right?). And we now know (or we think we do) that the "master" documents those scribes copied weren't right -- or at least they weren't the same as the older texts. Hmmmm. I've never heard that on Sunday morning.

If you look up the verse above in the New International Study Bible, you'll see the note above about the oldest texts. I point this out because the NIV is the center of conservative Christian thought. Take a look at the list of editors sometime. You will see the laundry list of evangelical Christian seminaries represented -- Dallas Theological, Grace Brethren, Asbury, Moody Bible Institute, and so forth. There not one representative from Harvard, Yale, anything Catholic, nor any other "non-conservative" group. This isn't a criticism nor a praise, by the way. It just is.

But think about that. Here are a group of very conservative, evangelical scholars who have devoted their lives to the Bible. All of them (except a couple) go to churches where the doctrinal statement says "Bible is infallible" (or some such words). They had every reason to take the "Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it" approach to the translation. But they couldn't.
I deeply respect there intellectual honesty here. But also, think about what it means. If there was significant enough evidence to convince these guys that certain parts of the Scripture were not accurate (or at least, not original), then the evidence must have been overwhelming, indeed.

So here we are. We think that we know that the Bible approved of by the council at Nicaea -- our Bible -- was not the same as the one written by the writers. This opens a vortex, theologically. Does that mean that the council at Nicaea was right? and the original authors were wrong? Does it mean that the Nicaean group was wrong? And, therefore, that our Bible is wrong?

And of course, if they were wrong about John 8, (and Mt 28; 18-20 -- look it up, it has the same note), then what if they were wrong about John 17? There isn't as much evidence that this was added later. But there are some strange things in it. There is some linguistic weirdness is that you can even see in the English. (For example, Jesus says "come, let us go", then talks for 2 more chapters before everyone gets up to go. That is possible -- believable, even -- but strange. And many scholars think perhaps John 16 and 17 were probably added later).

And if John 16 & 17 were not original, then what about the story of the Centurion's servant, which is different in each of the gospels in which it is told? Were there 2 Centurions? Or is it possible that one story is just a mistaken copy of the other.

Ask any serious Bible expert, and they'll admit to all this (and maybe more). But it's not what we hear on Sunday. On Sunday, the pastor gives us 8 Greek derivations for the phrase "without sin" in the story of the woman in adultery, neglecting to mention that we don't really know which words the original author used or if it was even penned in Greek.

That is the elephant in the room that we keep ignoring -- we just don't know. We say the Bible is inerrant in it's original text, but we don't have that. We can, possibly, put some of it back together by reading the early church writers, but then the best we can do is a patchwork of guesses that may not themselves be original.

more to come