Doubting the Bible has become fashionable among professing Christians who pride themselves on being highly educated and very intellectual. They see their duty as crushing the confidence of their more naïve fellow Christians. These prideful leaders and teachers have been caught up in a movement that has been developing for centuries: The Scholarship of Bible Doubt.
Seminaries
Not all seminaries are necessarily caught up in this movement. And not all professors at any particular seminary are necessarily deceived by this scholarship of doubt. However, many if not most young believers in Jesus who attend seminary to learn God’s word come away being influenced by professors to think that only ignorance allows a believer to truly have confidence in the Bible. Some have even seen enough to convince them to no longer profess to be a Christian.
Let’s take a stand against this Scholarship of Bible Doubt.
Two Questions
Let’s consider two questions:
1. How has God preserved His word?
2. How has Satan attempted to destroy God’s word and people’s confidence in it?
Since the time that the New Testament was being written there were already counterfeit Christian influences coming into the church as well as pagan and ecclesiastical and governmental attacks on the disciples of Jesus from outside of the church.
Constantine
Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century AD declared his form of “Christianity” to be a state religion. He merged the new religion with the power of the state as well as with his power of Pontifex Maximus over the pagan priesthood. He used the power of the state to persecute other forms of Christianity. This legacy continued through the centuries to this day.
The Remnant
There has always been a remnant of true believers in the Lord Jesus Christ who have assembled outside of the institutions of Christendom. This remnant has always been persecuted by the institutions of religious power. Christendom has murdered these believers and have burned Bibles in their campaigns to maintain their power over people.
The Reformation
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Reformation developed as a great movement that returned to the truth of salvation by grace through faith alone in Christ alone and questioned many of the corrupt beliefs and practices of Roman Catholicism. In the midst of this reformation there were many important efforts to collect Bible manuscripts and to translate God’s word into the languages of the common people.
The Counter-Reformation
The Roman Catholic Empire fought back by continuing to burn Bibles and to persecute those who advocated the Bible as the standard of truth. The Jesuits were formed as an army of the counter-reformation. They would eventually include education and scholarship as weapons in their arsenal.
The Pope or the Bible?
Roman Catholicism depends on the authority of the Pope and the supremacy of “Church” teaching and tradition over the authority of the Bible. Promoting the Scholarship of Bible Doubt has served to advance the Roman Catholic Empire’s battle against the freedom that believers in Jesus have when they know the Bible is the standard of truth.
Textual Criticism
Textual Criticism is supposed to be an academic tool for studying the origins and contexts and validity of manuscripts. And yet the use of any tool to determine the truth depends on the intent of those who use the tool. The textual criticism through recent centuries has been co-opted by those with an agenda contrary to the Bible itself.
What Shall We Do?
Let us research the above assertion about textual criticism.
Let us document to what degree the counter-reformation of the Jesuits has been responsible for the rise of the Scholarship of Bible Doubt.
Let us examine to what degree the Jesuit agenda has infected Bible societies, Bible translation organizations, and protestant and evangelical seminaries.
Not “King James Only”
On the one hand I stand against much of what I have seen regarding “King James Only” groups. Many of them have a cult-like mentality. But on the other hand I’ve come to the conviction that the Greek manuscripts that were used for the King James translation are superior to the manuscripts that most modern translations are based on.
I don’t necessarily reject all modern translations. Some are heretical. Some can be used with effectiveness in spite of this section or that because the differences may not be that great between translations.
The majority of modern scholars seem to have confidence in a very few manuscripts because they are older. These manuscripts are significantly different from the ones used for the King James translation and they are very different from each other. It may be that they are the oldest because they survived longer because they were never used by the church!
Let’s research the evidence that those few oldest manuscripts and papyri were perverted by Gnostic influences.
I recommend that we recognize the history of these manuscripts and the movements surrounding them in their use to build the Scholarship of Bible Doubt.
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