II. Broad Means of Revelation
  A. Through nature


B. Through providence - God's action in history


C. Through miracles - the glory of God is generally considered to be the bundle' of His attributes and character


D. Through direct communications


E. Through Christ--his life, work, words, example, Spirit (John 14-17)

John 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

F. Through special manifestations, or theophanies (e.g. Burning Bush, Shekinah Glory)

G. Through the Bible--The Christian claims that the communication from the Other Side came principally through a collection of documents known as the Bible.


III. The Christian Revelation in History - How Close were our Expectations?
 

A. The genesis - God's initiatives and responses in history


B. The recording of selected and paradigmatic cases, with the goal of our instruction/warning


C. The recognition of this 'origin' by the believing community - the question of the canon.... Was this communication sufficiently 'authenticated' by its characteristics, so that a large group of people RECOGNIZED it as a communication from God? were they aware of its "Other Worldly" origin?


D. Since they were understood to have been 'from God', the preservation and transmission of these documents and associated "understandings" was carried out carefully and successfully.


The base 'message-text' seems to have been preserved at an almost obsessive level. I have already mentioned the data on the NT mss, in which the number of MSS (of varying extent) exceeds 5,000. In that case the abundance of mss is 'strange'. In the case of the OT, the situation is the reverse. The OT had a very, very tightly controlled transmission, and every defective copy was burned/destroyed...in that case, the few early OT MSS point to a special handling by the literate class of their sacred book...

The OT was basically finished around 400 BC., but the earliest full copies (of all the books together) we have are from around 900 AD....we have fragments earlier, and can historically reconstruct the text back to around 100 AD. (beginning of the Talmudist period)...in this regards, the mss tradition is comparable to other classical literature...but the means of transmission of that text is so bizarre as to suggest that its reliability is very, very high...

For example, in the Talmudist period (100-500 AD) a great deal of time was spent in cataloging Hebrew civil and canonical law...they had a very, very intricate system for the transcription of synagogue scrolls...some of the rules were:

As bizarre as these may seem, they certainly convey an attention (yay, preoccupation) with detail, that would go a long way to preserving the textual-form of the message (not meaning, just form)

By the time you get to the Masoretic Period (ad 500-900), the discipline and safeguards are full-blown...they attempted over this period to bring together the various mss, create a catalog of variant readings, add vocalization, etc...they added a huge overhead of checksums to the process...

They calculated:

Up until 1947, how 'good' this transmission process would have been was open to question...but in November of 1947, the discovery of the Qumran scrolls (aka "Dead Sea Scrolls") gave us an interesting checkpoint...the discovery was of 40,000 fragments from which some 500 books were reconstructed...we recovered the great Isaiah scroll (24 feet in length) which was dated at 100 BC. by W.F. Albright, the leading American biblical archeologist, of Johns Hopkins Univ.

The question was quickly raised: how did this mss, that was a full millennium earlier than the best Masoretic text of Isaiah we had at the time, compare with it? Let me quote from Geisler and Nix, General Introduction to the Bible, 1968.

"Of the 166 words in Isaiah 53, there are only 17 letters in question. Ten of these letters are simply a matter of spelling, which does not affect the sense. Four more letters are minor stylistic changes, such as conjunctions. The remaining three letters comprise the word 'light' which is added in verse 11, and does not affect the meaning greatly. Furthermore, this word is supported by LXX and IQ Is. Thus, in one chapter of 166 words, there is only one word (3 letters) in question after a thousand years of transmission--and this word does not significantly change the meaning of the passage"
and then Gleason Archer, Survey of the Old Testament, 1964:
"[the Isaiah copies] proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling [by the Qumranists]"
So the transmission methods, although apparently a bit overkill(!), seemed to preserve the text from the close of the OT period...

Last piece under this point...I find it interesting that the whole attitude of fidelity to the original by the copyists extended even to transliteration of foreign names into/out of Hebrew, and that this was recognized as early as 30 years ago:

"In 144 cases of transliteration from Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Moabite into Hebrew and 40 cases of the opposite, or 184 in all, the evidence shows that for 2300 to 3900 years the text of the proper names in the Hebrew bible has been transmitted with the most minute accuracy. That the original scribes should have written them with such close conformity to correct philological principles is a wonderful proof of their thorough care and scholarship; further, that the Hebrew text should have been transmitted by copyists through so many centuries is a phenomenon unequaled in the history of literature" (Robert D. Wilson, A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament, 1959)
There are other data points on the OT stuff (e.g. NT quotations, targums, Mishnah) but this is probably too much detail already. (The issue of how the texts came together BEFORE the end of the OT is a subject WAY beyond the scope of this ).

The point was: the base of the text seems to have been preserved adequately as a vehicle for God's message.


E. Translation of this deposit into other languages


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