Ecclesia Militans: Where we got the Bible

Variations in the Text fatal to Protestant Theory

I have mentioned monasteries, and justly so, for there is no doubt that the vast majority, indeed practically all, of these venerable pages, were traced by the hand of some ecclesiastic. The clergy were the only persons who had learning enough for it. What care, what zeal, what loving labor was present by these holy men in their work of transcribing the word of Scripture we can judge by viewing their handiwork. Yet he work was necessarily very slow and liable to error; and that errors did creep in we know from the simple fact that there are about 200,000 variations in the text of the Bible as written in these MSS. that we have today. This is not to be wondered at, if you remember that there are 35,000 verses in the Bible. Consider the various ways in which corruptions and variations could be introduced. The variations might have been (a) intentionally introduced or (b) unintentionally. (a) Under this class we must unfortunately reckon those changes which were made by heretics to suit their particular doctrine or practice, just as, for example, the Lutherans added the word ‘only’ to St. Paul’s words to fit their new fangled notion about ‘justification by faith only’. Or again, a scribe might really think that he was improving the old copy from which he was transcribing by putting in a word here or leaving out a word there, or putting in a different word, so as to make the sentence clearer or the sense better. But (b) it is satisfactory to be assured (as we are) that the vast majority of changes and varieties of readings in these old MSS. is entirely due to some unintentional cause. (i) The scribe might be tired or sleepy or exhausted with much writing, and might easily skip over a word, or indeed a whole sentence; he might be interrupted in his work and begin at the wrong word when he recommenced. Or he might (ii) have bad eyesight (some lost it altogether through copying so much); or not know really what was the proper division to make of the words he was copying, especially if the copy he was busy with was one of the old Uncials, with no stops and no pauses and no division between words or sentences; or he might, if he were writing at the dictation of another, not hear very well, or pick up a word or phrase wrongly, as, for example, the woman did when she wrote ‘Satan died here’ for a milliner’s shop, instead of ‘Satin dyed here’. Or (iii) he might actually embody and copy into the sacred text to the Gospels words or notes or phrases which did not really belong to the Gospel at all, but had been written on the margin of the parchment by some previous scribe merely to explain things. These ‘glosses’, as they are called, undoubtedly have crept in to some copies and the Protestants are guilty of repeating one every time they say their form of the Lord’s Prayer, with its ending ‘For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’ Such an addition was not uttered by Our Lord; Catholics consequently do not use it.

These are some (and not all) of the ways in which you could easily see that differences could arise in the various copies made by old scribes. Put six men today to report a speech by any orator, there will be considerable variety in their reports, as one can prove by comparing different newspaper accounts of the same speech any morning. I do not say that the differences will always signify much or substantially alter the speaker’s meaning; yet there they are, and sometimes they may be serious enough; and if these things happen daily, even now with all our advanced and highly developed methods of printing, how much more would they happen in the old days before printing, when hand and brain and eyesight and hearing could make so many blunders? One single letter changed would conceivably reverse the meaning of the whole sentence. I shall not alarm you by flaunting specimens from the Greek or Hebrew, but shall make plain enough what I mean by recording an instance occurring in our own days in our own tongue. An old Provost of a certain East Lothian town had died and been duly buried, and a headstone had been erected bearing the fitting inscription from St. Paul’s 1^st Epistle to the Corinthians (xv. 52). ‘And we shall be changed.’ It was finished on the Saturday; but a deed of darkness was done before the ‘Sabbath’ morning. The minister had a son who loved a practical joke. He got accomplices for his shameful deed; they hoisted him up, and in cold blood he took putty and obliterated the letter ‘c’ in ‘changed’. On the ‘Sabbath’ the godly, passing around, with long faces, Bibles, and white handkerchiefs, to view the old provost’s tombstone, learned for the first time that the Apostle taught ‘And we shall be hanged’.

You see what I mean? Well, the Bibles, before printing, are full of varieties and differences and blunders. Which of them all is correct? Pious Protestants may hold up their hands in horror and cry out, ‘there are no mistakes in the Bible! It is all inspired! It is God’s own Book!’ Quite true, if you get God’s own book, the originals as they came from the hand of Apostle, Prophet, and Evangelist. These, and these men only, were inspired and protected from making mistakes: but God never promised that every individual scribe (perhaps sleepy-headed, or stupid, or heretical) who took in hand the copying of out the New Testament would be infallibly secure from committing errors in his work. The original Scripture is free from error, because it has God or its author; so teaches the Catholic Church; and the Catholic Bible, too, the vulgate, is a correct version of the Scripture; but that does not alter the fact that there are scores, nay thousands, of differences in the old manuscripts and copies of the Bible that were written before the days of printing; and I should like any enquiring Protestants to ponder of this fact and see how they can possible reconcile it with their principle that the Bible alone is the all-sufficient guide to salvation. Which Bible? Are you sure you have got the right Bible? Are you certain that your Bible contains exactly the words, and all the words, and only the words, that came from the hands Apostle and Evangelist? Are you sure that no other words have crept in or that none have been dropped out? Can you study the Hebrew and Greek and Latin manuscripts and versions, page by page, and compare them, and compile for yourself a copy of Holy Scripture identical with that written by the inspired authors from Moses to St. John? If you cannot – and you see at once that it is impossible – then do not talk about ‘the Bible and the Bible only’. You know perfectly well that you must trust to some authority outside of yourself to give you the Bible. The Bible you are using today was handed down to you: you have, in fact, allowed some third party to come between you and God, a thing quite repugnant to the Protestant theory. We Catholics, on the other hand, glory in having some third party to come between us and God, because God Himself has given it to us, namely, the Catholic Church, to teach us an lead us to Him. We believe in the Bible interpreted for us by that Church, because God entrusted to her the Bible as part of His word, and gave her a promise that she would never err in telling us what it means and explaining to us the ‘many things hard to be understood’, which St. Peter tells us are to be found within it. Though there were as many million variations as there are thousands in the different copies of the Bible, we should be still unmoved, for we have a ‘Teacher sent from God’, above and independent of all Scripture, who, assisted by the Holy Ghost, speaks with Divine authority, and whose voice to us is the Voice of God. It matters not to us when a Christian may have lived on earth; whether before any of the New Testament was written at all, or before it was collected, into one volume, o before it was printed, or after it has been printed; no matter to us whether there are 1,000 or 1,000,000 variations in texts and passages and chapters of ancient copies of which our modern Bibles are compiled; we do not hazard our salvation on such a precarious and unreliable support. We rather take that Guide who is ‘yesterday and today and the same forever’, and who speaks to us with a living voice, and who can never make a mistake; who is never uncertain or doubtful or wavering in her utterances, never denying today what she affirmed yesterday, but ever clear, definite, dogmatic; enlightening what is dark and making plain what is obscure to the minds of men. This is the Catholic Church, established by Almighty God as His organ and mouthpiece and interpreter, unaffected by the changes and unshaken by the discoveries of ages. To her we listen; her we obey; to her we submit our judgment and our intellect, knowing she will never lead us wrong. In her e find peace and comfort, satisfaction and solution of all our difficulties, for she is the one infallible Teacher and Guide appointed by God. This is a logical, consistent, clear, and intelligible method of attaining and preserving the truth, a perfect plan and scheme of Christianity. It is the Catholic plan; it is Christ’s plan. What plan have any others to substitute for it that can stand in a moment’s analysis at the bar of reason, history, commonsense, or even of Holy Scripture itself?

Chapter Seven