Kindle Notes & Highlights
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July 5 - July 12, 2025
An argument can therefore be made for some form of Hebrew having been the first language spoken and heard in this world; but be that as it may, it is an indisputable fact that practically the whole of the Old Testament is written in Hebrew.
God, He is able to make Himself known to us. As the source of all truth, He can teach us about His own wonderful Being; and therefore, as the Psalmist says, “In thy light shall we see light” (Psalm 36:9). This brings us, quite naturally, to the doctrine of revelation.
Dr. James Bannerman. He wrote: “Revelation, as a divine act, is the presentation of objective truth to a man in a supernatural manner by God. Revelation, as the effect of that act, is the objective truth so presented”.[1]
Dr. W. H. Green points out that keeping these documents in this holy place was “in accordance with the usage of the principal nations of antiquity”. He alludes to the fact that “the Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Babylonians, and Egyptians had their sacred writings, which were jealously preserved in their temples, and entrusted to the care of officials specially designated for the purpose”.[4]
Use case for preservation.
Although often denied today, the doctrine of the preservation of Scripture is to be believed and boldly declared. “The Old Testament in Hebrew…and the New Testament in Greek…being immediately inspired by God, and by His singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical” (The Westminster Confession of Faith, Chap. 1; Sect. 8).
The doctrine of preservation must be defended.
Originals, as we have already observed, are called “autographs”. Copies are known as “apographs”.
It is worthy of note just here that, in the purpose and providence of God, the Jews took greater care of their sacred writings than any other people in the ancient world.
On the same premise, therefore, could this not be said to indicate endorsement of the Septuagint as an inspired and accurate text? No, there is a serious flaw in such reasoning. The fact is that there are a number of places in the New Testament where the Septuagint version appears to have been deliberately rejected (e.g., Matthew 2:15, where the LXX reads: “Out of Egypt I called his children”; Romans 10:15, where the LXX reads, “I am present as a season of beauty upon the mountains, as the feet of one preaching glad tidings of peace, as one preaching good news”. See also: Romans 11:4; 1 Peter
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The first was the Jew’s profound reverence for the Holy Scriptures. A Jew would literally tremble before the written Word. According to Philo and Josephus, they would suffer any torments, and even death itself, rather than change anything in the Holy Scriptures. God used this reverence for the text to prevent it from being falsified and corrupted.
The doctrine of “providential preservation” requires careful definition. What exactly do we mean by it? Here, I would quote the words of Professor John H. Skilton: “God who gave the Scriptures, who works all things after the counsel of his will, has exercised a remarkable care over his Word, has preserved it in all ages in a state of essential purity, and has enabled it to accomplish the purpose for which he gave it”.[7]
Dionysius, a minister at Corinth, in a letter dated about AD 168-170, deplores the fact that his own letters have been altered, and then adds: “It is not marvellous, therefore, if some have set themselves to tamper with the Dominical Scriptures”.[14]
An unknown author (thought by some to be Hippolytus, but by others, Gaius) writes somewhere around AD 230: “They (the heretics) laid hands fearlessly on the divine Scriptures, saying that they had corrected them”.[15] Who were the heretics who dared to do such a thing?
The place where the copy was found. Churches themselves became the custodians of the pure Word of God (as was the case formerly with local synagogues); and if the copied document had been preserved in a church, one could be reasonably certain that it was a recognized, true and proper transcript.
Every attempt was made to utilize their underlying text, with the result that the overwhelming majority of early Greek manuscripts were in essential agreement. We may therefore believe that the text of the majority represented the Original with impressive accuracy.
Codex Sinaiticus, dated in the mid- or late-fourth century, contains only a part of the Old Testament but the whole of the Greek New Testament. It is the only complete uncial manuscript of the New Testament extant. This Egyptian codex was written on vellum, with four columns of forty-eight lines on each page, but there are clear indications in the text itself that it has several times been corrected.
Professor Warfield once observed, “It is not the mere number of years that is behind any ms. that measures its distance from the autograph, but the number of copyings”.[19]
The greatest care would have been taken over these church copies to preserve their original purity; and the testimony of a lectionary would be, in effect, the testimony of all the churches.
The major text-types are as follows: (i) the Byzantine (sometimes called the Traditional, Majority, or Antiochian text); (ii) the Alexandrian (or what some have called Neutral Text); (iii) the Western; and (iv) the Caesarean.
Painstaking scholarly research has shown that Justin Martyr (100-165 AD), Irenaeus (130-200 AD), Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD), Tertullian (160-220 AD), Hippolytus (170-236 AD), and even Origen (185- 254 AD) quote repeatedly from the Byzantine text.
The Byzantine text was the underlying text of all the great English Protestant Bibles, including those associated with the names of William Tyndale (1525), Miles Coverdale (1535), John Rogers (1537), and Richard Taverner (1539), as well as those known as The Great Bible (1539), The Geneva Bible (1560), The Bishops’ Bible (1568), and, of course, the Authorized Version (1611); and the Reina in Spanish, the Karoli in Hungarian, the Luther in German, the Olivetan in French, the Statenvertaling in Dutch, the Almeida in Portuguese and the Diodati in Italian.
The fact is that approximately 90% of the Greek manuscripts represent the Byzantine text-type.
It is inconceivable that God would give a totally corrupt and mutilated text to His people and then allow that text to be used by them for over eighteen centuries. Yet that is exactly what some modern textual critics would have us believe!
it has been estimated that there are somewhere in the region of 6,000 differences between the Alexandrian and Byzantine texts.
This Westcott/Hort Text was the forerunner of what is known today as the Nestle/Aland (United Bible Societies) Text, which has usurped the place of the Byzantine or Traditional Text and subsequently formed the basis for practically all modern versions.
