3135.— Where We Got Our Bible
By Editor
I would be grateful for a little information respecting the Bible and how we came by it. Is the Catholic claim true that they gave us the Bible? S. H. 1. The Old Testament canon was compiled by Ezra and Nehemiah, and the Jews held it as we have it at the present time. 2. The New Testament may be said to have come to us from the days of the apostles. The Gospels and the Epistles were read by the churches and generally received. There is what is called the Latin fragment published by Muratori in 1740 which gives almost a full list of the New Testament Scriptures from a writer who describes himself as contemporary with Pius, a bishop of Rome about A.D. 150. A similar list may be made out from the Syriac version, which can hardly be later than the second century. Athanasius, who lived between 296 and 373 A.D., enumerates unhesitatingly all the Scriptures of the New Testament as we have them now, and so do the Latin scholars Augustine and Jerome. In the Sinaitic manuscript of the fourth century the New Testament is entire. This was before backsliding had deepened into the great apostasy. Now in Catholic convents, in Catholic libraries, in various forms the books of the Scripture in valuable manuscripts have been preserved, but the origin of those manuscripts we do not owe to the Catholic Church. The preservation of some of these manuscripts in a way we do, just the same as we owe the Old Testament Scriptures to the Jewish people who apostatized from God. In all their gross idolatry, when they were stoning His prophets and even crucifying our Lord, they were still preserving the Scriptures. Yet some of these ancient and valuable manuscripts preserved in convents and libraries have really been unknown to the church as such. Some of them have been found within the last century or so. But when it is said that the Roman Catholic Church gave us our Bible, this is not true. The Bible has been preserved by them, but its origin is not in the church.