The Bible Has
Withstood and Overcome Centuries of Unparalleled Attack
In
2012 I jotted down all the reasons I could think of why I am a Christian. I
found 26 so I decided to serialise them in a blog every fortnight for a year.
I
have so far covered themes linked with science, philosophy and theology before
looking at five different facets of Jesus (I could have explored many more).
Now I am looking at the Bible.
Having
marvelled at the extraordinary unity of its message in Reason
15, I want to write about its almost miraculous durability.
In
July 1994 I travelled up a long and winding road in the wild and beautiful
Cévennes in Southern France. There is a museum at the end of the road - in the
middle of nowhere - called le Musée du Désert. It
bears testimony to the large community of Huguenots who fled and hid in that
rugged terrain following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in
1685 by Louis XIV, ending a period of tolerance towards Protestants. One
of the features of the museum is a display of tiny Bibles that were printed at
that time, some small enough to be successfully concealed in a woman’s hair.
The Bible was absolutely forbidden in those days and, in peril of their lives,
many people made inordinate efforts to safeguard it from obliteration.
It has occurred to me many times since that visit that the Bible must easily be the most consistently and passionately opposed book of all time.
As
A.W. Pink noted in The
Divine Inspiration of the Bible; “For two thousand years man’s
hatred of the Bible has been persistent, determined, relentless and murderous.
Every possible effort has been made to undermine faith in the inspiration and
authority of the Bible and innumerable enterprises have been undertaken with
the determination to consign it to oblivion.”
No
army has ever gone into action to either impose it on unwilling readers or
defend it by force. Its principal endorsement and sole defence have been the
love and esteem in which it is held by ordinary people who have read it and
been transformed by its message.
There
are billions of us. It is easily the best-selling and most translated book in
world history. At least one book of the Bible has been translated into over
2,500 languages. As an indication of the scale of that achievement, the
publishing phenomenon that is J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter has
been translated into less than 70.
And
yet, despite its popularity, the Bible is surely the most banned, burned,
ridiculed and smeared book ever published. Why does the Bible polarise opinion
like no other publication? I'll offer an answer at the end of this piece, but
first of all I want to trace the extraordinary history of hatred towards the
Christian Scriptures.
It
started in the Roman Empire. On 24th February 303, the Emperor Diocletian
published his Edict
Against the Christians ordering the burning of Bibles, the demolition
of places of worship and issuing a blanket ban on Christians assembling to
pray. This was the last great wave of Roman persecution against Christians but
the first to explicitly target the Bible itself as well as those who read
it.
Of course the Christian Scriptures in those days were all painstakingly copied by hand. There were no printing presses so the production of even one Bible would take many months. But despite Diocletian's bonfires, the Bible prevailed.
After
the Roman Empire declined, the Bible was zealously censored by a
lamentable, political corruption of Christianity we call Christendom. The
period we now call the European Dark Ages lasted for about a thousand years
(5th - 15th Centuries). During this time learning was
stifled, the arts were suffocated, social progress ground to a snail’s pace
and, with Christianity sick and separated from its main source of inspiration,
Islam was born.
(As
an aside, I would argue that, had the Bible been available to ordinary
Christians during the Dark Ages, none of the above would have happened;
education would have been encouraged, the arts would have flourished, social
progress would have accelerated and Islam would never have filled the vacuum
left by a corrupt and ailing church, unrecognisable from that of the 1st
Century. Incidentally, it’s also worth pointing out that the crusades occurred
at a time when the Bible was not publicly available. So people were denied the
opportunity to read plainly that taking up the sword to spread faith, or
even defend it, is contrary to the teaching of Jesus).
The
American sociologist, author and pastor Tony Campolo once mused about
how Christendom had been a bad idea. "Mixing the church and state" he
said, "is like mixing ice cream with cow manure. It may not do much to the
manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream!"
Various Councils from the time of Christendom stamped on calls for the Bible to be made available to the masses. They expressly forbade the translation of the Bible from Latin, thereby limiting its readership to the rich and powerful, who were eager to preserve their privileges at all costs. Canon 14 of the Council of Toulouse (1229), Canon 2 of the Council of Tarragona (1234) and Rules on Prohibited Books from the Council of Trent (1545-63) are three examples of this. In fact, even priests were usually denied access to the Scriptures for personal study.
But
towards the end of the Dark Ages, people rose up to reclaim the Bible.
Dissenters began to argue that God's Word should be available to everyone,
unshackled from Latin, and rendered in the language of the marketplace. At that
time, restrictive suppression of the Scriptures gave way to violent attack on
them.
John
Wycliffe (c.1320–1384) was the first to attempt to translate the Bible into
English, though it was from the Latin and not from the Hebrew and Greek source
texts. The Council of Constance (1414-1418) later declared Wycliffe a
heretic, banned his writings and trashed his work. His remains were exhumed and
burned. Wycliffe’s followers, called Lollards, were also burned at the stake
with their Bibles hanging round their necks.
The
scholarly William Tyndale (c.1494–1536) worked painstakingly, and at great
personal cost, to produce the first English-language Bible translated directly
from the original Hebrew and Greek. In his day it was a capital offence not
only to translate the Scriptures into English but even to read or own such a
translation or any part of it. He spent many months of his life in hiding,
having to travel clandestinely around Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany to
evade arrest and arrange for Bibles to be printed. They were smuggled into
Britain hidden in bails of wool. In the end, Tyndale was betrayed, captured,
tried and strangled to death before his remains were burned at the stake. His
last words were "Lord, open the King of England's eyes!"
Many
others were publicly executed at this time; most were burned alive. But the
Bible was now available all over England and throughout Continental Europe on
the black market. The lion was out of the cage!
Fierce
opposition to the Bible spread like a rash all over Europe. But little by
little, Bibles became available in more and more languages as the Reformation
took hold. The long and severe intellectual, artistic, cultural and social
winter of the Dark Ages started to thaw as the Bible began to influence culture
once again.
But
God's Word then came under another form of attack; an assault on its authority
through higher criticism.
Enlightenment scholars in the universities and seminaries of the 18th and 19th Centuries began to erode confidence in the Bible’s divine inspiration and authority. It was dismissed as inaccurate, unreliable and exaggerated. It was patronised as primitive legend, fable, and myth. It was disparaged as a human fabrication and rejected as revelation from God. Such attacks continue to the present day.
Of course, selective reading of the Bible was nothing new. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) once said "If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself." But at this time in history higher criticism was a full-frontal attack on the authority of Scripture just as it was becoming freely available everywhere.
Christians
who believe in the devil should be under no illusion why the Bible has been so
ferociously opposed throughout history. It is in the interests of the enemies
of Christ to keep the Holy Scriptures firmly shut. For wherever Christianity is
vigorous, growing, mission-minded and healthy, the Bible tends to be held in
high esteem and is centre stage. It is not for nothing that all the great
revivals - from the Great Awakening in New England, to the Wesleyan movement
that transformed 18th Century Britain, to the 1905 Welsh revival, to the Azusa
Street Pentecostal outpouring in Los Angeles - all held
tenaciously to the inspiration and authority of Scripture. Conversely, wherever
the Bible is marginalised and scoffed at, the churches associated tend to slide
into decline and irrelevance.
In
more recent times, the Bible has been opposed and forbidden by atheist
political dictatorships such as the former Soviet Union and present-day North
Korea. It has been denounced and barred by Islamic theocracies such as Saudi
Arabia, Yemen, the Maldives and Afghanistan. The Gideons list
18 countries where they are not allowed to operate at all. There are many other
countries where severe (though not outright) restrictions are imposed.
Increasingly, their work is resisted in Western nations (for example recent
reports in Canada and the U.K.) to avoid "causing offence" to people
of other faiths.
Has
any other book in human history sparked as much opposition and antagonism? It's
hard to think of anything that comes close.
And yet the Bible not only survives, it prevails. Even in secular countries where the Bible’s obituary was written long ago, it refuses to go away. Just last month (June 2013), for example, it stormed back up the best-seller lists in Norway, knocking Fifty Shades of Grey off the top spot.
The
Bible itself asserts its invincibility. 2,750 years ago the Prophet Isaiah said “The
grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures
forever” (Isaiah 40.8). And Jesus said “Heaven and Earth will
pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24.35).
Like Daniel and his contemporaries emerging unscathed from Nebuchadnezzar's furnace without a hair singed or even the smell of fire on them (see Daniel 3), the Bible continues to stand unflinching, untainted and undiminished by every angry attack on it.
So
why does the Bible divide opinion like no other book?
I think it is uniquely hated and attacked because it tells the full, unpalatable truth about human nature. We are sinners in need of a Saviour. And human pride and ego rage against the very idea that we need to be saved from ourselves and from the folly of our rebellion against God.
Furthermore,
no other book spells out so clearly the devil’s ultimate fate; he will be
judged and thrown into a lake of fire prepared for him (Revelation
20.10) and he unleashes his fury against the book that affirms it. No
wonder that virtually throughout the history of Christianity the Bible has been
burned, suppressed, outlawed, belittled and undermined.
And, conversely, I think the Bible is loved and treasured like no other book because its central message of God's love and grace is such good news. It transforms millions of lives like no other book ever can, ever has done and ever will. I'll reflect more about this in two weeks' time (Reason 17).
The
near miracle of its stubborn survival and ever-enduring popularity is the 16th reason
that I am a Christian. I love it that God's Word is indestructible!
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