Beginning
shortly after the death of the apostle John, four names stand out in prominence
whose teachings contributed both to the victorious heresy and to the final issuing
of manuscripts of a corrupt New Testament. These names are,
1, Justin Martyr,
2, Tatian,
3, Clement of Alexandria, and
4, Origen.
We shall speak first of Justin Martyr.
[1,
Justin
Martyr:]
The year in which the apostle John died, 100 A.D., is given as the date in
which Justin Martyr was born. Justin, originally a pagan and of pagan
parentage, afterward embraced Christianity and although he is said to have died
at heathen hands for his religion, nevertheless, his teachings were of a
heretical nature. Even as a Christian teacher, he continued to wear the robes
of a pagan philosopher.
In the teachings of Justin Martyr, we begin to see how muddy the stream of pure
Christian doctrine was running among the heretical sects fifty years after the
death of the apostle John.
[2, Tatian:]
It was in Tatian, Justin Martyr’s pupil, that these regrettable doctrines were carried
to alarming lengths, and by his hand committed to writing. After the death of Justin
Martyr in Rome, Tatian returned to Palestine and embraced the Gnostic heresy.
This same Tatian wrote a Harmony of the Gospels which was called the
Diatessaron, meaning four in one. The Gospels were so notoriously corrupted by
his hand that in later years a bishop of Syria, because of the errors, was
obliged to throw out of his churches no less than two hundred copies of this
Diatessaron, since church members were mistaking it for the true Gospel.fa19
[3, Clement of Alexandria:]
We come now to Tatian’s pupil known as Clement of Alexandria, 200 A. D.fa20
He went
much farther than Tatian in that he founded a school at Alexandria which
instituted propaganda along these heretical lines. Clement expressly tells us
that he would not hand down Christian teachings, pure and unmixed, but rather
clothed with precepts of pagan philosophy. All the writings of the outstanding
heretical teachers were possessed by Clement, and he freely quoted from their
corrupted MSS. As if they were the pure words of Scripture.fa21
His
influence in the depravation of Christianity was tremendous. But his greatest
contribution, undoubtedly, was the direction given to the studies and
activities of Origen, his famous pupil.
[3, Origen:]
When we come to Origen, we speak the name of him who did the most of all to create
and give direction to the forces of apostasy down through the centuries. It was
he who mightily influenced Jerome, the editor of the Latin Bible known as the
Vulgate.
Eusebius worshiped at the altar of Origen’s teachings. He claims to have
collected eight hundred of Origen’s letters, to have used Origen’s six-column
Bible, the Hexapla, in his Biblical labors. Assisted by Pamphilus, he restored
and preserved Origen’s library.
Origen’s corrupted MSS. of the Scriptures were well arranged and balanced with subtlety.
The last one hundred years have seen much of the so-called scholarship of European
and English Christianity dominated by the subtle and powerful influence of Origen.
Origen had so surrendered himself to the furore of turning all Bible events
into allegories that he, himself, says, “The Scriptures are of little use to
those who understand them as they are written.”fa22 In order to
estimate Origen rightly, we must remember that as a pupil of Clement, he
learned the teachings of the Gnostic heresy and like his master, lightly
esteemed the historical basis of the Bible. As Schaff says, “His
predilection for Plato (the pagan philosopher) led him into many grand and
fascinating errors.”fa23 He made himself acquainted
with the various heresies and studied under the heathen Ammonius Saccas,
founder of Neo-Platonism. He taught that the soul existed from eternity
before it inhabited the body, and that after death, it migrated to a higher or
a lower form of life according to the deeds done in the body; and finally all
would return to the state of pure intelligence, only to begin again the same
cycle as before. He believed that the devils would be saved, and
that the stars and planets had souls, and were, like men, on trial to
learn perfection. In fact, he turned the whole law and Gospel into an
allegory.
Such was the man who from his day to this has dominated the endeavors of destructive
textual critics. One of the greatest results of his life, was that his
teachings became the foundation of that system of education called
Scholasticism, which guided the colleges of Latin Europe for nearly one
thousand years during the Dark Ages.
Origenism flooded the Catholic Church through Jerome, the father of Latin Christianity.
“I love... the name of Origen,” says the most distinguished theologian of the Roman
Catholic Church since 1850, “I will not listen to the notion that so great a
soul was lost.”fa24
A
final word from the learned Scrivener will indicate how early and how deep were
the corruptions of the sacred manuscripts:
“It is no less true to fact than paradoxical in sound, that the worst
corruptions to which the New Testament has ever been subjected, originated
within a hundred years after it was composed; that Irenaeus (A. D. 150),
and the African Fathers, and the whole Western, with a portion of the Syrian
Church, used far inferior manuscripts to those employed by Stunica, or Erasmus,
or Stephens thirteen centuries later, when moulding the Textus Receptus.”fa25
The
basis was laid to oppose a mutilated Bible to the true one. How these corruptions
found their way down the centuries and reappear in our revised and modern Bibles,
the following pages will tell.
ft19 Jacobus, Catholic and Protestant Bibles Compared, p. 200, Note 15.
ft20 Fulton in the Forum, June, 1887.
ft21 Jacobus, Catholic and Protestant Bibles, p. 4.
ft22 Von Dobschutz, The Influence of the Bible on Civilization, pp. 61, 62.
ft23 J. N. Andrews and L. R. Conradi, History of the Sabbath, pp. 581, 582.
ft24 See Cathcart, Ancient British and Irish Churches, p. 16.
ft25 Idem. p. 17.
Benjamin G. Wilkinson, Ph.D.
Extraído do livro “Our Authorized Bible Vindicated” (1930), .Capítulo 1
– “Fundamentally, Only Two Different Bibles”, Seção “Early Corruption Of Bible
Mss”.
Traduzido por XXXX, 2007.
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