Chapter 4 of An Understandable History of the Bible by Samuel Gipp

Introduction
See Chapter 1
Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 last week.

If readers were looking forward to a concise and easily readable work on the history of the bible (making this assumption based on the title) they would be sorely disappointed. We are in chapter 4 and there is no sign that we are ever going to start at the beginning of history and work our way through the centuries on the writing and development of the bible. In fact chapter 4 concerns itself mainly with the past century or so.

So if one is looking for the type of work that digs into the centuries and really examines the origins and development of the bible I would suggest Professor Scott Han’s site. A thorough web site on the topic of bible history can be found at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.

Also see Where We Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church, by Rev. Graham which also actually follows the history of bible development.

In Chapter four Dr. Gipp’s main message seems to be twofold:
1. The King James Bible is the only bible authorized by God – so Protestants should deal with that instead of fighting each other because…
2. Our common enemy is the Catholic Church and we should be fighting that instead.

One rather silly comment caught my eye as I read the opening paragraphs:
” The battle of the lost theologians against the Bible has been waged since the Garden of Eden.”

I was unaware that Adam and Eve even had a bible – let alone a King James Version. Which one of them was the lost theologian? Adam? or Eve? perhaps the serpant.

Dr. Gipp spends a good deal of this chapter then trying to convince readers that the King James Bible has been universally accepted since 1611, that King James and politics had nothing to do with it, and that it should be the world-wide authoritative bible because English is the world’s language (which will be news to all of the Chinese, since Mandarin Chinese is the #1 language in the world according to several easily Googled resources.) All of these are easily refuted here.

At this point, the book is just getting ponderous and painful to read. I hope to finish the remaining chapters, but I’m not looking forward to it!

I will reply to Mrs. Brauer’s comments after she posts them.

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I didn’t find Mrs. Brauer’s comments as intersting as Dr. Gipp’s, so I have opted to continue fisking Chapter 4.

Frisking Gipp

What we must do as men of understanding is look into these statements and the questions which they naturally provoke.
“For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” II Peter 1:21.

Umm… the key word there is “spake” not “wrote!” The word of God is not only contained in the WRITTEN word of God. That’s a big part of the Catholic position. Here I suspect unwittingly, Dr. Gipp just made that point for me – and with the KJV no less!

Did God inspire His Word perfectly in the original autographs?
“The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.
Thou shalt keep them O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.” Psalms 12:6, 7.

Has God preserved His words?

I believe absolutely that He did. I believe He did that through the authority of the Catholic church and her Magisterium. It was the Catholic church that collected and closed the canon of the bible. It was the Catholic church who preserved it through painstaking handwritten copies through the ages. It was the Catholic church who continue to teach the bible to the people unable to read or own a bible of their own through the ages. So yes. I do believe God preserved it.

To coin a Catholic phrase… BINGO!!! And His method was to preach and teach, not to sit and read!!! The apostles after Jesus did the same thing.

Until then, only the Pharisees had possessed God’s words in the form of the completed, accepted Old Testament books, and although they were well educated and very religious, they were found to be taking advantage of the common people. Christ eliminated this problem by going directly to the common people of His day.

Preaching and teaching. Not writing and reading. Dr. Gipp’s very argument support the role of the early Christian church in preaching the gospel WITHOUT the use of the written word that could not be known directly by the common people.

If God’s words are locked up in the “Greek Text,” then once again education is a prerequisite to having the Word of God and knowing what it says.

BINGO again! However I find it interesting that a sola scriptura proponent is making this argument as having a bible as the sole authority REQUIRES THAT ONE BE ABLE TO READ!! It leaves out a huge chunk of the world’s population past and present that were never able to do so.

Stay tuned for part 2

See Part 2 here.

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