Revelation, Inspiration and Illumination: where the rubber hits the road

Koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Visiting Professor

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

Conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

12 October 2012

           First of all, we are humans and should take our shoes off when we contemplate the deep things of the Word of God. It is like talking about the Trinity - your shoes are off and you move forward on your knees (Dwight Nelson’s expression).

           There are certain misgivings regarding these important matters. It is better to list and negate them one by one.

-         It is not correct to say that a multiplicity of textual forms existed between Moses and the Second-Temple Period and that during that time they started considering to canonize the Bible by selecting one standard form.

-         It is not correct to say that a myriad of readings existed and then shortly before the coming of Jesus, the Jews selected a few writings that they want to canonize and focus on.

-         It is not correct to say that the selection and canonization was an arbitrary human process that implies that men created the Word of God not God giving man a specific Word. Fundamentalism and Biblicism has no room in these scholars’ scenario (like James Barr) since the conditions were fluid. Fluid concepts for the Word of God cannot be correct. The Word is sure. Maps are not fluid but certain and secure to be followed.

-         The prophet of the Bible did not walk around in the Ancient Near Eastern cultures and saw art as iconography in ceramics, sculptures, seals, and then decided that he does not know what God means in His word, he will use zoo-like descriptions to entertain his audience rather than the straight Word of God in his day in similar “ANE Cartoons”. He may not have understood the animal but he described what he saw: the animal and it was given by God and not by ANE depictions around him.

-         The prophet did not have nightmares which he interprets to mean something for them in those days.

-         The scribe of the Bible did not listen to Isaiah preaching or Moses preaching and then selected words, phrases and paragraphs that he liked and compounded them into a chapter and chapters into a book.

-         More than what the prophet selected to say or write existed in his day or before his day and we in the Modern era have no way to proof or disproof the quantity of data the prophet had when he compiled his document back then.

-         As Creationist John MacKay said to atheist evolutionist Richard Dawkins in their debate on www.youtube, what geologist Charles Lyell shortly before Charles Darwin did to modernity is to give them a set of glasses to see the world of the present and the past and on the basis of uniformatism, namely that the present is the key to the past, assumptions are carried into history in a faith position, whether Christian, Creationist, atheist or agnostic.

-         God did not come from Heaven and appeared in nightmares to the prophet and then went back to heaven and left it for the prophet to work out the meaning and remember what he saw and find ways to describe them. It is not just an encounter and the prophet is left to struggle his own descriptions through.

-         The prophet did not always write himself, he sometimes used scribes and he dictated for him the words that should be said. The scribe did not paraphrase what the speaker or prophet said. He wrote literal, and exactly what was said, even if the sentence had syntax problems or problems to be understood.

-         The scribe then carefully copied the notebook again on the vellums in proper script so that it can serve as the final original to the prophet, to Jeremiah, or to any other prophet.

-         Letters, notebooks, diary entries, reports, lists, recipes, anecdotes, were collected anyway as part of the history of the faithful people in those days and sometimes the prophet used these sources to compile a history of David, as Samuel did in 1 Samuel. These sources are seamed together and it is easy to see where the one begins and the other one ends. A characteristic of these seamed together anecdotes is that they are copied from the source verbatim in exactitude, whether they contain painful, incriminating, personal information or public scandals. The prophet seamed them in even in the presence of King David and his son Solomon around 970 BCE, for example. Moses did the same in the Book of Numbers and even included a recipe in one place. Every word of the Bible did not originate solely out of the air. Sources were used. Genesis 1-5 was selected by Moses in Midian in 1460 BCE from the Book of Adam (Genesis 5:1) and Genesis 6-11 was selected from the Book of Noah (Genesis 6:1). In Pre-Flood times before 2523 BCE, God walked with Adam and Eve and walked with Henoch and their memories would have been of a better DNA as ours and thus their descriptions of a better quality than ours. That is what Moses used to compile Genesis.

-        Moses is not just an entertainer of audiences, since they did not have TV’s in those days, no Theaters, no Dramas, no Musicals, no novels. It is not just to fill the vacuum of entertainment in the Ancient Near East that the prophet is writing his “story” or his “depiction” or his “description”. None of these. It was reality that became history when they were recorded with the utmost care the day God told Adam (we assume) how He created the world. The pagan festivals of the temples had yearly feasts and parades and costumes, dances, musicals, to portray the gods in their context and interaction with humans. These were the entertainment theaters for the public, in the streets watching with wonder. It is thus wrong to think they had no Dramas or “theaters” in those days.

-         The seamed together of the different sources, is not done by many scribes (very late) who used Moses’ name and Daniel’s name to attach it to the compilation “book” and claim that he wrote it. Unless it is the prophet himself, the scribes could not produce together a “Festschrift” in honor of Daniel. If a scribe is used, and maybe when Daniel was a geronti, like in Daniel 11:40 with that difficult syntax in the verse, the scribe nevertheless did not edit the syntax, or improved his own understanding of Daniel for posterity. He gave it exactly as it was dictated, with difficult syntax or not. The same is the case with Hosea in his book with his difficult syntax at times. Even Moses had difficult syntax where two or three prepositions are strung together in or around one word! Later copyists had to copy exactly.

-         Later Xerox scribes had to copy with the difficulties unchanged. It was to be 100% as received from the original. The Copyists were just the Ancient Near Eastern Xerox machines. If they improved the text, like we have with the corrupted (byzantine dating) manuscripts of the so-called LXX, by harmonizing, by adding what was omitted and omitting what seemed added, equalizing spelling differences and so forth, then one cannot accept this version as the Word of God but a later paraphrastic improved text that is no longer the original form of the Word of God.

-         Although the scribes for dictation tasks and copyists were the “pens” of the prophet, speaker, preacher, king (David or Solomon) in those days, since they had to produce exactly as the sounds came out, the prophet, speaker, preacher and king were not the pens of the Holy Spirit but His penmen. Their thoughts were washed, illuminated, enlightened, navigated to see the right sources with the correct information, prompted to select, helped that the communication process is successful, but their grammar and mental lexicons were their own. Moses wrote with Hebrew-Egyptianisms and with Egyptian-Hebraisms, so did Isaiah who used Moses extensively. Solomon wrote Hebrew with Phoenicianisms attached since he was bilingual fully and society was that way in those days, as one can see in the book of Ecclessiastes very clearly. The Holy Spirit did not prevent these Phoenicianisms, and Egyptianisms, and in Daniel the Greek and Aramaic and Persian words to slide into the Hebrew. He left the mental lexicon to the prophet himself.

           When I studied under Dr. Izak ben Yosef in 1980 he taught me the Philosophy of the Jews. Reading through his prescribed extracts on Philosophers, especially Philo, I noticed a correlation between Philo and 2 Peter 1:20-21

“v21 But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation”

“v22 for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God”

Philo “On Special Laws” I, 287 (VII, page 267)

“No pronouncement of a prophet is ever his own; he is an interpreter prompted by another in all his utterances, when knowing not what he does, he is filled with inspiration, as the reason withdraws and surrenders the citadel of the soul to a new visitor and tenant the Divine Spirit which plays upon the vocal organism and raises sounds from it which clearly express its prophetic message”

           Let us consider some facts: Philo died in 50 CE and was born in 20 CE. Peter died in 64 CE. 2 Peter, scholars claim was written shortly before Peter’s death, ca. 63/64 CE. Peter was in Rome. Rome stole libraries from other nations and also at times copied other nations libraries and kept the originals. Public libraries were in Rome where the public could have gone to read. Both Peter and Philo had access to public libraries, Peter between 31-64 CE and Philo between 2-50 CE. They overlap between 31-50 CE. Was the statement a common expression or “memory verse” format taught to all Jewish children and both Peter and Philo had the same memory verse taught to them from their mothers and both were presenting their “mother’s education memory”? Was Philo the origin of the statement before 50 CE and Peter copied it from his text available in Rome between 50-64 CE? Did Peter composed this statement before 50 CE and through his evangelism the statement was spread landing as a “sermon note of a listener to Peter’s evangelism” in Philo’s hands, and Philo utilized Peter’s earlier statement, reused of course later by Peter for compiling 2 Peter in 63-64 CE?

           Ellen White consulted Alfred Edersheim and James Farrar and as Fred Veltman indicated in his 1990 “The Desire of Ages Project: The Conclusions” that Ellen White used 23 scholars to write Desire of Ages (Veltman, "The Desire of Ages Project: the Data," Ministry, October 1990). A plagiarism claim cannot be upheld since there are large sections of Desire of Ages unaccounted for by these two scholars, and for now, anywhere else. The work of Tim Poirier is very crucial here as well: Tim Poirier's "Sources Clarify Ellen White's Christology," Ministry, December 1989, pp. 7-9. Poirier is in a position to know whether I am factual or not on this point. In John 8 “and there in the sand were the record of their own lives” is not in Edersheim nor in Farrar. It may be in one of the 21 other sources? I would love to know. But, it is in two Greek minuscles locked up in the British Museum and the other in Naples and which is, secondly, in Greek, and thirdly, dating to the 10^th and 12^th centuries. Did the Spirit of God “like” those two phrases in the British Museum and in Naples and impressed Ellen White to formulate it accordingly, unknowingly of the Greek minuscles and their content? Did the Spirit of God “like” the statement of Philo and impressed Peter with the statement also? Did the Spirit of God impressed on Philo’s mind the value of the statement of Peter during one of his public sermons prompting him to include it in his work “On Special Laws”?

           It is false to think that some parts of the Scriptures are Godbreathed (theopneustos) but other not (2 Timothy 3:16). It is false to think that some parts are valuable (ophelimos) and others not. It is false to think that some are valuable for teaching (didaskalian) in modern times but others are not. It is false to think that some can educate unto Righteousness but others cannot. The purpose of Scripture is also very important. On becoming. The individual is “on becoming” “so that the man of God can be worthy”. The Word does something in us and should because at conversion the heart of flesh is removed and God writes His law upon our hearts. The Bible is a salvation tool and calls for response on each page, for reaction, for decision, for submission, for victory. This Godbreathed Scripture (grapha = Scripture) is in totality His Book and what is His is Holy and so it is called in 2 Timothy 3:15 “Holy Scriptures/Writing” (hiera grammata). There is a difference in Paul’s vocabulary of the final product of the Holy Spirit’s navigation and an ordinary library. Says Paul in 2 Timothy 4:13 “bring. . . also the library” (ta Biblia). It is in the plural, a different root and not holy because it is not Godbreathed. It contains sources for the thinking of Paul. Paul is a reader and Moses was a reader utilizing the Book of Adam and the Book of Noah.

           What about slips? Well are there slips in the Bible? Will slips not take away from the infallibility of the Word of God? Careful reading of the doublets in the Old Testament revealed that there are five slips present: slips of the hand, slips of the eye, slips of the ear, slips of the memory, slips of the tongue. Modern scholars have studied it for years in linguistics of nearly all languages, and an article will be published in a month or two by myself for the Bible Society dealing with slips in Ancient Times. Next year articles will be submitted dealing with these slips in the books of Samuel and Chronicles since the doublets for 2 Samuel is in 1 Chronicles.

           Many of the variants between the text of Samuel and Chronicles can be explained with the following points: it is a fact that there was an Ancient Near Eastern custom to have double names so that different names listed between the two sources should not pose a problem. Chronicles, which is the later copy in 586 BCE (on internal evidence) substituted synonymous prepositions. Divine name substitutions were common, instead of Yahweh (Lord) as the Solomon time 2 Samuel is using, the Chronicle writer is using Elohim (God). There should be no doubt to the Hebrew reader of 2 Samuel 23:13 that the scribe of 1 Chronicles 11:15 experienced slips of the ear due to copying by dictation. He used the preposition upon instead of unto as in Samuel and he heard the qametz =/q/ pronounced as he =/h/. The word order is sometimes not the same and this can be due to a slip in the memory. The person memorized it at a security center where the scrolls are hidden and then walked to the copy area and in the meantime the memory faded and words got transposed. What do we do with these cases and the infallibility of the Word of God? The Word of God is infallible since these slips are common to humans of every culture. Why? We are not perfect. Hans LaRondelle use to say: “God slat reguit met een kromme stock”. God can hit straight with a bended stick. The Holy Spirit has something to tell us about the exile. The Exile was due to their sins and sins means imperfection. Even the Word of God suffers due to sin. But, the doublet provides the corrections so that the slight slips here and there cannot damage the perfect concepts of the Holy Spirit. It can still function 100% as a tool for salvation. God’s Word is pure, protected, continuously speaking to the heart to get into relationship with Him and to adjust our lives to His.