As Burgon observed,³ it seems too improbable to believe that in the last nineteen hundred years out of every thousand copies of the Greek New Testament, we are to suppose that nine hundred and ninety-five have proven to be untrustworthy. Moreover, that the four or five which have remained, whose contents were unknown until as good as yesterday, are supposed to have retained the secret which the Holy Spirit originally inspired. Furthermore, is it not incredulous that we are expected to accept that much of the gospel, lost to the world for nineteen centuries, had to be "rescued" from a wastebasket to be "saved" from the consuming fire - by a German text critic? How fortuitous.

We have shown a brief history portraying the struggle between the Church and the Biblical critics as to what constitutes a final form of the New Testament text. An irreconcilable difference exists between the Church and the text-critics/University with respect to the frame of reference that each takes with regard to the "Written Word".

The Church (in its broadest sense which includes the O.T. faithful) has historically viewed the Written Word as a "sacred" book. By sacred we mean that the text of the Book is viewed by its followers as being that of final authority. The status of the sacred text is fixed and absolute - one does not add to or subtract from it. It is seen as sacred because the entire content is accepted as having been given to the people as a deposit by the Deity. Until the time of the Reformation, the Bible was safely lodged within the confines of church use and thus retained its status as "sacred".

When the Church divided into the Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin-Rome) provinces, the time honored "specialness" that the Bible had held as "sacred" text began to change. The Christian community had divided into two very distinct entities. A Greek Vulgate (the TR) became the standard in the Eastern Church whereas the Western branch held to the Latin Vulgate of Jerome.

Eventually the animosity which developed between the Eastern and Western Church grew beyond mere doctrinal disputes. Each became convinced that the manuscripts used by the other had become corrupted. That is, as they did not always read the same, the Greeks came to distrust the Latin Bible and the Latins were equally certain that the Greeks had altered their texts. Each "Bible" continued to be authoritative for each given community, both affirming that theirs was the true original sacred text. Thus two distinct "sacred books" emerged - yet God had given only one text.

This enmity continued and heightened until the 5th century A.D. when the papacy restricted the flow of Greek language and literature into Western Europe as a method of keeping its dominion and distinctiveness.⁵ For nearly one thousand years (c.476-1453) all the treasures of the East's classical past - its records, history, archaeology, literature, and its science - remained untranslated and unavailable to the West. The Greek language became a stranger to the western part of Europe as

2 Fuller, Which Bible?, op. cit., p. 163.

3 Burgon, The Traditional Text, op. cit., p. 12.

4 Theodore P. Letis, "Brevard Childs and the Protestant Dogmaticians: A Window to a New Paradigm", Bulletin of the Institute for Reformation Biblical Studies, 2:1, (Fort Wayne, IN: 1991), pp. 4-8. Much of the material under this subtitle has been adapted by permission from Letis' article. Dr. Letis completed his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) in June of 1995.

5 Wilkinson, Our Authorized Bible Vindicated, op. cit., pp. 44-45.