The Way of the Church
Part 1:
Controlling
the Past -III
by
Hugh Nibley, Ph.D.
Improvement Era 58 (Mar. 1955), 152-4, 166, 168
CENSORSHIP
WHEN Joseph Smith
announced that the very first words of the Bible had been edited and their
meaning changed by "an old Jew without any authority," he knew
whereof he spoke.[1] Not that the
manipulation of that particular passage has been definitely proven—there
is not yet enough evidence, one way or the other—but that the common
practice of such manipulation has of recent years become an established fact,
thanks to the labors of Kahle and others. The work of the Masoretes, far from
being, as it was meant to be, the final and definitive fixing of the sacred
text for all time, simply laid the groundwork for new and daring
"reconstructions."
For the Masoretic
text in its turn suffered the usual process of deterioration until, in the
sixteenth century, Jacob ben Chaiyim set himself to the task of rescuing it
from the state of corruption into which it had fallen: "He was convinced
that there was only one correct Masora—the Masora compiled by
himself—and that the text arranged by him according to this Masora was
the very text which had been established by the great Masoretic authorities of
Tiberias. ..."[2] And so scholars accepted Jacob ben Chaiyim's text as
the one authoritative one; and when through the ensuing four centuries, older
and better texts turned up and showed wherein ben Chaiyim had been wrong, what
did the scholars do—correct him? Far from it: they corrected the ancient
manuscripts to agree with ben Chaiyim! His hasty, superficial, and hopelessly
out-of-date text "has been regarded as the only, authoritative text up to
the present day."[3]
In the nineteenth
century Baer made the most notable effort to restore the pure Old Testament.
His method was simple and effective: from all the material before him he
"selected ... what he regarded as 'correct' and what differed he declared
to be 'corrupt,' 'incomplete,' or 'in confusion.' ... But Baer not only selected what he regarded as the 'correct' text from the
material at his disposal, he also freely altered reading of his manuscripts when they did not give
what he regarded as 'correct.'[4] So when confronted by valuable old
manuscripts or even by texts corrected by the great ben Asher himself, Baer's
disciples firmly rejected them, since they differed from Baer's hypothetical
reconstruction of them.[5]
It is not as one might
suppose, the discovery of new and revealing manuscripts that controls and
guides the thinking of the scholars; it is their thinking that controls the
discoveries. "They approach the texts," wrote Father Deimel, the
Sumerian expert, "with a preestablished and readymade system, and then
force them to conform to this bed of Procrustes."[6]
Even when the scholars
have "gnashed their teeth and accepted" new discoveries, according to
Housman, they have been prompt to make it appear that such findings were no
surprise to them, "and the history of scholarship is mutilated to save the
face of those who have impeded progress."[7]
Anyone who thinks
Kahle may have exaggerated should consult Goldschmidt's introduction to his
standard edition of the Babylonian Talmud. Over 400 years ago Daniel Bomberg
brought out the first complete printed text of the Talmud. It was widely
circulated and became the "standard text." But in the ensuing
centuries, as might be expected, vast numbers of ancient Talmud manuscripts
have been discovered, texts entirely unknown to Bomberg and differing very
widely from his text as well as among themselves. Even without these discoveries it is apparent that the
Bomberg text swarms with mistakes" obvious even to the casual reader. In the face of this, one would expect
all kinds of new and improved editions of the Talmud, since Bomberg claimed no
more divine inspiration than any other editor. But not a bit of it!
His text had been accepted by the doctors and that settled the matter
forever. "All subsequent editions have been virtually stereotype copies of
the first," Goldschmidt tells us, and so is his! He brushes aside all the
great manuscript discoveries—out of respect for the received text he will
not even consider them.[8]
If even the most
obvious blunder in the Bomberg edition can possibly be justified by any
argument, Gold-schmidt retains it without comment; if it cannot be justified he
still lets it stand but makes a modest suggestion in a footnote. "The
present edition," he announces with pride rather than shame, "is thus
an exact reproduction of the first Bomberg edition; all other readings, even
those which are obviously more correct, are put in footnotes as variant
readings, the text itself remaining untouched. The official stamp of approval
has so sanctified a text which the doctors themselves describe as extremely
inaccurate and poorly substantiated that "no Talmud authority would accept
as reliable any text 'improved' from the manuscripts or by scholarly judgment,
or even recognize such as a Talmud text at all."[9]
Though it is hard for
the layman to believe that such things can be, they are the rule rather than
the exception.
A CAREFUL CONTROL
JOB: Comparison of this with less damaged copies of the same text shows that we
have here a studious inking out of any passage or word that might possibly be
construed to cast disrespect on the Christians or heighten the prestige of the
Jews.
HEAVY-HANDED
CONTROL OF THE PAST: An official censor inked out a passage in a volume of
Maimonides (Venice, 1551). The Jewish owner of the book then wrote what he
could of the passage from memory in the margin on the left. Later a surprise
inspection by another censor inked out this reconstruction, and probably cost
the offender a heavy fine.
The Way of the
Church
The rigorous and
arbitrary censorship of ancient texts belongs to the common heritage of all the
"people of the book," being an established routine in every age.
Antiochus ordered all copies of the Jewish scriptures burned, and pronounced
the death penalty on anyone guilty of possessing a copy.[10]
Diocletian passed a
like law against all Christian writings, and Constantine followed his example
by condemning to death anyone guilty of possessing writings by the heretics
Porphyr or Arius.[11] In 449 Theodosius and Valentinian passed a law that
"all that ... any person may have written against the pious religion of the
Christians be committed to the flames wherever found."[12]
Accordingly Bishop
Theodoret of Cyprus can boast of having collected and destroyed in his diocese
more than two hundred copies of the diatessaron New Testament.[13]
When it was officially
decided (for party reasons) that Ephraim should be "regarded as the
classical Syrian poet, all older forms of Syrian poetry were regarded as
imperfect and were destroyed."[14]
The Arabs, raised up
in the same tradition, upon fixing the final text of the Koran, so carefully
destroyed all other texts that for 1200 years it was possible to maintain that
the accepted text was the very one dictated by the Prophet, though today, we
know that it was nothing of the sort.[15]
In this wholesale
destruction of texts to control the past, it is precisely the religious who are
least troubled by qualms of conscience, "for how" asks Eusebius,
"could a man who writes
against the Christians do anything but lie?"[16]
But usually the
violent economy of wholesale book burning is not necessary to control the past.
Skilful officials avoid it as the brutal and straightforward technique of
soldiers and governors, and a risky business in the bargain—for there is
no telling what slippery or forgotten pages might escape the flames, and the
subsequent discovery of such has sometimes proved very embarrassing. The shrewd
administrator can exercise an equally crippling censorship simply by condemning
certain items wherever they appear, as when Theodosius ordered all his subjects
to consider "any laws or rescripts alleged in the favor of heretics as
either fraud or forgery."[17]
To prove that an
order is fraudulent one needs no
further evidence than that the party doesn't like it: it is not distasteful to
the party because it is a forgery, but is automatically declared a forgery
because it is distasteful. Acting on this principle, modern scholars tried to
decide whether the account of the Council of Sinuessa was spurious or not
solely on the grounds of whether its acceptance would do the Church more harm
than good.
One school accepted
it as genuine because it said
something they thought highly favorable to the Roman Church; the other school
condemned it because it said
something else which they thought very damaging. The whole problem was whether
the story was more favorable to the Church than otherwise—in which case
it would be automatically accepted as true. Hefele finds the damage greater
than the benefit, and so declares it false.[18]
With such principles
to guide him, the clever scholar in his office of editor can make the past out to be pretty much what he
wants it to be.
The voluminous
writings of Ambrose are, according to Leander, full of things "that differ
from the catholic sense," being "by no means in agreement with sound
doctrine." Accordingly, every such statement was to be regarded
automatically as apocryphal and removed from the text by a special committee
appointed by the Pope in 1580.[19]
Does that sound naive?
No less a sophisticated intellectual than Gilson begins his philosophical
investigation of God with the announcement, "If we believe by faith that
God has spoken, since what God says is true, all that contradicts the word of
God can, and must, be at once excluded as false."[20]
Is it at all
surprising then that M. Gilson ends up by proving his faith, since all his
arguments must conform? He is in
the position of a man who declares as an article of faith that any coin when
tossed will always come down heads. This being the true faith, anything that
contradicts it, such as those times when a coin comes down tails, "can and
must be excluded as false."
The religious censor is thus not troubled by conscience, and, once he is
thoroughly conversant with the party line, has a very easy time of it.
A subtle and very
effective form of censorship is the silent treatment. "It is permitted," writes St. Augustine,
"for the purpose of building up religion in things pertaining to piety,
when necessary, to conceal whatever appears to need concealing; but it is not
permitted to lie, of course, and so one may not conceal by way of lying."[21]
The distinction is too
fine, for silence can be very mendacious. The celebrated Duchesne, according to
his biographer, M. Leclercq, was honest, open, and impartial in all the
questions of church history that he treated, "but he would not handle all the questions:
for example, he built a wall around the life of Jesus and the founding of the
church, and he would not allow anyone to approach it. ... He would not tolerate
any discussion or any hesitation on that subject." Yet the whole labor of
his life was "to prove the validity of the Church's historic
claims,"—and the whole burden of the proof rests in the life of
Jesus and the foundation of the Church, the two subjects of which he would
tolerate no examination, even by himself![22]
Recently (1952) the Knights
of Columbus Foundation for the Preservation of Historical Documents in the
Vatican Library sent out a brochure
announcing its admirable project of microfilming the entire contents of the
Vatican Library and housing the films in a special building in St. Louis. Only
not quite all of the mighty collection was to be thus preserved: "The
documents which the Church has been collecting for nearly 20 centuries,"
reads the announcement, "include, of course, the ecclesiastical records
from the earliest Christian era. These are housed separately in the Vatican
Archives and are not to be microfilmed." Why not? one asks with surprise;
and the answer is a shocker: "... as they are not of general interest to
scholars."
Now anyone who
consults the card index of any of our big libraries can quickly discover that
precisely "the earliest Christian era" has been the subject of more
books and studies than all the other centuries combined. If "the
ecclesiastical records from the earliest Christian era" cast anything like
a favorable light on the case of the Roman Church, we could long since have
expected to see them splashed on the covers of some national magazines, not
"housed separately" and withheld from circulation. "Not of
general interest to scholars," indeed! The editors of the Patrologia are more ingenuous when they explain their failure
to include certain important texts in what purports to be a complete collection
of sources: "The editors have not published these three letters because of
certain calumnies against the pope."[23]
The silent treatment
is recommended however, only in dealing with powerfully unco-operative
documents. It is usually possible to control a text simply by weeding out the
objectionable matter here and there instead of condemning whole books. Why
destroy all the letters of Cyprian because some of them refute Roman claims?
You only need declare the unfavorable ones forgeries, as Archbishop Tizzani
did, and accept all the others. When Rufinus of Aquileia, translating early
Christian texts at the end of the fourth century, comes upon passages
presenting the peculiar and unacceptable doctrines of the early Christians,
especially concerning God, he simply leaves those passages out, as he explains
with disarming frankness.[24]
When he is translating
Origen and finds his text saying something with which he does not agree, he
just naturally assumes, he tells us, that Origen never wrote any such thing and
either rewrites the offending passage or strikes it out altogether![25]
When Eusebius finds anything
in the records of Constantine's life which might not make edifying reading (and
there is plenty!), he deliberately omits such improper stuff, he explains, lest
it detract from the glory of his subject.[26]
In the same way, the
biographers of Mohammed boast that they have eliminated all offensive passages
and accepted into their histories only such material as will cast luster upon
the name and reputation of the Prophet.[27]
Sometimes, however,
one can preserve an entire text almost intact simply by inserting a single
syllable into it—the little word "not." Though a powerful
censor, this tiny word comes so near to being nothing in itself, that editors
apparently think little harm can be done by introducing it here and there where
careless scribes seem to have a habit of leaving it out. Thus in the 127
Canons of the Apostles we read that
the church has lost the power once enjoyed by the saints to drive out devils,
raise the dead, and speak in tongues, though those powers were meant to be
"signs to those who believe." This agrees perfectly with Mark 16:17Ó ... these
signs shall follow them that believe," etc. but not with the conventional
Christian thesis, that the loss of the signs was not serious since they were
meant to impress only unbelievers.
And so our editor
helpfully inserts the little word which the original writer somehow overlooked:
"that they should be a sign to those who do not believe!"[28]
In the same spirit of
helpfulness, when Justin Martyr propounds the doctrine (to which he refers a
number of times) that "God created the world out of unorganized
matter," Lange, editing the text in the Patrologia, is good enough to oblige with a useful insertion:
"... God created the world not
out of unorganized matter," to which by way of clarification he adds a
further interpolation, "but out of nothing."[29]
Why bother to condemn
Justin as a heretic when his words can be so easily controlled?
c) Emendation—the
Rewrite Job: The excision of
annoying passages and the insertion of useful ones is, after all, a surgery of
last resort. Most scholars prefer to display their skill and ingenuity in the
more cultivated art of emendation,
the correction of purely scribal errors. The object of the game is to make the
greatest possible change in the reading of a text by the least possible
alteration of the written word; the smaller the alteration and the more
striking the change of reading it effects, the more "brilliant" the
emendation is considered. This, however, is a three-dimensional chess game
reserved for the elite: the art of rewriting texts is practised with little
enough subtlety by most churchmen, whose prime concern has ever been to do a
pious rather than a convincing rewrite job. At a very early period, "when
anyone, Catholic or heretic, found a statement in the New Testament which
appeared to be wrong," according to Kirsopp Lake, "it would seem to
him a moral duty to correct an obvious scribal error into a true statement. But
who can say what are the limits of 'scribal errors'?[30]
Those limits are set
by any pious reader whose duty it is to alter the text whenever he feels the
scribe is off the track. This is an unlimited license to control the past.
In one of the very
earliest postapostolic writings, Ignatius reprimands those Christians who won't
believe anything that can't be proved from the archives, telling the
Philadelphians, "My archives are Jesus Christ, and they can't be
tampered with."[31]
Which shows not only how soon the Church took to resting its case on documents,
but also how soon those documents began to be controlled.
The original version
of Josephus' Jewish War (II, 110)
contained a very unflattering reference to Christ. For this reason the book was
condemned. Yet the writings of Josephus had been raised to almost canonical
rank by the Christians—how could this treasure be saved? In the oldest
surviving manuscripts, the famous passage about Christ has been savagely inked
out, rubbed out, or cut out, as if in hasty attempts to clear the owners of any
charge of possessing illicit writings. In later manuscripts, however, this
passage re-emerges, but this time wonderfully altered: by the changing of a few
words and a little deft insertion and deletion the insulting paragraph has now
become a glowing character reference for Jesus from the mouth of an infidel![32]
Coming down to our
own time, we find the emendator still at work in the same old shop. When Pere Batiffol reads in the Odes of Solomon, "Thou hast introduced thy person into the world," he asks,
"How could God introduce his person into the world which belongs to him?
Let us rather say that God introduces his 'countenance' instead: not prosopon (person), but morphe (face, form)."[33]
Let us say, "indeed! And what has the author to say
about it? "This passage," Batiffol obligingly explains, "calls
for a rather energetic correction in order to have sense."[34]
Sense for whom? The
second-year Greek student is constantly running into passages that make no
sense to him, and which he feels strongly urged to "correct." But
when a text fails to make sense to a reader, or makes undesirable sense to his
church, the last thing he may do is to alter it to some form that he and his
party can accept. And that is notoriously the first thing that religious
scholars do—just look through the footnotes of almost any early volume of
the Patrologiae.
In all his extensive
writings, it is axiomatic with M. Batiffol that anything not satisfactory to
his church can only be nonsense. Armed with this supremely practical and
convenient rule of thumb, he has no difficulty or hesitation in perpetrating
his "energetic corrections" whenever an ancient writing refuses to
cooperate with him or his party. The Odes of Solomon, for example, repeatedly speaks of "the
worlds" in the plural. In one place it declares of Christ, "In Him
the worlds speak one to another," making him the common Lord of many
worlds. Such was early Christian doctrine; but not modern: "One is
surprised," writes Batiffol, "to see 'the worlds' speaking to one
another; one would expect rather that it would be men. ... I would understand it to read 'men,' not
'worlds.' "[35] To what purpose, then, does an ancient
author say "worlds" if
an editor many centuries later can substitute any word that suits him in its
place? Is a poet writing some eighteen-hundred years ago under any obligation
to put down what "one would expect" him to write today? Apparently he
is.
[1] Joseph
Smith, ÒKing Follett Discourse,Ó Teachings
of the Prophet Joseph Smith, comp. Joseph
Fielding Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1977), 348. Even the motive attributed to the scribe, that he Òthought
it too badÓ to leave the text as he found it, is the authentic and conventional
one.
[2] Kahle, The
Cairo Geniza, 71, 77; cf. 2nd
ed., 130.
[3] Ibid., 71-72; cf. 2nd ed., 131.
[4] Ibid., 63-66; cf. 2nd ed., 115.
[5] Ibid., 66; cf. 2nd ed., 118.
[6] Anton
Deimel, sumerische Grammatik (Rome:
Pontifical Biblical Institue, 1924), 8.
[7] Alfred E.
Housman, Manilius, 5 vols. (London:
Cambridge, 1927), 5:xxxiv.
[8] Lazarus
Goldschmidt, Der babylonische Talmud, 12
vols. (Haag: Nijhoff, 1933) 1:13.
[9] Ibid., and 1:14.
[10] 1 Maccabees 1:56-7, 63.
[11] Sozomen, HE I, 21, in PG 67:861-2; Socrates, HE
I, 9, 31, in PG 67:33-4. The pagan Diocletian was milder against
the Christians than they were against heretics, Eusebius, HE VIII, 11, in PG 20:768-9.
[12] Corpus
Juris Civillis, vol. 2: Codex
Justinianus, Paul Kruger, ed. (Berlin:
weidmann, 1877), 1.1:3; and Novella
42, I, 2; lib. 3, de
summa trinitate.
[13] Kahle, The
Cairo Geniza, 211.
[14] Ibid., 84.
[15] Ibid., 29; cf. 192-7.
[16] Eusebius, HE VI, 19, 9, in PG 20:561-72.
[17] Codex
Theodosius XVI, 1, 16 tit. v leg. 6-23,
discussed in Edward GibbonÕs Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (New York: The Modern Library, 1932) ch.
27, 2:956, 1001.
[18] Karl von
Hefele, Concillengeschichte, 9 vols.
(Frieburg: im Herder, 1856-90), 1:143-44.
[19] Leander, Praefatio (Preface) 1, in PL 18:89.
[20] E. Gilson, God
and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University,
1942), 11.
[21] Augustine, De Mendacio 1, 10, in Pl 40:500-2.
[22] Henri
Leclercq, ÒHistoriens du Christianisme,Ó in DACL 6:269-98. That the motive
for censorship was to cover up the adverse effect of the evidence is clear from
DuchesneÕs revealing explanation of why he did not leave the Catholic church in
view of his discoveries: he could not, he explained, offend his aged mother as
the price of being Òtrue to himself.Ó Idem.
[23] Editorial
note on Tertullian, Apologeticus adversus Gentes pro Christianis (Apology), in PL
1:1205.
[24]
Rufinus, Preface to the Recongitiones
Clementinae, in PG 1:1205.
[25] Rufinus, Preface to OrigenÕs Peri Archon (On First Things), in PG 11:111-4.
[26] Eusebius, De
Vita Constantini, 1, 11, in PG 20:924-5.
[27] C. Snouck-
Hurgronje, ÒDer Islam,Ó in Pierre Chantepie de la Saussaye, ed., Lehrbuch
der Religionsgeschichte (Tubingen: Mohr,
1925) 1:656.
[28] Jean &
Augustin Perier, Les Ô127 Canons
des ApotresÕ 48, in PO 8:623-4.
[29] Justin
Martyr, Apologia pro Christianis 1, 10,
in PG 6:340.
[30] Kirsopp and
Silva Lake, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Harper, 1937) 99. Cf. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, 157: the ÒTargums had no authoritative text. Every
copyist could try to improve the text he copied.Ó
[31] Or, Òthey
havenÕt been tampered with.Ó Ignatius, Epistola ad Philadelphenses 8, in PG
5:833: Òhou parakousal prodelos olethros.Ó
[32] Josephius, Jewish
War II, 110, 172; cf. Jewish
Antiquities XVIII, 63-4.
[33] This famous
Josephus passage is the subject of EislerÕs whole two-volume work, Iesous
Basileus ou Basileusas. Cf. Kahle, The
Cairo Geniza, 150.
[34] Pere
Batiffol, ÒLes Odes de Salomon,Ó Revue Biblique 20 (1911): 163.
[35] Ibid.