jmcrae, I usually don’t find much merit in your “the church gave us the NT argument”, which this is another form of the same, but I have to give credit to you this time. This particular wording of it makes the most sense I’ve seen any make for it.
In the summer of 1987, when my husband and I were visiting Scotland, I went to a print studio in Inverness, where such things are not valued very highly (old is just old - they have no concept of “antique”), and in the studio, there is one of the seven original Gutenberg presses.
In the cases next to the press are the very letters that were used to publish the world’s first mass-produced English Bibles - and yes, the upper cases still hold the
upper-case letters, ABCD … etc., and the lower cases still hold the
lower-case letters, abcd … etc. and as I picked them out and held them in my hands, I began to meditate on all of the steps of the process that brought the Scriptures from the lips of the Holy Spirit to the little table beside my bed.
It was then that I realized that I had a lot of gaps in my knowledge of how the Bible came to us. (Still do, today.) So, I decided to work my way backwards.
Bible. On the night table.
Got there, in a shopping bag. (Shopping bag got recycled.)
Was put into the shopping bag by the store clerk.
Was given to the store clerk by me.
I got it off the shelf in the book store.
It got to the shelf in the book store when a box boy unloaded a box of Bibles that he got off the back of a truck that came to the store.
The box of Bibles got on to the truck when a truck driver picked it up at a printer’s.
The Bibles were put into the box by the printers.
They got them from the Bindery area of the print shop, where they had just been glued and bound together.
Before that, they had to cut the pages apart and put them in the right order.
Before that, the ink was wet, and the pages were laying on drying racks.
The ink got on to the pages when they went through the press.
The press was loaded up with plates of text copied from proofs given by - who? The Holy Spirit?
That’s the part where I realized that there had to be human beings involved in the writing and proofing of the text of the Scriptures. Which means that there had to be an editing process. Who did the editing? By what criteria did they know when it was finally correct? When did this happen, originally?
After much research, the “who” turned out to be the Magesterium of the Catholic Church, the criteria turned out to be the Oral Tradition of the Catholic Church, and the “when” turned out to be some time between 400 and 405 AD.
), I’ve got a homework assignment for you.
