About Me

The Book That Never was...

This site grew out of one of many 'side-tracks' that interrupted my attempt to write a book chronicling the events that led to the current English language biblical New Testament. When I first started attempting to write this book, I had no idea of the task I was setting myself. In fact, I didn’t think I was writing a book at all. Instead, I thought that all I would be doing was assembling information that had already been written down in various forms, and in varying degrees of detail, by many biblical historians. I thought that I would just be creating a ‘time-line’, with a date and a brief description of each of the events, and that the details that I would be recording were ‘cut and dried’, were well known, and were easily available.

I also assumed that I would be listing just those events that took place after the books of the New Testament had been written. In other words, I believed that I would simply be recording the events that led to one ‘finished product’, the complete Greek Bible, being converted into another ‘finished product’, the English language New Testament. At the time I did know that many different English language Bibles existed, but I didn’t then know when, why, or how they all came to be created.

I soon found that things weren’t going to be as simple as I initially thought. In the first place, there wasn’t anything like the unanimity between the sources I uncovered that I had assumed there would be.  For one thing, how can you put events in chronological order when all you have are dates like ‘3rd – 4th century’! Because I hated (and ignored) history at school, I had assumed that all biblical events could be dated to exact years, like ‘The Battle Of Hastings, 1066’ (one of the few historical dates that probably all English school-age children know - or perhaps did then). I soon found I was quite wrong.

Secondly, I hadn’t appreciated just how many events I would want to record. For example, when you don’t even know that a group of Christians (or Heretics, depending on your point of view) called the Waldenses ever existed, you’re certainly not going to want to record when they were formed, what they were first called, who their leader was, what their effect on the Christian church was, why they were persecuted, and why and when they were eventually massacred.

I also had no idea that I would be led down so many side turnings. Many times I uncovered or researched a biblical event that mentioned a name or some other event that was previously unknown to me, and I would sometimes take many days, or even weeks, in researching this new name or event before I could properly understand what had originally seemed to require just a simple one or two line description.

One area that I thought I could ignore turned out to be crucial. I had assumed that questions of who wrote the books of the New Testament, when, where, and why they were written, and why they ended up collected together in the New Testament at all, were simply not interesting. I had assumed that the answers to these questions were well known, or even so obvious that in some cases the questions themselves were pointless (such as who wrote the letters known as 1 and 2 Peter?). I wasn’t at all prepared for the problems I encountered when I tried to find the answers to these questions.

I also found a number of dead ends that I hadn't expected. These were places where, essentially, people before me had simply said ‘we just don’t know’, or where opinions were sharply divided, with no obvious majority view. There were even a few cases where I looked at well-regarded explanations and simply said to myself ‘no, that can’t be right’. As I started to describe the problems I was encountering I began to realize that by putting these problem descriptions into my time-line I was making it very unwieldy, and that it would be far better instead to precede the time-line with a list of the major problems I had come across, together with an explanation of the possible solutions.

As a result of the above issues I found it impossible to write my time-line without having researched these problems and come to some conclusions about them. Many times I had to stop writing about an event as I found that what I was about to write needed explanation, and as a result the list of questions grew as I filled in various gaps in the time-line. Eventually, I stopped writing the book altogether, and started to focus instead on trying to find answers to my questions. This site attempts to answer just a few of them.

Background

Who am I, to be attempting to do something that has surely been done much better by many others far more qualified than I? In biblical scholarship terms, I’m not much better than a nobody. I’m a lay person, I have no formal biblical education or training, I have still not read the whole of any Bible, and I only became a Christian at the age of nearly 50, after having been either an atheist or an agnostic for most of my life. However, for whatever reason, I feel led to attempt this task, and in many ways the data analysis I performed on a daily basis in my professional life has a lot in common with sifting though the many and varied reports of the history of the Bible and related documents. Perhaps my background in analytical computing gives me a unique and dispassionate perspective that will be found useful by others.

Putting my formal biblical qualifications (or rather, lack of them) aside, how did I start? As perhaps many people have done before me, I didn’t start out by trying to describe how the words we find in our Bibles and other biblical texts came to be there. In fact, I wasn’t really aware that the topic was of any interest until, with the encouragement of my (then) pastor, I started preparing to lead our life group in a study of Paul’s letter to Titus. I quickly became aware that the words in my Bible, a King James Version (KJV), were quite different from those in the Good News Bible Today’s English Version (GNB) used by my wife, and that both contained quite different words from the Bibles used by other members of our life group. How was I to proceed? On what Bible should I base my study?

Being a computer professional, I did what perhaps many would now do as a first step - I surfed the Web for information. I very soon found the Grace Notes Home Page, which among other things contained a link to 30 online Bible book studies, including Titus. Better yet, the text used (although then I didn’t even realize it) was from the KJV. However, because in our life group I was the only member using a KJV, I decided to create my own ‘parallel translation’ for study purposes, and for various reasons I chose to use the KJV and the New Living Translation (NLT). This worked well for study purposes, and certainly our group felt that having parallel texts made it easier to study.

At that time I wasn’t really aware of any significance in the Bibles that I had chosen, but as I surfed more I realized that I had used both a ‘word-for-word’ (or formal equivalence) translation (the KJV) and a ‘phrase-for-phrase’ (or dynamic equivalence) translation (the NLT). At about the same time I became aware that there were differences in the Greek texts behind the translations I had used, and this led me to add a third text, from the New American Standard Bible (NASB), to my parallel translation. Although my intent was to add understanding, in practice I was too involved with the multiple translations to be able to ‘see the wood for the trees.’ I was more concerned with the textual differences than I was in trying to understand the meaning of the words. However, having three translations instead of two was not a success.

One thing did however stand out from the study: Having been born and bred in England (my family and I moved to California at the beginning of 1997), I did not seem to have the same trouble with the language of the KJV that my American friends did. Various words or phrases in the KJV that were foreign to them were ‘as plain as a pikestaff’ (!) to me, and even where we all knew a word, my understanding was sometimes different to theirs. For example the phrase ‘to correct’ seems totally non-threatening to me - if I correct someone then I am simply pointing out where they are wrong. However to my American friends ‘to correct’ has all sorts of overtones of authority and punishment, as in ‘The Department Of Correction’.

So, not only were we all using different texts, but even where the same text was used, we did not always have the same understanding of the meaning. It seemed to me at the time that if our small life group (all Christians, but of different denominations and from different countries) could disagree like this on the meaning of the word of God, how could I have any faith that the original text of the Bible had been preserved in any translation? How could my understanding of the words of the KJV be the same as my friends understanding of their NIV, or their NLT, or any of the translations we were using? Worse yet, how could people in other countries, whose native languages don’t even have a way to express some of the concepts that English speakers use, have the same understanding as anyone in our group?

For a while it seemed as though I was almost back at the place where I was a few years earlier. At that time I couldn’t understand how any religion or faith could be the only true one, when they all claimed that they were. This time, although my basic Christian belief wasn’t shaken, my belief in the Bible was. How could I get out of this mess? At this point my professional training and experience kicked in. I needed more data. I needed to know more about the differences that I was seeing in the various Bibles that I had access to, and, crucially, I needed to know how significant those differences really were.

The World Wide Web

Having realized that I needed more data, where was I to start? I am not a classical scholar, my Greek is limited, I know no Hebrew, and I failed Latin at school. So, as before, I surfed the web.Now, the really great thing about the web is simply the vast amount of data out there. Why spend time getting books out of a library when you can look it all up in the comfort of your own home?

I soon found that there was no shortage of articles, papers, etc. that I could read. The problem, of course, was that I had no way of knowing the quality of what I was reading. Was I reading the ravings of a madman, the words of a liar, a well reasoned argument by someone who had been misled, or was I reading the facts of the case?

In fact, I realized that I was having the same kind of problems others have had since the first translation of the Bible was attempted. In some cases all the sources I found would agree on dates, names, places, etc. surrounding an event; in some cases there would be agreement on everything but the date; sometimes the spelling of a name would be different; in some cases many sources would list an event; while in other cases perhaps an event would be mentioned only once.

My sources

As a result, I obviously had to filter the information I found – I had to separate the wheat from the chaff. Without even realizing I was doing it, I started to do what many Bible translators had previously done - I started to create my own ‘version’ of the histories I was reading, using many of the same techniques that they had used:

• • More often than not, I simply wrote down what the majority of the sources reported. This is a ‘Majority Text’ (or MT) approach.

  • Sometimes, where several sources agreed on most of the details of an event, I recorded the event, but with the differences (e.g. different dates) marked with a question mark. Call this a simple form of ‘Textual Apparatus’.

  • In some cases there was no clear agreement on the details of an event, and where this happened I looked for internal evidence in the whole document I was looking at to determine whether I would rely on it. Sometimes some of the sources showed a heavy sectarian bias, or were part of a document employing circular arguments, or had other problems. These documents I typically rejected as primary sources, although I sometimes retained them for reference purposes. What I was doing here was using a form of analysis to create a ‘Critical Text’ (or CT).

  • Occasionally I would find an event was only reported by one source, or that one source would have a different interpretation of the significance of an event than everyone else. If the source (using internal evidence) seemed reliable I would usually include the event, but in some cases I would reject it. As for interpretations, some seemed reasonable, but some seemed apocryphal. In any event, I chose to try to stick to the facts (so far as I could determine them) and reject interpretation unless there was clear agreement. By rejecting some events and interpretations I was creating my own ‘Canon.’

  • Sometimes, in reading from a new source, I would find something that caused me to alter the details I had already recorded regarding an event. This might be simply a different date, or could be something that contradicted what I had already written. Whatever it was, it would cause me to produce a revision of my work, so that over time I had created multiple variants.

  • Finally, I try to employ Occam’s Razor. In the 14th century a Franciscan friar; William of Occam (or Ockham, which is in the county of Surrey, England, where both he and I were born), expounded the principle that “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” This principle, known as Occam’s razor, is most usefully stated here as: When you have two or more competing theories which make exactly the same predictions, the simplest one is best.

What does all this mean? Basically it means that, like everyone before me, I've had to interpret the information I have found, initially largely regarding Marcion (supposedly the author of a 'competing' version of Luke's gospel), but more recently what is known as the Synoptic Problem. However, perhaps my training and experience in data analysis and knowledge management is leading me closer to the heart of the matter than others. Hopefully time will tell. Suggested places to begin: https://sites.google.com/site/inglisonmarcion/ or https://sites.google.com/site/inglisonmarcion/home/the-synoptic-problem 

David Inglis

If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, etc. regarding this site please email me at davidinglis2@comcast.net