Do Fake Quotations Matter?

We've all seen them, those quotes used to clinch an argument. Like the one seen here. Seems damning, doesn't it? Except Lenin never said it, and in fact it dates from the late 1940s, long after Lenin's death, and was fabricated to support a campaign to defeat President Harry S. Truman's plans for National Health Insurance. A little thought about the issue of course suggests that it has to be a fake - Lenin was a  revolutionary, not an advocate of slow and concealed change.

A fake quotation like this one is obviously important; it links one's opponent with a historic "baddie", creating a guilt by association argument where there is in fact no association. But what about those "positive" quotations such as that attributed to Thomas Jefferson, ‘A government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it away'. In these cases the point being made is not that the other fellow sounds like Lenin (and therefore is, by implication, trying to bring in Communism by stealth), but that your position is that of some great figure from your nation's history. And after all, if a sentiment is true, isn't it true no matter who said it?

Well, yes it is, but that's not why these fake quotations are used, and it's certainly not why they were manufactured in the first place; they were manufactured, for the most part, to add a spurious authority to an argument, rather than letting it succeed on its own merits. It is in fact a form of the argument from false authority; in this case it is not that (as is usually the case) the alleged authority is not an authority at all, but that the authority appealed to never said what they are alleged to have said. An argument being made by Joe Bloggs may well be ignored, an argument alleged to have been made by Winston S. Churchill is more likely to be listened to.

While there are spurious quotations being manufactured all the time, many of those circulating on the internet are, like the fake Lenin quote, over fifty years old. Those using them may be guilty of bad research, but usually they are guilty merely of believing a source that is otherwise trustworthy but made the mistake of not going back to a primary source for a quote; but how many of us actually do go back to the primary source every time we want to use a quote? I recall when at seminary asking a visiting preacher at the Church I attended for the original source of a Thomas Goodwin quote, and he sheepishly admitting that he got it secondhand - ah, the perils of visiting preachers in churches with theological students in the congregation!

So why does it matter? Well, it matters because quoting a past figure is ultimately an appeal to history, and an appeal to a false quotation is therefore an appeal to a false history, often a legendary history, history become myth, as it were. Now the word "myth" is often used as if it were synonymous with "fiction", but that is quite unfair to the language; myth is not just made-up story, often it is an elaboration of real events, or at least has a basis in reality, however tenuous, but central to myth is the concept of meaning. A myth is a meaningful story, and the meaning matters more than the story. The myths of King Arthur help to establish a national identity, the myths of Robin Hood tell us that there is always hope, the prospect a hero rising up to help those who are oppressed. And the false quotations are part of myth; they give us our champions on the one side, the great figures of history who stood where we stand, and who still stand somehow behind us, and the great villains who were overcome in the past but whose descendants must still be fought. One of the clearest cases of this turning of history into myth is the quotation frequently attributed to Martin Luther, “If I profess, with the loudest voice and the clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christianity. Where the battle rages the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle-field besides is mere flight and disgrace to him if he flinches at that one point.” This is in fact not Luther at all, but a Victorian author, Elizabeth Rundle Charles, in a historical novel about the German Reformation, where the words are spoken by a fictional character. Fiction and history blur into myth, and Mrs. Charles' writing is mistaken for Martin Luther - a tribute to her writing skills if nothing else. And Christians encourage each other to be bold by quoting words they think were penned by Luther in the midst of conflict but were in fact written by a Victorian lady in her comfortable study writing a serial story for a magazine.

But the greatest danger of all this is when myth and reality are confused, and myth is treated as history rather than myth. It becomes all the more dangerous when the myth is confused with history and the confusion leads to a call to return to a mythological golden age that never actually existed. The Christian is never to call to a return to a previous era in history, but to press forward; the myth of the golden age is pagan, it is not something the Bible ever engages in; the Bible ends not with Eden restored, but with something much greater and more wonderful than that; God not just visiting humanity in a garden, but God dwelling with humanity in a garden city. That does not mean we should not resist those trying to move the ancient landmarks, but that we do so not in the name of a golden age past, but in the name of God who is alive, and the same for ever more.

So make sure that quotation is real. Accept only primary sources!

Historiography: Rights and Wrongs

I am a pastor, not a professional historian. I am however an amateur historian, and have written history for publication, so I know a bit about how you do history. Sadly the discipline of Church history is either ignored or misunderstood by many evangelicals today. Historical ignorance is corrected by the injunction to "go and read a book", but there are those who know something about history, but do not understand how history is done

That was one of the worst things about the White-Pinto debate last week, that Chris Pinto demonstrated a thoroughly false historiography that is too common in certain circles. The word historiography in this context refers to the study of how we "do" history, and Pinto displays the view that certain historians of the 19th century form a "canon" (small 'c', note), a rule by which all other historians are to be judged. This isn't an uncommon view in certain circles, as witness the fact that there are still people who hold to the "trail of blood" view of Baptist history. Now of course when young Christians set out reading history, they will tend to go with the older writers, those of a viewpoint they themselves hold, and there is nothing wrong with that; a biography by a sympathetic author is always a far better read than a biography by an unsympathetic one, after all, and a history written by an atheistic Marxist intent on imposing his ideas of how things ought to have happened upon the record is going to be a pretty irritating read unless you are an atheistic Marxist (and even then...). But we must beware taking those favourite authors and saying, "If anyone disagrees with them, then so much the worse for the one disagreeing." As Christians who believe in the reality and objectivity of truth, our first commitment must be to that same truth, to what really happened, as opposed to what we would like to have happened. I don't just refer to the interpretation of history, what certain events mean, what motives lay behind a person's action, for example, but the actual historical record itself, who did what and when.

When we go any distance into the past beyond about a hundred years, our knowledge of history is based upon records, sources. As the knowledge of sources changes, so too our knowledge of the past does; to give one example, open a 19th century biography of John Knox such as Thomas M'Crie's famous work and it will tell you that Knox was born in 1505. More recent works, including the biography by Henry Cowan published in 1905, give the date as between 1513 and 1515, up to a whole decade later. Why is this? Because between M'Crie's writing in 1811 and Cowan in 1905 further research had been done on Knox, following M'Crie's lead. No historian is to be regarded ipso facto as having given the last word on a subject. Cowan notes that the traditional date of Knox's birth rested almost entirely upon a historian writing about 50 years later, in other words on a secondary source, while the later date is based upon Theodore Beza, who knew Knox personally, and other contemporary sources. Now M'Crie's work is a classic, and yet it is wrong on the date of Knox's birth because later historians were able to uncover data unknown to M'Crie. That is how history works, being based upon sources, the judgement of historians is liable to alteration if new sources come to light. There are also people who create fraudulent sources, which creates all sorts of havoc for historians. In E.C. Pike The Story of the Anabaptists (London, 1904) he refers to Goadby's Byepaths of  Baptist History and its reference to the graveyard at Hill Cliffe Baptist chapel, near Warrington, mentioning a gravestone dated 1357. It is quite certain that the stone in question had been fraudulently altered, firstly because its style was not 14th century, and secondly because old records exist that show what the original date on the stone was. In the effort to claim the name of "oldest" people have stretched points and flat out made things up. The temptation to exaggerate can be strong.

This being so, to claim that any historians, however orthodox their theology, are the canon by which all others are to be judged is just a demonstration of appalling ignorance of how history works. The great 19th century Church historians are not honoured by being treated as the be all and end all of history, as the men who gave us the infallible facts and interpretation, but by our following in their footsteps, taking up the trails that they blazed, developing the country they explored, exploring still further. Just because a particular interpretation of history is seen as favouring a particular theological position does not mean that, should the evidence force us to that conclusion, it may not have to be abandoned, as for example the claim that the Cathars and Paulicians were in any meaningful sense "reformers before the Reformation". Nor should we read back the excesses of the late Middle Ages into the age of Anselm, far less the age of Augustine. The historian must go where the evidence leads, not cling to Hill Cliffe as pre-Reformation when all the evidence shows it is of 17th century origin.

And the reader must recall that history is not an exact science; the reconstruction of what happened in the past is often straightforward, but sometimes it is not. In days past people were not so exact at keeping records as we are today, the exact date of an event was not seen as important in the way we see it - the event itself was what mattered. Historians of the past were men like us, capable of error, of being misled or of drawing false conclusions; that J.A. Wylie's estimate of the Cathars was in error does not mean that we should cast out everything he ever wrote, far less that we should all become Roman Catholics or something like that. But we should remember this: those writers were not infallible, and their writings are not inspired. And for us to treat them as such would be to do them a great disservice, for it would be to treat Protestant historians as though they were, in the field of history, infallible popes.

Utter Silliness!

Editing my review of Bennett's Catholicism: East of Eden, I came across this quotation from Faber's History of the Ancient Vallenses and Albigenses on P. 67. My reaction was one of disbelief followed by deep disquiet that this sort of thing is still believed by a worryingly huge number of Protestants. I quote:

"The Albigenses were a group of Christians, influential for their godly lives, who were condemned by the Church of Rome. George Stanley Faber, writing in 1838 provides an example of papal work, 'Avcording to the plan adopted by the inquisition of Langedoc, it was morally impossible for any of the accused Albigenses to escape [the charge of Manichaeanism]... No rational being can, by any conceivable possibilty, believe a syllable of the tales of Manicheism related of the Albigenses, when those tales rest upon such a foundation as that which has been laid by the Council of Narbonne..."

Note well. What Faber is in fact saying is that, because of the methods adopted by the Roman Catholics, we should discount all the evidence then available as to what the Albigenses believed. Faber's method utterly amazes me. Remember, the only actual evidence of the beliefs of the Albigenses (otherwise known as Cathars) available to Faber was found in the registers of that inquisition. Yet Faber decided to discount that, and amazingly to assume that in fact these people were "Protestants before the Reformation', on the basis that the Roman Catholic Church persecuted them. Yet we know that the Roman Catholics persecuted Jews in Europe and Muslims in Spain. In other words, merely being persecuted by Rome is no sign of orthodoxy! At most, therefore, all Faber should have been able to conclude is that the charges of dualism against the Albigenses were not proven. Instead he assumes them to be false, and projects onto the Albigenses the character of the Waldenses, an entirely different group!

Historians can only work with what exists, not with what does not, but Faber in effect reverses this procedure. Rome cannot be trusted, Rome says that the Albigenses were dualists, and therefore the Albigenses were in fact orthodox Protestants. Such reasoning condemns itself.

Contrast this method with the account of Albigensianism given in Harold O.J. Brown's magisterial Heresies Pp. 256-261. In brief he shows its links with Eastern dualistic groups, from which it derived its ordination. He writes: "As far as the Bogomils and Cathars are concerned, the testimonies that attribute moral purity to the leaders, but license to the generality of followers, are too numerous and unanimous to suppose them all to be hostile fabrications" (P. 257). This is the historical method - we use what sources we have, not uncritically, but with care. As far back as the 18th century, the Lutheran historican von Mosheim affirmed that the Alibigenses were dualists, and as Church history moved into the 20th century, so did other writers, for example the Frenchman Andre Lagarde, in his The Latin Church in the Middle Ages (Edinburgh, T. T. Clark, 1915), and Principal Adeney of Manchester in his The Greek and Eastern Churches (Edinburgh, T. T. Clark, 1908). By the time of K.S. Latourette's A History of Christianity (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), a clear distinction is made between the Albigenses and the Waldenses. A modern work by a conservative Reformed Christian, N.R. Needham's 2000 Years of Christ's Power takes this line as well - one now taken by all but a few who cling to works that are derived from such unhistorical writings as that of Faber.

Thus we see (or ought to see) that the whole 'Trail of Blood' theory is based on writings that simply do not take history seriously!

Book Review: Heresy!

Alister McGrath: Heresy (SPCK, 2009) Paperback, Pp. 288 £12.99

There has always been an interest in heresy, from John Henry Newman's Arians of the Fourth Century to Harold O.J. Brown's Heresies, there has always been a market for books dealing with these false teachings and erroneous beliefs. But in the wider culture, even in some contemporary 'Evangelical' circles, there are people who are interested in heresy as an exciting alternative to traditional Protestant Christianity. In Academia we have Elaine Pagels promoting Gnosticism, in popular culture Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, containing not a scintilla of truth, sold millions, and left many thinking that Christianity as it exists today was the result of a close vote at the Council of Nicea, where Jesus was proclaimed as Divine for the first time (every part of this statement is actually false). The heretics are the rebels, the heroes, the folk who had a greater insight than other people. In part this attitude has always existed, as witness the Baptist Successionism that claimed the Paulicians, Bogomils and Cathars as true Christians because of their rebellion against the authoritarian approach of the Greek and Latin Churches, though of course in this case the successionists ignored the stubborn fact that these groups held to a heretical theology.

McGrath is a careful historian, and of course he gently but firmly steps on this idea. Heresy, he tells us in this book, in not exciting, radical and libertarian. It is a dead-end in theology that has not been recognised as such. Since the 19th century it has been recognised by theologians and historians of theology that there is a process of development in doctrinal understanding. The Church is 'growing into' the Bible, exploring the fullness of the Biblical message. The heretics are people who have taken a wrong turn in that exploration, and instead of giving us a correct understanding, they have erred from the faith. This is not, McGrath warns us, to say that they were all wicked and designing men. Many of them were simply theologically naive, and ended up tenaciously clinging to a theory that was inadequate to account for the fullness of the Biblical revelation. Orthodoxy, on the other hand, has been based on a full-orbed study of the whole of Scripture.

This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book that will be welcomed by thoughtful Christians. As McGrath explores heresy and the causes of heresy, he brings us to a deeper appreciation of orthodoxy, and explodes many of the myths of the modern advocates of the old heretics. It simply is not true, he points out, to say that heresy is more liberating than orthodoxy. True, there were some heresies that were libertarian, but others, such an Donatism and Montanism, were extremely authoritarian, and condemned the orthodox as libertarian! Nor was Gnosticism a sort of proto-feminist movement, as is demonstrated by the notorious ending of the so-called Gospel of Thomas, which states "...every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven" (Thomas verse 114).

McGrath is a little too ecumenical in places for my tastes, but this is a small matter. The reader who wants an exhaustive account of the history of heresies should read Harold O.J. Brown. This is more an exploration of the nature of heresy, and as such it is very welcome. It certainly sets the record straight for those who get their ideas about heresy from The Da Vinci Code.

If there is one thing this book could have done without, it is the foreword by Rick Warren. On the other hand, I'd rather Warren was reading this book than many others!

'In The Beginning'

Alister McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 2001)

2001 saw a trio of books on the market telling the story of the AV. I have already addressed two of them, and in this post I hope to address the third. Alister McGrath is no stranger to modern readers, Professor of Historical Theology at the University of Oxford, he is one of very few Calvinists teaching within the British establishment. His writing style is excellent, and even more importantly, he is a meticulous researcher. This book does not disappoint.

In form it is more like Bobrick than Nicolson, tracing the history of the English Bible back to before the days of Wycliffe, and even tracing the rise of English as a literary language and the relationship between English and Englishness. He traces the major movements in English religion and relates them to Bible versions, King James only appears on the scene on P. 135! This is a rich book that explains how the King James Bible came to be the way it is, with factors including politics as well as religion - and of course religious politics! The fact that all of the translators came from the southeast of England also had an effect on the final product - if it had been translated in the Province of York it would have sounded very different!

McGrath gives us an excellent chapter dealing with the challenges of transaltion, and discusses such questions as why the AV's language was antiquated when it came out. The answer is that it was never intended as a brand-new translation from scratch, and was a revision of the Bishops' Bible, which was itself a revision of Coverdale, which incorporated Tyndale - who wrote in the 1540s, and in the language of the 1540s.

It may come as a shock to some that the AV was not instantly accepted, but there were good reasons. Firstly, the Geneva Bible was actually cheaper and usually of a better quality (the first edition of the AV was riddled with errors), and secondly people are always wary of a new Bible version. Also the AV was produced by a committee that included some of the worst persecutors of the Puritans. It was an Anglican Bible, and the Puritans were not prepared to buy it. But decades of promotion in the Church of England (and laws attempting to ban the Geneva Bible), followed by the restoration of the monarchy and the fall of the Puritans, led to the AV finally achieving its place as the English Bible.

Finally he deals with the influence the AV has had, and continues to have, on the English language, how Hebraisms and Grecianisms have become part of how we speak English because of the AV.

This is a different book again from the last two reviewed, and all three could be read with profit by anyone wanting to know more about the AV and how we got it. Only McGrath really deals with events after the Publication of the AV, while Nicolson tells us the most about the translators. I enjoyed all three books greatly.

Two Good Books on the King James Bible

How did we get the King James Bible (as the Authorised Version is generally known outside of the United Kingdom)? While there are some who seem to think it was let down on a string from heaven, the real story is far more interesting. A number of books have been published detailing this history, but two excellent volumes are Benson Bobrick's The Making of the English Bible (London, Phoenix, 2003), and Adam Nicolson's God's Secretaries (New York, Harper Perennial, 2003). Bobrick's book, as the title indicates, covers a wider field than Nicolson, who concentrates entirely on the AV. Bobrick covers the history of the Bible in English from Wycliffe's Bible to the AV, including the Jesuit Douay-Rheims Bible. This is a helpful treatment, as it is well known that the King James translators did not issue an entirely new translation, but drew on the existing translations, even the Douay-Rheims in places, although of course the Douay-Rheims is translated (barely) from the Latin Vulgate. On this subject, Bobrick notes how the Douay-Rheims translators were forced to retain at least 99 Latin words (P. 194), thus having "dominator" for 'sovereign' and "rationale" for 'breast-plate'. Thus Bobrick gives the 'pedigree' of the King James as well as the history of its actual making.

Nicolson, on the other hand, gives what he professes to, the story of "The making of the King James Bible." His English prose is excellent, probably influenced by the AV, and he is a professed admirer of the AV. What he gives is the political, religious and social background to the King James Bible, in glorious detail. We have potted biographies of the more exciting translators, such as the incomparable Lancelot Andrewes and the amazingly gifted Hadrian á Saravia, half-Dutch, half-Spanish, of whom it was said that he could be translator-general on the Judgement Day. Their faults are not ignored, but nor are their excellencies and abilities. King James Only folks may be a little uncomfortable when they learn that the translation committee of the King James was made up entirely of Calvinists and Anglo-Catholics. Thus those who were not Calvinist were Anglo-Catholic, and those who were not Anglo-Catholic were Calvinists. Bishop Miles Smith (yes, seven of the King James translators were Anglican Bishops), a strict Calvinist, once left a boring sermon to go to the pub. It was probably a very bad sermon, and an hour or so down the pub with Miles Smith was undoubtedly a time of edifying conversation.

We meet here King James, a deeply insecure man (the natural result of his mother and her lover having had his father blown up, and his then being raised by a committee of Presbyterian ministers) who wanted to unite England and Scotland politically and economically - the first modern scheme for a single currency, perhaps? There were questions asked about his 'Union' currency as well. James also fancied himself as a theologian, and it was this that led to the Hampton Court Conference, at which the plan for the AV was adopted.

In his treatment of the English Bible after the AV, Nicolson notes the failure of three subsequent English versions. The first is the rather funny 18th century version by Edward Harwood. Those interested in why it failed can read it here. Second is the Revised Version, which was accused by one of its own committee members of "impoverishing the English language". It also, Nicolson points out, was written in cod-Jacobean prose, a further barrier to its being an improvement on the AV, at least stylistically, especially as it actually introduced a number of archaic words the were not in the King James! Then he deals with the New English Bible, which had a combination of the problems of Harwood with vulgarity and flatness of prose.

These books are both excellently researched, and will enlighten the reader as to how we got the King James Bible, and why it reads as it does in places. Neither is written by an Evangelical Christian, and Bobrick in particular sounds rather liberal in places. The Christian will note those places and ignore them.

A book by a Reformed Christian on the subject is Alister McGrath's In the Beginning. Undoubtedly this is a well-written and researched book, but I haven't read it, so I won't comment on it until I have.

What really happened on the RV committees.

According to Gail Riplinger, the Revised Version was a Luciferian plot, and merely being on the RV committee lays a man open to all sort of aspersions. But what was it really like? First of all, we must remember that not all members of the committee agreed with Westcott and Hort. Among them were some of the most conservative Bible scholars of the period, some of whom produced a 'minority report' charging Westcott and Hort with going far beyond the remit of the committee.

According to Riplinger, the RV committee were determined to Let me quote to you Prof. David Brown, one of Westcott and Hort's critics on the RV committee. In 'The Expository Times' Vol. 4, P. 63 he recounts how a change was introduced in Matt. 2. 2:

"The wise men of the East ask: 'Where is He that is born king of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the east and are come to worship Him.' The question here is, What kind of worship is here meant? Is it the homage due to a superior among ourselves (as in Luke 14.10) or is it religious worship? The former, it was thought by one member, was the meaning intended, and therefore proper to be expressed. But, as it was belived by one member that verse 11 would throw light on this question, the Company agreed to wait until they reached that verse. On which it was stated that the phrase here rendered, 'they presented gifts' is one used several hundred times in the LXX., and always in the sense of religious offerings made in worship to God; and the only question here was, Is the phrase used in that sense in the New Testament? And the six passages besides this one in which it is found in the New Testament are admittedly used in this sense. Hence (it was argued), it ought to be so understood there; and therefore in verse 2 'worship' should be retained, and in verse 11, instead of 'presented unto Him gifts,' etc., we should render it 'they offered unto Him,' etc. This was accordingly done, if not unanimously, certainly without objection." (David Brown, 'Is the Revised Version a Failure?' Pp. 63-5, The Expository Times Vol. 4 (Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1892) P. 63.

Note that Brown did regard the RV as a failure. Elsewhere in the article he condemns it stylistically, and he is well known to have felt Westcott and Hort relied too much on the two Uncials Vaticanus and Sinaiaticus. That is not my concern here. My concern is to show that the RV committees did not sit in a smoke-filled room gleefully tearing out the deity of Christ from the New Testament, and that in fact in several places they strengthened the testimony to the deity of Christ.

It is interesting that while Riplinger piles abuse on Liddell of Liddell-Scott, she says nothing about Scott. Well, Scott was actually on the RV Committee! David Brown had something to say about this man that rather indicates why Riplinger may have been silent about him. Brown's biographer recounts how In Roman 6.1 one of the company, Dr. Kennedy, argued for the translation 'God who is over all be blessed for ever,' (thus replacing the ambiguous AV reading with one that is confessedly opposed to the deity of Christ) declaring that the only reason anyone disagreed with him was theology. Dean Scott (of the Liddell Scott Lexicon), replied, "No, sir, we stand upon Greek. The verse won't translate but, as in the Authorised Version, according to the Septuagint and New Testament Greek." Thus the R.V. (following the Geneva Bible, which here as in other places is much stronger than the AV) DOES describe Christ as 'God over all, blessed for ever.' Hardly an enemy of the deity of Christ, I think!