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THE SECOND JEWISH WAR: THE KITOS WAR (115-117 AD)

When the Roman army devasted Jerusalem and Judea in 70 AD, most of the Jewish population went untouched because – as pointed out earlier – most of them didn’t live in Judea. At first, these Jews kept their heads down because the First Jewish War had made Jews fairly unpopular. However, the fact that the Jews’ national, religious, and historical identity had revolved around the now non-existent Jerusalem; and the fact that Rome levied a tax on Jews throughout the empire to help pay for the expenses of the Great Revolt (soon to be called the First Jewish War because the Jews were going to rise up again), caused deep resentment within Jewish communities; they felt adrift, unappreciated, uncertain about their future as a people, and defensively decided they were wrongly burdened. Then in 115 AD their simmering hatred made them think they saw an opportunity they couldn’t pass up.

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In 115 AD the Roman Empire was involved in a major war in the eastern part of its empire in areas in and around Babylon against the expanding Parthian Empire. During the war Rome kept reserve troops garrisoned in the rear of the fighting in places west of Babylon like northern Africa, Judea, Syria, Cyprus, Turkey, and Greece. The presence of these reserve troops had kept the peace where they were garrisoned. But the war with the Parthians hadn’t been going very well for Rome, so these reserve troops were ordered to move up to the eastern front to help with the fighting – which left the reserve garrisons with very few soldiers to maintain order and to protect both the civilian populations and the families of the now-absent soldiers. The isolated soldiers, civilians, and families in these now-unprotected regions were caught completely off guard when their previously-peaceful Jewish neighbors suddenly turned against them with savage, sadistic, murderous, senseless, merciless rage. The Jews quickly gained the upper hand in the fighting because there was little effective resistance, and when they realized they had control, their killing became sport of the most shocking and appalling kind imaginable – the kind that shows we humans truly do differ nothing from beasts. Some statistics: The Jewish insurrectionists in Cyrene (Libya), using indescribable atrocities, slaughtered 220,000 people. In Alexandria the inhumane slaughter was accompanied by looting, burning the city, and destroying temples and monuments. On the island of Cyprus 240,000 were killed. Roman troops were quickly moved to these areas, hoping to save as many of their relatives, friends, and comrades as possible. However, these common soldiers were completely unprepared for the kinds of inhuman butchery they found...which caused them to retaliate by tearfully and angrily annihilating the Jews in Alexandria, Cyrene, and Cyprus. In Cyrene the Jews’ uprising had come so close to killing everybody that Rome had to begin a massive program of resettlement by having people relocate there from other areas.

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This Kitos – or, Second – War added to the general worldwide dislike people already had for Jews.

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THE THIRD JEWISH WAR: THE BAR KOKHBA REVOLT (132-135 AD)

Rome decided it needed to proactively prevent future Jewish uprisings. The solution it came up with was to sever the Jews from their history by eradicating the names “Israel,” “Judea,” and “Jerusalem.” Rome made Judea merge with Syria (making the large army garrison in Antioch more involved with Judea), and the merged result was named “Syria Palestina” – an ancient name that existed before the Philistines, and from which the Philistines got their name. Jerusalem was renamed “Aelia Capitolina,” which combined one of the names of the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, with a word linked to the Roman god, Jupiter. Appropriately enough, Hadrian had two statues erected on the old site of Jerusalem’s temple ­– one of himself, and one of Jupiter. (Hadrian was plagued by bad health, an unhappy marriage, and an unhappy life.)  Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem) was not to be the capital of Syria Palestina; for several reasons Antioch became the capital – its historic, ancient, lucrative trade routes; its large army garrison; and its overall beauty. (Those ancient trade routes were supposedly where the campfire tales originated that became the literary collection called The Arabian Nights – with its famous characters such as Sinbad the sailor, Ali Baba and his thieves, and Aladdin and his lamp.)

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As the Romans generously and forgivingly prepared to rebuild what was to be Aelia Capitolina, a Jewish rebel militia leader who was called Bar Kokhba (his real name was Bar Koseva), effectively used guerrilla warfare to inflict heavy casualties on Romans. One of the local rabbis encouraged Jews to enlist with Bar Kokhba by telling everybody Bar Kokhba was their messiah. Embarrassed by the small number of resulting volunteers who doubted that he was their messiah, an angry Bar Kokhba slaughtered both peaceful Jews who refused to join the rebellion, and Jews who had converted to Christianity. Rome, fed up with these rebellions, amassed a huge army (from as far away as Britain and the Danube River region of Europe!) and attempted to obliterate this and any future revolts by razing over a thousand villages and towns in Syria Palestina. Bar Kokhba retreated to a fortified city, but was found, besieged, and killed. It is estimated that 750,000 Jews died of fighting, disease, and famine. Many thousands more were sold into slavery. The Jewish religion was outlawed, and Jews who were caught practicing it were brutally dealt with. The Hebrews’ huge sacred Bible scroll was confiscated and burned on the rubble of the temple mount.

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Not surprisingly, many surviving Jews decided to move away; the temple and their priesthood were gone, their way of life and worship were gone, and their country was in shambles. It looked like even the new “Rabbinic Judaism” under the leadership of local rabbis might become extinct. The few rabbis left in Syria Palestina worried that if large numbers of the surviving Jews moved away, the Jews’ national and religious identity would perish. So, the rabbis stood up and loudly proclaimed that moving away from Israel was nothing short of idolatry – but this only kept a small remnant of Jews in “Palestine.” Disappointed and discouraged, Rabbinic Judaism gradually abandoned belief in a literal messiah by making the messiah a spiritualized, meaningless, allegorical abstraction. If the Jews had believed the literal Scriptures of the Old Testament, they would have worshipped their literal Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ according to Ac 24:14). But they didn’t believe the Scriptures…and became casualties of their own hatred and the wars they started.

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The three Jewish wars help illustrate the fact that the Roman Empire was in decline; it no longer had large enough armies to keep the peace, and shuttling army units back and forth to fight against uprisings was merely reacting, not controlling.

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The surviving Jews, after their three rebellions against their worldly authorities, lived in small, despised groups scattered around the world, and – like gypsies – had no national home or identity. It is not wrong to add the Jews to the above list of people who messed with God and His people…and then suffered. The Jews would not regain possession of their homeland (Israel, not “Palestine”) until 1948 after World War II, a period of 1,813 years. The survival of the Jews, the survival of their distinct identity, and their return to Israel are unique in human history – even miraculous.

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• Byzantine Greek: When the growing Roman Empire took over the Greek-speaking empires established by Alexander’s generals, Latin became almost as widely-used as Greek. In Judea that resulted in three “official” languages being spoken – Latin, Koine Greek, and Hebrew. A fourth language, a regional “street Aramaic,” was also commonly used. But it was the “big three” – Hebrew, Greek, and Latin – that Pontius Pilate used to write the superscription for Christ’s cross. (These “big three” languages would become universally associated with the written word of God for well over a thousand years.) Two historic events caused the informal Koine Greek spoken by the masses to begin transitioning to a more formalized Greek called Byzantine Greek or Medieval Greek:

• First, in 330 AD the capital of the Roman Empire was moved from Rome to Turkey to the Greek-speaking city of Byzantium, which was renamed Constantinople (today it’s called Istanbul). With the Latin-speaking Roman government now relocated to the center of the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean region, the previous informality of Koine Greek became influenced and changed by the formal precision of Latin.

• Second, in 395 AD the government in Constantinople decided to divide its empire because the weakened (and dying) Roman Empire had become too vast to manage and defend effectively. Rome would therefore be reestablished as the capital of the western part of the empire, and it would have its own emperor who ruled over, appropriately enough, the “Roman” Empire. The existing capital of Constantinople would rule the eastern part of the empire, with its emperor ruling the “Byzantine” Empire. In order to differentiate their empires, Rome promoted the use of Latin, and Constantinople began promoting Greek instead of Latin. Over the centuries, especially now that the government in Constantinople had made Greek the official language of its empire, Koine Greek developed more consistency and predictability as it morphed into the more formal “Byzantine Greek” of the Latin-influenced Byzantine Empire.

• Modern Greek: About a thousand years later, in 1453 AD, the introduction of gunpowder helped the Muslim hoards conquer Constantinople – marking the end of the Byzantine Empire. Greek usage quickly died out everywhere except in Greece itself and a few neighboring areas. With Greek now limited to a small area, it was easier to formalize and standardize Greek grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation…and modern Greek was born.

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THE GREAT COMMISSION: THE WRITTEN WORD

When the apostles wrote the NT epistles it is believed they used papyrus and parchment (2 Tim 4:13). Over decades and centuries, the Old and New Testament books were copied and recopied to preserve and spread the gospel. A brief look at the “paper” that was used back then:

• Papyrus was made from reeds grown in north Africa. Papyrus was a thin paper-like material used like we use paper today. (Our word paper is derived from papyrus.) It is believed papyrus was first manufactured in Egypt in about 350 BC. If undisturbed, papyrus could last for a long time in hot, dry climates; but humidity quickly caused it to fall apart and decay. When papyrus was used in a scroll, the constant rolling and unrolling caused it to crack, break, and lose parts. And when flat sheets of papyrus were bound into “codex” form (a book), turning the pages eventually caused cracking, breaking, and lost pages. (Theologians don’t think using English words like book and books is very impressive, so they use the Latin words codex and codices instead; their emphasis is language – not communication. Just remember that a book and a codex are the same thing.) The convenience of the new codex/book form made the number of books in circulation increase until the number of books equaled that of traditional scrolls by about 300 or 400 AD. By about 550 AD people quit making scrolls. The codex form also lasted longer, and because it lay flat and its pages could be written on both sides, even multiple copies were easier to transport and store. Therefore, a flimsy papyrus codex could easily (depending on circumstances) outlast a durable vellum scroll.

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The bottom line is this: sometimes Scripture is missing from old manuscripts, and it really might be that the strange marks in the margin where the missing verses should go are indeed calling attention to the fact that those verses need to be added…but neither missing verses nor marginal marks are proofs. We just don’t know. And there are many other unsolvable disputes and questions about many texts in the Bible. That fact is why some people have been able to make their living researching, speculating, and arguing about which wording might be correct…and then dying without solving a single thing! That’s why, even though the ending of the book of Mark is included in the vast majority of manuscripts, theologians have continued impotently whining and furiously debating it for over 1,700 years! These scholars’ perverse disputings and doting about questions and strifes of words (1 Tim 6:4,5)  were finally, beginning in 1611 AD, put to rest for most Christians when the King James Bible’s miraculously-inerrant text was recognized as of a lamb without blemish and without spot (1 Pe 1:19); the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (He 11:1); it became one of many infallible proofs (Ac 1:3) for which the faithful quietly thanked God with joy unspeakable and full of glory (1 Pe 1:8). For all Christian soldiers of every era the answer has always been a matter of faith in God and His word. Amen.

Early NT translations into various languages

Some of the early Bible versions ranging from 177-450 AD include the Gallic Bible of southern France, various dialects of the Coptic Bible of Egypt, the Armenian Bible, the Gothic Bible, various dialects of the Syriac Bible, the Georgian Bible, the Ethiopian Bible, the Slavonic Bible, the Old Latin Bible, and the Latin Vulgate Bible. Some of these Bible manuscripts do not seem to be “official” because they are not only incomplete, they seem to have been deliberately shortened by faithful groups of believers doing their best to have access to the word of God in their language. For example, translating the whole Bible or the whole New Testament was a project too large and too expensive for most groups of early Christian converts, so they went out and found whatever manuscripts in whatever language they could get their hands on and translated selected portions of the NT in well-intentioned efforts to capture the greatly-abbreviated “essence” of God’s treasured message in a small manuscript they could afford. They just wanted to learn the Bible. And they had no idea if it was a “good” manuscript from this “family” or that “family” or not.

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Because the Alexandrian manuscripts, especially the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, date back to about 325-425 AD, manuscripts that support the text of the KJV that are older than 400 AD are attacked by liberal scholars who use anything they can to discredit them. A good example is the Syriac version of the Peshitta Bible manuscript (260 copies exist) that date back as far as about 150-175 AD. Proponents of the KJV like to point out that the Peshitta manuscripts were produced in the region of Antioch, are older than the Alexandrian manuscripts, and could possibly have been handled by some of the Apostles. The Peshitta’s text is corroborated by other ancient witnesses older than the Alexandrian family…such as Old Latin Bible manuscripts and Scripture quoted in documents written by early church fathers. Interesting – even impressive – information…but it proves nothing…and the arguments rage on.

Documents by early church fathers

Early preachers and scholars frequently quoted Scripture in their writings. Many of their surviving writings are older than Bible manuscripts. In fact, when scholars claimed the oldest – and therefore the “best” manuscripts – did not have the last 12 verses of Mark, and therefore the verses were supposedly added centuries later for unknown reasons, it was discovered that a large number of early Christian writings that were centuries older than the so-called ‘best’ manuscripts had quotes that contained all of the last 12 verses of Mark. When Bible believers wanted to know how all of these ancient Christians in their writings quoted Scripture that didn’t even exist until it was ‘invented’ centuries later, scholars responded with incoherent, nonsensical theories.

Early lectionaries for church sermons

Lectionaries were collections of Scripture read in church on certain days throughout the year. They were mostly introductory readings that gave pewsters background information about topics covered by that day’s sermon. Lectionary readings were good ways for people who had no access to bulky handwritten Bible manuscripts to quickly and efficiently become familiar with the Bible’s teachings. Scripture quotes in lectionaries also – like early documents – often support the validity of the text of the KJV. For this reason, lectionaries are almost completely ignored by scholars who think early writings should only be used if they subvert God’s word! I say again–!  Sometimes lectionaries would quote the same Bible verse two or three different ways, which suggests early Christians thought faithfully presenting the message (like Stephen did in Acts 7) was more important than making sure they got all the words of the quote – and their order – exactly right. In other words, they lived in an era when humble Christians read and listened thirstily with faith…whereas in modern times the leaven of Reason has made what-is-truth skeptics of us; we’re listening for ways we can attack the word of God.

New Testament Manuscript “families”

Four areas in the Roman Empire have been singled out as having numerous Christians who were actively involved in copying Bible manuscripts, and scholars have used these areas to develop confusing and hotly-debated “families” of manuscripts that are identified by some of their regionally-distinctive texts. The usual “families” that come up are the Majority Text, the Caesarian Text, the Western Text, and the Alexandrian Text. However, because the Majority family has the overwhelming majority of manuscripts, and because the other three families collectively contain so few manuscripts that have relatively insignificant numbers of textual differences, many scholars lump the Caesarian, Western, and Alexandrian into a single “Minority” family – often just referred to as the “Alexandrian Text” because it is the Alexandrian group that is used to attack the reliability of the King James Bible. I say again (2 Cor 11:16), if the King James Bible did not exist no modern-era Christians would believe the word of God (as He defines it) exists, and the culture war against God’s way of life would already be won by the Devil.

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Summing up the “families”

The family groups are hotly disputed. One of the reasons for that is the fact that no manuscript in existence has a text that is 100% Byzantine or Caesarian or Western or Alexandrian; they all contain a mixture of family types – and are therefore assigned to a particular family if that family’s type of text has 1% more readings than the other text types…even though the “types” are often based purely on hotly-disputed opinions. Because the manuscripts of the first several centuries of the Great Commission were so unwieldy, bulky, expensive, and fragile, those manuscripts usually consisted of a single book/epistle, which vastly outnumbered multiple-book Bible manuscripts. Also, in order to keep bulk and expenses down, manuscripts were sometimes edited to make them shorter. And, because these codices and scrolls were so fragile, it wasn’t at all unusual for normal usage to cause the beginning or ending of a scroll to break off, or for the last page-or-three of codices to break off – especially the last pages because we generally put books down face up, which causes more wear to the back of the book.

MANUSCRIPTS IN REAL LIFE – A SEA STORY: In the real world, books, especially constantly-used Bibles, don’t have easy lives sitting on shelves – whether it’s 400 AD in a dirt-floored tent or stone hut…or 1968 AD on the high seas. Back in ’68 I was a midshipman serving aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer as part of the ‘Orange Fleet’ war games against the ‘Blue Fleet.’ My duties ranged from rapid-fire drills as a crewmember on the big deck-guns…to bending snapping signal flags onto halyards in the roaring wind at flank speed high up on the signal bridge during battle exercises…to putting chairs up on tables, swabbing the mess decks, and peeling potatoes during KP duty. During downtime we midshipmen passed around paperback novels about the Old West. Among the worn, crumbly-edged paperbacks was a 12-year-old (copyright 1956) novel (Thirty Notches by Brad Ward) about a gunslinger with integrity. Through much use it had lost its cover, and its cheap-paper pages were brown and fragile with age. I read the whole book from non-cover to non-cover and, as a youngster killing idle time on a Navy warship, loved it – especially the ending. And then I passed it on to another midshipman. All of us enjoyed it. Many years later as a Bible believer and married man, I was in a bookstore with my wife – when, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but Thirty Notches on a shelf…with a cover and in mint condition! I pointed it out to Robin, picked it up and examined it…and was shocked to discover it had a short chapter at the end that had obviously flaked off the badly-worn book I’d read decades earlier on my destroyer! I read the short chapter…and, like modern theologians who hate the real – ‘longer’ – ending of Mark, I hated the ‘longer’ ending of the novel! (It’s not a ‘longer’ ending; it’s the real, the only, ending of the novel.) End of sea story.

If that could happen to me with modern paper and printing, it could happen to the ending of Mark over 1,500 years ago. Add to manuscript fragility the fact that manuscripts made long, rough journeys by foot, by ships, carts, donkeys, and camels…which thereby transported so-called textual “families” way out of “their areas.” And then decent, innocent scribes were hired to collect enough manuscripts (many of these scrolls and codices were a lot older and in no better shape than the 12-year-young book I read on board my destroyer) so they could, from the many, make single copies of an entire Testament or Bible. (These scribes thought they were just making copies of Scripture – they had no idea modern theologians over a thousand years later would falsely accuse them of “conflating” textual “families” that “didn’t belong together.” I say again, the texts of all known Bible manuscripts are random collections from different “families,” and it is impossible to segregate, collate, deduce, and derive the original wording. The so-called “textual families” of the NT manuscripts have no importance, reveal nothing to anyone, and should be done away with. The examples I have covered in this chapter are but a few of the myriad reasons some of the best scholars throughout history – those with both intelligence and integrity – concluded after much study and research that no amount of textual criticism, when applied to any number of manuscripts of whatever “family” or century, could ever figure out the “best reading” …let alone the “original reading.”

My imaginary compilation of early NT manuscripts – to summarize what we’ve learned they were typically like

Before about 200 AD, it looks like most groups of believers only had a single (whole or partial) copy of a gospel or epistle, with Matthew being the most common. Ancient manuscripts show that humble believers were engaged in copying Bible manuscripts well over a century before the Vaticanus and Sinaticus manuscripts (circa 350 AD) existed. The pages of these early manuscripts are papyrus (it is surprising that papyrus survived so long) and they are in book form (200 years before scholars thought Christians began routinely using the more-easily-transported book form). The discovery of old papyrus manuscripts over the past 75 years has contributed to the undermining of the wrongly-assumed authority and importance of the Alexandrian manuscripts. There is one thing about this compilation-manuscript example of mine that is rare: it covers (not contains) the entire NT; the entire NT would take hundreds of handwritten pages. In my fictitious compilation, the early believers who produced it took several steps to reduce bulk so their codex manuscript would be smaller, cheaper, and easier to handle:

• They divided the NT into several books. The first codex would contain the 4 gospels and Acts; and the two or three subsequent books would contain the epistles and Revelation.

• To reduce the number of pages required, these early Christians focused on the message rather than on exact wording – similar to Stephen’s preaching the message of the OT in Acts 7, which God validated by putting it in the NT. These early believers carefully omitted words like adverbs, adjectives, participles, articles, nouns, and prepositions; they omitted parts of sentences, and even entire sentences that were repetitious or unnecessary; and they abbreviated commonly-used names and nouns. But their omissions never made the message confusing, ambiguous, or obscure; the text was obviously made to be readable and understandable. They also never added words to the word of God; they faithfully copied – they didn’t embellish or change. They produced for their own use a shortened NT that faithfully and effectively conveyed the Bible’s story and its doctrinal teachings.

• The handwriting in some early Bible manuscripts, while highly legible and in the same hand, is uneven and somewhat inconsistent, which suggests faithful Christians didn’t/couldn’t always hire professional scribes to do their copying – they did it themselves. They treasured their Bible manuscripts, even the papyrus ones, so they rebound them when they began falling apart, and they continued studying them…and they wrote notes in them. For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe (1 Thes 2:13).