November 8, 2007 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The following is excerpted from THE BIBLE VERSION QUESTION-ANSWER DATABASE, available from Way of Life Literature. This book gives diligently-researched, in-depth answers to 82 of the most important questions on this topic. A vast number of myths are exposed, such as the myth that Erasmus promised to add 1 John 5:7 to his Greek New Testament if even one manuscript could be produced, the myth that the differences between the Greek texts and versions are slight and insignificant, and the myth that there are no doctrines affected by the changes in the modern versions. The author has carried on extensive correspondence with men on all sides of this issue for the past 25 years, and this book answers the challenges that are made by the opponents of “King James Onlyism,” including James White, D.A. Carson, Doug Kutilek, the editors of From the Mind of God to the Mind of Man and One Bible Only, etc. It also includes reviews of several of the popular modern versions, including the Living Bible, New Living Bible, Today’s English Version, New International Version, New American Standard Version, The Message, and the Holman Christian Standard Bible. 423 pages, 7X8, perfect bound, $17.95.

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A critic of the defense of the King James Bible, who is so clever that he regularly finds errors where none exist, has claimed that the idea that the Sinaiticus was discovered in a waste paper receptacle is a myth.

ANSWER: 

1. We have the testimony of Tischendorf himself, the discoverer of the Sinaiticus. He was traveling in 1844 under the patronage of Frederick Augustus, king of Saxony, searching for manuscripts, when he visited St. Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai. Here he found some old manuscripts in a basket of papers intended for lighting the stove and upon examination found them to be very ancient. Here are his own words:  “In visiting the library of the monastery, in the month of May, 1844, I perceived in the middle of the great hall a large and wide basket full of old parchments; and the librarian, who was a man of information, told me that TWO HEAPS OF PAPERS LIKE THESE, MOULDERED BY TIME, HAD BEEN ALREADY COMMITTED TO THE FLAMES. What was my surprise to find amid this heap of papers a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek, which seemed to me to be one of the most ancient that I had ever seen. The authorities of the convent allowed me to possess myself of a third of these parchments, or about forty-three sheets, all the more readily AS THEY WERE DESTINED FOR THE FIRE” (When Were Our Gospels Written? An Argument by Constantine Tischendorf. with a Narrative of the Discovery of the Sinaitic Manuscript, New York: American Tract Society, 1866; an excerpt of this is at http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/extras/tischendorf-sinaiticus.html).

Thus, Tischendorf tells us plainly that the pages of the manuscript were found in a basket of papers intended for lighting the stove. I cannot imagine why anyone would protest against calling this a wastebasket.

2. Further, we have the testimony of John Burgon, who was alive when Tischendorf discovered the Sinaiticus and personally spent time at St. Catherine’s doing research into ancient manuscripts. At least three times in his writings Burgon said the manuscripts “got deposited in the waste-paper basket of the Convent” (The Revision Revised, 1883, pp. 319, 342; Burgon and Miller, The Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels Vindicated and Established, 1896, p. 12). This description of the location where Tischendorf found the Sinaiticus was published widely and was not challenged in Burgon’s lifetime.

3. We also have the testimony of other preachers who lived nearer to the day of Tischendorf’s discover of the Sinaiticus. For example, the famous preacher T. DeWitt Talmage (1832-1902), in his sermon “Mending the Bible,” said: “It is a plain matter of history that Tischendorf went to a convent in the peninsula of Sinai, and was by ropes lifted over the wall into the convent, that being the only mode of admission and that he saw there in the wastebasket for kindling for the fires a manuscript of the holy Scriptures.” It is obvious that Talmage was under the impression that the Sinaiticus was discovered in a “wastebasket.”

4. Finally, we have the testimony of Bruce Metzger, one of the most prominent textual critics of our day. “While visiting the monastery of St. Catharine at Mount Sinai, he chanced to see some leaves of parchment in a waste-basket full of papers destined to light the oven of the monastery” (Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, p. 43).