FdD Notebook 1/22/2025
Text of the New Testament - Scammers and faith - Exploding rocket
Bonjour dear reader,
Last week, Joël, our middle son, started wearing glasses. He's quite pleased, but his sister Madeleine is hopelessly jealous.
The appointment with the ophthalmologist was a bit difficult to sit through as a spectator. Joel is rather shy and speaks quietly, and he was communicating very clearly what he could see. For her part, the nurse was in a hurry and didn't know how to work patiently with him. And all I could do was sit awkwardly and watch. The scene brought to my attention the curious fact that the only way we have to determine the right prescription of a pair of glasses is for the patient to test several possibilities and say which one he sees best with. We (apparently) don't have an instrument that can measure the deformation of the eye to determine the right lenses.
Since we often use the analogy of glasses to talk about worldviews, it's interesting to note that the same reality applies to the comparison of worldviews. We can't determine which worldview is the right one by standing on some neutral ground outside all worldviews and examining them from the outside. There is no such neutral ground, and we can't look at anything without looking through some worldview or other. To test a worldview, the Christian worldview for example, you have to actually put on the glasses and look at the world through that worldview to see whether it makes things clearer or blurrier. As C.S. Lewis said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else,” which is the conclusion of a paragraph that's really worth reading in full:
I was taught at school, when I had done a sum, to “prove my answer.” The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of that primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams; I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner; I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific points of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.1
Text of the New Testament
Comparing five verses in two ancient manuscripts
Part of the presentation I'm preparing on the Bible is on the question of the reliability of the New Testament text. Whenever I do this, I’m always concerned about how to give, in a short space of time, a proper appreciation of what we have in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. There are erroneous exaggerations on both sides, either to give the impression that the text is dubious in general, or to give the impression that the variants that do exist are of no importance. The idea that I hit on for this presentation is to give a concrete example by comparing two specific manuscripts over a few verses. Now I did want there to be one really important variant in the comparison, so I decided on John 1:14-18 in Sinaiticus (4th century) and Alexandrinus (5th).
Here’s the two manuscrits :
And here’s the comparison :
The differences in yellow are spelling differences. In Alexandrinus the word patros is in an abbreviated form while in Sinaiticus it’s spelled out. And in Sinaiticus Moses is spelled Moüsseos while the scribe for Alexandrinus spells it Mosseos.
The differences in red are actual differences at the level of the words, but as you can see in the translations below, the difference in sense for the majority of these variants is quite small.
Sinaiticus :
(15) John bears witness about him and cries out: this one is the one who comes after me. He has become ahead of me because he was (existed) before me.
(16) Because, from his fullness we have all received also grace in exchange for grace.
(17) Because the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth were through Jesus.
(18) No one has ever beheld God; the only-begotten God at the side of the Father, that one has revealed him.
Alexandrinus :
(15) John bears witness about him and cries out, saying: this one is the one which I said: the one who comes after me has become ahead of me because he was (existed) before me.
(16) And, from his fullness we have all received also grace in exchange for grace.
(17) Because the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth were through Jesus Christ.
(18) No one has ever beheld God; the only-begotten Son who is at the side of the Father, that one has revealed him.
I think this example is fairly representative of the manuscript tradition for the New Testament as a whole. There are a lot of variants (7 variants here between two manuscripts over 5 verses, not counting spelling), but quite rare is the variant that has a significant impact on the meaning of a passage. What’s more, for the vast majority of variants, it’s fairly clear which reading is original once we’ve taken into account all the manuscripts that we have (hundreds for each verse of the New Testament!).
Attempted scam
And how we naturally exercise faith
This week I received a call from a man who wanted to warn me that there had been some suspicious transactions on my account. He wanted to help me secure my account against fraud. Of course I was suspicious from the start, but the fact that he knew my name and account number made the call feel plausible. However, as the discussion continued, I was able to recognize his insistence that I had to act immediately as a scammer tactic, and when his proposal for securing my account was walking me down the path of making a transfer to an IBAN that he would supply... “Dieu voit ce que vous faites,” I said (God sees what you do), and that was the end of the conversation.
This experience is a reminder how faith is such a profound part of human nature. The definition of faith given by Geerhardus Vos is “an acceptance as true by which we do not rest in ourselves but in the testimony of another.” By God's design, we human beings have a natural tendency to believe one another. If I talk to a stranger on the bus who tells me his name, profession, number of children, etc., my natural response is to accept what he says as true. And although I managed to avoid being scammed, the fact that he tried it on me proves that it succeeds all too often. Despite the weirdness of the proposed procedure to “secure the account,” the fact that we naturally believe what people tell us results in people being deceived.
I'm not saying that this tendency to believe is a bad thing. What is bad is the wickedness of men who abuse the trust of others, and this wickedness does make it necessary for our faith to be accompanied by discernment. But faith in itself is not only beautiful but absolutely necessary for human existence. Vos continues :
With some reflection it will be apparent that our entire human society, all spiritual communion with others, and by far the greater part of our thinking and acting rests on faith. Faith is the warp and woof in the fabric of human life. Without faith no one could exist in society. Life is a large ocean of which only a small segment falls within our horizon, and this small segment is nearly endlessly suffused with what we can know only by faith. […] Cooperation with others would be completely impossible if God had not given us the capacity to accept as true the testimony of others and rely on it, if He had not so curbed the deceitfulness inherent in all men by nature, at least on its external side, that a reality corresponds to this faith. However often our trust may be disappointed, without faith we cannot live at all, and every day we trust, more or less, most people with whom we come into contact.2
In my opinion, Vos' observations explode the myth that we can dispense with faith and believe only the things which we verify empirically. Our ability to form a minimal conception of the real world requires that we depend on each other, and if we can’t get along without believing each other, should we really think it strange if God expects us to exercise this faith towards him too?
Reading
Finished : Did Adam and Eve Exist? by C. John Collins. I appreciated the way Collins made the case that the great story of salvation in the Bible depends on the historical reality of a man at the origin of the human race whose rebellion has consequences for us all. His concern to integrate this biblical narrative into the secular understanding of the human origins is less interesting to those of us who consider that this secular understanding depends more on anti-biblical presuppositions than on scientific evidence.
I am used to reading Biblical scholars who are skeptical about whether this or that Biblical passage can really be historical; therefore it strikes me like a brisk wind to read in these students of the ancient Near East a respect for the historical basis of their sources. To them it is perfectly reasonable to affirm that “the earliest Flood stories themselves were not merely vague echoes of natural disaster, but were legends related to one definite event, a catastrophic Flood which occurred, if not in historic, then in prehistoric times.”3
Beauty is Your Destiny, Philip Ryken
Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, Andrew Wilson
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
Spaceflight
Thursday was a remarkable day in spaceflight with the launch of the very first New Glenn rocket from Blue Origin and the seventh launch of SpaceX’s Starship. New Glenn achieved orbit which is an amazing accomplishment for the maiden flight of any rocket. As for SpaceX, they successfully caught the returning first stage of the rocket for the second time. Unfortunately the second stage exploded, but apparently the problem has already been identified and a fix is in progress.
Launch of New Glenn. Photo credit NASASpaceflight.com
Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.
Psalm 139:14
Lewis, C. S.. Weight of Glory. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition, p. 138.
Vos, Geerhardus. Reformed Dogmatics. Edited & translated by Richard B. Gaffin Jr., vol. 4, Lexham Press, 2012–2016, p. 89.
Collins, C. John. Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? Who They Were and Why You Should Care. Wheaton: Crossway, 2011, p. 164.