Bible Question:
Hi my name is leonardo, and i have a question about the jehovaht witness.they say the Jesus is not Got.but what about I tim 3-16. if any of you any information I greatly thank you. |
Bible Answer: Hi Leonardo, Popular tradition has it that the fall of an apple started Sir Isaac Newton on the way to discovering the universal law of gravitation. Whatever may be the truth of this tradition, there is no question about Newton’s remarkable powers of reason. Concerning his renowned scientific work the Principia, we are told: “The whole development of modern science begins with this great book. For more than 200 years it reigned supreme.”1 Celebrated as were Newton’s scientific discoveries, he himself humbly acknowledged his human limitations. He was modest. Shortly before his death in 1727 he said of himself: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”2 Newton appreciated that God is the Source of all truth, and in line with the deep reverence he had for his Creator, he appears to have spent even more time searching after the true God than he did in searching out scientific truths. An analysis of all that Newton wrote reveals that out of some 3,600,000 words only 1,000,000 were devoted to the sciences, whereas some 1,400,000 were on religious topics.3 In his writings, Newton gave much attention to the doctrine of the Trinity. One of his most outstanding contributions to the Biblical scholarship of the time was his work An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, first published in 1754, twenty-seven years after his death. It reviewed all the textual evidence available from ancient sources on two Bible passages, at First John 5:7 and First Timothy 3:16. In the King James Version Bible, First John 5:7 reads: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” Using early Church writers, the Greek and Latin manuscripts and the testimony of the first versions of the Bible, Newton proved that the words “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one,” in support of the Trinity doctrine, did not appear in the original inspired Greek Scriptures. He then traced the way in which the spurious reading crept into the Latin versions, first as a marginal note, and later into the text itself. He showed that it was first taken into a Greek text in 1515 by Cardinal Ximenes on the strength of a late Greek manuscript corrected from the Latin. Finally, Newton considered the sense and context of the verse, concluding, “Thus is the sense plain and natural, and the argument full and strong; but if you insert the testimony of ‘the Three in Heaven’ you interrupt and spoil it.”4 The shorter portion of this dissertation was concerned with 1 Timothy 3:16, which reads (King James Version): “And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.” Newton showed how, by a small alteration in the Greek text, the word “God” was inserted to make the phrase read “God was manifest in the flesh.” He demonstrated that early Church writers in referring to the verse knew nothing of such an alteration. Summing up both passages, Newton said: “If the ancient churches in debating and deciding the greatest mysteries of religion, knew nothing of these two texts, I understand not, why we should be so fond of them now the debates are over.”5 In the two hundred years and more since that treatise was compiled by Isaac Newton, only a few minor corrections have been necessary to the evidence he adduced. Yet it was only in the nineteenth century that Bible translations appeared correcting these passages. Part of Newton’s original manuscript in his own handwriting is illustrated on the next page by courtesy of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England. Why did Newton not publish these findings during his lifetime? A glance at the background of the times may explain this. Those who wrote against the doctrine of the Trinity were still subject to persecution in England. As late as 1698 the Act for the Suppression of Blasphemy and Profaneness made it an offense to deny one of the persons of the Trinity to be God, punishable with loss of office, employment and profit on the first occasion, and imprisonment for a repetition. Newton’s friend William Whiston (translator of the works of Josephus) lost his professorship at Cambridge for this reason in 1711. In 1693 a pamphlet attacking the Trinity was burned by order of the House of Lords, and the next year its printer and author were prosecuted. In 1697 Thomas Aikenhead, an eighteen-year-old student charged with denying the Trinity, was hanged at Edinburgh, Scotland.6, 7, 8 (more to come) |