Subject: Help! Unclean vs clean meat? |
Bible Note: Dear Colt 045, I do believe there is a simple very simple answer to your question once one is willing to set aside the issue of whether or not it was in the origanal text... And then I will tell you about the places in your Bible where a text was not found in all manuscripts that make up your Bilble and try to exlain to you how it is that things get put in the Bible in the frist place so that you can see that men don't add or take away a part of a text, but that some manuscripts contain some things and some don't. But that is not the problem here with the verse you are interested in. You have to consider that when Jesus was speaking when Peter was near, He never said the words, "(Thus He declared all foods clean.)", or else they would be in red! What is going on here is that the writer, Mark added in words later to illustrate the meaning of what Jesus actually was saying to Mark's readers. This is an excersize in grammar- taking the parts of the grammar of the text and breaking it down into its harmonious parts and then putting it back together to make better sense of what the text means. So, Mark quoted Jesus, the red part, and then Mark made a comment to his readers summing up what Jesus just said; that food going in cannot defile a man, and then Mark takes what he learned their and states that because of what Jesus was saying before Jesus meant that all foods were clean. How many times did the disciples hear what Jesus said and not understand it? More than once! More than twice? Yup! They understood most of it later, when the they were teaching it and writing it! We can't assume Peter understood it when it was spoken based on his actions later can we? No, in fact we can conclude that he did not understand it at all... By the time we get to Acts 10, Peter is still practicing Judaism at the same time as all the Jewish Christians; they went to temple, they went to synagogue, they ate kosher food, they stayed away from the Gentiles, they considered themselvs Jews who believed in Jesus. The word Christian and the concept of being separate from Jews are two different things. They were first called Christians at Antioch by folks in that city and it was not a compliment. There was great division between Jews who were Christians and Gentiles who were Christians over food for a while, they did not eat together, they did not eat the same thing. When Peter got to that vision he did not go out and start eating any old thing, he understood all people can be made clean by God even Gentiles. Peter took a long time before he went and ate anything unclean and then when the Judean Jews came to Galatia, he backed right up and stopped eating Gentile food, and he and Paul fought about it. Now to the question of texts and what are in orginal texts and what are in copies, which make up our Bible. This is an area called textual criticisim; There are two sets of manuscripts used for the construction of the New Testament. The Latter Texts and The Earlier Texts. The Latter Texts were used to write the King James Bible, the very first one. These manuscripts were copies of the original texts written by the original authors and those are called the original autographs. These orginal autographs are gone now, they were around in the first century when they were written and then copied many, many, many times. Altogether there are upwards of 5,300 Greek manuscript fragaments which are portions of the New Testament used to construct the New Testament into one whole canon. The Latter texts were all discovered first, but they were not the oldest copies, they were the youngest copies - and from this we get the King James Bible. The Earlier Texts, the earlier manuscripts are more in number and contain less differences in textual content per passage and contain less copyist errors. From these Earlier Texts which are more reliable manuscripts and higher in number and which are older manuscripts we get the NASB, NIV, ESV, TNIV, NRSV, NASU, NAB, NJB, GNB, REB, which were all written in the last century or so. Our dear translators have a wonderful guide at the beginning of the NASB describing Explanation of General Format, but they left out one very important thing, the use of brackets in the all Bibles written in the last century or so. They talk about notes, cross referrences, paragraphs, quotation marks, and so on, even asterisks. Here is why everyone has brackets all over their Bible and it is the only reason. Where ever you see brakets, like in Mark 16:9-20 and the after note, it is because a set of manuscripts referrenced by the body of translators of your particular Bible came accross a situation where one set of manuscripts leave out that part of the verse, but the other manuscripts contain that part of the verse. Make sure to understand this only refers to brackets and not to parenthesis. Hope this clears it all up for you, God Bless, Tamara |