The Church.
Of today’s 2,800 churches and sects that comprise Christendom many call their own denomination: the ‘True Church’, or the ‘Correct ‘Church’.
Nevertheless, all but a very tiny minority, in Christendom’s 2.5 billion souls, have any idea of biblical regeneration. These, the Bible calls: the remnant. At best the rest merely use biblical vocabulary, clichés, and hackneyed phrases to justify their own doctrines of churchianity.
The word church, comes not from the original Greek manuscripts of the holy Scriptures, but from Constantine’s Latin term (‘ecclesia’) for the first official church of the 4th century, when the new Roman emperor stopped the Empire’s 300 years of incessant persecution of Christians.
Constantine decided to exploit the new religion of the East and use it to gain back control of an empire split between east and west in a long running civil war.
Thus he arranged for an Act of Toleration, and then started his ruthless militant program of nationalizing a beleaguered Christian minority into the Roman religion. He attempted thereby to end the civil war and join the factions into one. He arranged for the Bible to be rewritten into Latin, adding his seven new sacraments into the translation.
The Greek word ‘ekklesia’ (called out to assemble) he translated into ‘ecclesia’, meaning something else completely. The first English New Testament printed omitted the word ‘church’, as did five other modern translations in print.
At the dawn of the 16th C. Englishman William Tyndale dared to translate the Greek original New Testament manuscripts which had come to Europe after the forced exodus of scholars from Constantinople in 1400.
The Vulgate Bible had been the legacy (via Jerome) of Constantine’s 4th century Old Latin New Testament since his fifty new Latin Bibles, were scribed for the inauguration of the empire’s Roman (Catholic) Church around 411 AD.
Therefore, with the combined release of precious koine Greek manuscripts from the east; Gutenberg’s printing press; the restoration and recovery of the original Greek text by Erasmus; and Martin Luther’s Puritan Reformation (1517) the glorious light of the Gospel message began to shine once again in darkened Europe.
So the humanist scholar Erasmus, and the French scholarly publisher Stephanus (Robert Etienne) enabled the early Puritan translators in Switzerland, Germany, France and Britain to accurately publish the Greek text into English, French, and German, without the Church of Rome’s inserts in the Latin Vulgate.
William Tyndale, who printed the first English New Testament in 1526 was martyred at the stake by the infuriated Roman Catholic Church in Europe. They burnt his first edition, and imprisoned and tortured anyone who dared to read or own it. His crime: he had omitted the word church and its 4th C sacraments of Constantine. He was not the only Puritan scholar to be hounded into exile, imprisoned and martyred for promoting the original copy of the New Testament in their native tongue.
NEXT POST. (Pt.2)
