The New Covenant books were
written and made into a canon directly by the disciples of Christ. '
Bind up the testimony; Seal the Law among my disciples!' Isaiah 8:16. That is the principle and the prophecy.
Dr
Ernest L Martin set out the facts in his book:
Restoring the Original
Bible.
The idea that only in the fourth century the Roman Catholic
Church alone defined these books for ‘Christianity’ is patently absurd.
One word in the NT explains the process. It consistently mistranslated.
In fact I know of no accurate translation. That is a curious fact.
Correctly translated from standard references and lexicons, it would
have indicated who could, should and did define the canon. It would also
make clear that the Roman church could not have defined the canon!
The churches have been bamboozled after more than a thousand years of
Roman Catholic propaganda. The Vatican (which hated Jews and any idea
that Christ held any office in the Temple) made sure that no one asked
questions about such Greek terms. They banned the Greek text from Europe
for five centuries. Jerome mistranslated key Greek terms and replaced
them by nondescript Latin terms. And in the later period the Roman
Catholics made sure no one, not even its priests, understood Latin!
Authority
Why today have all the churches’ translators refused to translate this
word correctly? Self-interest and anti-Semitism may be some motives. What is the mystery word that this is all about?
That word is
epistatēs. It occurs not once but seven times in the NT.
Its true translation undermines the false dogma instigated by the
imperial Roman ‘Mother Church’. It also exposes the difference between
word church as used today and the original Greek word,
ekklesia. The
concept of church today is as different as if the Romans had looked at a
pig in a trough and said that is what the Bible means by a horse! Many
today still can’t recognize the
ekklesia – it’s a war horse!
All of
the occurrences of Jesus being called
epistatēs are in the priestly
book of Luke which centers around the Temple (5:5, 8:24, 45, 9:33, 49,
17:33). It is addressed to his Excellency Theophilus, 1:3. Luke covers
many technical Temple matters such as the 24 priestly courses, the
Sabbath, the calendar and various other tough topics of Torah. Luke was
no gentile! (See Luke the Priest: The Authority of the Author of the
Third Gospel by Dr Rick Strelan.)
Luke 1:3 implies the book is
written to the high priest, his ‘
Excellency Theophilus’ specifically to
be deposited in the archives as a true, witnessed record of
resurrections and miracles. One vital reason was that the Temple was
under threat of desolation by the arrival of the arch anti-Semite,
Caligula, as emperor. Reacting to the Resurrection which had trashed
belief in the Roman pantheon, Caligula wanted to reign from Jerusalem
and have a gigantic statue of himself inside the Temple and every
synagogue in the Empire.
The title ‘
Excellency’ relates to
Theophilus being the political leader of the nation, the high priest put
in power under the Romans. He was in office from 37 to 41 during all
Emperor Caligula’s near ethnocidal persecution. When Luke later wrote
Acts, Theophilus was no longer in office. Hence he wasn’t then addressed
as ‘
Excellency’ in Acts 1:1. This evidence identifies him
unambiguously. It explains what would otherwise be an affront by
omitting his title in Acts 1.
What is an epistatēs?
So when Luke has the disciples refer
to Jesus in the early ministry as ‘
epistatēs’ we should take
special
note. What is an
epistatēs? Nearly all translations render it ‘
Master’.
But in the Greek language it is a very precise term about a high office.
To render it ‘Master’ is the equivalent of going to a hospital and
referring to the chief brain surgeon as a health worker!
In fact,
one translation, the Concordant version, translates it as ‘Doctor’! But
in that case it has the sense of Professor of Hebrew Law. (The NWT has
Instructor.) But at least the translators realized they were faced with a
special term of office. Schonfield has ‘
Chief’. The Weymouth
translation gives it as ‘
Commander’. That signification is far off from
the idea of ‘
Herr Doktor’!
So what does it mean? The word has in
fact two main senses as you will see if you check any normal Greek
lexicon as distinct from the Romanized ones. One is in fact
Commander
of the city’s troops. In this sense it is equivalent, in the Hebrew
context of the Temple, to the
Priest for Warfare mentioned several times
in the Bible. (see Jesus, James, Joseph p218 for the summary table.)
There is some linkage with the sense that contemporary Jewish writers
like Philo and Josephus use the term as Superintendent.
President of what?
The second
sense in normal Greek usage is President of the city’s ruling Assembly.
What did the Greeks call their assembly? An
ekklesia! That should have
rung mighty bells for any honest translator. The word
ekklesia occurs
frequently in the NT. The same translators render it as ‘
church’, an
extremely bad choice. ‘
Church’ is a self-serving term for the
RC-Protestant community.
There was no such thing as their church in
the first century. There were no churches with steeples. There were no
stone cathedrals to terrify the population by their soaring
architecture. There were no crucifixes and there were no statues of
saints. Once people had all this under the fourth century Emperor
Constantine, a hierarchy of bishops under his central authority could
begin to control all the religion across the whole Roman Empire. Their
church meant all the local population meeting like pigs at their trough
in their buildings and subject to their lordship.
Attack the idea
of ‘
church,’ bishops and cathedrals and you attack the very foundation
of medieval autocracy. It would turn society upside down. In fact so
worried was King James that any translation would undermine the
hierarchy where the king not only ruled but defined the religion for the
people, that he laid down two very strict conditions for the
translators of the King James Bible.
Firstly, no marginal notes,
especially those that appeared in earlier versions denouncing Israel’s
evil kings. Secondly, all occurrences of the word
ekklesia should be
translated church! Why? Because Tyndale and the earlier translators had
had the audacity to translate the word correctly as ‘
Congregation’!
Even today you will find the Bibles of most of church committee
translations render Matt 16:18 (I will build my ‘
ekklesia’) as church.
Only those brave individual scholars like Robert Young’s literal
translation or Darby’s have ‘
I will build my Assembly’. The Assembly of
Israel! In the first century
ekklesia for Jews meant a governmental
body, the Assembled Congregation of God’s people.
How can we be sure
what ekklesia meant to Hebrews? It was the word used in the current
Greek Septuagint version to translate the Hebrew word
qahal, meaning the
Assembly of the twelve tribes. They met in ancient times in the Court
of Israel of the Temple. To reinstate it was part of Christ’s mission.
Christ is called an
epistatēs of such an
ekklesia. If modern churchman
translated it as something like ‘
President, professor, superintendent or
Commander of the church’ they would have a lot of questions put to
them! So what was Christ’s new Assembly?
Christ commands the Seventy
Luke explains it himself.
In Luke 10 he says Christ created an Assembly of Seventy. This clearly
relates to the Assembly created under Moses in the wilderness, Num
11:16f. It was composed of six men from each tribe, with two of them
staying in the camp. They experienced the power of God’s spirit in the
Tabernacle. It was a foretaste of the NT Pentecost.
Then after the
Resurrection, the 12 tribes had been forewarned to bring more witnesses.
In Acts 1:15 there were 120 from the 12 tribes, ten ‘named ambassadors’
per tribe. They came from far and wide, ‘
every nation under heaven,’
including Parthia, Rome’s rival superpower ruled by Israelite exiles,
Acts 2:5-11.
The Hebrew scriptures speak many times of the Assembly
of Israel, the
qahal. Peter is recorded in around 37 CE as saying that
the Assembly of Seventy that Christ formed, composed of tried and honest
men, was the first real
qahal meeting all the criteria since the time
of Moses. This was, said Peter, a real sign that Jesus was the Prophet
greater than Moses and foretold by Moses in Deuteronomy 18. Early
historians such as Eusebius record how important the Seventy were in
propagating worldwide the proof of the Resurrection.
So if the
qahal
is the real meaning of
ekklesia, what is the title that Jesus has as
its epistatēs? Turn to a standard reference like the Oxford Classical
Dictionary and you will find that the
epistatēs ..
'
presided over the Council (boulé) and Assembly (ekklesia).'
A classical Greek reference like Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Latin
Antiquities will tell you that the
epistatēs was in charge of the city
treasury and public works. In the Greek Septuagint version of the Hebrew
scriptures, the word
epistatēs occurs numerous times. It is translated
as Commander of the Army of Israel or as Superintendent of works in the
Temple. Those two functions describe the office of the Sagan, or Chief
Priest in the Temple.
But what has that to do with the canon?
The Oxford Classical Dictionary describes other attributes of the
epistatēs.
'He held the State seal and keys. … In the Hellenic kingdoms the title
epistatēs is given to an agent of the king within a subject city who
exercises considerable power.'
The Key
Jesus held the powers of the kingdom
of heaven. The Temple seal was clearly necessary for the exiled tribes
of Israel to recognize the writings of Jesus, James and the Davidic
House. The canon is a sealed book, sealed with the Temple seal of
David’s House. Up to just before the destruction of the Temple, this
high post of Sagan was occupied by James, the brother of Jesus Christ.
He wrote to the twelve tribes, 1:1. After he died or rather was
murdered, we hear in early writings of the period that John, son of
Zebedee, wore the diadem of office. He clearly was empowered to close
the NT canon and its 27 books. He sealed them.
What of the Key? The
Temple had a huge ‘Key of David’ that was used to open and close the
door to the Temple fortress. Christ, according to John’s book of
Revelation, holds the Key of David on his shoulder, Rev 3:7, Isaiah
22:22. He is dressed in the robes of the Sagan Chief Priest, the
cohen
ha-rosh, Rev 1:13.
No one other than the
epistatēs, and certainly not the paganized, gentile church of Rome could ever define the canon.
Case closed.
A fuller treatment is found in the free ebook:
Jesus, James, Joseph and the past and future Temple at http://www.academia.edu/10890773
