Battle of the Bibles - Present Truth

which they themselves have shortened" ("Anti-Nicene Fathers", [Scribners] Vol. I pp 434,
435).
Justin Martyr was born in Greece of pagan parents in the very year in which John
the Revelator is thought to have died (100 AD). He is credited with conversion to
Christianity and became a Christian teacher, but could not entirely divest himself of his
heathen upbringing and so he clung to some heretical ideas.
One of his pupils was the famed Tatian, who built upon the heresies of his
teacher by embracing Gnostic philosophy. He wrote what is known as the Diatessaron
meaning "four in one", which he claimed harmonised with the Gospels. But they were so
severely corrupted that a Bishop of Syria was astonished to find some of his
parishioners actually coming to believe in them as though they were genuine Scriptures.
He was so alarmed that he threw out some two hundred copies! ("Encyclopedias",
"Tatian").
As the way of pupils who emulate their mentors, one of Justin Martyr's pupils who
came to be known as Clemens of Alexandria, did just that. In his college which he
founded, he determined that he would not teach true Christianity, but would mix it with
pagan philosophy. Commenting on this J.W. Burgon, DD says:
"He [Clemens] habitually mistakes apocryphal writings for inspired Scriptures"
Burgon attributes Clemens' careless attitude toward Scripture to his familiarity with the
works of "Marcion and the rest of the Gnostic crew" ("Revision Revised", p 336).
Naturally, such teachings continued to be reflected in following generations. One
of Clemens' pupils, Origen, had a penchant for allegorising the Scriptures to the extent
that he came to the place where he could say:
"The Scriptures are of little use to those who understand them as they are
written" ("McClintock and Strong Encyclopedia", article: "Origen").
With such observations, one is led to ponder just what use for Scripture Origen
had in mind. Certainly it was not what the Author of Scripture intended, for had not God
said:
"All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for
reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; That the man of God may be
perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works" (2 Timothy 3:16, 17).
It can readily be seen that Clemens' philosophy would enable the Scriptures to
be interpreted to support practically any belief or dogma capable of being devised by
man. Thus Origen came up with the notion that the soul existed from eternity. After
death, it migrated to another form of life commensurate with one's conduct during the
human life span (shades of Buddhism!). His fantasies led him to believe that even the
stars and planets had souls which, like men, were on trial to learn perfection. ("Our
Authorised Bible Vindicated", p 18).
So we see a new type of Bible emerging which Wilkinson describes as "an
adaptation of the Word of God to Gnosticism ".
The learned Dr. Scrivener summed up the effect of this tragic prostitution of
God's Word, when he wrote some sixteen centuries after Clemens:
"It is no less true to fact than paradoxical in sound, that the worst corruptions to
which the New Testament has been subjected, originated within a hundred years after it
was composed; that Irenaeus (AD 150), and the African fathers, and the whole Western,
with a portion of the Syrian Church, used far inferior manuscripts to those employed by
Stunica, or Erasmus, or Stephens thirteen centuries later, when moulding the Textus
Receptus" ("Introduction to New Testament Criticism", 3rd Edition p 511).
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